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  War Maid’s Choice-ARC

  David Weber

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  Baen Books by David Weber

  Honorverse Novels:

  On Basilisk Station

  The Honor of the Queen

  The Short Victorious War

  Field of Dishonor

  Flag in Exile

  Honor Among Enemies

  In Enemy Hands

  Echoes of Honor

  Ashes of Victory

  War of Honor

  At All Costs

  Mission of Honor

  Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)

  Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)

  The Shadow of Saganami

  Storm from the Shadows

  A Rising Thunder

  Honorverse Anthologies:

  More than Honor

  Worlds of Honor

  Changer of Worlds

  The Service of the Sword

  In Fire Forged

  Honorverse Young Adult Novel:

  A Beautiful Friendship

  Fire Season (forthcoming)

  Empire from the Ashes

  Mutineers’ Moon

  The Armageddon Inheritance

  Heirs of Empire

  Empire from the Ashes (omnibus)

  Path of the Fury

  In Fury Born

  The Apocalypse Troll

  The Excalibur Alternative Oath of Swords

  The War God’s Own

  Wind Rider’s Oath

  War Maid’s Own

  With Steve White

  Insurrection

  Crusade

  In Death Ground

  The Shiva Option

  The Stars at War I

  The Stars at War II

  With John Ringo

  March Upcountry

  March to the Sea

  March to the Stars

  We Few

  With Eric Flint

  1633

  1634: The Baltic War

  With Linda Evans

  Hell’s Gate

  Hell Hath No Fury

  WAR MAID’S CHOICE

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Words of Weber, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3835-6

  Cover art by Dominic Harman

  First printing, July2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  tk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  Cables of blue-white lightning, tangled with knots of livid green, streaked down the ebon heavens, crashing to earth in a coruscating circle around the stupendous, many-turreted structure. The shortest of those turrets towered hundreds of feet above the endless, smooth pavement stretching away in every direction as far as any mortal eye might have seen, and the glare of lightning danced and glittered from the mirror smooth obsidian of which the enormous palace had been built. Or formed, perhaps. There were no tool marks, no lines between blocks of masonry, on that titanic façade, and the light—such as it was—that glowed from its narrow window slits was a pestilential green, less brilliant than the corruption of that lightning yet more sullen, more...poisonous.

  Fresh lightning hammered down, replenishing the glaring circle, feeding it, keeping it alive while thunder echoed and rolled and bellowed. Each braided strand lit the purple-bellied clouds from within, momentarily etching their swirling depths upon the eye, and strange, unclean shapes flew in those briefly illuminated deeps. One of those shapes plummeted from the clouds, sweeping lower, riding through the chinks of darkness between the lightning’s pickets. Larger it grew, and larger, insectlike head armed with brutal pincers, enormous bat wings and mighty talons throwing back the glare of lightning until it seemed gilded in the eye-tearing fury of the seething heavens.

  At the very last moment it flared its wings and settled upon the balcony of the very highest turret, a thousand feet and more above the lightning-crowned pavement. The size of that obsidian palace dwarfed even its stature, and a rider stepped from its back to the balcony and disappeared within.

  More lightning sizzled and howled out of the darkness, smashing into the earth with redoubled ferocity, bolt following bolt, driving that circle of fury higher and brighter as if that flying shape’s arrival had been a signal, and perhaps it had.

  * * *

  The throne room was impossibly vast.

  It couldn’t possibly have been as large as it seemed, and yet it was. In some way no mortal could have described, it was vaster than whole worlds and yet small enough the purple-cloaked figure which swept into it could cross it in no more than a dozen strides, and a strange perfume—sweet and seductive, yet undergirt by the scent of something long dead—drifted on its air. The newcomer ignored the six others who had been gathered there, awaiting his arrival. He stalked past them, ascending the high throne against the huge chamber’s rear wall and seated himself, and the wan, green radiance which had filled the room flared abruptly higher and brighter as he sat. A nimbus of deadly green fire hissed above his hooded head, and balls of the same lurid radiance crackled into existence high overhead, dancing and swirling beneath the soaring, vaulted ceiling like lost galaxies trapped in the throne room’s miasma of incense.

  Like the palace itself, the throne was a single, seamlessly extruded outcropping of obsidian, but this obsidian was veined with gold, and its surface glittered with diamonds, emeralds, and precious gems. The arms ended in carven demon’s faces, each encrusted with more gold, more gems, and each held a mangled, dismembered body in its fangs. Rubies dripped from their jaws in glittering, lovingly detailed streams of blood, and a huge, haughty face looked down from the wall above the throne, etched across the stone in bas-relief and glittering with still more gold. As the figure seated upon the throne threw back the hood of his cloak, the face which was revealed matched that upon the wall.

  Phrobus Orfro, once the seventh son of Orr All-Father and Kontifrio, gazed down upon his chosen mate and their children, and his expression was not a happy one.

  “I wonder, sometimes, which of you is the least competent,” he said abruptly. “The competition is so fierce I can’t make up my mind between you.”

  His voice was deep, beautifully modulated, yet something seemed to scream somewhere inside those resonant, perfectly articulated tones, and only one of the six beings gathered before him returned his glare levelly. Krashnark Phrofro stood with square shoulders, arms crossed, refusing to cringe, and Phrobus’ eyes glittered. Yet he let the defiance—if such it was—pass. Krashnark was the strongest of his children, the only one who might have openly challenged his own position, but there was scant fear of that. Not from Krashnark. There was no lack of ambition or surfeit of mercy in his second son, and he was the most powerful of all of Phrobus children. Yet that strength was hobbled by his perverse, inner code of honor. He neither gave nor asked quarter, but his oath was unbreakable, which was why Phrobus felt no fear of Krashnark’s rebellion, for he had sworn fealty to his father. It was unthinkable that he might raise his hand against Phrobus after swearing that oath...and none of the others, not even—or perhaps esp
ecially—Shīgū would ever have dared.

  “All of you know the stakes for which we play,” he continued, “yet none of you seems capable of accomplishing even the simplest task.”

  “In fairness, Father,” one of his other children said, raising her head and using one hand to draw glorious red hair back from her face to reveal pupil-less eyes as black as his throne’s obsidian, “that isn’t precisely correct. Things have gone...poorly in several universes. That’s unfortunately true, but we’ve succeeded in others.”

  Her voice was calm, respectful, yet pointed, and Phrobus gritted his teeth. Carnadosa was his youngest child, and although she’d been careful not to say it, many of those other successes had been her doing—a point she obviously wasn’t above making by not making it. Yet not even a god or a goddess could deal with all the possible alternative realities of every potential universe. There had to be some division of labor, and in all too many of those realities which Carnadosa—and Krashnark—had not overseen, Phrobus’ plans had failed catastrophically. He could feel his other children’s, and his wife’s, hatred seething like the lightning outside his palace as they glared at Carnadosa for underlining their failures, yet they dared not speak.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment. “We have succeeded in some, but we’ve failed in far too many others. We can afford no more losses, especially in those where victory had seemed within our grasp. Too much hangs on what happens there, which is the reason your accursed uncle is striving hard to snatch them back from us, yet none of you seem capable of stopping him. I’ve looked into the future, Carnadosa. If we fail to stop this slide of events in the Light’s favor, if Tomanāk’s successes continue, our power—the power of all of us—may suffer catastrophic damage.”

  He paused, letting the implications sink into all of his listeners. It wasn’t as if they shouldn’t have been able to figure out for themselves just how dire their situation might become, but sometimes they needed to be shaken by the scruff of their collective necks before they could step back from their plotting and mutual betrayals long enough to really think about the nature of their struggle with the Gods of Light.

  He leaned back in his throne, glaring down at them, his own thoughts running back over the ages since his failed rebellion against his own father. It was his brother’s fault, he told himself once more, thunder rolling outside the palace in echo of his inner rage. It had been Tomanāk who’d rallied the others after the devastating surprise of Phrobus’ initial attack. Tomanāk who’d personally struck Phrobus down, taken his original name from him and given him the one he bore now. “Truth Bender,” that was what his name meant, and in the depth of his defeat, he’d been unable to reject it when his brother fastened it upon him forever. Not even he now remembered what his name had once been, and he thought perhaps he hated Tomanāk most of all for that.

  Yet much as he hated—and feared—Tomanāk, he hated the myriad worlds of mortals even more.

  His attempt to seize Orr’s power as his own had very nearly succeeded, but in the moment in which Tomanāk ripped it back out of his grasp, that power had fractured, broken into more pieces than even a god could count. Worse, each of those pieces had taken on its own life, its own existence, and when that happened, the fates of all the gods had become captive to those insignificant, puny mites crawling about all of the worlds upon worlds which had spilled from the riven, shattered power he’d hungered to make his own. A new concept had come into existence in that moment—the concept of time. The concept of a future...and an end. And not even the gods themselves were immune to it, able to ignore the endless, steady trickle of years sliding one after another into the maw of eternity. Yet worse still, far worse, was the intolerable discovery that those ephemeral mortals held his fate in their hands.

  In many ways, only the fragmenting of Orr’s power had preserved Phrobus’ own life, for there was no doubt what Tomanāk would have done with him if only he could. But all of them were entrapped in the uncertain fate Phrobus had unwittingly, unintentionally, created. Orr himself had been diminished, weakened, stripped of his ability to command the tides of fate and left as captive to those capricious mortals as Phrobus himself. The restoration of his power was beyond his own reach, and neither the remaining Gods of Light nor Phrobus could repair it for him. It must heal itself in the fullness of that mortal creation—time.

  But how would it heal itself? It had taken Phrobus centuries to realize the question could even be asked, for no one had ever considered the possibility that Orr’s power could be shattered, and so no one had ever considered what might happen if it was. He knew how frustrated Tomanāk was that the cataclysmic collision of so many potential alternate futures had prevented him from slaying him for his treachery, yet Tomanāk had no choice. The death of a god, any god, would have released far too much additional power, poured far too much additional uncertainty into the shattered present and chaotic future of Orr’s realm. And so Tomanāk had been forced to let him live, let him leave the home from which he’d been cast for his crimes, let him carve out his own realm in the broken confusion of too many realities.

  And as he’d paced the confines of that lesser realm, contemplating the far vaster one he’d held so tantalizingly within his fingers, it had come to him.

  The entire universe—the original, un-shattered universe, his father’s great creation—had broken with Orr’s power. It was as if a glass had been dropped upon a stone floor, and the shattered bits and pieces had flown in every direction. It had been impossible for anyone, even a god, to predict where any of them might land, far less where all of them might end their bouncing journeys across the stone. Now they lay scattered, tumbled into confused windrows without rhyme or reason, separated from one another and yet longing on some deep, fundamental level to become whole once more. To become one once again. And as they lay, they could be gathered back up by the proper set of hands. They could be...reassembled, put back together, and the hands which put them back together would control what they became on the day that they were one once more.

  If he could reclaim them, gather enough of them together in the pattern of his choosing, he could remake them not as a reflection and restoration of Orr’s power, but of his own.

  Of course, that infernal busybody Semkirk had reasoned it out before him, and his accursed brothers and sisters—even that flighty fool Hirahim and that pathetic simpleton Sorbus—had set themselves to restoring the broken bits and pieces themselves. But there was a catch. Those bits and pieces had minds of their own. They were...malleable. They could be shaped, convinced, seduced, even taken, but only from within. In the end, they would choose their own fates on the basis of their own decisions, and those choices—and only those choices—would decide whose hands they came into in the fullness of time.

  It was a race between him and his brothers and sisters, and so he’d taken to himself a wife and begotten children of his own to aid him in the struggle. Even with them, he was badly outnumbered, but not all of the Gods of Light were equally suited to the nature of the struggle between them. And the most ironic thing of all was that individual strength was of secondary importance, at best. They were forced to contend for each reality separately, individually, and the nature of the contest leveled the difference between their abilities. Any god could have destroyed any single fragment of that broken power, yet none of them knew how many fragments could be destroyed before the whole failed, and so none of them dared to destroy any of them. They must confront one another within the limits and constraints each individual mortal reality could endure, until that reality reached its tipping point and fell as the possession of the Light...or of the Dark.

  And in the fullness of time, enough of those individual realities would fall to one side to give that side possession of them all. Which meant, that despite his failure all those ages ago, Phrobus might yet win all he’d sought.

  But that could happen only if those mortals he loathed with all his being—loathed because they ultimately held his fate in the
ir hands—gave him that victory. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of them realized the prize for which the gods truly contended, and their puny lifespans made most of them shortsighted and easily duped. Many of them could scarcely wait to give themselves to him and to his children, and his hatred for them only made the taste of their souls still sweeter.

  Yet not all of them were blind, not all were easily seduced. Their resistance to the Dark ran through their realities like ribs of steel, and some of them...oh, yes, some of them were far more dangerous than others.

  “All of you know how much Tomanāk has poured into Orfressa,” he said now. “All of you know how many possible outcomes run through that single cable of universes.”

  His eyes burned even hotter as he glared at them, his anger smoking in the air as he contemplated how close they’d come to victory, to seeing that reality—all the facets of that reality—safely locked into their possession twelve hundred of the mortals’ years ago, only to have it slip through their fingers at the last moment. It lay now like a strand of fire wrapped in shadow, its central core surrounded by the penumbra of all its potentialities, not quite within his grasp, not quite beyond it, and the long wait to determine the side to which it must ultimately fall burned in his bones like slow poison. To be sure, centuries were but the blinks of an eye to one such as himself. Or they should have been, at least...had he been one bit less aware of the galling chains the mortal concept of “time” had set upon him.

  “Father, the advantage is still ours,” another voice said. “No one in all of Norfressa—except, perhaps, Wencit—even imagines what’s preparing in Kontovar. Surely—”

  “Don’t speak to me of ‘surely,’ Fiendark!” Phrobus snapped, turning the full power of his glare upon his eldest son. “There was a time when Orr’s power was ‘surely’ mine! And I tell you that I’ve looked long and hard into the future of this reality and all those spinning from it, and I see confusion. I see uncertainty. And I see threads of Tomanāk’s weaving that lead to places I cannot see. Places where this reality—all of these realities, and all the myriad others which might spring from them yet—fall from our hands into his unless we cut those threads of his, and do it quickly.”