The alternative was unbearable.
Chapter Twenty-Four
January 13
The door chime rang as the hummer battered its beak against the bell mounted beside Arylis Ulthar’s porch door.
She turned from the cake she’d been frosting, and her eyes widened as she realized how exhausted that hummer was. The wings were missing a few iridescent green feathers, and whatever Novice or Journeyman had been supposed to recharge the levitation spell at the last way station to help the small beast’s natural magic maintain its breakneck speed had obviously bungled the job. The creature had settled, exhausted, into the open wire cage by the doorpost instead of taking any number of more natural perches in the small yard or nearby trees.
Strong compulsion spells gave the hummer no choice in its destination, and the crystal chip in the base of the cage glowed as it transferred the message from the travel-worn creature. Arylis wanted that message-wanted it badly-but she knew hummers well enough to realize how thoroughly distressed this one was. The message would be there whenever she got to it; the hummer might not be, if something wasn’t done about its exhaustion.
She’d worked summers as a hummer trainer and run a hummer nursery business with her sisters before marrying Therman Ulthar. It was the sort of support work-on the edge of the Army but not quite in it-many Andaran women did between school and marriage and sometimes after, and her family was garthan. They’d found refuge from the nightmare of Mythalan society under the protection of Andara, and like most refugees, their patriotism and devotion to their new home burned hot and fierce, which had made that support work even more satisfying. The young hummers needed about a year’s growth after leaving the nest before they gained enough strength to receive their enchantments, and her family had bought hummer chicks from Gifted breeders and fed them up before reselling the strong, older birds to the Union Army and private communications services. She’d come to love the swift, jewel-like little creatures, and she didn’t bother to close the cage door or slip on the bespelled handling gloves hanging under the cage before she reached for this one with her bare strong, dark-skinned hands. She knew hummers too well to bother with them, and she didn’t care to mess the inside of the gloves with cake frosting from her interrupted baking.
She handfed the creature a couple of ounces of honeywater with her icing bag. The small magic in the icing tip wasn’t designed to feed birds, but it worked-beading in a fat wet globe at the end of the bag between the hummer’s red-throated gulps. It was very hungry, and she wanted the worn creature fed before she confirmed the download from its message chip and let it follow its next spell-compulsion to streak back to the North Portalis Hummer Aerie. She hoped it would receive a gentle grooming and a few days rest before its next long message route.
Her half-iced cake had been more in the way of practice than actually needed for a gathering, so she didn’t mind interrupting her decorating efforts to ensure the little creature at least got some sugar in its system before powering back home again. Not only had she spent years raising them for the mail service, but more recently, sleek-winged hummers who’d probably never flown further than the outskirts of Old Portalis on Arcana Prime arrived weekly with short messages from the Commandery’s Bureau of Family Relations and Military Support Services. That always happened when a unit was deployed, and Arylis had grown accustomed to their general nothing messages about Therman’s unit when it was on deployment.
Of course, those messages had been anything but “general” or “nothing” since the first news of the clash with the mysterious Sharonians had blasted over the entire Union or Arcana. The nightmare of not knowing for almost two weeks what had happened to him-if he was even alive or dead-had been horrible, despite the way in which all the 2nd Andarans’ wives and family members had rallied about one another. But then had come the wonderful news that he was alive and recovered from his wounds, although he was now stationed in a universe called “Thermyn,” which she’d never even heard of. Once she’d gotten over the shock-and finished weeping in joy-at the news that he was alive, she’d been a bit amused that his current post’s universe bore a name so similar to his own.
But she hadn’t heard a great deal directly from him yet. There’d been a brief note from her brother Iftar, telling her Therman had been found alive and rescued. And there’d been an even briefer standard Military Support Services survivor’s message, from Therman himself. Aside from that, there’d been nothing, which suggested the censors were clamping down pretty hard. Arylis had enough of a garthan’s suspicion of those in authority to make her uneasy over that silence, but she trusted the Army to tell her if anything bad-anything else bad-happened to her husband.
This message might well be from BFR or even from Therman himself, which was why her fingers itched to check its contents, but she made herself take the time to finish caring for the hummer. Hummer stations could transfer the messages from creature to creature as they came down the line, but the hummers didn’t get immediately sent back after long trips, either. So if the message was from Thermyn and not the BFR office right here in Portalis, this hummer might have been the one to bring her message much of the way across New Arcana from the outbound portal to New Andara. Or it might have brought some other message and simply been reused for a purely local message by a sloppy handler who hadn’t noticed the creature’s need for rest.
If it had been Threeday, she’d have been certain it was just another Bureau of Family Relations nothing message. But today was Fiveday and she’d already gotten one of those this week.
The hummer finished the last bead of sugar water, pressed its needle-sharp beak against the back of her hand with feathery gentleness, then squirmed until she released it. It hopped back into the cage, crossed to the cage’s message chip, and tapped the chip once with that same beak. Its complex enchantments had completely transferred the message to the sarkolis chip in the base of the cage, and it was clearly impatient-thanks to those same complex enchantments-for her to confirm receipt and send it upon its way once more.
She had no intention of doing anything of the sort, however. It needed a longer feeding, and so she refilled the icing bag with more honeywater and hung it from the top of the cage before she extracted the crystal from its receptacle. then she latched the hummer into the cage to ensure it would get to finish feeding before the homing compulsion forced it on.
Arylis tried not to hope for too much when her shaking hands slotted the message chip into the carved lines of the family’s old message reader. A family with a magister, or even a novice in its household, would use a PC for this and a multitude of other tasks. Since neither Arylis nor Fifty Ulthar had a scrap of Gift between them, she used reliable single purpose spellware for the few things in their home life that required enchantment or disenchantment.
“My name is Arylis Ulthar.” She spoke carefully into the device, enunciating, and projecting her voice a bit more than normal to make sure its aetheric energy made a strong enough field for the old spellware to work.
The carved lines marking out runes and amplification circles around the message chip glowed a familiar solid blue, and Arylis relaxed. The old device hadn’t chosen this moment to stop working.
The chip slowly warmed until it too glowed. Then it did exactly what she expected.
“Personal message from”-the spellware paused to access the sender’s name and then continued, and Arylis’s heart leapt as Therman’s familiar reference number rolled out of the reader-“soldier 2AS-5 °C-03-73524. Speak access code to retrieve message.”