David Weber - The Road to Hell

And that was one reason he needed to get them out of this just as badly as he needed to get his own men out of it. Whether, when, and where he might be able to regain contact with higher authority, it was important for that higher authority to have the window into the Union of Arcana and its military represented by Ulthar Therman and Jaralt Sarma. If the young officers were correct that they’d been deliberately lied to and manipulated by their superiors-and if the “Kerellian Accords” and the standing military law of the Union of Arcana Army truly did prohibit the sort of systematic torture which had been inflicted by the “Arcanan Expeditionary Force”-then it was entirely possible the actual government of Arcana genuinely didn’t have one godsdamned idea what was happening out here.

That was a staggering concept, one any Sharonian could be excused for finding difficult to grasp. Yet if the hints he’d gotten about just how far it was to Arcana from Hell’s Gate turned out to be accurate, and given that this was an entire civilization which had never heard of Voices, it was actually possible. It was almost- almost , but not quite-impossible for Velvelig to imagine a civilization which didn’t have the ability to pass messages at Voice speeds. It wasn’t a lot harder than accepting that magic really existed, however, and if that was what had happened, if this entire invasion was essentially a rogue operation launched without the authorization, consent, or even knowledge of the Arcanan government, it put a completely different face on what had already happened…and suggested a completely different list of options for dealing with it.

Maybe.

On the other hand, it might turn out that the Arcanan government would decide to stand by the actions of its commanders on the spot. And it might also turn out that things had gone so far by now that there was no way back for either side, much less both of them. But if there was the remotest chance this rolling catastrophe could be…turned off- stopped somehow-then Namir Velvelig was entirely prepared to die trying to bring that about.

Not that he had any intention of dying if an alternative offered, which was the reason they were heading out across the mountains of West New Ternath into the teeth of winter.

There were, however, some unforeseen advantages to having magic on his side for a change. Some of the Arcanans’ crystals seemed to contain a bewildering array of spells, almost like a magical version of the famous Ternathian Army pocketknife, with its blade or folding tool for every conceivable purpose. Others contained only a single type of much more powerful spell, or perhaps two of them, but with multiple uses of each stored spell. He’d been astonished-and deeply envious-when Fifty Ulthar demonstrated one of the levitation spells. It wasn’t that Velvelig had never seen an object invisibly lifted before; one of his own cousins was a Lifter, with a powerful Talent that allowed her to Lift more than twenty times her own body weight unassisted. It required focused concentration, however, and she could only sustain the Lift for about thirty minutes before she was required to rest and recuperate. But the crystal Ulthar had fitted under the center of one of the PAAF wagons left behind at Fort Ghartoun had lifted the entire vehicle effortlessly into the air and held it there until the spell was deactivated.

The standard PAAF wagons were of all-steel construction, which made them much lighter than wooden-framed vehicles would have been, and fitted with heavy-duty axle bearings, leaf springs, and forty-three-inch wheels with tubular steel spokes and wide pneumatic tires, which allowed them to tackle even extremely difficult terrain. They were sized to allow a standard four-mule team to haul fourteen thousand pounds of cargo on a hard-surfaced road and up to half of that across soft terrain, but they were still wagons, and rough going could slow them to a crawl, even with the best draft teams imaginable. The possibility of boosting them almost effortlessly over the worst obstacles was enough to turn any PAAF quartermaster green with envy, and according to Ulthar, a single spell crystal could support up to fifteen tons of deadweight for up to forty-eight hours on a single charge. Not only that, each crystal could contain up to thirty charges. Apparently, when the Arcanans used dragons for transportation, they relied on even more powerful levitation spells, which probably explained a lot about how flying beasts could support the logistic needs of an army capable of advancing across even the roughest terrain with preposterous speed. The levitation spells available to the garrison of Fort Ghartoun offered nowhere near that sort of capacity, but they were going to make an enormous difference to the more pedestrian, ground-based transport of the unlikely allies, especially given the topography they were about to face.

Other specialized crystals offered advantages of their own. One of them, for example, provided the warmth (although not the light) of a roaring bonfire from a piece of rock no larger than a child’s fist. The amount of heat it could produce when what Velvelig thought of as “the wick” was turned all the way up was astounding, and at lower temperatures it could produce that warmth for hour after hour. Given the weather and the travel conditions awaiting them, that might well prove the difference between life and death.

Still, marvelous though the Arcanans’ magic was, it had its limits. Many of their army’s crystals, like the ones he thought of as the Ternathian Army knife, appeared to be designed (if that was the right verb) to be used by anyone who knew the activating sequence. The more powerful, more specialized spells, however, required a Gifted user, which resulted in a basic “technology” with a far narrower…base, for want of a better term, than Sharona enjoyed.

Velvelig suspected that figuring out the parallels and differences between the Arcanan Gifts and Sharonian Talents was going to take a long time, but some of them had already become evident. A particularly strongly Talented Sharonian might have a single primary Talent and as many as two or even three secondary ones which were usually (but not always) in associated areas. Apparently, a Gifted Arcanan might also have more than one Gift or “arcana,” as they were labeled, but such powerfully Gifted Arcanans appeared to be less common than powerfully Talented Sharonians. At the same time, the sophisticated technology of their crystals allowed them to distribute stored spells to a larger percentage of their total population, yet not as broadly or as freely as one might have expected. The bottleneck was apparently the fact that only Gifted Arcanans could charge those crystals. Without a Gifted technician to recharge a crystal, it became useless once its stored spells were exhausted.

The fact that Arcanans who were not themselves Gifted could make use of the crystals was obviously a huge advantage, but Velvelig had found himself wondering if the Arcanan reliance on the marvels stored in those glittering pieces of rock wasn’t its own potentially crippling weakness. Gods knew most Sharonians would have loved to be able to bottle Talents to be decanted at need, and an Arcanan spell might be able to accomplish things even the most strongly Talented Sharonian could only dream of doing. But Sharona’s industrial technology had been developed alongside its people’s Talents, specifically to be used-and supported-by people who were not Talented. He strongly suspected that dynamite was as effective as any Arcanan blasting spell might be, and even though a sufficient quantity of it was undoubtedly bulkier and heavier than a single crystal, workers in the factory which produced it required no special Talent or Gift. Anyone could learn to operate almost any Sharonian device, whether on the production floor or in the field, unlike the Arcanan spells whose use was limited to someone with at least a minimal Gift, and no one needed a Gift to charge a cartridge for a Model 10 rifle.