David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

"It's obvious from the Voice reports and print articles you've had me Watching and reading ever since I got back that Chava never really regarded the original Arcanan massacre as a genuine threat. He was doing his best to game the situation then, and he's doing exactly the same thing now. He's just changing technique, using the threat everyone else sees as genuine to frighten them into conceding the points they refused to give him before. If he can simultaneously frighten the other members of the Conclave badly enough and appear sufficiently intransigent, he'll get at least some of his demands-maybe even most of them. And he won't give a good godsdamn how long he delays unification, how much damage he does to our ability to deal with the Arcanans, as long as there's a chance of improving his position."

"But-"

""thinspace"'But' nothing, love," Kinlafia said softly, sadly. "You know that's what would happen. And so does her father. My gods, Alazon, you know how much he loves her, and you saw as well as I did what he was prepared to do out there today! Yes, it was her decision, and I know as well as you do that she never even warned him she was going to do it. That she deliberately didn't give him time to think about ways to stop her, or for the father in him to find some justification-any justification-for keeping her from doing this. But if he hadn't realized in the end that she was right, he would never have let her get away with it. Never."

"But there has to be another way." Alazon was no longer protesting or denying. She was almost pleading. "We can't just let her do this, Darcel. We can't!"

Tears glittered in the Privy Voice's eyes, and Darcel put his arm around her and hugged her tightly.

"I don't see how we can stop her," he said, and in the back of his brain he saw once again the image of Andrin weeping. "I'm finally beginning to understand-really understand-what sort of price being born a Calirath can exact. She's going to do this. The only person who could stop her is her father, and he won't-he can't. He'll do everything he can to protect her, but this is the one thing he can't stop her from doing."

"It will kill her," Alazon said softly. "Maybe not physically-not quickly. But it will kill her." She looked up at Kinlafia, and a single tear broke free and trickled down her cheek. "I never really knew her until this entire impossible crisis just exploded in our faces. But now that's changed. And if she marries someone like one of Chava Busar's sons, it will just destroy her inside."

Kinlafia nodded, hearing the pain in her beautiful voice. That pain, he knew, was the reason someone with Alazon's sharp intelligence and grasp of politics could insist that Andrin had to be stopped. And gods knew she was right. If there'd been any way to avoid this … .

"We're just going to have to hope she's stronger than that," he said. "I've read the entire Act since you gave me a copy. If I could see any way for her to-"

He paused suddenly, and Alazon stiffened in the circle of his arm as she Felt a sudden, incredible cascade of thoughts and emotions tumbling through him. Then he inhaled sharply and looked into her eyes.

"Gods!" he half-whispered. "That's it."

"What?" Alazon demanded.

"I've just had an idea," he told her. "My gods, it's what Janaki Glimpsed!"

"What's what Janaki Glimpsed?!"

"We've got to go find Andrin," Kinlafia told her. "And be sure you bring your copy of the Act!

The sun had set hours ago.

The slider car raced up what should have been the valley of the Razinta River almost silently, but for the rush of wind. It was a cloudy, moonless night, cold and still … and very, very empty.

The Arcanans called the Razinta the Kosal, and they'd traveled almost eighteen hundred miles across the face of the universe they called Lamia to reach it, racing steadily southwest towards the next portal in their endless journey. From the maps Jasak had shown them, that portal lay some miles south of Usarlah, the capital of the province of Delkrath back in Sharona, almost in the center of the Narhathan Peninsula.

But this Usarlah lay almost a hundred thousand miles from the Usarlah Shaylar had visited as a young university student so long ago.

I've come almost half the distance to the moon from home, she thought, staring out into the darkness, and that's as a bird-or a dragon-might have flown it. Half way to the moon. She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around the sheer distance involved. And we still have almost forty thousand more miles to go.

"You seem … pensive tonight, Shaylar," Gadrial said, and Shaylar turned back from the window.

The Ransaran magister sat across the small table from her, shuffling the sixty-card deck with slender, adroit fingers. She'd been teaching Shaylar and Jathmar an Arcanan card game called Old Basilisk. The rules weren't all that complex-certainly not any more complicated than several Sharonian card games Shaylar could think of-but the deck had five twelve-card suits instead of the three eighteen-card suits she was accustomed to, which made keeping track of exactly what had been played challenging. Or would have, if Voices hadn't had photographic memories, at any rate.

"I feel pensive," Shaylar admitted. "We're such a long way away from everything I've ever known. And it's so … empty out there."

"Appearances can be deceiving," Gadrial told her, looking out the window herself. "Back home, all of this is part of the Duchy of Forkasa, one of the oldest and wealthiest independent territories of Shaloma.

Of course, the factors that made Forkasa so wealthy back in Arcana don't necessarily apply in the outuniverses.

And we're still a long way from Arcana or New Andara. But the last time I checked the census figures, Lamia had a population of somewhere around three million, I think."

"Three million," Shaylar repeated. She had to remind herself that Arcana had been expanding into the multiverse for two centuries, almost three times as long as Sharona. Still, the thought that they had three million people living in a universe forty thousand miles from their home universe was sobering, to say the least.

"Well, Lamia's attracted more colonization than a lot of other universes," Gadrial said as she offered the deck for Shaylar to cut. "The distance between portals is shorter than in some, and it's all overland, which helps. And the natural tendency is to spread out to either side of the slider right-of-way, which just happens to run across some of Shaloma's best real estate. Not to mention the fact that some of the most beautiful beaches of the Western Hesmiryan are less than a hundred miles from where we are right now."

She began to deal, and Shaylar nodded in understanding. The Hesmiryan Sea was what the Arcanans called the Mbisi Sea, and Gadrial was certainly right about the Narhathan beaches. Tourism was one of Teramandor Province's most lucrative industries back home in Sharona, and Teramandor beach resorts were famous throughout the multiverse.

"Anyway," Gadrial continued, "I think every universe looks emptier when you see it in the dark. It always makes me feel like there's nothing really quite real out there."

"I've felt that way a lot, lately," Shaylar said in a low voice, and Gadrial's hands paused. She looked across the table at the other woman, and her almond-shaped eyes were dark with sympathy.

"I know you have. And I wish none of this had happened to you and Jathmar."

"We know that, Gadrial." Shaylar managed a smile. "Go ahead and deal, silly!"

Gadrial smiled back and resumed dealing cards. Shaylar watched them fall, listening to the quiet, snapping sounds the cardboard rectangles made as they landed on the table top. She would never have been able to hear that sound aboard a Sharonian train moving at this speed. Indeed, the quiet, vibrationless slider cars continued to amaze her, although she and Jathmar had noticed several weaknesses, compared to old-fashioned, noisy, vibrating railroads.