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Chapter Sixteen
"Sit down. Sit down, Klayrman!"
Commander of One Thousand Toralk obeyed Commander of Two Thousand Harshu's ebullient invitation and seated himself across the snow-white tablecloth from him. Harshu's command tent was pitched upwind of the smoke—and smell of seared flesh—rising from what had once been Fort Brithik, but occasional tendrils of that smoke still reached it, and the silver, china, and crystal glittering on the table under the accumulator-powered light globe seemed almost ... bizarre to the Air Force officer.
"Wine?" Harshu invited, and beckoned to his orderly before Toralk could reply. The orderly poured ruby-colored wine from a bottle whose label had never been printed in Arcana into Toralk's glass, and Harshu smiled.
"Whatever else we might want to say about these people, they seem to be excellent vintners," he observed. "Try it. I think you like it."
Toralk sipped obediently, then nodded. It was excellent, rather like one of the better Hilmaran reds.
"It's good, Sir," he said, and Harshu chuckled.
""thinspace"'Good'?" The two thousand shook his head. "And here I thought all Air Force officers had an appreciation for the finer things in life! Oh, well, I suppose I can't have everything. I'll just have to settle for the frankly remarkable job you've been doing managing this advance, Klayrman."
"I'm glad you're satisfied, Sir," Toralk replied.
"I'm a lot more than just 'satisfied,'"thinspace"" Harshu told him. "So far, you've hit every objective ahead of schedule. Your SpecOps teams have done a remarkable job of cutting the Voice chain ahead of our attacks, and we haven't lost a battle dragon since the swamp portal. I'm very pleased, Klayrman.
Very pleased."
"Thank you, Sir."
Toralk started to say something else, then stopped and sipped more wine instead.
"Something troubling you, Klayrman?" Harshu asked, and the Air Force thousand looked up. He'd hoped Harshu hadn't noticed his hesitation, but he should have remembered just how sharp, how observant, the two thousand was.
"Well, as a matter of fact, Sir, there are a couple of things that ... concern me," Toralk admitted.
"Spit them out, then," Harshu invited, and snorted a chuckle. "You've got a lot of capital with me just now, Klayrman. You might as well use some of it, so trot out whatever's on your mind."
"Sir, it's just that I'm not ... entirely comfortable about some rumors I'm hearing. Rumors about POW
treatment."
Toralk met the two thousand's eyes levelly, and Harshu frowned ever so slightly.
"I assume you're referring to Five Hundred Neshok," the expeditionary force commander said after a moment.
"His name has come up in some of the rumors that concern me. On the other hand, it isn't the only name that's been mentioned to me, Sir."
"What kind of rumors are we talking about, exactly?" Harshu asked, then sipped from his own wineglass.
"From what I've been hearing, Sir, I'm afraid we're having a lot of Kerellian Accord violations. I'm hearing about prisoners who never make it back into confinement. Who 'mysteriously disappear'
between the point of their capture and the POW cage they're supposed to be marched off to. And I'm hearing about other prisoners who are badly beaten, systematically, by their guards. A lot of it, I think, is the result of the stories about what happened to Magister Halathyn. The fact that Intelligence hasn't been able to confirm or deny those stories bothers me, Sir. It bothers me a lot. And in addition to that ... inability—" Toralk met Harshu's eyes again "—there are those rumors about Five Hundred Neshok and his ... mistreatment of prisoners undergoing interrogation."
The Air Force officer sat back in his chair, waiting, and Harshu turned his wineglass under the light, gazing into its crimson heart as if it were a scrying crystal. He stayed that way for several moments, then returned his attention to Toralk.
"I've heard some of those same rumors," he said finally, his voice quieter and less ebullient than it had been. "Some of that, I imagine, is inevitable. And, to be completely honest, I'd rather see that than a reluctance to engage the enemy. But I have to agree that from what I've heard from certain sources, there have been significant violations of the Kerellian Accords."
Toralk started to say something, then made himself sit silently, waiting, and Harshu shrugged.
"I don't like the thought of casually mistreating prisoners of war, Klayrman. It's a violation of the Articles of War, it's conduct unbecoming the Arcanan armed forces, and—ultimately—it's prejudicial to good discipline. Nothing turns first-line soldiers into their own worst enemies quicker than developing a taste for atrocities.
"But we're in a peculiar position right now," the two thousand continued. "We don't really know these people, and they don't know us. We don't know what their equivalent of the Kerellian Accords may be.
And we still don't know how deep we have to go to find the sort of readily held bottleneck we need to provide defensive depth for Hell's Gate."
"But, Sir," Toralk said quietly when the two thousand paused, "if we don't know what their equivalent of the Kerellian Accords are, then wouldn't it be wiser of us to be sure that we adhere as closely as possible to our version? As you say, we don't know how deep we have to go, or how long we may end up fighting these people. In the long run, isn't it important for us to establish from the begi
"There's some of this in any war, whatever we might wish, or whatever the Articles of War or some neatly sanitized history might suggest to the contrary," Harshu said. "It always happens, Klayrman, even with the best troops. And at the moment, given the fact that we've attacked them while we were still negotiating with them, I doubt very much that we're likely to find any Sharonians cherishing warm and fuzzy thoughts where we're concerned, however closely we might adhere to the Accords."
"I'm sure you're right, Sir." In fact, that had been the basis for Toralk's greatest reservation about the wisdom of this entire operation from the outset. "But eventually we're going to have to get past that, unless we're pla
"No doubt it will. To be honest, though, I'm inclined to cross that bridge when we reach it. At some point, this front is going to stabilize. Frankly, I intend to get quite a bit deeper into their rear areas before that happens, but it is going to happen, Klayrman. When it does, we're going to be looking at new negotiations, probably debates on prisoner exchanges, and quite probably demands—from both sides, I imagine—that those responsible for the deliberate abuse of POWs face punishment. Exactly how all of that will play out is more than I'm prepared to speculate upon at this point. One thing I do know, though, is that no matter how angry one side or the other may be, everything is going to be subject to reinterpretation and negotiation when that time comes. They may be as angry with us as they like, may distrust us as deeply as they please, but sooner or later, we're still going to have to talk to each other, and we will. Whatever's happened between us, we will."
"Sir, are you saying that the mistreatment of POWs by Arcanan perso
"No, I'm not," Harshu replied just a bit frostily. "I'm saying that, at the moment, there are aspects of our situation and our mission requirements which concern me more than the rumors—no, let's be honest and call them what they are, the reports—you're referring to.
"We're flying completely blind out here, Klayrman. We don't know squat about these people. Oh, we've captured quite a stack of maps and other information, but unfortunately, our translation spellware doesn't let us read written documents just yet. It's not going to for at least several more weeks, according to the Intelligence people, either. From the maps we've found so far, this Sharona's explored territory doesn't appear to be anywhere near the size of our own, but we can't be certain of that. And I've got to know what's out there in front of us if we're going to continue to advance without heavy losses. And we can't afford heavy losses, since there's nothing immediately behind us to hold any Sharonian counterattack that gets by us.
"Those are the concerns which are floating around the front of my brain, Klayrman."
Toralk looked at his commanding officer for several seconds which seemed like minor eternities.
"Sir," he said finally, quietly, "if you don't stop this, and stop it quickly, it's going to stick to your name, your reputation, forever."
"Fuck my reputation," Harshu said flatly. Toralk's eyes widened in astonishment, and the two thousand snorted in harsh amusement. "Oh, I won't pretend I'm not as vain as anyone you're likely to meet. Hells, I'll go further than that—I've got an ego big enough for any three other men I know! So what?
Reputation isn't worth a fart in a windstorm—not when it gets in the way of the mission. I've got fourteen thousand men out here with us or spread out behind us. My responsibility is to them and to the mission. I need the information that little bastard Neshok is bringing me if I'm going to keep as many as possible of those men alive and accomplish what we're out here to do."
So there it is, Toralk thought. You know exactly what I'm talking about, exactly who it is that worries me, and you're willing to accept it in the name of expediency.
The thousand knew he wasn't being entirely fair. "Expediency" was an ugly word, but what Harshu had said about keeping his men alive was also true. And the fame-seeking two thousand's indifference to what posterity made of him was what had surprised the Air Force officer so deeply.
"Sir," Toralk said after a moment, "I'm not sure I can agree with you. I don't mean that I disagree with anything you've said about the responsibility to our men, or even the importance of our mission, now that we're out here and engaged on active operations. But I'm worried about what simply ignoring violations of the Accords is going to do to us, not what it's going to do to the enemy. We do have a moral responsibility where the treatment of the Sharonians is concerned, and if we shirk it, it's going to poison us."