Hell's Gate

"No, I'm sure he doesn't," Velvelig said glumly. "You know, I really wish Prince Janaki hadn't brought us this particular guest."

"At least dropping him off with us helped get the Prince out of the combat zone, Sir. That's got to be a plus, however you look at it."

"It certainly does." Velvelig sipped more tea, gazing ruminatively out the window once more. The sun was almost gone, he noticed, leaving the mountain summits etched dark and black, looming against the afterglow. He was going to have to light the lamps, he thought.

"If you don't mind my asking, Sir," Silkash said out of the gathering dimness after a moment, "you mentioned how busy chan Tergis is passing messages back up-chain. How well are the negotiations going?"

"I don't mind your asking, but if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be a regiment-captain sitting out here at the ass-end of nowhere," Velvelig said dryly. "I'd be making my fortune as a Precog back home."

He drank a little more tea, set his mug back down on the desktop, got out a box of matches. He lit the lamps, replaced the glass chimneys and adjusted the wicks, then tipped his chair back and folded his hands behind his head.

"chan Baskay and Rothag are still convinced these people are lying about entirely too many things for my peace of mind," he admitted. "What bothers me most about it isn't that diplomats … shade the truth. Gods know, they do that back home whenever they can, and if our diplomats didn't have Talents on the other side to keep them honest, they'd probably do a lot more of it. But if they're as urgently interested in negotiating some sort of permanent cease-fire as they claim to be, then I'd think they should have a lot more incentive to be at least forthcoming, if not completely honest. But they haven't really given us a lot more information. They seem almost obsessed with the little stuff, the fine details about how we're supposed to go about negotiating, rather than more substantive questions like what we're supposed to be negotiating about. And I don't much care for the attitude their military escort seems to be showing. There've been a couple of potentially ugly incidents already."

"What sort of incidents, Sir?"

"That's just it, they're the stupid kind. People who take umbrage or even insult from i

"But why would they be doing that, Sir?" Silkash's puzzlement showed.

"That's what neither chan Baskay nor I can understand," Velvelig admitted. "Logically, if all they want to do is waste our time, then why talk to us at all?"

"So you don't have any idea why they might be doing it?"

"Actually, chan Baskay's come up with one possible explanation that sort of makes sense. After all, one of the reasons we haven't pressed them harder is the delay in message turnaround between here and Sharona. We don't know exactly how these people communicate over long distances, but if they don't have Talents, they obviously don't have Voices. They may use this magic of theirs to do the same sort of things our Voices can do, but they may also have to physically transport messages, as well, and chan Baskay's suggested that their communications loop may well be even longer than ours. He thinks this Skirvon may be trying to kick grit into the works to slow things down until he can get definite orders?or maybe even until a more senior diplomat can arrive at Hell's Gate with official instructions from home about exactly what they are and aren't willing to settle for when it comes to possession of the cluster."

"And they're bothering to talk with us in the meantime because??"

"I'm not sure, although I suppose it's possible they want to make sure we don't press on with our own exploration beyond the swamp portal. From Voice Kinlafia's Portal Sniffing, we know their entry portal for that universe isn't very close to the swamp portal, but that's really all we know. They might have some particularly important installation or colony much closer to it than that, and they might be trying to divert us from any exploration in its direction."

Velvelig shrugged, clearly unhappy with his own hypothesis.

"I don't say that's the only explanation. It's just the only one I can come up with. And, at least while we're negotiating, we're not shooting anymore. So, in some ways, it's as much to our advantage as to theirs to just keep right on talking. Besides," he gri

Commander of Two Thousand Mayrkos Harshu looked up from the paperwork in his PC as someone rapped gently and respectfully at the frame of his office doorway. His dark, intense eyes focused like a hunting gryphon on the officer standing in the open door. Then he laid his sarkolis crystal stylus on his blotter, much the way another man might have sheathed a sword.

"Enter," he said, and acting Commander of Five Hundred Alivar Neshok obeyed.

"I assume you're here for the afternoon briefing?" Harshu said, raising his eyebrows, and Neshok nodded.

"Yes, Sir, I am. May I go ahead and set up for it?"

"Of course you can, Five Hundred," Harshu said testily. "Unless my memory fails, that's why you're here, isn't it?"

The two thousand had a near-fetish for not "wasting time." Especially with what he considered pointless, u

"Yes, Sir," Neshok said, and moved quickly, uncasing his own crystal and bringing it swiftly on-line. He Felt Two Thousand Harshu's impatient eyes on him while he made his preparations, but he found them far less intimidating than some of his fellow officers did. He had an even more powerful patron of his own, after all. Besides, he was far too well aware of the opportunities of his present assignment to worry about the two thousand's famed temper tantrums.

And that asshole Olderhan probably thought he'd spiked my career with his godsdamned shardonai, the acting five hundred thought with a mental sneer. Gods! He's even stupider than Two Thousand mul Gurthak told me he was.

Neshok hadn't enjoyed the reaming-out mul Gurthak had given him in front of Olderhan and the two diplomats. Nobody would have, and he'd labored under the additional suspicion that mul Gurthak intended to leave him swinging in the wind if Olderhan lodged any formal protests about Neshok's behavior when he got back to Garth Showma. But he'd wronged the two thousand. mul Gurthak had simply been covering his own back, and Neshok's brevet promotion to his present rank and his assignment as Two Thousand Harshu's senior intelligence analyst was sufficient proof of mul Gurthak's continuing confidence in him.

And if it hadn't been for Olderhan's insistence on extending shardon to that arrogant little bitch and her husband?and 'Magister Kelbryan's' backing him up?the two thousand's plan would have worked, he reflected. We didn't know she'd already managed to learn a civilized language, but that only would've made it easier to get her to talk. She'd damned well have told me anything I wanted her to by the time I got through with her.

He let the fingertips of one hand brush the unsleeping eye insignia of the Intelligence Corps on his collar. He'd taken that off, at mul Gurthak's instructions, before he ever went to "greet" Olderhan and his prisoners. Aping the part of a line officer hadn't been all that difficult, however distasteful it might have been, and the two thousand had hoped a fellow line officer might have found it easier to separate Olderhan from his prisoners. And once they'd been separated and "administratively lost" somewhere at Fort Talon, it would all have turned out to have been a completely honest case of confused orders at a junior officer's level. Most unfortunate, of course, but just one of those things. Neshok had never doubted that Olderhan would have been furious, even if he'd gotten his prisoners back with only minor damage, but his own Intelligence superiors would have been quick to protect him, if only behind the scenes, if he'd managed to extract vital information first.