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

by David Weber

  Not without a down-and-dirty fight!

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hayrn 18, 206 YU

  [January 9, 1929 CE]

  Shaylar sat beside the slider window and peered out with rising excitement. They were very near the end of their journey, at last, and she was eager to see the Union of Arcana’s capital city. The universe explorer in her had longed to stop and do surveys all along the way here, but as prisoners of war, even honored shardonai, they didn’t control the itinerary. And despite the length of their journey, they’d seen very little of Arcana’s cities.

  They’d spent most of the journey through the outer universes flying on military dragons, which landed on military bases, not in civilian cities. Once they’d reached the inner universes, they’d boarded sliders, which passed through every crystal-controlled traffic junction at high speed. Some truly enormous towns for frontier universes had hung tantalizingly on the other side of the slider windows, but they’d been so busy passing through that there’d been no time to really study anything.

  The only real Arcanan city they’d even spent an hour in was Theskair. While Shaylar had been amazed by that city—it had a population of almost two million—it was little more than a sleepy, backwater town compared with Portalis, according to Gadrial. Now that they were close enough to actually see Portalis in the distance, she knew the other woman had been right. The capital of New Arcana stunned the senses.

  Tajvana was a large city, the largest Shaylar had ever visited. During the years she’d spent at the Portal Authority’s academy, she’d marveled at the city built on both sides of the Ylani Straits. But Portalis made Tajvana seem small.

  Their final approach wasn’t made at ground level. The slider’s crystal control network lifted into the sky, running alongside a wide pedestrian bridge which floated nearly eighty feet above the earth, skimming well clear of the magnificent winter forest below. The vast expanse of trees was the estate where Jasak had grown up, and he hadn’t exaggerated his description of the lands. She could tell at a glance that she was looking at pristine, old-growth forest, truly untouched despite two centuries of settlement. Even with only winter-bare branches, it was breathtakingly lovely.

  That soaring bridge should have been impossible. On Sharona, it would have been. The crystals that guided the sliders were embedded only now and again in the bridge rail, and the towers connected to the bridgeway from below were very nearly gossamer structures, like spiders’ trailing lines that must surely sway to the touch of any breeze. Those slender towers couldn’t possibly be structural supports for the bridge, let alone the sliders floating past on either side.

  “Why is the sliderway so high, here?” Jathmar asked as they hurtled silently over the treetops, and Jasak’s mouth crooked in a half smile that was part embarrassment.

  “When the Union wanted to put in a slider path, several decades ago, my grandfather—who, just coincidentally, also happened to be named Sherstan—refused to allow the construction battalion to cut down any trees. He said that forest had been held in a pristine state for a century and a half and no transport clerk was going to cut the heart out of it with a slider right-of-way.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Grandfather was fond of colorful exaggeration. All they wanted to do was cut down enough trees to entrench a control lattice, something on the order of fifty feet wide. But Sherstan was a stubborn old…gentleman,” he said carefully, causing Shaylar and Gadrial to glance at one another in amusement. “He told them,” Jasak continued, determinedly ignoring their suppressed laughter, “that if they were so set on building sliderways to hook Portalis to the rest of the multiverse, they could by Torkash run the sliders over the forest. Which is exactly what they did.

  “So many people stopped their sliders along the route to take in the scenery that they ended up building the pedestrian bridge too and modding the guidance crystal spellware to ensure all the sliders keep moving. My family added the lifts later—” he pointed to the towers “—to allow people to walk around in the forest itself.”

  “But weren’t there already roads cut through it?” Jathmar asked. “If this is the main portal out of Arcana, there must be roads leading out of the city, through your family’s land?”

  “There are,” Jasak nodded. “Those roads were built at the same time the Union formalized the treaty conferring property rights on my family. The city and the Union can maintain and widen those roads as necessary, which they’ve done many times. For all practical purposes, there’s only one portion of the original land grant still in forest cover.” He pulled over the map again and zoomed in to show them. “This section, surrounding the falls, across to here, is still in forest. The rest of it’s been leased out to the city and to the Union—for the military bases, primarily, but also for access corridors to the suburbs that extend for many miles beyond the leased land.

  “That’s why Portalis is lopsided, like this.” He zoomed back out and pointed to the irregular blob of the city, which bulged and fanned out across the map on the sides away from the forested estate. “What the Transportation Corps wanted to do was run a line through the inviolate section left in old-growth forest. Grandfather refused to cut down even one more tree of what was left.”

  “That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,” Shaylar said, studying the map and glancing out the window. “When one has a legacy to protect, one has to be adamant about such things. Otherwise, there’d eventually be nothing left to conserve.”

  Jasak smiled. “That’s precisely how he felt and frankly, I agree with him. For one thing, it would’ve robbed the citizens of Portalis, since the section they wanted to cut the line through runs through a section of the forest that’s open to the city as a public park.”

  Shaylar broke into a delighted smile. “That’s a wonderful thing to do for your neighbors!”

  Then the slider rounded a curve on its approach to Portalis and Shaylar got her first close look through the wide train windows.

  “Oh…”

  The single word was a soft exhalation of wonder.

  Portalis was a magical city…literally. The dominant feature was, naturally, the portal. It wasn’t the largest she’d ever seen, but it was a whopping big one, nonetheless, and every single mile of that immense hole in reality was jammed with roads, control towers for sliders, floating highways, and what looked like flocks of migrating birds, except these “birds” were dragons of so many bewildering sizes and hues the air seemed to shimmer from all their wings. They flew in what seemed at first to be total chaos, but as she stared, entranced, she began to discern patterns.

  Beasts of a certain size flew in one line, on what was clearly a well-established flight path. There were dozens of such lines, each with dragons of a different size, going at different speeds. Some of the small beasts were falcon-fast, making impossible maneuvers as they shot over and around other flight paths.

  There were smaller winged creatures, as well. The gryphons they’d seen again and again at military bases whipped through Portalis’ skies at phenomenal speeds, intent on errands Shaylar couldn’t even guess at. Other flying things registered as she gazed in wonder at the astonishing panorama ahead, and what looked like small lozenges floated well above the ground, although still far below the sliderway, moving at a surprisingly rapid pace.

  “What are those?” she pointed.

  Gadrial answered. “The very latest in transportation. They’re automated carriages, powered by the latest motive spells. The official name is ‘automoticars,’ but that’s too big a mouthful. The advertisers are calling them ‘motics,’ although I’m not sure the name’s going to catch on. At this point, they’re still new enough, the public really hasn’t decided, yet, what to call them.”

  “Why so new?” Jathmar frowned. “Those motic things are much smaller than a slider. Why weren’t they developed first?”

  “Ah,” she smiled. “The problem was one of steerage. Sliders are guided by the control net and even dragons are guided by pilots. Gryphons a
re small enough and smart enough to avoid mid-air collisions, but the idea of hundreds of ungoverned vehicles—even thousands of them—flying anywhere people chose, straight through established flight paths, flown by anybody with enough cash, not by responsible, licensed pilots, buzzing across roads, whipping around people’s houses and through city streets…” She shuddered. “The very idea horrified city councils. Most cities passed laws prohibiting ungoverned flying vehicles piloted by nonlicensed pilots.

  “Things stayed that way for a long time, until a very bright spellcaster—a Ransaran, of course,” she added, eyes sparkling with mischief and challenge, “figured out how to cast a motive spell that follows predetermined flight paths, responding to a series of permanent traffic pods put up in a grid all over the city. Once he did that, the door opened and the djinn was out of the bottle, so to speak.

  “Although I’ve never understood why any rational person would actually want to let a djinn out of its bottle,” she added in a surprisingly grim tone. “They’re bad-tempered, incurable liars who invariably cheat any fool stupid enough to fall for their promises. Of course, they do provide a decent living for spell-casters who specialize in personal disaster and curse reversal, not to mention attorneys representing people damaged when some idiot wished for the most beautiful women in the world, which caused a djinn to yank a thousand or so perfectly innocent girls out of their houses, offices, or schools with no warning at all and no way to get home again, without suing the irresponsible worm responsible for djinn-napping them.”

  Shaylar and her husband gaped at Gadrial.

  “You…are joking, aren’t you?” Shaylar gulped.

  “I never joke about women wronged through no fault of their own,” Gadrial said, grim as any soldier on the way to combat.

  “It’s a recurrent problem,” Jas said quietly. “The military’s returned victims home many times, as a public service. There are djinn-victim aid societies, too, and it’s illegal—profoundly so—to traffic with a djinn. But idiots and reckless, irresponsible jackasses keep risking it, convinced they’ll come out ahead. They never do, but the challenge and the lure is just too irresistible for some.

  “It doesn’t help that djinn are almost impossible to control, once released. There’s a whole branch of the UBI—the Union Bureau of Investigation—devoted to tracking the magic trails left by renegade djinn some fool’s let loose, but it takes a powerful spell-caster to re-bottle a djinn. It usually requires a team of them, acting in concert. More than one team’s subsequently encased a djinn bottle in concrete, to keep anyone from releasing it again, but the black market thrives on stealing bottled djinn out of holding facilities and selling them at huge prices to gullible fools. We can’t just dump them into deep ocean water, because some black marketer would use lifting spells to bring the bottle back up to the surface. And you can’t drop a djinn’s bottle into a volcano, either. That just melts the bottle and lets it out, again. That was tried, once, with genuinely horrifying results. You can’t kill a djinn by roasting it in lava, but you can make it furious enough to level a city.”

  Shaylar stared in horror and Jasak shook his head, partly in sorrow, partly in obvious disgust.

  “Some people are just too stupid or too desperate to pay attention to public warnings or the mandatory prison sentences for anyone trafficking in djinn, whether it’s selling a corked bottle or uncorking one for gain or revenge. Those are the worst cases, by far—the revenge cases. Trying to undo a revenge-motivated djinn attack can be a nightmare. People have died, from it. Lots of people, over the years. There’s a reason for those mandatory sentences, and anyone responsible for a djinn episode that kills someone is tried for voluntary manslaughter even if that was never his intent. If it was his intent, it’s an automatic charge of premeditated murder, whatever he may claim about extenuating circumstances.”

  Jathmar’s jaw muscles quivered as fury swept through him. “Just how the hell did these things come to exist?”

  “They were created, we think,” Gadrial replied when Jasak hesitated. “During the Arcanan portal war, two centuries ago. By Mythalan shakira caste lords and their greatest magisters. The Ransarans lodged massive protests when the Mythalans turned the djinn loose against Andaran armies and ships—in fact, that’s what brought most of Ransar actively into the war on the other side—but the protests didn’t do any good. We’ve been trying to bottle them back up—permanently—for two hundred years. So far, no one’s succeeded.”

  “There’s no way to destroy the things?” Jathmar demanded, and Gadrial bit her lip.

  “The last team that tried it…” She shuddered. “No one’s tried actually killing one since, although we’ve been working on an approach we think would work at Garth Showma. The problem is that we aren’t sure it’ll work, and it’s the sort of field test that only gets to go wrong once. Sooner or later, we may have no choice but to give it another try, and we intend to go right on refining our R and D until we have to trot it out. In the meantime, fortunately, they can be forced back into bottles, eventually, with enough sufficiently Gifted magisters. But trying to kill one just makes it desperate enough and mean enough to get truly ugly.”

  Her voice turned bitter.

  “They know being bottled won’t be a permanent state. Most of them think it’s an amusing game, being released and having their fun, trying to elude capture in the chase, then being cornered and put back into a bottle, then waiting for some black marketeer to steal the bottle again so some other idiot will open it. They actually make a contest of it, amongst themselves. They’re hoping that eventually, we’ll get tired of chasing them down and leave them unbottled.”

  “Which is something we don’t dare do,” Jasak added grimly.

  “Why don’t they just kill anyone who tries to bottle them?” Jathmar asked, still seething with anger.

  “Because it isn’t sporting,” Jasak growled. “Their creators gave them a sense of humor and a twisted sense of respect for anyone clever enough to re-bottle them, as well as an appetite for creative ways to dupe their victims. So far, that seems to be holding true, but as Gadrial just implied, we can’t be certain it’ll stay that way forever. And, of course, the day it stops being true is the day some poor team of magisters is going to find out about it the hard way. The magisters know it, too,” he said grimly, his eyes flicking sideways to Gadrial for just a moment, “but they have to go right on bottling them and pray each time that this isn’t the moment the djinn stop playing games and start slaughtering magisters. That,” he added with a vicious snarl in his voice, “is another reason I hate most Mythalan shakira.”

  Shaylar stared from Gadrial to Jasak and back again, then shuddered.

  “Every time I think I’ve gotten used to your culture, something like this knocks the props out from under me, again, and I end up feeling like a lost and scared little girl. Again.”

  Jathmar slipped an arm around her, and she needed it. If they were willing to do that to one another, she thought, what would they do to Sharona? Would their Commandery decide to uncork those bottles and turn the djinn loose against Sharona’s forts? Sharona’s cities? She leaned against her husband’s shoulder, trying to blot that ghastly image from her mind and not succeeding very well.

  Jathmar’s worry for her prompted him to change the subject, bringing the conversation back to the one they’d been discussing before their unexpected digression.

  “So these ‘motics’ respond to programmed pods that steer them?”

  Gadrial nodded, and her expression was relieved.

  “Yes. The pods keep them in clearly marked lanes high enough above the streets and houses not to endanger anyone on the ground but low enough to avoid collisions with other air traffic. A car’s owner must tell the vehicle’s guidance crystal where he or she wants to go, and the GC is programmed to contact the nearest traffic control pod by means of a short-range communication spell. The pod sends back a response call that gives the car’s GC the flight path to reach the next pod
in the system, leading the car from pod to pod until it reaches the its destination.”

  “It sounds complicated,” Shaylar put in, grateful that her voice didn’t shake as much as her insides, which were still quivering.

  “It is complicated. The initial spellware was very complex to build, and it took the designers and city traffic engineers a couple of years to set up the grid, put the pods in place, test the system, and work out the kinks even after the initial spells were created. Then they had to convince the air traffic controllers and the city councilors it would work and that it would be safe. But they finally did it and the system went live a few months before I left to join Halathyn. Motic sales soared so quickly the makers couldn’t produce them fast enough to fill the orders.”

  “If there was so much resistance from the government, what gave the companies enough incentive to go ahead with them?” Shaylar wondered.