Don't be stupid, he told himself sharply. Gadrial wouldn't have let her stand up if there were broken bones anywhere in her body.

Shaylar had to lean heavily on the other woman, but she managed to take the few tottering steps back to the open clearing. The smoke had dissipated, but the smell lingered, and Shaylar swallowed nausea, certain she would carry this stench to her grave. Then they reached the edge of the trees, and her footsteps faltered. She would have fallen, if the other woman hadn't been holding her so tightly.

She couldn't count the bodies. There were too many of them, and the world was spinning again, trying to drag her down into darkness. She fought off the vertigo and the tremors, fought to regain control of her swimming senses. Why had they brought her out here? Why did they want her to see the pitiful remains of the people she loved-and the foul remains of the men who'd killed them? She wanted to scream at them for making her come out here and face this again.

What finally caught her attention was the way the surviving soldiers were standing. They were silent, helmets in hand, and then the tall man began to speak. His voice was very quiet, and Shaylar finally realized what he was doing. It was a eulogy-sacred rites for the dead.

And not just his own, she noticed, forcing herself to look again. She saw the bodies of her own companions, laid out with the same care they'd taken with their own dead. Limbs had been straightened, hands crossed over breasts, crossbow quarrels removed . . .

Her crippled, frustratingly erratic Talent was still functioning well enough to catch the emotions of the woman she leaned against, and she winced as they flooded through her. These people were nearly as devastated as she was, with guilt added to the grief. They were trying to show proper respect, according her people the same honors and rites as their own. Someone was moving among the bodies, now, laying a small object on each man's chest. Whatever the objects were, they were placed with reverence and care. Rectangular and dense, they caught the sunlight with the same odd, crystalline sheen as the terrifying weapons which had hurled fire and lightning at them.

The last one was placed, and the man who'd placed them returned to the edge of the clearing and rejoined his companions. Their commander said something further, then turned once again and looked at Shaylar, with something terrifying and almost pleading in his eyes. He took something from the pocket of his uniform blouse, looked at his men, and spoke again.

His voice was harsh with command, and every one of his men snapped to attention. Their right hands struck their left shoulders in what was obviously a salute, and they held it as the commander drew a quick breath, as if for courage, and touched something on the object he taken from his pocket.

Light flared, so bright Shaylar had to look away, her eyes clenching shut in reflex. When she got them open again, her entire body stiffened. The bodies laid so carefully on the ground were burning.

She choked, tried to whirl away, and lost her precarious balance. She was falling, dragging the other woman with her. Someone was screaming mindlessly, and a corner of her mind realized it was her. Strong hands caught her, kept her from sprawling across the ground, and she fought like a wildcat, striking out with her fists and nails, frantic to escape this newest horror. She might as well have tried hitting a mountain. The hands were strong, terrifyingly strong, yet strangely gentle, and their owner was saying something in a voice filled with raw pain.

And then her Talent betrayed her once again.

His emotions battered her bleeding senses with someone else's regret, so sharp it was like a knife in her own heart. And that wasn't all. She felt his aching desire to erase her suffering, and a bitter acknowledgment that his attempt to show respect to her people had backfired hideously. He would have done anything in that moment to ease her pain, and she knew it. Knew it with the absolute certainty possible only to a telepath.

It was the cruelest thing he could have done to her. She needed an enemy to hate, and he gave her this-his bleeding heart and the agony of a man whose every instinct was to protect and who knew, with a certainty which matched her own, that he'd destroyed her very life, instead.

Shaylar opened her eyes and stared up into his, and then shuddered violently and went limp, undone by that last realization.

Jasak stared helplessly at the tiny, wounded figure slumped in his arms. He'd tried to show her companions the same honor he'd paid his own fallen men. He'd hoped-prayed-she could understand that there were too many dead, too few living to carry them home again. Too many for them to bury in earthen graves if they had any hope of getting the wounded back to safety in time for it to do any good.

He couldn't-wouldn't-leave any of them for the buzzards and the carrion crows. Her companions had been as human as his own men, and he was already beginning to suspect that they hadn't been soldiers at all. They'd been civilians, but they'd fought trained soldiers with a courage-and a ferocity-any man of honor must respect. If anyone had ever deserved proper treatment from their enemies, these men had.

But he should have realized what those fiery bursts of light and flame would do to someone who'd just seen all of her companions slaughtered in deadly explosions of fire. Especially when there was no way for any of them to explain to her what they were doing.

Jasak didn't know what to do. No training manual, no officers' course, covered something like this, and he glanced up at Gadrial, hoping for enlightenment, or even a simple suggestion. But he found her biting her lip, her own face twisted with guilt and a sense of helplessness which matched his own.

But then the slender woman he held lifted her head. Her eyes were wet and wounded, reddened from too many tears, but they studied him for a brief, dreadful eternity. He was unaware he'd been holding his breath until she turned that deadly gaze away, releasing him from the paralysis which had gripped him, and looked out at the still fiercely blazing funeral pyres.

She wrenched away from him and stood watching the flames, her body swaying for balance, her face ashen. When she started to speak, Jasak's pulse jumped in shock. Her voice was a thin, fragile sound against the roar of magic-induced flames. He couldn't know if she was invoking a deity, or speaking a eulogy, or simply saying their names, but a chill ran across his skin as he watched her face the flames and all they meant.

Everyone else was staring at her, as well, and several of his men shivered. Jasak wondered how many of his men she'd killed. She'd still had a weapon in her hand when they found her. Who was she? They didn't even know her name, much less what she was, or why she was here, and the totality of his ignorance appalled him.

She finished speaking at last and closed her eyes. She stood silently for long moments, tears sliding down her cheeks. Her face was bruised and swollen, blood had dried in her hair, and the poignancy of her grief tore at his heart like pincers. She nearly crumpled when Gadrial wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and Jasak started forward to catch her. But she caught herself, stiffened her knees, and stayed on her feet.

"Jathmar," she whispered brokenly, and Jasak watched Gadrial guide her back into the trees and help her sit down beside the man who wore the cuff that matched hers.

Jasak watched for a moment longer, then dragged his attention away and focused on the next task at hand. Somehow, he had to transport his own wounded, a woman with an obvious concussion, and a man so badly injured he literally hovered at death's door, through almost twenty miles of rough wilderness. And somehow, he had to figure out what had happened here, and how a handful of people had slaughtered Fifty Garlath's command in such a tiny handful of minutes. First Platoon had gone into the fight with fifty-six arbalestiers and dragon gunners. Twenty-seven of them were dead, and another nineteen were wounded, some of them critically.

With Threbuch and one other trooper dispatched to find the other side's portal, he had fewer uninjured men than he had wounded, even counting his six engineers and the baggage handlers.

He didn't look forward to the rest of the day.

Haliyar Narmayla struggled to hold back tears as the carriage clattered through the cobbled streets of New Ramath. The cavalry escort riding in front of her cleared the way, giving her carriage absolute priority, and the port master had already been alerted to expect her arrival. The dispatch boat was undoubtedly raising steam even as the well-sprung, rubber-tired carriage swayed and vibrated over the cobbles.

It was impossible to see much, or would have been, if she'd had the heart to look out the window in the first place. New Ramath was a respectable small city-or very large town, depending on one's standards-but it was no huge metropolis. It was also out towards the end of the explored multiverse. In fact, its only reason for existence was to serve Fort Tharkoma, perched in its mountainous aerie almost four hundred miles inland, where it covered both the exit portal from the universe of Salym and also the railhead from Sharona itself. Additional track was being laid beyond Tharkoma, of course. In fact, the actual railhead was currently no more than a few hundred miles short of Fort Salby in the universe of Traisum.

But New Ramath was a critical link in the chain which bound the ever expanding frontier to the home universe. The entry portal for Salym was guarded by Fort Losaltha, almost fourteen hundred miles from Fort Tharkoma. The rail line could have been extended from Losaltha directly to Tharkoma, but Losaltha was located at the Salym equivalent of Barkesh in Teramandor, where the fist of the Narhathan Peninsula and the Fist of Bolakin closed off the eastern end of the Mbisi Sea. A rail line would have had to skirt the northern coast of the Mbisi and penetrate some of the most rugged mountains to be found in any universe. With its long experience, the Portal Authority and the shareholders of the Trans-Temporal Express had opted to avoid the huge construction costs and delay that would have entailed and utilize the water route, instead.

The city of Losaltha, built on the splendid harbor which had served Barkesh for so many thousands of years back in Sharona, was in the process of becoming a major industrial city. For now, however, the Express and Portal Authority were still shipping steamships through to Salym by rail. They arrived as premanufactured modules, which were assembled at Losaltha and then put into service, closing the water gap between Losaltha and New Ramath. In fact, it had amazed Haliyar when she realized just how big the modules the Trans-Temporal Express's specialized freight cars could transport really were. Of course, most of the shipping here in Salym was still of local manufacture-small, wooden-hulled, and mostly powered by sail. That was the norm in the out-universes, after all.

But given the fact that New Ramath's sole reason for being was to handle the bigger, faster TTE freighters and passenger vessels plying back and forth between Losaltha and the Tharkoma Portal, its dockyards and wharves were several times the size one might have expected, with not a few luxury hotels under construction. But it remained a provincial city, for the most part, with few of the amenities those closer to the heart of civilization took for granted. Which had struck Haliyar as particularly amusing when she was first assigned here, since Tharkoma was little more than two hundred miles from Larakesh, the Ylani Sea seaport serving the very first portal ever discovered, and little more than three hundred miles from Tajvana itself. Or, rather, from the locations Larakesh and Tajvana occupied in Sharona.

And why are you letting your mind run on like a crazed tour guide at a moment like this?

Her mouth tightened as the question drove through her brain, but she knew the answer. It was to keep from thinking about the message locked in the agonized depths of that self-same mind.

If only Josam hadn't taken ill, she thought bitterly.

But he had. Josam chan Rakail was the Voice assigned to Fort Tharkoma, and he had the range to reach Chenrys Hordan, in the small town of Hurkaym. Hurkaym was actually little more than a village, built on the island which would have been Jerekhas off the toe of the boot of the Osmarian Peninsula to serve as a link in the Voice chain between Fort Tharkoma and Fort Losaltha. Josam could reach Hurkaym easily, but Haliyar's range was far more limited. That was why she'd been assigned to serve as the New Ramath Voice and link the city to the portal fortress. But Josam had come down with what sounded like pneumonia, and his assistant Voice at Tharkoma had even less maximum range than Haliyar did. Which meant all he'd been able to do was to relay the message to her for her to pass on to Chenrys.

And since I don't have the range to do it from here, either, I'm going to have to get into range in the first place, she thought.

She finally glanced out the window. It was the middle of the night in New Ramath, and without gas streetlamps, the city was wrapped in slumbering darkness, sleeping peacefully. She wondered how that would change when its inhabitants discovered the news she was about to pass on.

Her fingertips traced the hard, round outline of the pocket watch in the breast pocket of her warm jacket. It was hard to believe, even for a Voice, that less than half an hour had passed since the vicious attack on the Chalgyn Consortium's survey crew, five universes, two continents, and an ocean away from New Ramath. Haliyar bit her lip, fighting back a fresh burst of tears.

She'd met Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband on their way through Salym. As a Voice herself, although never one in Shaylar's league, she'd been unable to avoid feeling the echoes of their mutual devotion. Their marriage bond was so strong that no telepath-whether of Voice caliber, or not-could spend five minutes in their company without feeling it, whether she wanted to or not. And that made the agony of Seeing Jathmar's horrible death before Shaylar's very eyes, and then Seeing-and feeling-the even more terrible moment when Shaylar's Voice went abruptly silent, even worse. The experience had been like an ax blow, and now it was her job to pass that dreadful, soul-searing experience on to Chenrys in all its horrifying detail.

She wouldn't have had to do this if Josam hadn't fallen ill. She might have managed to avoid the unbearable immediacy of knowing exactly what had happened to two people she had both liked and admired deeply . . . and envied more deeply still.

The carriage slowed, and she drew a deep breath, preparing to climb down when the door opened. The dispatch boat-an incredibly fast little vessel, powered by the new steam turbines and capable of sustained speeds of thirty knots or more-lay waiting for her, smoke pluming from its two strongly raked funnels. It wouldn't have to take her all the way to Hurkaym. Haliyar's range was almost three hundred miles; getting her as far as the west coast of Osmaria would allow her to reach Chenrys, and that would take the dispatch boat less than four hours. Then the message-and all its grim, horrible imagery-would go flashing further along the transit chain literally at the speed of thought.

There were still water gaps which couldn't be closed by convenient relay stations like Hurkaym, Haliyar thought as the carriage came fully to a halt. Those were going to impose delays much greater than just four hours. Still, the message would reach Tajvana and the Portal Authority's headquarters there in less than a week.

And what happens then, she thought as the coachman's assistant opened the door for her, scarcely bears thinking on.

She stood for a moment, gazing at the dispatch boat under the bright, gas-powered lights of the TTE wharf, and tried not to shiver.

Chapter Ten.

Jasak had to send another message. However little he might relish the thought, he had no choice, and he strode over to Iggar Shulthan.

"Iggy, I need two more hummers."

"Yes, Sir. I thought you would, Sir."

The hummer handler opened a small wire cage, made of heavy gauge mesh rather than the sort of wires and crosspieces wealthy ladies used to house chirping canaries or rainbow-winged near-sprites.

He moved carefully and gently, whispering the whole time, as he retrieved one of the ten remaining hummers from the dozen he carried everywhere First Platoon-or whichever of Charlie Company's subunits he was attached to at the moment-went.

Hummers were so aggressive they required not simply soothing handling, but also carefully controlled incantations that turned off their natural attack instinct. The bird Shulthan had retrieved was a beautiful creature, with iridescent green feathers and a ruby throat. And it was also five times the size of any wild hummingbird, with a stiletto beak that was even larger in proportion.

The Andaran Scouts, like all other trans-universal military organizations, bred magically augmented hummers by the hundreds of thousands. Incredibly fast in the air-a hummer could top a hundred and fifty miles per hour-male hummers were aggressive enough to ward off attacks by any airborne creature smaller than a gryphon. They formed the backbone of the Union of Arcana's long-distance communication network, routinely flying distances of well over a thousand miles.

The most remarkable thing about hummers, to Jasak's thinking, was how they transported messages. Rather than strap a message to the outside of a large, slow bird vulnerable to gryphon attacks, the inventor of the hummer system-an Andaran Scout, Jasak thought, with a touch of familiar smugness even now-had found a way to embed a message inside a smaller, faster bird. Every hummer in service was surgically implanted with a message crystal, wafer thin yet capable of storing complex and surprisingly long messages.

Just as Gadrial and Halathyn used spells to store their notes in personal-crystal displays, hummer handlers used spells to store urgent messages which could be retrieved by the receiving hummer handler. Dragons always gave Jasak's spirits a lift, but hummers were sheer artistry.

"Ready to record your messages, Sir," Shulthan said. "Destination?"

"First bird to the coast," Jasak said. "The second to Javelin Krankark at the portal."

Shulthan nodded and spoke the proper spell to implant the first destination's coordinates, then looked back up at Jasak.

"Begin message, Sir."

"Hundred Olderhan, second Andaran Scouts to Five Hundred Klian, Commander, Fort Rycharn. Urgent. First Platoon of my company has sustained heavy combat casualties. The platoon's combat strength has been reduced to eight-I repeat, eight-effectives after an encounter with what I believe to have been a survey party from another trans-temporal civilization." Even as he said the words, they still sounded impossible, even to him. "Several of my casualties have serious internal injuries," he continued. "They are in critical condition and urgently require a healer's services. I am transporting them to our base camp as quickly as possible, but I estimate that it will require twenty-plus hours from the time chop on this message to return."

Jasak paused, considering what he'd said, wondering if he should say still more. But what could he say until he got back to report in person and answer all of the no doubt incredulous questions Five Hundred Klian was certain to have?

He grimaced and tossed his head.

"Hundred Olderhan reporting," he said. "End of message."

Shulthan spoke again, locking the message properly into the crystal. Then he stroked the hummer gently, whispered to it, and tossed it into the air. It sped away so rapidly Jasak couldn't follow the motion with his eyes even though he'd been waiting for it.

He drew a deep breath, trying to visualize the consternation that hummer was going to create when it reached Fort Rycharn. Then he turned back to Shulthan.

"Second hummer, please," he said.

At least he could include one piece of good news with the message to Krankark. He could reassure Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah that Gadrial had taken no harm, despite the fact that Halathyn had trusted her safety to Sir Jasak Olderhan.

He recorded the message and tried to watch the second bird streak away through the forest. He failed again, as always, and steeled himself to turn back to the remnants of his shattered platoon. He'd done all he could; it remained to be seen whether that-and Gadrial's minor Gift for healing-would keep the wounded alive.

He hoped twenty-five hours of travel time wouldn't turn out to have been an overly optimistic estimate.

Andrin Calirath felt twitchy.

It was an uncomfortable sensation, like feeling swarms of honeybees buzzing just under her skin. It plucked at her nerve endings with a constant, jarring twang, until it threatened to drive her mad. It had plagued her most of the afternoon, too vague to consider a true Glimpse, yet far too insistent to ignore.

The weather hadn't helped. The last week had been fair and fine, like a holdover of summer, but today had set out to remind everyone that autumn was upon them. Like the sensations under her skin, the weather was maddeningly neither one thing nor another, for today had been one of those perpetually drizzling days, too wet to call a mist, too halfhearted to call rain. Below the vast expanse of glass that served the Rose Room as a window, the gardens were all but obscured by the combination of misting rain and approaching evening, and her mood matched the garden-cold, foul, and unsociable. The cheerful chatter of her younger sisters was almost enough to drive her from the room, ripping out handfuls of hair as she went.

Andrin bit down on the impulse-hard. A grand princess of the Ternathian Empire did not display public fits of temper, no matter what the provocation. That stricture-not to mention responsibility-weighed heavy on shoulders that had seen only seventeen changings of the seasons, but she didn't really mind the pressure of her birth rank. Not much, anyway. She enjoyed her many opportunities to help people, to make a difference in their lives. She was grateful for what she had, and for what she could do, but she never forgot who-and what-she was. She was a Calirath, born to a tradition of service to her people, her family, and to herself. Everything else, including any private dreams she might nourish, was secondary.

A coal fire burned steadily behind her in a fireplace built when coal had been little more than a funny sort of black rock and trees and peat had been the only fuel on the island. The vast fire pit could have held half a mature oak tree; instead, it held five separate coal fires, spaced evenly along the length of the fireplace. The scent of coal dust, sharp and thick at the back of her throat, was just one more irritant to be weathered. Winter in Ternathia was nothing like the snow-laden ordeal of Farnalia, and it was still only early October, but the wet, raw day had brought an early chill to the palace. It was more than enough to make her grateful for the fire's heat, and she'd draped a woolen shawl around her shoulders, as well. Its soft, warm touch was like a soothing caress, offering at least a little comfort against the angry honeybees.

The little clock on the mantle chimed the hour with a sprinkling of liquid crystal notes, and the silver-sweet bells were a reminder that yet another hour of her life had been devoured by someone else's schedule. The honeybees snarled louder at the thought, whittling away another few notches of her temper, and she sighed. She loved her mother and her sisters, but on days like this, with the Talent riding hard with sharpened spurs, Andrin desperately needed time alone. Time to focus inward, to ask-demand-of this inner agitation what message lay beneath it.

Another clock chimed, farther down the mantle, setting her teeth on edge. Her mother loved fussy little bric-a-brac, like clocks that chimed with the sound of real birdcalls. The Rose Room, Empress Varena's private domain, was filled with her collection of delicate breakables. Andrin had been terrified to move in this room for the first ten years of her life, for graceful deportment had not come naturally to her. Unlike her younger sisters, she'd been forced-grimly-to learn it in the same way a fractious schoolboy might be forced to learn his arithmetic.

I want out of here! her soul cried out. Out of this room, this palace, this awful sensation of doom . . .

Andrin's Talent never made itself felt for joyous things. That blistering injustice was the reason she was so agitated-no, be honest, afraid, she thought harshly-standing here beside the window, staring hard at the garden she could barely see through the mist and the misery. On days like this, she would have given a piece of her soul to be an ordinary milkmaid or shop clerk somewhere, untroubled by anything more serious than helping some wealthy fribble choose which color of ribbon looked best with a card of lace. Shop clerks didn't have inscrutable portents buzzing like angry bees under their skin.

Precognition was a curse of royalty.

At least Janaki is the heir, she consoled herself.

The stiff set of her face eased a little at that thought. Her older brother was in the Imperial Ternathian Marines, assigned to border patrol in a newly colonized world at the edge of Sharonian exploration. She envied him enormously. The open sky, the freedom to gallop one's horse for the sheer mad delight of it, the ability to actually step through portals, not just read about them from the confines of stone walls and garden hedges. She would have been happy just to ride her palfrey through the streets of Estafel today, despite the drizzling rain that had-by now-turned the capital city's cobbled streets into slick and dangerous ribbons of stone.

She started to sigh again, but checked the impulse before it could become audible. She didn't want to inflict her sour mood on her mother or sisters.

The door clicked open.

Andrin turned, grateful for any diversion, yet so anxious about what might be happening somewhere in the many universes Sharonians now called home that her heart stuttered until she saw that the sound was merely her father's arrival for dinner.

She tried to summon a smile, grateful that bad news hadn't actually arrived on their doorstep . . . yet, at least. Her father was a large man, as were most Ternathians. Not stocky, and certainly not fleshy, but he was built like a bull, with the massive shoulders and thick neck that were the hallmark of the Calirath Dynasty. To her private dismay, and the despair of her dressmaker, Andrin looked altogether too much like her father, and not a bit like her mother. The Empress Varena might stand nearly five feet eleven inches in her stockings, but she looked delicate, almost petite, standing beside His Imperial Majesty, Zindel XXIV, Duke of Ternath, Grand Duke of Farnalia, Warlord of the West, Protector of the Peace, and by the gods' Grace, Emperor of Ternathia.

The emperor who, at that moment, wore a look which so nearly matched Andrin's own mood that she felt herself trying not to gape openmouthed.

Zindel chan Calirath caught the grim set of his daughter's jaw, the stiffness of her shoulders, and knew, without a word spoken, that Andrin felt it, too. He halted in the doorway, halfway in and halfway out, and nearly had the door rapped into his heels. The doorkeeper had been opening and closing the Rose Room door every day at six p.m. sharp for the last twenty years, and not once in all that time had the emperor stopped dead in the middle of the doorway.

But Zindel couldn't help it. The warning that vibrated through him when his gaze locked with his eldest daughter's was as brutal as it was unexpected. He sucked in a harsh breath, totally oblivious to the doorkeeper's frantic, last-minute grab at the door handle. He never even realized how close the door had come to slamming into him as his entire body vibrated with the Glimpse.

Something was going to smash her life to pieces. Soon.

Dear gods, no, not Andrin, a voice whispered inside his head, and his eyes clenched shut for just an instant. Clenched shut on a bewildering dazzle of half-guessed images, so fleeting, so jumbled, they were impossible to capture. Explosions of flame. Weeping faces. A powerful locomotive thundering along a desert rail line, with the Royal Shurakhalian coat of arms displayed on either side of its cab. A great whale rising from the sea in an explosion of foam. Gunfire stabbing through darkness and rain. A city he'd never seen yet almost recognized, a ship flaming upon the sea, a magnificent ballroom, and his tall young daughter weeping like a broken child . . .

His nostrils flared under the dreadful cascade of almost-knowledge which had been the greatest gift and most bitter curse of his line for twice a thousand years and more. He was no Voice, yet he could taste the same splinters of vision ripping through Andrin, as if the proximity of their Talents had somehow sharpened the fragmented Glimpse for both of them, and he bit his lip as he felt her anguish.

But then he fought his eyes open again and saw Andrin biting down on her own distress. He understood the tension singing just beneath her skin, the shadows in her eyes. They were echoes of his own fear, his own gnawing worry, and his eyes held hers as the cheerful greetings from his wife and younger daughters splashed unheard against him, drowned out by the terrible prescience. Andrin's eyes were dark with its heavy weight, all the more terrible because they could give it neither shape nor name, and when she smiled anyway, it broke his heart.