The Road to Hell (Hell's Gate Book 3)

by David Weber

  “Bergahl honors this union.” Lavo read out in a loud carrying voice. “As Bergahl is Just, so is this completion to the Articles of Confederation. Blessings of glory, honor, and wisdom on the Prince of Uromathia chosen this day to wed our own Crown Princess—”

  The words continued and Raka stood as frozen as his master. They were exactly the words on the papers, but they’d never been intended for this!

  Sparing the Seneschal nothing, Lavo read every word with Nekhaan holding and turning the pages. Then the three Elder Triad gods had their traditional invocations. And all the while Finena turned her feathered head this way and that, studying the Seneschal’s eyes.

  All seven of the holy men and women clasped hands together, with the Vothan and Sekharan priests giving the Seneschal no other option, and the priestess of Marnilay pronounced the final words.

  “In the names of All Gods, Ternathian and Uromathian, we and Sharona Entire bless our daughter Andrin and our son Howan and join them before all people as one house. And in this holy joining we renew our blessings on the People of Sharona and the united Empire of Sharona. Rise daughter and son, wife and husband, Crown Princess and Prince Consort.”

  The Seneschal opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “In the names of All the Gods,” the Double Triad six called out together, “Blessings, blessings, seven times blessings!”

  * * *

  “That conniving little whore!” Raynarg snarled. “I had to bless them. Bless them! While those six tridiots fawned over the sanctity of marriage and acted oh so delighted to preside over that six times damned farce! She should be whipped in the streets!”

  Chava Busar watched the spittle-flecked would-be holy man with partially concealed disdain. “I’d settle for dead. In childbirth would be appropriate, but we probably shouldn’t wait that long.”

  Faroayn Raynarg offended Emperor Chava’s sensibilities. But the price of empire demanded using tools like the soft man in front of him. Ternathians dismissed “His Crowned Eminence” as a buffoon, because he was one. But Chava could use buffoons as handily as he could men of capability. In fact, handled properly, buffoons could be far more valuable than more capable—and wary—tools.

  “Zindel Calirath, the father, is our true enemy here, remember,” the Uromathian counseled. “The girl is just his blood, and not yet out of her teens, to boot. Trouble enough in time, but for now she’s still untrained.”

  “She offends me.” Raynarg ignored this comment, not pausing in his furious pacing to actually acknowledge the wisdom being offered him. “I’ll cut her. Cut her where it hurts.”

  Chava sighed inwardly and continued, pointing out more Calirath weaknesses that would never apply to a Uromathian imperial heir.

  “Zindel’s children do not compete amongst themselves for heirship, so when he lost the boy he lost his only truly trained heir. Princesses are only good for alliances. Admittedly, our bride chose poorly, but such errors can be…corrected. So, certainly, if your knives get an opportunity, kill her.”

  “Yes!” Raynarg clenched a fist in a manner probably meant to be threatening and collapsed into a heavily padded chair exhausted by the few minutes of pacing.

  The emperor hid his personal contempt for the qualities which made the Seneschal so attractive as a tool. The man was a fat toad. He was a pure terror to small men, the flies—like those acolytes in the Order of Bergahl who wanted to serve the gods rather than enrich their order’s leader—but he appeared utterly impotent against a force like the Caliraths. Yet that very incompetence was what made him valuable in Chava’s present need. The Seneschal of Othmaliz would never be taken seriously by even the extremely thorough Ternathian Imperial Guard, and so a strike using his Order had a far better chance of succeeding than one might have expected from so feckless a leader. The unholy cleric just needed to be properly led.

  “But Zindel is the one who stole your palace and presumes to rule us, not—at least not yet—this girl.” The emperor pointed out. “He represents the true threat. Still, it would be as well to eliminate this new heir of his before he has a chance to train her as he did his son. If a chance arises, I trust your Daggers have enough sense to make a cut?” He lifted his glass in inquiry.

  “Absolutely!” Raynarg slammed his fist on the table, rattling the glasses. It was no way to treat the gently aged vintage in the crystal decanter between them, but Chava had long since determined that the self-absorbed man before him only desired the finer things in life, without the true refinement to actually identify quality in his possessions.

  “My informants, trusted loyalists you understand, tell me the new consort’s mother has asked for a visit,” he said now. “The newlyweds will hide with the Caliraths for a time. But eventually, and count on it to be sooner than later, they’ll want some manner of honeymoon. The royal yacht has been sent for an overhaul. The next voyage may have the crown princess and her prince consort aboard. If they take that honeymoon by sea, they could visit Eniath.”

  His spies had had reported nothing of the sort, but if an imperial yacht left the harbor chances were high someone Zindel cared about would be onboard, and he continued the lie fluently with a fine salting of truth.

  “They would be at their weakest when out of sight of land, with no reinforcements near to call. But they’ll also be readiest then. I suggest your men examine the palace’s harbor and its approaches. You may find some most unique Talents available to you among your newest supplicants.”

  Raynarg’s eyes lit as Emperor Chava had expected they would. Lending the Seneschal a few exceptionally capable men was, he deemed, absolutely necessary to provide a decent chance of breaking through the Ternathian Imperial Guard. Fortunately, Zindel wasn’t the only emperor capable of searching his lands for useful people and enticing them into his service. Certainly the Ternathians had an unusual number of such capabilities born to families of those already in service, but Chava suspected that came of having started the process centuries earlier and somehow managing to keep whole families in service instead of simply the young men.

  Not for the first time Chava longed for a way to make slavery desirable. If he’d just been born a few thousand years earlier, he could have established a stronger Uromathian tradition for the Talented to be wards of the state. Property of the state would have been better, but his otherwise competent ancestors had denied him that possibility. When the Talents which had first arisen in Ternathia finally found their way into Uromathian bloodlines, the rulers of the kingdoms which had predated his own empire adopted many of the Ternathians’ practices in order to encourage their growth. He liked to think they would have showed more wisdom if they’d realized where it would lead, and at least they’d stopped short of the more ridiculous of the Ternathian excesses, but they’d established early on that the Talented were exempt from enslavement except after conviction for certain very specific crimes. By the time of Chava’s birth, those traditions were too ingrained to be overcome in a single generation. He was working on it, of course, and the empire did have the tradition of service, but something stronger than that—something which allowed the assigning of spouses and obligated apprenticeships—would be so much more useful.

  Perhaps a breeding program…The idea intrigued him. Not all the Talents would be willing, but surely some could be enticed. And other Talents were valuable enough they didn’t need to be willing.

  But that was later. For now Chava needed to tone down the Seneschal’s aspirations. A public flogging of an imperial princess would never happen. The man was a fool to even speak of it. Positions and titles must be respected or the public might come to think they could live without emperors and kings. Or even seneschals.

  This had to be an assassination, and a speedy one, because the attacking team itself would never survive the Calirath response. Of this Chava approved. An emperor should be properly ruthless.

  For that matter, the entire Order of Bergahl was unlikely to survive a less than fully successful attack on the
Caliraths, not that Chava intended to mention that to Raynarg. And such a neat clean up would be distinctly convenient for Emperor Chava—a reality the Seneschal failed to note and which the Uromathian emperor carefully declined to reveal to him.

  A certain breed of man-eating fish could be adapted to survive in saltwater and be trained to enjoy the taste of warm-blooded cetacean, but as soon as the orca became aware of their presence, that nest was as good as eaten. The Bergahldian could make for a useful toothy little fish. If Faroayn Raynarg thought of himself instead as a shark, Chava would let him continue in the delusion.

  * * *

  Drindel Usar received his recall orders two hours later—the time required for a trusted Uromathian courtier to decode Emperor Chava’s orders and issue all the necessary secondary commands required to see His Excellency’s will accomplished, plus a terrifying hour and a half for the Haimath Island Director of Talents to actually find the grubby Talent.

  Drindel had neither updated his residency card nor filed his papers with Haimath Prefecture and thus was guilty of several small felonies. These would have to be immediately lost in governmental paperwork, because the seal on the Flicker-sent summons meant the missing Drindel Usar was required for Service to Uromathia.

  No mere prison term could be allowed to stand in the way.

  The director wished fervently for an option to have Drindel locked in a dank cell overnight first, but dared not report to the Imperial Court that he’d taken any action other than performing his own Service to Uromathia as expeditiously as possible. So he settled for slapping the papers in Drindel’s face and storming out of the rundown dockside establishment in which he’d finally found the man.

  The director left too quickly to notice Drindel’s pleased misinterpretation of the slight. In the young Talent’s mind a local bureaucrat had hand-delivered his orders and left with all speed, honoring the importance of Drindel’s work, while the director’s silence proved the petty rules of Talent registration were beneath one such as Drindel Usar!

  Drindel took great pleasure in tearing open the missive immediately. He scattered wax bits all over tavern the floor and ground some into the space between the boards for the wait staff to crawl after.

  Rena would probably be the one bent down on her hands and knees. He hoped she saw the slight gleam in the wax and spent the evening on the floor picking up each little bit to gather the minuscule amount of gold fleck added to the wax of an Imperial Order.

  Her father Toruph certainly wasn’t going to do it. Drindel shot a dark look at the old man, but he was careful to keep his own head down and his eyes lidded. Old Toruph’s arms were as wide around as some of the shark jaws adorning his tavern walls, and he’d never needed a bouncer to keep order in his tavern. That didn’t mean he had any right to keep Rena working in the back just because Drindel was in town, though!

  But he’d deal with that later.

  “I am recalled to active service!” Drindel announced to no one. He lifted the papers with a flourish anyway.

  He waved a hand at the stacked glasses and plates: one of everything and no matter that he couldn’t eat that much and didn’t care for the taste of any of the liquors available in his hometown. He dumped the drinks he hadn’t touched on the floor to ensure Toruph didn’t pour them back into the bottles to serve him again next leave.

  “Charge these to Uromathia.”

  Drindel had no right to authorize anything, but his hometown had chaffed him irritatingly. And he wanted to hear all about Toruph trying to get a reimbursement from the Empire. Maybe the Prefecture could take care of Toruph for him. The man’s skill with a sea spear made the usual methods too challenging.

  Drindel stomped out of the tavern into the brisk evening air holding tight to his papers, but under his swagger there was an edge of disquiet. They were marked urgent, and a cold knot of fear squeezed his belly.

  What if the fearful Director of Talents had found the right ear to whisper into? The island administrator might lay the blame for a slow start on Drindel Usar—instead of on the sloppy care the Prefecture provided for their elite Talents.

  He forced himself to calm. No. The orders had come only on paper without a member of the emperor’s special police to oversee their execution. This wouldn’t be noticed.

  And besides, who was the Director of Talents to be listened to? The administrator probably had just one name like most of the rest of the Haimath. Drindel was no longer just little boy Drindel, or worse, Drindel son-of-Drand. No, he was Drindel Usar—a man of rank who’d taken a second name to honor his emperor.

  And he wanted to visit his mother. There should be time to see his Maman Usar, before he headed as directly and quickly as possible across the inlet to catch a night train across Uromathia.

  Maman jumped to her feet and ran to see him when he knocked at the door.

  She respected him, oh yes.

  A dinner, a lunch, and copious extra tidbits—she pressed on him for the journey. Maman Usar had proper respect for his work and the honor bestowed on him by selection for Service to Uromathia.

  As for Drand, well, his father was a long time ago.

  And it hadn’t been his fault, really. The way Drindel saw it, and the way he’d convinced Maman to see it, was that all of the mess truly had been Drand’s own fault. The old man had been a Talent himself and never even registered: a crime. And worse, his father’s Talent had been to call fish easily into the nets, despite which they’d been only a moderately prosperous fishing family. Drand should have brought them the best and largest fish every day, with never a boat trip returning with empty nets. But no, the old man had been too squeamish about the registration and always hid the Talent away.

  Drindel had the better Talent. The regular fish ignored him entirely, which had seemed a deep misfortune at first, until he found that the sharks would follow him for miles and not just the little ones that got caught up in the nets.

  His father, Drand, had been a criminal. That was the important part. Drindel using his Talent to teach a criminal a lesson was almost a Service to Uromathia, really.

  All that had been before Drindel was old enough to formally register and have his own Talent tested. And some of the comments the Prefecture Mind Healer had made to Maman had been sadly lacking in perspective. But that man had transferred inland before Drindel’s first home leave, so Drindel had never had a chance to even things up properly. Some of the locals still thought he’d been sent into Service as some kind of punishment. Drindel kept track of who said such things and who wasn’t appropriately kind to his mother.

  Maman had lists for him every home leave of who to teach lessons to. Everyone was very nice to her. Now.

  Toruph was about the only one left who didn’t make a point of greeting Maman cordially on the street and sending her things now and again to ease her troubles. His Maman deserved the best of life while her one son was off working so hard for the good of Uromathia.

  A boat ride across to the mainland was easy to cadge at the docks, with half the local fishermen falling over themselves to offer him a trip across. Drindel accepted the one with the largest boat and seated himself carefully in the center of the vessel. He hated being on the water. He always tried to blank his mind as much as possible to reduce the chance of even the smallest tendril of his Talent squeezing out. It was just that he wasn’t always successful.

  This trip across was uneventful, for which Drindel thanked Heaven most fervently, but only in the confines of his own heart.

  Outwardly, he took care to pose as if he’d known exactly what went on beneath the surface of the waves and had all the ocean’s mysteries under his complete dominion.

  The truth, Drindel had to acknowledge, if only to himself, was something significantly less comforting. He could call sharks, all kinds of sharks and especially the biggest of the white ones. And the sharks would come great distances for him, even without enough food and without the energy to do more than wash up dead on the beaches once they arrive
d.

  But they would come. He just couldn’t direct them to do a single thing once they arrived. And deep down Drindel wondered if they didn’t all come in hopes of finally getting a bite of him, snapping him in half with those great teeth, and tearing out mouthfuls of his liver and lungs. Those open jaws seemed like they would do anything to stop the compulsion to come, to follow, to swim to wherever he was.

  The compulsions he couldn’t find a way to stop sending. Drand had said the Talent could be controlled with mental exercise and should be expanded only most carefully after control was proven. The work of control had hurt and left him exhausted, though, and Drindel was now sure it had been no more than a trick his father had played on him. There was certainly no pain and exhaustion in expanding the summons! When Drindel unfurled his Talent, it felt like Arcunas Himself had descended from the Heavens to kiss his brow.

  The euphoria was better than anything. In fact, Drindel couldn’t stop calling, at least softly, even if he wanted to. And he wasn’t sure he could imagine ever wanting to stop. It wasn’t like the sharks should really mind. They were cold, wet, and heartless creatures.