Hell Hath No Fury

Chapter Twenty-Two

Commander of Fifty Halesak reminded himself that he was going to need the use of his hands soon.

Which would be a bit of the problem if he insisted on clinging to the rope so tightly that the hands in question were numb.

He forced himself to loosen his grip-a little-and pressed his face against the side of the transport dragon's freight platform. Even with the Air Force-style face shield on his helmet, the wind of the mighty beast's passage threatened to suck the breath right out of his lungs. He felt every prodigious sweep of the dragon's pinions, the pounding of its vast heart, and the night wind battering past him was cold even through his heavy clothing and thick gloves, also Air Force-supplied, at an altitude of almost six thousand feet.

All of that was true-and none of it mattered at all. Not tonight. Tonight was even more important than silencing the relays in the Voice chain. Tonight they brought some of their people home again, and no one-no one-was going to do that without the Second Andarans.

The dragon slowed abruptly, and Halesak's nerves tightened as the cargo-master slapped him on the shoulder in warning. The commander of fifty pulled his head back as the slipstream weakened. He looked down, and saw their objective.

Timing for this operation had been tricky. Halesak wasn't sure exactly where the other side of this portal was located, but it had to be at least seven or eight thousand miles further east in its own universe, given the obvious ten-hour or so time difference between the two aspects of the portal. Personally, he suspected that was one reason the Sharonians had located their portal fort in the lee of a steep ridgeline.

The last thing someone needed in the middle of his night was to have a miles-wide half-disk of noonday brightness streaming in through the window. To be sure, it was undoubtedly a spectacular sight when that flaming sun and hot, bright sky carved themselves out of a sky dusted with winter constellations.

Halesak had watched the same sort of thing himself, with an unfailing sense of awe … and knew how fervently he and his fellow troopers would have bitched if it had been shining in through their windows.

From all the reports, the far side of the portal also had to be substantially lower in altitude. There'd been ample signs of the kind of damage that sort of differential produced, although it had obviously happened a long, long time ago. That damage had complicated things a bit when it came to picking the path for the ground element, too. In the end, they'd had to take a chance on sending in a high-altitude recon gryphon and generating detailed topographic maps from the imagery its crystal had captured.

Fortunately, no one on the ground seemed to have noticed the unusually large eagle circling over their fort.

Ideally, the planners would have liked to hit Ghartoun in full darkness. Thanks to the portal, however, there was no full darkness for this particular objective. The best they'd been able to do was to schedule the attack for roughly five o'clock in the morning, local time. At this time of year, that would still be about thirty minutes before local sunrise, and about thirty minutes after sunset on the other side of the portal. It wouldn't be true full dark on either side, but at least the portal was east of their objective. That meant all of the available light would be coming from the same direction, which would let them approach out of the darker western sky above the Cratak Mountains. Personally, Halesak would have preferred some heavy cloud cover, but that wasn't going to happen here.

The cargo-master slapped his shoulder again, harder this time, and Halesak nodded vigorously. Then the dragon swept over the parapet of the fort, clearing it by barely fifty feet, and braked into an abrupt hover as the Gifted cargo-master activated the levitation spell.

The spell wouldn't support the dragon's heavy bulk for more than a very few minutes, but that was all the time in this universe-or any other-Iftar Halesak and his men needed.

Under-Armsman Lyntail chan Turkan hated the dawn watch.

Chan Turkan was what was technically known in the PAAF as "a screwup." Actually, Master-Armsman Karuk, Fort Ghartoun's senior noncom, was prone to use a rather more pithy and less polite term in his own native Arpathian on the many occasions when he … counseled chan Turkan. Which was one reason chan Turkan tended to draw the dawn watch as often as he did, given that Karuk was a great believer in using unpleasant duty as a gentle spur to encourage better performance. And when Regiment- Captain Velvelig decided to double the sentries on each watch for reasons best known only to himself, chan Turkan had been the inevitable candidate for his present duty.

After almost eight months of attempting to encourage better performance, however, even someone as formidable as Master-Armsman Karuk might be excused for beginning to feel the first, faint outriders of despair where chan Turkan was concerned.

The master-armsman might not have despaired, but he was showing clear signs of deciding the time had come for more drastic measures. Chan Turkan had no idea what those "more drastic measures" might be, but as he stood on Fort Ghartoun's eastern parapet, gazing out at the portal and the dawn slowly strengthening beyond it, he was glumly certain he'd be finding out shortly.

As it happened, he was wrong.

Something made him turn around. It might have been a sound, it might have been something else. Either way, he didn't have time to figure out what it was.

His jaw dropped in total disbelief as something the size of a very large wolf or a small pony came hurtling over the fort's western parapet. Whatever it was, chan Turkan had never seen anything like it before. It was an impossible fusion of improbable creatures-something with the head of a huge bird of prey, the hindquarters of a lion, feathered forelegs that ended in monstrous talons, and wings.

It came over the wall, bursting out of the predawn darkness of the western sky without a sound, and the PAAF trooper on the northwestern tower never had a chance to scream. The terrifying apparition swooped down upon him. The clawed talons snatched him up by the shoulders; the clawed rear feet ripped out, raking him from chest to abdomen in a dreadful disemboweling stroke; and the terrible, metallically glinting beak snapped once. The severed head flew in one direction and the discarded, mutilated body tumbled to the parade ground in a shower of blood and other body fluids as the impossible killer rocketed back upwards.

Chan Turkan was frozen, unable to believe-to comprehend-what was happening as more and more of the murderous creatures came streaking over the fort's walls.

Some of the sentries had time to scream as the fresh wave of death swept over them. Someone actually even had time and the presence of mind to start ringing the alarm bell, but it tolled only twice before one of the monstrosities pounced on whoever it was. Chan Turkan heard the screams, heard the high, wailing hunting shrieks of the no-longer-silent killers. Somewhere a rifle or pistol cracked as one of the sentries somehow got a shot off, and chan Turkan found his own hands suddenly scrabbling frantically at the leather rifle sling on his own shoulder.

He was still scrabbling at it when one of the second-wave gryphons struck him from behind, like a falcon striking a hare, and snapped his neck instantly.

As the transport dragon came over the palisade and went into its hover, Halesak watched the opening gryphon strike swarm over the defenders.

He'd always hated the strike gryphons. The recon gryphons were something quite different. First, they were almost always female, whereas every strike gryphon was a male, although that was less important than their other differences. The recon gryphons were also bigger, stronger, less maneuverable, smarter … and much, much more biddable. Some of them were actually affectionate, and became quite devoted to their handlers.

So far as Halesak was aware, no strike gryphon had ever been devoted to anyone. Their designers had built them around an almost insane territoriality, a vicious temper, and a voracious hunger. They had one and only one function: to kill anything in their programmed area of attack. Strike gryphons were never trained for their missions, the way recon gryphons often were. Instead, their handlers relied completely on the compulsion spells laid into the creatures' hate-filled brains through the sarkolis chips surgically implanted in the young no more than four or five days after hatching. That was one reason Halesak hated them. There was always the possibility that those compulsion spells might fail, and the last thing any semi-sane soldier wanted was to have a theoretically "friendly" rogue gryphon rampaging through his formation in a killing frenzy.

At least this time the spells seemed to be holding, and it was obvious the Sharonian sentries had never had a clue the attack was coming. Most of them were caught with their shoulder weapons still slung, and very few of them had time to do anything about that.

In fact, very few of them had time to do anything but die.

Namir Velvelig's bare feet hit the floor as the cacophony of screams, shots, and a strange, high-pitched wailing sound yanked him brutally up out of dreamless sleep. He seized his pistol belt, slung it about his waist without even considering trousers or blouses, and raced out of his quarters to the office window which overlooked the parade ground.

At the moment, that parade ground was a scene of barely predawn nightmare.

He saw the hawk-headed monsters ripping and tearing at his sentries, saw the mutilated bodies of his men strewn across the interior of the fort where their killers had dropped them like so much garbage.

And he saw those same killers sweeping back, circling above the barracks where most of the rest of his men were quartered.

Velvelig was an Arpathian. Despite his thoroughly modern education, despite his years as a professional soldier in a modern army, the shamans' tales had prepared him for devils and demons in a way most Sharonians would no longer have understood. His forebrain could only stare in disbelief at the slaughter outside his window. Deep down inside, though, those shamans' tales took over. He didn't have to think to know what a man did about demons, and that part of him instantly determined that his revolver was not the best possible tool for his requirements.

He whirled away from the window. He didn't have the key which was still in the pocket of the trousers he wasn't wearing, and there was no time to worry about niceties. A single shot from his H amp;W blew the lock off the chain through the trigger guards of the racked shotguns.

Velvelig's hands moved with flashing speed as he scooped up one of the weapons. The Model 7 combat shotgun was a purely military weapon, a slide-action weapon with a five-round detachable box magazine and a bayonet lug, and designed to fire brass-cased ammunition which was much more powerful than the standard civilian loads. It was heavy, ugly, and a brute to fire, but it was as lethal as it was unlovely, and there were twenty-four preloaded magazines of double ought buckshot on the shelf across the bottom of the weapons rack. Each cartridge contained tenpellets, each of them the size of a Polshana .36-caliber bullet, and Velvelig racked the action open, slid a loose round into the chamber and closed it, then slapped in a magazine. He had few illusions about what was about to happen, but he took long enough to sweep half a dozen more magazines into a canvas ammunition carrier and slung it over his shoulder.

Then he stepped out onto the planked walkway in front of his office.

Halesak grunted as he fast-roped down from the transport and his heels thumped on the firing step inside the fort wall. He started to bark the order for his men to assemble on him, then ducked as another gryphon came slicing in just above his head.

Something exploded down below him. His ears classified it instantly as the sound of one of the Sharonian weapons, but this one sounded slightly different, somehow. He whirled towards the noise and saw a single man, naked but for a loose white pair of skivvies and a weapons belt, standing on the veranda across the front of what Neshok's sketch map called the office block. He had what looked like one of the standard shoulder weapons, but as Halesak watched the man fired again, and a second gryphon shrieked and collapsed in midair as if it had just flown headlong into a wall. It slammed into the ground in a broken ball of fur and feathers, and the single defender's left hand stroked back under his weapon's barrel and he fired again.

A third gryphon went down, and the man who'd killed it cycled his weapon once more and tracked smoothly, almost unhurriedly, onto a fourth target.

Velvelig had a vague impression of something huge and dark hovering just above the wall. Whatever it was, there wasn't anything he could do about it at the moment, and he was totally focused on the task he could do something about. The veranda roof gave him overhead cover, and he had an excellent view of the monster-besieged barracks. He'd always been a superior wing shot, and these things-whatever the hells they were-were bigger than deer, not doves. He squeezed the trigger, the shotgun's buttplate hammered his shoulder, and a fourth monster smashed into the barracks wall like two hundred pounds of dead meat.

He swung onto a fifth creature and fired. Then a sixth.

Half a dozen of the murderous beasts were down, and he pressed the magazine release. The empty magazine thumped to the veranda floor, and he slammed in another, worked the slide, and brought down a seventh target.

Nothing could ever let Iftar Halesak forget that the Sharonian butchers had murdered one of the greatest men in Arcana's history in cold blood. The hatred that had kindled in his heart was something perhaps only another garthan could truly have understood. Yet as he saw that single defender, standing his ground, firing with such cool, steady precision, he felt an unwilling surge of admiration. It wasn't just the other man's courage, though gods alone knew how much raw nerve it must take for someone who'd never even suspected that gryphons existed to face them with such steadiness. No, it was the other's obvious sense of duty … and his effectiveness.

Even as Halesak watched, that single Sharonian brought down a seventh and an eighth gryphon. The fact that the attacking predators were so focused on the targets designated by the combination of their controlling spellware and their own natural viciousness meant they paid the man killing them almost no attention at all. They were so totally committed to neutralizing the barracks, keeping anyone from getting out of them, as their pre-attack command programming required, that they never noticed the single man outside the office block.

"Yirman!" the commander of fifty barked. "Get the gates open! The rest of you, on me!"

Lance Yirman Farl and the two other man assigned to help him went thundering down the nearest stair to the parade ground below. The rest followed Halesak as he went scurrying along the firing step, looking for a clear fiiring angle.

Velvelig brought down yet another gryphon, and his second magazine was empty. He dropped it out of the magazine well and reached into the carrier at his side for a third.

That was when the crossbow bolt hit him.

It slammed into his right hip like an incandescent spike, and he grunted explosively at the raw, brutal stab of agony. The sheer sledgehammer impact was enough to knock him backward, off his feet, and he went down, losing his shotgun as he landed. His left hand went to the stubby, thumb-thick steel shaft driven deep into his pelvis, but his right swept down to his holster and the heavy, familiar weight of his H amp;W revolver fell into his palm.

The monsters swarming around the barracks had noticed him at last, and one of them came straight at him. He brought the revolver up, tracking the incoming nightmare with a rock-steady muzzle, and fired.

The hollow-nosed .46-caliber slug hit the gryphon in the left eye at a range of little more than fifteen feet. The creature's head snapped up under the brutal impact, but momentum kept it coming, and Namir Velvelig's world went black as the plummeting body smashed into him.

Iftar Halesak stood in the center of the captured fort's parade ground, looking about him at the litter of bodies-and body parts-sprawled across the gore-splashed dirt. In some ways, the carnage was even worse than he'd seen at Fort Shaylar and Fort Brithik. The bodies there hadn't been this mangled.

This … shredded. True, many of them had been so burned and shriveled as to no longer look human, but in some ways that had actually lessened the impact. It was hard to think of them as anything which had ever been human, while those killed by the yellows had at least been intact. These bodies were not.

In fact, they looked exactly like what they were-the brutally mutilated corpses of men who had been literally torn to pieces by vicious, ravening predators bigger than most of them had been.

So what? he demanded of himself harshly. Dead is dead, however you get that way. Besides, at least it's pretty quick when a gryphon gets hold of you! And none of these bastards was an old, gentle civilian who got murdered after he'd surrendered.

A stubborn little voice buried deep in the back of his brain stirred uneasily at that last statement. He felt it there, but he crushed it ruthlessly back into silence. Whatever might be happening to surrendered Sharonian POWs, he and his men hadn't had anything to do with it. And none of it could change what the butchers had done to Magister Halathyn.

He watched the dismounted unicorn cavalry troopers spreading out to relieve the initial infantry assault force. He and the other air-dropped infantry had opened the gates and held them until the cavalry could arrive against the disjointed efforts of the dozen or so Sharonians who'd been outside the barracks and somehow evaded destruction by the gryphons. He'd lost three of his own men, but the defenders had been so stunned, so shocked, by what had happened to them that they'd had virtually no unit organization at all. Their counterattacks had been determined, but they'd been launched in ones and twos, without sufficient strength-even with their infantry weapons-to break through the defensive fire of Halesak's arbalests and infantry-dragons.

Most of those who'd tried to retake the gate were just as dead as the ones the gryphons had ripped apart, and-

"Sir! Fifty Halesak!"

Halesak turned and found Yirman Farl pelting across the parade ground towards him.

"What is it?" the officer asked sharply.

"We've found the POWs!" Farl announced excitedly. "One of them's asking for you, Sir!

"For me?" Halesak blinked.

"Yes, Sir!" Farl's smile looked like it was about to split his face in half. "It's Fifty Ulthar!"

"Ulthar?" Halesak repeated sharply. "Where?"

"Over here, Sir!"

Halesak followed the lance quickly through the carnage to what was obviously the fort's brig. There were perhaps a dozen men locked into its cells. The early morning light pouring in through the outer barred windows showed that the cells weren't particularly crowded, and that they'd been provided with ample bedding. That registered peripherally with Halesak, but his attention was locked on the tallish, wiry, red-haired Andaran who had a cell entirely to himself.

"Therman!" Halesak seized his brother-in-law's good hand as Fifty Ulthar reached it through the bars to him. "Gods, man! We thought you were dead!"

"Not quite." Ulthar was paler than ever, Halesak thought, and noticed the awkward way the other man stood, with his left arm in a sling. The shoulder on that side was oddly hunched and swollen, as if there might be multiple layers of bandage under his blouse, and his face was grooved with pain lines which hadn't been there the last time Halesak had seen him.

"I took a hit through the shoulder," Ulthar explained as he saw the direction of Halesak's gaze. "Tore the hell out of it, actually, and these people don't have healers. Not like ours, anyway. They did their best, but …"

He shrugged his good shoulder, and Halesak's jaw tightened.

"If they did, it's the only time they did," he grated, and Ulthar's eyebrows rose.

"What's that mean?" he asked. Halesak looked at him in surprise, and Ulthar smiled crookedly. "I know you better than that, Iftar. It's not like you to leap to conclusions, and I'm a bit at a loss to understand how you'd know anything about how they've been treating us since they captured us."

"I don't have to know about that to know what sort of butchers these people are," Halesak said harshly.

Ulthar's surprise was obvious, and Halesak's lips drew back in a snarl. "The fact that they shot Magister Halathyn down like a dog after he surrendered is all I need to know, Therman!"

"Shot Magister Halathyn?" Ulthar's surprise had segued into confusion. "What're you talking about?

They didn't kill Magister Halathyn!"

"What?!" Halesak stared at him in disbelief. For an instant or two, the ex-garthan's brain simply refused to process information. Then he shook himself violently. "But the Intelligence reports … the briefings

– "

"I'm telling you, they didn't do it," Ulthar said. "They couldn't have. It wasn't one of their weapons-it was one of ours. An infantry-dragon. A lightning-thrower."

"Are you sure, Therman? Are you positive?"

"Damned right I'm sure," Ulthar said. "They allowed us funeral rites when they buried the dead. I saw Magister Halathyn's body with my own eyes, Iftar. He'd been wounded in one arm, probably by one of their hand weapons, during the attack, yes. But it was the lightning that killed him."

"Oh my gods," Halesak whispered, remembering the hatred, the fury which had impelled him. "They said they couldn't confirm it, but …"

"I don't know what 'they' told you," Ulthar said, "but as far as I can tell, these people have treated all of their prisoners-including me, Iftar-with respect. I haven't seen one bit of casual brutality, and their healers-such as they are-have done everything they could for our wounded. Despite the fact that we shot at them first."

"We shot first?" Halesak parroted.

"Of course we did!" Ulthar's voice was suddenly harsh and bitter. "Hundred Olderhan was right. He wanted us pulled back, away from the portal until we could sort out how to manage a peaceful contact, but Hundred Thalmayr had other ideas. I talked to one of the sentries he ordered to open fire on the single cavalry trooper they sent forward to talk to us. To talk to us, Iftar!"

Halesak's mind was working overtime, putting bits and pieces together, remembering the rumors about how Five Hundred Neshok went about "interrogating" captured Sharonians … and remembering that Two Thousand Harshu hadn't done a thing to stop him.

"Listen, Therman," he said quickly, urgently, leaning closer to the bars and keeping his voice low, "can you prove we didn't kill Magister Halathyn?"

"Prove it?" Ulthar's confusion was obvious, and Halesak shook his head hard.

"All our intelligence briefings have … strongly suggested that the Sharonians murdered Magister Halathyn after he surrendered. I didn't have any more reason to question that than anyone else did. Not till now. Now I do, and I have to wonder why they've gone out of their way to 'suggest' to all of us that that's what happened."

Ulthar stared at him for a moment, then grimaced.

"Magister Halathyn's been buried for three months now, Iftar. In a grave in a swamp, without any sort of preservation spell. I don't know if anyone could prove exactly how he died at this point. I know I saw his body, and I think at least one or two of the others did, but I can't prove anything."

"And can anyone else confirm that we shot first?" Halesak pressed.

"I don't know," Ulthar said slowly. "The man I spoke to-Lance Tiris-died shortly after we were captured. Their healers tried, but they couldn't save him."

"Damn," Halesak murmured, and Ulthar cocked his head, blue eyes intense.

"What the hells is going on here, Iftar?"

"Look," Halesak said, even more quietly than before, "I don't know for sure what's going on. We were told they started it both times. And we were told there were those 'unconfirmed reports' that Magister Halathyn was murdered after he surrendered. Plus the rumors-I don't know exactly who started them-

that they shot our wounded after they surrendered."

"That's bullshit!" Ulthar exploded. "That's-"

"Shut up!" Halesak hissed. "Shut up and listen to me!"

Ulthar spluttered to a stop and Halesak drew a deep breath.

"That's better," he said, then paused, trying to decide how to say what needed saying.

"Look," he said again, finally, "you're my sister's husband, my daughter's uncle. I don't want to go home and explain to either of them that something happened to you after I found you alive!"

"But-"

"I'm telling you, we wouldn't have been told what we were told as often as we were told it before this op kicked off unless somebody had decided it was what we needed to be told. And if that was what happened, it fucking worked." He smiled grimly. "Believe me, Therman, you don't want to know the things I've been contemplating since they told me how Magister Halathyn is supposed to have died, and I am sure as hells not alone in that.

"But if I'm right, if it was done on purpose, how do you think they're going to react if you insist on telling them we've all been lied to?"

"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.'"thinspace""

"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 your 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. "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."