"Excuse me, Sir."

Company-Captain Grafin Halifu, commanding officer of the portal fort which had been named in memory of the murdered Voice Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr, looked up from the paperwork on his desk with an undeniable expression of relief as Junior-Armsman Farzak Partha rapped on the frame of his office door. Halifu had never been one of those officers who was particularly good with paperwork. He was conscientious about it, but he managed to get through it only by sheer, dogged persistence. In fact, it was the one part of his chosen profession that he genuinely hated. And the situation had gotten significantly worse after those Arcanan lunatics massacred Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's survey party.

There was more of it, for one thing, and Halifu was prepared to swear it was getting increasingly trivial, as well. This morning's chore, for example, included trying to track down three cavalry mounts which appeared to have evaporated into thin air.

Not that the air's particularly thin around here, Halifu thought grumpily as he glanced out his office window. At least nothing was actively falling out of the sky at the moment. In fact, they'd had the better part of thirty-six hours without any ran at all, but from the look of the low, dark clouds, their record wasn't going to get a lot longer.

"What is it, Farzak?" he asked, resolutely turning his back on the charcoal sky.

"Petty-Captain Baulwan would like to see you for a moment if, of course—" Partha had been Halifu's senior clerk for almost a year now, and his eyes gleamed as he allowed them to drop for a moment to the sheafs of paper spread across the company-captain's desk "—you can spare the time away from your paperwork, Sir."

"Away from my paperwork, is it?" Halifu tipped back his chair and grinned at Partha. "I'll 'paperwork'

you in a minute, Farzak! In fact," his eyes narrowed and his grin grew broader, "I've got a little chore for you. It seems that three of our horses have mysteriously disappeared. Why don't you go ahead and show Petty-Captain Baulwan in, and then take this report—" he picked up the offending sheets of paper and handed them over "—and trot right over to the stables and find out where these three miserable nags are."

"Of course, Sir," Partha replied, and somehow he managed to simultaneously maintain proper military decorum, radiate an air of martyrdom, and make it perfectly obvious that such a routine task was well within the limits of his capabilities, whatever might have been the case for his superior.

Halifu snorted in amusement and handed over the report, then watched Partha depart. The door opened again, a moment later, and Shansair Baulwan stepped through it.

"Good morning, Sir." The petty-captain came to attention and saluted.

"Good morning, Shansair," Halifu replied, returning the salute just a bit less crisply.

Baulwan had only been on-post for a bit over three weeks, and it was clear to Halifu that the Voice still didn't feel totally comfortable with him. In fact, he suspected Baulwan was taking refuge in military formalities precisely because he wasn't comfortable with Halifu. It was, unfortunately, an attitude to which Halifu had become unhappily accustomed when dealing with officers from Eastern Arpathia.

Halifu himself was a Uromathian, and Uromathia—especially, Halifu was forced to admit, under its current Emperor—hadn't proved a particularly friendly neighbor for Arpathia in general.

Halifu didn't like it when he ran into an Arpathian who was prepared to dislike him simply because of where he'd been born. He couldn't really blame them, though, and he had to admit that when he finally got through to one of them and convinced them to separate him from the Uromathian stereotype, he felt an undeniable glow of pleasure.

It's too bad Hulmok is forward-deployed, the company-captain thought. He'd probably be a big help getting Baulwan over the hump.

"What can I do for you this morning, Shansair?" he asked aloud.

"I'm just a little concerned, Sir," the Arpathian Voice said. "I haven't heard anything from Petty-Captain Traygan this morning."

"Well, it's fairly early yet," Halifu pointed out. In fact, it wasn't quite ten a.m.

"Yes, Sir, it is. But it's not that early at Fallen Timbers," Baulwan pointed out in return, and Halifu nodded. In fact, Fallen Timbers was three hours east of Fort Shaylar (and, of course, in a totally different universe), which meant it was almost one in the afternoon there. "They should have broken for lunch by now, Sir," the Voice continued, "and that's when Rokam—I mean, Petty-Captain Traygan—usually sends me a synopsis of the morning's negotiations."

"Maybe they're just running a little later than usual," Halifu suggested.

"That certainly possible, Sir. But when that's happened before, he's at least dropped me a short Voice transmission to let me know about the delay. After all, he knows I'm camped out on the Hell's Gate side of the portal, waiting, whenever I expect to hear from him and he's usually careful about not leaving me hanging around when there's not going to be any Voice traffic to receive after all."

Halifu frowned. Put that way, Traygan's failure to check in with Baulwan did sound a bit peculiar. In fact, his frown deepened, when he put that failure together with the message chan Baskay had transmitted up-chain about Arthag's suspicions, it became more than just peculiar.

He looked back up at Baulwan and saw the same thought in the youthful Voice's eyes. Of course, Baulwan was the one who'd relayed that very message to Halifu. Not only that, but Arthag was also an Arpathian, and one with a steadily growing reputation among his fellow countrymen. Clearly, Baulwan, at least, had taken his and chan Baskay's warning to heart.

"I understand your concern, Shansair," the company-captain said after a moment. "In fact, now that I've had a chance to think about it, you're starting to make me a bit nervous, too." He smiled tightly at the Voice. "On the other hand, we're probably both a little extra jumpy just now."

"I thought about that, Sir." Baulwan seemed to relax a little at Halifu's reaction. "That's why I tried to contact him when he didn't come through on schedule. I didn't get any response, Sir."

"I see."

Halifu grimaced and climbed out of his chair.

"Come with me," he said, and led the way out of his office and across Fort Shaylar's muddy parade ground. He always thought better in the open, and he needed to carefully consider what Baulwan had told him.

"Have you ever had trouble getting through to him before when you initiated the contact?" he asked the Voice as Baulwan walked a respectful half-pace behind him and to his right.

"Honestly, Sir?" The Arpathian shrugged. "I did have trouble making contact a couple of times. Once, he was asleep, and it took me at least half a dozen contact attempts to wake him up. The other time, he was concentrating on something else and it took him a while to Hear me. But both of those were unscheduled contacts. This time around, he should have been expecting to Hear something from me, I'd think, since I hadn't Heard anything from him."

"I see," Halifu repeated.

They reached the foot of the tall, steep, ladder-like stair that zigzagged up to be top of the fort's observation tower, and the company-captain started up it, with Baulwan following. It was a stiff climb, which Halifu made it a point to make at least three times a day on the premise that whatever didn't kill him would help maintain his current belt size, and he was slightly amused, despite his growing concern, as the considerably younger Voice began to puff before they were two-thirds of the way up.

They topped out, and Halifu crossed to the sturdy, split-log railing around the observation platform and leaned forward, resting his elbows and forearms on it as he gazed out through the stupendous portal in front of him.

It'd take a dozen damned forts this size to really cover this portal, he thought, for far from the first time.

No one had ever seen a portal this size before, and their wasn't any real point in pretending Fort Shaylar was anything more than an administrative center. Technically, he was supposed to have enough manpower to let him send out patrols to cover the entire face of the portal for which he was responsible.

Actually, he wouldn't have had enough men for that even if none of his assigned strength had been sent forward to chan Tesh.

Hell's Gate was thirty-seven miles across, which meant the actual frontage to be patrolled would have been seventy-four miles. Seventy-four miles of rainsoaked, incredibly luxuriant, virgin woodland.

Under the circumstances, all he could realistically hope to do was keep an eye on things, relay messages back and forth between chan Tesh and chan Baskay and the home universe, and keep at least a few of his dragoons available for field service in some sort of emergency.

And I've stripped my own support weapons to the bone sending them forward to help chan Tesh, he reminded himself sourly. Not that he—or chan Tesh—had had a lot of choice about that.

"When are you scheduled for your next transmission up-chain?" he asked Baulwan.

"I'm not, really, Sir," the Voice replied. Halifu arched an eyebrow, and the young Arpathian shrugged slightly. "I'm sorry, Sir. I thought you knew that."

"Son," Halifu said with a crooked smile, "there's been so much crap going on out here ever since we met these people that I'm willing to bet there're at least a dozen things people think I know about that I don't."

"I should have seen to it that this wasn't one of them, Sir," Baulwan said a touch stiffly. "I apologize for failing to do that."

"Why don't you save the apologies for something that deserves them?" Halifu said.

"Thank you, Sir." Baulwan seemed to relax just a bit. In fact, he actually allowed himself a slight smile of his own. "To be honest, Sir, we haven't tried to keep a set schedule because Rokam and I are all alone out here. The rest of the Voices are spread almost as thin as we are, and most of us are trying to get as much rest as we can whenever we don't have to be actively transmitting."

Halifu nodded. Fatigue could become a real problem for anyone who pushed his or her particular Talent too hard. In extreme cases, it could lead to Talent burnout, or even death. And Talent fatigue could be insidious, creeping in without being noticed. Voices were particularly susceptible to it, especially if they worked in one of the major Voicenet transmission junctions.