The Road to Hell

Chapter Nineteen

January 9

Emm vos Sidus hated Portalis. He hated the crowds of people, the racket, the disgusting melange of Gifted and non-Gifted, and the need to pretend he didn’t hate all that. Even the pristine magic source of the falls emitted a frost-coating mist instead of proper humidity.

The high-climbing city structures were filled with offices and manufactories, with not a palace in the lot. Portalis, on either side of the portal, hardly deserved the name of city. Even the Duke of Garth Showma’s own family had little apartments in the city. A shakira with that demesne would level the mess of trees, build a proper villa with orderly plantings and garden the grounds. Emm would add a few dragon breeding fields and set garthan to working fields and livestock across the larger duchy to support the elite in the city, but Thankhar Olderhan did nothing so useful.

Instead the duke had his sizable living quarters in a corner of the Garth Showma demesne quite a ways distant from Portalis, leased property to merchants and army clerks, and allowed the masses to harvest deadfall timber from his private woods. The Olderhans didn’t even stock the forests with predator game animals.

The Duchy of Garth Showma could be bearable in the summer months, when the wet of the falls cooled the skin instead of freezing to it. Not so in midwinter. Pretending to like Garth Showma’s Snowfall Night festivities was yet another thing Emm hated about Portalis.

As a member of the shakira sent to treat with the upper crust of Andara, he had to lodge in what passed for elegance in a hotel near Garth Showma Institute. The lobby’s wide windows proudly showed the falls choked by ice and snow with only a few of the base station chargers online to repower accumulators. Winter always affected the falls…yet another reason the flawed diamond of Andara could never compare to the brilliance of Mythal.

The Andarans grouped their hotel rooms in squads, small cramped rooms all of a size circled a common room. The clerks assumed a senior officer would share the same quarters and provisions as his men, and that any business traveller with his staff would likewise imitate Andaran military customs.

Andarans were idiots.

Emm vos Sidus took a full grouping. His staff were garthantri, drawn from the subclass who’d demonstrated personal loyalty to their betters for at least three generations. They were as magicless as all garthans but the very the best of their kind and they would adjust the place to better suit his needs while he took a leisurely lunch with an old friend. The common area would be his main chamber with most of the quartering spaces to become holding areas for his clothing, personal necessities, and bathing room. The lot of them would take turns sleeping in the remaining pair of rooms and use the bath down the hall.

They wouldn’t bother him with the details, so vos Sidus put it from his mind. He was shakira. His task was the work of magic and those small duties assigned to him by his seniors., and his job today was a lunch, so a lunch he would have.

The “old friend” in question was a contact and not actually a companion in any true sense, but Emm vos Sidus did what his superiors asked, even if that meant taking up a friendship with an only barely gifted Andaran. And Nosak Urrihan had risen to the highest ranks of the Andarans now. It was only appropriate, vos Sidus agreed, for a person with some magic ability to be placed over so many with absolutely none, but if the man had been Mythalan he would have been carefully ringed all round by a cohort of many-generations-loyal garthantri. And probably with an equally carefully selected tutor. Someone needed to turn Nosak Urrihan’s dabblings into something approximating competence, anyway.

The thought wasn’t entirely fair. Back in his youth, when his duties had been limited to riding dragons, Urrihan might even have been a capable officer, but now the man was retired from military service and held a political appointment in the Andaran Air Force: Undersecretary, Office of Dragon Warfare. Urrihan could be relied on to fly his favorite old dragon breeds every chance he had. For everything else-policy making, the organization of branches and forces-he wasn’t just uninformed, he was actively disinterested in ever becoming more knowledgeable or remotely capable. That made him an exceptionally useful idiot.

Emm vos Sidus made it a point to visit Urrihan at least once a quarter to maintain the fiction of their long-time friendship. Mostly they spoke of dragons. Emm’s family bred the seadrakes, which Urrihan disdained as not true dragons, but since Urrihan didn’t really consider transport dragons worthy of being called true dragons either, it was a friendly old argument.

And the shared luncheons and dinners weren’t that terrible, either, since Andarans made a point of serving their troops good hearty meals whenever possible. Urrihan always made that observation, and Emm vos Sidus always agreed. And he actually meant it. Some truly excellent cuisine was available at this heart of Andaran power. They didn’t serve the exquisite delicacies of Mythal, but there was something to be said for being able to dispense with a taster and enjoy the pantomime play that came with a trip outside his family estates.

In Garth Showma, vos Sidus pretended all people were equal and that he didn’t even notice the poor quality of the spellware hanging about or that those who would have been trained up as garthan in a proper household were to be found here and there begging on street corners. In Portalis, some of the magicless pretended to be artists and played off-key music for coins in a hat and Urrihan seemed to enjoy hearing military marches butchered by street players, so vos Sidus even tossed the savages coins himself now and then.

Mostly he made charitable little gestures in Urrihan’s company, but just in case someone in the Andaran’s extended family ever smartened up enough to run some kind of inquiry, he did it while on his own as well. His duties outside the home estate were clear: make contacts, keep them at a distance, and plant servants in their households.

The girl he’d placed overtly with Urrihan was doing well. No complaints at all. In fact Urrihan was effusive in his praise and a little concerned that her period of study might end too soon, calling her back to Mythalan Falls Academy and leaving a hole in his staffing.

There was no notice at all of the others placed in the man’s employ or the handful vos Sidus recruited among the garthan Mythlan immigrants living in the town. Those were utterly unreliable, since they’d abandoned their original lords and selfishly destroyed the trust their families had spent generations building, but a few words here and there via his own staff would always get them to feed him what he wanted to know.

Combine enough independent semi-reliable sources and a reasonably accurate piece of general intelligence could emerge. Currently he was interested in the mood of the city, and it was leaning strongly against the war.

The common people were horrified by the reports they were hearing. But they were still Andarans at heart, so they supported the soldiers: their brothers, sons, and grandsons in the forward universes. That meant the discontent had to go somewhere else, and it was beginning to focus on the Andaran Army’s senior officers. That was too soon for the plan, but there’d always been a certain flexibility to the schedule, and no one could have anticipated the boon of the encounter with the Sharonian barbarians. Indeed, it seemed likely a good dose of fury towards the Sharonans would help spice everything up…and the Duke of Garth Showma’s own son had brought back two Sharonan prisoners under the odd Andaran honor code.

Emm vos Sidus considered. Yes. Yes. That should do nicely…and I won’t even actually have to do a single thing!

That was good. It would require no extension of his assets or risk exposing anything. The natural fury of an untrained mob of garthan was about to hit the lords of Garth Showma.

The High Lords would be very pleased. Vos Sidus would make the suggestion in his report and then ensure he was nowhere near Portalis in the next few months, when all this came to a head. He’d seen a rough report of the events at the front-as an Andaran handler he was entitled to that information-and the news that currently riled the Andaran people wasn’t going to get any better. Oh no, not by a long shot.

Emm vos Sidus boarded the transport dragon for home content with the multiverse…and pleased with the hell about to rain down on his Line Lord’s enemies.

* * *

The salt and foam of the Strait of Tears lifted her easily while the porpoises played about her. Whale song ran out at a distance, and Cetacean Ambassador Shalassar Brintal-Kolmayr floated with an ease that belied her inner turmoil.

Her ocean guardians didn’t notice the distress. A pod of porpoises crested and dove with the waves around her. The peaceable, friendly creatures were clearly taking turns swimming beside her in case she grew tired and needed a tow back to shore. They were mostly younger ones who hadn’t yet decided who they were with enough conviction to select adult names, and Shalassar floated with the waves, reaching out and listening to the many others speaking and singing in the oceans today.

The cetaceans were discussing things she thought had been decided absolutely a long time ago. The topic at hand was whether or not to consider Arcanans sentient. It was clear that all of the speakers knew beyond any doubt that Arcanans could think, but a more fundamental question was at stake.

The orca wanted it formally agreed that the Arcanans could be eaten freely. Most of the dolphins agreed quite readily with the idea of the Arcanans being eaten, but given their digestive preferences did not intend to actually bite the bad human flesh themselves. Most of the various whale types were somewhat less accepting of the idea.

The discussion hinged on the interpretation of how a finned creature would know if a particular stranded human flailing about at sea was of the Sharonan pod or of the Arcanan pod.

Shalassar listened with growing horror as some of the orca, who had multiple representatives instead of just a single primary, provided detailed descriptions of the taste, crunchiness, and texture of human meat that could be compared with any samples of Arcanan meat if it were ever tasted. Teeth Cleaver, newly elevated to hunter-scout within the pod for his week in the aquarium car, swam a careful distance from these toughest of orca.

One of the porpoises nudged Shalassar gently and informed her that humans hadn’t been intentionally killed or eaten even by the orca in a very long time. Shalassar reminded herself of the cetaceans’ long memories and oral tradition of passing down all knowledge without screening out distasteful bits of history in the way human cultures tended to do. The cetaceans had no paper records to hold the details of things that had happened but which the current generation preferred not to think on too much. For a cetacean everything was either remembered in living minds and passed on via song to the young ones or else it was entirely forgotten.

The cetacean Remember Talent made it possible for those mammalian histories to keep their vivid accuracy over centuries. They had none of the telepathic component of a human Voice Talent, but the ocean’s transmission of sound carried their songs through the deeps just as well as Voice transmission might and no psionic Talent was needed to hear the Rememberer’s song.

And so Shalassar heard in detail about the taste of humans and how the orca used to hunt fishing vessels and overturn them to get at the meat of the large floating clams. The details about breaking the boats and only taking the ones that had drifted out of sight of the others suggested a full understanding that the creatures they’d been eating were thinking beings who could retaliate if allowed to know just what had been hunting them. The orcas weren’t the ocean’s finest hunters by accident. The ease with which they’d once hunted man without humanity managing to notice gave her a chill.

It was also highly informative, however, and Shalassar couldn’t help filing the information away as an explanation for why the orca in particular had never taken offense at the human history-ancient records from before the emergence of Talents-when humans had blithely slaughtered intelligent cetaceans. And the larger whales whose ancestors had been the primary targets of those genocides had also not complained so very much either. The singing thunder-fluke reached an interlude about using a strong tail to destroy boats too tough in construction for an orca pod to take apart, and it occurred to her-not for the first time-how lucky humans were to have developed Talents and to have chosen to stop preying on the cetaceans. There’d been a war, and the humans hadn’t even known they were losing it.

The old history made the water feel colder than the sun’s warmth should have made it. Enough so that for a long moment she even felt uncomfortable floating in the deep waters with these cetaceans she’d been talking with and listening to for years.

The deeper side of this discussion was the absolute certainty the cetaceans had that they would be involved in the portal wars. These weren’t idle plans. The cetaceans fully expected to meet Arcanans one day, to fight alongside Sharonan warships and feast on the flesh of their enemies. The dolphins and porpoises planned to pull away the Sharonans and leave the Arcanans for the orca. The great whales wanted the details of Arcanan ship design so they could break open the hulls more efficiently. They even suggested the Sharonans might build mock-ups for them to practice with. The cetaceans were preparing for war.

Shalassar hoped by the Double Triad that war would never come so far as the Sharonan home universe. The cetaceans hummed their throaty agreement…and sang of portals, great tanks, and traveling out universe.

* * *

Emm vos Sidus had always loved the sea. High waves crashed against the good Mythlan rock as the two natural powers of stone and sea warred against each other, and the native magic soothed his very blood. At home everything felt right. The sea salt flavored each breath, and in the distance his youngest sister could be heard squealing with glee over the frolicking of the newborn hydra seadrakes. It was good to be back on the family estate.

The garthan manufactories and boarding houses hugged the earth out of sight of their betters. A garthantri carrying a filleted pigfish destined for dinner paused for an obeisance before continuing on his run from the butchery to the roasting house. Vos Sidus favored the servant with a nod and the man immediately deepened his bow at the honor of being so noticed. Had he not been carrying food meant for a shakira’s table, the garthantri would have fully abased himself from the first, but one made allowances to ensure an unpoisoned meal.

The Book of Secrets taught that remnants of old curses seethed invisible in the very soil, so the pure ate only of clean food prepared by the hands of the washed. The Book told of many other things besides, but that one was permitted to be known by garthan and was spoken of so widely that even children in Andara and Ransar practiced the ablutions of health before preparing and consuming their meals.

The garthantri held the pigfish high so not even the tail touched the ground as he stopped again for another obeisance at the drake nursery pool. This time the man bowed only once, vos Sidus noted with pleasure. His youngest sister had outgrown her habit of speaking with every garthantri she saw, an unfortunate legacy of a brief fosterage with an Andaran family now corrected.

The raising of a shakira was a complex art with far more challenges than arose in educating garthan children. Vos Sidus was proud to have had a youth of his immediate family selected by the Line Lord as precocious enough to build lines of false obligation with outsiders before even her Mythal Falls novitiate induction. Already little Bre received letters from Andaran girls signed “sister.”

Vos Sidus himself had passed through novice, journeyman and magister training at Mythal Falls Academy with fine marks several years past and then been assigned his lifework by the Line Lord. But as a trained Mythlan magister of good family, it was only natural he would also take up a hobby.

He had. His passion was for the biggest and strongest drakes, known for their stunning ocean gladiatorial contests. It was quite incidental that Andarans mistook that hobby for his true work.

Seasprite, his current favorite, lifted a long gray-green head and nuzzled at his cheekbones with the exquisite delicacy required of a creature nearly ten times human size. Her other two heads remained submerged in the pool snapping and gulping the farmed fishes his family’s garthan servants raised for her feed. These animals had less financial use than their more lucrative flying cousins, but the Sidus family had always enjoyed expanding the scope of the possible with their breeding programs. The hobbies had been mistaken for a family business for quite some time now.

They’d proved with one of Seasprite’s great grand dames that all three heads could be made fully functional. Certain Ransaran magisters had argued it could never be done. And they were undoubtedly right about their own abilities, but no Mythlan shakira had so little faith in the power of magic.

The practical issues of a three-headed beast had presented some formidable challenges, however.

For example, when the originally vestigial secondary heads became equally capable of controlling the body after the prime head was loped off it did create certain control issues. Then there was also the difficulty of controlling the bleeding. But any drake put into the arena these days wore specialized spellware tourniquet collars, so very few of the powerful beasts were lost to head amputation injuries, and crystals embedded in the center of each of the three foreheads controlled which mind dominated. Training varied by beast of course, but Sidus drakes usually had two fighting styles and a third mind trained for docile transport and feeding.

Passivity wasn’t usually a desired setting among any of the families that chose to buy seadrake young, but vos Sidus enjoyed having the beasts entirely calm and nearly puppy like for transport. The best money to be had was for the pit fighters, to be sure, and for those, all three heads needed to be as vicious as possible. Other drakes, with shepherd training and control spellware, were used to corral the pure fighters and move them from training pits into arena-bound slidercages.

A clear sky with brilliant sunlight pouring over the ocean surf marked this morning as a very good one for the day’s fight, and float-bespelled spectator palanquins were just beginning to jostle for position around the distant island.

The Sidus VI breed was being tested against a new Vacus line. They’d captured and bred a kind of shark creature that breathed through gills instead of lungs. Vos Sidus thought it might have some small use as a guard fish around prisons and the like, but the gladiatorial sales would be miserable. The beasties were smaller and tended to clutter the view of carnage with blood and entrails. If it were only the entrails, many shakira would enjoy watching, but put too much blood in the water and even the clearest pools suddenly showed nothing but boring red.

Breeding a special kind of prey fish that didn’t cloud up the waters had been tried, but the interesting fights were always the ones that involved humans in some way. Vos Sidus’s aunt had tried bringing in the great whales for fights, but those fights were too dull. Some pleasure boats still went whale hunting-which was to say they followed behind a pair or a small nest of seadrakes and watched as they found and devoured the larger cetaceans-and vos Sidus had been on a few of those pleasure cruises as a child. Aunt Kellbok had pointed out the garthan ship captains’ maneuvers to set the drakes against only the very largest and toughest of the whales, but he’d agreed with his aunt: cetacean prey wasn’t tough enough for a drake. Whales lacked sufficient intelligence and cunning for a decent fight.

Sometimes, when Aunt Kellbok had used just one drake and set up an ocean arena around a full pod of masked whales-the ones with the black and white coloring that hid so well in the water-she’d entice cetacean combatants to perform a show worthy of a shakira audience. But even then, she’d had to send in a drake youngling bloodied from an earlier fight. When it got dull-because it would get dull-she’d signal the show master to release the mother drake to empty the seas as a grand finale.

The best argument vos Sidus had seen for cetaceans having some modicum of intelligence-more than, say, that of a barnyard cat-was that the larger whales all avoided the Mythlan coasts. That the masked whales still came said something else, but Aunt Kellbok insisted insanity had entertainment value.

Universes beyond Arcana Prime allowed for more varied open ocean shows. In New Mythal, there were still oceans where native creatures didn’t know to swim for their lives the moment they tasted drake blood in the water or heard the bellows of a hunting drake reverberate across the ocean bottom.

Of course Union law forbade the release of drakes into the wild, but a breeder couldn’t truly know his training held until it was tested. The Seadrake Owners’ Association understood that, so from time to time vos Sidus could fill his slidercages and transport a nest of seadrakes to a preserve on New Mythal owned by a cousin of Aunt Kellbok’s.

Sometimes training failed. In those cases, he’d make a discreet report to the Seadrake Owners’ Association and send in a troop of garthan for cleanup. If the team was too slow, a few ships would be crushed or a crew might be eaten, but the accidental fodder were generally garthan of low value, with few years of service left, and the SDO paid well for the use of the land. Every shakira with property near by knew when tests were scheduled to be run and would remove their persons and garthantri well in advance. But there was no point trying tell that to an Andaran or a Ransaran! They didn’t understand that acquiring true wisdom required a certain amount of…breakage along the way.

Every monument worth building killed a few garthan in its construction. That might be unfortunate for the garthan involved, but better a dozen garthan lost than a single shakira maimed, and even the Ransarans understood the value of experience. “A burned hand is the best teacher.” That was one of their own proverbs, although they turned their noses up at the Mythlan equivalent, of course. “Blood buys true value,” as the great vos Hardyna had observed thousands of years ago, and it was true. It was always true, and if the barbarians thought it applied solely to garthan, that only showed how stupid they truly were. Vos Sidus had memorized every proverb in the Book of the Shakira at Aunt Kellbok’s knee before his tenth birthday-most non-Mythlans were still playing at learning their sums at that age-and he knew that proverb applied to all Mythlans. Even the blood of a thousand shakira was nothing to the honor due a Line Lord.

Non-Mythlans didn’t understand context. The SOA used only drake males for arena events outside Arcana Prime for that precise reason. An escaped drake gone feral in Delkor had devastated a fishing community for several decades before a passing magister put the beast down as a favor to a shakira cousin. But when a breeding pair had escaped on New Mythal, it had taken a full company of magisters over a month to hunt down the creatures and all their offspring. If it happened again, the Union of Arcana would expect exactly that second level of effort, even if it were just to clean out the oceans of a wilderness world hardly worth preserving. These annoyances were the cost of working with the uninitiated, but one day every Arcanan would bow to a Line Lord and hold the teachings of the Book of Secrets more valuable than their own hearts.

That would be a lifework worthy of Line Lords. Emm vos Sidus had his own small part to play in the great glory of Mythal, and in the between times he had the drakes. All too often, he found himself wishing he could uncage a nest of seadrakes in the Garth Showma Falls Basin and remake the Union in a bloody baptism, but that, sadly, was not his assignment.

The sand-in-silk frustration that annoyed him the most was that the Andarans had never recognized the military power inherent in the proper use of seadrakes. He blamed their focus on land. Sure people lived on land, but any fool could see over a third of the Arcanan-discovered frontier universe transits required ocean passage to reach the next portal-not to mention that two of the five newly taken portals were on those universe’s equivalents to the North Mythal River and the Evanos Ocean. Now that war with these Sharonian barbarians was afoot, perhaps it was time to finally put together a multiverse nautical power with more teeth than the Union of Arcana Navy. Let the Andaran Army struggle with the arcane logistics of a cross portal war with “gun”-carrying Sharonians. The Mythlan Navy could save them all with a simple seadrake barricade.

And slipping drake mating pairs into hostile universes’ oceans could do wonderful things for the destruction of their economies, vos Sidus reflected dreamily while he petted Seasprite’s long neck.

The great benefit of the seadrake’s amphibious nature was that these beautiful creatures didn’t just hunt the oceans. They claimed the beaches and seaside cities as well…and if Sharonians were anything like Arcanans, more than eighty percent of their population lived on ocean coasts and riverways.

Any trained Arcanan with the right spells could control a drake, but Sharonians didn’t use magic. Every single one was garthan, and their ignorance made them nothing more than walking meat for the seadrakes’ triple rows of teeth.

Vos Sidus scratched the underside of Seasprite’s vestigial wing and she lifted all three heads to hiss in pleasure. Then the dexter side head suddenly snapped to the right, the whole drake launched across the pool, and the delicate plantings screening the handler station broke instantly.

Vos Sidus shook his head in resignation and waited for the gurgling scream to stop before he keyed the spell to force the docile head to resume control. The new servant hadn’t worked out. Seasprite went through handlers faster than his other drakes, but then she also cost less to feed. Unless one started counting the cost of a garthan against her food bill, which he was beginning to seriously consider. These weren’t his valued servants, of course. He used only pit drake handlers on Seasprite. That kind of garthan one bought by the dozen from the prison system, with special care taken to ensure no past members of one’s own estate were included in the lot.

He held Seasprite bespelled with no backup handler for three full minutes, patting her noses, and using her scrub brush to get the worst of the carnage off her faces. Then he stepped back through the bars of her enclosure and retreated across the white sand circle that marked the far edge of her bite reach. Just beyond the line, he released her. The timbre of her hiss changed, but not one of the three heads made a lunge for him. Seasprite knew her range.

A pair of garthantri with long tongs worked from the opposite side to withdraw the remains of the body. Seasprite watched their progress coldly with her sinister head while the other two quite reasonably remained fixed on the magister who’d most recently held control of her minds.

When the garthantri finished retrieving the corpse, one made the sign of Mithanan and spat on the body. Emm couldn’t hear what the other said, but neither showed any care when they dumped the parts into a wheelbarrow and trundled it off to a convict’s pit. Funeral pyres were reserved for honorable servants.

He shrugged mentally, dismissed the garthantri from his attention, and turned back to his original train of thought.

Anyone could operate the pre-charged spells to control a seadrake, he reflected, although few demonstrated the persistent, careful attention required to become a veteran handler. Yet if the Sharonians lacked not only magisters but also even the most rudimentary understanding of the principles of magic, nests of drakes could be sent in entirely handlerless. The Mythlan Navy could never do that in a war against a civilized nation, because the opponent’s magisters or even ground troops armed with spellware would simply take control of the drakes. But Sharonians might not even realize it was possible. This kind of opportunity had never existed before.

There were potential difficulties as well, of course. For example, uncaged drakes in Mythal found without a handler would be re-enchanted by a neighboring house and claimed as feral foundlings under the old estray laws. That sort of carelessness could lead to a century or more of careful breeding going to enrich a rival drake line without even a sum of coin or lot of chattel in exchange. The Siduses had taken a few such opportunities in the past, as had every other member of the Seadrake Owners’ Association when granted the chance, but he certainly didn’t care to give away his stock easily, and he considered the legal difficulties of free roaming drakes in the frontier universes. Some type of branding could work, he decided. And he would have to insist marked drakes be reclaimed only by the respective breeder houses after the end of the war, with offspring to be divided on a pro rata basis determined by share contributions of the possible parent drakes released in each universe.

And the Union of Arcana would need to pay rental fees to the breeders for the use of the animals for the duration of the conflict. It wouldn’t do to have the Union’s other members just assuming that Mythal would pay the heavy blood price of war simply because they were best suited to it and were the only ones who had prepared to fight properly at sea.

* * *

Ullery the Fool patted each long neck of his drake and paced around the beast examining every inch of her armor. The sand of the small, created island off the coast of the Sidus estate burned Ullery’s bare feet, but he did his best not to limp. The shakira would be watching, and Ullery kept all his attention on Silverstreak’s hide as he scratched the base of her dexter neck carefully. The scales were thinner here at the very back of the animal in the indentation where a drake’s garthan driver latched in. The spiny ridges on either side had small, carefully drilled holes which gave the purchase needed to attach his ropes and body netting.

The crystal implants in Silverstreak’s center head were giving her trouble again. Ullery could tell from the way her neck ticked that head in an uncontrolled spasm every few minutes. If they were still back serving the House Belftus, he would have known which of the shakira lords to go to and could have gotten it fixed. But since their sale to House Vacus a fortnight ago, he hadn’t been able to figure out which, if any, of the shakira masters actually cared about maintaining their drake property.

He’d been born a garthan servant, and from certain of his features, he was fairly sure his father had been a member of the Belftus family. But since no Gift had manifested, his bastardry was an embarrassment to be hidden from other shakira. A lord was supposed to only breed true.

Ullery himself had continued to expect to be taken into the family proper long after he should have realized it was never going to happen. Still, his unusually advanced early education had granted him a few advantages. Those had kept him alive when no Gift manifested and his early mistakes earned him a place as a drake rider on the animals used to host spectator fights for shakira amusements. Ullery did at least understand magic theory, even if he utterly lacked the spark necessary to cast spells. He knew how the drake’s spellware worked, and he had the sense to be very, very careful with the control crystal belted across his waist.

The other garthans of the Belftus House had been careful not to offend Ullery lest his possible shakira father choose to take offense. And since Ullery didn’t complain and managed his drakes so cleverly that they never quite caught anyone who tried to swim the straits to leave shakira service, he’d been treated well by his fellows.

But that had been in the last household. In House Vacus, Ullery knew far too few people to really know what his place was. He was beginning to suspect that the reason for the chill distance was that none of the other servants really wanted to get to know him. They’d prefer not to know the man-like-object who’d end up mangled by their House-bred drakes during the next exhibition event.

It was a fair assumption. Except that the last two weekends had passed without a drake-on-drake fight. And just recently orders had come down to begin seeing if any of the drakes could be trained to work together. He’d overheard one of the Vacus handlers muttering worriedly about it. They didn’t seem to think it could be done. And maybe with Vacus drakes it couldn’t. But House Belftus had done it any number of times. The trick was to keep the calm driving head dominant during all the close maneuvers.

Ullery could show them all how to do it…if he survived the next few hours.

The fins in the water around the island were moving in ways he didn’t think were natural. A shark’s head came up with far too wide a mouth for the body and snapped at empty air.

The glare on the surface of the ocean blinded him for a moment, and then Ullery saw the creature clearly in the passing foam. Not natural at all. There were sarkolis crystals on the monsters’ flanks imbedded just before the dorsal fins. Idiotic placement for water flow, but no one asked a garthan’s opinion.

Just behind the fin was the vortex null where natural water magics amplified sarkolis enchantment, but some imbecile had implanted the shark’s control crystals higher up the spine at almost at the spellbreak point. Which meant the ocean would polish imperative-strength spell commands down to mere nudges with every passing wave.

Squeals above from young shakira voices revealed that the controllers had discovered that exact error.

Ullery marked the width of the island. It was all soft sand that felt steady underfoot but the edge dropped off sharply just beyond the waterline. Only about twice the diameter of Silverstreak’s length from bite to tail, it was a created island, probably on a float spell that could drop to the bottom of the sea on a word.

He ran soothing hands down each of Silverstreak’s necks rubbing out tension and encouraging her to stretch and flex. She was going to need to shark hunt for him today. Bludgeoning tail strikes and rapid sarkolis cracking bites should work if he could keep Silverstreak’s delicate inter-talon webbing protected from the razor teeth.

Dark trails followed the sharkbeasts already. The kids had enchanted the teeth to enlarge and sharpen them without considering the damage to gums and jaws.

The mouths were too large for the gullets too. These sharkbeasts wouldn’t be able to feed themselves. Some out of favor garthan would have to do it.

He shivered and Silverstreak vibrated in response. He forced himself to still and calm her anxiety. No good panicking about what might happen at the feed pits this evening when he hadn’t yet survived the afternoon.

A child, announcing himself as master of ceremonies, blew a great horn. The poorly tuned blat earned an eruption of laughter from his fellows.

A teacher of some sort confiscated the horn and restored order.

“Shakira, Multhari, and guests-welcome! The fosterlings and young ones of the House of Sidus present for you this afternoon’s entertainment. Monsters of the deep patrol a classic drake deathmatch!

“Step right up to the red palanquin if you’d like to take your turn handling a sharkbeast. We’ve colorized the sarkolis and the controllers for you so it’s easy to see which beast is yours, but if you have any doubt at all, we have a spotter next to each control.”

Rousing cheers and a flurry of nursemaided small ones hopped onto small platforms and converged on the red palanquin.

“Ask any of our garthantri servants if you need anything at all. Remember your sharkbeasts can’t breath air, so just snap at the drakes when one throws the other into the water.”

A slidercage was beginning the slow float from Sidus Proper to Arena Island. Ullery had heard of Sidus. Every handler had heard of the nightmare Sidus V line. But this cage was big even for a Sidus V, and Ullery had the sinking feeling that the long awaited Sidus VI line might be coming out for first blood.

Silverstreak’s center head let out a low moan and jerked again. She’d seen the cage coming too.

Ullery tested the tension on his straps and practiced deep breaths. If he had to go into the water, he needed to be able to match Silverstreak’s lung capacity. He’d give near anything for an air spell right now, but he’d’ve needed four of them, one for each of Silverstreak’s three heads and one of his own, for it to make any difference.

Belftus had had short-duration breather spells, but Vacus hadn’t bothered to refresh anything to do with his belt crystal. Ullery figured he might have a few gasps left on an old air spell, but if he tried to use that enchantment it might empty the accumulator too much to maintain the control spells. Silverstreak had never yet tried to take a bite out of him, but if the fight ran on long enough she’d get extremely hungry.

Ullery did his very best not to test his drake like that. He’d rather be eaten alive by something else.

The massive slidercage dragged to a stop on empty sand in the middle of the island. And Ullery the Fool finished belting himself in. However bad this got, he’d have the best survival chance on his drake’s back.

The horn sounded again, and the cage bellowed in response. Then all four sides clanged flat into the sand and the roof flew up and away to spiral high over the tops of the audience palanquins.

Ullery didn’t wait to hear the splash. He hunkered Silverstreak down and clamped his precious belt tight against her back. The cloud of dust risen from the cage opening would give him the first and only cover he’d get during this fight. He urged Silverstreak to sidle around the island, feet and tail kept carefully out of the water.

“The House of vos Sidus presents Blackfang Heartripper of their Sidus VI line! And awaiting on Arena Island, from the breeders at Belftus, we have Silverstreak Fleshrender!”

Children cheered. Some threw down pieces of cookie, inadvertently giving away Ullery’s attempt at subterfuge.

He let Silverstreak snap the sweets out of the air before they reached the sand and was rewarded with more substantial cuts of roast and sausages. Iridescent horned crests streaked down all three of his seadrake’s heads, straight to her great club of a tail. She was a lovely creature, and it wouldn’t hurt to have some of the audience on her side.

Silverstreak preened at the sky, and from out of the cloud of sand in the center of Arena Island, a massive black seadrake raised two heads and howled fury. The third head twisted back and struck cobra fast to rip its handler out of the harness straps.

Blackfang’s third head swallowed his handler’s skull. Then all three heads ripped at the corpse’s soft entrails, and gasps from the audience mixed with laughter and applause to acknowledge the fight’s first blood as Blackfang flung limbs and bits of flesh in all directions.

Ullery patted Silverstreak’s neck. A leg still encased in loose trouser cloth landed nearby. It had a shoe.

Blackfang’s sinister head paused long enough to hiss in Silverstreak’s direction. She hissed back and lifted her body high, trying to look bigger and intimidate the much larger beast.

Ullery looked into the sinister head’s eyes and was all but certain it would be impossible to intimidate the uncontrolled monster. Blackfang was operating on pure instinct now, and the sinister head returned to gnawing the body, but the dexter head curled back to watch them. With the control spell broken so abruptly, the large Sidus drake might not even have a dominant head.

Ullery took a wild chance and directed Silverstreak to do something he’d never thought he’d tell a drake to do.

Silverstreak complied instantly. She snapped her center neck forward and closed her jaws around the still dripping human leg. Ullery prayed she would obey the rest of the order too, and somehow-miraculously-she did. She arched her neck and hurled the leg in a high arc. Up, and up…Then it hit the floor of the red palanquin and splashed into the ocean. Blackfang’s dexter head had tracked the full motion. The other two heads snapped back and forth, tracking the sharkbeasts circling the spot where the stolen piece of their kill had hit the water.

The red palanquin veered back, and children clamored at the controls while sharkbeasts swarmed after the leg, some controlled and some not, fighting each other for the taste of blood in the water. That was a mistake, and all three Blackfang heads roared in chorus.

The whole drake dove into the ocean. Nothing got between a seadrake and his kill, and Ullery imagined the points about his tactics that the vos Vacus tutors in the palanquins above would be making to their charges right now.

Silverstreak shivered and trembled with her need to follow, but Ullery held her back with every bit of will he could muster. He let her pick at a bit of cake, dropped from above and missed in the handler’s slaughter, but he had no desire to enter the fray he and Silverstreak had arranged for Blackfang.

But then his drake shied right as a bottle was hurled down at them. It shattered on the beach nearby, and Ullery realized some of the yells above were directed towards him. He glanced up to see Kon vos Vacus gesturing urgently at him to enter the fight.

Ullery didn’t go so far as to shake his head at the Master, but he had no intention of obeying. Still, the spectators needed a show, and as the only remaining handler, it was up to Ullery to give them one. If he didn’t, they’d change something about the arena fight, and it probably wouldn’t be survivable, so he urged the quivering Silverstreak to slink around the edge of the low dune island to give him a view of the ocean melee.

Blackfang’s dexter head cracked the spine of a sharkbeast and tossed it high overhead. It missed the red palanquin but not by very much. Small arms reached out trying to touch this second bleeding projectile before it fell back into the sea.

The crowd roared approval. And cookies rained down from the heavens.

Mostly they fell on Silverstreak who caught them with elegantly arched necks and flicking tongues.

Blackfang’s center head took a frosted coconut puff to the nose and went cross-eyed staring at the thing lodged between the horns of his muzzle.

And that was the point at which Ullery’s drake, dancing in the fall of sweets, slid off the island into the waves herself.

A sharkbeast bit her. Probably entirely by accident in the chum-thickened waters, but Silverstreak’s center head responded with a lightning-quick jawlock on the beast’s dorsal fin and a flip that snatched the creature into the air. And then, just before the jaw should have released for a clean upward toss, the center head spasmed.

The stunned sharkbeast tumbled tail over rictus mouth directly at Blackfang.

The drake’s dexter head caught it just by the tail fluke. The sinister head crunched through the shark’s skull, and the center curved back and forth watching Silverstreak.

Ullery pressed his drake towards the island and she took an unwilling half step in the direction of partial safety.

Then Blackfang’s center head tore out the sharkbeast’s liver and tossed it in a clean throw straight at Silverstreak who swallowed it whole.

There weren’t enough sharkbeasts in the water to satiate both seadrakes, so in the end Silverstreak licked the frosted coconut puff off Blackfang’s nose while Ullery tried to keep his pulse steady and his breath even. Someone else, someone with magic, would have to be the one to tell Silverstreak Fleshrender and Blackfang Heartripper they wouldn’t be permitted to mate.

High above, adults hurried to end the children’s party before the events on Arena Island became too explicit to explain to inquisitive young Mythlan nobles.