"It will kill her," Alazon said softly. "Maybe not physically—not quickly. But it will kill her." She looked up at Kinlafia, and a single tear broke free and trickled down her cheek. "I never really knew her until this entire impossible crisis just exploded in our faces. But now that's changed. And if she marries someone like one of Chava Busar's sons, it will just destroy her inside."
Kinlafia nodded, hearing the pain in her beautiful voice. That pain, he knew, was the reason someone with Alazon's sharp intelligence and grasp of politics could insist that Andrin had to be stopped. And gods knew she was right. If there'd been any way to avoid this ... .
"We're just going to have to hope she's stronger than that," he said. "I've read the entire Act since you gave me a copy. If I could see any way for her to—"
He paused suddenly, and Alazon stiffened in the circle of his arm as she Felt a sudden, incredible cascade of thoughts and emotions tumbling through him. Then he inhaled sharply and looked into her eyes.
"Gods!" he half-whispered. "That's it."
"What?" Alazon demanded.
"I've just had an idea," he told her. "My gods, it's what Janaki Glimpsed!"
"What's what Janaki Glimpsed?!"
"We've got to go find Andrin," Kinlafia told her. "And be sure you bring your copy of the Act!
Epilogue
The sun had set hours ago.
The slider car raced up what should have been the valley of the Razinta River almost silently, but for the rush of wind. It was a cloudy, moonless night, cold and still ... and very, very empty.
The Arcanans called the Razinta the Kosal, and they'd traveled almost eighteen hundred miles across the face of the universe they called Lamia to reach it, racing steadily southwest towards the next portal in their endless journey. From the maps Jasak had shown them, that portal lay some miles south of Usarlah, the capital of the province of Delkrath back in Sharona, almost in the center of the Narhathan Peninsula.
But this Usarlah lay almost a hundred thousand miles from the Usarlah Shaylar had visited as a young university student so long ago.
I've come almost half the distance to the moon from home, she thought, staring out into the darkness, and that's as a bird—or a dragon—might have flown it. Half way to the moon. She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around the sheer distance involved. And we still have almost forty thousand more miles to go.
"You seem ... pensive tonight, Shaylar," Gadrial said, and Shaylar turned back from the window.
The Ransaran magister sat across the small table from her, shuffling the sixty-card deck with slender, adroit fingers. She'd been teaching Shaylar and Jathmar an Arcanan card game called Old Basilisk. The rules weren't all that complex—certainly not any more complicated than several Sharonian card games Shaylar could think of—but the deck had five twelve-card suits instead of the three eighteen-card suits she was accustomed to, which made keeping track of exactly what had been played challenging. Or would have, if Voices hadn't had photographic memories, at any rate.
"I feel pensive," Shaylar admitted. "We're such a long way away from everything I've ever known. And it's so ... empty out there."
"Appearances can be deceiving," Gadrial told her, looking out the window herself. "Back home, all of this is part of the Duchy of Forkasa, one of the oldest and wealthiest independent territories of Shaloma.
Of course, the factors that made Forkasa so wealthy back in Arcana don't necessarily apply in the outuniverses.
And we're still a long way from Arcana or New Andara. But the last time I checked the census figures, Lamia had a population of somewhere around three million, I think."
"Three million," Shaylar repeated. She had to remind herself that Arcana had been expanding into the multiverse for two centuries, almost three times as long as Sharona. Still, the thought that they had three million people living in a universe forty thousand miles from their home universe was sobering, to say the least.
"Well, Lamia's attracted more colonization than a lot of other universes," Gadrial said as she offered the deck for Shaylar to cut. "The distance between portals is shorter than in some, and it's all overland, which helps. And the natural tendency is to spread out to either side of the slider right-of-way, which just happens to run across some of Shaloma's best real estate. Not to mention the fact that some of the most beautiful beaches of the Western Hesmiryan are less than a hundred miles from where we are right now."
She began to deal, and Shaylar nodded in understanding. The Hesmiryan Sea was what the Arcanans called the Mbisi Sea, and Gadrial was certainly right about the Narhathan beaches. Tourism was one of Teramandor Province's most lucrative industries back home in Sharona, and Teramandor beach resorts were famous throughout the multiverse.
"Anyway," Gadrial continued, "I think every universe looks emptier when you see it in the dark. It always makes me feel like there's nothing really quite real out there."
"I've felt that way a lot, lately," Shaylar said in a low voice, and Gadrial's hands paused. She looked across the table at the other woman, and her almond-shaped eyes were dark with sympathy.
"I know you have. And I wish none of this had happened to you and Jathmar."
"We know that, Gadrial." Shaylar managed a smile. "Go ahead and deal, silly!"
Gadrial smiled back and resumed dealing cards. Shaylar watched them fall, listening to the quiet, snapping sounds the cardboard rectangles made as they landed on the table top. She would never have been able to hear that sound aboard a Sharonian train moving at this speed. Indeed, the quiet, vibrationless slider cars continued to amaze her, although she and Jathmar had noticed several weaknesses, compared to old-fashioned, noisy, vibrating railroads.
It had taken them a while to realize just how big a disadvantage the absence of engines was. There was no doubt that the fact that each slider was self-propelled made the slider cars far more flexible, but the price for that flexibility was high. Each slider required its own spell accumulator, and for all their luxury, they were much more lightly built than Sharonian rolling stock ... for reasons which had become obvious as they'd watched the Gifted technicians recharge the accumulators at the stations where they'd stopped. The spells which propelled the sliders were obviously complicated, and it took quite a while to recharge each slider's accumulator. And as Gadrial had explained, when they'd finally asked her about it, there was a reason the cars were so light. The sliders relied upon a variant of the levitation spells used by the cargo pods dragon transports often towed, and those really weren't very efficient on a tonnage basis. From what she'd said, Jathmar (who knew far more about railroads and steam engines than Shaylar did) had calculated that the Arcanans would be lucky if one of their slider cars could transport a quarter of the tonnage one of the TTE's freight cars routinely carted across the multiverse.
It's nice to think we have at least some advantages, she thought moodily as she gathered up her cards and began sorting her hand.
She glanced across the compartment to where Chief Sword Threbuch and Jathmar were engaged in a game the Arcanans called battle squares. It was a complicated, highly stylized wargame using eighteencarved pieces on each side, played across a gameboard that was nine squares wide and nine squares deep. Jathmar had turned out to be surprisingly good at it, and he was pushing Threbuch hard while Jugthar Sendahli kibitzed. She could feel his concentration—and enjoyment—through their marriage bond, and it was obvious that Sendahli was amused by Threbuch's predicament.
Shaylar was glad Jathmar was enjoying himself, but even that was flawed for her tonight. She could feel his concentration and enjoyment, yes, but not as clearly as she should have been able to. Their wedding bond was definitely weaker, and when they'd stopped for the last accumulator charge, Jathmar had tested his Mapping Talent.
It was weaker, too.
In a way, Shaylar was almost relieved. Even in Sharona, marriages and relationships sometimes proved less enduring than the people involved in them might have wished, especially in the face of unexpected stress or anxiety. Very few people could ever have been under more stress than the two of them, and she'd seen more than one marriage bond simply wither and die as the partners drifted apart. The thought of that happening to her and Jathmar was more than she could have borne, and she was almost desperately glad that there was some other reason for what was happening. But even so, the implications of their weakening bond and Jathmar's weakening Talent were nearly as frightening as the thought of losing Jathmar might have been.