Hell's Gate

Chapter Fifty-One

"HISTORIC VOTE DUE TODAY"

Thaminar Kolmayr barely glanced at the banner headline on the morning issue of the Gulf Point Daily News their new press secretary had brought in. He didn't need to do any more than that, because he was intimately familiar with the story beneath that headline. Indeed, he'd gotten depressingly good at political analysis over the past dreary, endless weeks.

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 Ronnel of Farnalia had probably had a little something to do with it?had dug in their heels in stubborn resistance. Apparently the thought of finding themselves one day living under the rule of Chava Busar's grandchild was more than they could stomach. They were a minority of the total Conclave, but they also included many of the strongest original supporters of the concept of a world empire. Besides, the Act of Unification had required a supermajority for its original ratification. The same supermajority would be required for any amendment of the original Act, and there were enough holdouts to put final approval very much up for grabs.

"In the end," he said, "I suppose it depends on whether or not Ronnel goes on holding out. According to everything I've read, he's one of Zindel's closest allies on almost everything else. I can't believe he won't eventually come around to Zindel's thinking on this issue. It's not as if it's his son who's going to have to marry one of Chava's daughters, anyway."

"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.

Yet it remained to be seen whether or not Ternathia's ruler could talk his own "allies"?including King Fyysel?into accepting an arrangement which would guarantee Chava Busar's dynastic grasp on the crown of Sharona.

"I think, in the end, they'll have to accept," he said finally. "If Zindel is willing, how can they refuse? They intend to make him the Emperor of all Sharona. Are they going to start right out by telling him he doesn't have the right to make this sort of decision for his own family?" Thaminar shook his head. "That's insane."

"And people don't regularly get insane where Chava is concerned?" Shalassar shot back.

"I don't have any easy answers for you, love," he said. "I wish I did. I wish I still believed in easy answers. But the only way we're going to find out is to wait until the votes are counted."

"I know, I know," Shalassar said, and managed to smile at him. He smiled back at her, then folded the paper and deliberately set it aside as she began spooning melon, grapes, and dates onto his plate. He wished that he could put his worries away as easily as he could discard the newspaper, but that wasn't going to happen. Today's vote was so critical that neither of them really wanted to think about it, but he knew they weren't going to be able to avoid it.

Which didn't mean they wanted both going to try to pretend they could.

"Do you have any delegations coming in today?" he asked, deliberately turning away from the vote in Tajvana and concentrating on their own lives, instead.

Shalassar gave him another smile, but he felt the terrible tension in her through their marriage bond. It was just as hard for her to let go of the Unification vote as it was for him.

"I'm not expecting any," she said, shaking her head. "That doesn't mean the bell won't ring anyway, of course."

Her smile turned a little less forced as she added the qualification. An ambassador to aquatic sentients couldn't do her job the way other diplomats did theirs, and Shalassar's life?and that of her family?had always reflected that inescapable reality.

Human-to-human ambassadors' jobs were almost boringly easy in comparison. They simply received written, verbal, or Voice messages about meeting dates, times, and places, then went and had them. They could actually calculate their calendars, at least for a day or so in advance.

The ambassadors assigned to serve the great apes?the mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons, some of the higher monkey species, and so on?lived far lewith ifss organized lives. They couldn't expect comfortable quarters in the fashionable, diplomatic sections of Sharona's capital cities, because they had to live close to the populations they served. So they ended up parked out on the fringes of the wilderness areas set aside for the apes … which allowed primate emissaries to simply walk up to their houses and knock on the door whenever they felt like it. Which they were notoriously prone to do. The apes were much less interested in the sort of formal, regimented protocols and scheduling humans preferred.

More often, of course, contact with the apes was actually initiated from the human side. The human ambassador would find himself compelled to trek out into the wilderness, seeking out the population of apes affected by a proposed development in their area?a construction site, road, or mine?in order to ask the apes' permission to build on their territory.

Sometimes no permission was forthcoming, but those cases tended to be the exception, not the rule. Usually, some sort of quid pro quo could the arrived at. Sometimes the agreements hammered out provided for moving the whole clan into an unoccupied region capable of sustaining them. Sometimes all it took was a gift of technology to help the clan improve its standard of living. More than one large cat had been unpleasantly surprised by sword-wielding chimps protecting their young and infirm, and most of the clans loved steel axheads and saws. Other clans had acquired access to medicines and Healers, paid for by the private developer or government negotiating the treaty.

Word of that sort of agreement generally spread to other clans in the region. Thaminar and Shalassar had smiled over one news story, in particular. The Nishani chimps had allowed mines to be developed in their clan's territory in exchange for medical care. Not to be outdone, the neighboring Minarti chimpanzee clan had plied their telepathic ambassador with questions about what humans might need or want from them. Once they'd discovered that several varieties of rare medicinal herbs which grew in profusion in their territory could be found virtually nowhere else, they'd offered to exchange them for the same medical care.

Horticulturists had been imported to coach the Minarti clan on propagation techniques designed to promote a cultivated supply of the herbs, rather than deplete the wild sources. The delighted chimpanzees had settled down to enjoy their improved health care, tending the plants upon which it depended, and everyone had been quite satisfied by the arrangement.

It was all very human-like … which was one of the reasons it had amused Shalassar and Thaminar so much, since Shalassar's own experiences had been rather different.

For one thing, even chimpanzees had a far better developed sense of time?by human standards, at least?than the cetaceans did. There was, quite literally, no way to predict what hour of the day or night a whale or dolphin might suddenly come seeking the human ambassador. The denizens of the sea lived at an entirely different pace, and in a totally different environment, from humanity or its close cousins, and their perceptions and interests were shaped accordingly. If the cetaceans had even been aware of the Minarti clan's activities at all, they would have thought the entire business was unutterably boring.

Most of the land-dwelling sentients of Sharona (including the majority of humans) felt sorry for and smugly superior to the cetaceans, which had no hands and couldn't use human technology for much of anything. Most cetaceans, on the other hand, didn't think about the apes at all, except to feel sorry for and smugly superior to the hapless primates (including the majority of humans) who were stuck on dry land and unable to exploit a full three-quarters of their home planet's surface. They were totally disinterested in the goings-on of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas, although they'd been forced to modify that attitude where the humans who routinely crossed their home waters were involved.

Human beings might be unable to do much more than barely scratch the shallows of the cetaceans' endless oceans, but they did exploit at least some of the same territory. And since the emergence of Talents among them, it had been the humans who had initiated contact. No one?Shalassar included?quite understood how cetaceans maintained their historical record, but the fact that they did was beyond dispute. And because they did, they remembered the days in which even the greatest and most intelligent of them had been no more than one more food source for humanity … and how that had changed.

There were those, among the cetaceans, who remained wary of, even hostile towards, humanity because of things which had happened thousands upon thousands of years ago. More of them, though, remembered that humanity had altered its actions once it realized that it was dealing with other intelligent species. And even those who remained wary, recognized that at least some contact with human beings was inescapable.

That was where ambassadors like Shalassar stepped into the picture. She'd spent her life establishing contacts with the cetaceans, and even more than the ambassadors to the apes, she'd discovered that the nonhumans with whom she dealt had become the very center of her life and career. She wasn't simply their official conduit to land-dwelling humanity; she and her family had made friendships among the great whales, the dolphins and the porpoises, building intensely personal bridges across the inter-species gap.

Still, she was an ambassador, which meant she had more than a merely personal interest in the outcome of today's vote. She had a professional interest, as well, because if Zindel chan Calirath did, indeed, become the Emperor of a united Sharona, he would also become Shalassar's ultimate superior. In essence, she'd find herself working for him, as his representative to the cetaceans, rather than for the Kingdom of Shurkhal. Which meant that somehow she'd have to find a way to explain to those aquatic intelligences just what sort of bizarre political convolutions those peculiar bipeds were up to now.

That thought brought her back to the vote once again, and she glanced at the clock on the mantle. It was nearly time for the SUNN Voicecast from Tajvana, and she suddenly felt Thaminar's arms wrap themselves around her from behind. She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, clinging to the love pouring through their marriage bond like another, even stronger set of arms, and he kissed the side of her neck.

"Let's go out to the beach," he said gruffly. "I don't want to stay inside."

Shalassar nodded, and they walked outside. They moved well down the beach from the house, past the official Embassy with its dock and bell, to a favorite spot well shaded by palms. Then they sat down on a blanket between the endless sweep of sea and sky. Shalassar sat in front of her husband, leaning back against the solidness of him, and treasured the cherishing strength of the arms about her.

Out here, there was enough sunlight and wind and sky to make the ache of loss feel smaller than it did enclosed by walls and a ceiling. They'd been spending a lot of time out here, in recent weeks, and Shalassar sighed as she leaned her head back against his chest. Memories slipped into their shared awareness. They saw Shaylar skipping down the beach, playing with her older brothers, building castles in the sand and hunting for shells. They saw her laughing in the surf, riding on the back of one of the dolphins who'd come as an emissary to the Embassy.

They sat there for a long time, watching the birds wheeling overhead, listening to their inexpressibly lonely cries as they drifted against the vast infinity of sea and sky. Shalassar's people believed that the human soul rose like a seabird after death, singing its way into the sky in search of its final resting place in the heavens, out in the endless vastness of the ether where the gods dwelt. . . .

Shurkhali believed the soul was like a grain of the endless sands that swept across their arid homeland. When a Shurkhali died, his soul would be blown, like those grains of sand, back into the great drifts of souls that marched across the face of heaven, like the dunes of sand blowing across the face of Shurkhal. The soul of a person found worthy would be swept up and placed like a jewel in the diadem of heaven, to shine as a beacon to guide others on their way home.

Whether her journey had ended as a bird singing its way to heaven, or as a star shining in the diadem of the gods, Shaylar's parents had to believe their daughter had found the peace and happiness reserved for those who had lived life in joy and service to others. Surely her final action, safeguarding every living soul in Sharona by destroying the maps that might have led her killers here, had earned their child a place in the arms of the gods.

"Do you think Ronnel is really on our side?" Ekthar Shilvass murmured quietly in Shamir Taje's ear.

Andrin knew she hadn't been supposed to overhear the Internal Affairs Councilor's question, but she'd always had remarkably acute hearing. And, she had to admit, she found Shilvass' inquiry well taken. The Emperor of Farnalia was on his feet once more, his eyes crackling with fury, as he rebutted the comments of yet another of Chava Busar's allies.

He'd been doing a lot of that over the past several hours, as early morning turned into late afternoon, she reflected.

Taje's lips twitched in what could have been amusement or irritated agreement?or both, Andrin supposed?but the First Councilor didn't respond. Perhaps he was too well aware of all of the attention focused on the Ternathian delegation as the debate raged onward. Andrin wished he'd responded anyway, and, after a moment, she decided to take advantage of her own youthfulness. She didn't do it very often, but she was barely seventeen years old. There were times when being a teenager allowed her a degree of latitude the official adults around her were denied.

"Papa," she said quietly, looking up at her father in the chair beside hers, "why is Emperor Ronnel kicking up such a fuss?"

Zindel chan Calirath found himself restraining an abrupt temptation to burst into deep, rolling laughter. "Such a fuss" was precisely the right word for what his old friend was doing at the moment, although he rather doubted that anyone except his Andrin would have described it with such succinct accuracy. It took him a few seconds to be sure he had his voice under control, then he looked down at her and shook his head slightly.

"Ronnel is just a bit … stubborn," he said, with massive understatement. "To put it bluntly, he doesn't like Chava, he doesn't trust Chava, and he doesn't want Chava anywhere near the imperial succession. Not in any empire that he belongs to, at any rate."

"But if you don't object to it, then how can he?" she asked. "I mean, it doesn't seem very logical."

"Politics often aren't logical, 'Drin," he replied. "People think with their emotions at least as much as they do with their brains?probably more, I often think. Part of the art of ruling is to recognize that. To allow for it when it's likely to work against you, and to figure out how to use that same tendency when it can help to accomplish the things you have to accomplish.

"At the moment, though, Ronnel is convinced?in some cases for some pretty emotional reasons?that he has a lot of perfectly rational reasons to hate and distrust Chava. And he does, actually. To be honest, most people who know Chava have reasons to hate and distrust him."

He considered telling her about his intelligence reports on Chava's use of terror tactics against suspected opponents among his own people … and against his neighbors, as well. The "brigandage" which no one could ever quite stamp out in the mountains and valleys along his borders had been inexplicably on the upsurge over the last couple of decades?a period which just happened to coincide with his accession to the throne. And for some peculiar reason, it appeared to be directed primarily against people the Uromathian Emperor didn't like very much. That was bad enough, but there were other, still darker reports which even Ternathian Imperial Intelligence hadn't been able to definitely confirm or rebut.

He thought about those reports as he looked down into his daughter's clear, sea-gray eyes, and decided not to share them. Someday he might have to, but that day had not arrived yet, and for all of her strength, she was still only a girl. His girl, and the father in him decided that just this once he would shelter her a little longer.

"No one is ever likely to confuse Chava with one of the paladins out of the old tales," he said instead. "Ronnel?and some of the other delegates?aren't about to forget that. And, to be perfectly honest, I suspect that the fact that Ronnel is one of my closer friends has something to do with his present attitude."

Andrin looked puzzled, and he squeezed her shoulder gently.

"I've told Ronnel this is how it has to be," he told her. "But he's not at all convinced that it's how I want it to be. Which is fair enough," he conceded, "since if I had any choice at all, I certainly wouldn't do something like this to Janaki! But the point is that Ronnel is convinced I made my decision for reasons of state, and he's furious at the thought of seeing me backed into this sort of corner by someone like Chava. And don't forget, he's Janaki's godfather, as well. Do think he really wants to see Janaki with Chava Busar as a father-in-law?"

Andrin shook her head with a grimace, and Zindel shrugged.

"To be perfectly honest, neither do I. But we don't seem to have a great deal of choice, and I know your brother, 'Drin. Once everything was explained to him, he'd make exactly the same decision I've made. Getting back to your question, though, it's the combination of Ronnel's own reasons to despise Chava, coupled with the fact that he's trying to 'defend' me from a decision he feels has been forced upon me, which accounts for his decision to oppose me on this particular issue. I did say," he reminded her, "that politics often aren't logical."

"But if this is necessary??" she said, and he shrugged once again.

"Ronnel and I differ on just how necessary it is," he said. "I think we need Uromathia included from the outset. And I think we need to do it in a way which makes it perfectly clear to everyone that we've made an extra effort to accommodate Chava's reasonable demands. I think we can't afford to leave an excluded Uromathia sitting out there like some sort of canker, distracting us while we're trying to gear up for a major war against the Arcanans. And if we're going to include Uromathia, I want to do it in a way which cuts the legs out from under any future attempt on Chava's part to argue that we didn't meet him at least halfway.

"Ronnel's view is that the Conclave's already approved Unification and already approved my election as Emperor. As far as he's concerned, the rest of Sharona can get along quite handily without Uromathia. In fact, I think he'd just as soon see Uromathia excluded in order to keep Chava as far away as possible from the levers of power. And the news that the Arcanans have initiated negotiations leaves Ronnel feeling less of a sense of urgency than he felt when unification was originally proposed. So where I'm willing?even determined, however little I like it?to include Uromathia, he's perfectly prepared to exclude it. And all he has to do to accomplish that is to prevent me from assembling a big enough supermajority to amend the original Act."

He smiled down at his daughter, but his eyes were dark.

"So you see, 'Drin, it's the very fact that he's my friend which is driving him to do everything in his power to defeat what I'm trying so hard to accomplish."

Andrin nodded slowly, but the youthful eyes looking up into his were just as dark, just as shadowed, and he knew. She'd Glimpsed what he had. Neither of them had Glimpsed it clearly?not yet?and, in many ways, that was even more terrifying than it would have been if they had. Over the millennia the Calirath Dynasty had discovered that the more deeply involved someone with the Calirath Talent was in the events he Glimpsed, and the more harshly those events impinged directly upon him, the harder it was to See that Glimpse's details sharply. That was what frightened Zindel chan Calirath now, because there was too much darkness, too much loss and pain, woven through the chaotic scenes he and Andrin had managed to Glimpse for him to force clarity upon them.

But because his daughter shared his Talent, she understood what Ronnel Karone?who did not?never could.

"I do see, Papa," she said quietly, laying her slender hand atop one of his. "Thank you for explaining to me."