Hell's Gate

"You're so proud and conceited you can't even grovel properly!" the two thousand grated. "A man in your shoes should be on his belly begging not to be ordered to commit rankadi!"

The words struck home?and finally pierced the armor of vos Hoven's inflated self-worth. He went rigid for a long, horrified instant, then rolled onto his belly, where he belonged, moaning and covering his head with his chained hands to hide his shame.

"Better!" mul Gurthak hissed.

"M-may I plead with My Lord?" vos Hoven's voice quivered with the tremors ru

"Plead for what? Your miserable life?"

"N-no, Mightiest Lord. That is yours, to end, if you demand it," vos Hoven whispered, then gulped and waited.

"It's good to see that at least a few basic facts continue to rattle around inside that empty skull of yours. What do you plead for?"

"Understanding. I have failed the caste, and I don't know how!"

There was genuine anguish in that confused cry?the anguish of a spoiled, selfish child taught poorly by careless, empty-headed adults. A child now caught in the jaws of a genuinely vicious trap. If he could see and admit that he'd erred without knowing how, there might?just might?be some hope of salvaging something from the ruins.

"What fool raised you?"

vos Hoven cringed under the withering scorn of that question. There was no more profound insult than to openly denigrate a Mythalan's family line. In the world of the shakira, there was nothing more important than family line. The family determined one's position in the caste, just as the caste determined one's position in the world of men and the realms of the gods. Without caste, a man was nothing to the gods. Without family line, a man was nothing to the caste. To be born of a line of fools was to serve the forces of chaos … and to well deserve one's inevitable divine destruction.

mul Gurthak listened to the desperate weeping of the man whose place in the eternal cosmos he'd just ripped so totally and unexpectedly into shreds. The two thousand felt no pity at all. Mithanan's bollocks! That terrible deity, God of cosmic destruction, would wreak vengeance on the entire caste for the utter idiocy of this worm at his feet. Such awe-inspiring stupidity was beyond belief.

"Please, Mightiest Lord," vos Hoven cringed, "will you not instruct me? How have I si

mul Gurthak paced thoughtfully around the creature on his office floor, trying to decide how best to go about attempting to salvage something out of it.

"Explain the purpose of the garthan," he commanded finally, and for just a moment, vos Hoven lifted his face off the floor, staring up at him in total confusion.

"My Lord?" he said, and mul Gurthak reached for patience.

"What is the purpose of the garthan?" he repeated. "Of their entire caste?"

"To serve the shakira," the prisoner managed to get out as he pressed his face back where it belonged: on the floor.

"To serve the shakira?" mul Gurthak glowered down at the prostrate body. "How?"

"As our slaves." vos Hoven's voice was low, tentative. Obviously he wondered why he was being taken through this basic nursery school catechism. "To do whatever we demand."

"Fools." mul Gurthak shook his head almost pityingly. "Triple-cursed fools have had the raising and teaching of you."

"B-but … why are they fools?"

"Garthan exist to make it possible for the shakira to carry out the most critical work in the cosmos: the study and mastery of magic. To understand magic, at all its levels, in all its nuances, is to touch the minds of the gods themselves. To gain admittance into the Divine's sacred presence. To bring one's yurha to a point of growth worthy of Divine notice, as a first step toward achieving oneness with the Divine.

"If the shakira had to plow the ground and grow food out of it, if shakira had to weave cloth and cook and raise the cattle that provide leather for shoes, if shakira had to haul the freight and clean the latrines, no one in all of Arcana would understand magic. No one would be able to use magic. It was Mythal that tapped the Divine spirit and won the Gifts for the human race. It was Mythal that set down the laws of magic, mapped the dimensions of magic, discovered what magic could do when properly harnessed. It was Mythal that built Arcanan civilization, spell by spell, and Mythal did it through the shakira caste's tireless efforts across mille

"But none of that would have been possible without the garthan. Without the magicless masses?unwashed, untutored, unlettered, inferior in every possible sense of the word. Yet without them, Arcana?and the glories of Arcanan civilization?would be nothing more than a collection of illiterate laborers and herders. That is the purpose of the garthan. That is their sole purpose. They don't exist to polish your boots and pop the zits on your worthless arse because you're too godsdamned lazy to do it yourself!"

vos Hoven flinched under the whiplash of that caustic voice, and mul Gurthak snorted harshly.

"Next question. What does caste law say of the man who beats his children in a public place?"

"The Law Giver's holy command is that such a man be punished by his caste-lord in kind, for the disciplining of children is a private matter, to be carried out in the domain of the family line, the privacy of the home. To beat children in public shows lack of judgment, lack of patience, and lack of sufficiently wise instruction of the young entrusted to the family line. These things bring shame to the family line and to the caste."

He was parroting the words by rote, without the slightest understanding of their meaning, mul Gurthak thought disgustedly.

"Under caste law?true caste law, not the bastardized, compromised version forced upon Mythal when the Union formed?what were a family's garthan?"

"Its property."

"A narrow reading. Give me the ancient reading of that law?its full meaning."

mul Gurthak could practically see vos Hoven's mind searching through the texts memorized by rote, repeated recitations spa

"The oldest text I have heard mentioned, although I was never shown a copy of it, Mightiest Lord, mentioned garthan as our … children… ."

vos Hoven's voice trailed off, and he gulped.

"But I didn't discipline the garthan in public!" he protested. "I was careful to do it in private! Away from the eyes of others."

"And that is precisely why you are a fool!" mul Gurthak hissed. "Because you understand nothing. You can parrot back the words, but your brain is full of sand and your yurha is as avoid of understanding as the gulfs between the stars. The words have no meaning in your emptiness, and so you make mistakes?stupid mistakes. Costly ones. Mithanan's balls, do you have any idea of the cost of this mistake? Out here, outside the borders of the homeland, we are all under scrutiny?we are all in public, fool! Is it so impossible for you to understand that there is no privacy?! Now, because of what you've done, every Andaran officer will watch every shakira in uniform, looking for evidence of garthan abuse! And what will any evidence of the 'abuse' of garthan do? It will taint all of us. It will cause these honorbound Andarans to watch our every move. And what will that do to the cause you and I are here to serve? What will that do to our mission?"

The prisoner whimpered, and mul Gurthak sneered.

"Oh, you see it now, do you? A shakira who's watched too closely can't function as we need him to function, can't acquire the seniority we need. You've jeopardized everything the Council of Twelve has spent the last thirty years putting into place. Our whole timetable must come to a screeching halt while we try to make certain that no one's stumbled across what we're doing because of the way you've made all of them look so much more closely at all of us. I'll have to send messages, you utter, cursed moron, warning others to stop. To lie low. Messages that will put me at risk of exposure!"