by David Weber
"If you've been lied to, then it's my duty to tell people the truth." The familiar stubborn look in Ulthar's blue eyes made Halesak's stomach clench painfully, and he fought a sudden urge to seize his less massively built brother-in-law by the front of his uniform blouse and shake some sense into him.
"Godsdamn it, you listen to me this time, Therman Ulthar," he said instead, a whetstone of passion sharpening the edge of his intense voice. "I'm a garthan. My people—your people now, damn it—know all about being lied to and manipulated. Gods, man! Those bastard shakira have been doing it for thousands of years! And given what you've just told me, I smell the mother of all lies. Don't you think for one moment that whoever's responsible for it wouldn't be perfectly willing to 'disappear' a single inconvenient commander of fifty who can't even substantiate his 'preposterous claims.' "
"That kind of thing may go on in Mythal," Ulthar said sharply, "but this is the Union Army, godsdamn it!"
"And I'm not telling you to keep your mouth shut forever," Halesak shot back. "I'm telling you to keep your mouth closed and your head down until you know for absolute, fucking certain that the senior officer you're telling about it isn't part of a deliberate campaign to change the truth. Do you understand me, Therman? I'm not going home to tell Arylis that you got your stupid self killed playing Andaran honor games with somebody you shouldn't have trusted!"
Ulthar glared at him, but then, slowly, drop by drop, the anger flowed out of his blue eyes to be replaced by something else.
"I'm sorry, Ulthar," Halesak said more gently, meeting that blue gaze of bitter disillusion. "I'm sorrier than I can say. And I agree with you. The truth has to be gotten out eventually. But for that to happen, you have to be alive to do the getting, and I am not going to lose you when I just got you back from the dead. Do you read me on this one?"
Ulthar looked at him for long, long moment of silence. And then, finally, nodded slowly.
"Good," Halesak said quietly, reaching through the bars to squeeze his brother-in-law's sound shoulder. "Good."
'Chapter Twenty-Three
"Well, well, well," Alivar Neshok murmured as he walked down the line of sullen-faced Sharonian prisoners assembled on the captured fort's body-strewn parade ground. Some of them were lightly wounded; all of them had their hands manacled behind them; and if the look of anyone except a combat-trained magister could have killed, Neshok would have been a smoldering corpse.
The thought rather amused him, actually.
"Those five," he told Javelin Porath. "And . . . that one," he added, pointing at an overweight, blue-eyed senior-armsman.
"Yes, Sir!"
Neshok nodded and walked off, hands clasped behind him, whistling softly. He knew he could count on Porath to deliver the selected prisoners suitably.
His whistling faded as the one major flaw in his present sense of satisfaction floated to the top of his mind once again. The fact that his interrogations had revealed the presence of Arcanan POWs here at Fort Ghartoun was going to be a major feather in his cap, since that was the only reason they hadn't been killed right along with their captors instead of being liberated. But the fact that the attack had gone in on the ground to rescue them meant the Intelligence section had gotten in further behind the lead combat elements than they had during the previous operations.
Which meant the fort's badly wounded Sharonian commander was out of Neshok's reach . . . for the moment, at least.
Neshok growled a mental curse at the thought. Commander of Five Hundred Vaynair had the bastard safely squirreled away in the casualty queue over at the field hospital. Personally, Neshok would have preferred to let the son-of-a-bitch die from his wounds—which he certainly would have done, probably fairly quickly, without Gifted healing—as an example to the rest of the prisoners. Or, failing that, Neshok could at least have shot him himself for the same purpose. Vaynair wasn't going to let that happen, though, and Neshok spared another mental curse for the officious Andaran Scouts commander of fifty who'd hustled the wounded Sharonian off to the healers before Neshok could get his hands on him.
Well, I'll just have to do the best I can with what I still have to work with and settle up with the troublemakers later, he told himself. And at least this time around, I've got a lot more people to get answers out of.
He stepped into his chosen interrogation site. It had been a stable, but the unaugmented horses who had been housed here no longer required its stalls. Dragons and gryphons—especially battle dragons and gryphons—had active metabolisms, and horses and mules tasted just as good as cattle and sheep as far as they were concerned.
And watching gryphons and dragons feed was probably an eye-opener for the Sharonians, especially after what the gryphons did to so many of their buddies. He chuckled nastily to himself. That alone ought to loosen a few tongues.
He strolled across the front of the stable, considering the stalls. They'd do as holding cages if he needed them, he decided, while the tack room he'd had cleared would give him the sort of privacy and . . . intimacy he'd found so effective in the past.
He glanced up as Porath and two other troopers kicked and cuffed their prisoners into the tack room.
"Now, now, Lance Porath," he chided gently, following them inside. "Surely there's no need for all that roughness . . . yet, at least."
"Yes, Sir. Whatever you say," Porath replied with exactly the right edge of disappointment, and the five hundred shook his head and wagged one finger admonishingly. Then he turned his attention to the Sharonians.
"Now then," he continued, addressing them through his translating PC. "My name is Neshok, Five Hundred Neshok of the Army of the Union of Arcana. You and I are going to become very well acquainted, and in the process, you're going to tell me exactly what I want to know."
None of the Sharonians replied, of course, and Neshok smiled thinly.
"You may not think at this moment that you will," he told them, "but if you do, you're wrong. Trust me, you're wrong."
* * *
Folsar chan Tergis looked at the smiling, thin-faced Arcanan and felt a cold stab of terror. This Neshok was radiating his emotions so powerfully that even a half-Deaf Voice—and chan Tergis was anything but half-Deaf—couldn't help picking them up, physical contact or no.
Not any more than he could help realizing that the Arcanan was the next best thing to certifiably insane.
He's enjoying this, chan Tergis thought. Really, really enjoying it. It's not just about power for him; there's something almost erotic about it as far as he's concerned, and he's looking forward to killing. Triad, how many more of these people are just like him?!
"Now," the smiling lunatic's voice was almost caressing, "suppose one of you tells me who your assigned Voice might be?"
Chan Tergis' blood seemed to freeze in his veins, but his brain raced with feverish speed. Obviously, these people knew a lot more about Sharonian Talents than anyone had thought they might. Which made the reason for the silence from the down-chain Voices suddenly and terrifyingly easy to understand.
In that moment, Folsar chan Tergis could see what was going to happen as clearly as any Calirath, and a fresh thought hammered through him. He hadn't made any secret of Syrail Targal's awakening Talent. Indeed, he'd been proud of the boy, bragged about the strength of his Voice. If this Neshok was as . . . thorough as chan Tergis was afraid he might prove, someone who knew about Syrail was going to break and tell him. And when that happened . . . .
For an instant, there was no response. Then he Saw a flash of vision, someone else's hands scooping sweet feed from a burlap bag for eager, velvet-nosed horses.
He sent flashing mental images—horrific images, of the striking gryphons, the horned, lynx-eared unicorns, and the terrifyingly enormous dragons—with the speed and completeness possible only for a highly trained Voice. The thirteen-year-old at the other end of the Voice link gasped at the raw brutality of everything he was Seeing and Hearing, and chan Tergis allowed himself a moment of bitter regret for having inflicted that upon him. But someone had to know.
He felt a brief instant of stunned silence, of shock so profound he was afraid the boy was going to withdraw entirely. He wouldn't have blamed Syrail a bit if he had, but the boy was made of sterner stuff than many an adult chan Tergis had known.
* * *
"It may be," Neshok said reasonably, "that some of you—maybe even all of you, at this point—don't believe me. Perhaps you believe that by keeping your mouths shut you'll manage to deprive us of some critical piece of information. But, you see, there's a problem with that particular line of logic. We've captured quite a few of you this time. Believe me, even if you manage not to tell me something when I ask, someone else will answer the same question before it's over. Someone else always will. It's just a matter of how many people get hurt first."
None of the Sharonians replied, and something inside Neshok purred like a huge, hunting cat.
He clasped his hands behind himself again, letting himself bob gently up and down on the balls of his feet as he studied their expressions. They seemed less shaken than most of his earlier interrogation subjects had been, he decided. That was interesting, something to bear in mind. Apparently seeing their fellows ripped apart by gryphons was a less shattering experience than being strafed with fireballs or strangled in a cloud of gas. Our perhaps it was simply that the casualty count had been so much lower this time?
"Come now," he told them almost caressingly. "Don't pretend you don't understand what I'm telling you. And think about this. You six have the unfortunate privilege of being the first people I'm going to be asking these questions. There are a lot more where you came from, and, the truth is that you'll be almost as useful as . . . examples, shall we say, as you'll be as information sources. To be perfectly frank, I don't really care whether you answer my questions or not."
Still no one spoke, and Neshok unclasped his hands to reach out and take the Sharonian revolver from Porath.
"Now to return to my first question," he said with a bright, friendly smile. "Who's your assigned Voice?"
* * *
Chan Tergis' spine stiffened. He didn't even have to turn his head to know that none of his fellow prisoners as much as glanced in his direction. All of them stared straight ahead, jaws clenched.
"Perhaps you think I'm joking about the consequences of refusing to answer my questions," the Arcanan said. He raised the H&W with the air of a man who knew how to use it and aimed it at the forehead of Petty-Armsman Erkam Varla, the prisoner at the far end of the line. "Trust me," he cocked the hammer, "I'm not."
Sweat beaded Varla's forehead, but he only pressed his lips more tightly together, and Neshok began to squeeze the trigger. There was no hesitation in him. The emotional aura blasting across the tack room battered chan Tergis like waves driven by a winter gale, and the Voice knew beyond a doubt that the Arcanan was going to fire.
"Stop!"
Neshok paused, one eyebrow arching, and glanced sideways at chan Tergis.
"You had something you wished to say?" he said politely.
"I'm the Voice," chan Tergis said hoarsely.
"Are you, now?" The Arcanan glanced at the crystal which had been translating. It glowed with a steady blue, and he nodded. "Yes, you are," he said. "How convenient. I expected it was going to take longer to find you."
Chan Tergis said nothing, only looked at him, and Neshok smiled.
"Now, the next question, I suppose, is whether or not you're the only Voice here or in the local settlements. Are you?"
Chan Tergis' mind seemed to be speeding faster than ever. The way the Arcanan had checked his crystal suggested it was somehow capable of telling him whether or not chan Tergis was lying. It must be one of these people's preposterous "spells" which somehow duplicated a Sifter's Talent. But how literal-minded was it?
"I'm the only Voice Regiment-Captain Velvelig has," he said in flat, hard tones, and the crystal glowed blue again.
"So you are," Neshok said, and chan Tergis Felt Syrail's whirling emotions from the other end of their link as the boy tasted his own fierce determination to protect him.
"I'm afraid," Neshok continued, "that we've only been able to come up with one way to make certain you Voices don't go chattering away to one another."
Chan Tergis felt his facial muscles tighten, but it was scarcely a surprise. Not given the emotions he'd already sensed from this smiling, purring butcher.
"I'm sure you'll understand," the Arcanan continued, moving the revolver from Varla's forehead to chan Tergis'.
The blinding brilliance of the muzzle flash silenced his Voice forever.
* * *
"I've got the intelligence summaries for your next couple of objectives Klayrman," Two Thousand Harshu told Thousand Toralk that evening. "From what we've been able to put together so far, the next stop—the one in the universe they call 'Karys' should be easy. But the one after that, in 'Traisum'—that one's going to be the hardest nut to crack yet."
"Really, Sir?" Toralk tried very hard not to let his distaste for the way that "intelligence summary" had been assembled show. Harshu obviously saw it anyway, and gave his head an impatient shake.
"I know how you feel about Neshok, Klayrman. And, to be honest, it's time I started reining him in. In fact, I have started. I've removed our prisoners from his control, and I've approved Five Hundred Vaynair's refusal to release the wounded to him."
"May I ask why, Sir?" Toralk inquired very carefully.
"Mostly because we're starting to hit more heavily settled universes, according to what we've already learned. Or we will be shortly, at any rate. Fort Mosanik in Karys isn't much. Your yellows should be able to deal with it without any trouble. But somewhere on the other side of it, we're going to encounter this 'railroa
d' of theirs. Apparently they've got quite a large work crew pushing it down-chain as quickly as they can, and it's undoubtedly got one of these Voices of its own assigned to it.
"That's going to make problems enough all by itself. But once we get past that, there's this Fort Salby in Traisum. I think you'll find the information on the portal itself fascinating reading. Then, once we get past that, there's the fort and a substantial settlement around it. In addition, it appears that there are quite a few farming and ranching villages and homesteads stretched out along the route from Fort Salby to the next universe. With that many people mucking about, it's highly unlikely that we're going to be able to continue to . . . neutralize this Voicenet of theirs. There's too much chance of missing a Voice hiding in the underbrush, as it were. That means we're going to lose the advantage of surprise, which is going to make any real advance beyond Fort Salby problematical, at best.
"But that's all right, actually. As you know, we've captured quite a few of their maps intact. We still can't read their language, but a couple of my bright young staff officers have been fooling around with our standard recon image-intepreting spellware, and they've found a way to adapt it. They're scanning the captured maps into their PCs, and then using the interpreting spellware to compare them to our maps and look for terrain feature matches. Once they find one, the spellware automatically orients the Sharonian maps to ours and scales them accurately, using ours as a base. We may not know how to read any of the names on their maps, but we're able to make some detailed appreciations of the terrain on them now. Which means we know what the rest of this portal chain looks like, although I could wish we knew more about the rest of their explored chains. At any rate, the maps all confirm what the prisoners say. The Traisum portal is definitely going to be the chokepoint we've been looking for. For a lot of reasons."
"Really, Sir?"
"Oh, yes." Harshu smiled thinly. "As I say, I think you'll be impressed. The portal itself would be a nightmare for anyone without dragon capability, and the approaches to the portal in Traisum itself are almost as bad. The only ground access to the portal is by way of a valley which is dominated by this Fort Salby. That's one reason I want Salby so badly. I want to be able to control that valley, keep them penned up in it where we can pound them hard, bleed any effort just to reach the portal. Given their lack of any aerial capability, we should always be able to break off and fall back through the portal if they start pushing us too hard."
