The Road to Hell

Chapter Thirteen

December 18

It was snowing.

The flakes came sweeping in on the teeth of a biting wind that was unusually cold, even for Fort Ghartoun. The weather was going to get worse-a lot worse-before they reached the New Uromath portal, but somehow that failed to make Namir Velvelig feel any warmer just now as the snowflakes touched his wind-chilled face like frozen kisses. Nor did the fact that he’d endured the icy snow and knife-edged winds of northern Arpathia throughout his childhood make him any happier about his current prospects. There was a reason he’d spent so few winters at home since joining the PAAF, after all. This season would not have been his choice for this little jaunt if he’d been given an option. Unfortunately, options were in short supply.

He turned in the saddle, looking behind him and down the length of the small column, and wondered if they were going to get beyond range of the Arcanans’ casualty locating spells before someone who could use those spells came looking for them. He was more than a little afraid the answer would be no, but there was only one way to find out.

Of course, he pointed out to himself as he turned back to the blowing snow in front of him and resettled himself in the saddle, you could always avoid the possibility entirely by simply cutting the bastards loose. Let them evade their own damned army on their own damned terms while you and the rest of your boys skedaddle on your own. Their locator spells wouldn’t help them find you that way, at least!

No, they wouldn’t. And despite everything, a hard, hating part of him hunkered down, hunched its shoulders, and wanted to do exactly that. But he couldn’t, and not simply because Ulthar and Sarma and all of their men had put their necks on the chopping block to rescue what was left of his own command. He might find it difficult to disassociate them in his own mind from the Arcanan sneak attack, yet that attack hadn’t been their idea. They’d simply been carrying out the orders they’d given by their lawful superiors, and the Arpathian in him recognized the enormous risk they’d taken by mutinying against those superiors because they believed honor required it of them. And however much he might hate Arcanans like Hadrign Thalmayr and whatever motherless bastards had launched the entire attack, he couldn’t deny that the mutineers had acted with decency at enormous risk to themselves.

And that was one reason he needed to get them out of this just as badly as he needed to get his own men out of it. Whether, when, and where he might be able to regain contact with higher authority, it was important for that higher authority to have the window into the Union of Arcana and its military represented by Ulthar Therman and Jaralt Sarma. If the young officers were correct that they’d been deliberately lied to and manipulated by their superiors-and if the “Kerellian Accords” and the standing military law of the Union of Arcana Army truly did prohibit the sort of systematic torture which had been inflicted by the “Arcanan Expeditionary Force”-then it was entirely possible the actual government of Arcana genuinely didn’t have one godsdamned idea what was happening out here.

That was a staggering concept, one any Sharonian could be excused for finding difficult to grasp. Yet if the hints he’d gotten about just how far it was to Arcana from Hell’s Gate turned out to be accurate, and given that this was an entire civilization which had never heard of Voices, it was actually possible. It was almost-almost, but not quite-impossible for Velvelig to imagine a civilization which didn’t have the ability to pass messages at Voice speeds. It wasn’t a lot harder than accepting that magic really existed, however, and if that was what had happened, if this entire invasion was essentially a rogue operation launched without the authorization, consent, or even knowledge of the Arcanan government, it put a completely different face on what had already happened…and suggested a completely different list of options for dealing with it.

Maybe.

On the other hand, it might turn out that the Arcanan government would decide to stand by the actions of its commanders on the spot. And it might also turn out that things had gone so far by now that there was no way back for either side, much less both of them. But if there was the remotest chance this rolling catastrophe could be…turned off-stopped somehow-then Namir Velvelig was entirely prepared to die trying to bring that about.

Not that he had any intention of dying if an alternative offered, which was the reason they were heading out across the mountains of West New Ternath into the teeth of winter.

There were, however, some unforeseen advantages to having magic on his side for a change. Some of the Arcanans’ crystals seemed to contain a bewildering array of spells, almost like a magical version of the famous Ternathian Army pocketknife, with its blade or folding tool for every conceivable purpose. Others contained only a single type of much more powerful spell, or perhaps two of them, but with multiple uses of each stored spell. He’d been astonished-and deeply envious-when Fifty Ulthar demonstrated one of the levitation spells. It wasn’t that Velvelig had never seen an object invisibly lifted before; one of his own cousins was a Lifter, with a powerful Talent that allowed her to Lift more than twenty times her own body weight unassisted. It required focused concentration, however, and she could only sustain the Lift for about thirty minutes before she was required to rest and recuperate. But the crystal Ulthar had fitted under the center of one of the PAAF wagons left behind at Fort Ghartoun had lifted the entire vehicle effortlessly into the air and held it there until the spell was deactivated.

The standard PAAF wagons were of all-steel construction, which made them much lighter than wooden-framed vehicles would have been, and fitted with heavy-duty axle bearings, leaf springs, and forty-three-inch wheels with tubular steel spokes and wide pneumatic tires, which allowed them to tackle even extremely difficult terrain. They were sized to allow a standard four-mule team to haul fourteen thousand pounds of cargo on a hard-surfaced road and up to half of that across soft terrain, but they were still wagons, and rough going could slow them to a crawl, even with the best draft teams imaginable. The possibility of boosting them almost effortlessly over the worst obstacles was enough to turn any PAAF quartermaster green with envy, and according to Ulthar, a single spell crystal could support up to fifteen tons of deadweight for up to forty-eight hours on a single charge. Not only that, each crystal could contain up to thirty charges. Apparently, when the Arcanans used dragons for transportation, they relied on even more powerful levitation spells, which probably explained a lot about how flying beasts could support the logistic needs of an army capable of advancing across even the roughest terrain with preposterous speed. The levitation spells available to the garrison of Fort Ghartoun offered nowhere near that sort of capacity, but they were going to make an enormous difference to the more pedestrian, ground-based transport of the unlikely allies, especially given the topography they were about to face.

Other specialized crystals offered advantages of their own. One of them, for example, provided the warmth (although not the light) of a roaring bonfire from a piece of rock no larger than a child’s fist. The amount of heat it could produce when what Velvelig thought of as “the wick” was turned all the way up was astounding, and at lower temperatures it could produce that warmth for hour after hour. Given the weather and the travel conditions awaiting them, that might well prove the difference between life and death.

Still, marvelous though the Arcanans’ magic was, it had its limits. Many of their army’s crystals, like the ones he thought of as the Ternathian Army knife, appeared to be designed (if that was the right verb) to be used by anyone who knew the activating sequence. The more powerful, more specialized spells, however, required a Gifted user, which resulted in a basic “technology” with a far narrower…base, for want of a better term, than Sharona enjoyed.

Velvelig suspected that figuring out the parallels and differences between the Arcanan Gifts and Sharonian Talents was going to take a long time, but some of them had already become evident. A particularly strongly Talented Sharonian might have a single primary Talent and as many as two or even three secondary ones which were usually (but not always) in associated areas. Apparently, a Gifted Arcanan might also have more than one Gift or “arcana,” as they were labeled, but such powerfully Gifted Arcanans appeared to be less common than powerfully Talented Sharonians. At the same time, the sophisticated technology of their crystals allowed them to distribute stored spells to a larger percentage of their total population, yet not as broadly or as freely as one might have expected. The bottleneck was apparently the fact that only Gifted Arcanans could charge those crystals. Without a Gifted technician to recharge a crystal, it became useless once its stored spells were exhausted.

The fact that Arcanans who were not themselves Gifted could make use of the crystals was obviously a huge advantage, but Velvelig had found himself wondering if the Arcanan reliance on the marvels stored in those glittering pieces of rock wasn’t its own potentially crippling weakness. Gods knew most Sharonians would have loved to be able to bottle Talents to be decanted at need, and an Arcanan spell might be able to accomplish things even the most strongly Talented Sharonian could only dream of doing. But Sharona’s industrial technology had been developed alongside its people’s Talents, specifically to be used-and supported-by people who were not Talented. He strongly suspected that dynamite was as effective as any Arcanan blasting spell might be, and even though a sufficient quantity of it was undoubtedly bulkier and heavier than a single crystal, workers in the factory which produced it required no special Talent or Gift. Anyone could learn to operate almost any Sharonian device, whether on the production floor or in the field, unlike the Arcanan spells whose use was limited to someone with at least a minimal Gift, and no one needed a Gift to charge a cartridge for a Model 10 rifle.

Sure, he thought now, no doubt there are all sorts of advantages to good, old-fashioned Sharonian technology, but don’t pretend you aren’t glad to have Arcanan “technology” backing you up this time around, Namir!

Well, of course he was, since he wasn’t an idiot. At the same time, he’d been at least equally delighted when he got a look inside Fort Ghartoun’s armory and discovered the Arcanans had neither removed nor destroyed the weapons which had been stored there. Some of those weapons had disappeared, presumably collected for study and analysis, but most were right where Velvelig had left them. The expeditionary force’s commanders had probably planned on disposing of them one way or another whenever they got around to it, but for the moment they’d settled for locking them up securely.

He’d been a bit surprised, despite the fact that Ulthar and Sarma had agreed that the Arcanan mutineers and the erstwhile Sharonian prisoners had no option but to cooperate fully, when neither of them had objected to the PAAF personnel’s re-arming themselves. It had been something of an acid test of the Arcanans’ sincerity, really, since for all their crystals’ capabilities, an individual Arcanan was considerably less lethal than an individual Sharonian equipped with a Model 10 and an H amp;W revolver. To their credit, the mutineers had passed the test with remarkably calm expressions. In fact, they were clearly as relieved to have that Sharonian lethality on their side for a change as Velvelig was to have their magic on his.

They were short on horses and mules-apparently, most of the Fort Ghartoun stud had been used to feed dragons and unicorns-but one of Fifty Cothar’s responsibilities had included looking after a sizeable pool of reserve unicorns for the main expeditionary force. They’d been left at Fort Ghartoun in no small part to take advantage of the opportunity to “graze” on the more mundane draft animals which had been captured with the fort, which left Velvelig and his men with rather mixed feelings where the creatures were concerned. The fact that unicorns appeared to have fractious personalities didn’t make them any happier about it, either. But if the mutineers were to be believed (and Armsman chan Dersain’s Sifting Talent insisted they were telling the truth) the carnivorous unicorns were capable of incredible feats of speed and endurance. Cothar insisted that they were routinely capable of covering a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles per day even cross country. They weren’t as efficient as the PAAFs powerful, big-boned mules as draft animals-not surprisingly, when those mules went to a thousand pounds each and a unicorn was little more than seven or eight hundred-but they could handle that job when they needed to. And because Fort Ghartoun had been turned into a remount depot, they had enough of them to provide teams for all seventeen of the wagons available to them and still mount all thirty-seven of Cothar’s dragoons and half of Velvelig’s surviving troopers.

The mutineers’ total strength consisted of sixty-three infantry, most from Sarma’s platoon, plus Cothar’s understrength cavalry troop and the three Healers and eleven of their assistants in addition to Velvelig’s surviving forty-one men. A hundred and fifty-five men fell just a bit short of an overwhelming host, but they’d helped themselves to the machine guns and the half-dozen 4.5-inch mortars from the armory, and the Arcanans had over a dozen of the crystal staffs which served them as heavy weapons. They couldn’t possibly have enough firepower to stand off the force Two Thousand Harshu could dispatch to run them to earth, but they had enough to ensure that anyone who caught up with them would have one hell of the fight. And between the wagons and the saddle unicorns, they could move much more rapidly than any PAAF mounted force had ever moved before. Each of the wagons had been fitted with its winter canopy, as well-a lightweight, well-insulated shell that bolted into place and turned the vehicle into a reasonably snug hut on wheels. They were fitted with ducted flues to allow the use of coal-fired stoves, but that was unlikely to be needed with the Arcanan crystals to keep them warm.

The majority of what had been Hadrign Thalmayr’s garrison had no interest in joining the mutineers’ “treason,” so they’d been left behind-deprived of weapons, mounts, draft animals, and the “hummers” the Arcanans used as carrier pigeons-while the fugitives decamped. Velvelig wasn’t happy about the sorts of troublemaking they were likely to get up to, but he couldn’t very well insist that men who’d mutinied to prevent prisoners from being tortured and killed turn around and kill their loyal fellows just to keep their mouths shut and their hands out of mischief. So, since they had to be left behind anyway, Sarma and Ulthar had been careful to “let slip” the deserters’ intention to dash across the portal into Failcham.

The arid terrain on the other side of the portal was hardly inviting, but hopefully their supposed route would make sense to any pursuers. The barren desert was no picnic, but it wasn’t likely to be lashed with New Ternath’s bitter blizzards, either, and they could reach the Sarlayn Valley and follow the mighty river for almost six hundred miles, all the way to the Mbisi Sea. Conversely, they could keep heading east for another hundred and fifty miles until they reached the Finger Sea and cross into Failcham’s version of Shurkhal. In either case, the PAAF wagons were designed for ready conversion into pontoons or even sailing craft-not, admittedly, the fleetest and most maneuverable of vessels, but surprisingly stable-which would provide fugitives with a wide option of possible destinations (and hiding places) that wouldn’t be frozen solid.

Which, Namir Velvelig conceded as he felt the cold setting its teeth in his bones, actually had quite a lot to recommend it.

“I wish I didn’t feel so guilty about leaving the civilians behind, Sir,” Golvar Silkash said from beside him, his voice half-lost in the snow-sharpened wind sighing through the pines, and Velvelig turned to look at the surgeon.

Fort Ghartoun’s garrison had been badly understrength at the time it was attacked. Unlike the Imperial Ternathian Army, the PAAF’s regiments contained only two battalions at the best of times, and out here on the bleeding edge of the frontier, it wasn’t unusual for a regiment to have its battalions deployed to widely separated locations. In Fort Ghartoun’s case, 2nd Battalion of Velvelig’s 127th Regiment had been heavily raided for reinforcements for New Uromath and Hell’s Gate following the initial clash at Toppled Timber, while 1st Battalion was still somewhere up-chain from Salym, as far as Velvelig knew. There’d been no great urgency to get them forward to Thermyn prior to the confrontation with the Arcanans, and even after that, Velvelig hadn’t expected their arrival for at least another month or two.

The single understrength battalion under his command when the Arcanan attack crashed over the fort had taken heavy casualties, and those casualties had been worst among its officers. Only four of them had survived: Company-Captain Halath-Shodach, Gold Company’s CO; Platoon-Captain chan Brano and Platoon-Captain Tobar, who had commanded Gold Company’s 2nd and 4th Platoon, respectively; and Platoon-Captain Larkal, who’d commanded 1st Platoon of Silver Company. Although Silkash outranked all four of them in terms of seniority, he was a medical officer, which meant he stood outside the direct line of command. He was ten years older than Halath-Shodach, however, and better than twice young Larkal’s age, and he’d become Velvelig’s executive officer, for all intents and purposes. It wasn’t something Silkash and ever been trained for, but as he’d pointed out just a bit sourly, it wasn’t as if the regiment really needed his services as a surgeon at the moment, since Fifty Maisyl and his Gifted healers had the magic touch-literally-when it came to medical needs. And, despite his tendency to deprecate his own competence outside sick bay, Silkash had been a tower of strength during the organization of this hasty withdrawal.

“I don’t like leaving them behind, either, Silky,” Velvelig said after a moment, “but it’s not like we had a lot of choice. Or time, for that matter.” He shook his head. “Besides, they’re probably safer keeping their heads down where they are than they’d be slogging through the hills with us. Especially if Harshu’s bastards turn up and run us to ground.”

“I know,” Silkash conceded. “It doesn’t make me feel any better about it, though. And I don’t like thinking about what could happen to any of them who’re Talented, especially if somebody like Thalmayr decides to make examples out of them!”

“I don’t like that thought any more than you do,” Velvelig said. He didn’t think it was likely to happen, either, though it was probably too much to ask Silkash or Tobis Makree to expect anything but the worst, given their own treatment at Thalmayr’s hands. “On the other hand,” he continued more grimly, “I doubt they’d be all that interested in any of the remaining Talents. It’s the Voices they’ve been worrying about, Silky.”

Silkash nodded jerkily, remembering Senior-Armsman Folsar chan Tergis. He’d been Fort Ghartoun’s senior-and only-Voice, and he’d been murdered in cold blood by Alivar Neshok. That was bad enough, but Sahrimahn Cothar had confirmed that a section of Arcanan cavalry under Senior Sword Barcan Kalcyr had also murdered young Syrail Targal, chan Tergis’ student and protegee. They’d been the only two Voices in or around Fort Ghartoun.

“For the most part, the best we can do for all of them is to get as far away from them as we can,” Velvelig said. “I don’t want any of them in our vicinity if it comes to a firefight.”

“Understood, Sir. It’s just-”

Silkash broke off with a jerky headshake that was as sharp with frustration with himself as with anything else, and Velvelig smiled slightly. It wasn’t a happy smile, because he understood exactly what Silkash had just started to say. It was the PAAF’s job to protect civilians. For the most part, that might consist of protecting them from fellow civilians with…flexible attitudes towards things like law codes and other people’s property rights rather than ravening hordes of magic-wielding barbarians, but protection was still the heart of their job description. It felt wrong to be leaving any of them behind, and the fact that they’d have been more endangered trying to escape along with the column didn’t make it feel any less wrong.

Probably wouldn’t exactly be a pleasure trip for them, if we did pull them out with us, though, the regiment-captain reflected. It’s sure as hells not going to be one for us, for that matter!

In theory, it was “only” about fourteen hundred miles from Fort Ghartoun to the portal to New Uromath, located a few miles west of what would have been the site of the small city (or large town, depending on one’s perspective) of Wyrmach in the republic of Thanos. Unfortunately, those were fourteen hundred miles as a bird-or one of the Arcanans’ dragons — might have made the trip. It would be closer to two thousand for land bound refugees, and getting through the Wind Peak Mountains east of Bitter Lake City was going to be…unpleasant in the extreme, even with the well marked trails, the wagons’ canopies, and the Arcanans’ magic to help along the way.

The good news was how much tougher, hardier, and faster the unicorns were than any horse Velvelig had ever encountered. He was sufficiently Arpathian to find that profoundly unnatural and more than a little distasteful, but he was too pragmatic not to be grateful for it. With them for draft animals and mounts and with the Arcanans’ levitation spells to boost the wagons across the rougher terrain, they ought to be able to make thirty or forty miles per day even through the mountains and probably up to a hundred miles a day once they were clear of the Wind Peaks. At the best speed they could manage, though, it would take them over two weeks just to reach Bitter Lake City and-hopefully-get beyond the range at which the mutineers’ locator spells could be triggered by their pursuers.

The question, of course, was whether or not they’d have two weeks.

Only one way to find out, I suppose, he thought now, turning to face back into the snowy wind. If I were a betting man, I’d probably bet against our pulling it off. Fortunately, Arpathians are so lousy at math that we don’t have a clue how to calculate odds.