David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

"Prove it?" Ulthar's confusion was obvious, and Halesak shook his head hard.

"All our intelligence briefings have … strongly suggested that the Sharonians murdered Magister Halathyn after he surrendered. I didn't have any more reason to question that than anyone else did. Not till now. Now I do, and I have to wonder why they've gone out of their way to 'suggest' to all of us that that's what happened."

Ulthar stared at him for a moment, then grimaced.

"Magister Halathyn's been buried for three months now, Iftar. In a grave in a swamp, without any sort of preservation spell. I don't know if anyone could prove exactly how he died at this point. I know I saw his body, and I think at least one or two of the others did, but I can't prove anything."

"And can anyone else confirm that we shot first?" Halesak pressed.

"I don't know," Ulthar said slowly. "The man I spoke to-Lance Tiris-died shortly after we were captured. Their healers tried, but they couldn't save him."

"Damn," Halesak murmured, and Ulthar cocked his head, blue eyes intense.

"What the hells is going on here, Iftar?"

"Look," Halesak said, even more quietly than before, "I don't know for sure what's going on. We were told they started it both times. And we were told there were those 'unconfirmed reports' that Magister Halathyn was murdered after he surrendered. Plus the rumors-I don't know exactly who started them-

that they shot our wounded after they surrendered."

"That's bullshit!" Ulthar exploded. "That's-"

"Shut up!" Halesak hissed. "Shut up and listen to me!"

Ulthar spluttered to a stop and Halesak drew a deep breath.

"That's better," he said, then paused, trying to decide how to say what needed saying.

"Look," he said again, finally, "you're my sister's husband, my daughter's uncle. I don't want to go home and explain to either of them that something happened to you after I found you alive!"

"But-"

"I'm telling you, we wouldn't have been told what we were told as often as we were told it before this op kicked off unless somebody had decided it was what we needed to be told. And if that was what happened, it fucking worked." He smiled grimly. "Believe me, Therman, you don't want to know the things I've been contemplating since they told me how Magister Halathyn is supposed to have died, and I am sure as hells not alone in that.

"But if I'm right, if it was done on purpose, how do you think they're going to react if you insist on telling them we've all been lied to?"

"If you've been lied to, then it's my duty to tell people the truth." The familiar stubborn look in Ulthar's blue eyes made Halesak's stomach clench painfully, and he fought a sudden urge to seize his less massively built brother-in-law by the front of his uniform blouse and shake some sense into him.

"Godsdamn it, you listen to me this time, Therman Ulthar," he said instead, a whetstone of passion sharpening the edge of his intense voice. "I'm a garthan. My people-your people now, damn it-know all about being lied to and manipulated. Gods, man! Those bastard shakira have been doing it for thousands of years! And given what you've just told me, I smell the mother of all lies. Don't you think for one moment that whoever's responsible for it wouldn't be perfectly willing to 'disappear' a single inconvenient commander of fifty who can't even substantiate his 'preposterous claims.'"thinspace""

"That kind of thing may go on in Mythal," Ulthar said sharply, "but this is the Union Army, godsdamn it!"

"And I'm not telling you to keep your mouth shut forever," Halesak shot back. "I'm telling you to keep your mouth closed and your head down until you know for absolute, fucking certain that the senior officer your telling about it isn't part of a deliberate campaign to change the truth. Do you understand me, Therman? I'm not going home to tell Arylis that you got your stupid self killed playing Andaran honor games with somebody you shouldn't have trusted!"

Ulthar glared at him, but then, slowly, drop by drop, the anger flowed out of his blue eyes to be replaced by something else.

"I'm sorry, Ulthar," Halesak said more gently. "I'm sorrier than I can say. And I agree with you. The truth has to be gotten out eventually. But for that to happen, you have to be alive to do the getting, and I am not going to lose you when I just got you back from the dead. Do you read me on this one?"

Ulthar looked at him for long, long moment of silence. And then, finally, nodded slowly.

"Good," Halesak said quietly, reaching through the bars to squeeze his brother-in-law's sound shoulder.

"Good."

"Well, well, well," Alivar Neshok murmured as he walked down the line of sullen-faced Sharonian prisoners assembled on the captured fort's body-strewn parade ground. Some of them were lightly wounded; all of them had their hands manacled behind them; and if the look of anyone except a combattrained magister could have killed, Neshok would have been a smoldering corpse.

The thought rather amused him, actually.

"Those five," he told Javelin Porath. "And … that one," he added, pointing at an overweight, blue-eyed senior-armsman.

"Yes, Sir!"

Neshok nodded and walked off, hands clasped behind him, whistling softly. He knew he could count on Porath to deliver the selected prisoners suitably.

His whistling faded as the one major flaw in his present sense of satisfaction floated to the top of his mind once again. The fact that his interrogations had revealed the presence of Arcanan POWs here at Fort Ghartoun was going to be a major feather in his cap, since that was the only reason they hadn't been killed right along with their captors instead of being liberated. But the fact that the attack had gone in on the ground to rescue them meant the Intelligence section had gotten in further behind the lead combat elements than they had during the previous operations.

Which meant the fort's badly woundedSharonian commander was out of Neshok's reach … for the moment, at least.

Neshok growled a mental curse at the thought. Commander of Five Hundred Vaynair had the bastard safely squirreled away in the casualty queue over at the field hospital. Personally, Neshok would have preferred to let the son-of-a-bitch die from his wounds-which he certainly would have done, probably fairly quickly, without Gifted healing-as an example to the rest of the prisoners. Or, failing that, Neshok could at least have shot him himself for the same purpose. Vaynair wasn't going to let that happen, though, and Neshok spared another mental curse for the officious Andaran Scouts commander of fifty who'd hustled the wounded Sharonian off to the healers before Neshok could get his hands on him.

Well, I'll just have to do the best I can with what I still have to work with and settle up with the troublemakers later, he told himself. And at least this time around, I've got a lot more people to get answers out of.

He stepped into his chosen interrogation site. It had been a stable, but the unaugmented horses who had been housed here no longer required its stalls. Dragons and gryphons-especially battle dragons and gryphons-had active metabolisms, and horses and mules tasted just as good as cattle and sheep as far as they were concerned.

And watching gryphons and dragons feed was probably an eye-opener for the Sharonians, especially after what the gryphons did to so many of their buddies. He chuckled nastily to himself. That alone ought to loosen a few tongues.

He strolled across the front of the stable, considering the stalls. They'd do as holding cages if he needed them, he decided, while the tack room he'd had cleared would give him the sort of privacy and … intimacy he'd found so effective in the past.

He glanced up as Porath and two other troopers kicked and cuffed their prisoners into the tack room.