David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

Janaki grimaced and started to say something, then stopped himself and looked away once more. His own feelings at being bundled safely off to the rear, however important the job they'd found to give him as part of the bundling process, remained profoundly ambiguous. The part of him which had been trained as his father's heir recognized the logic in Company-Captain chan Tesh's decision to send him back to Sharona. Indeed, that intellectual part of him recognized that it would have been the height of insanity for chan Tesh to do anything else. But what his intellect recognized as sanity and what his emotions insisted he ought to be doing were two quite different things.

"Sir," chan Braikal said quietly, "I know this isn't really what you want, but you know it's the right thing for you to be doing."

Janaki looked back at the older man, and chan Braikal smiled sadly.

"You'd have done just fine, Sir," the chief-armsman told him. "I've seen quite a few platoon-captains in my time. Brought along my share of 'em, for that matter, if you'll pardon my saying so. Some of them, to be honest, scared the shit out of me. Others … well, let's just say I wasn't too sure where I'd find them standing on the day it finally fell into the crapper on us. But you?" He shook his head. "You might've ended up screwing up-I don't think you would have, but anybody can. But if you had, at least I'm pretty sure all of the holes would've been in the front."

"Thanks, Chief … I think," Janaki said wryly.

"Don't mention it, Sir." Chan Braikal grinned at him, and Janaki snorted.

"Well, however that might be, I suppose we should get this show back on the road."

"Yes, Sir."

The chief-armsman turned in the saddle to bawl a few pithy suggestions to the other men of Janaki's platoon. The recipients of his requests responded promptly, and the ambulances containing the Arcanan POWs Janaki was responsible for escorting to the rear moved briskly forward.

Janaki watched them roll past him behind their double teams of mules, each ambulance flanked by its pair of assigned, watchful mounted Marines, and admitted to himself that he felt a profound sense of relief. Despite any ambiguity (and he was honest enough with himself to realize chan Braikal had put his finger squarely on the question which bothered him the most), he would be overjoyed to get those prisoners back to Sharona. And not just because he knew how vital their interrogation was likely to prove, either. From the reports he'd received down the Voicenet, it sounded as if his father had more than enough forest fires to put out. No doubt Emperor Zindel could find any number of useful things for his heir apparent to be doing as part of the extinguishing process. And according to those same reports, his sister Andrin had been forced to shoulder a huge share of the heir's responsibilities in his absence … and she wasn't even eighteen yet. It was time he got home and took that off her shoulders.

Of course, there was that bit about marriages.

Janaki grimaced. He'd never doubted that his eventual marriage would be carefully considered and weighed. It couldn't have been any other way for the heir to the Winged Crown of Ternathia, and there'd been no point pretending it could have been or whining about the factthat it wasn't. But given the … testy relations between Ternathia and Uromathia, he'd never anticipated being required to marry into the family of Chava Busar, and he couldn't say he found the idea very appealing.

The Voice reports he'd been able to monitor had been fragmentary and disjointed. He didn't have a Voice actually assigned to his platoon, and the Voice relay stations tended to be far enough apart to make it all but impossible for travelers passing between them to stay in any sort of steady touch, unless they were Voices themselves. From what he had Heard and Seen, though, it didn't sound as if his father was any happier about the prospect than Janaki himself was. Not that his father's unhappiness would change anything anymore than Janaki's might have. They were both Caliraths, after all, and Janaki felt an odd sort of pride in the realization that his father would make the decision on the basis of what had to be done, regardless of any personal costs, in the full confidence that Janaki would understand.

He looked up, at the graceful speck circling lazily against the blazing sky and raised his gauntleted left hand, then whistled shrilly. He rather doubted that the circling peregrine falcon could possibly have physically heard anything, but Taleena didn't need to. She caught the thought he'd sent with the whistle and folded her wings.

He watched the magnificent bird streak down out of the heavens, rocketing towards him, touched with the reflected fire of the sun. Then she struck his gauntlet with all the power and control of her breed. He lowered his hand, and she hopped from his leather-protected wrist to the frame mounted on his saddle, pausing only to press her wickedly sharp beak gently and affectionately against his cheek.

Janaki chuckled softly, stroking the sleek head with an equally gentle fingertip, and crooned to her.

"There, dear heart," he murmured. "Wouldn't want to lose you, would I?"

Taleena ignored the comment, just as it deserved to be ignored, Janaki thought with a smile. Imperial Ternathian falcons didn't get "lost."

Which is just as well, he thought as he urged his blue roan Shikowr forward after the last ambulance.

And if she doesn't get lost, I don't suppose I can, either. However tempting it might be. And I suppose the truth is that I'm still anxious to get home, marriage or no marriage. Whatever else happens-he snorted in amusement-I should at least get a long, hot bath out of it. Two or three days worth of soaking ought to be just about right, and the way I feel right now, that would be worth even having Chava Busar as a father-in-law!

Tayrgal Carthos watched the smoke curling up from the bonfire which had once been a pathetic excuse for a portal fort and tried to decide whether he felt more satisfaction or irritation.

It was a hard call to make, he reflected as his command dragon came in to a relatively smooth landing.

On the one hand, he'd been given independent command of one arm of the pincer punching into Sharonian-held territory. On the other hand, it was definitely the secondary arm, and he and the relatively light forces Two Thousand Harshu had seen fit to assign to him (little more than three thousand men and barely enough transports to move them) had an enormous journey ahead of them-a point the extensive flight they'd had to undertake just to get to their next staging point underscored quite nicely, he thought grumpily.

The portal between the previously Sharonian-claimed universes of New Uromath and Thermyn was located in the flat plains of northwestern Elath in Central Andara, but the portal between Thermyn and Nairsom lay a good twelve hundred miles south of there. That put it in a deep, narrow, inconveniently placed valley in the mountains near what should have been the city of Gerynth in the Kingdom of Yanko, where the connection between the continents of Andara and Hilmar began to neck down. And once he'd finished moving his entire command that far (and resting his dragons before beginning the next stage) he'd moved through into Nairsom only to discover that he'd also moved from the heat of Gerynth back into the late autumn chill of Elath within fifty miles of the city of Drekon, barely three hundred miles from his Thermyn starting point at Fort Brithik.

The good news was that it was only a little more than six hundred miles from Drekon to his next portal, located in the Kingdom of Lokan's Duchy of Kanaiya. The bad news was that it lay at the northern tip of Lake Kanaiya, and while the weather at Drekon was only pleasantly crisp, the temperature in Kanaiya was going to be quite another matter. And from Five Hundred Neshok's prisoner interrogation, it looked like a leg of well over three thousand miles once he'd crossed over from Nairsom to Resym.