The young woman was obviously flustered, but as she looked up into his face, she realized he meant it and her protests faded. He took her hand in both of his and gave her another bow-which only flustered her even more deeply, of course-and turned her over to one of the assistant housekeepers. Then he returned to his office, dropped into the comfortable chair behind his desk, and glared up at the ceiling while his mind raced.
He’d ruthlessly shoved he job of unraveling the chain of incompetence behind that fool trainee pilot onto the desk of Five Thousand Rukkar. The entire thing was a mess. The yellow wasn’t even a proper battle dragon-just a youngling on loan from Mythal Air Expeditionaries for a breeding experiment that probably should never have been approved. MAE was as undisciplined a group as ever claimed commissions, but Mythlan private families paid for the feeding and care for MAE’s fleet of dragons-a relief on the Union of Arcana’s military budget too large for Parliament to decline. The old practice of an airknight paying for his own equipage and fodder was darn useful in that respect, but other Mythlan habits didn’t mesh well with Andaran sensitivities. Among other things, they conducted side line breeding efforts and produced special dragon lines for crowd control, which had to be one of the stupidest godsdamned ideas Thankhar had ever heard of. And what kind of frigging idiot authorized a yellow for “crowd control”?
He shuddered as he thought about it. He’d never heard of a yellow which produced nonlethal gas, and he doubted like hell that anyone in Mythal was interested in producing one, whatever they might claim. And he had his doubts-serious doubts-about the rider’s claim that he’d never intended to actually fire on the crowd. Hells, he doubted he’d believe it even if the kid repeated it under a dozen truth spells! No, that little prick had been ready to gas the street in front of Garth Showma House, and what kind of miserable bastard used poison gas on a crowd of bereaved women and children?
As soon as the healers had that trainee back on his feet, Sathmin would have him at a meeting with the spouse’s club to make a very heartfelt and public apology. Sathmin would make it work, but the real apology should be coming from someone far more senior who’d allowed the almost disaster to launch. Rukkar had better figure out who’d started it, or Thankhar would have to.
He didn’t care how mild the MAE’s Hundred who’d claimed credit for the idea thought the yellow’s gas was. That idiot had also been shocked-or claimed he had, anyway-that the crowd hadn’t instantly dispersed the moment yellow wings flared overhead. He’d clearly never met an Andaran woman. And he equally clearly hadn’t figured out how much of that crowd had been garthans who didn’t give a single solitary damn about any shakira ever born. Once they got out from under the bastards’ thumbs, there was no stopping any garthan. It was one of the things he most liked about them…and what was making it so godsdamned hard to get them to stand back and believe the truth about how Magister Halathyn had actually died.
And now this. What in all Shartahk’s Hells was going on at the front? He’d had his doubts, had his concerns, but this-!
His staff commo officers, with some assistance from Magister Gadrial-he wasn’t going to let a possible forgery slip by when he had a theoretical magister of her caliber on hand-had confirmed the message was legitimate. Arylis Ulthar hadn’t faked it, and the original message had definitely been recorded on a hummer at the front. He had to bear in mind the theoretical possibility that Fifty Ulthar hadn’t sent the original message, but the chance of anyone’s getting a successful forgery past Gadrial Kelbryan was virtually nil. Which only made it even worse, in a way. Ulthar had a solid performance record before his posting to the frontier, and Jasak had flatly stated that he’d been the best fifty in C Company. There was no reason-no sane reason Thankhar could think of, at any rate-for a man like that to invent an elaborate story, especially one like this…which meant what he’d reported was almost certainly true.
And that meant Thankhar had to assume the events at the front really were as bad as the message claimed. He needed to find out what was going on out there-everything that was going on out there-and he needed to find out yesterday. Most people would have felt the meat of Ulthar’s message was all about the violation of the Kerellian Accords and the truly horrible treatment of Sharonans held under Arcanan military authority, and Thankhar Olderhan’s fury had burned fiery hot as he read that part of it. Yet under the fury had been something far, far colder.
The Commandery knew the truce had broken down, that Two Thousand Harshu had led a counterattack deep into the Sharonian-claimed universes, and that the initial offensive seemed to have done well. But aside from that bare notification and the report that at least some Second Andaran survivors had been recovered alive, there were still no additional official messages. It was preposterous-or worse-but the most recent reliable information they really had was Jasak’s report, and that was both suspect in certain quarters and locked down, denied public release, until after his court-martial had delivered its verdict.
It wasn’t unheard of for there to be delays-sometimes very lengthy delays-in reports from the frontier when officers were overwhelmed dealing with some crisis. The Union of Arcana had learned long ago that it couldn’t micro-manage affairs over a communications chain that could take weeks or even months to pass a message one way. The military had to trust the judgment of the officers on the spot, and those officers were often more focused on the problem at hand rather than on writing reports for superiors who couldn’t do one damned thing to help them, anyway. So, yes, there’d been lots of examples of that sort of delay over the years.
But it also happened when officers were doing something profoundly stupid and thought they could fix it before the Commandery found out, and Thankhar Olderhan had decided weeks ago that that was almost certainly the case this time…unless it was something still worse. In fact, he’d been inclining further and further towards that “still worse” hypothesis even before Jasak, Gadrial, and Jasak’s shardonai reached Portalis. Now, with what Therman Ulthar had said about intelligence reports which contradicted what he knew first hand to be true added to what Jasak and Gadrial had already told him…
For anyone who’d spent as many years as he had fighting corruption and facing down one scheming political maneuver after another, the possibility that Army and Air Force personnel were being deliberately lied to by their own superiors raised questions which were far more chilling even than the violation of the Accords. Ugly questions about who was doing what, who was covering it up, and-above all-why he was covering it up. And when that was added to what was clearly an orchestrated campaign to leak the false narrative from the front to the news services which were most hostile to the current government…
He needed an investigation, and he needed it now. And whatever team he sent down-chain needed the military teeth to be listened to and the strength to withstand whatever threat the Sharonan military-and, much as he hated the possibility, its own military-represented. Collecting evidence in an active war zone was not for the faint of heart.
Lucky for him, Thankhar Olderhan was an Andaran, and Andaran inquiry officers didn’t come in faint of heart.