Hell's Gate

Chapter Twenty-Two

"Dear, you've hardly touched your breakfast."

Andrin Calirath looked up at the sound of her mother's gentle voice. Empress Varena wasn't the sort of parent who nagged, and she wasn't nagging now, really. That didn't keep Andrin from feeling as if she were, but the look in her mother's eyes stopped any protest well short of her vocal cords.

"I'm sorry, Mother," she said instead, and managed a wan smile. "I'm afraid I'm just not very hungry."

The Empress started to say something else, then stopped, pressed her lips together, and gave her head a tiny shake. Her brain had already told her there was no point trying to get Andrin to eat. That the attempt would only make things worse, by pointing out that she'd noticed something her daughter was desperately trying to pretend wasn't happening. But what her mind recognized and her heart could accept were two different things.

She looked at her husband, sitting at the head of the table, and he looked back with a sad smile and eyes full of the same shadows which haunted Andrin. The smile belonged to her husband, her daughter's father; the shadows belonged to the Emperor of Ternathia, and not for the first time in her life, Varena Calirath cursed the crushing load the Calirath Dynasty had borne for so many weary centuries.

Andrin peeked up through her eyelashes, acutely aware of her parents' exchanged looks. She wished desperately that she could comfort her mother, but how could she, when she couldn't even explain her terrifying Glimpses to herself? Her father would have understood, but she didn't need to explain to him. It was painfully evident that he was experiencing the same Glimpses, and she refused to lay the additional weight of her own fears, the terror curdling her bone marrow, on top of the other weights he must already bear.

Unlike her, he had to deal with all the crushing day-to-day burden of governing Sharona's largest, oldest, wealthiest, and most prestigious empire despite his own Glimpses. He didn't need a whining daughter on top of that!

She used her fork to push food around on her plate, trying to convince herself to try at least one more bite. There was nothing wrong with the food itself. Breakfast had been as delicious as it always was; it was simply that a stomach clenched into a permanent knot of tension couldn't appreciate it.

Almost a week, she thought. A week with the bumblebees crawling through her bones, the nightmares which woke her and skipped away into the shadows before she could quite grasp them. A week with visions of chaos and destruction, the outriders of heartrending grief to come, of loss and anguish. No wonder she couldn't eat! She knew she was losing weight, and she'd seen the shadows under her eyes in her morning mirror, and that didn't surprise her one bit, either.

She'd had other Glimpses in her life, some of them terrible beyond belief. The Talent of the Caliraths was … different. Unique. Precognition wasn't actually that uncommon. It wasn't one of the more common Talents, but it wasn't as rare as, say, the full telempathic Healing Talent.

But precognition was limited primarily to physical events and processes. A weather Precog could predict sunshine and rain for a given locale with virtually one hundred percent accuracy for a period of perhaps two weeks. Longer-range forecasts of up to two months could also be extremely accurate, although reliability tended to begin falling off after the first month or so, and the level of accuracy degraded rapidly thereafter. Other Precogs worked for forestry services, predicting fires. And along the so-called "crown of fire" around the Great Western Ocean, they watched for volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. They'd saved countless lives over the centuries with their warnings, like the one they'd issued before the island of Juhali in the Hinorean Empire?and its analog in every explored universe, for that matter?had blown up so devastatingly thirty-seven years ago.

Yet those events were all the results of physical processes. Of the movement of unthinking masses of air and water, the random strike of lightning bolts, the seething movement of magma and the bones of the earth. The Glimpses of the House of Calirath dealt with people.

Quite often, they also dealt with natural disaster, because people were trapped in them. But those disasters would have happened whether there'd been anyone there to witness them, or not. What Andrin and her father and their endless ancestors before them had seen in those cases was the human cost of the disaster. The impact on the lives of those trapped in its path.

There had been times when a Calirath Glimpse had been enough to divert or at least ameliorate the consequences of cataclysm. Andrin was grateful for that. She herself had saved possibly thousands of lives with her Glimpse of the Kilrayen National Forest fire in Reyshar before high winds had sent it sweeping over the town of Halthoma like a tidal bore of flame. She'd Seen the flames leaping the firebreaks, cutting the roads, consuming the town, burning women and children to death. It had been that human element?the terror and pain and despair of the people involved?which had generated her Glimpse … and her father's frantic EVN message had warned the Reyshar government in time to evacuate and thwart that very Glimpse. She treasured that memory, despite the nightmares of the disaster only she had Seen, which still came back to her some nights. And she was only too well aware from her history lessons of how often in Ternathia's past it had been a Glimpse, the Talent of the imperial house, which had plucked victory from defeat, or turned mere survival into triumph.

But there were times?like today?when all those accomplishments seemed less than a pittance against the cost of her Talent.

If only she could make it come clear! If only she could take it by the throat, choke it into submission. But it didn't work that way. Glimpses could be of events from next week, or next month, or next year. Some had actually been of events which had not occurred until the person who had Glimpsed them was long dead. Sometimes, they never came to pass at all, but usually they turned out to have been terrifyingly accurate … once they were actually upon you. And one thing the Caliraths had learned over the mille

Which was the reason her stomach was a clenched fist and there were shadows under her eyes. This was already the strongest Glimpse she had ever endured, far stronger than the Halthoma Glimpse, and it was still growing stronger. The images themselves were growing sharper, even though she still lacked the context to place them, and she felt as if she were a violin string, tuned far too tightly and ready to snap.

"Andrin," her father said calmly, "I've been thinking that this afternoon, perhaps you and I might drop by the stables, and?"

He stopped speaking abruptly, and his and Andrin's heads turned as one, their eyes snapping to the breakfast parlor's door an instant before the latch turned. Andrin felt herself go white to her lips, and her father's hand tightened into a fist around his napkin, as the door opened and Shamir Taje stepped through it.

"Your Imperial Majesties," the First Councilor of the Ternathian Empire said, bowing first to Zindel and then to Varena and the rest of the imperial family, "I apologize for intruding on you."

Varena Calirath held her breath as she saw Zindel's face. His entire body had gone deathly still, and she bit her lip as she realized that whatever he?and Andrin?had awaited appeared to be upon them.

"I'm sure you had an excellent reason, Shamir." Her father's voice was amazingly calm, Andrin thought, when he had to feel the same jagged lightning bolts dancing along his nerves.