Hell's Gate

"Where's Borkaz, Chief?" Shulthan asked after moment, and Threbuch's jaw tightened.

"Didn't make it." He shook his head and started to explain, then stopped himself. Shulthan's anguish at having cut and run while his friends died behind him was only too obvious. He didn't need to be told how Borkaz had died ru

"All right," the chief sword continued after moment. "Have you already sent back a hummer?"

"No, Chief." Shulthan shook his head. "I've just been ru

"Don't think I've been doing anything else since it happened," Threbuch said, shaking his head. The chief sword looked at the sky. The night was at least half over, he reflected.

"We need to send one back now, though," he continued. "It's going to take the rest of the night just to reach the coast, and we need to let Five Hundred Klian know what's happened. Come to that, we need to set up an LZ for them to pull us out of here, too."

"Yes, Chief."

Threbuch looked down at his PC again, trying to decide on the best spot. He didn't want a dragon within miles of the base camp. Gods alone only knew how far those bastards could throw whatever they'd used for artillery!

His empty stomach rumbled painfully while he was thinking, and he glanced at Shulthan again.

"You wouldn't happen to have anything to eat on you, would you, Iggy?" he asked, and blinked as Shulthan actually chuckled.

"Matter of fact, Chief, I managed to grab my whole pack. I've got a couple of blocks of emergency rats."

"Iggy, it's too bad you're not a woman," Threbuch said with the fervor of a man who hasn't eaten in well over twenty-four hours. "Or maybe it isn't. If you were, I'd have to marry you, and you're ugly as sin." The chief sword looked back down at his PC, picked the coordinates he needed, and then glanced back up at Shulthan. "Let's get that hummer on its way. Then lead me to those rations and stand back."

"Is a … unicorn," Shaylar said in slow, carefully enunciated Andaran.

"Yes, exactly!" Gadrial replied in the same language with a broad smile. She leaned closer to the breathtakingly life-like image displayed above the gleaming crystal on her tiny desk and indicated the booted and spurred man standing beside the beast in an anachronistic-looking steel breastplate. "And this?"

"Is a war-rider," Shaylar said firmly. Gadrial nodded once more, and Shaylar smiled back at her. Then she glanced at Jathmar, sitting beside her on the unused bed in the quarters which had been assigned to Gadrial, and felt her smile fade around the edges as she tasted his reaction to the imagery Gadrial was showing them through the marriage bond.

The coal-black creature Gadrial had just informed her was called a "unicorn" was unlike anything either of them had ever seen before, yet it was close enough to familiar to make it even more disturbing than something as totally alien as a dragon. The beast was roughly horse-sized and shaped, except for the legs, which were proportionately too long, and the improbably powerful looking hindquarters. But no horse had ever had those long, furry, bobcat-like ears, or that short, powerful neck, or the long, deadly-looking tasks?like something from some huge, wild boar?and obviously carnivorous teeth. Or the long, ivory horn which must have been close to a yard in length. And then there were the eyes. Huge green eyes with purple irises and catlike slitted pupils.

Jathmar, she decided, had a point. Compared to that bizarre, opium-dream improbability, the half-armored cavalry trooper standing beside it with his lance and saber looked downright homely.

"Your words?" Gadrial asked, and Shaylar looked back at the images and shrugged.

"No word," she said, pointing at the 'unicorn' and grimacing. Then she pointed at the man standing beside it. "Cavalryman," she said, and watched the squiggles of Gadrial's alphabet appear briefly under the image.

"Good. Thank you," Gadrial said, and touched the small wand-like stylus in her hand to the crystal-clear sphere of her "PC." The image changed obediently, and this time it showed something Shaylar and Jathmar recognized immediately.

"This," Gadrial said "is called an 'elephant.'"

Gadrial watched her "students" studying the floating picture of the elephant and tried to keep her bemusement at their rate of progress from showing.

She'd almost forgotten that she had the language spellware package with her. It wasn't something she'd ever used before, but it had come as a standard component of the "academic" package an enterprising vendor had managed to sell the Garth Showma Institute a year or so before. Gadrial had been perfectly happy with the previous package's general capabilities?most of the spellware she used in her own work was the product of her own department at the Academy, or at least so highly customized that it bore very little relationship to its original form?but the Academy had insisted on providing the new and improved spellware to all its faculty members. She'd been more than mildly irritated at the time, since she probably would never use more than twenty percent of the total applications and the changeover had required her to become familiar with the new package's idiosyncrasies (which were, as always, many). But she'd long since learned not to waste energy fighting over the little things, and it wasn't exactly as if the bundled spells providing all the useless bells and whistles she'd never need were going to use up a critical amount of her PC's memory.

Over the last four days, though, she'd actually found herself deeply and profoundly grateful for the white elephant with which the Academy's administration had lumbered her. She'd thought she remembered something in the manual about language and translation spellware. After their arrival at Fort Rycharn, she'd hauled out the documentation and, sure enough, she had a comprehensive translation spell package, capable of both literal and figurative translations between any Arcanan languages. More importantly, under the circumstances, it also included what she thought of as a "Learn Ransaran in Your Spare Time" spell platform for people who preferred to master those other languages for themselves, rather than relying upon magical translations. Of course, it couldn't simply magically stick another language inside someone else's head, but it was well designed to introduce that language to a new student in a carefully structured format. The people who'd put it together had assumed?not unreasonably?that their students would speak at least one of Arcana's languages, which created quite a few problems of its own, but it had still provided her with an invaluable basis from which to begin teaching Shaylar and Jathmar Andaran.

She hadn't even considered teaching them Ransaran, for several reasons. First, even though it sometimes irked her to admit it, Ransaran wasn't an easy language to learn. There were those, especially in Mythal, who were wont to refer to Ransaran as a "bastardized mongrelization," and she couldn't really dispute the characterization. Ransaran was riddled with irregular verb forms, homonyms, synonyms, irregular spellings, nonstandard pronunciations, and appropriations from every other major language. One of her friends at the Academy had a T-shirt which proclaimed that "Ransaran doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." Over the centuries, Gadrial cheerfully admitted, Ransaran had done precisely that … which was why it was unparalleled for concision, flexibility, and adaptiveness. Indeed, she'd heard it argued that the notorious Ransaran flexibility and i