Hell's Gate

"There are three major Ransaran religions, Shaylar, and quite a few subsidiary sects floating around the fringes. I personally belong to the Fellowship of Rahil, and we Rahilians follow the teachings of Rahil, the Great Prophetess. By all accounts, she was a magistron of truly phenomenal ability back in the days before the theoretical basis for magic was at all understood. We believe her abilities in that regard were directly inspired by God as a sign of His favor, and her writings about God constitute the seminal text of our religious beliefs. In the Rahilian view, God is infinite, and as such infinitely unknowable, but a benign and loving Creator who progressively reveals to us as much about Him as finite mortals are capable of understanding.

Like the Mythlans, Rahilians believe that the purpose of a physical, mortal existence is for the individual soul to live and grow?to 'evolve' upward, to use the Mythalan term?by making choices and acquiring experience. But we also believe that God is separate from the universe around us, that He extends beyond and transcends it as an individual distinct from it, and that He seeks an individual relationship with each of us. That was what Rahil taught, at any rate.

"Over the centuries, the Rahilians and the other two major Ransaran religions have spent quite a lot of their time massacring one another over various points of religious disagreement," Gadrial admitted. "We stopped doing that about, oh, nine hundred years ago, I guess. Not that we all turned into sunshine and light where our differences are concerned, of course. But at least all of us got to the point where we agreed that whoever was right, God would probably be fairly irritated with His?or Her?worshipers if they insisted on slaughtering everyone else in job lots simply for being mistaken.

"At any rate, there are three things that all three of our major religions have in common. First, we believe there's an individual God, an all-powerful being who exists outside the material universe, rather than being bound up in it.

"Second, none of us believe in reincarnation, although all of us do believe in the immortality of the human soul. And we believe that each soul has a single mortal existence in which to establish its relationship to God. There's some disagreement among us about what happens to the souls that don't manage to establish the right relationship with God. In fact, that's one of the points we used to kill each other over, back in the good old days.

"Third, we believe each individual must have the greatest possible opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Not simply because all of us agree God wants us to love one another, but because it's in the process of becoming all a person can be, that person is brought closer to God and so to the ability to establish that 'right relationship' we all believe in … even if we're not quite in total agreement over what it ought to be."

She stopped again, gazing at Shaylar, and the Voice nodded slowly. Gadrial was right, she reflected. Assuming that the magister had described the Mythalans and Ransaran viewpoints as accurately?or, at least, honestly?as Shaylar was confident she had, it was scarcely surprising that the Mythalans would hate, despise, and fear everything Ransar stood for. And she could think of nothing someone with Gadrial's religious and philosophical values would find more revolting and cruel than the Mythalan caste system. Which only made the deep and obvious love which had existed between Gadrial and Magister Halathyn even more remarkable.

"At any rate," Gadrial continued, "given the Ransaran views on the preciousness of each individual life, the possibility of any of our major religions?most of which were still quite cheerfully chopping up the adherents of their Ransaran coreligionists at the time?signing off on the notion of trial-and-error experiments on humans was … remote, shall we say. So both the Mythalans and the Ransarans, each for their own very different reasons, outlawed that sort of experimentation on humans from the very begi

"But not on other creatures," Shaylar said, and managed not to grimace when Gadrial shook her head.

The more Shaylar heard about the Mythalans, the more she preferred the Ransarans. Yet it was obvious to her that even the humanistic Ransarans were very, very different from her own people. Most Sharonians would have found it exceedingly difficult to "sign off on" that sort of experimentation upon any creatures, not just humans. There were exceptions, of course, as she was well aware, but the existence of those like her mother, whose Talent allowed communication with sentient non-human species, made them rare. Very few Sharonians would have been prepared to suggest that a cow, or a chicken, was intellectually or morally equivalent to a human being. But, by the same token, very few Sharonians would have been prepared to deny that the great apes and the cetaceans had attained a very high level of intelligence which, if not equal to that of human beings, certainly approached it very closely. In some ways, that same Talent kept them from over-anthropomorphizing the lesser animals, with whom no meaningful contact was possible. Still, by and large, they tended to regard themselves as the stewards of the worlds in which they lived, and the notion of creating experimental monsters would have been highly repugnant to them.

Not that she had any intention of discussing that with Gadrial just now. Especially since, so far, she'd managed to conceal the existence of that specific Talent, despite her mother's life work.

If they ever ask me exactly who Mother's an ambassador to, keeping that particular secret a secret is going to get sticky, she thought. So let's not go there just now, Shaylar.

"So, how does all of this relate to transport dragons and battle dragons?" she asked, instead.

"Well, it was Ransaran magistrons who built the first dragons," Gadrial said, as if she were discussing how to go about baking a cake, Shaylar thought.

"'Built' them out of what?" the Voice demanded.

"There's some dispute about that," Gadrial admitted. "According to at least one tradition, there were still some of the great lizards living in Ransar at the time." She shrugged. "I've always had problems with that particular explanation, myself, since the fossil record seems to indicate that all of the great lizards had died out?rather abruptly, in geological terms?long before dragons were ever developed. Still, there are undeniable similarities.

"At any rate," she continued, as if blithely oblivious to the way Shaylar's eyes were bugging out ever so slightly, "the original dragons were developed in Ransar strictly as beasts of burden. As a way to move cargo quickly from point to point, for the most part, although there are still some wingless dragons in Ransar, where they've been used for centuries instead of horses or unicorns as really heavy draft animals. For the most part, though, their military applications were limited strictly to improving transport. Until the Mythalans got into the act, that was."

"And why did I see that one coming?" Shaylar demanded rhetorically.

"Because you're so clever," Gadrial told her with a wry chuckle.

"I've always rather suspected that Mythalan resentment that we primitive Ransarans had produced something they hadn't played a part in what happened," the magister continued. "After all, to be brutally honest, most of us were pretty primitive compared to Mythal, at that particular point. Hansara was a Tosarian, and Tosaria had evolved a much higher level of civilization than most of the rest of us. My ancestors, for example, were still painting themselves blue and yellow and pickling their enemies's heads as door ornaments at the time. As far as Mythal was concerned, though, all Ransarans were still doing that, and yet the Tosarians had produced not just dragons but Hansara's basic work. Given shakira arrogance, I'm sure they felt an enormous temptation to prove they could do it better than we had. But they weren't interested in simply improving transportation capabilities; they were looking for direct military applications."