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Chapter Thirty-Four
Darcel Kinlafia followed Andrin and chan Zindico back into the ballroom. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done, and his right arm tightened protectively around Alazon as the sledgehammers of shock, disbelief, grief, and fury hammered at their Voice's sensitivity.
Yet if it was terrible for them, it was still worse for Andrin, for she knew what her father was about to tell her.
He saw it in the way all color had drained out of her face, felt it in the emotional aura trailing behind her like a fog of smoke and poison. Yet she crossed that ballroom floor tall, straight, and graceful.
"Yes, Papa?"
Her voice cut through the stillness, the silence, with an impossible clearness as she stopped before her parents. Her mother's face was as white as her own, but Empress Varena's eyes were filled with the dark terror of the unknown, not the even darker ghosts of foreknowledge inflicted. Emperor Zindel's right arm was about his wife's shoulders, and his face was strained.
"Andrin." His deep, powerful voice sounded frayed about the edges, and his arm tightened about his wife. "We've just received word from Traisum. From Division-Captain chan Geraith. It's—"
His voice broke, and his left hand rose. It settled on the back of the Empress' head, cradling it protectively, as he turned her and folded her against his massive chest. His own head bent as he bowed over her slenderness, and the tears of a strong man gleamed in his eyes.
"It's Janaki," Andrin said. Her father looked up, and she met his eyes levelly, steadily. "He's been killed."
The Empress stiffened convulsively in her husband's arms. There was no word to describe the sound she made. It was far too soft to call a wail, yet too filled with pain to be called anything else. She shuddered, and the sound she'd made turned into something else—shattering sobs that filled the hollow silence.
"Yes," Andrin's father confirmed in a voice which had been pulverized and glued unskillfully back together once more.
Andrin swayed. Her regal head never drooped, yet Kinlafia could literally See the wave of agony that flowed through her. He stepped away from Alazon quickly, offering the princess his arm, and she took it blindly, without even looking at him.
Gods, he thought. Dear sweet gods. If Janaki's dead, then Andrin is—
"We have to go," her father told her across her sobbing mother's head.
"Of course, Papa." Andrin straightened her spine with a courage which made Kinlafia want to weep, and despite the tears which streaked her face and fogged her tone, her voice never wavered. "Razial and Anbessa will need us."
"How is she? How are they?"
Alazon looked up at the harsh, angry question, and shook her head.
"I don't know, love," she replied quietly. "The Empress and Razial are sedated. His Majesty is holding himself together—I don't know how. And I don't believe Anbessa really understands what's happened.
Not yet."
"And Andrin?"
"She's just ... sitting there," Alazon said sadly. "Sitting there in the nursery, beside Anbessa's bed.
Razial's asleep in her arms—she cried herself out, poor little love, after the herbalist sedated her. Andrin
—" Alazon's voice broke, and she raised gray eyes, soaked with tears, to Kinlafia's. "Andrin ... sang them both to sleep," she managed to get out.
She began to weep once more, weep with deep, tearing shudders, and Kinlafia put his arms around her, hugging her tightly while his own eyes burned.
Again, he thought. The bastards have done it again.
His jaw clenched so tightly he thought his teeth would shatter as memories ripped through him, and white-hot rage boiled in their wake. The same Arcanan butchers who'd murdered Shaylar and all of his friends—his family—at Fallen Timbers. They'd done it again.
Despite his earlier conversation with the Emperor, or perhaps because of it, the pain of Janaki's death was like some huge, jagged splinter buried in his chest. And with that pain came the anger, the fury, that the Arcanans could wreak such carnage on the hearts and souls of those for whom he cared even here, even in the very heart of Sharona.
His eyes burned even hotter as he thought about all the men he'd known, fought with. The men who'd avenged Shaylar's murder—Balkar chan Tesh, Grafin Halifu, Rokam Traygan, Delokahn Yar, Hulmok Arthag ... If the Arcanans had penetrated as deeply as Fort Salby, managed to kill Janaki, then all of those others—still more of Darcel Kinlafia's friends—must have been killed or captured first.
And now the treacherous murderers had killed the heir to the throne himself ... and devastated his family.
"Is there anything I can do?" he whispered almost pleadingly into Alazon's hair. "Anything at all?"
"I—" she began.
"There will be something you can do, Voice Kinlafia," another, deeper voice interrupted Alazon's, and she and Kinlafia looked up quickly as Zindel chan Calirath strode into the room.
He looked in that moment, Kinlafia thought, like an Imperial Navy dreadnought with its main battery swinging out to bare its teeth as it forged into the teeth of a winter's gale. His face might have been hammered out of old iron, and his gray eyes were colder than chilled steel.
"Your Majesty?" Kinlafia said.
"There will be something," the Emperor repeated in a hard, flat voice. "I don't know what—not yet. But I know that much."
"Your Majesty, I—"
"You'll know what it is when the time comes, Darcel," Zindel said. "For now—" He drew a deep breath and raised both hands, scrubbing his face in his palms. "For now, all I know is that all the Arpathian hells together couldn't hold everything that's about to break loose right here in Tajvana."
His voice came out muffled by his hands, and Kinlafia looked at Alazon. Then both of them looked back at Zindel as the Emperor lowered his hands with a smile as bleak as northern sea-ice.
"Chava Busar is going to see his opportunity in this," the Emperor said. "Shamir Taje is out talking to the heads of the various delegations to the Conclave right now, and you can be damned certain Chava will soon have his ... representatives doing exactly the same thing. They're going to use my son's death any way they can. As if what's happened to Janaki wasn't going to do damage enough all by itself."
"How bad is it, Your Majesty?" Alazon asked quietly.
"They've taken at least five universes," Zindel said flatly. "As far as we know, every soldier—and civilian—we had in those universes is either dead or prisoner. And somehow—" he met the two Voices'
eyes "—they managed to keep a single Voice from getting the warning out, as well."
Kinlafia's belly muscles clenched, and he felt Alazon's sick awareness of what the Emperor was telling them.
"They've advanced over four thousand miles in less than two weeks," Zindel continued. "The sort of transport and logistics capability that suggests is going to be terrifying as soon as its implications sink in, and the existence of these ... dragons, and these lion-eagle things of theirs, is going to be even worse.
But, frankly, what's going to hit home the hardest, going to have the most catastrophic effect on public opinion, is that they launched this entire attack while they were negotiating with us."
Kinlafia's teeth grated together with fresh fury, and Zindel snorted with cold, bitter anger of his own.
"They've truly done it this time," he said harshly. "First, Shaylar's murder. Now this ... this treachery and the murder of my son. The heir to the throne. The whole of Sharona is going to explode in fury. Any possible hope we ever had for stopping this insanity is gone forever. Whether we're ready for it or not, whether we want it or not, we're in a fight for our very survival, and my son—"
His voice broke savagely. It took him three tries to get it under control again.
"My son's death will not be in vain." He grated at last. "We're going to take every one of those portals back. We're going to drive those bastards back into the universe they came from. And I don't mean the universe on the other side of the portal you helped capture, Darcel—I mean their home universe. We're going to shove them back and bottle them up and blow them apart so hard it'll knock them back into the godsdamned Stone Age." He stared hard into Kinlafia's eyes. "And you, Parliamentary Representative Kinlafia, are going to help me do it."
"Yes, Sir." Kinlafia met that hard, bitter stare of steel across Alazon's head and nodded once, sharply.
"Yes, Your Majesty," he agreed in the voice of a man swearing an oath. "No matter what it takes."
"Good."
Zindel's voice was different, too. It was the voice of an emperor accepting an oath of fealty. Then the grief, the anguish, in his eyes shifted. It turned into something else, equally hard, and yet somehow almost ... desperate.
"And the other thing you're going to help me do, Darcel—" he added in a chilling tone "—you and Alazon both—is to find a way to keep that bastard Busar from forcing Andrin to marry one of his monstrous sons."
Kinlafia's heart lurched.
"Oh, dear gods ..." he half-whispered.
How could he have missed it? He'd already realized that Andrin had just become the Crown Princess of Sharona, or shortly would, and that meant—
"I will personally put a bullet through every last one of Chava Busar's sons before I let any of them marry your daughter, Your Majesty," he said, and felt Alazon shudder in his arms. Shudder with the thought of Andrin wed to any member of Chava's family ... and with her Voice's knowledge that he meant every single word he'd just said.
"Good." Zindel chan Calirath's eyes could have frozen the heart of hell itself, but then he made himself inhale deeply.
"Good," he repeated. "But now let's try to figure out a way to stop it without throwing our world into a civil war at the same time we have to deal with these Arcanan butchers."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Kinlafia nodded and the Emperor turned to Alazon.
"Shamir is canvassing our allies' delegations," he told her. It was a sign of his own grief and shock that, despite his outward self-control, he'd clearly forgotten that he'd already told them that. "I expect him back within the hour. Please contact the members of the Privy Council. This crisis won't wait; tell them we'll meet two hours from now, and I want Orem Limana present, as well. We'll need him to help us coordinate portal traffic."