by David Weber
Jasak crouched for a closer look of his own.
It was a metal cylinder, closed on one end, open on the other. There was a small, distinct ridge or lip formed into the metal around the closed end, as if to form a base, and there were faint marks on the metal. Striations that were discolored. It smelled sharp, sulfurous, a deeply unsettling smell.
Jasak measured the distance between the footprint and cylinder with his eyes. Four and a half feet, give or take. It hadn't been dropped, he realized. It had been thrown into the weeds. Deliberately? Or had the man hurled it away accidentally, in reflex perhaps, when Osmuna's quarrel struck flesh? It didn't look like a weapon, or even a part of one. And it was certainly far too small to hold anything big enough to punch a hole that big through solid flesh. Unless—
Jasak frowned in fresh speculation. The hole in Osmuna's back was enormous, yes. But the hole in his chest was small. Very small. Just about the diameter of that cylinder, in fact.
"He used this to kill Osmuna."
"How?"
Jasak hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud until the chief sword's one-word question told him he had. Threbuch didn't sound incredulous—quite. But he did sound . . . perplexed, and Jasak scowled up at the grizzled noncom.
"Beats hell out of me, Otwal. But look." He fished the thing gingerly out of the weeds, picking it up by inserting a small twig into the open end. "It's the same diameter as the hole in Osmuna's chest."
"That couldn't possibly have gone through Osmuna." Fifty Garlath's tone was scathing enough to cross the line into open insolence. "There's no blood on it, and the angles are wrong, and it landed in the wrong place. If that thing had gone through Osmuna, it would've landed on the other side of the creek, not up here."
"I didn't say this had gone through the poor bastard," Jasak snapped, gripping his temper in both hands.
"Maybe whatever was in it went through him? Chief Sword Threbuch mused, and Jasak tilted the cylinder so that sunlight fell into it as he peered inside.
"If there was anything in here, there's barely a trace of it left." He sniffed again. "Something smells . . . burnt?"
He reached into the open neck with one fingertip and felt some kind of residue inside. The chief sword twitched violently, as though he'd just suppressed a need to jerk Jasak's hand away, and the hundred managed to summon a wry smile.
"I think it's fairly safe to say Osmuna wasn't poisoned," he said.
"And you're sure of that because—?" Threbuch growled.
"Point taken. So I won't lick my finger, all right?"
"Sir!" Threbuch's eyes widened. "Look at your finger."
Jasak glanced down, startled, and discovered a black smudge on his fingertip.
"That's carbon," he said wonderingly. "It's like ordinary lampblack."
"But—" Garlath began, then clicked his teeth on whatever he'd been about to say.
"Go on, Fifty," Jasak said quietly.
"It doesn't make sense, Sir. Osmuna wasn't burned, any more than he was poisoned!"
"No," Jasak agreed thoughtfully. "No, he wasn't. But something was burned inside this thing, burned so completely that all that's left is a film of lampblack. And the end of this cylinder is the same size as Osmuna's wound. So there's a connection somewhere, even if we can't see it."
"An incendiary spell-thrower, Sir?" Gaythar Harklan asked nervously, and Jasak glanced at him.
"I'm not ruling anything out at this point, Shield," he said. "How close were you to Osmuna when he died?"
"About thirty yards away, Sir. Maybe forty." The trooper pointed to the other stream bank, where Gadrial sat on a boulder in the sun, waiting with commendable calm for a civilian plunged into the middle of a military emergency an entire universe away from the nearest help. "I was behind all that mess of underbrush. Shartahk's own work getting through it, too, Sir."
"And how loud was that cracking sound we all heard?"
"Damned loud, Sir. Hurt my ears, and that's no lie."
"It was loud enough where we were that I can well believe it," Jasak said, nodding absently.
He stood frowning at the enigma perched on the palm of his hand. Harklan was certainly right about how obstructive the underbrush was. The noncom's own nervousness—not to mention his military training's insistence on advancing cautiously in the face of the unknown—undoubtedly meant it had taken him even longer to get through it. Which, unfortunately, had given Osmuna's murderer a priceless gift of time in which to make his own escape.
He realized that his frown at the bland metal cylinder had become a glower, instead, and felt a burning frustration that he couldn't make any of the puzzle pieces fit together.
But whether he could do that or not, they still had a wounded killer to track.
"He went into the water," Jasak said. "After he threw this into the weeds. Was he just trying to rinse his wound, or was he trying to accomplish something else? Was anything of Osmuna's missing?"
He glanced at Evarl Harnak, who gave him a hangdog look of sudden guilt.
"I don't know, Sir," he admitted. "We, uh, didn't look."
"Then look now, curse you!" Garlath snapped so viciously Harnak paled.
"Yes, Sir!"
The platoon sword threw a sharp salute and scrambled down the bank, and Jasak bit back an acid comment. Harnak should have checked Osmuna's gear immediately; he and Garlath actually shared that opinion. But the men were already shaken, as it was. Snarling at them would only make them more nervous—and mistake-prone—than ever.
Garlath caught Jasak's tightlipped disapproval and glared back defiantly, as though daring Jasak to reprimand him for ordering a trooper to repair his dereliction of duty. But the hundred couldn't do that, of course, however severely tempted he might be. If he reprimanded Garlath, even in private, it would only add weight to any charge of personal prejudice against Garlath the fifty might make.
In that moment, Jasak realized just how much he truly hated Shevan Garlath. Any man who abused shaken troops in the middle of a crisis—let alone a crisis bigger than anything the Union of Arcana had weathered since its founding—was a man who deserved to be cashiered. Preferably with his head stuffed up his nether parts.
Jasak wanted, more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life, to do that stuffing. The fact that he couldn't only fanned his cold fury, and his voice was an icy whiplash when he spoke.
"I want that killer's trail found and followed, Fifty. Send First Squad west, with one section on this side of the creek, and the other section on the far bank. Have them look for a place our man might've crawled out of the streambed. We know he's been hit, but we don't know how seriously, or which way he went. It'd be rough going for a wounded man to wade very far through all those boulders, though, so send them, say, half a mile.
"If we haven't found any trace of him by then, chances are he headed back east again. His footprints certainly appear to have come from that direction. So, in the meanwhile, send Third Squad east, looking for the same thing."
"And you, Sir?" Garlath bit out.
Jasak held the older man's eyes coolly, staring down the hostility in them. Hostility and a dark flare of pure hatred. Both of them knew precisely how badly Jasak wanted to be rid of Shevan Garlath, yet both of them also knew they were stuck with one another—at least for the duration of this crisis—and Jasak's reply would have frozen a lump of lava.
"Chief Sword Threbuch and I will backtrack the only solid evidence the bastard left behind. That trail." He pointed toward the faint line of footprints along the stream bank, prints that disappeared into the tangle of undergrowth. "Give me a couple of point men—preferably a fire team that's trained together."
He needed someone to watch out for Gadrial, and neither he nor Threbuch could devote the proper attention to that job. Not while tracking a murderer through this terrain. But they couldn't leave her behind, either. The multiple Mythalan hells would freeze solid before Jasak Olderhan entrusted Magister Gadrial Kelbryan's safety to the likes of Shevan Garlath.
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br /> "Yes, Sir!" Garlath made the snappy precision of his salute an insult in itself. Then he spun away and started snarling orders.
"Begging your pardon, Sir," Threbuch muttered, "but whoever this bastard is, he would have done us a grand favor if he'd killed that asshole instead of poor Osmuna."
Jasak didn't respond. The chief sword was way too far out of line for a noncom of his seniority, and he knew it. Worse, though, he obviously didn't care. And, worse still, Jasak couldn't blame him. So he simply ignored the remark entirely and gave the order no commanding officer liked to give.
"Chief Sword, please see to it that someone collects Osmuna's personal effects. We'll have to forward them to his widow. Then find Kurthal. He's the best draftsman we have. Have him render a sketch of those wounds, front and back, to proper scale."
Threbuch nodded, and Jasak drew a shallow breath.
"When he's done," he said, his voice flat as the ice on Monarch Lake, "prepare Osmuna's body for field rites. We can't just leave him, and we can't spare anyone to take him back to camp."
"Yes, Sir."
The older man's expression told Jasak he was about as happy with those orders as Jasak was. Nobody enjoyed that particular duty, least of all Threbuch, who'd conducted field rites over the years for more troopers than any man cared to recall. Jasak's father had very nearly been one of those troopers, and something in the chief sword's eyes said he was determined to make certain Jasak didn't become one, either.
While Threbuch went to deal with that unpleasant chore, Jasak glanced across the stream to where Gadrial sat, unobtrusively watched over by troopers who stood a yard or so above her with loaded arbalests, their gazes roaming ceaselessly for possible danger. She was watching Jasak. Even at this distance he could practically see her blazing curiosity over what they'd found. Not out of any ghoulishness, but because she was worried. More than worried, however splendidly she was concealing the fear he knew she must be feeling.
There was no point keeping her in suspense, and he motioned for her to join him.
Gadrial rose from her perch on the boulder, waded carefully across the swiftly moving stream, and climbed the far bank to join Jasak. She carefully kept her face calm, her manner composed, but she feared her eyes would betray her inner agitation. She wasn't afraid, precisely, but she was gripped by a strong emotion she couldn't readily identify. She was unsure whether to call it anxiety, worry, nervous jitters, or healthy caution, but whatever it was, she was determined to remain in control of it.
She dug her boots into the soft earth of the stream bank, resisting the temptation to rub her posterior, which hadn't enjoyed its stony resting place. It was a steep scramble, but she finally reached the top, where Sir Jasak Olderhan stood watching her through hooded eyes.
Military secrets, she thought, and sighed mentally. He would tell her only what he thought she needed to know. Which wouldn't be much. That was going to be frustrating enough, but the slight chill in his manner distressed her almost more, since she knew its probable source.
She hadn't looked at Osmuna as she waded the stream.
Sir Jasak didn't understand that, she was sure. Mired in his rigid Andaran codes of behavior, he probably thought she was being callous, possibly even coldhearted. He'd expected her to stare, perhaps blink on tears and bite her lip in an emotional display, because she wasn't Andaran, and therefore didn't share an Andaran woman's set of responses to such situations. He'd expected her to display curiosity, at the least, particularly since his men hadn't let her get close enough to see the wounds that had killed the poor man.
She had yet to meet any Andaran male who'd bothered to learn the attitudes held by other cultures' women on much of anything, let alone something as rigidly prescribed as the Andarans' views on death and the proper responses to it. Gadrial, on the other hand, wasn't particularly interested in learning the proper responses to death, because she held a profound respect for the sanctity of life, and murder violated that sanctity unforgivably.
Staring at a murdered person's remains was deeply disrespectful to the soul which had inhabited those remains. Worse, that soul was usually still there, confused by the sudden, brutal shift in its state and unwilling to move on until the shock had worn off. But more importantly even than that, her main concern—as always—was for the living, not the dead. There was nothing she could do to help Osmuna's brutalized soul, whereas there were a number of thing she could do to help Sir Jasak Olderhan and his soldiers. If Hundred Olderhan allowed her to help. Being a stiffnecked Andaran noble, he was far more likely to order her wrapped up in cotton gauze and protected like a child.
She bit back a sigh and scrambled up the last two feet of the bank to level ground. She found herself more upset than she'd expected to be by Jasak's cool manner. It disturbed her that she wanted so deeply for him to understand, even if none of the others did. But there was nothing she could do about that, so she simply drew a deep breath and looked up a long way to meet his hooded eyes.
"Did you find anything?" she asked quietly.
"Nothing but more mysteries," he admitted. "That, and a trail to follow. More precisely, to backtrack. We're still looking for traces of where he went after he splashed into the stream."
"At least we've got something to follow," she said with a wan smile that lightened a little of the grim chill in his brown eyes. He studied her for a silent moment, then seemed to come to a decision.
"Ever see anything like this?"
He held a small metal cylinder on the palm of his hand. Gadrial peered closely without touching it, then frowned as she realized what she was seeing.
"Somebody burned something inside that," she said, and he nodded, one eyebrow flicking slightly upward.
"Yes, they did," he agreed.
"What?"
"I was hoping you might be able to tell me that."
The morning air felt suddenly colder. He didn't know what had killed Osmuna. He had no more idea than she did, and she stared at the object on his hand.
"It's so simple there's nothing you could use as a clue, trying to figure out what it does," she said. "Of course," she frowned, "someone who'd never seen a personal crystal might wonder what it was for, let alone how to retrieve any notes stored in it."
"Why do you say that?"
She looked up, a bit startled by the sharp edge in his voice and the sudden intensity of his eyes.
"What?"
"What in particular made you think about someone who'd never seen a PC before?" he amplified, and she pursed her lips.
"Well," she said, "the men under your command are scared. I mean, really scared. There's something wrong—terribly wrong—about Osmuna's death. None of you seem to know what caused the poor man to die, and now you're showing someone who isn't even a soldier an unknown device found near the dead man. That suggests to me that you have no idea who killed Osmuna, no idea how. And that means . . . "
Her voice trailed off as the full import of her own subconscious insight came sputtering up to the surface.
"That means somebody who isn't Arcanan did the killing," she said finally, slowly, and realized she was rubbing her arms in an effort to persuade the fine hairs to lie back down. She wanted desperately to stare into the woodline, and kept her gaze on Sir Jasak's face instead through sheer willpower.
"I'm right, aren't I? Otherwise, you wouldn't have asked me if I'd seen something like that."
He drew breath, visibly stepped back from whatever white lie he'd been about to utter, and nodded.
"Right on all counts," he said simply, and she shivered.
"You're sure it isn't a spell accumulator of some kind, Magister?" Chief Sword Threbuch asked. The question startled her, since she'd been concentrating too hard on what Sir Jasak was saying to realize the noncom had returned behind her.
And that's not the only reason it 'startled' you, either, is it? she told herself tartly. There was something unnerving about having a grizzled combat veteran old enough to be her grandfather ask her such
a question. Especially, in a voice filled with such flagging hope. She wished she didn't have to, but she shook her head.
"No, Chief Sword," she said almost gently, hating to kill even that tiny hope. "It isn't an accumulator. At least, it's nothing like any accumulator I've ever heard of, and I've had plenty of exposure to odd bits and pieces of experimental equipment. It doesn't seem to contain any sarkolis at all, so I don't see any way it could have been charged in the first place. And there isn't even the faintest whiff of magical energy clinging to it. Not even a faint residue. It's not connected to anything arcane."
When she glanced at Jasak again, she found a curious blend of relief and unhappiness in his eyes.
"Well," he muttered, "at least you didn't identify it as some sort of super weapon cooked up by a theoretical magician."