Hell's Gate

Chapter Forty-Seven

"I have to say that this is a heavenly relief," Shaylar sighed, leaning back in her deck chair. "Don't get me wrong," she cracked one eye, glancing at Gadrial as the magister reclined in the deck chair beside hers. "I've gotten very fond of Skyfang, and I'm delighted they were able to fit him aboard, but dragon riding is still pretty … strenuous. Especially for Jathmar and me."

"Especially for you?" Gadrial looked back at her.

"Well, at least you and Jasak have more experience with the entire process."

"We've done it before, if that's what you mean. But if you think having made the same trip on the way out is making it any more restful to make the trip on the way back in, I'm afraid you're mistaken." The Arcanan woman grimaced. "Believe me, I'm not particularly enjoying all those endless hours with the wind whistling around my ears any more than you two are."

"I suppose not," Shaylar conceded with a smile. "And I have to admit, it is fascinating to watch the world rolling by underneath. Jathmar's always had dreams about wanting to fly. I think it has something to do with his Mapping Talent. The fact that his dreams had to come true this way's put a pretty heavy damper on his enjoyment, of course, but there's still a 'little kid in a fairy tale' excitement to it. Of course, it starts to wear a little thin after the first five or six hours in the saddle."

"Oh, you noticed that, did you?"

Shaylar grimaced at Gadrial's teasing tone, and the magister chuckled. Then, reminded of Jathmar by Shaylar's comments, she turned her head, glancing up at the fat lookout pod on the ship's single mast. Jasak and Jathmar were both up there at the moment, gazing out across the endless blue waters of the southern Evanos Ocean. She doubted that they were going to see anything significant from up there, but that wasn't really the point.

Jathmar's emotions remained much less … resolved than Shaylar's where Jasak was concerned. That was undoubtedly inevitable, for at least two reasons, Gadrial admitted unhappily.

First, Jathmar lacked Shaylar's ability to directly sense the emotions of those around her. Shaylar was a Voice. As she'd said, she'd been born and bred to communicate. She couldn't help communicating, even when she didn't want to. That meant she had a much more direct grasp of Jasak's feelings about what had happened. And from several things she'd said, Gadrial also suspected that the Shurkhali honor code was probably quite a lot closer to that of Jasak's native Andara than the one Jathmar had grown up with. Which was particularly ironic, given that it sounded as if Jasak and Jathmar had probably grown up within a few miles of one another on their respective home worlds.

But, second, and possibly even more important, Jathmar was also male. Gadrial tried not to sigh in exasperation, but there it was. There was a zoologist's term one of her friends at the Garth Showma Institute had explained to her. It was "alpha male," and from the moment her friend had explained what it meant, Gadrial had thought it was a great pity that the Andaran military hadn't been required to take courses in zoology. If she'd ever met an "alpha male," it was that paragon of all Andaran virtues, Sir Jasak Olderhan. And if she'd ever met a second "alpha male," it was Jathmar Nargra.

Which just goes to show you that truly irritating male characteristics are inter-universal in scope, she thought grumpily. Rahil! What did I do to deserve two of them at a time like this?

Jathmar knew that Jasak was completely?one might almost say fanatically?dedicated to protecting him and Shaylar from additional harm. But he was also Shaylar's husband, and he loved her, which meant that primitive male wiring of his demanded that he protect her. That he protect her. Which, of course, he couldn't do. The fact that he was totally reliant upon Jasak (the officer whose men had slaughtered all of his and Shaylar's friends, whatever Jasak might have wanted to happen) to provide the protection he couldn't, only made his own sense of frustration and failure even worse. And the fact that Shaylar, as deeply as she loved Jathmar, was comfortable with the notion that Jasak's honor code required him to protect her?and that she looked to Jasak (who was not her husband) as the protector for both of them probably punched more than a few male jealousy buttons, as well.

Then there was the fact that Jasak, in his own invincibly "alpha male" fashion, couldn't conceive of any circumstances which could possibly absolve him of his responsibility to protect his shardonai. That him with a protective attitude not just towards Shaylar, but towards Jathmar, as well. Which, despite the fact that Jathmar's intellect knew better, struck his raw-edged and bleeding emotions as . . . patronizing. Not to mention insulting, diminishing, and infuriating.

That was why Gadrial and Shaylar had effectively packed the two of them off to the lookout pod where they could?hopefully?spend a little time getting over the worst of their mutual prickliness.

Of course they can, the magister thought dryly. And the Evanos is only a little damp.

"Do you think they've said three words to each other the whole time they've been up there?" Shaylar asked, and Gadrial blinked as the other woman's words broke in on her thoughts.

"What?" she asked, and Shaylar snorted in amusement.

"I asked if you think they've said three words to each other the whole time they'd been up there," she repeated, waving one hand at the lookout pod.

"I'd like to think so," Gadrial said after a moment, grinning as they both admitted what was really going on. "I'm not holding out a lot of hope, though."

"Me either." Shaylar's slight smile slowly faded, and she drew a deep breath. "Not that I can really blame either of them. It's an … ugly situation, isn't it?"

"Very," Gadrial agreed with a heavy sigh of her own. "If there were any way we could undo it, we'd?"

"Don't say it," Shaylar interrupted. Gadrial's eyes widened, as if with an edge of hurt, and Shaylar shook her head. "What I mean, is that you don't have to say it. I know it's true, and so does Jathmar, however … uncomfortable he may still be around Jasak. It's just that there's not any point. Saying it won't change anything, and there's no good reason why you should keep beating yourself up over it, apologizing for things that weren't your fault and that no one can change, anyway."

"I suppose not. But in that case," Gadrial smiled crookedly, "what can we talk about to wile away this pleasant little ocean voyage?"

Shaylar chuckled. As nearly as she could figure out, they were traveling from the eastern coast of the great island-continent of Lissia across the Western Ocean to the western coast of New Farnalia. That was almost five thousand miles, which was going to take them around nine days, even aboard one of the Arcanans' marvelous ships. Still, as she'd told Gadrial, she was profoundly grateful for the break in their arduous travels, even if every mile of seawater they crossed did remind her of her mother's embassy back home.

"Actually," she said, after moment, "I've been thinking about what Fifty Varkal and Jasak had to say about the difference between Skyfang and Windclaw."

"Yes?"

"I got the distinct impression that there are more significant differences between 'battle dragons' and what Fifty Varkal calls 'transports' than just their size and maneuverability." Shaylar ended on an almost questioning note and raised both eyebrows.

"Oh, there are," Gadrial agreed. "Mind you, I'm no magistron, and what I know about dragons?or, for that matter, any other augmented species?isn't much more than any other layman would be able to tell you. Well," her lips quirked, "maybe a little more than that, given what I do for a living, but not a lot. Still, if you'd like, I'll tell you what I know."

"By all means, please," Shaylar said, sitting up a bit straighter in her deck chair and rolling slightly up on one hip as she turned to face the other woman more squarely.

"Well," Gadrial began, "as Daris suggested back at Fort Talon, battle dragons are deliberately designed to be faster and more maneuverable than transport dragons."

"'Designed'?" Shaylar repeated. Gadrial looked surprised by the question, and Shaylar gave her head a little shake. "I haven't had much choice but to accept that your people can do all sorts of 'impossible' things, but I guess I'm still just feeling a bit … uncomfortable over the notion of 'designing' a living creature."

"As I said, I'm not a magistron, so it's not remotely my area of specialization," Gadrial replied, "but the actual techniques have been around for a long time. As matter of fact, it's one of the few areas in which Ransar actually led the way in both theoretical and applied research for something like three hundred years."

"Over Mythal, you mean?"

"Exactly." Gadrial looked away, gazing out across the endless, steady swell as the passenger ship sliced through it with a graceful, soothing motion. "It was a Ransaran magistron who first perfected the spells for examining what he called the genetic map of living creatures."

"And what's a 'genetic map'?" Shaylar inquired with an air of slightly martyred patience.

"Sorry." Gadrial looked back at her and smiled. "The word 'genetic' is derived from the Old Ransaran word for race or descent. And the reason Hansara?Rayjhari Hansara, the magistron who developed the original concept and spells?called it that was that it's basically a symbolically congruent representation of the physical characteristics of the creature. It's a fundamental principle of magic that the map is the territory, and once Hansara came up with a way to represent a living organism's characteristics in a fashion which could be visualized and manipulated, it really did become possible to 'design' creatures to order."

Shaylar shivered as if a sudden icy wind had found its way up and down her spine. And, in fact, one had, in a metaphorical way of speaking.

"And does that include people?" she asked after moment.

"No," Gadrial said firmly. Shaylar looked both relieved and skeptical, in almost equal measure, and Gadrial shrugged. "There's no arcane reason it couldn't include people," she conceded. "Human beings' codes can be visualized just as well as those of any other creature. But from the very beginning, any efforts to tinker with humanity were outlawed."

"Even in Mythal?" Shaylar said, with rather more skepticism, and Gadrial surprised her with a harsh bark of laughter.

"Especially in Mythal! The last thing any shakira would want to do is come up with a way to turn garthan into shakira. Given their religion, they'd see it as blasphemous, at the very least. And from a practical perspective?which I personally happen to think is even more important to them than their ludicrous religious concepts?if they were to turn all of the garthan into Gifted shakira, what happens to the existing shakira's slave class? It's been my observation that their 'religious principles' serve their more worldly ambitions much more than the other way around."

"But what about turning garthan into even more obedient slaves?"

"Now that probably would be something that would appeal to the caste-lords," Gadrial admitted with a grimace of distaste. "These days, at least. But at the time the rules and laws which prohibit tampering with humans were being put into place, no Mythalan garthan had any hope of ever managing to escape or defy his overlords. There was no need to turn them into 'more obedient slaves,' because it was impossible for them to be disobedient under the existing system."

"And why did everyone else feel it should be outlawed?"

"Because, at the time, it was all a process of trial and error," Gadrial said. "In fact, that's still the case whenever anyone begins mapping a new species, in a lot of ways. Hansara had found a way to producer congruent map, but it's an incredibly complex chart, Shaylar, and initially, he had no way of establishing the congruency between a particular section of the map and specific characteristics of the creature it represented. So he and his fellow magistrons not only had to come up with techniques to modify the chart, they also had to figure out which parts of it they needed to modify to achieve a specific objective. Most of their initial efforts?for decades, literally?produced creatures which couldn't possibly survive on their own. Or, at best, which were far, far cries from what they'd wanted to produce. No one was willing to allow them to experiment on humans when they might as readily produce a three-headed monster as an improvement on the original model. And, of course, Hansara and his colleagues were almost all Ransarans."

"Which was significant why?" Shaylar asked, and Gadrial paused with an arrested expression.

"You know," she replied after moment, "you speak Andaran so well that I keep forgetting how little you actually know about Arcana. Like all of the reasons, aside from the purely personal, of course, a Ransaran like me would have for disliking a Mythalan."

"Should I take it that one or more of those reasons would have a bearing on all of this?"

"Oh, I think you could probably take it that way. You see, one of the primary causes for the hostility between Mythal and Ransar is that we have totally different religious beliefs. Mythalans believe in something they call reincarnation. They believe that each individual human soul?they call it a 'yurha'?experiences dozens, possibly thousands, of lives, and that the purpose of those lives is for each yurha to become more completely realized?a 'higher being'?in each incarnation. Ultimately, the individual yurha reaches a state of actual divinity, in which it becomes one with the entire universe. That's what they visualize God to be: the entire universe. He's not an individual entity, not a creator, but a sort of … confluence of all of the magical energy bound up in all of creation. That's why the shakira are 'obviously' the highest of the Mythalan castes. Because they're the ones with the Gifts which allow them to manipulate that magical energy, they're clearly much closer to attaining the godhead than anyone else, since they as a caste must consist solely of people with highly evolved yurhas.

"It also justifies their treatment of the garthan on several levels. The function of the garthan is to do all of those dirty, demeaning, physically exhausting jobs the shakira couldn't possibly take the time to do, since it would draw them away from their mastery of magic and thus separate them from the godhead. It would actually be sinful for them to allow themselves to be diverted, since that might cause their yurhas to move downward through their 'great chain of being.'"

"That sounds a little bit like a really distorted version of what some Lissians believe," Shaylar said cautiously. "But the Lissians are among the gentlest, most compassionate people on Sharona."

"Well, Mythalans certainly aren't gentle or compassionate," Gadrial said tartly. Then she sighed.

"I suppose my own experiences with them really do color my reaction," she admitted. "But part of the problem I have with their entire culture is that once you accept their religious beliefs, and the mindset they've developed to go with them, then their treatment of the garthan is perfectly logical and reasonable. They really and truly simply don't understand why the rest of us can't just see that and admit that Mythal's been right all along … which is one of the reasons both Ransar and Andara simply can't stand them.

"As they see it, the whole object of the human race, the whole reason we exist?according to the Mythalans?is for all of us eventually to obtain oneness. And, since they believe in reincarnation, each of us has an effectively limitless number of lives in which our yurha can advance. So no matter what they do to an individual garthan?or to all garthan, as a caste?they aren't really harming that individual, are they? After all, this is only one brief stop in an endless journey, and eventually all garthan?aside, of course, from the inevitably willful or evil ones?will become shakira themselves. In fact, some of the greatest cruelties the shakira have traditionally practiced upon the garthan, like the law codes which take Gifted children away from garthan parents and give them to shakira to raise, are justified on the basis of helping their victims attain enlightenment sooner."

Shaylar looked at Gadrial for several seconds, reminding herself that, by her own admission, Gadrial hated Mythalans. But she'd also come to know Gadrial Kelbryan. If the magister hated Mythalans, it was probably because she despised their beliefs, rather than a case of her despising?or distorting?their beliefs because she hated them.

"So how do Ransaran beliefs differ from Mythalan beliefs?" she asked finally.

"In just about every conceivable way," Gadrial snorted. "First, every Ransaran?with the exception of the Manisthuans?is monotheistic. That is, we all believe there's only a single God, since God is, by definition, infinite and since, equally by definition, there can't be two infinite beings. All of our theologians agreed long ago that if two beings are separate from one another, then neither can be truly infinite, since they have to stop somewhere if there are going to be two of them in the first place. Unfortunately, we're Ransarans. While we may all agree that there's only one God, we don't all agree on who He?or She?is."

The corners of her eyes crinkled with amusement at Shaylar's expression, and she chuckled.

"In fairness to the Mythalans," she said, "and much as it pains me to even consider being fair to them, I can't conceive of anyone who could possibly be more profoundly … irritating to them than Ransarans. It's almost as if God deliberately designed us to drive them crazy. And vice-versa, of course.

"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 beginning."

"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."

Gadrial's amusement of only moments before had vanished.

"Skyfang is a pure transport type. As Daris says, he probably goes clear back to the first egg. Which means he's bigger, stronger, and less maneuverable than a battle dragon, but that he has more endurance and basic lift capability. And, aside from his teeth and claws, he has no natural weapons."

"You mean battle dragons do have other weapons?" Shaylar's eyes widened.

Mother Marthea! she thought shakenly. Surely the things' fangs, claws, and horns are vicious enough! How could even Mythalans want to add still more weapons to their nightmare?

"They certainly do." Gadrial's voice was as grim as if she'd actually Heard Shaylar's thought … and shared it. "The weapons Jasak's men used against your people are called 'infantry-dragons' because they replicate the 'natural' weapons the Mythalans built into their real dragons, Shaylar. Some battle dragons breathe fire?or, rather, spit fireballs. Others throw lightning bolts. And still others, despite periodic efforts to ban the breeds in question entirely, project poisonous gases and vapors."

Shaylar gazed at her in horror, and the magister shrugged. She was obviously sympathetic to Shaylar's reaction, but there was something more than simple sympathy behind that shrug, and she returned Shaylar's gaze levelly.

"I can understand that you find the thought frightening and unnatural, Shaylar," she said. "And I don't disagree with you that building something like that into a living creature is a typically Mythalan sort of thing to do. In fact, I've always thought battle dragons are probably the most horrific battlefield weapons?short of the mass destruction spells which were banned when the Union was formed, at least?that Arcana's ever deployed. But I can't believe your people are that much different from ours when it comes to fighting wars. You've thrown the fact that Jasak's troopers' infantry-dragons burned your people to death into the face of every Army officer you've confronted, and I admit that that's a horrible way to die. But war is full of horrible ways to die, isn't it? Are you going to tell me your people never poured flaming oil onto someone trying to storm a castle wall? That they never blew someone's abdomen open with those artillery pieces of yours?those "mortars"?and left him to bleed slowly to death on the field of battle, screaming in pain? Never used fire as a naval weapon that gave men the choice between burning to death or drowning when their wooden ships went up in flame around them?"

Shaylar started to open her mouth in a quick response, then paused and closed it once more. Gadrial was right, she realized. When it came to the organized slaughter of combat, there were countless horrific ways to die. No one had a monopoly on ghastliness.

"I'm not saying you don't have every right to regard what happened to your survey crew as an act of barbarism," Gadrial said more gently. "If nothing else, your people were civilians, and all you were doing was defending yourselves. But when you think about all the horrors Arcanan weapons could unleash against your people, you need to remember that our people are worrying about horrors just as great coming from your people. Both sides are terrified, and both sides think the people on the other side are barbarians. I pray to God every night that we're both wrong, that Master Skirvon and Master Dastiri are going to sit down with your people and somehow negotiate an end to all of this without one more single person being killed.

"But if Skirvon and Dastiri don't pull that off, then Jasak's father is one of the men who are going to decide what happens next, how Arcana goes to war against Sharona. You already know what Jasak's going to tell him, but it's going to be almost as much up to us?to you, Jathmar, and me?to convince the Duke that prosecuting the war with every weapon at our disposal is the wrong thing to do. And if you're going to help convince him of that, you've got to be able to be brutally honest about just how much barbarism there really is on both sides."

She stopped speaking, and there was no sound except the noise of wind and water for several seconds. Then Shaylar gave a tiny nod.

"You're right," she said. "Or partly right, at least. I'm sure being caught in the explosion of an artillery shell is just as terrible as being killed by one of your lightning bolts. And, yes, my people have used flaming oil and set their enemies' ships on fire with what we call 'Ternathian Fire.' I suppose the only real difference is how we go about inflicting our mutual atrocities, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid so," Gadrial agreed sadly.

"Maybe it's only the fact that I am a civilian," Shaylar continued. "I'd never seen anyone actually killed in front of me before, never even thought about how horrible and terrifying and ugly that would be. And," she managed something that was almost a smile, "something about being on the receiving end of something like that does tend to give you a somewhat biased opinion of just how … humanitarian it is.

"But I'll try to think about what you've said. Especially the bit about helping to convince Jasak's father Sharona isn't simply a pit of horrors waiting to consume Arcana."

"From what I've heard of the Duke, he's not likely to think that, anyway," Gadrial said. "But there are going to be others, as well, and some of them very well may."

"I understand." Shaylar nodded. Then she inhaled deeply and squared her shoulders.

"But you were saying about the dragons?" she said.

"I was saying that they call the infantry support weapons 'dragons' because of the way they replicate dragons' natural weapons," Gadrial said. "But they aren't anywhere near as deadly as an actual battle dragon. The artillery's field-dragons are many times more powerful than the infantry-dragons Jasak's men had with them that day, and much longer ranged. But even the heaviest field-dragon is much less powerful than the weapons built into battle dragons. All of the infantry and artillery weapons rely on charged spell accumulators, but battle dragons are spell accumulators. They charge themselves from the magic field after every shot."

"I'm trying very hard to remember what we were just saying," Shaylar told her a bit wanly. "It's a bit difficult, though, when you tell me about something like that."

"I never said it would be easy. Just that we've got to do it, anyway."

"I know, I know." Shaylar shook her head. "But are you saying that you think it's something about the … magic the Mythalans used to graft those horrible capabilities into their battle dragons that causes them to hate me where transports like Skyfang don't?"

Shaylar asked, deliberately trying to step back from the horrendous vision of dragons flying over Sharona belching death and devastation.

"Probably," Gadrial said, leaning back in her deck chair as if she, too, was grateful to back away from the same vision. "Although, actually, I think it probably has less to do with the weapons themselves than with the changes in the dragons' … personalities, for want of a better word, that went with it. The original Ransaran dragon breeding lines had deliberately emphasized docility. The breeders didn't want something that size which would suddenly decide it ought to be eating its handlers. The Mythalans, typically, decided to 'improve' upon that when they set out to create dragons for combat. So they spliced in several of the characteristics of a Mythal River crocodile." She grimaced once more. "You might say that their personalities are just a little more aggressive than those of a pure transport, like Skyfang."

"I see," Shaylar said slowly, and, in fact, she rather thought she did. She'd sensed a similarity between Skyfang and the huge whales who sought out her mother when they needed an interface with humanity. The dragon wasn't as intelligent as the great whales?or, at least, she certainly didn't think he was?yet there was that undeniably familiar "feel" to his personality. But if Skyfang was somehow similar to whales, then the battle dragons were more akin to the great sharks … or, perhaps, to barracudas.

"That's very interesting," she said after several seconds. "It's a lot to take in, of course … even without your well-deserved little lecture." she smiled crookedly, then she yawned. It wasn't completely feigned, and her smile turned lopsided. "In fact, if you don't mind, I think I'm going to take advantage of the sun until lunchtime and sleep on it."

"By all means, get as much rest as you can," Gadrial advised her with an equally crooked smile. "We won't be getting much of it over the next half-dozen universes or so."

"In that case … "

Shaylar settled back in her deck chair and tucked the light blanket around her legs. Then she gave Gadrial a smile, closed her eyes, and dreamed nightmares of Sharonian nights filled with the ghastly pyres of dragon breath.