David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

Don't be silly, she scolded herself. And don't be a coward, either. You know why it's scaring the daylights out of you!

And she did know. It frightened her because she knew too much about the Calirath Talent. She knew how hard and fast the Glimpses were falling upon her father, because they were falling upon her, too.

Yet there was one enormous difference between her Glimpses and his.

Those gifted-or cursed-with the Calirath Talent were not given the ability to Glimpse events in their own lives. There were times-many of them, in fact-when a Calirath's Glimpse did tell that person a great deal about what was going to happen to him or her. But even when that happened, there was almost always a … blind spot. A blankness. A cutout in the vision where the person whose Glimpse it was ought to have been and which kept him from Seeing himself, his actions … his fate. No one knew why that was, yet it was true. With one exception.

There was one Glimpse that was given to most of those who carried the activated Calirath Talent, and cold comfort it was. It was the Glimpse of their own violent deaths. Not in accidents, or of disease, because the Calirath Talent didn't work that way. A Glimpse revealed the consequences of human actions, human events, not the simple workings of fate or chance. That was one reason there'd been so few successful assassinations of Caliraths over the millennia. It was hard for a killer to sneak up on someone who was able to Glimpse the moment of his or her own murder, after all. Not impossible, as history had unfortunately demonstrated, but difficult.

Andrin wasn't concerned about her own impending demise. She was worried-deeply and desperately-

over the continuous flickers of Glimpses about Janaki. She longed to be able to nail those down. To choke the truth out of them. But there were too many other people tied up in them, too much violence, too many images which made no sense.

Yet what frightened her even more than that was the possibility that her father's understanding, his obvious concern for her, meant he was Glimpsing something about her future that worried him deeply.

She knew her father would face anything to protect her and her sisters. What frightened her was her growing suspicion that he was afraid of something not even he could protect her from.

And how does Voice Kinlafia figure in all of that? she wondered, turning to gaze back over her shoulder at the handsome, brown-haired man perched in the one-person float behind her. She knew he had to be scared to death. Triad knew there were enough butterflies dancing in her middle, and she'd been riding in parades like this since she was younger than Anbessa! But if he was anxious, he was concealing it well.

That was good. Andrin had already discovered how frequently famous or important people failed to to measure up to others' expectations. She couldn't say Kinlafia was exactly what she'd expected from the power and the anguish and the clarity of the Voice transmission SUNN had broadcast throughout all of Sharona. She'd expected someone taller, bigger than life, with a granite chin and piercing eyes.

What she'd gotten was a man who needed no steely jaw or granite chin. A man whose brown eyes were wounded, not piercing, yet still remained warm and compassionate. A man whose heart had taken savage wounds, yet refused to close inward upon its pain. A man who was not yet fully aware of his own strength. She wondered if she were catching just a faint echo of the Glimpse her father had obviously experienced when she and voice Kinlafia first came face-to-face.

I don't know you … yet, she thought, glancing back over her shoulder at him again. But I will. I know I will … and that my father approves of whatever will happen when I do. But Glimpses never show gentle, happy things, do they, Voice Kinlafia? So how much pain, how many tears, are waiting for you and me? And will you someday curse the day you first became entangled in the Calirath destiny?

She didn't know, and as the parade to began to move at last, she turned unquiet sea-gray eyes away from the man behind her with a silent prayer to any god who might be listening.

He's lost enough already, she told whoever might hear. Don't let me cost him even more. Please. Spare me that debt, at least.

Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr closed the book in her lap, leaned back with a sigh, and glanced back out the window.

"Tired, love?" a voice asked, and she looked across the small compartment at her husband, Jathmar, and smiled slightly.

"Not physically," she said, knowing that he didn't really need a verbal answer, given what he could sense through their marriage bond. "Not at the moment, anyway. But I think my soul's feeling the wear and tear."

"I suppose that's a pretty fair way to describe it, at that," Jathmar acknowledged. "After all, we're further away from home than any Sharonian's ever been before, aren't we?"

Shaylar's mouth tightened briefly, then she shrugged.

Jathmar was right, of course. They'd already traveled to the very end of the explored multiverse before they ever discovered the huge portal which had led them into such disastrous contact with the Arcanan Army. It was hard to believe that in barely two months, they'd already traveled the better part of twentynine thousand miles since their capture … or that they were still just under a third of the way from the universe Arcana had named Mahritha to their destination in New Arcana. According to the maps their captors had shown them, they were currently in a universe called Mountain Spine, speeding rapidly along a narrow, canyon-like roadway cut through a humid stretch of jungle in what a Sharonian would have called the Sunhold of Garmoy in southeastern Uromathia.

"I know we both wanted to see the multiverse," she said wryly, after a moment, and waved out the window at the terrain rushing by as evening came on, "but this is a bit more of it than I had in mind, at any rate. Even if we are seeing it in indecent comfort, at the moment."

The thing the Arcanans called a "slider" was a bit like a Sharonian railroad … but only a bit. They'd first boarded the slider almost a thousand miles ago, in the universe of Ucala, and it was an enormous improvement over riding the backs of transport dragons. True, there was still a certain sense of wondrous disbelief about dragon flight, even after so many wearisome thousands of miles of it, but the deeply, comfortably cushioned seats and sleeping berths of the slider were an unspeakable luxury.

In most ways, the slider was like a first-class railway car, yet the differences between it and any railroad Shaylar or Jathmar had ever seen only stood out even more starkly because of the surface similarities.

For one thing, the slider car was a self-contained unit. They'd seen several "trains" of sliders, proceeding together, but that was simply because of routing considerations. There was no such thing as a slider

"locomotive;" instead, each slider contained its own spell accumulator, and that spell accumulator moved that slider car-and only that slider car-along the slider track. Except, of course, that it wasn't really a "track" at all, in the Sharonian sense of the word. It was only a series of nodes, arcanely anchored to the bedrock beneath them, which served the sliders' motivating spells as guides. The slider itself whizzed along a rock-steady eighteen inches above the graded right-of-way at a speed of about fifty miles per hour. If two sliders should meet one another headed in opposite directions, they simply slid to the side to let each other past, then moved back into the center of the roadbed and continued on their separate ways.

Any slider had to slow down occasionally, of course. Not even magic, it appeared, could avoid the occasional tortuous switchback or necessary tunnel when it came to staking out rights-of-way over literally thousands of miles. In fact, Shaylar suspected that it was probably no faster, over an average distance, than one of the Trans-Temporal Express's passenger or freight trains. But its silence, smoothness, and flexibility were yet another proof of how incredibly different the "technology" of Arcana was from that of Sharona.