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Chapter Eighteen
Sir Jasak Olderhan sat backward in the pedestal-mounted swivel chair, resting his crossed forearms on the top of the chair back, and leaned his chin pensively into the cushion they provided. Outside the observation dome, the virgin forests of the universe called Dystria flowed past. It was early morning, and the humid air of the Kythian lowlands hung in a sort of translucent golden haze as the slider rushed towards the coast and the passenger ship waiting to transport them across the fifteen hundred miles of saltwater to the next portal in Paerystia.
Thirty-five thousand miles, he thought. That was how far he'd traveled with his shardonai and Gadrial Kelbryan in the last two months. And we're still less than halfway to New Andara. I wonder if—
His musing thoughts broke off as he heard feet on the steps behind him. He looked back over his shoulder, and his eyes brightened as he saw Gadrial climbing up them from the lounge level.
"So here you are," she said. "We missed you at breakfast, you know."
"Sorry." He smiled briefly. "I wasn't very hungry this morning."
"So we all surmised. The question, of course, is why not?"
Jasak wondered for a moment if she realized just how scolding her tone sounded. There was a gleam in her dark eyes as she folded her arms across her chest and cocked her head to one side. She looked for all the world like a na
"By my calculations, Five Hundred Klian's initial dispatch got to New Andara somewhere around four o'clock this morning, our time," he said.
Gadrial's eyes darkened, losing their glint of amusement, and she unfolded her arms to touch him lightly on the shoulder.
"I hadn't even thought about that," she said quietly.
"I'm not surprised." He smiled crookedly at her. "We're still barely forty percent of the way home, and it feels like we've been traveling forever. Sometimes, I think 'home' doesn't really exist, you know. There's only this bubble around us, filled up with dragons and slider cars and passenger cabins aboard ships. We just think there's anything else out there."
"It is strange," she agreed. "I know it took just as long to get to Mahritha as it's going to take to get home again, but you're right. Somehow, I do feel less ... co
"Because it was all new on the way out?"
"That may have been part of it, but I don't think it's the real reason for the difference."
Gadrial frowned, gazing out the observation dome's windows and apparently forgetting about the slim, fine-boned hand still resting lightly on his shoulder.
"I think the real difference is the reason we're making this trip," she said slowly after several seconds, and he nodded.
"Of course it is. And, to be honest, a part of me wishes we could just stay inside my nice, safe bubble.
But we can't, can we?"
"I'm afraid not." Her hand squeezed his shoulder for a moment, and her own smile was sad. "Sooner or later, we're going to get home, whatever it may feel like now. And what happens then?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "We'll find out in another couple of months, I suppose. At the moment, to be honest, I'm more concerned about how my mother and father felt when the hummer finally arrived."
Gadrial nodded slowly. With no equivalent of the Sharonians' Voicenet, the Union of Arcana had to rely on the arcanely augmented, specially bred "hummers" for quick long-distance communication. But
"quick," she had discovered, was a relative term. From what Shaylar and Jathmar had said so far, it would have taken Shaylar's original message less than two weeks to reach their own home universe.
Exactly how much distance that represented was one of the questions they'd declined to answer, for which neither Gadrial nor Jasak blamed them. From several things they'd let drop, however, Gadrial was convinced that the total distance was substantially less than the distance between Mahritha and New Andara. Still, that had to be a very different thing from "short," given how long Shaylar's message—
which unlike Five Hundred Klian's, had moved literally at the speed of thought, except when it had to slow down to cross the occasional water gap—had taken to cross it.
But however great the distance might be, the communications loop between the swamp portal and Sharona was eighty percent shorter than the one between Fort Rycharn and New Andara. Gadrial was no soldier, but even she could see the military implications of that sort of advantage.
Not that those implications were foremost in her mind at that instant.
"I know you're worried about your parents," she said after a moment. "I don't blame you. But I've learned a little bit about the Duke during my years in Garth Showma. And I've learned quite a bit more from you."
He turned his head to quirk an eyebrow at her, and she snorted quietly.
"You don't exactly run on and on about them, Jasak, but when you do talk about them, I hear an awful lot of love ... and trust. And just from watching you in action with Shaylar and Jathmar, I've learned a lot about the values they thought were important enough to teach their son. So I know they're going to be worried, and they're going to be upset, but they're also going to understand what you did and why you did it."
"I know." He inhaled deeply. "I really do know. Unfortunately, that doesn't keep me from wishing that if they'd had to hear about something like this, I'd been able to tell them in person."
"Maybe not, but look at it this way. This way, at least they're going to have had a couple of months to begin coping with it before they actually see you. And unless I miss my guess, your father's going to have been using that time to very good purpose."
"Gods, I hope so," Jasak said softly, and Gadrial squeezed his shoulder once more.
She started to say something, then stopped and shifted mental gears. Jasak had already made it abundantly clear that he didn't want to discuss the board of inquiry he would certainly face, or the courtmartial which might very well follow close upon its heels.
"How do you think Parliament is going to react?" she asked instead.
"I think it's going to be a godsdamned mess," he replied flatly. "The Mythalans, at the very least, are going to go absolutely berserk, and I'm afraid at least a chunk of the Andaran MPs are going to find themselves in at least limited agreement this time around."
"Really?"
"Not for the same reasons." Jasak shook his head quickly. "We Andarans don't go in much for xenophobia for xenophobia's sake, and I don't imagine most of us are going to hold the fact that Sharonians don't know anything at all about magic against them. But what they did to Thalmayr when they punched out the portal ... that's going to really, really worry a lot of Andarans."
"I can see that, I suppose. But is it going to make them more cautious, or is the perceived threat going to make them more belligerent?"
"That I couldn't begin to tell you," Jasak said frankly. "I'd prefer to see more caution, but I'm afraid the opposite is probably at least as likely. To be honest, an awful lot is going to depend on what else has happened out there in Mahritha."
"And no one in Parliament is going to be able to affect that very much either way, are they?"
"No, and that's one of the things that worries me most," Jasak admitted. "Even if Parliament does its dead level best to put the brakes on the situation—and I know that's what Father, for one, is going to be recommending—it's still at the end of a four-month two-way communications loop. Which means that whatever happens out there is really in the hands of the local command structure and likely to remain there."
"You're thinking about Two Thousand mul Gurthak, aren't you?"
"Yes." Jasak pursed his lips and exhaled noisily. "The more I think about it, the more I wonder exactly why he wanted me out of his office before he talked things over with that diplomat, Skirvon. I keep trying to tell myself I'm just being paranoid, pessimistic. But I keep coming back to it."
"Why?"
"Because he knows who my father is, and he knows where we're headed. What if he wanted me out of that office because he didn't want me to know what his plans really are?"
Gadrial turned back from the windows, her eyes narrowing.
"I don't much care for Mythalans either, you know," she said with truly massive understatement, "but why would he want that?"
"I did say I know it sounds paranoid," Jasak reminded her. "But if I'd been the local senior officer, and if I'd known that someone with a close, personal co
Gadrial started to tell him he truly did sound more than a bit paranoid. But then she stopped. Maybe he did, but as one of her research team members in Garth Showma was fond of pointing out, even paranoiacs sometimes had real enemies.
And mul Gurthak is Mythalan, she reminded herself.
"What do you think he might not want your father to know about?" she asked instead.
"I don't know."
"But you obviously suspect that there's something, or you wouldn't be worrying about it this way."
"I just can't quite understand why he'd want to discuss his instructions to his diplomats in such ... privacy. Not under these circumstances, anyway."
"Maybe he just felt he could speak to them more freely without you," she pointed out. "You were the officer in command during the initial incident. Maybe he felt they'd be more frank about discussing options and possibilities—or the consequences of the incident—without you. And you said you didn't think he was very happy about your decision to make Shaylar and Jathmar your shardonai. Maybe he was afraid they really have managed to influence you—us—somehow, and he wanted to minimize any secondhand impact that might have had on what Skirvon might say or think."