David Weber: The Road to Hell

November 29

The very tall, powerfully built man strode down the early morning hallway like an icebreaker through floe ice. Or perhaps, given his expression, like a battleship breaking an enemy line. The brilliant sunlight of Tajvana shone through the broad windows down the eastern side of the hall, gleaming on floors of polished marble and gathering in rich puddles, dense with color, on the runner of priceless carpet stretched down the passage’s center. That same sunlight touched the strands of gold threaded through his dark hair, but it did nothing to lighten the darkness in his gray, shadowed eyes.

He had not slept, though those who didn’t know him well might not have guessed it from his appearance. Those who did know him well had no need to guess; they would have known how any trace of sleep must have eluded him in the hours of the night so recently passed. There was bitterness in those gray eyes, and anger. And there was fear-not for himself, but for someone dearer to him than life itself-and there was despair. The harsh, hard, angry despair of someone unaccustomed to powerlessness. The despair of someone who hated himself for his helplessness.

His name was Zindel chan Calirath, Duke of Ternathia, Grand Duke of Farnalia, Warlord of the West, Protector of the Peace, Wing-Crowned, and, by the gods’ grace, Zindel XXIV, Emperor of Ternathia and Zindel I, Emperor Designate of Sharona. He was the most powerful man in more than forty universes…and a father who could not save his daughter from the destruction of her life.

* * *

One of the Calirath Palace maids looked up, saw the emperor bearing down upon her, and flattened herself against the wall with a squeak of dismay. Under other circumstances, Zindel would have paused, smiled at the young woman, asked her name and attempted to set her at ease. This morning, he simply strode past her with a curt nod. He doubted that engaging her in conversation in his present mood could have contributed much to her peace of mind, anyway.

He reached the door of his daughter’s apartments, and the pair of grim-faced bodyguards flanking it came to the attention. They saluted sharply, and he nodded in acknowledgment once more, eyes hard with approval this time as he noted the Model 7 shotguns, bayonets fixed, which supplemented their usual Halanch and Welnahr revolvers. The slide-action weapons were ugly and heavy, not at all what a smartly-dressed imperial guardsmen would carry, and they offered less range than a rifle, but inside the confines of the Palace’s corridors and passages, they were also far more lethal.

He stepped past them without slowing, but his inexorable progress checked abruptly as he crossed the apartment’s threshold and saw the chair outside the closed bedroom door. It was-like all the chairs in Calirath Palace-beautifully made, comfortably padded and richly upholstered. Yet it was intended for people to sit in, not as a bed, and the middle-aged woman curled up in it under the light blanket could not have spent a restful night. He gazed at her for a moment, trying to remember if he’d ever before seen Lady Merissa Vankhal without cosmetics, her hair awry. She looked older and somehow worn, even in her sleep, and Zindel’s hard, set expression softened as he gazed at her. There were those, he knew-including his daughter, at times-who saw only Lady Merissa’s fussiness, her insistence on protocol, her determination that her charge’s public appearance should always be immaculate, and overlooked her deep, personal attachment to the imperial grand princess she served so devotedly. Neither he nor his wife Varena had ever made that mistake, and her presence here was not the surprise to him that it would have been to all those other people. She hadn’t mentioned her intention, yet he realized now that she shouldn’t have needed to. He should have known anyway.

He paused and gently tucked the blanket about her shoulders, then drew a deep breath, squared his broad shoulders, and knocked softly upon his daughter’s door.

* * *

Andrin Calirath, Imperial Crown Princess of Ternathia and Sharona, turned in her chair when the tap sounded.

“Come,” she called, and the door opened.

Her father stood in the doorway for just a moment before he stepped hesitantly into the room. Sunshine warm as melted honey poured across the small marble balcony where Andrin sat, staring across the quiet morning at the ultramarine waters of the Ylani Straits and the mourning banners fluttering from every rooftop and railing of Tajvana. Her face was worn and tired, her unquiet gray eyes swollen from the tears she’d been too proud to let anyone see in yesterday’s tumultuous Conclave meeting. A girl with the vitality of youth, sitting in warm, golden sunlight, shouldn’t have looked like ice on a windowpane, so pale light very nearly shone through her, and yet there was a hard-won serenity in that tired face. One that seemed to shatter his heart within his chest. The heart which had already lost a son and now had failed his daughter, as well.

“Andrin,” he said brokenly, “I’m sorry…”

She shook her head. “It isn’t your fault, Papa. There was no other way to secure the accords. I understand that. I don’t blame you, Papa. I blame the spineless cowards in the Conclave for not standing up to Chava’s demands, but never you. ”

That simple absolution cut Zindel to the bone. She wasn’t just his eldest daughter and heir; she was the promise of greatness. And she would never reach it, not under one of Chava Busar’s sons. If nothing else, they would kill her in childbed, getting child after child on her. He wanted to wrap his hands around the throat of every rutting royal bastard in Uromathia and squeeze until all that remained was crushed bone and purpled, lifeless flesh. Wanted-more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life-to denounce the accords which made her marriage to a Uromathian prince the price for putting the crown of a united Sharona upon his own head. But duty-that cruel, uncaring goddess of ice and steel which had demanded so much of his ancestors over the millennia-demanded this of him…and of her.

He had an entire world to protect, and protecting it meant he couldn’t protect her .

Gods, he couldn’t protect his baby girl.…

“Did you bring the list?” she asked softly.

He held it out. It was short. Brutally so. The Emperor of Uromathia had only five unmarried sons. Among them was the crown prince, who was obviously his father’s first choice. She scanned it briefly, then handed it back.

“It isn’t complete, Papa. Please have it amended.”

There was an odd note in her voice, not at all the one he’d expected. It was harder, with an edge of the same steel she’d shown the entire Conclave when she spat her defiance into Chava’s teeth, and he frowned down at her.

“What do you mean, ’Drin?” he asked, trying to identify that oddness in her voice.

She lifted her eyes to meet his, and they were no longer dead, filled with burnt-out grief and proud despair. They were violently alive, those mirrors of his own eyes, and there was no defeat in them. Not in those eyes. The fierce triumph in his daughter’s gaze sent a shockwave through Zindel chan Calirath, and he seized both of her hands, crouched at her feet.

“What is it, Andrin? What have you thought of?”

“It was so obvious we didn’t see it,” she said. Her smile turned almost cruel, and she gave a strange little laugh that chilled Zindel’s blood. “None of us did…except Darcel Kinlafia. Maybe we’ve just spent too long concentrating on the threat of Chava and his empire for any Ternathian to have thought beyond it, but not Darcel. He and Alazon came to me with the answer in the middle of the night.”