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."

Chapter Fifty-Two

The bright morning sunlight only made Sarr Klian's mood even darker by comparison.

The final draft of Two Thousand Harshu's reinforcements had arrived last night, and it was, Klian conceded, an impressive force. mul Gurthak had managed to assemble even more fighting power than he'd projected in his original dispatches to Klian. He'd not only managed to dig up two complete Air Force talons, but he'd even come up with an additional four-dragon flight of the rare yellows. Klian hadn't expected that.

The Air Force's battle dragons were divided into flights and strikes on the basis of their breath weapons. The reds (the traditional colors of the original Mythalan war dragons bore very little resemblance to modern dragons' actual colors but still made a convenient shorthand for purposes of reference) were the fire-breathers, although it probably would have been more accurate to describe them as spitting fireballs. They'd been bred as a general attack type, although the "flight time" required for a fireball to reach its target made them less suitable for air-to-air combat.

The blacks were the lightning-breathers, who'd originally been developed expressly to fill that gap in dragon-versus-dragon combat. Their attacks delivered less total damage than a red's, but it was extremely focused. More importantly, it struck with literally "lightning-speed," which meant there wasn't any point in attempting to evade it the way someone might a fireball, if he was fast?and lucky?enough.

Both weapons sites were, of course, also effective against ground targets. No one in his right mind wanted to get in the way of dragon-spawned fireballs or lightning bolts, and it had been two hundred years since anyone had. But however little Klian might have liked the thought of being incinerated or flash-fried by lightning, the yellows were the ones that really gave him nightmares.

Almost every peace organization on Arcana?and a rather surprising number of officers within the Air Force itself?had tried repeatedly to have the yellows banned along with the weapons of mass destruction which had been outlawed when the Union was formed. Although the yellows' opponents hadn't succeeded in getting them completely banned, the Air Force had allowed their numbers to run down drastically. There simply weren't very many of them left, and Klian hadn't imagined that any of them were out here in the Lamia Chain. Nor could he imagine why they'd been sent in the first place, or what possible use anyone in the Commandery might have expected them to be.

Yellows were poison-breathers.

The shortest-ranged of all the dragons, they were also the most lethally effective against unprotected personnel. Their breath weapon had the largest area of effect, and without gas masks and a sound doctrine in their use, there was no defense against it.

They came in several varieties, the most deadly of which breathed what the Healers called a nerve-toxin that was uniformly lethal. Others breathed gases like chlorine, which were horrible enough but at least offered some possibility of survival if the wind was in your favor, or if you could get out of the gassed area quickly enough. But even a tiny concentration of the nerve-toxin was deadly once it was inhaled. There were rumors that the Mythalans had developed contact nerve-toxins during the Portal Wars. If that were true, at least they'd never been used, thankfully, but the existing varieties of yellows were more than enough to make Klian's skin crawl.

Especially now, as he stood on the Fort Rycharn parapet, gazing out across the crowded dragonfield at the rows upon rows of canvas tents. According to the latest returns, Harshu currently had two cavalry regiments and eight infantry battalions, plus artillery support, assembled under his command. That gave him over two thousand cavalry and almost nine thousand infantry, even before he counted the artillerists, the Air Force personnel, and the special combat engineer units. All told, Harshu had better than fourteen thousand men?as many men as many a full division could have boasted?and Klian felt a deep surge of inexpressible bitterness as he gazed out across that crowded encampment and thought how easily he might have contained this situation at the outset if he'd had it under his command.

Assuming you hadn't pissed it away the way you did Charlie Company, he told himself with bleak self-honesty.

He heard the flag above the fort cracking and popping in the crisp wind, and he was tempted to turn around and gaze back at the central office block. But he didn't. There wasn't any point. He'd already heard everything he needed to hear.