by David Weber
"Enough!" chan Hagrahyl's bellow silenced the entire clearing. "We don't have the luxury of time?not for funerals; not for arguments. Yes, Braiheri, he stayed in the stream on his way back to us, but there wasn't any reason for him to try to hide his tracks on the way out, was there? It may take them a little while to get organized, but they won't have any trouble finding as once they do!"
He glared at the naturalist for a moment, then turned back to Shaylar.
"Shaylar, send the message to Darcel immediately. Then pack your essential gear and abandon the rest. And don't leave behind anything that would let Falsan's murderers trace us beyond the portal. Carry all your maps, your notes?everything."
He shifted his gaze to include the others.
"Don't abandon any technology higher than knives and sticks, either. These people don't know a solitary thing about us, and I'd like to keep it that way. Braiheri, if it'll make you feel better, strip Falsan's gear and cover him with a cairn of rocks. Preferably in the stream, so they don't find his body and realize they've killed one of us. You can pack your notes, or bury him: your choice. And that's all you have time for."
He switched his attention back to Shaylar again.
"You understand why Jathmar will have to rendezvous with us en route? Or catch up with us as best he can? My duty's to get as many of us out as possible. I can't wait for anyone."
He held Shaylar's gaze, pleading with her to understand.
Her heart cried out with the need to protest, but he was right. She nodded, stiffly, instead, her muscles rigid with the knowledge that Jathmar was completely alone out there in a forest where someone had already committed murder.
Thank you, chan Hagrahyl's gaze seemed to say. Then he turned back to the others.
"Let's get busy, then. Take only enough trail rations to get us to the portal. We're marching light and fast."
Shaylar saw eyelids twitch as several of the men started to glance down at her. All of them?except Futhai?managed to abort the movement. But their thoughts were as clear as if each of them had been a full-blown Voice, and she swallowed hard as the import of those not-quite-glances sank in.
I'm going to slow us down. They know it; and I know it. And we can't afford it.
Something hard and alien stirred deep inside, giving her strength as she pushed herself to her feet. She surprised herself when she realized she'd already shoved aside the shock of Falsan's death. She had a job to do. It wasn't precisely the job she'd signed up for, since a shooting war with unknown people was the last thing anyone had expected to occur out here. But that didn't change the facts.
"I'll send the message to Darcel from my tent," she said in a hard voice she barely recognized. "While I'm packing. And I'll do my best to warn Jathmar."
Her voice actually held steady, and Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl looked into her eyes for long moment, taking careful measure of what he saw reflected there. Then he nodded.
"Good. Let's rip this camp apart and hit the trail."
Chapter Four
They found the footprints first, naturally.
"Whoever it was," Gaythar Harklan said, pointing toward the far bank, "they came down that into the water."
Jasak studied the steep slope opposite them, and his eyes narrowed speculatively. The other bank was steeper, rising a good ten or eleven feet above Osmuna's body. Had the killer entered the water before he attacked? Or to investigate the body after the killing was done? Or, the hundred's eyes hardened, to make certain his victim was dead?
Nothing offered any answers, just as nothing he saw could explain the sharp cracking sound which had split the morning apart.
"What's up there?" he asked Osmuna's squad shield.
"Nothing much, Sir. Looks like he'd been following the stream bank when he spotted Osmuna."
"Show me."
"Yes, Sir."
Harklan started back across the stream, with Jasak wading alongside. Threbuch followed the hundred, and Garlath tagged sullenly along behind.
"Here's where he slid down the bank, Sir," Harklan said. "See the gouges and footmarks?"
Jasak saw them clearly. Whoever had come down that bank had been clumsy as hell doing it. No Andaran Scout worth the uniform on his back would have left a trail like that to follow. In fact, Jasak couldn't think of anyone who would have.
He very carefully didn't glance at Fifty Garlath for his reaction. Instead, he stooped closer to the mud, peering intently.
"Send a couple of men both directions along this creek, Fifty Garlath. Tell them to look for a blood trail."
"Blood trail?" Chief Sword Threbuch muttered to himself. He peered more closely at the same marks, then grunted.
"By damn, Sir, you're right. Osmuna nailed the bastard. I didn't even think to check his arbalest to see if he'd fired it," the chief sword admitted in a chagrined tone.
"We're all a little rattled," Jasak answered, his voice dry as brittle weeds. "What I can't tell from this is how badly Osmuna nailed him."
There were only a few drops of blood splashed into the mud, but whoever had slithered down this bank had been wounded when he did it.
"Search this whole area," he told Garlath. "I want every inch of this ground run through a sieve, if necessary. Get me some gods-cursed facts to look at here!"
Garlath nodded sharply and turned to spit orders with a brisk efficiency that Jasak tried?hard?to give him credit for, since they were actually the right orders for a change. Search teams spread out, looking for a trail to follow and whatever else might be out there waiting to be discovered.
"Fifty Garlath!" someone called only moments later. "I've got something, Sir. I just don't know what it is."
Jasak followed Garlath to the top of the bank. Evarl Harnak, the platoon sword, was crouched down in a tangle of weeds almost directly above Osmuna's body.
"Look here, Sir," he said. "Here's a set of footprints. You can see where he must've been standing when Osmuna came along."
The noncom pointed to a distinct pair of footprints in the soft earth. Unlike the prints on the slope, these were undistorted and crisp, and Jasak studied them closely.
The feet which had made them had been wearing boots, he realized. Not soft-soled ones, either. They showed deeply ridged treads, the sort of treads found in the footgear of soldiers, or civilian outdoor enthusiasts. A design had been worked into the tread, he noticed uneasily. The kind of design an Arcanan bootmaker would use as a maker's mark, cut into the thick leather of the sole. If that footprint hadn't been left by a manufactured boot, Sir Jasak Olderhan would eat the ones on his own feet.
The realization chilled him even further. Osmuna's killer was no primitive half-wild savage. He was wealthy and sophisticated enough to wear manufactured boots and wield weapons of frightening, unknown power.
"You said you'd found something you couldn't understand?"
"Yes, Hundred." Harnak nodded and pointed into the clump of weeds. "The sunlight caught it as I was bending down to look at the footprints. It's metal, Sir. But I'm hanged if I can figure out what it is."
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 fa
ct.
"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.
"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.