"But you aren't comfortable in your mind about any 'allergy attack' in this case," Velvelig said shrewdly, and chan Tergis shook his head again.
"No, Sir, I'm not," he admitted. "Lamir's receiving range is shorter than his transmission range, that's why he's closer to Fort Brithik than to us. He'd have to be seriously ill to be unable to reach me with a transmission from his end, especially if he tranced to do it. And he's never let better than three days go by without sending at least a test message."
"Is it possible he's come down with something a bit more serious than an allergy attack? Something that came on quickly enough that he didn't realize he needed to get a message off to you before it put him out of commission?"
"Certainly it's possible. Probable, though?" Chan Tergis shrugged. "I'd have to say I don't think it's very likely."
"I see," Velvelig said again.
"This is a prime example of why we shouldn't have Voice relay stations with only single Voices assigned to them," chan Tergis said. "If one Voice goes down, for any reason, there ought to be another one ready to back him up the way they do in the inner and middle rings. And we wouldn't have had to play musical chairs with Baulwan and chan Lyrosk this way, either. To be honest, we've virtually built communications breakdowns into the system ourselves simply by stretching our supply of Voices so thin."
"I agree with you, Senior-Armsman," Velvelig said dryly. "Unfortunately, there are those nasty budgetary considerations. And, let's face it, the supply of Voices willing to go haring off into the wilderness is limited—very limited."
"I realize that, Sir." Chan Tergis' tone held a hint of what might almost have been apology, and Velvelig's use of his own rank had apparently jogged his mental elbow into remembering the proper form of military address when speaking to a superior . . . for the moment, at least. But his expression was also stubborn.
"I'm not saying there weren't what seemed to be perfectly good reasons for accepting the kind of stretch we're working with out here," he continued. "I'm only saying that we've just found out why what looked like good reasons really weren't. Not now."
"A point which I'm quite sure hasn't been lost on First Director Limana and the rest of the Portal Authority," Velvelig said. "In the meantime, we're still left with our uncertainty about the reasons for the silence coming from down-chain."
Chan Tergis nodded, and Velvelig inhaled deeply.
"Very well, Senior-Armsman. I want you to continue trying to reach Voice Ilthyr. But I also want you to send a message up-chain. I want higher authority informed about this."
"You think something serious is wrong?" Chan Tergis' question came out sounding remarkably like a statement, Velvelig thought, and shrugged.
"I don't know that I'd say I think something is seriously wrong. But I'm certainly open to the possibility that something may be wrong. It's hard for me to visualize something that could have kept any warning from getting out to us, but in light of what chan Tesh and chan Baskay have been saying, I'm not going to rule anything out, either."
"I'm not exactly in favor of taking any chances, either, Sir, but it's almost three hundred miles from Fort Shaylar to Fort Brithik, and it's another twelve hundred miles from Fort Brithik to Fort Ghartoun. That's the next best thing to sixteen hundred miles of nothing but horse trails and wilderness, and Lamir's relay station is five hundred miles this side of Brithik. I can't think of anything that could cover that much ground in just three days!"
"Neither can I," Velvelig said mildly. "On the other hand, two months ago I couldn't have imagined anything that threw honest-to-gods fireballs or lightning bolts, either. Under the circumstances, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to accustom ourselves to stretching our mental horizons, don't you think? And if it should happen that for some strange reason we drop off the Voicenet, I'd like to think someone might notice."
"Yes, Sir. I understand."
"Good, Senior-Armsman. Now—" Velvelig made a shooing motion with his right hand "—go do it."
'Chapter Twenty
"Now that's a sight for sore eyes, Sir. If you don't mind my saying so."
Platoon-Captain His Grand Imperial Highness Janaki chan Calirath drew rein as they topped out across the modest ridge line, then looked across at Chief-Armsman Lorash chan Braikal with a quizzical expression.
"I don't mind at all, Chief," he said mildly. "In fact, I agree. Although, to be honest, it's not my sore eyes I'm thinking about."
The chief-armsman's mouth twitched, but he'd been an Imperial Marine for seventeen years, and his expression had learned to behave itself . . . more or less.
"As the Platoon-Captain says, of course, Sir," chan Braikal responded after a moment. "Far be it from me to confuse the Platoon-Captain's anatomical parts."
"I should certainly hope not, Chief." Janaki's voice was admirably severe, but his eyes twinkled, and chan Braikal snorted. Then the noncom's expression turned more serious.
"All joking aside, Sir, I really am glad to see that," he said, waving one hand at the incredible energy raising the thick clouds of dust under the baking sun of the Queriz Depression. Black banners of smoke from the funnels of steam shovels and bulldozers mingled with the dust, hanging in a lung-clogging pall, and they could see the long, gleaming line of steel rails stretching out towards the southern horizon beyond it.
"I am, too," Janaki agreed, and uncased his binoculars. He raised them to his eyes, and the distant scene jumped into sharp focus as he turned the adjusting knob.
There had to be at least a thousand workers immediately visible down there, he reflected, and every one of them was as busy as an entire clan of beavers. Bulldozers and shovels chewed the roadbed out of the bone-dry, mostly flat terrain, rampaging through their self-induced fog of dust like steam- and smoke-snorting monsters. Steam-powered tractors followed along behind them on caterpillar treads, dumping heavy loads of gravel for more bulldozers, scrapers, and steamrollers to level into place and tamp firmly. Then more tractors followed behind, hauling heavy trailers stacked high with railroad ties and rails. Workers balanced precariously atop the loads tossed ties and rails over the trailers' sides with the easy rhythm of long practice, and each balk of timber, each gleaming length of steel, landed precisely where it was supposed to be.
More workers moved forward, adjusting the ties, setting them into the waiting gravel ballast of the steadily advancing roadbed. Gangs of track-layers followed them, lifting the rails, swinging them into place on the heavy, creosote-soaked ties, holding them there while plate men fished the rail ends, then stood aside while flashing hammers drove the spikes.
The Crown Prince of Ternathia—who was well on his way to becoming the crown prince of all of Sharona—lowered the binoculars and shook his head. This was scarcely the first Trans-Temporal Express railhead he'd ever watched advancing across a virgin universe, but right off the top of his head, he couldn't remember ever seeing such a focused, frenzied, carefully choreographed boil of energy.
And just why should you find that particularly surprising, Janaki? he asked himself sardonically. You've never seen them laying track towards something that looks entirely too much like an inter-universal war, either, have you?
"That sore part of me that isn't eyes is really looking forward to parking itself in a passenger car's seat," he informed chan Braikal as he returned his binoculars to their case. "Of course, after this long in the saddle, my memory of what passenger cars are like has become a bit vague."
"I'm sure it will all come back to the Platoon-Captain," chan Braikal said. "And I hope you won't take this wrongly, Sir, but the main reason I'll be glad to see those passenger cars has more to do with speed than places to sit. The farther and faster towards the rear we get these prisoners—and you—the better I'll like it."
Janaki grimaced and started to say something, then stopped himself and looked away once more. His own feelings at being bundled safely off to the rear, however important the job they'd found to give him as part of the bundling process, remained p
rofoundly ambiguous. The part of him which had been trained as his father's heir recognized the logic in Company-Captain chan Tesh's decision to send him back to Sharona. Indeed, that intellectual part of him recognized that it would have been the height of insanity for chan Tesh to do anything else. But what his intellect recognized as sanity and what his emotions insisted he ought to be doing were two quite different things.
"Sir," chan Braikal said quietly, "I know this isn't really what you want, but you know it's the right thing for you to be doing."
Janaki looked back at the older man, and chan Braikal smiled sadly.
"You'd have done just fine, Sir," the chief-armsman told him. "I've seen quite a few platoon-captains in my time. Brought along my share of 'em, for that matter, if you'll pardon my saying so. Some of them, to be honest, scared the shit out of me. Others . . . well, let's just say I wasn't too sure where I'd find them standing on the day it finally fell into the crapper on us. But you?" He shook his head. "You might've ended up screwing up—I don't think you would have, but anybody can. But if you had, at least I'm pretty sure all of the holes would've been in the front."
"Thanks, Chief . . . I think," Janaki said wryly.
"Don't mention it, Sir." Chan Braikal grinned at him, and Janaki snorted.
"Well, however that might be, I suppose we should get this show back on the road."
"Yes, Sir."
The chief-armsman turned in the saddle to bawl a few pithy suggestions to the other men of Janaki's platoon. The recipients of his requests responded promptly, and the ambulances containing the Arcanan POWs Janaki was responsible for escorting to the rear moved briskly forward.
Janaki watched them roll past him behind their double teams of mules, each ambulance flanked by its pair of assigned, watchful mounted Marines, and admitted to himself that he felt a profound sense of relief. Despite any ambiguity (and he was honest enough with himself to realize chan Braikal had put his finger squarely on the question which bothered him the most), he would be overjoyed to get those prisoners back to Sharona. And not just because he knew how vital their interrogation was likely to prove, either. From the reports he'd received down the Voicenet, it sounded as if his father had more than enough forest fires to put out. No doubt Emperor Zindel could find any number of useful things for his heir apparent to be doing as part of the extinguishing process. And according to those same reports, his sister Andrin had been forced to shoulder a huge share of the heir's responsibilities in his absence . . . and she wasn't even eighteen yet. It was time he got home and took that off her shoulders.
Of course, there was that bit about marriages.
Janaki grimaced. He'd never doubted that his eventual marriage would be carefully considered and weighed. It couldn't have been any other way for the heir to the Winged Crown of Ternathia, and there'd been no point pretending it could have been or whining about the fact that it wasn't. But given the . . . testy relations between Ternathia and Uromathia, he'd never anticipated being required to marry into the family of Chava Busar, and he couldn't say he found the idea very appealing.
The Voice reports he'd been able to monitor had been fragmentary and disjointed. He didn't have a Voice actually assigned to his platoon, and the Voice relay stations tended to be far enough apart to make it all but impossible for travelers passing between them to stay in any sort of steady touch, unless they were Voices themselves. From what he had Heard and Seen, though, it didn't sound as if his father was any happier about the prospect than Janaki himself was. Not that his father's unhappiness would change anything any more than Janaki's might have. They were both Caliraths, after all, and Janaki felt an odd sort of pride in the realization that his father would make the decision on the basis of what had to be done, regardless of any personal costs, in the full confidence that Janaki would understand.
He looked up at the graceful speck circling lazily against the blazing sky and raised his gauntleted left hand, then whistled shrilly. He rather doubted that the circling peregrine falcon could possibly have physically heard anything, but Taleena didn't need to. She caught the thought he'd sent with the whistle and folded her wings.
He watched the magnificent bird streak down out of the heavens, rocketing towards him, touched with the reflected fire of the sun. Then she struck his gauntlet with all the power and control of her breed. He lowered his hand, and she hopped from his leather-protected wrist to the frame mounted on his saddle, pausing only to press her wickedly sharp beak gently and affectionately against his cheek.
Janaki chuckled softly, stroking the sleek head with an equally gentle fingertip, and crooned to her.
"There, dear heart," he murmured. "Wouldn't want to lose you, would I?"
Taleena ignored the comment, just as it deserved to be ignored, Janaki thought with a smile. Imperial Ternathian falcons didn't get "lost."
Which is just as well, he thought as he urged his blue roan Shikowr forward after the last ambulance. And if she doesn't get lost, I don't suppose I can, either. However tempting it might be. And I suppose the truth is that I'm still anxious to get home, marriage or no marriage. Whatever else happens—he snorted in amusement—I should at least get a long, hot bath out of it. Two or three days' worth of soaking ought to be just about right, and the way I feel right now, that would be worth even having Chava Busar as a father-in-law!
* * *
Tayrgal Carthos watched the smoke curling up from the bonfire which had once been a pathetic excuse for a portal fort and tried to decide whether he felt more satisfaction or irritation.
It was a hard call to make, he reflected as his command dragon came in to a relatively smooth landing. On the one hand, he'd been given independent command of one arm of the pincer punching into Sharonian-held territory. On the other hand, it was definitely the secondary arm, and he and the relatively light forces Two Thousand Harshu had seen fit to assign to him (little more than three thousand men and barely enough transports to move them) had an enormous journey ahead of them—a point the extensive flight they'd had to undertake just to get to their next staging point underscored quite nicely, he thought grumpily.
The portal between the previously Sharonian-claimed universes of New Uromath and Thermyn was located in the flat plains of northwestern Elath in Central Andara, but the portal between Thermyn and Nairsom lay a good twelve hundred miles south of there. That put it in a deep, narrow, inconveniently placed valley in the mountains near what should have been the city of Gerynth in the Kingdom of Yanko, where the connection between the continents of Andara and Hilmar began to neck down. And once he'd finished moving his entire command that far (and resting his dragons before beginning the next stage) he'd moved through into Nairsom only to discover that he'd also moved from the heat of Gerynth back into the late autumn chill of Elath within fifty miles of the city of Drekon, barely three hundred miles from his Thermyn starting point at Fort Brithik.
The good news was that it was only a little more than six hundred miles from Drekon to his next portal, located in the Kingdom of Lokan's Duchy of Kanaiya. The bad news was that it lay at the northern tip of Lake Kanaiya, and while the weather at Drekon was only pleasantly crisp, the temperature in Kanaiya was going to be quite another matter. And from Five Hundred Neshok's prisoner interrogation, it looked like a leg of well over three thousand miles once he'd crossed over from Nairsom to Resym.
Yet those were merely logistical details, to be taken in stride, he reminded himself as he climbed down from the dragon. To be sure, those "details" meant there was no way in any world that he could possibly hope to reach Traisum before Harshu. He'd simply had to accept that he'd been turfed out of any of the glory for the conquest of that universe and that that miserable Air Force puke Toralk was going to get credit for it, instead. Still, by the same token, he'd been given an independent command, whereas Toralk was going to be right under Harshu's eagle eye.
The question in his mind was why Harshu had arranged things that way. Several hypotheses suggested themselves to h
im, ranging from the possibility that Harshu had such unbridled trust in him that he was the only man suitable for the task (which Carthos rated as only a little less likely than holding the winning ticket in the All-Arcana Sweepstakes) to the possibility that Harshu had discovered just how deeply in debt to Two Thousand mul Gurthak Carthos actually was.
That was the possibility that worried the thousand. On the face of things, it wasn't very likely anyone knew, given how carefully both he and mul Gurthak had covered their tracks. But if Harshu had figured it out before he decided to send Carthos clear out here on the "flanking sweep," as he'd called it in his orders, then several thoroughly unpleasant possible futures presented themselves to Carthos' scrutiny.
The fact that it was illegal for a senior officer to cosign a loan for one of his subordinates could lead to ugly repercussions if Harshu reported it to the Inspector General. It happened from time to time, anyway, as everyone perfectly understood, but seldom if ever on the scale of Carthos' dealings with mul Gurthak. Or, rather, with the Central Bank of Mythal, upon whose Loan Board one of mul Gurthak's innumerable cousins happened to hold a permanent seat. CBM was the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful of all the Mythalan banks, as befitted the official state bank of the Mythalan Hegemony. It must hold literally millions of loans. But very few of them had been granted on such favorable terms or secured by such threadbare collateral, and the fact that CBM had been remarkably patient with his . . . spotty repayment record would also interest the IG, Carthos felt quite sure.