“The cork’s just as bad from their side,” Mahrkrai pointed out. “In fact, it’s a lot worse. They may be digging in to keep us from getting dragons through the portal, Sir, but they don’t have any dragons to put through in the first place! Trying to fight their way out of the Cut would be a nightmare, and the demolition spells are already in place to take out the rails-and the Cut-if they try. For that matter, even if those heavy guns of theirs are real, and even if they have the ability to reach four or five miles this side of the portal, all we have to do is fall back outside whatever their range is and start picking them apart from the air.”
“We’d need more battle dragons for that,” Toralk pointed out. “And what the dragons can do isn’t going to take them by surprise. Not again.”
“No, and they’ll undoubtedly factor the possibilities of air mobility into their thinking, at least as well as they can,” Harshu observed thoughtfully. “But how well can they factor it in without their own dragons to use as a measuring stick? And even if they manage to extrapolate a lot more accurately than I suspect they can, based on what they’ve seen so far, they can’t change the constraints their lack of air mobility imposes. Once they’re this side of the portal, we can circle as wide as we need to to get around behind them instead of trying to stuff your tactical and transport dragons through the mouth of a jar, Klayrman. We’ll be able to get at their lines of communication without running the gauntlet of those rotating cannon. In fact, the farther into Karys they advance, the more vulnerable they’ll make themselves.”
“Are you thinking about falling back from the Cut, Sir? Giving them a free pass into Karys?” Toralk asked.
“Oh, no! Keeping them out of Karys in the first place, at least until we’re properly reinforced, is a lot better idea. And one thing they’ve already demonstrated is that they aren’t idiots, Klayrman! If we were to suddenly and obligingly let them through the Cut without a fight, they’d have to wonder why we were being so helpful. I’m just saying that if they do decide to come after us, and if they do manage somehow to break out of the Cut, we’ll be able to hurt them a lot more badly than they may realize.”
He smiled almost whimsically.
“I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”
Chapter Five
December 9
“Twenty for your thoughts,” Jathmar Nargra said quietly, leaning back in the comfortable deck chair.
“I don’t know that they’re worth that much,” his wife, Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr, told him with a wan smile.
“Oh, they have to be worth that much!” Jathmar disagreed.
Shaylar chuckled, although that chuckle was edged by sorrow and more than a hint of bitterness. A twentieth-falcon was the smallest Ternathian coin, so putting that price on her thoughts didn’t set their value very high. But Jathmar shouldn’t have needed to ask her about them in the first place. Oh, the details of what might be running through her mind at any moment, yes. But their marriage bond was so strong, ran so deep, he’d always known what she was thinking, feeling, on a level far below words.
Except that now he didn’t. She still wasn’t certain exactly when the bond had started fraying, but it continued to grow weaker day by day, almost hour by hour, and that terrified her. It was all they had left to cling to as they traveled steadily across the faces of far too many universes towards their black, bleak future of captivity, and it was slipping away, like Shurkhali sand sifting between her fingers. The tighter she clenched her grasp, the more clearly she felt it seeping away, blood dripping from a wound neither of them could staunch.
No, she thought, gazing out through the porthole. It’s not weakening day by day; it’s weakening mile by mile. The farther we get from home, the weaker it grows, and Sweet Mother Marnilay, but what in the names of all the gods could cause that?
She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was happening, and she turned away from Jathmar-from the husband who felt as if he were somehow drifting away from her even as he held her hand tightly and warmly in his own-to gaze up at stars which were achingly familiar.
She and Jathmar could at least have an illusion of privacy, and she was grateful to Sir Jasak Olderhan for allowing that. There was no place they could possibly have escaped to from a ship in the middle of the Western Ocean’s vast empty reaches, but that wouldn’t have stopped all too many Arcanans they’d met on this endless journey from posting guards over them, anyway. After all, they were both Sharonian, with who knew what sort of still undisclosed terrible, “unnatural” Talents? Never mind that the Arcanans could work actual magic. Never mind that she and Jasak were unarmed civilians in a universe which was the gods only knew how far from their own. Somehow, they were still the threat, and in her more introspective moments she could actually almost sympathize with that attitude. The Talents with which she and Jathmar had grown up, which were as natural to them as breathing, were just as bizarre and inexplicable to the Arcanans as the Arcanans’ magic and spells were to her. And whatever someone couldn’t explain became, by definition, uncanny and frightening, especially when the whatever in question was possessed by one’s enemies.
She understood that only too completely, as well, she thought bitterly.
So, yes-whether she wanted to or not, she appreciated at least intellectually why they might be seen as a threat. More than that, she knew Jasak’s refusal to post round-the-clock guards was an unequivocal declaration of his bedrock trust in them. Trust that they hadn’t lied to him about their Talents…and that even if those Talents might have somehow allowed them to violate the parole they’d given and escape, they wouldn’t do it. And Jasak was a man who recognized that that sort of trust was its own kind of fetter, especially for a Shurkhalian who understood the honor concept which lay at its heart.
At the same time, as much as she’d come to value Jasak, to recognize the fundamental goodness and iron fidelity which were so much a part of him, she remembered an ancient Shurkhalian proverb her father had taught her long ago. “Too much gratitude is a garment that chafes,” he’d told her. She’d wondered, then, what he’d meant and how he could have said that, for hospitality and open handedness was at the very heart of the Shurkhali honor code. More than that, Thaminar Kolmayr was the most generous man she knew, someone who was always ready to help, to lend support-the sort of man to whom others automatically turned in need and who was a natural focus for others’ gratitude. But now, looking back, she could see that he’d always found ways to allow those whom he’d helped to help him in return, to allow them to repay him with their own gifts or favors.
And she couldn’t repay Jasak Olderhan any more than she could forget that without him-without his protection-she and Jathmar would be locked up in a cell somewhere, probably separated and subjected to ruthless interrogation…or dead. He and Gadrial Kelbryan were all that stood between her and Jathmar and death-Gadrial had literally snatched Jathmar back from the very gate of Reysharak’s Hall-and it was the totality of their helplessness which made it so difficult to not somehow resent Jasak’s generosity. And the fact that he’d been the commander of the Arcanan patrol which had made the initial contact between the Union of Arcana and Sharonians-and killed every single one of her and Jathmar’s companions in the horrendous, chaotic madness sparked by Commander of Fifty Shevan Garlath’s cowardice and stupidity-only filled her emotions with even greater pain and confusion.
“Really,” Jathmar said beside her, lifting the hand he held to press its back against his cheek. “What are you thinking, Shay?”