by David Weber
"Not yet. The camp hadn't been disturbed when I got there. And I haven't heard anything behind me."
"That's something, at least," chan Hagrahyl muttered. "You made good time catching up to us. Let's hope to hell Falsan's killer doesn't to the same. All right, we're moving out."
Jathmar pushed through the spirea behind chan Hagrahyl, and Shaylar flung himself into his arms, holding on tightly. She wasn't quite trembling, but he felt the distress tightening her muscles, and spikes of emotion ripped through their bond.
"I was so scared," she whispered against his chest. "Thank all the gods you made it back to us!"
"Shhh." He lifted her chin and kissed her gently, then frowned as he glanced at her bulging pack. "That's too heavy for you."
"Yes, but I didn't dare leave any of this behind, in case … "
She swallowed hard, and he brushed a fingertip across her lips.
"Never say it, love. It didn't happen. Here." He slid off his pack, opened hers, and redistributed the weight. "That ought to help."
She gave a sigh of relief when he helped her shrug the straps back across her shoulders.
"Oh, that's lovely. Thanks."
"Don't mention it, M'lady," he said with a courtly bow, and her smile wavered only slightly as she squeezed his hand.
She headed out behind the others, and Jathmar followed, carefully placing himself between her and whatever might be coming up behind them. They moved at a rapid pace, not quite jogging, but the difference was so tiny as to hardly matter. The trail wasn't a friendly one. It still drove inexorably uphill, and it was littered with underbrush, deadfalls, and deep gullies that hindered their progress. It hadn't seemed like such rough country coming through in the other direction, he thought bitterly, then gave himself another mental shake.
Be fair, he told himself. It isn't that rough?you're just scared too death and trying to get through it five times as fast!
chan Hagrahyl kept them moving for two hours without stopping. Shaylar strode grimly forward, outwardly holding her own, but Jathmar could feel her aching weariness and the need for rest that she managed to keep hidden from the others. He'd never been so proud of her, nor so frightened for her, but he wasn't surprised when chan Hagrahyl finally called a halt and she cast pride to the winds and simply sank to the ground, panting.
The stocky Ternathian who'd once been an imperial officer cast uneasy glances at the forest behind. Probing glances that tried to see into the shadows behind far too much underbrush, far too many trees. Barris Kassel and the other ex-soldiers spread themselves into a defensive ring without a word, silently standing guard while everyone gulped a few swallows of water and caught their breath. Shaylar had her breathing under control again, but he could feel the aching weariness in her.
She can't keep going hour after hour at this pace, Jathmar thought despairingly. Not all the way to the portal.
He wasn't sure the rest of them could keep up this wicked pace, for that matter. Jathmar already felt the strain, and Braiheri Futhai was at least as badly winded as Shaylar. Jathmar tried to keep his worries quiet, tried to keep Shaylar from catching them, but he didn't succeed. When she lifted her head, meeting his gaze levelly, he tried to smile, and her answering smile's courage, and the strength of her love, nearly broke his heart.
Being here with you is worth it, worth the risk and the danger, her smile told him, and he smiled back, aware that he'd never loved her more.
Far too soon, chan Hagrahyl gave the soft-voiced order to move out again.
Chapter Six
"That's not a campsite, Sir. It's the next best thing to a godsdamned fortress," Chief Sword Threbuch breathed in Sir Jasak Olderhan's ear, and Jasak nodded grimly. It was an exageration … but not much of one.
They'd found no trace of where their quarry had gone after murdering Osmuna, which told Jasak that he'd turned back in the direction from which he'd come, keeping to the stream to throw off the scent. It also meant the only clue they had to follow was the trail he'd left on his way to the site of the murder.
So they'd backtracked him. It hadn't been especially difficult; whoever he was, he hadn't bothered to cover his tracks when walking towards his murderous rendezvous with Osmuna, so the trail itself was easy to pick up. On the other hand, that trail had wound its way through the underbrush along the stream like something a snake with epilepsy might have left behind, and after what had happened to Osmuna, Fifty Garlath's men moved with a certain understandable caution.
Jasak told himself the killer couldn't be very far in front of them now. Not when he was wounded and struggling through the boulder-strewn stream. Jasak had halfway expected to overtake the bastard somewhere along the creek, but they'd found no trace of him. And he had to admit that they'd taken at least two or three times longer than they ought to have to get their pursuit organized in the first place. He knew he could legitimately blame most of that delay on Garlath's inefficiency, but innate honesty forced him to admit that he'd been more than a little slow off the mark himself.
In fairness to himself?and Garlath?the sheer, stunning impossibility of what had already happened would have thrown anyone off stride. And despite the importance of finding the killer and anyone else who might be with him, Jasak knew he'd been right to take the time to try to learn everything he could before setting out in pursuit.
However little "everything" turned out to be in the end, he thought glumly, lying belly-down beside Threbuch with his chin on his folded forearms while they studied the natural clearing on the far side of the stream.
The camp in the middle of that clearing made it painfully obvious that whoever he was, Osmuna's killer wasn't out here alone. One man could never have built the palisade-like wall they were studying from their vantage point across the streambed. Not by himself. That high brush barrier of interwoven branches and cut saplings surrounded an area at least thirty yards in diameter, and it was too high to see over from their present position.
There was too much timber down around the edge of the clearing, too, all of it showing the white scar of newly cut wood, for one man to have felled it all. If he'd cut down that many branches and small trees by himself, the oldest cuts would have started losing that raw, pale look of just-hacked-down timber.
"At least fifteen or twenty, you think?" he murmured to Threbuch.
"Couldn't be much less than that, Sir," the chief sword replied. "Not from all the work the bastards've put in over there."
Jasak nodded again and thought some more.
If that estimate was accurate, First Platoon had the mysterious strangers substantially outnumbered. In addition to the fifty-seven men of his four line squads, Garlath had an attached six-man engineer section, four quartermaster baggage handlers, and a hummer handler. Adding Jasak himself, and Chief Sword Threbuch, that came to seventy men, which ought to provide Jasak with a comfortable superiority.
But he couldn't be sure of that. Threbuch's estimate was based on the minimum number the construction of that palisade would have required, but it was large enough to house a considerably bigger number. A simple division of labor could easily have put fifteen or so to work building it while others hunted for food, prospected for minerals?there was a substantial iron deposit in the area, Jasak knew?or even pillaged some nearby village unfortunate enough to have been targeted by pirates. There simply wasn't any way to know from out here how many people really were occupying that camp. Which meant someone had to go inside to find out. Yet Jas didn't feel like rushing forward and risking the lives of more of his men unnecessarily.
The palisade was strong enough to repel anyone who wanted to get inside, unless he had a convenient field-dragon to blast it down with explosive spells, which Jasak didn't. The thick wall of saplings?cut from the stream bank where there was enough open sunlight to allow heavy shrubs and saplings to grow?had been interwoven with tough brush, much of it thorn-covered, to create a high, virtually impenetrable barrier. His scouts' infantry-dragons, far lighter than the field-dragons t
he artillery used, would find it extremely difficult to blow gaps in it.
Despite the chief sword's comment, it wasn't quite a fortification. But it was more than stout enough to keep out any wild animals, and the number of people who could have been concealed in the area inside that high, thorny wall was dismayingly large … especially when those people were equipped with whatever unknown sort of weaponry they'd used against Osmuna.
Worse, the camp had been placed by someone with an excellent eye for terrain. The land rose towards it from the streambed, not steeply but steadily, and that location and its wall?higher than necessary to stop any native predator, but perfect for hiding its interior from an aggressor and preventing him from seeing the placement of men and weaponry on the other side?spoke of military planning. That much was unmistakable, but who had built it? And?more to the point?why?
In the face of so many unknowns, Jasak was unwilling to assume anything. What he needed was hard evidence, the answers to at least his most pressing questions, and he had nothing. For all he knew, this might not even be be killers' encampment. It might belong to someone else entirely?someone the killer had been scouting, prior to attacking.
Yet Jasak didn't believe that for a moment. Indeed, he was becoming more and more convinced that what he was looking at was a base camp for another multi-universal civilization. The very notion was absurd, but no more absurd than what had already happened. And they were close to what Magister Halathyn and Gadrial strongly believed was a class eight portal. If they were right, no one could possibly have lived in the vicinity without literally stumbling across the thing. A class eight wasn't the sort of thing that could escape notice for very long. The class three portal leading to their own swampy encampment was almost four miles across; a class eight would be closer to twenty-five or even thirty.
With something that size and the swamp portal only a couple of days travel apart by foot, Jasak couldn't believe any natives in the general vicinity would have failed to notice them. Which meant they should have built cities, or at least villages and transportation systems, to take advantage of them. Yet all the Andaran Scouts had found was this tiny, semi-fortified camp.
Which meant Osmuna's killer had probably been doing much the same thing they were: mapping and exploring.
Jasak conscientiously ordered himself not to wed himself to any sweeping conclusions without more evidence. They could be in the middle of some noble's huge game preserve, after all. Whoever had killed Osmuna might have thought he was eliminating a locally born trespasser or poacher. Or Jasak and his men might have unknowingly trespassed upon sanctified or unsanctified ground, in which case Osmuna might have been killed for blasphemy. But however firmly he reminded himself of those possibilities, he kept coming back to the totally alien nature of whatever had been used to kill his man.
This isn't getting me anywhere, he told himself. And every minute I waste speculating is another minute for anyone inside that camp to make his ambush nastier, if he's planning one.
The problem was what to do about it. Anyone who stepped out into that open clearing would undoubtedly find out if there was someone waiting inside that palisade with a terror weapon in his hands. Getting holes blown through more of his troopers didn't exactly strike Jasak as the best way of going about finding out, though. Oh, for one lowly reconnaissance gryphon to do an aerial sweep!
That gave him an idea.
He caught Fifty Garlath's eye, which wasn't all that difficult since the platoon commander was staring at Jasak with something close to panic in his eyes. The hundred pointed silently toward the nearest tree, then upwards into its widespreading branches. It stood along the bank of the creek where they lay prone, and Garlath nodded convulsively, with a look of relief that would have been comical under other circumstances but managed to look mostly pathetic under these.
The fifty signaled to Sword Harnak, then pointed at the same tree. Harnak, in turn, signaled to Jugthar Sendahli, who nodded, tapped one of his squad mates on the shoulder, and disappeared into the concealing brush.
It took the two troopers the better part of six sweat-filled minutes to work their way around to the back of the tree through the brush. Its trunk was more than broad enough to conceal them when they finally reached it, and Jasak heard the slightest of rustles as Sendahli's squad mate boosted the garthan high enough to reach the lowest of the widespreading limbs.
The dark-skinned scout went up the tree in slow motion, each movement silent with caution, each toehold tested gently before he used it to boost himself higher. He scarcely jostled a single leaf on his way up, and Jasak gave an internal nod of approval, pleased that Garlath's tenure hadn't ruined the garthan yet. Jasak had recommended Sendahli for promotion, and he hoped it went through.
The man was Mythalan, but hardly shakira or even multhari. The garthan caste was the lowest of the low in Mythalan society, comprised of the vast masses born without any Gift at all. In most parts of the Union of Arcana, those born without the ability to use magic were simply ordinary citizens. They might not be able to aspire to the magistery like Gadrial, but they could look forward to ordinary careers and the same basic opportunity to earn a good living as anyone else.
But not in Mythal.
Jasak's jaw muscles knotted as he watched Sendahli's slow, skillful execution of his orders and felt his Andaran sense of civilized behavior towards other human beings rising up in fresh indignation. A garthan wasn't legally property any longer. Chattel slavery had been outlawed two centuries ago, under the Union of Arcana's founding accords. But the accords had only limited power inside a country's national borders, which meant most local laws had remained the same. And in countries which had embraced the Mythalan culture and its rigid stratifications, those born without the ability to use magic faced lives little if any better than those of a Hilmaran serf from Andara's first age of conquest.
People born to the garthan caste lived painfully limited lives. Their employment choices were a matter of heredity?a butcher's son became a butcher, even if he was better suited to building wagon wheels?unless the whim of their shakira lords and masters willed otherwise. The magic-using castes and sub-castes, with the ruthless support of the traditional multhari military caste, still ruled Mythal and her allied colonies?including those in several new universes?with an iron hand. They jealously guarded their hereditary privileges and frothed at the mouth at the slightest suggestion of abolishing the caste system that relegated men like Sendahli to third-class citizenship and a grimly limited future.
Jasak had never learned the details of the debacle which had finally driven Magister Halathyn to sever all connection with the great Mythal Falls Academy, the premier magic research and development academy in all of Arcana's many universes. Much as he personally detested the shakira caste, Jasak had to admit that, historically, the majority of the great breakthroughs in magical theory had originated with the Mythalans. Which, of course, only made them even more insufferably overbearing and arrogant.
It undoubtedly also helped to explain what had happened with Magister Halathyn. Jasak did know that Halathyn had infuriated many of his shakira peers by devoting so much of his time and talent to the needs of the UTTTA even before he left the academy. It wasn't so much that they'd objected to trans-temporal exploration, but the shakira as a caste harbored a fierce resentment for the fact that the military (which meant Jasak's native Ardana) dominated trans-temporal exploration. The Mythalans had tried for years to secure control of the Union's exploration policies, only to be frustrated by Andara and Ransar. Whatever their own differences might be, the Andarans and Ransarans had formed a unified front against shakira arrogance literally for centuries, which had only made Mythal's resentment of the UTTTA's policies worse. Halathyn had never had much patience with that particular view, and he'd actually taken the time to find out how he could best aid in the exploration process.
And then had come Gadrial Kelbryan. She'd been only a lowly undergraduate, at the time?not yet seventeen, which had been a
n almost unheard of age for anyone, even a shakira, far less a Ransaran, to win admission to the academy?but every story agreed that she'd been at the heart of whatever had driven Halathyn vos Dulainah out of Mythal Falls forever in a white-hot rage. Given what Jasak had come to know of Halathyn, added to the obvious strength of Gadrial's Gift and the deep and abiding Ransaran faith in the individual, he rather suspected he could guess how it had happened. And he was absolutely certain that the Mythalan version?that Gadrial had been Halathyn's out-of-caste lover, trading sexual favors for better grades?was a total fabrication.
Ransaran and Mythalan societies, and the religious beliefs which underpinned them, could not have been more different. Mythalans believed in the reincarnation of the soul, and that lives of virtue were rewarded by successive incarnations in steadily higher castes on the path to a fully enlightened existence. Virtually all Ransaran religions, whatever else they might disagree about, were monotheistic and believed in a single mortal incarnation and a direct, personal relationship with God.
The Mythalan belief structure validated the superiority of the shakira and bolstered the monolithic stability of the structure which rested upon the garthan's total subjugation. After all, how could someone become a member of the shakira in the first place, unless he had attained the right to it in his previous incarnations? But Ransaran theology engendered a passionate belief in the right and responsibility of the individual to take command of his own life, to make of himself all that his own God-given abilities and talent made possible. The Mythalan caste system was a loathsome perversion in their eyes, and the clash between the two cultures was long-standing and bitter.
The discovery that a Ransaran possessed such a powerful Gift would have been gall-bitter for most shakira, and it was widely believed that the Mythal Falls faculty had a habit of washing out "unsuitable" students any way it had to. Or, if the student in question was too academically strong for that, using the requisitely brutal form of harassment to drive him?or her?away.