by David Weber
It wasn't just the debris that was responsible for his unsteady gait. Just being in this clearing was agony, but he also had trouble distinguishing between what his own eyes saw and what he'd Seen through Shaylar's eyes. The memories kept superimposing themselves over what he was seeing here and now. He kept trying to step over branches that weren't there, and stumbled over ones that didn't exist in the view Shaylar had transmitted. He blinked furiously, trying to clear his distorted vision, and cursed himself when he couldn't. He needed to be clearheaded, not muddled between past and present. He had to be if he was going to help spot something that would provide clues for Parcanthi and Hilovar.
He stopped, turning in place, looking for the exact spot where Shaylar had crouched, where the agonizing memories in his mind had been born of fire and thunder. There. It was somewhere in that direction, he decided, and started forward once more, moving with grim determination through the confusion of reality and remembrance. If he could find the spot, he and the others might dredge up something they could use. Darcel had little hope that anyone had survived, but he needed to know. One way or the other, he had to know, because anything would be better than this dreadful uncertainty. This doubt.
He cursed the men who'd done this, not only for the killing, but for burning the dead and stealing everything they'd been carrying. They hadn't even marked the ash piles in any way! What kind of barbarians didn't even mark a grave? If they'd simply marked the sites, just indicated which piles of ashes had held Sharonians, and which their own accursed dead, there wouldn't have been this horrible doubt. The column would have known how many people needed to be rescued.
And how many needed to be avenged.
Darcel couldn't even lay remembrance wreaths at the graves of his dearest friends because he didn't know whose ashes were whose! It was intolerable, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it, other than help the Whiffer and Tracer wring every scrap of information they could from this place and from his own memory, with its perfect recall.
Shaylar's entire transmission was still in his memory. He simply had to calm down enough to retrieve it, and he had to remain detached enough to analyze every fleeting second of those harrowing minutes. If Shaylar had known where everyone was, and if she'd been aware of everyone's deaths as they occurred, then theoretically, he knew that, too. Those were distressingly large "ifs," but he had to start somewhere.
So did Platoon-Captain Arthag. The officer had to know if they were on a rescue mission, or a punitive strike. So Darcel tramped through the fallen trees, comparing views and angles with what he saw in memory.
It took a long time, but he found it in the end. When he finally located the spot, he stood peering down at it for a long silent moment. Had she died here? Or "merely" been wounded badly enough to knock her unconscious?
Most of the branches and tree trunks in a four-foot swath around her place of concealment had been scorched during the battle. Dead leaves had burst into flame and burnt to white ash, some of which had fallen onto branches below, and some of which—protected from the wind—still clung to branches and twigs, paper-thin ghosts, holding their shape eerily . . . until the slightest touch of his breath caused them to crumble to nothing.
He was tempted to crouch down to match the views precisely, but he stayed carefully to one side. He didn't want to contaminate the site with his own energy residues, but even so, his boot brushed a thick clump of char that wasn't wood.
What the devil? Darcel frowned and bent over it. Someone from the other side had clearly looked at it after the fight and dumped it again, leaving it as useless. That was the only way it could have gotten to where it was, because it wasn't where Shaylar had been crouching, and the ground directly under it wasn't scorched. Most of the ground wasn't, actually, he realized with another frown. It looked like the fireballs had passed horizontally through the broken trees several inches above the ground.
But there was one burnt spot down there, he realized. One directly under where Shaylar's feet had been.
This is where she burned the maps, he realized.
An icy centipede prickled down his spine as he recognized it. He'd found the remains of her map satchel, and the binder which had held her meticulous records. Both of them had been made of oiled leather, to resist rain, and the binder had been wrapped in a waterproof rubber case, as well. None of them had burned completely, despite her frantic efforts. She'd ripped out individual pages from the binder to burn her notes, just as she'd burned the maps one by one, to ensure their destruction. Then she'd tried to burn the satchel and binder, as well.
He didn't even poke at the charred lump with a stick. He left it for the Tracer to examine, instead. Since both Shaylar and one of her killers had handled it, they might get something valuable from it, so Darcel marked its exact location and kept looking.
A moment later, his throat constricted as he discovered why she'd lost consciousness so abruptly. A thick branch behind the spot where she'd burned her maps and notes was marked by dried blood and several strands of long, dark hair. Darcel's fingers went unsteady as he reached towards the strands, but then he made himself stop. Parcanthi and Hilovar needed to examine everything here before he contaminated it.
Darcel looked for the branch where Jathmar had been flung when the fireball caught him and spotted a few shreds of scorched cloth on the ground directly beneath it. The branch itself, thick as Darcel's forearm, had been seared black . . . except for a spot exactly the width of Jathmar's body.
The Voice moved cautiously around, staying outside the actual spot while his eyes searched carefully. The unburnt bark of the limb into which Jathmar had been thrown was scraped and cut where gear and buttons had dug into it, and he peered at the ground to see if anything of Jathmar's had fallen into the leaf litter.
If anything had, their attackers had found it first and carried it off. Unwilling to risk stirring things up with a closer search, Darcel called the Whiffer and Tracer over to join him and explained what he'd found.
"You'd better go first, Nolis," Hilovar said, glancing at Parcanthi. "You need uncontaminated patterns. I'll touch the evidence once you've gleaned what you can."
Parcanthi nodded and started with Jathmar's spot first. He closed his eyes and went very still, and even though Darcel couldn't sense the energy patterns Parcanthi was carefully examining, he knew enough theory to recognize what he was doing.
Every living creature generated its own energy field, created by that mysterious, poorly understood force that animated a physical body. Inanimate objects had their own strange energies, as well, and all objects vibrated at a specific rhythm. A person sensitive to those rhythms could detect them, focus on them, separate them from one another and wrest information from them. Could discern what forces had worked upon them, could draw visions—the famous "flashes" of the Whiffer—of past events out of the energy flowing about them.
Someone like Soral Hilovar, on the other hand, could touch an object and trace the major events in its history. If a living creature handled or came into contact with an object, some of that creature's life energy remained behind. The residue was like a static charge, except that it never entirely dissipated. Details would fade eventually, yet for the most part, the energy patterns left behind endured for a long time. But where a Whiffer might use those patterns to determine what had happened, a Tracer, like Hilovar, was sensitive to the connection between the object and whoever had touched it. Unlike a Whiffer, a Tracer couldn't see the general vicinity of those events, couldn't pick up flashes of what else had happened in its vicinity. But in many ways, what a Tracer did see was considerably more detailed. He could frequently tell whether or not the person involved in an event was dead or still alive. And, somewhat like Darcel's own sensitivity to portals, a Tracer could determine a directional bearing to the person in question.
The residue Whiffers and Tracers worked with was even stronger when a complex living creature—like a person—took a specific action, and a violent action, or o
ne steeped in powerful emotion—terror, rage, passion—left the strongest residue of all. If someone picked up a rock and bashed somebody else with it, a ghostly imprint remained behind, creating a shadow copy of the action . . . and its results. The shadow copy didn't even need to be tied to a specific object, if the original action had been sufficiently intense. The stronger the emotions, the stronger the copy. Sometimes, the shadow could last for years, particularly indoors—
Parcanthi hissed aloud and flinched. Sweat beaded up on his brow and a cliff, trickled down his temples.
"Oh, sweet Marnilay," he whispered, his voice shaking. "They burned him alive. . . . "
Darcel's mouth tightened into a thin, harsh line. He knew exactly what the Whiffer was Seeing. He'd already Seen it himself.
"He collapsed there," Parcanthi said in a low voice, eyes still closed, pointing to the ground. "He was still alive when they found him. Their emotions were strong. Excitement. Relief?"
The last words sounded puzzled, but a flare of hope shot through Darcel, sharp and painful. Alive. Jathmar had been alive!
But Parcanthi was still talking, and Darcel's heart clenched at the Whiffer's next words.
"He was burned something ghastly. His back was burnt black, the shirt was just gone—burned away. He was barely breathing. Someone's crouched over him, trying to help. Gods! I can See bone down inside the burns!"
Parcanthi shuddered, his face twisting.
"It's too faint, curse it," he whispered, "and there were too many people crowded into the spot. The energy patterns are all jumbled up, imprinted on top of one another. I can't sort them out."
His intense frustration was obvious, and he opened his eyes and shook himself.
"That's it," he said grimly. "I'm not going to get anything much clearer than that from here." His jaw muscles bunched for a moment, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled. "Let me try Shaylar. Where?"
"There."
Darcel pointed, and the red-haired Whiffer nodded. His lean, craggy face was pale, covered with cold sweat, but he walked across and crouched down, as Shaylar had, surrounding and centering himself in the residue. Bleak eyes closed again, and he gave another shudder . . .
"She's burning everything. Maps, notes. She's shaking, linked to Darcel. Jathmar's starting to climb down from there—" he pointed to a spot above them, without opening his eyes. Then his entire body flinched.
"Fire! There's fire everywhere!"
He was slapping at his own clothes, clawing at his hair, shaking. Then the fireball Darcel had seen through Shaylar's eyes passed, and the Whiffer sagged in relief. He turned, eyes still closed, toward the branch that had knocked Shaylar unconscious.
"She crashed into that." He pointed to the blood-crusted branch. "She's lying still. Her face is swelling up, turning purple and black. There are cuts and scrapes."
Darcel's breath faltered. This time, his hope was so terrible it actually hurt his lungs, his entire body. If her face was swelling and bruising, she was alive. Corpses didn't bruise—did they? He realized that he wasn't sure, and the uncertainty was intolerable.
"They found her, too," Parcanthi said. "They're shocked, horrified, that they attacked a woman."
Darcel's fists clenched at his sides. He didn't want to think of these bastards as people who could be shocked and horrified by what they'd done to an innocent, lovely girl.
"They can't wake her up," Parcanthi said abruptly. "There's something wrong, desperately wrong. Inside her head. They're trying. They're frantic, but they can't wake her up, and she's badly injured . . ."
His voice shook, frayed. Then he groaned.
"It's fading out! The whole godsdamned thing's wavering and fading away. They carried her out of here, but I can't See anything beyond that. It just fades into nothing. Or, rather, it blurs into that same mess Jathmar's did, with all the imprints jumbled up together. I can't see anything more than that."
"You have to!" Darcel cried, unable to stop himself. "We have to know what happened to her! Is she still alive?"
"I can't tell!" Parcanthi's eyes opened, filled with anguish. "Too many people died right here." He waved at the toppled trees around them. "And too damned many people came through here—trying to rescue survivors, trying to find every last piece of equipment. It all bleeds and blurs and fades like ink in the water." He furrowed his brow, rubbed his eyes. "Maybe if we can figure out where they took her and Jathmar, I can tell more from there."
Darcel choked down more frantic demands. Parcanthi couldn't do the impossible, and he knew it. So he turned to Hilovar instead, and the Tracer glanced at Parcanthi.
"Go on." The Whiffer nodded. "I've got everything I'm going to get out of this spot. I'll head over to the trees, where the enemy's lines were, try to find the spot where they tended the wounded. Maybe I can tell more there."
Parcanthi extricated himself from the spot where Shaylar and Jathmar had fallen. As he did so, Hilovar met Darcel's gaze squarely.
"You have to realize," the ebony-scanned Ricathian said in a low, cautionary tone, "that I may not be able to tell, either. I can tell you what happened to an object and the person or people most closely associated with it, but I may not be able to Trace anything beyond the event itself."
"But Tracers can find missing persons from hundreds of miles away!" Darcel protested. "I know they can. You've done it yourself!"
"Sometimes I can," Hilovar agreed. "That was useful in police work when I was still working homicide. But you have to understand, Darcel. The more traces there are at a crime scene, the harder it is to filter out just one. I worked a case once where an entire extended family had been killed by portal pirates. These bastards had a nasty habit of raiding isolated mining camps, taking off with years worth of profits, and killing all the witnesses.
"There were so many members of the gang, so many victims, and so much violence done in such a small space, that I couldn't get an accurate Trace on anything. It took us over a year—and three more slaughtered mining camps—to run the bastards down. If there'd been only one or two victims, or fewer pirates, I could probably have nailed them in a matter of weeks. Maybe even days."
Hilovar's eyes were dark with remembered pain and frustration, and he sighed.
"We've got the same trouble here. There was so much violence the event residues have contaminated the objects caught in the middle of them. Everything I've touched so far has so many echoes clinging to it that I can't get accurate readings. If we had more objects to Trace from, the odds would be better. But with so little evidence, and so many strong residues, it's going to be tough. I'll do my dead level best, I promise you that. And if we can find the place where they took the wounded, if we can isolate something there that she and Jathmar touched, the odds will go up. But even then, it's going to be dicey. And if there's another portal nearby—"
He spread his hands, indicating helplessness.
"I don't understand," Darcel said, with a frown.
"Portals always screw up a Trace." Hilovar seemed surprised by Darcel's response. "You're a Voice—and a Portal Hound, too. Can you transmit a message through a portal?"
"Of course not. No one can trans—"
Darcel stopped abruptly, and Hilovar nodded with a compassionate expression.
"The energy around a portal is always weird stuff, damned weird. That's another reason it took us so long to trace those damned pirates. You can't Trace anyone through a portal any more than a Voice can send a message through one, or a Mapper can Map through one of them . . . and you can't just follow someone through and pick him up again on the other side. Stepping through a portal . . . scrambles the residue. Those pirates would slip through a portal, and every trace of them would literally vanish. It was like the gods had stepped down, erased their very existence. This—" he waved at the virgin forest surrounding them "—isn't anyone's home universe, which means the other side came through a portal, too. If they've taken any survivors back through it with them, the odds of Tracing them on the other side—Wel
l, I'd be lying if I told you they even existed, Darcel."
Darcel cursed, then gritted his teeth and nodded. At least Hilovar was too honest to offer false comfort, he told himself.
"All right," he said. "I understand. Do what you can."
The Tracer took a deep breath, turned away, and grasped the branch Jathmar had struck. His knuckles locked, and a ghastly sound broke from his throat. His eyes shot wide, and his pupils dilated in shock, then shrank to pinpoints. He shuddered, then jerked his hands loose and shook them violently, as though flinging off drops of acid.
"Sorry," he muttered, scrubbing sweat from his face with one forearm. "I'll . . . try again."
He gripped the branch longer, this time, but his entire body began to shake. The muscles of his face quivered, veins stood out in his temples, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was thick with pain and shock.
"Hurlbane's balls . . . ! Bones broken . . . bleeding inside, deep inside . . . burns from scalp to knees . . ."