David Weber - Hell's Gate

The Emperor had been impressed. Certainly, the proposal had represented an excellent deal for Bolakin, but it was also pragmatic and eminently fair to Ternathia, as well. Not only that, but his own naval commanders and merchants had been suggesting for some time that the Fist had to be either neutralized or taken under imperial control. He'd vastly preferred the treaty approach, which had the enormous advantage of avoiding the need to maintain armed garrisons to defend against Bolakini efforts to retake conquered territory … or rebel against an imperial oppressor.

So the treaties had been signed, the marriages of alliance had been arranged, and four and a half prosperous millennia later, Andrin carried a trickle of Bolakini blood and both sides were well content with a long-standing pact.

The Fist was an immense, crouching lion of stone, a sharply sloped mountain planted solidly to protect the sheltered waters of Bolakin Bay, carved out of the southeastern edge of the Narhathan Peninsula. The Fist was three miles long and three quarters of a mile wide, connected to Narhath by a low, sandy isthmus which had been steadily expanded over the years behind its advancing seawalls as land was reclaimed from the sea and used for wharves, warehouses, taverns, and?in recent years?luxury hotels. The ancient passage duties on shipping through the Strait were long gone these days, but Bolakin Bay remained a vitally important service port for the traffic sweeping in and out of the Mbisi every day, and it had also been one of the Empire's most critical naval bases for thousands of years. The original bronze-age forts had long since disappeared, although archaeologists had recently exhumed one of them, and the curtain walls and catapults and ballistae of a later age, and the muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon which had followed them, had disappeared in turn. Now armored gun turrets, their barbettes and magazines blasted deep into the Fist's stony heart, boasted rifled artillery capable of reaching entirely across the Straits to the shore of Ricathia.

Beside that huge, ancient crag, Windtreader was a child's toy tossed into the sea. The immovable mass of stone caught the westering sunlight with a deep golden glow. Stark black shadows marked the locations of the powerful batteries, their turrets protected by tons of armor plate and reinforced concrete, capable of sending any battleship ever built to the bottom at a distance of over twelve miles.

Two flags snapped and cracked in the wind above that mighty fortress, representing the two nations who shared sovereignty over it to this day. One was the black field and golden lion of Bolakin, rippling and wavering as it streamed out from its staff. The other was the eight-rayed golden sunburst of Ternathia on its deep green field, and as Andrin watched, both of them started down their staffs in perfect unison.

She couldn't have explained to anyone why sudden tears filled her eyes. It wasn't just pride in her people, wasn't just the honor that salute accorded to her father, her family, and all they represented to their people. There was something else. Through some strange alchemy, born of the eerie light of the dying sun and the black shadows that marked those immense guns, of the threat which pulled this ship and its passengers towards a fateful meeting in Tajvana, that simple salute?the dipping of two flags as the Emperor passed by?became something more. Became a reminder of all the ancient Empire had endured … and an ominous portent of what was yet to come.

Men in Ternathian uniform were already on their way to fight. To rescue any survivors, and to prevent the deaths of more innocents. But Sharonians had already died, and that simple salute brought home with painful clarity the fact that still more would die tomorrow?for an unknown stretch of tomorrows. She felt the weight of those deaths pressing down on her soul, crushing her until it was a struggle simply to breathe. The enemy had no face, beyond the indistinct images transmitted by a woman unable to clearly see the men killing her, yet Andrin was suffocating under the weight of the more and more deaths to come. Her throat was locked. She wanted to promise the memory of Shaylar Nargra Kolmayr that she would be avenged. She wanted so badly to make that promise, to give in to the need to strike back in an outraged demand for justice, but the terrible weight on her chest wouldn't let her.

She could see the men on the fortress walls, waving and cheering, and however hard she tried, she couldn't lift her arm to respond. They would literally go to their deaths, if ordered to do so by her father … or by Andrin, if she ever came to the throne. The terrible prescience, if that was what gripped her, left her chilled and frightened, alone despite her father at her side, despite Lazima chan Zindico at her back. She had never felt smaller, less heroic or less capable, in her life than she did as she contemplated the kinds of decisions an empress would have to make in time of war.

She swallowed once. Twice. And then she made a silent vow?not to Shaylar's shadow, but to the men in that fortress, and to all the other men in uniform scattered across the known universes.

She would do her best?the very utmost best she could?to prepare herself to lead them. And if the time ever came that she must, she would not risk them lightly. She was the daughter and granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter of emperors and empresses. Throughout the millennia of the Empire, its rulers had sent Ternathian fighting men out to die again and again, sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for bad. She knew that, just as she knew emperors and empresses would send them out to die in the future, as well. She knew that, too. But if those men in that fortress must die under her orders, she would spend them well. Not on a whim, not capriciously, not to satisfy her own anger or out of her own fear. She would spend them as if their blood were more precious than gold, more precious than her own … because it was.

The thought burned through her, and then, without warning, Finena launched unexpectedly from her wrist. The silver falcon arrowed skyward, drawing the eye as white wings flashed red in the glowing sunset. She wheeled once, high above the fortress flags, then folded her wings and dove, streaking earthward like a meteor plunging down the sky.

She snapped her wings wide again, fanned her tail, and whipped across the deck at more than a hundred miles an hour. Sailors ducked out of sheer instinct, and Andrin lifted her wrist as Finena's piercing call shrilled against the wind. The falcon banked into a wide, sweeping turn, then floated back down the crystal depths of air like a dream of beauty until her talons slapped against Andrin's gauntleted wrist.

The magnificent bird perched there for an endless, breathless moment?a living sculpture, carved from silver and ash-pale ivory, wings spread wide, ready to fly again and strike at a moment's notice. Fierce, proud, defiant, protective . . . The adjectives and emotions tumbled through Andrin, too many and too rapidly to name them all.

Then the wings folded, the head tilted inquiringly up to meet Andrin's shaken gaze, and Finena was just a bird again. Only a falcon, sitting peaceably on Andrin's arm, and no longer an avatar of fate itself.

Andrin drew a single, shallow breath and turned her gaze from her falcon to her father. Her eyes met his, and she recognized the look in them. It was the same look she'd just given the soldiers in the fortress?the look of a man who knew his word would send other men to their deaths on a world so far away the message would travel for days, even at the speed of thought, just to reach it. Men who would go willingly, trusting him to send them for good reason, for a cause that was worthy of their sacrifice. The look of the man who knew the terrible weight of that responsibility … and feared that one day it would be transferred from his shoulders to hers.