incredulity. Janaki couldn't be serious! But when he looked into that young face, so much like a younger version of the official portrait of Emperor Zindel hanging in his office, any temptation towards disbelief vanished.
'Attacked by whom, Your Highness?' he asked instead. Then he shook his head in irritation. 'That's a stupid question, I suppose, isn't it? Who else could it be?'
'I know it sounds crazy, Sir,' Janaki said, 'but some of the details I've managed to strain out of the Glimpse might explain how they could get this far up-chain this quickly. Mind you, I don't know how they did it without any sort of warning getting out, but the short version is that they've got something I can only describe as … dragons.'
'Dragons?' chan Skrithik repeated very carefully, and Janaki snorted a humorless laugh.
'I did mention that I knew it was going to sound crazy,' he reminded Fort Salby's commanding officer.
'Unfortunately, I don't know what else to call them. They're big-in fact, they're godsdamned huge, from what I've Glimpsed sofar-and they fly. Not only that, they breathe fire and … other things.'
Chan Skrithik sat back in his chair, examining his future emperor's face very carefully. Then he drew a deep breath of his own and pointed at the chair on the other side of the table.
'If you'll forgive me, Your Highness, I haven't eaten yet this morning, and my brain doesn't work very well without its morning infusion of caffeine. Why don't you join me for breakfast and tell me just what in Vothan's name is going on?'
'… sometime within the next few days, Company-Captain,' Janaki said a couple of hours later. 'I wish I could be more specific than that, but that's not the way Glimpses work. Not for me, at any rate. I only know it's coming and that they've somehow kept any advance warning from getting out. And that Petty- Captain chan Darma-' he nodded at the only officer present who was even more junior than he was '-
has been unable to raise Fort Mosanki's Voice this morning.'
'I see.' Company-Captain Vargan frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged. 'No one can have everything, Your Highness. The fact that we know they're coming at all is more than we really had any right to expect.'
Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik nodded in agreement. He, Vargan, Petty-Captain Kaliya chan Darma, chan Skrithik's assigned Voice, and Sunlord Markan sat in a row of chairs, facing Janaki as he stood in front of a large- scale, detailed topographical map of Fort Salby and the surrounding territory. Janaki felt remarkably like a junior student, called upon to read his latest research paper aloud to a visiting delegation of department heads.
Not all of whom seemed particularly enthralled by his presentation.
'As Company-Captain Vargan says, we are fortunate to know as much as we do,' Sunlord Markan agreed after a moment, but the Uromathian cavalry commander's expression was more shuttered than the Shurkhali's. He gazed at Janaki with cool, thoughtful eyes, then cocked his head. 'Forgive me … Your Highness, but I appear to be somewhat less familiar with the nature of your family's Talent than my colleagues are. Or, perhaps, I should say that I am less familiar with its limitations. May I ask a question or two?'
'Of course, Lord of Horse,' Janaki replied.
This entire briefing felt awkward. Partly, that was the inevitable result of the fact that his Glimpse remained less than complete at this point. Partly it was because despite his official separation from PAAF service, he still wore the uniform of the Imperial Ternathian Marines (and would continue to do so until he reached home and formally mustered out), which made him the most junior officer in the room, despite his exalted birth. And partly it was because Markan's ambivalent feelings where he was concerned had been evident from the very beginning. The sunlord seemed inclined towards skepticism, as if he suspected Janaki, as the heir to the throne which Uromathia had never quite managed to best (or equal), of trying to use and manipulate him. Janaki didn't like that last point very much, but there was no use pretending it wasn't true. Or, for that matter, pretending it would have been reasonable to expect any other response out of a senior noble of the Ternathian Empire's greatest rival.
'You say that your Glimpse indicates we will be attacked here shortly,' Markan said in excellent, although accented and somewhat overly formal, Ternathian. 'I understand that you can not tell us exactly when-not yet, at any rate. But the question in my mind is whether the fact that you have warned us at all will not alter the events you have Glimpsed, and so invalidate the entire Glimpse, in part or in whole?'
'I see what you're asking, Sunlord.' Janaki gazed at the Uromathian for a second or two while he considered how best to answer the question.
'First, anything that might be altered would happen … downstream from the initial attack itself,' he said then. 'The Arcanans' decision to attack us, the approach route they're likely to take, the timing of the attack-all of those are governed by circumstances which almost certainly can't and won't be changed by any actions we might take prior to their arrival here in response to my Glimpse. That's not absolutely guaranteed, of course, but it's very, very likely.
'Second, Glimpses are never as clear as straight Precognition. Because they relate to the actions and decisions of human beings, they're more … flexible. More 'amorphous,' I suppose. Any Glimpse is in a state of flux right up to the moment the events it concerns actually occur. That's one reason they're sometimes so difficult to interpret or describe to anyone else. Some aspects are very clear, and tend to remain that way. Those are what we think of as the 'core aspects' of a Glimpse. According to the latest theory on how Glimpses work, what someone with my Talent actually Sees is the most likely outcome of human actions and decisions from a potentially huge number of closely parallel universes.' He shrugged. 'I'm not positive the theory is accurate, but it seems to hold up, and according to it, those 'core aspects' represent the points in a Glimpse at which the decision trees of all those universes flow together most strongly, where the outcomes we See are most statistically likely to occur. The less clear aspects are the ones in which the decision trees have greater numbers of branches, so there's less certainty as to which ones are going to be chosen.'
He paused again, watching Markan's face. After a few moments, the Uromathian nodded in understanding, and Janaki continued.
'Up until the moment this attack actually begins, the decision trees are already pretty well set. Oh, it's possible that if we do something in preparation and they find out about it, they might alter their plans as a result. It's unlikely, though, and I don't expect any pre-attack portions of my Glimpse to change very much. Once the attack does begin, things get more complicated, and at that point what we do to meet the attack is definitely going to affect the possible decisions and actions of our adversaries as they respond to our responses. However, that's where what we refer to as the 'fugue state' of my family's Talent comes into play.'
Rof chan Skrithik shifted slightly in his chair. He seemed about to say something, but Janaki gave him the sort of look platoon-captains weren't supposed to give regiment-captains, and the fort's commander kept his mouth firmly shut. He still looked more than a little unhappy, though, and Janaki understood why. Some aspects of the Calirath Talent were carefully not talked about. Including this one.
''thinspace''Fugue state,' Your Highness?' Markan repeated. From his tone, which was no more than politely inquiring, one might have been fooled into thinking he'd failed to notice chan Skrithik's unhappiness, Janaki thought with a wry mental smile.
'No one can deliberately summon or induce a Glimpse, Sunlord. Although my family's obviously been experiencing them for a long time, there are some things about Glimpses no one has ever been able to explain satisfactorily, and we've never been able to make our Talent perform to order, as it were. There are certain sets of circumstances which seem more likely to trigger Glimpses, but no one's ever been able to find a way to do it at will. One thing we do know, though, is that once someone with the Talent experiences a major Glimpse, that person almost always finds himself experiencing a sort of … continuous Glimpse if he himself is directly involved in the events as they occur.'
Markan's eyes sharpened in sudden, intense speculation, and Janaki smiled again, a bit more tartly.
'That's right, Sunlord,' he confirmed. 'That's why battlefield Glimpses have served my family so well upon occasion. It doesn't always happen. For that matter, the occasions on which someone finds himself an actual participant in his own Glimpse are rare, to say the very least. But the odds are very good that my own involvement in whatever happens here will trigger the fugue state, in which case I'll be able to predict-probably at least several minutes ahead of time, and possibly quite a bit better than that-how events are going to depart from my original Glimpse.'
'With all due respect, Your Highness,' chan Skrithik began, 'I don't think having you-'
'Regiment-Captain.' Janaki's quiet voice cut chan Skrithik off like a knife. Fort Salby's commander looked at him, and Janaki looked back.
'Even with Sunlord Markan's men added to your own, you have fewer than four thousand men,' the Crown
