“You and Jathmar could find some way, surely, to put your Talents to use,” Gadrial said.
Shaylar glanced at her husband, trying to send a silent question to him. It was like trying to walk through thick syrup, now, to reach his mind, and what little she could still sense took as much mental effort as it had once taken to connect another telepath at the very edge of her eight-hundred-plus-mile range.
His glance into her eyes was hooded and wary; then a sigh escaped him and he shrugged.
“We might as well tell them,” he said softly. “Maybe Gadrial can tell us why.”
“Tell you what?” she asked as Jasak leaned abruptly forward, gaze sharp with sudden interest.
Jathmar lifted one hand to touch Shaylar’s face, then turned to Gadrial. “We can barely Hear one another, now.”
Gadrial blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we,” he said.
“What, exactly, do you mean?” Jasak asked.
Shaylar tried to explain. “At one time, I could touch Jathmar’s emotions, his feelings, so easily, I could often guess what he was thinking. You saw, yourself, what happened on board that first ship, when I was so distressed. Jathmar felt my chaotic emotions so clearly, he came charging into Gadrial’s cabin from ours. That’s gone,” she whispered, very nearly in tears. “I have to very nearly Shout to make Jathmar sense my emotions through the marriage bond, now. And it’s terribly difficult for me to sense his. Even sitting close, like this, it’s hard to do. When we’re in different rooms, now, we can’t Hear each other at all.”
Jasak stared from one to the other and back. “That makes no sense.”
“You think we don’t know that?” Jathmar demanded in a harsh voice. “We’ve lost everything else. And now we’re losing the most precious thing our marriage gave us: the telepathic bond between us.” Pain and anger throbbed through his voice.
“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” Gadrial asked, baffled. Jathmar only looked at her, but, after a moment, Jasak answered for them.
“Because it’s important data, Gadrial,” he said. “Militarily important.” He sounded weary, frustrated. It came as a shock when Shaylar realized he felt that way because of the added pain it was causing them. When Gadrial still looked baffled, Jasak explained.
“If their Talents don’t work as well here, their military’s greatest advantages-including their Voice network-disappear. That places their soldiers at a serious disadvantage.”
“But why?” Gadrial wondered. “If their Talents don’t work as well here, would our Gifts not work as well on their homeworld?”
“You tell me,” Jasak said quietly. “With Halathyn gone, you’re the best theoretical magister we have. The team you’ve built at the Garth Showma Institute is as good as anything in Mythal. Surely there’s something you can do to figure out why something like this might be happening?”
Gadrial’s eyes reflected one moment of stark terror as the sudden responsibility for answering a question of that magnitude landed on her slim shoulders. Then the muscles in her jaw tightened and the look in her eyes shifted from fear to determination.
“All right,” she said, her voice hard with purpose. “We’ll do everything we can to figure it out.”
She frowned in thought for several seconds, then raked one hand through her hair with a grimace of what looked very much like irritation.
“It occurs to me,” she said slowly, “that we-theoretical magisters-have overlooked something very important. Something that was dismissed out of hand…and that I suddenly suspect shouldn’t have been. The last year I was at the Mythal Falls Academy, I ran across an entire file of reports while researching a major project for Halathyn. They’d been files by early portal explorers, Gifted ones, who reported magic didn’t work quite as well in pristine universes as it did here in Arcana. No one paid much attention to it, certainly not in academe. The analyses I read treated it almost as a joke. At best, a curiosity, but more likely just a mistake by people with poorly trained Gifts. And don’t look at me like that,” she added tartly when Jasak glared at her with a flash of irritation. “I don’t mean to belittle the soldiers who reported those observations, let alone suggest they were incompetent. We hadn’t seen anything significant, though, and what little was reported was a small enough difference to fall inside measurement error. Besides, I wasn’t the one who dismissed their reports!
“Remember, Jasak, for most of the last two centuries, the only people doing research in the field of multi-universe theoretical magic fields were shakira. To them, any non-Mythlan is an unreliable observer, particularly when it comes to something as genuinely complex as theoretical magic and the way portals interact with the magic field. The Garth Showma Institute’s the first non-Mythlan academy we’ve ever had that could match the Mythal Falls Academy.”
Jasak managed a sheepish smile, mollified by her explanation.
“Sorry about that, Gadrial. I’ve just heard snide remarks from shakira a shade too often, myself, belittling anyone in the Army. Any non-Mythlan in the Army, at any rate. My father’s position’s meant I’ve seen and heard more shakira than most other Andarans.”
Gadrial’s expression softened. “Of course, Jas. And I realize the stress you’re under, as well. I’m sorry I snapped at you.” Then she frowned in an abstracted way. “If there is something about the way universes interact that make certain things possible in some universes but not in others, we need to know what it is and why it operates.”
“Yes, we certainly do,” Jasak agreed. “Urgently.”
Gadrial’s eyes glinted, and she nodded.
“Yes, I can see that, too,” she said. “All right. I’ll pull together the best theoreticians we have and sic them onto this question as our top priority.”
“Thank you, Gadrial,” Jasak said quietly. Then he turned to Jathmar and Shaylar. “And thank you, both of you, for telling us this. I understand the risk you’ve both run, revealing that. I can’t even guarantee Arcana won’t use that information against Sharona, should we somehow fail to stop the shooting war we’ve started, out there.”
“You’ve been as honest with us as you can,” Jathmar said slowly. “I appreciate that. Our situation…” His mouth tightened. “I could try for the rest of my life to explain it and you still wouldn’t understand the depth of what we feel, cut off from everything and everyone, unable to reach our own families to tell them we’re safe. Unable to trust your superiors, your government, unable to trust even you as fully as we might if we’d met under other circumstances. And now this. If Shaylar and I have to lose a vital piece of who we are, if our souls have to be ripped apart, as well as our lives…we’d at least like to know why.”
Gadrial bit her lip. “I’ll do everything I can to find that answer for you,” she said in an unsteady voice.
“Thank you,” Jathmar said softly. “That’s all we can ask.”
Before anyone could say anything further, the slider glided down a low slope to street level and slowed even more. A moment later, they were pulling into a long, low building. It was far more graceful than most of the slider stations they’d passed through on their endless journey, and it was adorned with magnificent frescoes and glowing sculptures of light, but none of that hid the utilitarian aspects of its design. Shaylar saw the multiple rails of guidance crystals that made it easy to shunt slidercars from one track to another, and one entire wall of the building opened on what she thought of as the equivalent of the Trans Temporal Express’ switching yards. The broad pads used to recharge levitation accumulators stretched away from the covered passenger platforms in neat rows. There must have been at least a hundred-possibly twice that many, really-some of them empty, but most with sliders parked on them.
They’d reached Portalis Station.