The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  Arylis was suddenly mashed against the wall around the townhouse. A quick turn saved the reader inside the cake carrier, but put the force of the impact on her left hip and shoulder for two surges of the crowd. It knocked the breath out of her, as well, and she staggered for balance, suddenly terrified she might fall and be trampled underfoot. But she managed to keep her footing, somehow, and sucked in a deep breath of relief.

  On the next pulse in the chant, she regained her momentum and spun the cake carrier on its side, with the reader pressed into her belly, while she used the cake as a pillow against the wall, pushing inch by inch closer to the entry.

  A stone handrail to the entry stairs blocked her path almost at the goal, and she gave up on gentleness, using elbows and kicks to push the precious feet straight back into the crowd to get around the side rail and up on the stairs themselves.

  Two javelins and a sword of the Garth Showma Guard stood at the head of those stairs. They were armed with peacekeeper staffs and, judging from their expressions, furious as they glared at the crowd.

  One of the javelins was saying something to the sword, utterly inaudible over the chanting of several hundred angry voices. He got a headshake in response, but the first one gripped his staff as if he was going hit the crowd with it, and Arylis flinched back. She had absolutely no desire to be struck by accident. For that matter, she wasn’t sure that if the javelin hit her it would be by accident. There was no way the Guardsmen could differentiate between her as separate from the rest of the crowd, after all.

  The peacekeeper staffs had a rough look to them. They were solid eldritch oak, with rounded sarkolis caps that glowed faintly and ominously, and Arylis wished she could pull back well out of the crowd control weapon’s fifty-foot range. Getting struck with one wouldn’t kill her, but being unconscious and alone in a crowd this angry could be deadly all on its own.

  “Please,” she tried to yell over the roar of the crowd, “I just need to come in!”

  A crash sounded somewhere behind her, and she dared a fearful look over her shoulder into the mass of people. Had more people joined in since she worked her way to the front of the townhouse?

  And then a dragon bellowed suddenly and she found herself in what had abruptly become a great deal of open space. She looked up…and swallowed a squeak of terror as a yellow—young to be ridden—soared over in a slow pass. The crowd roared back at the sky, even the chanting lost in momentary surprise. Some of the protestors recognized the threat inherent in that pass, but at least half the crowd had misinterpreted it as no more than a surprise bit of airshow. After all, for all their fury, they knew it was the Air Force’s job to protect the Union’s citizens, not threaten them with lethal force!

  The pilot turned the dragon and began a second pass, coming in so low this time that Arylis could feel the air pressure change as the spells pulled in aetheric power to hold the beast aloft.

  She clambered a few steps up and crouched against the rail wall to the side of the stairs her arms still wrapped around the cake carrier. Groups at the edges of the crowd had begun to move away and the center moved back with it. The chanting was gone, replaced by individual yells and shrieks, and she drew in a deep breath of relief. They’d all go home now, she thought, and in a few moments she might even be able to speak loudly enough to be heard over the din and possibly gain admittance at least into the public reception hall.

  She looked back to the Guardsmen and saw not calm, but horror sketched across both their faces. They were screaming at the pilot, who certainly couldn’t hear them. She snapped her head back the other way and saw the dragon open its mouth.

  Two shots burned over her head passing a warmth and numbness across the back of her neck. Through a darkening sight Arylis saw the pilot collapse limp in his straps and the dragon’s mouth go slack and snap shut.

  * * *

  “What the hell was that?”

  A noncommittal grunt answered.

  Icy fingers running down the back of Arylis’s neck cut through the thumping in her head. She awoke, still on the steps to Garth Showma House, but with a nearly empty street in front of her. The yellow perched on a nearby building roof and lowed mournfully, its pilot limp in his cockpit.

  More people in GSG uniforms scurried from huddle to huddle in the street giving aid or assistance as needed to those left behind by the crowd.

  She moaned and found one of the Guardsmen immediately at her side.

  “Awake now, Missus?”

  She nodded slowly, surprised to find her neck functioned just fine and that the pain in her left arm was only the too tight tangle of the cake carrier’s strap.

  “Why don’t you head on home then? We’re going to help a group down to the slider station nice and slow here in a minute if you feel you can stand?”

  “No.” I need to go see the Duke.

  “That’s alright, you can rest a few more minutes, and we’ll get someone to carry you. Maybe there’s someone you could send for?”

  “I need to get in,” Arylis said and was rewarded with a long sigh for her accidental repeat of the chant. “No, not that—” she tried to explain “—I’m trying to see the Duke.” She pointed her cake in an effort to explain.

  The man cursed softly. “A cake delivery? In the midst of all that? I’d hate to have your boss, Missus.”

  He didn’t get it right, but the door was opening and another retainer was summoned to help her up and walk her inside. Arylis saved her explanations for further inside the townhouse.

  She found a comfortable chair in the receptions office and settled into it. Office doors were flying open, and staff were rushing about entirely too quickly to catch their attention immediately. She rested, for just a moment.

  “I don’t believe for one moment the Undersecretary for Dragon Affairs personally authorized that disaster!” The voice echoed down the hall.

  “I’m just telling you where the staffer I spoke with said the order came from, Fifty.”

  “That pilot up there isn’t even a commissioned Twenty-Five.”

  “Hope to Graholis he never gets a commission either, Fifty.”

  “Hm. Kid might not even be alive.”

  An inarticulate grumble answered that one.

  “Trooper’s right, Fifty. I don’t want to serve with anyone who’d even think about firing on civilians.”

  “He’s going to say he didn’t mean it. You know he’s going to say he was just faking to scare the crowd, and he’d never have dropped gas on anyone!”

  “Don’t they gas people sometimes in Mythal?”

  “I don’t care what the spell-blasted Mythlans do. We don’t, and that boy up there needs a healer. The dragon probably caught some of the blast, too. See about finding a dragon healer while you’re at it.”

  Arylis let herself slip back into a dozy grey while she waited for the public offices to calm.

  * * *

  Later, hours later, Thankhar Olderhan, the Duke of Garth Showma personally opened the door and bowed to the fifty’s wife as she dropped him a curtsy and prepared to withdraw from his private office. She still seemed more than a little awed that the duke himself had wanted to hear her story, and she’d been more than a little nervous when she entered the warm, wood paneled room with its comfortable chairs, large desk, and the PC which now held a certified copy of her husband’s shocking message. He’d spent over an hour taking her back through every aspect of the extraordinary circumstances which had brought her to Garth Showma House—and damned nearly gotten her killed—and everything she’d said had only made him even more grimly confident that she was absolutely trustworthy.

  “Thank you, Madam Ulthar,” he said as she rose from her curtsy. “It’s my honor to have men like your husband in the Second Andarans, and I genuinely can’t tell you how deeply grateful I am for your own integrity—and courage—in bringing his message to me so quickly. Magister Halathyn would be as proud of you as I am, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace.” The w
ords came out husky and the young woman’s beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. “I only…I mean, it was Therman who did it, really. And—”

  “Your husband, Madam Ulthar, would be the first to tell me what a critical and personal service you’ve done me and my entire house, as well as the entire Union,” he said firmly. “And I’m very much afraid he may have put you at risk by asking you to undertake it. Because of that, you’ll be moving into Garth Showma House—unless you’d be more comfortable at Garth Showma itself?—until we know precisely what’s going on out there.”

  “Oh, Your Grace, I couldn’t! I mean—”

  “My dear, Her Grace has already spoken in this matter,” he told her with a faint smile. “I assure you that I’m not foolish enough to argue with her about it, and I’d recommend you not argue, either. It will be safer for both of us.”

  The young woman was obviously flustered, but as she looked up into his face, she realized he meant it and her protests faded. He took her hand in both of his and gave her another bow—which only flustered her even more deeply, of course—and turned her over to one of the assistant housekeepers. Then he returned to his office, dropped into the comfortable chair behind his desk, and glared up at the ceiling while his mind raced.

  He’d ruthlessly shoved he job of unraveling the chain of incompetence behind that fool trainee pilot onto the desk of Five Thousand Rukkar. The entire thing was a mess. The yellow wasn’t even a proper battle dragon—just a youngling on loan from Mythal Air Expeditionaries for a breeding experiment that probably should never have been approved. MAE was as undisciplined a group as ever claimed commissions, but Mythlan private families paid for the feeding and care for MAE’s fleet of dragons—a relief on the Union of Arcana’s military budget too large for Parliament to decline. The old practice of an airknight paying for his own equipage and fodder was darn useful in that respect, but other Mythlan habits didn’t mesh well with Andaran sensitivities. Among other things, they conducted side line breeding efforts and produced special dragon lines for crowd control, which had to be one of the stupidest godsdamned ideas Thankhar had ever heard of. And what kind of frigging idiot authorized a yellow for “crowd control”?

  He shuddered as he thought about it. He’d never heard of a yellow which produced nonlethal gas, and he doubted like hell that anyone in Mythal was interested in producing one, whatever they might claim. And he had his doubts—serious doubts—about the rider’s claim that he’d never intended to actually fire on the crowd. Hells, he doubted he’d believe it even if the kid repeated it under a dozen truth spells! No, that little prick had been ready to gas the street in front of Garth Showma House, and what kind of miserable bastard used poison gas on a crowd of bereaved women and children?

  As soon as the healers had that trainee back on his feet, Sathmin would have him at a meeting with the spouse’s club to make a very heartfelt and public apology. Sathmin would make it work, but the real apology should be coming from someone far more senior who’d allowed the almost disaster to launch. Rukkar had better figure out who’d started it, or Thankhar would have to.

  He didn’t care how mild the MAE’s Hundred who’d claimed credit for the idea thought the yellow’s gas was. That idiot had also been shocked—or claimed he had, anyway—that the crowd hadn’t instantly dispersed the moment yellow wings flared overhead. He’d clearly never met an Andaran woman. And he equally clearly hadn’t figured out how much of that crowd had been garthans who didn’t give a single solitary damn about any shakira ever born. Once they got out from under the bastards’ thumbs, there was no stopping any garthan. It was one of the things he most liked about them…and what was making it so godsdamned hard to get them to stand back and believe the truth about how Magister Halathyn had actually died.

  And now this. What in all Shartahk’s Hells was going on at the front? He’d had his doubts, had his concerns, but this—!

  His staff commo officers, with some assistance from Magister Gadrial—he wasn’t going to let a possible forgery slip by when he had a theoretical magister of her caliber on hand—had confirmed the message was legitimate. Arylis Ulthar hadn’t faked it, and the original message had definitely been recorded on a hummer at the front. He had to bear in mind the theoretical possibility that Fifty Ulthar hadn’t sent the original message, but the chance of anyone’s getting a successful forgery past Gadrial Kelbryan was virtually nil. Which only made it even worse, in a way. Ulthar had a solid performance record before his posting to the frontier, and Jasak had flatly stated that he’d been the best fifty in C Company. There was no reason—no sane reason Thankhar could think of, at any rate—for a man like that to invent an elaborate story, especially one like this…which meant what he’d reported was almost certainly true.

  And that meant Thankhar had to assume the events at the front really were as bad as the message claimed. He needed to find out what was going on out there—everything that was going on out there—and he needed to find out yesterday. Most people would have felt the meat of Ulthar’s message was all about the violation of the Kerellian Accords and the truly horrible treatment of Sharonans held under Arcanan military authority, and Thankhar Olderhan’s fury had burned fiery hot as he read that part of it. Yet under the fury had been something far, far colder.

  The Commandery knew the truce had broken down, that Two Thousand Harshu had led a counterattack deep into the Sharonian-claimed universes, and that the initial offensive seemed to have done well. But aside from that bare notification and the report that at least some Second Andaran survivors had been recovered alive, there were still no additional official messages. It was preposterous—or worse—but the most recent reliable information they really had was Jasak’s report, and that was both suspect in certain quarters and locked down, denied public release, until after his court-martial had delivered its verdict.

  It wasn’t unheard of for there to be delays—sometimes very lengthy delays—in reports from the frontier when officers were overwhelmed dealing with some crisis. The Union of Arcana had learned long ago that it couldn’t micro-manage affairs over a communications chain that could take weeks or even months to pass a message one way. The military had to trust the judgment of the officers on the spot, and those officers were often more focused on the problem at hand rather than on writing reports for superiors who couldn’t do one damned thing to help them, anyway. So, yes, there’d been lots of examples of that sort of delay over the years.

  But it also happened when officers were doing something profoundly stupid and thought they could fix it before the Commandery found out, and Thankhar Olderhan had decided weeks ago that that was almost certainly the case this time…unless it was something still worse. In fact, he’d been inclining further and further towards that “still worse” hypothesis even before Jasak, Gadrial, and Jasak’s shardonai reached Portalis. Now, with what Therman Ulthar had said about intelligence reports which contradicted what he knew first hand to be true added to what Jasak and Gadrial had already told him…

  For anyone who’d spent as many years as he had fighting corruption and facing down one scheming political maneuver after another, the possibility that Army and Air Force personnel were being deliberately lied to by their own superiors raised questions which were far more chilling even than the violation of the Accords. Ugly questions about who was doing what, who was covering it up, and—above all—why he was covering it up. And when that was added to what was clearly an orchestrated campaign to leak the false narrative from the front to the news services which were most hostile to the current government…

  He needed an investigation, and he needed it now. And whatever team he sent down-chain needed the military teeth to be listened to and the strength to withstand whatever threat the Sharonan military—and, much as he hated the possibility, its own military—represented. Collecting evidence in an active war zone was not for the faint of heart.

  Lucky for him, Thankhar Olderhan was an Andaran, and Andaran inquiry officers didn’t come in fai
nt of heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  January 15

  The winter air was crisp and the sunlight crystalline as it drenched the target range on the outskirts of Portalis. The temperatures had been freezing since Jathmar and Shaylar arrived, but Arcana’s use of magic to heat their homes and offices had produced one consequence no Sharonian would have anticipated: no coal smoke. As a result, the distant tree line was a sharp, dark thicket of bare branches, undimmed by the grey smudge of urban smoke. They were as clear here with Jathmar’s eyes wide open as they would have been in this same meadow in Sharona if he’d closed his eyes and stretched out his Mapping Talent.

  He drew a deeper, fuller breath than any he’d taken since their arrival at Portalis. He didn’t try his Talent—he had no desire to face either a headache or the heartache of its extremely reduced range. It was enough to enjoy the familiar bite of cold air and the joy of being outdoors. They’d been confined in one room or another since their arrival, allowed outdoors only long enough to dash into or out of the duke’s motic or ornate, improbably speedy coach for trips between Garth Showma House and wherever the current day’s inquisition happened to be located.

  For this trip the shiny new motic and its driverless GC had been deemed unacceptable. The angry crowds outside the huge townhouse undoubtedly had something to do with that—the motics’ restriction to pre-set, predictable routes would have been a nightmare for the duke’s security personnel—but Jathmar wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have preferred a vehicle controlled by the central traffic system. It might have been more susceptible to ambushes, but at least he’d have been confident the journey itself wouldn’t kill him!

  The duke’s black coach horses, on the other hand, had whipped through the city streets so fast his hands had gone white-knuckled gripping the seat arm while Shaylar leaned against him, eyes shut tight, the whole way. He’d braced for collision so many times he’d spent the whole city portion of the ride stiff as a brick. Yet not even that speed had prepared him for what those horses could do on open roads, like the one leading to this army post.