Hell's Gate

Taje had no choice but to nod.

"Very well." Zindel never turned away from the window. "Inform Representative Kinshe that Ternathia formally accepts Uromathia's proposed amendment of the draft Act of Unification. I suppose," his mouth twitched with just a trace of genuine humor, "that the crown of Sharona is worth a Uromathian daughter-in-law."

Chapter Fifty-One

"HISTORIC VOTE DUE TODAY"

Thaminar Kolmayr barely glanced at the ba

Thaminar had never been a particularly political person before, but since the murder of their daughter, he and Shalassar had followed the news coming out of Tajvana with quiet, grieving intensity, for reasons very different from those motivating most other Sharonians. Everyone else was worried about who would rule them, and how their lives would change. Thaminar couldn't bear the thought of more change in their lives?not after the traumatic savagery of the "change" they'd already endured?but he knew it was inevitable. And however little interested he might have been in change for change's sake, he and Shalassar were profoundly interested in justice.

It had hurt desperately, seeing their daughter's photograph and name splashed across newspaper and magazine pages, or embedded in the telepathic Voicecasts. None of it carried anything approaching the sheer agony of Shaylar's final Voice message, but neither he nor Shalassar had the heart any longer to View those Voicecasts. Using their Voices at all, these last two months, kept bringing back the searing pain of their daughter's death. So they read the newspapers, instead, and told themselves they'd almost gotten used to seeing little Shaylar's picture everywhere they turned.

But the endless, aching grief had not yet passed, and he'd come to realize it never would truly heal. It had faded enough to let them pick up enough of the shattered pieces of their lives to move forward again, yet the pain remained, wrapped around the jagged, empty void her death had left in their hearts, and impossible to forget or assuage. To lose a child, no matter how, was agony. To literally know how she'd died, to have experienced with her the horror and terror of her final minutes of life and yet been forever unable to so much as touch her one last time …

Shalassar came in from the kitchen, carrying their breakfast on a tray. He wasn't especially hungry?he seldom was, these days?yet the steaming scent of the coffee was a comforting reminder of normal home life that he welcomed gratefully. They clung to such things, little rituals, familiar things done a thousand ordinary times, as a way of holding themselves together and getting them through each day.

Shalassar glanced at the headline. Just beneath it was yet another black-bordered photograph of Shaylar between the photographs of the only two men in the entire Conclave who truly mattered. The Conclave's delegates had already voted to create a united Empire of Sharona based on the Ternathian model and with Zindel chan Calirath as Emperor. Uromathia's refusal to accept the outcome of that vote as binding upon it had created an enormous amount of anger, but no one had really been surprised. What had been at least a little surprising was the fact that Emperor Chava had managed to convince half a dozen smaller nations to stand with Uromathia by appealing to supposed ancient Ternathian wrongs.

Actually, Thaminar reflected, it probably has less to do with 'convincing' them to go along with him than it does with finding ways of threatening them into going along. He's supposed to be good at that, after all, and every one of them borders on Uromathia.

However he'd gotten their support, it had given his protests an added degree of legitimacy. Thaminar didn't much care to admit that, but he couldn't deny it, either. Whether or not anyone liked it, Chava Busar and his adherents had positioned themselves well behind their single "reasonable demand." Now it remained to be seen whether the nations which had already accepted Zindel of Ternathia as their new world emperor were prepared to accept the amendment Chava had demanded.

"Do you think they'll accept?" Shalassar murmured, biting her lip gently as she set out the breakfast neither of them truly felt like eating.

"I don't know," Thaminar admitted. She paused, a plate of cut melon slices poised in her hand above the polished tabletop in the bright, sunlit dining nook, and looked up at him, and he shrugged. "I would have thought that when Zindel accepted in Ternathia's name that that would have been the end of it. But apparently Chava is even less popular than I'd thought, difficult though that is to believe."

Shalassar surprised him with a slight smile, then shook her head.

"Do you really think there's significant opposition? Or is this another example of the papers needing to play up the drama to help circulation?"

"My dear, that's pretty cynical," Thaminar observed. "Not that it couldn't be true, too."

He smiled back at her, but the truth was that he didn't really know what was going through the minds of the men and women in Tajvana. On the one hand, it seemed remarkably cut and dried; on the other, some of the delegates?the reports suggested that Emperor Ro

"In the end," he said, "I suppose it depends on whether or not Ro

"Oh? And what about Fyysel? How reasonable was he when Chava's name was placed in nomination?" Shalassar challenged, and Thaminar grimaced.

She had a point, he conceded. Fyysel had strongly supported Halidar Kinshe's original proposal. But when Chava tried to put his own candidacy forward, Fyysel had spoken for his subjects' blazing outrage at the very suggestion. If, the King of Shurkhal had said bluntly, the world were stupid enough to ramrod Uromathia's ruler down Shurkhal's throat, it would discover that Shurkhali honor still burned hot and that Shurkhali men and women still knew how to fight a war.

Thaminar hadn't even tried to keep track of the number of times he'd read or heard the phrase "Death before Uromathia!" in his kingdom's newspapers and public debates. He'd been in total agreement with the sentiment, and he'd been well aware, through news reports, that Uromathia had done everything in its power to stir up old and vicious hatreds of Ternathia amongst those nations she'd once conquered in an effort to generate some sort of counterbalancing backlash against Zindel.

Despite the miserable failure of Chava's effort to put his own candidacy forward, he had succeeded in energizing a vociferous lunatic fringe almost everywhere outside the current-day boundaries of Ternathia. Fortunately, that fringe had found itself increasingly marginalized as the debate had raged. And as Zindel had emerged more and more strongly as a reasonable, moderate-minded, honorable man who steadfastly refused to allow his own allies to ram his candidacy down anyone's throat, the tide had shifted decisively in his favor.