Jathmar’s jaw muscles quivered as fury swept through him. “Just how the hell did these things come to exist?”
“They were created, we think,” Gadrial replied when Jasak hesitated. “During the Arcanan portal war, two centuries ago. By Mythlan shakira caste lords and their greatest magisters. The Ransarans lodged massive protests when the Mythlans turned the djinn loose against Andaran armies and ships-in fact, that’s what brought most of Ransar actively into the war on the other side-but the protests didn’t do any good. We’ve been trying to bottle them back up-permanently-for two hundred years. So far, no one’s succeeded.”
“There’s no way to destroy the things?” Jathmar demanded, and Gadrial bit her lip.
“The last team that tried it…” She shuddered. “No one’s tried actually killing one since, although we’ve been working on an approach we think would work at Garth Showma. The problem is that we aren’t sure it’ll work, and it’s the sort of field test that only gets to go wrong once. Sooner or later, we may have no choice but to give it another try, and we intend to go right on refining our R amp;D until we have to trot it out. In the meantime, fortunately, they can be forced back into bottles, eventually, with enough sufficiently Gifted magisters. But trying to kill one just makes it desperate enough and mean enough to get truly ugly.”
Her voice turned bitter.
“They know being bottled won’t be a permanent state. Most of them think it’s an amusing game, being released and having their fun, trying to elude capture in the chase, then being cornered and put back into a bottle, then waiting for some black marketeer to steal the bottle again so some other idiot will open it. They actually make a contest of it, amongst themselves. They’re hoping that eventually, we’ll get tired of chasing them down and leave them unbottled.”
“Which is something we don’t dare do,” Jasak added grimly.
“Why don’t they just kill anyone who tries to bottle them?” Jathmar asked, still seething with anger.
“Because it isn’t sporting,” Jasak growled. “Their creators gave them a sense of humor and a twisted sense of respect for anyone clever enough to re-bottle them, as well as an appetite for creative ways to dupe their victims. So far, that seems to be holding true, but as Gadrial just implied, we can’t be certain it’ll stay that way forever. And, of course, the day it stops being true is the day some poor team of magisters is going to find out about it the hard way. The magisters know it, too,” he said grimly, his eyes flicking sideways to Gadrial for just a moment, “but they have to go right on bottling them and pray each time that this isn’t the moment the djinn stop playing games and start slaughtering magisters. That,” he added with a vicious snarl in his voice, “is another reason I hate most Mythlan shakira.”
Shaylar stared from Gadrial to Jasak and back again, then shuddered.
“Every time I think I’ve gotten used to your culture, something like this knocks the props out from under me, again, and I end up feeling like a lost and scared little girl. Again.”
Jathmar slipped an arm around her, and she needed it. If they were willing to do that to one another, she thought, what would they do to Sharona? Would their Commandery decide to uncork those bottles and turn the djinn loose against Sharona’s forts? Sharona’s cities? She leaned against her husband’s shoulder, trying to blot that ghastly image from her mind and not succeeding very well.
Jathmar’s worry for her prompted him to change the subject, bringing the conversation back to the one they’d been discussing before their unexpected digression.
“So these ‘motics’ respond to programmed pods that steer them?”
Gadrial nodded, and her expression was relieved.
“Yes. The pods keep them in clearly marked lanes high enough above the streets and houses not to endanger anyone on the ground but low enough to avoid collisions with other air traffic. A car’s owner must tell the vehicle’s guidance crystal where he or she wants to go, and the GC is programmed to contact the nearest traffic control pod by means of a short-range communication spell. The pod sends back a response call that gives the car’s GC the flight path to reach the next pod in the system, leading the car from pod to pod until it reaches the its destination.”
“It sounds complicated,” Shaylar put in, grateful that her voice didn’t shake as much as her insides, which were still quivering.
“It is complicated. The initial spellware was very complex to build, and it took the designers and city traffic engineers a couple of years to set up the grid, put the pods in place, test the system, and work out the kinks even after the initial spells were created. Then they had to convince the air traffic controllers and the city councilors it would work and that it would be safe. But they finally did it and the system went live a few months before I left to join Halathyn. Motic sales soared so quickly the makers couldn’t produce them fast enough to fill the orders.”
“If there was so much resistance from the government, what gave the companies enough incentive to go ahead with them?” Shaylar wondered.
“The military wanted them,” Jasak explained. “For the officers’ corps, mainly. It’s cumbersome to schedule a pilot and dragon to fly across town, but that’s usually the fastest way to get around, especially in a city as large as Portalis. We have the best mass transit system in New Arcana, but the public sliders make so many stops it can take double the dragon flight time to reach anywhere in Portalis even with the faster slider speeds. And the portion of the city in Arcana, beyond the portal, wasn’t built for the public city slider system, but the pod control system’s flexible enough to be made to work even in Old City Portalis. Of course, motics can’t cross a portal threshold any better than a slider can, and that’s going to be an ongoing problem for their owners. You’ve seen the elaborate arrangements the slider stations have for transferring passengers between coaches at a portal, but how does the owner of a private motic manage that?” He shook his head.
“I think they’ll manage it in the end,” Gadrial said confidently. “There’s been some fundamental research into purely mechanical ways of getting entire sliders across thresholds, Jas. If we can make that work, we can scale it down for motics. And there’ll be a lot of motivation to do just that.” She shrugged. “As you say, it’s flexible enough to make it work anywhere. Eventually, everyone’s going to want one of them, so the pressure to make it work will certainly be there!”
Shaylar glanced out the window, where the vast spread of the city stretched for miles. “I can well imagine. It’s certainly faster than any carriage I’ve ever seen! And some of our largest cities are a nightmare to navigate during peak traffic times.”
Curiosity touched Jasak’s eyes, but he was careful about pushing Shaylar and Jathmar for details they were unwilling to share. She and her husband both knew how fortunate they were that to have avoided falling into the hands of someone like Hundred Thalmayr. He would have treated them like criminals. Or worse. Each time Jasak Olderhan showed restraint, Shaylar and her husband gave thanks for their good fortune.
So she said, “What did you want to ask about our cities, Jasak?”
Surprise lit his eyes. Then he leaned forward. “You’ve never told us what the capital city of Sharona is called. Will you at least tell me that?”
The unspoken, “So I’ll have something concrete to tell my superiors” was clear, and Shaylar glanced at Jathmar, who met her gaze with as much dismay as she felt. Neither of them knew what to say. Sharona had no capital city because it wasn’t a unified world, the way Arcana was. Yet admitting that would only make Sharona seem weak and disorganized. Even Shaylar, about as unmilitary as a person could be, realized the danger inherent in that.