Sarma just looked at him for several seconds while his own mind raced. He’d seen Shield Valnar Rohsahk here at Fort Ghartoun, but he hadn’t paid him much attention. Rohsahk was probably a year or two younger even than Sarma, with light brown hair and unremarkable features. Like Ulthar, he’d been severely wounded in the Sharonian attack on the Mahritha portal. That was true of all the 2nd Andarans here at Fort Ghartoun; they’d been left by their captors to spare them the additional pain of being transported across such rough terrain by someone who didn’t have dragons. He seemed to keep to himself quite a bit, but now that Sarma thought about it, the shield always seemed to have a game or some other app running on his personal crystal. Or at least that was what Sarma had assumed Rohsahk was up to…
“And just what, if I might ask, did Shield Rohsahk do to Fifty Wentys’ spellware?” he asked with a certain trepidation.
“He just hid a file in the letter I sent my wife to tell her I was alive after all,” Ulthar said. “It’s keyed to the standard extraction code Arylis uses to unpack all my letters, but it won’t activate until it hears the code in her voice.” He shook his head. “If Wentys could find his arse with both hands we’d have had to think up something a lot more sophisticated.”
“What if someone farther up-chain is better at his job than Wentys is?”
“They could hardly be worse at it,” Ulthar pointed out. “I mean, do you really think Five Hundred Isrian left his best commo officer here in Thermyn with the gods only know what waiting for the AEF when it finally hits a Sharonian position that’s too tough to take?”
That was a valid point, the other fifty reflected. Commander of Fifty Tohlmah Wentys was a Chalaran who’d somehow ended up in the Army instead of the Navy, and he was unlikely to rise much above his present rank. He was a stolid sort-an officer who did what was required of him without imagination, drive, or ambition. He was sufficiently Gifted to perform adequately as a communications specialist in peacetime, but as Ulthar had just suggested, he was hardly the pick of the litter.
And he was also one of the officers who’d swallowed the official version of Sharonian “war crimes” and what had happened to Magister Halathyn. Sarma doubted Wentys would have had the nerve to beat one of the Sharonian POWs, but he would certainly have held Thalmayr’s truncheon for him between blows.
“Well, no. Not if you put it that way,” he conceded.
“Wentys officially cleared the file for transmission and sealed it with his personal cipher,” Ulthar said. “It’s unlikely anyone up-chain’s going to go to the trouble of breaking it just to double check. They can’t do it openly without leaving tracks I doubt anyone involved with some kind of cover-up wants to leave, and if they do it clandestinely, it’ll be almost impossible for them to hide the fact. And whether they do it openly or covertly, Valnar set the file to self-destruct if anyone other than Arylis tries to access it. Of course, Arylis won’t know she’s accessing it until it pops out at her. At which point,” his smile turned very, very cold, “she goes straight to the Duke with it.”
“You’re sending your wife directly to Duke Garth Showma?” Sarma blinked.
“He’s the hereditary commander of the Second Andarans,” Ulthar replied simply. “If she takes it to him, he’ll read it. And when he does, and when he realizes what one of his officers has been doing, hell won’t hold what’ll come down on Hadrign Thalmayr’s head.”
“Or anyone else’s, I imagine,” Sarma said slowly.
“Or anyone else’s,” Ulthar agreed, but then he shrugged. “Unfortunately, it’s going to take over a month for that letter to reach Arylis, and Velvelig’s healers’ll be dead long before that happens. For that matter, once he actually beats a couple of them to death, I’m pretty sure Thalmayr’ll decide all the Sharonian POWs were shot trying to escape. Dead witnesses don’t tend to dispute live witnesses’ version of what happened.”
“No, they don’t. And you’re right about what’s going to happen to them if someone doesn’t stop it. It’s nice to know the Duke’s going to bring the hammer down eventually, but I’m afraid it’s still up to you and me to do something about Thalmayr in the short term.”
“Yes, it is. And I’m glad you stopped me from going after him all by myself, Jaralt. I hadn’t thought about involving anyone else, especially what’s left of my men. In fact, if I’m going to be honest, I’m so frigging furious I wasn’t really ‘thinking’ at all. Now that you’ve jogged my brain back into functioning, though, I’d really prefer to work out a solution where anybody who gets killed is one of the bad guys. And it occurs to me that you and I probably aren’t the only members of this garrison who loathe Thalmayr and his toadies. If we’re going to be charged with mutiny, we might as well go the whole dragon, don’t you think?”
Chapter Four
December 8
The magnificent imperial Ternathian peregrine gave a shrill cry of disapproval, spread her four-foot wings, and launched from the saddle-mounted perch. She soared effortlessly into the clean blue sky, and Regiment-Captain Rof chan Skrithik looked enviously after her. There was more than a touch of sorrow in that envy, an aching grief for the death of a prince which had brought him and Taleena together, yet there was also a fierce joy as he watched her spiraling higher and higher against the cloudless blue.
Unfortunately, it was far from cloudless at ground level, and chan Skrithik tried to be philosophical about that as he climbed down from his horse, handed the reins to an under-armsman, and made his way through the incredible racket and blowing wall of dust towards the officer who stood waiting for him.
Regiment-Captain Lyskar chan Serahlyk was a tallish man, only an inch or two shorter than chan Skrithik himself, and although he’d been born in Teramandor and spoke with a distinct Teramandoran accent, he had the tightly curled hair and dark complexion of his Ricathian father. Of course, the dust rolling steadily eastward on the permanent, powerful wind from the Karys Portal to coat everything in sight made it difficult to judge anyone’s skin color just at the moment. It was ironic, really. Given the mechanics of portal dynamics, the dust cloud-laced with coal smoke from the heavy equipment helping to spawn it-blew steadily east and west here in Traisum, away from the portal in both directions like two fog banks fleeing from one another, which meant there was no way to approach the portal without getting grit blasted between one’s teeth.
Chan Skrithik tied a bandanna to cover his nose and mouth as he walked, and chan Serahlyk’s eyes narrowed in amusement above a matching, dust-caked bandanna. The unseasonably hot weather-for a Shurkhali winter, at least-had finally broken, which was a vast relief. Now if only there’d been anything remotely like rain on the horizon from either side of the portal…
“Good morning, Rof,” the Third Dragoons’ senior engineer said as soon as chan Skrithik was close enough to hear anything through the background din. He still had to raise his voice, but at least they could talk without shouting.
“Good morning,” chan Skrithik acknowledged, reaching out to clasp forearms. “Seen any dragons lately?”
Chan Serahlyk chuckled. It was a serious question, but like most Sharonians, he still found the notion of dragons absurd, despite the fact that his combat engineers had helped to bury the last of the rotting carcasses.
“Not today,” he said. “Haven’t seen any since that little problem they ran into last week, as a matter of fact.”
The engineer’s voice was grimly satisfied, and chan Skrithik smiled in satisfaction of his own. The Karys aspect of the Traisum-Karys Portal was four and a half miles across but the entire portal was relatively low-lying, especially from its Traisum aspect. On that side, it was buried-literally-in the heart of the Ithal Mountains, which reached altitudes of over six thousand feet. Getting to it was difficult from ground level, yet it could be done, as the existence of the Traisum Cut indicated. Approaching that aspect from the west, the terrain was even more challenging than from the east.