by David Weber
“The military wanted them,” Jasak explained. “For the officers’ corps, mainly. It’s cumbersome to schedule a pilot and dragon to fly across town, but that’s usually the fastest way to get around, especially in a city as large as Portalis. We have the best mass transit system in New Arcana, but the public sliders make so many stops it can take double the dragon flight time to reach anywhere in Portalis even with the faster slider speeds. And the portion of the city in Arcana, beyond the portal, wasn’t built for the public city slider system, but the pod control system’s flexible enough to be made to work even in Old City Portalis. Of course, motics can’t cross a portal threshold any better than a slider can, and that’s going to be an ongoing problem for their owners. You’ve seen the elaborate arrangements the slider stations have for transferring passengers between coaches at a portal, but how does the owner of a private motic manage that?” He shook his head.
“I think they’ll manage it in the end,” Gadrial said confidently. “There’s been some fundamental research into purely mechanical ways of getting entire sliders across thresholds, Jas. If we can make that work, we can scale it down for motics. And there’ll be a lot of motivation to do just that.” She shrugged. “As you say, it’s flexible enough to make it work anywhere. Eventually, everyone’s going to want one of them, so the pressure to make it work will certainly be there!”
Shaylar glanced out the window, where the vast spread of the city stretched for miles. “I can well imagine. It’s certainly faster than any carriage I’ve ever seen! And some of our largest cities are a nightmare to navigate during peak traffic times.”
Curiosity touched Jasak’s eyes, but he was careful about pushing Shaylar and Jathmar for details they were unwilling to share. She and her husband both knew how fortunate they were that to have avoided falling into the hands of someone like Hundred Thalmayr. He would have treated them like criminals. Or worse. Each time Jasak Olderhan showed restraint, Shaylar and her husband gave thanks for their good fortune.
So she said, “What did you want to ask about our cities, Jasak?”
Surprise lit his eyes. Then he leaned forward. “You’ve never told us what the capital city of Sharona is called. Will you at least tell me that?”
The unspoken, “So I’ll have something concrete to tell my superiors” was clear, and Shaylar glanced at Jathmar, who met her gaze with as much dismay as she felt. Neither of them knew what to say. Sharona had no capital city because it wasn’t a unified world, the way Arcana was. Yet admitting that would only make Sharona seem weak and disorganized. Even Shaylar, about as unmilitary as a person could be, realized the danger inherent in that.
She felt her husband’s desire to handle this one, so she let him speak. His answer surprised her, but it made sense, as well.
“The city’s called Tajvana. For several thousand years, it was the capital of Sharona’s largest and most ancient empire, called Ternathia.”
“The name of the language you taught us,” Gadrial said in surprise.
Jathmar nodded. “Ternathia either controlled or colonized at least two thirds of the world. Today, Tajvana is the seat of world governance. Even our Portal Authority is headquartered there, despite the fact that no portal lies in or near Tajvana.”
Shaylar could very nearly see the thought that formed behind Jasak Olderhan’s eyes: Their capital city is protected from direct invasion through a portal. She managed to hold in the shiver that touched her spine, feeling glad—very glad—Jathmar had answered. She would’ve bungled it, she knew, but Jathmar hadn’t actually lied, not once.
Which hadn’t prevented him from leaving the distinct impression of a long-unified multiverse government. The failed truce in Hell’s Gate had been called under the auspices of something called the Sharonan Empire, but neither of them knew if that really existed as more than a polite fiction useful for negotiating with the Union of Arcana. Yet if Sharona as a unified political entity had come into existence after Toppled Timber, Tajvana was the city most likely to be named as the seat of that new multiversal government.
Who would head it and what form it might take were unknowable. Shaylar couldn’t even hazard a guess. So she sent a flood of gratitude to Jathmar over the weakened bridge of their marriage bond and turned her attention back to the city they were approaching. The closer they got to Portalis’ heart, the more amazing it grew.
Buildings soared to impossible heights, rising at least forty or fifty floors above the streets, and the shapes were even more astounding than their height. One immense building resembled a butterfly, with wings outstretched beyond a central tower shaped like the long, slender body of that delicate insect. The windows in those “wings” dazzled the eye, catching the sunlight with myriad colors, mimicking real butterfly wings with uncanny success.
Others had fantastic, soaring arches that spanned entire city streets, connecting buildings, allowing people to cross busy thoroughfares without leaving a covered building. Yet those arches seemed gossamer thin, like bridges made of spidersilk and thistledown and soap bubbles. She couldn’t imagine how they didn’t fall apart or plunge into the busy streets below, let alone support so many people’s weight as they crossed along the soaring spans.
Other buildings had strange projections, like shelf mushrooms made of glass and what caught the sunlight like metal. Only these “shelves” were the size of large houses, projecting sixty and seventy feet from the sides of buildings, with no visible support. Their walls and roofs were almost entirely glass and they were undeniably beautiful, but Shaylar would have been petrified just nerving herself to step out onto one of them. When the slider slowed and the sliderway angled down to a height merely twenty feet above street level, she stared in wonder at yet more sights nothing could have prepared her for.
Everywhere she looked, there was something new and marvelous, so much, her senses began to overload. She couldn’t take it all in. Little flashes now and again came clear in the blur of unfamiliar sights. People rising up the sides of buildings in lines like marching ants, to reach doorways cut into the sheer, vertical sides of those buildings. Many of those doorways were cut into the sides of the strange, cantilevered “shelf mushroom” extensions, which she could see more clearly, now that they were actually inside the city.
She saw street entertainers performing complex acrobatics and dances, while hovering mid-air. They whirled like spinning tops, made prodigious leaps, turned graceful somersaults like a high-trapeze artist, except there were no apparatuses to assist them. They simply danced and whirled and leapt like birds who’d decided to take up acrobatics.
Sidewalk artists painted the air. Glorious swaths of color burst into being as they swept their hands in complicated patterns, creating breathtaking works of art that shone with unearthly beauty. Some glowed with soft tones, others glittered like gold dust, and still others scintillated like sunstruck opals. As Shaylar watched, entranced, a girl pointed to one of the patterns hovering mid-air and the whole glowing “painting” floated gently over to an easel, where it landed on what looked like a sheet of that strange, glassy substance that stored spells.
The artist picked up the sheet and handed it to the girl, who passed money to him, then walked away with her artwork, smiling happily. The other patterns floated over to other sheets of that strange glassy material, creating yet other paintings the artist then stacked up beneath the easel, and Shaylar sighed as she sat back in her seat.
“What’s wrong, Shaylar?” Gadrial asked in sudden worry.
She turned her gaze away from the astonishing city. She was still so amazed by what she’d just seen, she blurted out precisely what was on her mind.
“I wanted one of those glorious paintings. The ones that artist painted in the air.” Then she reddened and covered her face with both hands. “I can’t believe I just said that,” she said, aghast.
Jasak laughed softly. “If you want a spell painting, Shaylar, I believe I can afford to buy one for you.”
She lowered her han
ds to meet his gaze. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t,” he said gently. “But it’s my fault you’re here, unable to leave. If you want something beautiful, that’s only natural. And Shaylar, if you ever need anything, tell me. Please. My responsibility for you is as deep as though you were members of my own family. I’m bound by honor to provide you with everything you need, and the friendship I’ve come to feel for you makes me want to provide you with gifts, as well—things you might have purchased for yourself, before all of this happened.
“At some point, it’s my hope we’ll be able to help you work in some fashion, to earn your own money. I know it must gall to be totally dependent on what you surely view as charity or the grudging support of a jailor,” he added, looking into Jathmar’s hooded eyes, as he spoke. “You probably think I don’t understand how you feel, and I will admit I probably don’t.
“But I do understand wanting to feel like I’ve accomplished something on my own merit. Neither I nor my sisters have the slightest need to work, but we all do, nonetheless. Except for the youngest, who’s still in school. Working, contributing to society, earning your own money—that’s something important to self-esteem. But until we can find some way for you to do that, until we can help teach you to live safely in Arcanan society, you must rely on my help, financially.
“You’ve been watching the city with wonder and fright in your eyes. Now that you’ve seen some of the things that happen on an ordinary city street, I think you have a better understanding of the fact that we have to teach you how to live, here. How to avoid unseen dangers, such as accidentally stepping into a spell-field that sends you thirty stories up the side of a building when you’re not expecting it. That will take time, as well.
“I hate seeing you virtually helpless as young children, when both of you are extremely intelligent, well-educated, talented—and Talented—” he added with a very serious expression of respect, “people, highly skilled at what you do.”
Shaylar, seated on a train in the middle of the most amazing city she’d ever seen, met Jasak’s worried eyes and bit her lower lip. “I’d like to work, somehow. But there’s very little I can do, here.”
“You and Jathmar could find some way, surely, to put your Talents to use,” Gadrial said.
Shaylar glanced at her husband, trying to send a silent question to him. It was like trying to walk through thick syrup, now, to reach his mind, and what little she could still sense took as much mental effort as it had once taken to connect another telepath at the very edge of her eight-hundred-plus-mile range.
His glance into her eyes was hooded and wary; then a sigh escaped him and he shrugged.
“We might as well tell them,” he said softly. “Maybe Gadrial can tell us why.”
“Tell you what?” she asked as Jasak leaned abruptly forward, gaze sharp with sudden interest.
Jathmar lifted one hand to touch Shaylar’s face, then turned to Gadrial. “We can barely Hear one another, now.”
Gadrial blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we,” he said.
“What, exactly, do you mean?” Jasak asked.
Shaylar tried to explain. “At one time, I could touch Jathmar’s emotions, his feelings, so easily, I could often guess what he was thinking. You saw, yourself, what happened on board that first ship, when I was so distressed. Jathmar felt my chaotic emotions so clearly, he came charging into Gadrial’s cabin from ours. That’s gone,” she whispered, very nearly in tears. “I have to very nearly Shout to make Jathmar sense my emotions through the marriage bond, now. And it’s terribly difficult for me to sense his. Even sitting close, like this, it’s hard to do. When we’re in different rooms, now, we can’t Hear each other at all.”
Jasak stared from one to the other and back. “That makes no sense.”
“You think we don’t know that?” Jathmar demanded in a harsh voice. “We’ve lost everything else. And now we’re losing the most precious thing our marriage gave us: the telepathic bond between us.” Pain and anger throbbed through his voice.
“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” Gadrial asked, baffled. Jathmar only looked at her, but, after a moment, Jasak answered for them.
“Because it’s important data, Gadrial,” he said. “Militarily important.” He sounded weary, frustrated. It came as a shock when Shaylar realized he felt that way because of the added pain it was causing them. When Gadrial still looked baffled, Jasak explained.
“If their Talents don’t work as well here, their military’s greatest advantages—including their Voice network—disappear. That places their soldiers at a serious disadvantage.”
“But why?” Gadrial wondered. “If their Talents don’t work as well here, would our Gifts not work as well on their homeworld?”
“You tell me,” Jasak said quietly. “With Halathyn gone, you’re the best theoretical magister we have. The team you’ve built at the Garth Showma Institute is as good as anything in Mythal. Surely there’s something you can do to figure out why something like this might be happening?”
Gadrial’s eyes reflected one moment of stark terror as the sudden responsibility for answering a question of that magnitude landed on her slim shoulders. Then the muscles in her jaw tightened and the look in her eyes shifted from fear to determination.
“All right,” she said, her voice hard with purpose. “We’ll do everything we can to figure it out.”
She frowned in thought for several seconds, then raked one hand through her hair with a grimace of what looked very much like irritation.
“It occurs to me,” she said slowly, “that we—theoretical magisters—have overlooked something very important. Something that was dismissed out of hand…and that I suddenly suspect shouldn’t have been. The last year I was at the Mythal Falls Academy, I ran across an entire file of reports while researching a major project for Halathyn. They’d been files by early portal explorers, Gifted ones, who reported magic didn’t work quite as well in pristine universes as it did here in Arcana. No one paid much attention to it, certainly not in academe. The analyses I read treated it almost as a joke. At best, a curiosity, but more likely just a mistake by people with poorly trained Gifts. And don’t look at me like that,” she added tartly when Jasak glared at her with a flash of irritation. “I don’t mean to belittle the soldiers who reported those observations, let alone suggest they were incompetent. We hadn’t seen anything significant, though, and what little was reported was a small enough difference to fall inside measurement error. Besides, I wasn’t the one who dismissed their reports!
“Remember, Jasak, for most of the last two centuries, the only people doing research in the field of multi-universe theoretical magic fields were shakira. To them, any non-Mythalan is an unreliable observer, particularly when it comes to something as genuinely complex as theoretical magic and the way portals interact with the magic field. The Garth Showma Institute’s the first non-Mythalan academy we’ve ever had that could match the Mythal Falls Academy.”
Jasak managed a sheepish smile, mollified by her explanation.
“Sorry about that, Gadrial. I’ve just heard snide remarks from shakira a shade too often, myself, belittling anyone in the Army. Any non-Mythalan in the Army, at any rate. My father’s position’s meant I’ve seen and heard more shakira than most other Andarans.”
Gadrial’s expression softened. “Of course, Jas. And I realize the stress you’re under, as well. I’m sorry I snapped at you.” Then she frowned in an abstracted way. “If there is something about the way universes interact that make certain things possible in some universes but not in others, we need to know what it is and why it operates.”
“Yes, we certainly do,” Jasak agreed. “Urgently.”
Gadrial’s eyes glinted, and she nodded.
“Yes, I can see that, too,” she said. “All right. I’ll pull together the best theoreticians we have and sic them onto this question as our top priority.”
“Thank you,
Gadrial,” Jasak said quietly. Then he turned to Jathmar and Shaylar. “And thank you, both of you, for telling us this. I understand the risk you’ve both run, revealing that. I can’t even guarantee Arcana won’t use that information against Sharona, should we somehow fail to stop the shooting war we’ve started, out there.”
“You’ve been as honest with us as you can,” Jathmar said slowly. “I appreciate that. Our situation…” His mouth tightened. “I could try for the rest of my life to explain it and you still wouldn’t understand the depth of what we feel, cut off from everything and everyone, unable to reach our own families to tell them we’re safe. Unable to trust your superiors, your government, unable to trust even you as fully as we might if we’d met under other circumstances. And now this. If Shaylar and I have to lose a vital piece of who we are, if our souls have to be ripped apart, as well as our lives…we’d at least like to know why.”
Gadrial bit her lip. “I’ll do everything I can to find that answer for you,” she said in an unsteady voice.
“Thank you,” Jathmar said softly. “That’s all we can ask.”
