Hell's Gate

But even as that thought crossed his own mind, Janaki surprised him by smiling.

"You'd be wasted in the Army, Kinlafia!"

"I beg your pardon?" Kinlafia blinked, and Janaki shrugged.

"Think about it. What would you accomplish, in the Army? You'd be just another soldier, and you're a Voice. That means you'd be stuck using your Talent, not your rifle. One more messenger, passing other people's orders through the Voice chain. Going where you were told to go. Shooting when you were told to shoot . . . and not shooting when you were ordered to hold your fire. Vothan! Voices are way too valuable for the military to risk in combat if it can possibly be avoided?you know that. So if you were to enlist, your chances of actually shooting anyone would go down, not up!"

That drew a scowl, and the Crown Prince chuckled a bit grimly.

"I didn't think you'd thought about that aspect of it," he said.

"No," Kinlafia muttered. "I hadn't."

"Then there's probably another thing you haven't thought about, either. Frankly, the last thing we can afford to do is to repeat what Company-Captain chan Tesh and Platoon-Captain Arthag managed to accomplish here."

"Why?" This time, the question wasn't belligerent, just baffled.

"Because we don't know how many of them there are, for one thing. How many universes do they occupy? How big is their army? Their navy? What the hells do they use for technology? Most of what we've seen doesn't make any sense at all yet?you know that even better than I do, because you've actually seen it. And Seen it, for that matter."

Janaki paused, holding Kinlafia's eyes levelly with his own, and wondered if the Voice saw the ghosts hovering within them. A part of him hungered to tell the Voice?tell anyone?what he'd Glimpsed that night in the mountains. But he couldn't. The visions of death and destruction, of flame exploding across the night, of bizarre weapons spitting devastation … those were his alone, for now at least. He was desperately afraid that they were going to become the property of other Sharonians, but they hadn't yet.

The thought flickered through his mind once again that he really ought to consider sending word to his father by Voice of what he had Glimpsed. Yet, what could he truly tell the Emperor? That he'd Seen images of war and slaughter? That he'd felt the foretaste of his own terror? That he was afraid? His father's Talent was much stronger than Janaki's?almost as strong, Janaki suspected, as his sister Andrin's. He'd probably already Glimpsed everything Janaki had, and even if he hadn't, the Calirath Glimpses weren't something to be discussed through any intermediary, even that of a Voice. They had to be discussed face-to-face, where Talent could speak directly to Talent.

I wish my Glimpse had been clearer, just this once, at least, he thought for a far from the first time, with familiar frustration. But it hadn't been clear . . . only vast, powerful, and terrifying.

Well, at least if chan Tesh is sending me all the way home with these people, I'll be seeing Father in person for that little chat a lot sooner than I'd expected. That's something.

"We punched right through them here," he continued, still holding Kinlafia's gaze captive with his own. "Punched through so quickly and easily it wasn't even a contest. But this time we had the advantage of surprise, since they presumably don't understand our technology any better than we understand theirs. And armies, unfortunately, tend to learn more from failure than they do from success. Do we really want to assume we're looking at an endless succession of walkovers? They obviously didn't expect anything like Platoon-Captain chan Talmarha's four-point-fives. What if it turns out that they've got weapons we haven't even seen yet? Weapons that make mortars look like damp firecrackers by comparison? Do we want to send in 'a division or six' to wipe out every post they have in this region, then discover they've got six hundred divisions, with heavy weapons support, poised to wipe out every man, woman, and child from here to Sharona?"

"No." Kinlafia bit his lip, and his voice was low and reluctant. "No, we don't."

He sat slumped on the camp stool, gazing at nothing and seeing something that made his eyes go bleak, and for two long, endless minutes, he said absolutely nothing more. But then, finally, his eyes refocused on Janaki, deep, dark … and lost.

"What I never told anyone," he said in a terrible whisper, "was how much I loved her."

Janaki didn't speak. He couldn't.

"You're not a Voice," Kinlafia said softly. "You don't understand what it's like to communicate with another Voice. When you're linked, deeply linked, the way we were during that ghastly attack … "

His voice trailed off for another long moment, and his hands twisted themselves together in his lap.

"You become the other person, for a few minutes. For however long you're linked. Voices try to avoid going that deep. No matter how voluntary the link is, it's almost a … violation. It doesn't happen with normal message relays, but when the psychic impact is this deep, hits this hard, you fuse. Everything she felt, everything she saw, and heard, and smelled happened to me."

A shudder rippled visibly through him.

"For those few minutes, I was Shaylar. I could Hear and See more than just the thoughts and sights she was transmitting. I could taste her terror. Her love for Jathmar. The realization that she would never see her parents again, never have children, never leave that tangle of broken trees alive. Yet she stayed linked with me, deeper than I've ever linked with another Voice. And she kept shooting at them, when anyone else would have been cowering on the ground with both arms over his head. Hell, some of the others were doing just that! But not her. No, not her. She heard the fire dying, knew our friends?our family?were being killed all around her, and she never stopped. Never quit once. She burned all her maps, all her notes, everything, and then she reached for her gun again, because there was no one else still up and shooting, No one but Jathmar, and the bastards killed him right in front of her! Gods! She was so beautiful, so brave … and I couldn't get to her, couldn't reach her, couldn't be with her, and then I felt her go… . "

His voice shattered.

Janaki's own eyes burned, and his vision blurred, but his hands were steady as he drew the cork from a bottle of highland single malt whiskey. He'd suspected from the begi

Kinlafia wrapped himself around the liquor and gulped at it, his hands unsteady as he struggled to regain control. Janaki was wise enough to say nothing. He simply refilled the glass when it emptied, then sat down on his bedroll again and waited until Kinlafia finally mastered himself sufficiently to meet his gaze one more.

"Thanks," the Voice said then, hoarsely, gesturing with the empty glass in his hand. Then he wiped wetness from his face with a brusque sleeve and cleared his throat, roughly.

"I still hoped, you know," he said. Janaki raised an eyebrow, and the Voice grimaced. "I still hoped she was alive. Parcanthi and Hilovar Saw her still alive after the fighting. Saw her being taken back to that camp of theirs. I hoped so hard that after we hit those bastards, we'd find her. But we didn't."

"But there were those glimpses of some sort of transport animal," Janaki said gently. "And we didn't find her body, either."

"Do you think I didn't think about that?" Kinlafia demanded harshly, half-glaring at Janaki. "But you've seen that swamp. My maximum range for reaching her was over six hundred miles. Sur, I had to trance to do it, but even if her own Voice had been completely shut down by some head injury, like Hilovar described, I'd have been able to sense her at up to four hundred, maybe even five, after linking that closely during the fight. I'd be able to feel her presence the same way I can feel the direction to the closest portal, and there was nothing. What kind of 'transport animal' could have taken her across four hundred miles of this kind of swamp in less than thirty-six hours?"