Hell Hath No Fury

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 combattrained 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 woundedSharonian 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 … .

"Syrail!" he Shouted. "Syrail, Listen to me!"

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.

"Folsar?" Syrail's Voice came back as the vision disappeared. The boy sounded startled, and more than a little apprehensive. Obviously, more of chan Tergis' side trace emotions were coming through than he'd intended, but maybe that was a good thing. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"It's the Arcanans," chan Tergis Said urgently. "They've taken the fort."

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.

"What's happening now?" he Asked after a moment, his Voice amazingly steady. "What do you want me to do?"

"For right now, just hold the link open," chan Tergis Said. "Listen and Watch."

"Do you want me to try and get through the portal? Contact the Failcham relay station?"

"No!" chan Tergis practically Shouted the single word. Then he shook himself mentally, managing somehow to keep his expression from revealing what was going on inside his-and Syrail's-heads. "If they've gotten this far up-chain without anyone getting a warning out, then they've been taking out the Voices as they come," he went on in a calmer, more normal Voice. "That means they know what to look out for, and it probably means they're going to take pains to locate that relay station. If you try to get across the portal and contact anyone, it's just going to draw their attention, and that's the last thing you need to do. Believe me, Syrail."

"All right. " Syrail sounded much more subdued, even frightened, and chan Tergis' jaw tightened as he realized the boy's fear wasn't for himself. He wanted to tell Syrail how proud he was of him, how much the boy had come to mean to him, but there wasn't time. Nor was there really any need-not for two Voices as deeply linked as they were in this moment.

"It's going to be-" chan Tergis began, then broke off as the man who'd introduced himself as Alivar Neshok walked over to stand four feet in front of the line of prisoners.

"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 amp;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.

"No, Folsar!" Syrail Cried in the back of his brain, but chan Tergis' eyes never even flickered from Neshok's face.

"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 literalminded 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'.

"Folsar!" Syrail Cried. "You can't-"

"There's no more time, Syrail," chan Tergis Said, and his Voice was almost calm. "I'm sorry. Tell your parents. Tell them someone else here at the fort may remember how I've bragged about you, may tell them about you. You've got to run. Hide. Don't let them-"

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 'railroad' 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 captured their maps intact here at Ghartoun, and a couple of my bright young staff officers have worked out an adaptation of the standard recon image-intepreting software. We still can't read most of their documents, but they're loading the captured maps into their PCs and then using the interpreting software to compare them to our maps and look for terrain feature matches. Once they find one, the software 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 confirmed what the prisoners had already said. 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."

"Excuse me, Sir, but if the portal is as defensible as you seem to be suggesting, why should we move beyond it?"

"There seems to be substantial agreement among our current prisoners that the reinforcements their swamp portal commander was anticipating will probably be no more than a week or so out from Fort Salby by the time we can reach the portal. If I were their commander, and if I didn't have transports, then I'd probably think long and hard before even contemplating fighting my way through the portal from Traisum to Karys. On the other hand, we still haven't seen these people's heavy weapons, and we don't have any way of predicting the actual combat power of this reinforcement they're expecting. They may think they can force the portal. They might even be right.

"By taking Salby and controlling the approach valley, we'll be able to start hitting them early. Hopefully, we'll have a chance to get a feel for how their combat capabilities differ from those we've already encountered. I want that feel before it comes down to a toe-to-toe fight for the actual portal. If, on the other hand, their basic combat power is as outclassed as our more optimistic junior officers prefer to assume, they may never get past us to the portal in the first place. At any rate, from the topography on these maps, it looks like whoever selected the site for Fort Salby had an excellent eye for terrain.

They've definitely put the plug into this valley at its most defensible point, which means it's the logical anchor for us to hang our own defensive positions on.

"In any case, I'm assuming that once we hit the fort itself, word of our presence is going to get out. We won't be able to keep it from spreading up-chain from Traisum, no matter what we do. And I'm not planning on advancing any further than Traisum, anyway."

The two thousand shrugged.

"In light of all that, the intelligence value of anything more Neshok could extract from his prisoners has got to be of strictly limited utility. And, quite frankly, I'm delighted that that's the way it is." For just a moment, a haunted, almost haggard, expression flickered across Harshu's face. Then he met Toralk's eyes levelly. "I can't justify continuing to allow him to do the things he's been doing unless he's in a position to provide me with genuinely critical information, and that's not going to be the case any longer."

"I can't pretend I'm not … very relieved to hear that, Sir," Toralk told him after a moment.

"I know you are, Klayrman." Harshu reached across the floating map table in his command tent and patted the Air Force officer's forearm gently. "I know you are."

There was silence for a moment. Then Harshu inhaled sharply and handed Toralk his copy of the current intelligence summary.

"When you look this over, I think you'll see why this Fort Salby's going to be tough," he said much more briskly. "I'll be interested to see if you come to the same conclusions I did about the most effective approach. I don't want to prejudice your thinking, but as you look through the summary, I'd like you to consider-"

"My gods, Sir! I thought you were dead!"

"As you can see, Silky, we Arpathians are even tougher then you knew." Namir Velvelig's eyes were darker and bleaker than Company-Captain Silkash had ever before seen them, yet his voice held a ghost of genuine amusement.

"No one's that tough," Silkash said flatly. "Remember, I'm the one who triaged you in the first place."

"You did?" Velvelig cocked his head to one side. "Odd. I don't recall it."

"I imagine that's because you were unconscious, almost out of blood, and had serious cranial injuries, not to mention a badly shattered hip and what I'm almost certain was at least one spinal fracture,"

Silkash told him. The surgeon's face twisted with bitter memory. "I black-tagged you."

"I see."

Velvelig reached out and squeezed his friend's shoulder. He understood now why Silkash looked the way he did. A black tag indicated that there was no point trying to save the patient. That it was time to let him go and concentrate on saving those who might live, instead.

"I don't think your judgment was in error, if that's what's bothering you, Silky," the regiment-captain said after a moment. Silkash looked skeptical, and Velvelig snorted. "Look, don't forget that these people can work magic. Magic, Silky. And apparently it's not limited solely to better ways to kill people, either. You wouldn't believe what I saw their healers doing before they decided I was fit enough to go to jail with the rest of you."

"If they could fix everything that was wrong with you, they really are wizards," Silkash said. Then he grimaced.

"What?"

"I was just thinking. If they could fix you up, as badly hurt as you were, and do it this quickly, no wonder an idiot like Thalmayr didn't understand what we were doing! I'll bet you they don't use surgery at all."

"I don't know about that." Velvelig shook his head. "I saw them doing some surgery, but I'd say they only do it for relatively minor injuries. I'm guessing there's some kind of limit on how much healing they can do at any one time with these spells of theirs, so they probably handle the little stuff the hard way and save the 'magic' for really serious problems. But I think you're probably right about Thalmayr … since I saw him walking out of their medical tent unassisted."

He and Silkash looked at one another, and Velvelig saw the mirror of his own response to the sight of a magically-literally-restored Hadrign Thalmayr walking around Fort Ghartoun. Of course, it was probably even more complex for Silkash than it was for Velvelig. After all, Silkash was a Healer. His oath, as well as his natural personality, required him to want to see any of his patients fully recovered.

However stupid, frustrating, detestable, and just plain infuriating the patient in question might be.

"Well, that's certainly interesting," Silkash said after a moment.

"That's one way to put it. On the other hand, I'm considerably less interested in Thalmayr than I am in what else has been going on."

"I don't know everything that's happened," Silkash replied slowly, and Velvelig's spine stiffened at the bleakness which suddenly infused the surgeon's voice. "What I do know hasn't been good, though."

"In that case," Velvelig said, in a tone whose evenness might have deceived anyone who didn't know Arpathians, "I suppose you'd better tell me about it."

"I'm worried about the horses, Dad," Syrail Targal said.

"So am I," his father said, patting him on the shoulder. "They'll just have to look after themselves for a while, though. Just like we will."

Syrail nodded, and his father ruffled his hair the way he'd done when Syrail was much younger. The youngster managed a smile, and Kersai gave him a gentle nudge in the direction of the carefully hidden tent.

"Go help your mother with supper," he said quietly.

"Yes, sir." Syrail nodded again and headed obediently towards the assigned chore.

His father watched him go, doing his best to hide the depth of his own concern. It had been just over twelve hours since the fall of Fort Ghartoun, and given the strength of the Voice talent Syrail had been showing for the last several months, there wouldn't have been a lot of point trying to deceive the boy into thinking his parents weren't frightened. But no father wanted to add to his child's fears. Especially, Kersai thought, his expression turning hard and bleak, when that child had already Seen what Syrail had Seen in Folsar chan Tergis' last moments of life.

A part of the worried father was furious at the Fort Ghartoun Voice for inflicting that sort of trauma on his son. And an ignoble part of him was even angrier at chan Tergis for having bragged about Syrail's remarkable Talent to other members of the fort's garrison. If the Voice had just kept his big mouth shut, then Kersai Targal wouldn't be hiding in the early-winter woods praying that the cold-blooded butchers who shot Voices out of hand wouldn't catch up with his son!

But most of him knew it was totally irrational to be angry with chan Tergis. There had been no possible way for the Voice to anticipate what had happened, to even guess that his pride in his protegee might prove dangerous to Syrail. And if his final Voice message to Syrail had been traumatic, it had also been the only thing that had warned Kersai and Raysith to flee.

The man warned us with literally the last seconds of his life. Told Syrail to run and hide when he knew he was about to be murdered, Kersai thought. Gods-while he was being murdered! How could anyone be angry with someone who did that?

He knew all of that intellectually; it was just his emotions which couldn't quite catch up with the knowledge. Which was stupid … which, in turn, was one reason he was as irritated with himself as he was. He could actually understand that, although there wasn't anything he could do about it. Not yet. Not when his son might very well already be under sentence of death by the same barbarian butchers who had massacred the Chalgyn Consortium crew and now, apparently, launched a vicious, unprovoked attack on all Sharonians even while they were officially "negotiating for peace."

He grimaced, gazing up at the sky, wondering if one of those eagle-lions Syrail had tried to describe to him might already be circling high overhead, spying on them. He'd hidden his encampment as carefully as he could, and he'd used his surveys of the surrounding terrain to pick a spot which offered at least three separate avenues of escape. But if these bastards could literally fly … .

He grimaced again and reached into his coat pocket to squeeze the bronze falcon he'd taken out of Syrail's dresser drawer. Then he turned and made his own way towards the tent.