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"Perhaps you think I'm joking about the consequences of refusing to answer my questions," the Arcanan said. He raised the H&W with the air of a man who knew how to use it and aimed it at the forehead of Petty-Armsman Erkam Varla, the prisoner at the far end of the line. "Trust me," he cocked the hammer,
"I'm not."
Sweat beaded Varla's forehead, but he only pressed his lips more tightly together, and Neshok began to squeeze the trigger. There was no hesitation in him. The emotional aura blasting across the tack room battered chan Tergis like waves driven by a winter gale, and the Voice knew beyond a doubt that the Arcanan was going to fire.
"Stop!"
Neshok paused, one eyebrow arching, and glanced sideways at chan Tergis.
"You had something you wished to say?" he said politely.
"I'm the Voice," chan Tergis said hoarsely.
"No, Folsar!" Syrail Cried in the back of his brain, but chan Tergis' eyes never even flickered from Neshok's face.
"Are you, now?" The Arcanan glanced at the crystal which had been translating. It glowed with a steady blue, and he nodded. "Yes, you are," he said. "How convenient. I expected it was going to take longer to find you."
Chan Tergis said nothing, only looked at him, and Neshok smiled.
"Now, the next question, I suppose, is whether or not you're the only Voice here or in the local settlements. Are you?"
Chan Tergis' mind seemed to be speeding faster than ever. The way the Arcanan had checked his crystal suggested it was somehow capable of telling him whether or not chan Tergis was lying. It must be one of these people's preposterous "spells" which somehow duplicated a Sifter's Talent. But how literalminded was it?
"I'm the only Voice Regiment-Captain Velvelig has," he said in flat, hard tones, and the crystal glowed blue again.
"So you are," Neshok said, and chan Tergis Felt Syrail's whirling emotions from the other end of their link as the boy tasted his own fierce determination to protect him.
"I'm afraid," Neshok continued, "that we've only been able to come up with one way to make certain you Voices don't go chattering away to one another."
Chan Tergis felt his facial muscles tighten, but it was scarcely a surprise. Not given the emotions he'd already sensed from this smiling, purring butcher.
"I'm sure you'll understand," the Arcanan continued, moving the revolver from Varla's forehead to chan Tergis'.
"Folsar!" Syrail Cried. "You can't—"
"There's no more time, Syrail," chan Tergis Said, and his Voice was almost calm. "I'm sorry. Tell your parents. Tell them someone else here at the fort may remember how I've bragged about you, may tell them about you. You've got to run. Hide. Don't let them—"
The blinding brilliance of the muzzle flash silenced his Voice forever.
"I've got the intelligence summaries for your next couple of objectives Klayrman," Two Thousand Harshu told Thousand Toralk that evening. "From what we've been able to put together so far, the next stop—the one in the universe they call 'Karys' should be easy. But the one after that, in 'Traisum'—that one's going to be the hardest nut to crack yet."
"Really, Sir?" Toralk tried very hard not to let his distaste for the way that "intelligence summary" had been assembled show. Harshu obviously saw it anyway, and gave his head an impatient shake.
"I know how you feel about Neshok, Klayrman. And, to be honest, it's time I started reining him in. In fact, I have started. I've removed our prisoners from his control, and I've approved Five Hundred Vaynair's refusal to release the wounded to him."
"May I ask why, Sir?" Toralk inquired very carefully.
"Mostly because we're starting to hit more heavily settled universes, according to what we've already learned. Or we will be shortly, at any rate. Fort Mosanik in Karys isn't much. Your yellows should be able to deal with it without any trouble. But somewhere on the other side of it, we're going to encounter this 'railroad' of theirs. Apparently they've got quite a large work crew pushing it down-chain as quickly as they can, and it's undoubtedly got one of these Voices of its own assigned to it.
"That's going to make problems enough all by itself. But once we get past that, there's this Fort Salby in Traisum. I think you'll find the information on the portal itself fascinating reading. Then, once we get past that, there's the fort and a substantial settlement around it. In addition, it appears that there are quite a few farming and ranching villages and homesteads stretched out along the route from Fort Salby to the next universe. With that many people mucking about, it's highly unlikely that we're going to be able to continue to ... neutralize this Voicenet of theirs. There's too much chance of missing a Voice hiding in the underbrush, as it were. That means we're going to lose the advantage of surprise, which is going to make any real advance beyond Fort Salby problematical, at best.
"But that's all right, actually. As you know, we captured their maps intact here at Ghartoun, and a couple of my bright young staff officers have worked out an adaptation of the standard recon image-intepreting software. We still can't read most of their documents, but they're loading the captured maps into their PCs and then using the interpreting software to compare them to our maps and look for terrain feature matches. Once they find one, the software automatically orients the Sharonian maps to ours and scales them accurately, using ours as a base. We may not know how to read any of the names on their maps, but we're able to make some detailed appreciations of the terrain on them now. Which means we know what the rest of this portal chain looks like, although I could wish we knew more about the rest of their explored chains. At any rate, the maps all confirmed what the prisoners had already said. The Traisum portal is definitely going to be the chokepoint we've been looking for. For a lot of reasons."
"Really, Sir?"
"Oh, yes." Harshu smiled thinly. "As I say, I think you'll be impressed. The portal itself would be a nightmare for anyone without dragon capability, and the approaches to the portal in Traisum itself are almost as bad. The only ground access to the portal is by way of a valley which is dominated by this Fort Salby. That's one reason I want Salby so badly. I want to be able to control that valley, keep them pe
"Excuse me, Sir, but if the portal is as defensible as you seem to be suggesting, why should we move beyond it?"
"There seems to be substantial agreement among our current prisoners that the reinforcements their swamp portal commander was anticipating will probably be no more than a week or so out from Fort Salby by the time we can reach the portal. If I were their commander, and if I didn't have transports, then I'd probably think long and hard before even contemplating fighting my way through the portal from Traisum to Karys. On the other hand, we still haven't seen these people's heavy weapons, and we don't have any way of predicting the actual combat power of this reinforcement they're expecting. They may think they can force the portal. They might even be right.
"By taking Salby and controlling the approach valley, we'll be able to start hitting them early. Hopefully, we'll have a chance to get a feel for how their combat capabilities differ from those we've already encountered. I want that feel before it comes down to a toe-to-toe fight for the actual portal. If, on the other hand, their basic combat power is as outclassed as our more optimistic junior officers prefer to assume, they may never get past us to the portal in the first place. At any rate, from the topography on these maps, it looks like whoever selected the site for Fort Salby had an excellent eye for terrain.
They've definitely put the plug into this valley at its most defensible point, which means it's the logical anchor for us to hang our own defensive positions on.
"In any case, I'm assuming that once we hit the fort itself, word of our presence is going to get out. We won't be able to keep it from spreading up-chain from Traisum, no matter what we do. And I'm not pla
The two thousand shrugged.
"In light of all that, the intelligence value of anything more Neshok could extract from his prisoners has got to be of strictly limited utility. And, quite frankly, I'm delighted that that's the way it is." For just a moment, a haunted, almost haggard, expression flickered across Harshu's face. Then he met Toralk's eyes levelly. "I can't justify continuing to allow him to do the things he's been doing unless he's in a position to provide me with genuinely critical information, and that's not going to be the case any longer."
"I can't pretend I'm not ... very relieved to hear that, Sir," Toralk told him after a moment.
"I know you are, Klayrman." Harshu reached across the floating map table in his command tent and patted the Air Force officer's forearm gently. "I know you are."
There was silence for a moment. Then Harshu inhaled sharply and handed Toralk his copy of the current intelligence summary.
"When you look this over, I think you'll see why this Fort Salby's going to be tough," he said much more briskly. "I'll be interested to see if you come to the same conclusions I did about the most effective approach. I don't want to prejudice your thinking, but as you look through the summary, I'd like you to consider—"
"My gods, Sir! I thought you were dead!"
"As you can see, Silky, we Arpathians are even tougher then you knew." Namir Velvelig's eyes were darker and bleaker than Company-Captain Silkash had ever before seen them, yet his voice held a ghost of genuine amusement.
"No one's that tough," Silkash said flatly. "Remember, I'm the one who triaged you in the first place."
"You did?" Velvelig cocked his head to one side. "Odd. I don't recall it."
"I imagine that's because you were unconscious, almost out of blood, and had serious cranial injuries, not to mention a badly shattered hip and what I'm almost certain was at least one spinal fracture,"