by David Weber
It didn't seem possible. Still, at least it had all come at him so quickly he hadn't really had time to come to grips with it. That was good, because he rather suspected that when he finally did have the opportunity to sit down and think about it, it was going to scare the holy living hells out of him. It was one thing to think about running for office, about the probably mundane career of a mere Parliamentary Representative. It was quite another to discover that he—Darcel Kinlafia, from a sleepy little university town in the pampas of New Farnal—had a fate which was somehow bound up with that of the heir-secondary to the Winged Crown of Ternathia . . . and now of all Sharona.
Somehow, he didn't think his life was ever going to be "boring" again.
* * *
Andrin made a soft, soothing sound to Finena as the falcon shifted uneasily on the back of her elaborate chair. The sound itself was all but inaudible against the surf of background voices, but the falcon didn't have to physically hear it to recognize it. Her head bent, and the razor-sharp beak stroked gently against the side of Andrin's neck. Then the bird straightened once again, standing proud and motionless on her perch.
The good news was that Finena had already endured a half-dozen parades back home in Ternathia. The bad news was that none of them had been even remotely like this one was going to be. The rumble of voices which was making Finena nervous came almost entirely from the Calirath Palace staff—of which, admittedly, there seemed to be somewhere in the vicinity of fourteen million, she thought wryly—and her family's personal retainers. Once they began moving out of the palace gates and down the formal parade route, and the thousands upon thousands of spectators began to cheer, it was going to get infinitely worse.
"There," she murmured, reaching up to stroke Finena's folded wings comfortingly. "There, love. If it gets too bad, you can always fly back to the Palace." She smiled crookedly. "I wish I could," she added.
Her father glanced at her as if he'd heard her. He hadn't, of course—not as quietly as she'd spoken, and not through all the background noise. But he hadn't really had to. She'd realized, over the last several weeks, that her father actually knew her even better than she'd ever thought that he did. She'd never doubted his love, the time that he always somehow saved for his children. But since the disaster at Hell's Gate, he'd shown an almost terrifying awareness of what was inside her. What she felt, what she feared, what she dreamed of and about as all of them swept inexorably into the future. It was immensely comforting and simultaneously frightening, in an obscure sort of way.
Don't be silly, she scolded herself. And don't be a coward, either. You know why it's scaring the daylights out of you!
And she did know. It frightened her because she knew too much about the Calirath Talent. She knew how hard and fast the Glimpses were falling upon her father, because they were falling upon her, too. Yet there was one enormous difference between her Glimpses and his.
Those gifted—or cursed—with the Calirath Talent were not given the ability to Glimpse events in their own lives. There were times—many of them, in fact—when a Calirath's Glimpse did tell that person a great deal about what was going to happen to him or her. But even when that happened, there was almost always a . . . blind spot. A blankness. A cutout in the vision where the person whose Glimpse it was ought to have been and which kept him from Seeing himself, his actions . . . his fate. No one knew why that was, yet it was true. With one exception.
There was one Glimpse that was given to most of those who carried the activated Calirath Talent, and cold comfort it was. It was the Glimpse of their own violent deaths. Not in accidents, or of disease, because the Calirath Talent didn't work that way. A Glimpse revealed the consequences of human actions, human events, not the simple workings of fate or chance. That was one reason there'd been so few successful assassinations of Caliraths over the millennia. It was hard for a killer to sneak up on someone who was able to Glimpse the moment of his or her own murder, after all. Not impossible, as history had unfortunately demonstrated, but difficult.
Andrin wasn't concerned about her own impending demise. She was worried—deeply and desperately—over the continuous flickers of Glimpses about Janaki. She longed to be able to nail those down. To choke the truth out of them. But there were too many other people tied up in them, too much violence, too many images which made no sense.
Yet what frightened her even more than that was the possibility that her father's understanding, his obvious concern for her, meant he was Glimpsing something about her future that worried him deeply. She knew her father would face anything to protect her and her sisters. What frightened her was her growing suspicion that he was afraid of something not even he could protect her from.
And how does Voice Kinlafia figure in all of that? she wondered, turning to gaze back over her shoulder at the handsome, brown-haired man perched in the one-person float behind her. She knew he had to be scared to death. Triad knew there were enough butterflies dancing in her middle, and she'd been riding in parades like this since she was younger than Anbessa! But if he was anxious, he was concealing it well.
That was good. Andrin had already discovered how frequently famous or important people failed to to measure up to others' expectations. She couldn't say Kinlafia was exactly what she'd expected from the power and the anguish and the clarity of the Voice transmission SUNN had broadcast throughout all of Sharona. She'd expected someone taller, bigger than life, with a granite chin and piercing eyes.
What she'd gotten was a man who needed no steely jaw or granite chin. A man whose brown eyes were wounded, not piercing, yet still remained warm and compassionate. A man whose heart had taken savage wounds, yet refused to close inward upon its pain. A man who was not yet fully aware of his own strength. She wondered if she were catching just a faint echo of the Glimpse her father had obviously experienced when she and voice Kinlafia first came face-to-face.
I don't know you . . . yet, she thought, glancing back over her shoulder at him again. But I will. I know I will . . . and that my father approves of whatever will happen when I do. But Glimpses never show gentle, happy things, do they, Voice Kinlafia? So how much pain, how many tears, are waiting for you and me? And will you someday curse the day you first became entangled in the Calirath destiny?
She didn't know, and as the parade to began to move at last, she turned unquiet sea-gray eyes away from the man behind her with a silent prayer to any god who might be listening.
He's lost enough already, she told whoever might hear. Don't let me cost him even more. Please. Spare me that debt, at least.
'Chapter Fourteen
Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr closed the book in her lap, leaned back with a sigh, and glanced back out the window.
"Tired, love?" a voice asked, and she looked across the small compartment at her husband, Jathmar, and smiled slightly.
"Not physically," she said, knowing that he didn't really need a verbal answer, given what he could sense through their marriage bond. "Not at the moment, anyway. But I think my soul's feeling the wear and tear."
"I suppose that's a pretty fair way to describe it, at that," Jathmar acknowledged. "After all, we're farther away from home than any Sharonian's ever been before, aren't we?"
Shaylar's mouth tightened briefly, then she shrugged.
Jathmar was right, of course. They'd already traveled to the very end of the explored multiverse before they ever discovered the huge portal which had led them into such disastrous contact with the Arcanan Army. It was hard to believe that in barely two months, they'd already traveled the better part of twenty-nine thousand miles since their capture . . . or that they were still just under a third of the way from the universe Arcana had named Mahritha to their destination in New Arcana. According to the maps their captors had shown them, they were currently in a universe called Mountain Spine, speeding rapidly along a narrow, canyonlike roadway cut through a humid stretch of jungle in what a Sharonian would have called the Sunhold of Garmoy in southeastern Uromathia.
/> "I know we both wanted to see the multiverse," she said wryly, after a moment, and waved out the window at the terrain rushing by as evening came on, "but this is a bit more of it than I had in mind, at any rate. Even if we are seeing it in indecent comfort, at the moment."
The thing the Arcanans called a "slider" was a bit like a Sharonian railroad . . . but only a bit. They'd first boarded the slider almost a thousand miles ago, in the universe of Ucala, and it was an enormous improvement over riding the backs of transport dragons. True, there was still a certain sense of wondrous disbelief about dragon flight, even after so many wearisome thousands of miles of it, but the deeply, comfortably cushioned seats and sleeping berths of the slider were an unspeakable luxury.
In most ways, the slider was like a first-class railway car, yet the differences between it and any railroad Shaylar or Jathmar had ever seen only stood out even more starkly because of the surface similarities.
For one thing, the slider car was a self-contained unit. They'd seen several "trains" of sliders, proceeding together, but that was simply because of routing considerations. There was no such thing as a slider "locomotive"; instead, each slider contained its own spell accumulator, and that spell accumulator moved that slider car—and only that slider car—along the slider track. Except, of course, that it wasn't really a "track" at all, in the Sharonian sense of the word. It was only a series of nodes, arcanely anchored to the bedrock beneath them, which served the sliders' motivating spells as guides. The slider itself whizzed along a rock-steady eighteen inches above the graded right-of-way at a speed of about fifty miles per hour. If two sliders should meet one another headed in opposite directions, they simply slid to the side to let each other past, then moved back into the center of the roadbed and continued on their separate ways.
Any slider had to slow down occasionally, of course. Not even magic, it appeared, could avoid the occasional tortuous switchback or necessary tunnel when it came to staking out rights-of-way over literally thousands of miles. In fact, Shaylar suspected that it was probably no faster, over an average distance, than one of the Trans-Temporal Express's passenger or freight trains. But its silence, smoothness, and flexibility were yet another proof of how incredibly different the "technology" of Arcana was from that of Sharona.
"At least we're still alive, Shay." Jathmar's soft voice summoned her back from her wandering thoughts. "And we're still together. And," his voice changed subtly as an almost grudging edge crept into it, "whatever else, we're damned lucky Jasak is such a fundamentally decent sort."
"Yes, we are." Shaylar's dark, beautiful eyes warmed with deep approval as she gazed at him. Jathmar felt that approval through the marriage bond, and acknowledged it with a crooked smile of his own.
"I am trying, love."
"Oh, I know," Shaylar said. "Believe me, Jath, I know."
And she did. She not only knew, but she understood exactly why Jathmar's feelings where Sir Jasak Olderhan were concerned remained . . . complex, to put it as tactfully as possible. Gadrial Kelbryan—Magister Gadrial Kelbryan—had shared a term to describe both Jathmar and Jasak. It wasn't one Shaylar had ever heard before, but once Gadrial explained its meaning, she'd had to agree that it was a perfect fit for both of them. The term was "alpha male," and she and Gadrial had watched with a mixture of apprehension, frustration, impatience, and genuine amusement as the two men tried to come to some sort of understanding of their mutual roles.
It wasn't an easy task. Of course, it wouldn't have been an easy task for anyone, whatever sort of alpha or beta male they might have been.
No one could possibly expect Jathmar to forget that it was the men of Jasak Olderhan's company who had killed every other member of their survey crew. Who had come literally within a hair's breadth of killing Shaylar, as well—and even closer than that to killing him. In fact, without Gadrial Kelbryan's minor Gift for Healing, Jathmar, at least, would have died, and it was highly probable that Shaylar would have followed him.
No, no one could reasonably have faulted Jathmar for hating the very ground Jasak walked upon, or feeling a fierce, savagely satisfied sense of vengeance when Sharonian troops virtually annihilated Jasak's command after Hundred Hadrign Thalmayr relieved him of command. One thing was certain—Jasak had never blamed Jathmar for feeling that way.
But Shaylar was a Voice, with the perfect recall and gift for languages which accompanied her Talent. Since her capture, she'd acquired a native's fluency in Andaran, the common language of the Union of Arcana's Army. Which was the reason she knew that Jasak had never intended for anyone to die. That what she'd thought at the time was the order to open fire had, in fact, been Jasak's voice shouting the order not to fire.
The order one of his subordinates, whose stupidity had apparently been exceeded only by his arrant cowardice, had disobeyed.
Jasak had been even more horrified than Shaylar and Jathmar, in some ways, when Shevan Garlath shot down Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl while the survey crew's leader stood there with empty hands, trying to talk. But when the infuriated Sharonians responded to chan Hagrahyl's murder by opening fire with the rifles no Arcanan had ever even imagined might exist, Jasak had found himself with no option but to fight the battle no one had wanted. So he had . . . and at the end of it, Shaylar and a savagely wounded Jathmar had been the only Sharonian survivors.
"We really are lucky he and Gadrial are both such decent people," she told her husband now. "And that he's an Andaran."
"And that he's some sort of an anachronistic throwback, too," another voice said.
Shaylar and Jathmar's heads turned as another woman—a little older than Shaylar, and a little taller (everyone was at least a "little taller" than Shaylar)—appeared in the compartment door.
"Sorry," the newcomer said. "I didn't mean to intrude, but it's getting towards suppertime. I'm sure Jasak and Chief Sword Threbuch have the stewards setting up in the dining compartment by now. Would you two care to join us?"
"As a matter of fact, I'm starved," Shaylar said. "I don't really understand why. It's not like we've been burning off a lot of energy traveling for the last few days."
"No, we haven't," Gadrial Kelbryan agreed. "I'm hungry enough to eat a dragon myself, though. I wonder if it's because we're all finally in a position to take it a bit easier and pay more attention to little things like starvation?"
Her wry smile was almost impish, and Shaylar snorted in a combination of amusement and frustration.
Gadrial was a Ransaran, which meant she came from the Arcanan equivalent of Uromathia, but Ransar was very unlike the Uromathian Empire. Ransarans were much more like Ternathians—or even New Farnalians, like Darcel Kinlafia—than Uromathians, with a fervor for freedom and the rights of individuals which sometimes seemed to Shaylar's Shurkhali sensibilities to border on the fanatical, or the obsessional, at least. Not that Shaylar had any intention of complaining. She owed Jathmar's very life to the Ransaran . . . sorceress, for want of a better term, and despite the unmitigated horror of the circumstances which had brought them together, Gadrial had become one of the closest non-Talented friends Shaylar had ever had.
But, for all of that, the slim, powerfully-Gifted magister was also one of her jailers. The fact that Gadrial was also a potent protector, one who'd demonstrated her willingness to literally step between Shaylar and a furious dragon, only made their relationship still more . . . complicated. And the emotions Shaylar could sense out of Gadrial whenever the other woman looked at Sir Jasak Olderhan added their own unique strand to the impossibly tangled knot into which the gods had decided to weave all four of their fates.
"He is a throwback, you know," Gadrial said as the three of them left the passenger compartment and started down the carpeted hallway towards the luxury slider's dining compartment.
"Jasak?" Jathmar asked.
"No, Chief Sword Threbuch," Gadrial replied with a grimace. "Of course I mean Jasak!"
"It was intended as a simple expression of interest," Jathmar said with dig
nity. His own Andaran was improving steadily, although he remained substantially less fluent in it than his wife. Given her utterly non-Andaran sandalwood complexion, flashing dark eyes, glorious midnight hair, and exotically musical accent, Shaylar could never have passed as a native Andaran-speaker, but her command of the language was at least as good as Gadrial's own.
"She knew that, Jath!" Shaylar scolded now, poking him sharply in the ribs with a jabbing index finger. Then she looked at the other woman. "I think I agree with you, Gadrial, but exactly how do you mean that?"
"I sometimes think Jasak thinks he's living back during the days of Melwain the Great," the magister replied. Her tone was light, almost jesting, but Shaylar sensed a core of genuine concern under the amusement.
" 'Melwain the Great'?" she repeated, and Gadrial shrugged.
"Melwain was an Andaran king who lived well over a thousand years ago. By now, the legends crusted around him are so thick that no one really knows how much of his story is historical and how much is invented, but it doesn't really matter. He's become almost the patron saint of Andara because he lived such an unbelievably honorable life."
Gadrial rolled her eyes with such a fundamentally Ransaran combination of emphasis and resignation that Shaylar giggled.
"All very well for you," Gadrial said severely. "You didn't grow up living in the same universe as Andara! Those people—!"
She shook her head again, and Jathmar's deeper chuckle joined Shaylar's amusement.
"Actually," Gadrial continued after a moment, her voice and expression both considerably more serious, "most non-Andarans really do find Jasak's people a bit hard to understand. Mythalans don't believe the concept of 'honor'—to the extent that they're even capable of visualizing the concept, at least—extends to anyone outside the shakira and multhari castes. And my own people spend a lot of their time scratching their heads and trying to figure out how anyone could define so much of who and what they are on the basis of an honor code that goes back well over a millennium and seems to consist primarily of accepting an endless series of obligations simply because of who you chose as parents. But there they are. They really still exist—some of them, at least."
