“You said our soldiers hunted you down like a dog,” he said finally. “Explain.”
Her recitation was cool, detailed, and astonishingly clear, both in the sequence of events and thoughts and emotions she’d experienced at the time. She even repeated the shouts she and others nearby had traded, fighting off the attack from flanks and rear. He finally interrupted with a question.
“How is it you can give us such a detailed description weeks after an event that was emotionally and physically traumatic? None of the other witnesses recalled the kind of detail you’ve been so glibly repeating.”
She didn’t react angrily to what amounted to an accusation of lying-or more accurately, stretching the truth. Nothing she’d said had triggered the lie-detection spells, which would have caused an indicator light on the wall behind her to glow instantly. Given her earlier reactions, he expected her spit in his face, again, for such a criticism, but she didn’t. She merely blinked in surprise.
“Of course they couldn’t. They don’t have my Talent. Jasak and Gadrial are Gifted, but they can’t do what I do. I’m a Voice.”
Brith Darma frowned in confusion. “I don’t understand. What do you mean by that? What does being a Voice have to do with describing something that happened to you?”
“Voices have perfect recall.”
Brith Darma blinked in surprise, this time.
“Perfect recall?” His voice was flat with disbelief.
“Of course. All Voices do. It’s part of the Talent. We have to transmit long, complex messages, whether we’re in government service or work in a corporate office, sending complex legal documents to another company’s Voice or working in the news business, transmitting news stories. Perfect recall’s been bred into us, so to speak.”
Githrak leaned forward abruptly. “Prove it!”
She repeated every word she and Brith Darma had spoken since her arrival in this room. She got it right. Terrifyingly so. She repeated things Brith Darma had already forgotten. She captured the intonations of his voice with a stunning mimicry, duplicating the emotional effect he’d striven to portray with eerie, chilling accuracy. She even described things she’d merely observed: facial expressions, movements, Kordos’ habit of toying with his stylus while listening.
A swift glance as Kordos and Githrak revealed horrified expressions. Brith Darma understood that reaction in his bones. Not only could the enemy transmit across vast distances, the enemy could do so with terrifying accuracy, not only what they’d heard, but what they’d seen, every tiny detail of it. Even a prisoner of war could transmit critical intelligence data. It was one thing to read Hundred Olderhan’s report that this woman had transmitted every instant of the Toppled Timber battle; it was quite another matter to have that report graphically demonstrated.
Brith Darma deliberately drew another slow, careful breath, then asked, “How many Talents are there?”
“What?” Surprise touched her eyes. “Clarify your question, I mean, so I’ll know how to answer.”
Why did such a simple question surprise her?
“How many Talents are there? We have two prisoners. You and your husband. Both have Talents. Different Talents. Here, a Gift means you can manipulate magic. Some people have stronger or weaker Gifts: magistrons are Gifted in portions of the magic field touching upon living things; magisters work primarily with nonliving things, but within that broad categorization, a Gift merely means an ability to work with spellware and the magic field. There’s no…specialization within Gifts. But you and your husband are fundamentally different from one another. How many different Talents are there? And how many of your people have them?”
She held his gaze steadily when she answered. “I don’t know how many different Talents there are. New ones appear unexpectedly from time to time, which makes it difficult to count them. I know or have heard of dozens.”
“And how many of your people have them?”
“About eighty percent.”
The truth spell light never even flickered, and horror cascaded through the Earl of Brith Darma. Eighty percent of their population were Talented?! Barely twenty percent of Arcanans were Gifted! If they had that huge an edge in these “Talents” of theirs…
He fought to control his expression, but some tiny glitter of satisfaction in her eye told him he’d failed. He sat there for a moment, trying to think of where to go next, feeling irrationally as if he was the prisoner and she the captor. But then Commander of Legions Githrak cleared his throat.
“If I may, Sir?” he said calmly. Brith Darma nodded brusquely, and the intelligence specialist looked at Shaylar. “And are all of them as strongly Talented as you and your husband, Madam Nargra?” he asked.
Something other than satisfaction flickered in her eye, but she smiled very slightly, like a fencer acknowledging a hit.
“No,” she said courteously. “One of the qualifications for a Voice with one of the survey teams is a particularly strong Talent. Obviously, the same is true of every other Talented member of a team like ours, given how far from our home base and any support we operate.”
Once again the indicator light remained dark, and Brith Darma felt a cautious sense of relief.
“I see,” Githrak said. “And what percentage of those with ‘Talents’ are sufficiently powerful to be trained to use those abilities? In a professional sense, I mean. As a way for them to earn their livings?”
“Perhaps twenty out of a hundred,” Shaylar replied, manifestly wishing she didn’t have to.
Again, the indicator light remained dark, and the relief surging through Brith Darma became a torrent, although he did his best to conceal it. Their effective percentage of Talented people was no higher than the Union of Arcana’s percentage of Gifted people. Of course, depending on how large their population was, the total number of Talented people could still far surpass the Union’s Gifted population. And if it did, their non-Talented population would be far larger, as well, an eventuality he did not enjoy contemplating.
“How large is Sharona’s population?” he asked, taking back control of the interrogation…and reminding himself very firmly not to give the intelligence officer a grateful look.
“I have no idea.”
He stared hard at her. He wanted to accuse her of lying, but the lie-detection spells still refused to trip the warning light.
“Why not?” he asked.
“We’ve spread across so many universes, I’m not even sure how many we’ve colonized. We’ve never done a formal census to count how many of us there are. We’re more interested in exploring, colonizing, building factories and forts, mines and farms than we are in counting people. Why waste time when there’s so much work to be done, building a multi-universe civilization? One that’s strong and healthy and productive. Our priorities are focused on building and living, not pigeon-holing and counting and controlling everyone.”
The lie-detection light remained stubbornly dark, and Brith Darma sat back, contemplating her, what she’d said. She simply stood there, calmly waiting for the next question. A group of people who didn’t know how many members it had sounded like a slipshod bunch of backwoods barbarians, but for one thing. Their technology-the weaponry and other equipment-as well as their extremely effective use of it in combat suggested otherwise. Strongly so. Underestimating them could well prove fatal. Of course, so could overestimating them.
Before he could frame the next question, Kordos glanced at him and arched one eyebrow.
“May I?” the Navy officer asked, and Brith Darma nodded. Then Kordos leaned sharply forward, scowling thunderously at Shaylar. “However many of you there are, do you seriously expect us to believe that these mental Talents of yours aren’t weapons?”