David Weber - The Road to Hell

He smiled almost whimsically.

“I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”

December 9

“Twenty for your thoughts,” Jathmar Nargra said quietly, leaning back in the comfortable deck chair.

“I don’t know that they’re worth that much,” his wife, Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr, told him with a wan smile.

“Oh, they have to be worth that much!” Jathmar disagreed.

Shaylar chuckled, although that chuckle was edged by sorrow and more than a hint of bitterness. A twentieth-falcon was the smallest Ternathian coin, so putting that price on her thoughts didn’t set their value very high. But Jathmar shouldn’t have needed to ask her about them in the first place. Oh, the details of what might be running through her mind at any moment, yes. But their marriage bond was so strong, ran so deep, he’d always known what she was thinking, feeling, on a level far below words.

Except that now he didn’t. She still wasn’t certain exactly when the bond had started fraying, but it continued to grow weaker day by day, almost hour by hour, and that terrified her. It was all they had left to cling to as they traveled steadily across the faces of far too many universes towards their black, bleak future of captivity, and it was slipping away, like Shurkhali sand sifting between her fingers. The tighter she clenched her grasp, the more clearly she felt it seeping away, blood dripping from a wound neither of them could staunch.

No , she thought, gazing out through the porthole. It’s not weakening day by day; it’s weakening mile by mile . The farther we get from home, the weaker it grows, and Sweet Mother Marnilay, but what in the names of all the gods could cause that?

She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was happening, and she turned away from Jathmar-from the husband who felt as if he were somehow drifting away from her even as he held her hand tightly and warmly in his own-to gaze up at stars which were achingly familiar.

She and Jathmar could at least have an illusion of privacy, and she was grateful to Sir Jasak Olderhan for allowing that. There was no place they could possibly have escaped to from a ship in the middle of the Western Ocean’s vast empty reaches, but that wouldn’t have stopped all too many Arcanans they’d met on this endless journey from posting guards over them, anyway. After all, they were both Sharonian, with who knew what sort of still undisclosed terrible, “unnatural” Talents? Never mind that the Arcanans could work actual magic . Never mind that she and Jasak were unarmed civilians in a universe which was the gods only knew how far from their own. Somehow, they were still the threat, and in her more introspective moments she could actually almost sympathize with that attitude. The Talents with which she and Jathmar had grown up, which were as natural to them as breathing, were just as bizarre and inexplicable to the Arcanans as the Arcanans’ magic and spells were to her. And whatever someone couldn’t explain became, by definition, uncanny and frightening, especially when the whatever in question was possessed by one’s enemies.

She understood that only too completely, as well, she thought bitterly.

So, yes-whether she wanted to or not, she appreciated at least intellectually why they might be seen as a threat. More than that, she knew Jasak’s refusal to post round-the-clock guards was an unequivocal declaration of his bedrock trust in them. Trust that they hadn’t lied to him about their Talents…and that even if those Talents might have somehow allowed them to violate the parole they’d given and escape, they wouldn’t do it. And Jasak was a man who recognized that that sort of trust was its own kind of fetter, especially for a Shurkhalian who understood the honor concept which lay at its heart.

At the same time, as much as she’d come to value Jasak, to recognize the fundamental goodness and iron fidelity which were so much a part of him, she remembered an ancient Shurkhalian proverb her father had taught her long ago. “Too much gratitude is a garment that chafes,” he’d told her. She’d wondered, then, what he’d meant and how he could have said that, for hospitality and open handedness was at the very heart of the Shurkhali honor code. More than that, Thaminar Kolmayr was the most generous man she knew, someone who was always ready to help, to lend support-the sort of man to whom others automatically turned in need and who was a natural focus for others’ gratitude. But now, looking back, she could see that he’d always found ways to allow those whom he’d helped to help him in return, to allow them to repay him with their own gifts or favors.

And she couldn’t repay Jasak Olderhan any more than she could forget that without him-without his protection -she and Jathmar would be locked up in a cell somewhere, probably separated and subjected to ruthless interrogation…or dead. He and Gadrial Kelbryan were all that stood between her and Jathmar and death-Gadrial had literally snatched Jathmar back from the very gate of Reysharak’s Hall-and it was the totality of their helplessness which made it so difficult to not somehow resent Jasak’s generosity. And the fact that he’d been the commander of the Arcanan patrol which had made the initial contact between the Union of Arcana and Sharonians-and killed every single one of her and Jathmar’s companions in the horrendous, chaotic madness sparked by Commander of Fifty Shevan Garlath’s cowardice and stupidity-only filled her emotions with even greater pain and confusion.

“Really,” Jathmar said beside her, lifting the hand he held to press its back against his cheek. “What are you thinking, Shay?”

“I’m thinking that looking up at those stars, knowing where we are at this moment, only makes me feel even farther from home,” she replied after a moment, and felt his cheek move against her hand as he nodded in understanding.

The ship upon whose deck their chairs stood was slicing through the water at ridiculous speed, and doing it in an unnatural silence. The night was full of the voice of the wind, the rush and surging song of the sea as they drove through it, yet here aboard the ship there was none of the vibration and pulse beat of the machinery they would have felt and heard aboard a Sharonian vessel moving at anything like a comparable rate. Jathmar’s Mapping Talent had weakened in step with their marriage bond, but it remained more than strong enough to let him estimate speeds with a high degree of accuracy, and at the moment their modestly sized ship was moving at well over twenty knots-probably closer to thirty, as rapidly as one of the great ocean liners of Sharona. The wind whipping over the decks certainly bore out that estimate, yet there were no stokers laboring in this ship’s bowels to feed its roaring furnaces, no plume of coal smoke belching from its funnels, no thrashing screws churning the water to drive it forward. There was only somewhere down inside it one of those “sarkolis” crystals which Gadrial had tried so hard to explain doing whatever mysterious things it did to drive the vessel forward.

Yet for all the differences between this vessel and any Sharonian ship, these were waters Shaylar had crossed before, often. They’d cleared the Strait of Junkari, between the long, hooded cobra head of the Monkey Tail Peninsula and the thousand-mile long island of Lusaku just before sunset. Now they were well out into the South Uromathian Sea, sailing between the Hinorean Empire on the Uromathian mainland and the vast, scattered islands of western Lissia. Shaylar’s mother had been born little more than two thousand miles-and forty-one universes-from this very spot, and Shaylar had sailed these waters many times on visits between Shurkhal and the island continent of Lissia, sixty-five hundred miles from the place of her own birth. But they weren’t traveling to visit friends or family this time. They were halfway between their entry portal in Harkala, which the Arcanans called Shehsmair, and the next portal in their endless journey, located in the Narash Islands, which the Arcanans called the Iryshakhias. And there they’d leave the universe of Gryphon behind and enter yet another universe called Althorya.