“What do you see?” Ulthar asked, and Velvelig’s lips gave the slightest of twitches…which would have been a broad grin in anyone who wasn’t Arpathian.
He and his Sharonians found the Arcanans’ casual use of magic fascinating, yet the Arcanans seemed at least equally fascinated by routine, everyday bits and pieces of Sharonian technology. They’d never seen anything like a pair of binoculars, for example. Instead of learning to grind and polish lenses, they’d learned how to polish and enchant “sarkolis” crystals to let them see distant objects. And as nearly as Golvar Silkash and Tobis Makree had been able to figure it out, their “magistrons” could Heal nearsightedness, farsightedness, and even cataracts, so no one needed spectacles. The thought of being able to duplicate a Distance Viewer’s Talent with a shiny piece of rock was certainly impressive-and seductive-but Velvelig was well content with his binoculars, and Ulthar and his people appeared to be just as deeply impressed by the notion of a distance viewing apparatus that required no Gift to produce or use.
“Nothing in the air, right now,” he replied, answering the fifty’s question. “What about your Rohsahk?”
“Nothing,” Ulthar said. “Unfortunately, there could be fifty dragons hovering on the other side of that portal and Valnar wouldn’t be able to detect them from here.”
Velvelig grunted in combined understanding, unhappiness, and worry. It was interesting that the Arcanans’ Gifts and spells were no more capable of crossing a portal threshold than a Sharonian’s Talent. Learning that minor fact had made it abruptly clear how Balkar chan Tesh had managed to ream what were clearly elite troops so easily when he’d attacked the Swamp Portal. Of course, it had helped that the idiot in command of those elite troops had been Hadrign Thalmayr. Velvelig remembered a conversation with Silkash in which he’d tried to explain his suspicion about the quality of the prisoners chan Tesh had sent up-chain from Hell’s Gate. Now he knew he’d been right, although he supposed he ought to cut Thalmayr at least a little slack. The man was an idiot, and his defensive deployment and tactics (such as they were and what there’d been of them) had reflected that, but they’d been based on his understanding of his own weapons. None of the Arcanans at the Swamp Portal had ever imagined that anything more lethal than an arbalest bolt or a grenade could be thrown through a portal. Velvelig liked to think a Sharonian commander wouldn’t have made any comfortable assumptions about that, but the fact that the Arcanans had taken five entire universes with such absurd ease suggested he might have been wrong about who had a monopoly on overconfidence.
What mattered at the moment, however, was that the handful of Arcanans who were now his allies couldn’t tell him anything more about the far side of that portal than he could see with his own two eyes and the assistance of his binoculars, and that was limited enough to make anyone unhappy.
What he could see from here was that the Arcanans appeared to have placed their picket on the Thermyn side of the portal rather than the New Uromathian side. Given the normal weather in New Uromath, Velvelig completely agreed with their decision. The rainfall and seasonal temperature variation in Malbar, the Sharonian city nearest to the New Uromathan portal’s site, was less pronounced than in Wyrmach, but Malbar also got around four times the annual precipitation, and he preferred surroundings which were a bit less damp. It did leave him with a bit of a problem, though.
“You were right about where they put their fort,” he said, studying the offending structures through the binoculars. “It’s right damned in the middle of this side of the portal.” He lowered the glasses and showed the Arcanan his teeth. “I suppose there’s only one way to be sure they haven’t switched things around on you on the far aspect, though.”
“Part of me hopes they have,” Ulthar admitted. “Not the smart part of me, of course. It just offends me to think that the Union Army could be sloppy enough to’ve left things this way.”
“Peacetime thinking dies hard,” Velvelig replied. “Here on the frontiers, it’s always been our policy to locate our forts on the down-chain side of each portal as we explored it, so it’s probably not too surprising your people operate the same way in what they think are their rear areas.”
Ulthar nodded, although his expression remained an odd mixture of hopefulness and disgust.
The New Uromath Portal was fourteen miles across-what Ulthar had described as a Class Six portal. Sharonians didn’t bother about classification systems; they simply measured a portal’s diameter and got on with exploring it. This one happened to be quite a bit wider than most and aligned roughly on a north-south axis…on this side. On the far side, it was aligned almost exactly on an east-to-west line, however, and that was where the “counterintuitive” nature of portals came into play. Standing west of the Thermyn aspect of the portal and gazing through it, one looked due south into New Uromath; if one circled around to the eastern aspect of the portal, however, one looked due north into New Uromath. It was impossible to look across or through a portal within a single universe-all you could see was the other universe, as if you were peering through a picture window, and in this instance, vision was as useless as spells or Talent. The only way for an observer in one universe to find out what was happening on the far side of a portal in the same universe was to move around the perimeter of the portal until he had a direct, unobstructed line-of-sight.
Which meant that unless the Arcanans had gone ahead and constructed a second position-a lookout post, at least-on the far side of this portal, they’d left a fourteen-mile wide blind spot. The blind spot in question happened to be fourteen miles high at its tallest point, as well…which didn’t do Velvelig any good since he didn’t have any handy dragons of his own.
Personally, he damned well would have put at least an outpost on the far side of that portal if he’d been going to war against another multi-universal civilization, no matter how far in his rear it might happen to be. But he’d known dozens of Portal Authority officers who probably wouldn’t have, too.
“I suppose it all comes down to how crazy your Two Thousand Harshu-or whoever the hells is behind this frigging cover-up of yours-thinks we are,” he said finally. “If anyone who’s looking for us thinks we might be big enough lunatics to head even deeper behind your lines instead of hiding out in the mountains west of Fort Ghartoun and Snow Sapphire Lake, he’ll damned well have put somebody on the other side of this portal to watch its eastern aspect. If he doesn’t think we’re crazy enough to try sneaking into New Uromath in the first place, he won’t be worrying about watching for us here.”
“Especially not if they’re trying to keep what happened at Fort Ghartoun from leaking out,” Ulthar agreed. “They wouldn’t want to issue any orders that might make people wonder what the hells is going on, I suppose. I wish I had a better feel for whether or not they will try to keep the news from getting out, though. In a way, I’d feel a lot better if I knew they’d decided to go as public as possible about it. It’d make sneaking past them harder, but at least then I’d assume they weren’t thinking in terms of making as quietly disappear before Duke Garth Showma starts asking awkward questions.”
“Does make it a little harder to catch someone when you’re trying to keep the truth about why you’re hunting them from your own troops,” Velvelig acknowledged. “You can probably come up with plausible orders to cover a lot of contingencies, but if the man on the spot doesn’t know what you’re really trying to do, he won’t do a very good job of adapting or modifying those orders to cover a contingency you didn’t think of when you gave them.”