"What?" Company-Captain Balkar chan Tesh stared at Petty Captain Rokam Traygan in total disbelief. "You can't be serious!"
"I wish to all the Uromathian hells I wasn't, Sir," Traygan said harshly. The Ricathian Voice's face was the color of old ashes, and his hands shook visibly. He looked away from chan Tesh and swallowed hard.
"I—" He swallowed again. "I threw up twice receiving the message, Sir," he admitted. "It was . . . ugly."
chan Tesh stared at the petty-captain, then shook himself. He didn't know Traygan as well as he might have wished, hadn't even met the man before the Voice caught up with his column in Thermyn. But they'd traveled over a thousand miles together on horseback since then, from the rolling grasslands of what would have been central New Ternathia and across the continent's deserts and rocky western spine. The heavyset, powerfully muscled Voice hadn't struck chan Tesh as a weakling, yet he was obviously shaken—badly shaken—and chan Tesh was suddenly glad that he wasn't a Voice.
"Tell me," he said quietly, almost gently, and Traygan turned back to face him.
"Company-Captain Halifu didn't know exactly where we were," the Voice said, "and I've never worked with the Chalgyn Voice, Kinlafia. So instead of trying to contact us directly, he had Kinlafia pass the report straight up the chain with a request that Fort Mosanik relay to us. I got Kinlafia's entire transmission."
He swallowed again and shook his head.
"I never imagined anything like it, Sir," he said, his voice a bit hoarse around the edges. "It was—It was like Hell come to life. Fireballs, explosions, lightning bolts, for the gods' sake! And Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband caught right in the middle of it."
chan Tesh felt his own face turn pale. He was Ternathian, himself, not Harkalian, but Nargra-Kolmayr was virtually a Sharona-wide icon. The first woman to win the battle for a place on a temporal survey crew; one of the most powerful Voices Sharona had ever produced; daughter of one of Sharona's most renowned cetacean ambassadors; half of one of Sharona's storybook, larger than life romantic sagas. The fact that she was beautiful enough to be cast to play herself in any of the (inevitable) dramatizations of her own life had simply been icing on the cake.
"Was she hurt?" he asked urgently.
"Yes," Traygan half-groaned. "She was linked with Kinlafia, and somehow she held the link to the end. Held it even while whoever the bastards were slaughtered her crew—even her husband!—all around her. And then—"
His face twisted with what chan Tesh realized was the actual physical memory of the last moments of Nargra-Kolmayr's transmission.
"She's dead?" chan Tesh almost whispered.
"We don't know. We think she hit her head, so she might just be unconscious." Traygan sounded like a man whose emotions clung desperately to what his intellect knew was false hope, chan Tesh thought grimly.
"All right, Rokam," he said. "Tell me exactly what you know. Take your time. Make sure you tell me everything."
It was the news a transport pilot least wanted to hear.
Squire Muthok Salmeer's quarters, such as they were, were almost adjacent to the hummer tower. The handler on watch had handed the message straight to Salmeer, and Salmeer had run all the way from his quarters to the CO's office to deliver the ghastly news.
"Combat casualties? Combat with what?" Commander of Five Hundred Sarr Klian demanded incredulously as he scanned the message transcript the duty communications tech had pulled off the incoming hummer's crystal. It was, Salmeer recognized, what was known as a rhetorical question, and the pilot waited tensely for the five hundred to finish reading.
By the time he was done, Klian was swearing blisters into Fort Rycharn's roughly finished wooden walls. He glared at the authorizing sigil at the foot of the message, then shook his head, looked up, and glared at Salmeer.
"He met someone from another universe and attacked? Has Hundred Olderhan lost his blue-blooded mind?"
"Sir," Salmeer said, leaning forward and jabbing a finger at the two words in the entire message which had meant the most to him, "I don't know who attacked who, but he says he's got heavy casualties, Sir. Whatever his reasons, whatever's going on out there, he needs a med team. We've got to scramble one now, Five Hundred. My dragon's got seven hundred miles to fly just to reach the portal."
The pilot was almost dancing in impatience. Sarr Klian swore once more, explosively. Then, as Salmeer opened his mouth to protest the delay, Fort Rycharn's commander shook his head savagely.
"Yes, yes, of course! Throw a medical team into the saddle and go," he said sharply.
Salmeer paused just long enough to throw an abbreviated salute. The five hundred returned it with equal brevity, and Salmeer whipped around. He was already back up to a run by the time he hit the door, but even so, he heard Klian muttering behind him before the door closed.
"He attacked them? What the fuck is Olderhan doing out there?"
Twenty minutes later, Fort Rycharn's sole permanently assigned transport dragon was lumbering out to the flightline, loaded with an emergency medical transport platform, several canvas bags of medical supplies, two surgeons, four herbalists, and Sword Naf Morikan, Charlie Company's journeyman Gifted healer, whose R&R had just been cut brutally short.
"Sir Jasak attacked?" Morikan demanded as he fumbled his way into the saddle on the already-moving dragon. "Attacked what, in the gods' names? There's nothing out there!"
Salmeer bit his tongue to keep himself from pointing out that there obviously was something out there, since Sir Jasak Olderhan had gotten into a blood-and-guts fight with whatever it was. The pilot found it impossible to believe it really had been representatives of another trans-universal civilization. That was simply too preposterous for him to wrap his mind around without a lot more evidence. But he didn't have any better explanation for what it might have been than anyone else at Fort Rycharn did, and he reminded himself that Morikan was Olderhan's company healer. He knew every one of the men of Fifty Garlath's platoon personally. Of course the noncom was worried half out of his mind.
"I have no idea, Sword," he said instead. "Be sure your safety straps are buckled tight."
"Yes, Sir," Morikan replied. "Ready when you are, Squire," he added after a moment, and Salmeer gave Windclaw the signal.
The dragon launched quickly, as if he'd caught his pilot's urgency, and he probably had. Windclaw was a fine old beast, a century old last month, and as smart as a transport ever got. Of course, that wasn't much compared to a battle dragon, but Windclaw was no mental midget, and his experience made him doubly valuable in the field, particularly in an emergency. A canny old beast like Windclaw knew every trick in the book for coaxing extra speed during an emergency flight.
Salmeer wished bitterly that they'd had even one more dragon available to send with Windclaw, but this universe was at the ass-end of nowhere, almost ninety thousand miles from Old Arcana. Worse, it was over twenty-six thousand miles back to the nearest sliderhead at the Green Haven portal, and almost ten thousand of those miles were over-water. A transport dragon like Windclaw could cover prodigious distances—up to a thousand miles, or possibly a bit more in a single day's flight—but then he had to rest. That meant landing on something, and the water gaps between Fort Rycharn and Green Haven were all wider than a dragon could manage in a single leg.
That made getting anything all the way to the fort an unmitigated pain in the ass. But Salmeer was used to that, just as he was used to the fact that Transport Command promotion was slow to the point of nonexistence. Muthok Salmeer himself had almost thirty years in, but he was never going to be a combat pilot, and he still hadn't been promoted as high as a fifty. Taken for granted, overworked, underappreciated, and underpaid: that was a Transport Command pilot's lot in life, and most of them took the same sort of perverse pride in it that Salmeer did.
None of which made his current problem any more palatable.
The Arcanan military—and the UTTTA civilian infrastructure, for that matter—were notoriously casual about extending the slide rails out into the boondocks. It was hard to fault their sense of priorities, Salmeer supposed in his more charitable moments. After all, even Green Haven boasted a total population of considerably less than eight hundred thousand. That wasn't a lot of people, spread over the surface of an entire virgin planet the size of Arcana itself, and it wasn't as if other portals, much closer to Arcana, couldn't supply anything the home world really needed. Exploration and expansion were worthwhile in their own right, of course, and there were always homesteaders, eager to stake claims to places of their own. But simple economic realities meant the inner portals were far more heavily developed and populated and invariably received a far greater proportion of the Transit Authority's maintenance resources as a result.
And it's the poor bloody transport pilots who make it all possible, Salmeer thought bitterly. Not that anyone ever notices.
He supposed it was inevitable, but every bureaucrat, whether uniformed or civilian, seemed to assume there would always be a transport dragon around when he needed one. The sheer range a dragon made possible was addictive, despite the fact that even a big, powerful, fully mature beast like Windclaw could carry only a fraction of the load a slider car could manage. Most of the freight that needed moving on the frontiers was relatively light, after all. But the demands placed upon the Air Force's Transport Command were still brutal. The Command was always short of suitable dragons, and Cloudsail, Windclaw's partner in the two-dragon teams which were supposed to be deployed, had torn three of the sails in his right wing colliding with a treetop. They'd had to ship him back to the main portal for treatment, and, of course, there'd been no replacement in the pipeline.
All of which explained why Windclaw was the only dragon currently assigned to Fort Rycharn when Salmeer was desperately afraid that Sir Jasak Olderhan might well need far more than a single beast.
He glanced back, craning around in the saddle which ran securely around the base of Windclaw's neck, to be sure his passengers were still with him. Straps passed behind the dragon's forelegs, as well, to keep the saddle from slipping sideways. It put Salmeer in the best position to see where Windclaw was going and to communicate his orders to the dragon. Behind the saddle, Windclaw's back supported the emergency medical lift platform—a low-slung, aerodynamically streamlined lozenge made of canvas, leather, and steel tubing.
The platform was broad enough to accommodate two people lying flat beside one another, and deep enough to allow for a bottom shelf and top shelf for the storage of reasonably small items of cargo. It also ran most of the way down Windclaw's spine, which made it long enough to permit the transport of up to twenty critically injured people on stretchers laid end-to-end. A turtle-backed windbreak of taut canvas was stretched over the front two thirds of the framework to keep the slipstream off the medical casualties during transport.
Passengers who weren't incapacitated could ride in one of three saddles strapped in front of the lozenge, and both surgeons and the Gifted healer had opted to do so. All three wore helmets with full-length visors to keep the wind—and insects—out of their faces during flight. The herbalists, the most junior members of the medical team, rode inside the transport lozenge itself.
The terrain below them was a morass of mud, standing water, low-growing swamp forest, and vast stretches of reed-filled marsh. Waterbirds by the hundreds of thousands—probably by the millions, if he'd been able to count them—were visible below, some winging their way above the swamps, some dotting the marshes like a variegated carpet in shades of gray, white, brown, and pink. Still others rested among the trees, in what Salmeer suspected were vast rookeries, given the season in this part of this particular universe.
It was a breathtaking sight, even for a man accustomed to piloting transport dragons through empty universes. He loved the vast sweep of nature at its pristine best, and vistas like this one still raised his spirits. A wry grin formed behind the wind shield fastened to his leather-padded steel riding helmet. Despite all of his complaining about overwork and lack of respect, there was a reason he'd signed up for the Air Force, after all! He always felt sorry for the soldiers who had to slog across most universes on foot, like the Andaran Scouts did.
Shaylar walked in a daze, stumbling forward at Jathmar's side. He lay so still she would have been afraid he was dead if not for the faintest of flutters under her fingertips, where his pulse beat against the skin. It was the only way she could tell he wasn't, because she couldn't sense him through the marriage bond at all. Black acid lay at the core of her brain, preventing anything—even Jathmar—from connecting.
It was terrifying, that silence. And yet, given the agony he was in, or would be when he awoke, it might be a mercy, as well.
Her world had shrunk to a tightly constricted sphere around herself and Jathmar's hand. Everything beyond was lost in a haze, out of focus and rumbling with a strange, muted roar, like freight trains whispering in the distance. The strongest reality was the unrelenting, raw agony inside her own head—an ache with spiked heels, doing a raucous Arpathian blade dance behind her temples and eyelids.
She had no idea how much time had passed since the attack, no idea how far she would be forced to struggle through this endless wilderness. Her awareness faded in and out, unpredictably, with an occasional louder noise close by. An explosive crack as a dried branch broke under someone's foot; a murmur of voices speaking alien gibberish. The sounds whirled around her like a slow cyclone, leaving her lost and dizzy in the middle of nothing at all . . .
She awoke brutally, with her face against something rough and uneven. Ground, she thought distantly. The roughness was the ground, covered with drifts of leaves. Confusion shook her like a terrier with a wounded rat, and voices rose in alarm on all sides. For long, terrifying moments she had no idea where she was, or why. Then memory slammed her down, and she bit back the scream building in her throat. She wanted to fall back into the delicious nothingness, couldn't find the strength to face what had happened or was yet to happen.
Someone was sobbing uncontrollably, and she realized slowly that it was her.
Then a voice came to her. It was a gentle voice, the voice of a woman whose name she knew but couldn't find in her broken memory. An equally gentle hand touched her hair, and the whirling confusion steadied. The voice came again, more sharply focused this time, and someone's arms were around her. They lifted her gently, laid her on a soft surface.
Cloth, she realized. Cloth cradling her from head to toe. She collapsed against it, sinking into its supporting embrace, boneless with gratitude for the chance to simply lie still and rest.
"Is she asleep?"
Gadrial glanced up. Sir Jasak Olderhan was bent over her shoulder, peering worriedly at Shaylar, his eyes dark.
"Very nearly," she said. "Let's get her litter up to transport height."
She let Wilthy adjust the levitation spell in the accumulator. Once Shaylar was floating between waist and hip height, Wilthy passed guidance control to a strapping soldier with a bandage on one thigh and livid bruises across the right side of his face. The trooper's expression as he gazed down at the slender girl was a curious blend of wonder and apprehension, as though he expected her to mutate into a basilisk at any moment. Given the damage Shaylar had helped inflict on the soldier's unit, Gadrial supposed the analogy might be apt, at that.
She watched the litter float away, then drew a deep breath and looked up at the afternoon sky visible through occasional breaks in the leaf canopy. It was later than she liked, for their progress had been agonizingly slow, with twelve litters to guide through primeval wilderness and far too few able-bodied soldiers to do the piloting. They should have been no more than twelve hours' hike from the portal when they began their homeward trek, but she was beginning to fear that Jasak's twenty-five-hour estimate had been too optimistic.
"You're worried," Jasak said quietly.
"Terrified!" she snapped, then bit her lip. "I'm sorry. But Shaylar isn't strong. I think there's some internal injury, something inside her skull. I'm trying to keep it stabilized, but it takes constant attention, and I think she's slipping away from me slowly, anyway. And Jathmar—"
She lifted both hands helplessly in admission of a deep, unfamiliar sense of total inadequacy, and saw Jasak's face tighten.
"If we could only get a transport dragon in here," he murmured. His voice trailed off, but then, suddenly, his eyes snapped to life. He, too, glanced skyward for a moment, obviously thinking hard, then nodded sharply.
"It might just be possible," he muttered to himself, then refocused on Gadrial. "Excuse me," he said, almost abruptly, and wheeled away, walking straight to Javelin Shulthan.
"Send another hummer back to camp, Iggy," he said. "Tell Krankark to send the medical evacuation team through the portal the instant it reaches camp. Have them meet us at the stream where Osmuna was mur—"
He paused, glancing at the litters where Jathmar and Shaylar lay crumpled and broken, and the verb he'd been about to use died in his throat.
"At the stream where Osmuna died," he said instead, looking back at Shulthan. "A transport dragon should have the wing room to take off if he flies down the streambed. Tell Krankark to send a reply hummer, homed in on these coordinates, to confirm receipt of our message. Stay here until it returns, then catch up to us at the stream. It's less than ten minutes from here to the portal for a hummer, so you shouldn't have to wait too long."
"Yes, Sir!"
The hummer shot away through the trees less than two minutes later, like a feathered crossbow bolt. Jasak watched it disappear into the towering forest, willing it to even greater speed, then turned to find Sword Harnak with his eyes.
"Let's get them moving again, Sword," he said briskly. "We're heading for the stream where Osmuna died."
Jasak was grateful that he'd entered the exact coordinates for the spot of Osmuna's death into his personal navigation unit. He'd done it for the purposes of making sure his report was complete and accurate, of course, but now it was going to serve a second, even more important purpose. With that for guidance, they could follow a cross-country course directly to the same place, and they set back out, moving steadily . . . and unbearably slowly. Someone's litter hung up on something every few moments, which made walking a straight line—difficult in this kind of terrain, under any circumstances—outright impossible. Only the coordinates in Jasak's nav unit made it possible to follow a reliable bearing towards their destination at all, and the terrain was actually rougher on their new heading.
Jasak winced inside every time one of his wounded men stumbled, or cursed under his breath, or blanched, flinching as an unexpected, leaf-hidden foot-trap jarred his ripped and torn flesh. As a first combat experience, it—and he—had been a dismal failure, he thought. Too many good men were wounded or dead, and he still had no answers. He hadn't prayed—really prayed, and meant it—in years, but he did now. He prayed no one else would die out here; that no one else would pay for his errors in judgment. And while he prayed, he moved among his men as they struggled forward, pausing to murmur an encouragement here, to jolly someone into a painful smile there, anything to keep them on their feet and moving forward.
He wasn't sure he'd made the right decision now, either. But he'd made it, for good or ill, and the sound of the stream, musical and lovely in the silence, was a blessed sound as it guided them across the last, weary stumbling yards to its banks several hours later.
The sun was barely a hand's width above the treetops when they finally caught sight of the rushing, sparkle-bright water. Jasak longed to fling himself down, surrender at least briefly to his fatigue and the pain of his own wounded side, give himself just a few moments of rest as a reward for getting his survivors this far. But this late in the season, and this far north, full darkness would be upon them quickly. The rescue party couldn't possibly reach them before nightfall, and probably not before dawn, and the night promised to be clear and cold. Some of his wounded would die before sunrise without a hot fire . . . and Jathmar would be among them.
So Jasak didn't fling himself down. Instead, he ordered his exhausted men to pitch camp. He put those still capable of heavy manual labor to work cutting enough firewood to keep half a dozen bonfires going all night, asked Gadrial to check on his own wounded as soon as she'd tended to Jathmar and Shaylar, and then got a work party of walking wounded organized to assemble the tiny two-man tents they used only during the worst rainstorms into a single tarpaulin large enough to shelter all of the critically injured.
Lance Inkar Jaboth got busy cobbling together a hot meal from trail rations, local wild plants, and what Jasak had always suspected was a dollop of magic. Something made the concoctions Jaboth whipped up for special occasions—and emergencies—not just edible, but actually palatable. Whatever it was, it would be a gift from the gods themselves, under conditions like these. Jasak wished it had been possible to detach someone to hunt game for the pot, but he'd needed every able-bodied man he still had just to transport the wounded. Besides, if there were soldiers close enough to that other portal, out there, Jasak might find himself facing counterattack tonight. Under the circumstances, he had no arbalest bolts to waste.
He set perimeter guards and established a sentry rotation that would take them through the night. He put his best, most reliable troopers on the graveyard watch, the long, cold hours between midnight and first dawn. The men were spooked enough, as it was; he didn't want some overwrought trooper with a bad case of vengeance on his mind firing an infantry-dragon at shadows. Or worse, at Otwal Threbuch, returning from the portal they'd come here to find.
By the time darkness fell, half a dozen small bonfires crackled, driving back the pitch-black shadows under the trees and warming the crisp night air. Jasak worried about providing a homing beacon for a possible enemy scouting force or counterattack, but they had to have the warmth. So he did his best by moving his sentries as far out as he dared, then saw to his people, pausing at each fire to speak with exhausted soldiers, praising their courage under fire and seeing that their wounds were properly dressed.
Those wounds horrified him.
The sheer amount of trauma made him wonder just how much force was behind those tiny lead lumps. None of the bland metal cylinders they'd found looked dangerous enough to cause this kind of damage. Some of the wounds, they'd inflicted like the one in his own stiffening, throbbing side, were long, shallow trenches gouged out of skin and muscle at the surface. Others were more serious. Korval, one of his assistant dragon gunners, would never have the use of his left hand again. Not, at least, without some very serious Gifted healing. Korval had just unwrapped the bloodied bandages, waiting white-faced while the water heated over the fires so the wound could be properly washed, as Jasak crouched down to look. The bones had shattered, and the muscles and tendons looked as if they had literally exploded from within.
Korval looked up, met his shocked gaze, and managed a wan smile.
"Could've been worse, Sir. Might've been through m'balls, eh?"
"Watch your language, Soldier," Jasak growled. "There are ladies present." But he gave Korval's shoulder a hard squeeze and said. "You did a damned fine job today, keeping that dragon crewed under heavy fire. I've never seen anyone operate an infantry-dragon one-handed. Frankly, I don't know how you did it. I'll send Ambor to dress that properly; there should be some herbs in his kit to help with pain, at least," he added.
"That'd be just fine with me, Sir," Korval said, and Jasak smiled and gave the wounded man's shoulder another squeeze.
Then he moved on, still smiling, while behind his expression he cursed his own decision to send his company surgeon back to the coast with Fifty Ulthar's platoon for R&R. Layrak Ambor was rated surgeon's assistant, but he was only an herbalist, with neither the trained skill of a field surgeon, nor a Gift. But he was doing his dead level best, and he was far better than nothing. However limited his skills might be, Jasak was thankful they had at least that much medical help to add to Gadrial's healing Gift.
The men who'd been shot through the body, rather than an extremity, were in serious condition. Most were still shock-pale, and the low moans of grievously wounded men, floating above the steady, musical tones of rushing water, left Jasak Olderhan feeling helpless and useless. Anything he could do for them was hopelessly inadequate, and while cursing Garlath relieved some of his own emotional pressure, it did nothing to ease their suffering.
He paused briefly at the makeshift tent where Ambor worked frantically to keep their worst casualties alive. When Jasak hunkered down beside him, the herbalist was nearly wild-eyed, overwhelmed by the sheer number of ghastly wounds he had to treat, and by the appalling number of lives held in his trembling hands.
"You're doing a fine job, Ambor," Jasak said quietly. "Under conditions like these, no one could do better. Where can Magister Kelbryan help the most?"
A little of the wild panic left Ambor's eyes. He swallowed, then looked around his charges, obviously thinking hard.
"Ask her to look after Nilbor and Urkins, if you would, Sir. They're in bad shape. Gut wounds, the both of them, Sir. Unconscious and in shock, despite everything I've tried, and they're getting weaker. Without the Magister—"
He shrugged helplessly, and Jasak nodded.
"I'll send her in immediately."
"Thank you, Sir."
Ambor looked and sounded steadier, and the heat of the fire just outside the casualty tent was beginning to take hold, radiating at least a fragile comfort over the semi-conscious wounded. Jasak paused for just a moment, looking back at the herbalist over his shoulder, then strode quickly back out into the darkness.
He found Gadrial kneeling beside his injured prisoners. The tender look on her face as she stroked Jathmar's scorched hair with gentle fingertips, sounding his pulse with her other hand, touched something deep inside Jasak. He, too, was worried about the unconscious man. Jathmar hadn't roused even once, although that might have been as much Gadrial's doing as the result of his injuries.
Gadrial looked up as Jasak approached Jathmar's litter, which someone had adjusted to float ten inches above the ground.
"You need me for someone else?" she asked, and he nodded, his expression unhappy at the demands he was placing upon her.
"How are you holding up?" he asked quietly, and her eyes widened, as though his question had surprised her. Then a smile touched her lips.
"I'm tired, Sir Jasak, but I'll manage. Where do you need me?"
"In the tent. We've got two men Ambor's losing—belly wounds, both of them. They've slipped into a coma."
She paled and bit her lower lip, then simply nodded and rose in one graceful, fluid motion he couldn't possibly have duplicated. He escorted her into the tent, then stepped back outside, giving her privacy to work.
He looked around the bivouac one last time, then inhaled deeply. He'd done everything he could to settle everyone safely, however little it felt like to him, and curiosity was riding him with spurs of fire. Since there wasn't much else he could do about any of their other problems, he decided he could at least scratch that itch, and pulled out some of the strange equipment they'd recovered, both from the stockade and from the massive toppled timber.
He took great care with the long, tubular weapons every man—and women—had carried. There seemed to be several different types or varieties of them, and he rapidly discovered that they were intricate mechanical marvels, far more complex than any war staff his own people had built. Of course, war staffs—including the infantry and field-dragons which had been developed from them—were actually quite simple, mechanically speaking. They merely provided a place to store battle spells, and a sarkolis-crystal guide tube, down which the destructive spells were channeled on their way to the target.
Jasak had no idea what mysterious properties these tubular weapons operated upon. Nor could he figure out what many of the parts did, but he recognized precision engineering when he saw it.
A dragoon arbalest, like the one Otwal Threbuch favored, used a ten-round magazine and a spell-enhanced cocking lever. The augmented lever required a force of no more than twenty pounds to operate, and an arbalestier could fire all ten rounds as quickly as he could work the lever. It had almost as much punch—albeit over a shorter range—as the standard, single-shot infantry weapon, and a vastly higher rate of fire, but no man ever born was strong enough to throw the cocking lever once the enhancing spell was exhausted. Infantry weapons were much heavier, as well as bigger, and used a carefully designed mechanical advantage. They might be difficult to span without enhancement, but it could be done—which could be a decided advantage when the magic ran out—and they were considerably longer ranged.
The workmanship which went into a dragoon arbalest had always impressed Jasak, but the workmanship of whoever had built these weapons matched it, at the very least. Still, he would have liked to know what all of that craftsmanship did. Even the parts whose basic function he suspected he could guess raised far more questions than they answered.
For example, the weapon he was examining at the moment was about forty-two inches long, over all. The tube through which those small, deadly projectiles passed was shorter—only about twenty-four inches long—and it carried what he recognized as at least a distant cousin of the ring-and-post battle sights mounted on an arbalest. But the rear sight on this weapon was set in an odd metal block mounted on a sturdy, rectangular steel frame about one inch across. The sides of the rectangle were no more than a thirty-second of an inch across, as nearly as his pocket rule could measure, and it frame could either lie flat or be flipped up into a vertical position.
When it was flipped into the upright position, a second rear sight, set into the same metal block as the first, but at right angles, rotated up for the shooter's use. But the supporting steel rectangle was notched, and etched with tiny lines with some sort of symbols which (he suspected) were probably numbers, and the sight could be slid up and down the frame, locked into place at any one of those tiny, engraved lines by a spring-loaded catch that engaged in the side's notches.
Jasak had spent enough time on the arbalest range to know all about elevating his point of aim to allow for the drop in the bolt's trajectory at longer ranges. Unless he missed his guess, that was the function of this weapon's peculiar rear sight, as well. If so, it was an ingenious device, which was simultaneously simple in concept and very sophisticated in execution. But what frightened him about it was how high the rear sight could be set and the degree of elevation that would impose. Without a better idea of the projectiles' velocity and trajectory, he couldn't be certain, of course, but judging from the damage they'd inflicted, this weapon's projectiles must move at truly terrifying velocities. Which, in turn, suggested they would have a much flatter trajectory.
Which, assuming the sophisticated, intelligent people who'd designed and built it hadn't been in the habit of providing sights to shoot beyond the weapon's effective range, suggested that it must be capable of accurate shooting at ranges far in excess of any arbalest he'd ever seen.
There was a long metal oval underneath the weapon. It was obviously made to go up and down, and he suspected that it had to be something like the cocking lever on Threbuch's dragoon arbalest. In any case, he had absolutely no intention of fiddling with it until they were in more secure territory, away from potential enemy contact. And when he let the very tip of his finger touch the curved metal spur jutting down into the guarded space created by a curve in the metal oval, his fingertips jerked back of their own volition. That startled him, although only for a moment. Obviously, that curved spur was the weapon's trigger—it even looked like the trigger on one of his own men's arbalest's—and his meager Gift was warning him that it was more dangerous than the cocking lever (if that is what it was).
The metal tube itself was made from high-grade steel, and when he peered—very cautiously—into it, adjusting it to get a little firelight into the hollow bore, he saw what looked like spiraling grooves cut into the metal. Interesting. The Arcanan Army understood the principal of spinning a crossbow bolt in flight to give it greater stability and accuracy. He couldn't quite imagine how it might work, but was it possible that those spiraling grooves could do the same thing to the deadly little leaden projectiles this thing threw?
He put that question aside and turned his attention to the snug wooden sleeve into which the tube had been fitted. It was held in place with three wide bands of metal that weren't steel. They looked like bronze, perhaps. The wood itself continued behind the tube to form a buttplate—again, not unlike an arbalest's—so a full third of the weapon's length was solid wood.
The long, tapering section of wood, narrowest near the tube, widest at the weapon's base, had been beautifully checkered by some intricate cutting process. It was the only decoration on the weapon, and it was obviously as much a practical design feature as pure decoration. As Jasak handled it, he realized that the checkering would serve exactly the same function as the fishscale pattern cut into the forestocks of arbalests, making them easier to grip in wet weather.
Other items ranged from the obvious—camp shovels, hatchets, backpacks—to the completely mysterious, and he gradually realized that what wasn't there was as interesting as what was. Although Jasak searched diligently, he found no trace of maps or charts anywhere in their gear. He found notebooks, with detailed botanical drawings and startlingly accurate sketches of wildlife, but no trace of a single chart.
The implication was clear; they'd realized—or, feared, at least—that their position was hopeless, so they'd destroyed the evidence of where they'd been. If they were, indeed, a civilian version of Jasak's Scouts, working to survey new universes and map new portals, they would have carried detailed charts that showed the route back to their home universe. From a military standpoint, losing those maps was a major disaster for Arcana. From a political standpoint . . .
Jasak thought about the reaction news of this battle was bound to trigger—particularly in places like rabidly xenophobic Mythal, whose politicians trusted no one, not even themselves. Especially not themselves. As he thought about them and their probable response, Jasak Olderhan was abruptly glad these people had destroyed their maps, even as the Andaran officer in him recoiled from such blatant heresy.
He told the Andaran officer to shut up, and that shocked him, too. Yet he couldn't help it, for a shiver had caught him squarely between the shoulder blades, an odd prescience quivering through him like a warning of bloodshed and disaster.
Than a log snapped in the fire, jolting him out of his eerie reverie, and the uncanny shiver passed, leaving him merely chilled in the night air. He rubbed the prickled hairs on the back of his neck, trying to smooth them down again, and his glance was caught by a small, flat circular object lying wedged into the box of jumbled gear at his feet. He picked it up, and was surprised by its weight. The object was made of metal, rolled or cast to form a strong metal casing. After fiddling with it for a couple of moments, he determined that the top section was a lid that unscrewed. He removed it . . . and stared.
Inside were two . . . machines, he decided, not knowing what else to call them. In the lid section, there was a glass cover that sealed off a thin metallic needle, flat and dark against a white background. Tiny hatchmarks were spaced evenly around the circular "face" with neat, almost military precision. More alien symbols—letters or numbers, he was certain—marked off eight points around the perimeter.
Someone moved beside the casualty tent, and Jasak glanced up, automatically checking to see if it had been Gadrial. It hadn't, and when he turned back to the device in his hand, his gaze snapped back to the needle. He'd moved the case with the rest of his body, but the needle—which appeared to be floating on a post, able to spin freely—hadn't moved with the rest of the case. Or, rather, it had moved, swinging stubbornly around to point in the same direction as before despite the case's movement.
The discovery startled him, so he experimented, and found that no matter how he turned the case around, the needle swung doggedly to point in the exact same direction: north.
Understanding dawned like a thunderclap. It was a navigation device. But this was no spell-powered personal crystal that oriented its owner to the cardinal directions, as every Arcanan compass ever built did. It was nothing but a flat needle on a post, an incredibly simple mechanical device, powered by nothing he could see. How the devil did it work?
The bottom section of the metal case was much heavier than the lid, providing most of the heft he'd noticed when he first picked it up. Clearly, it housed something dense, and this object, too, had a flat glass face, under which lay another dial with hatchmarks, and another series of letters or numbers of some kind, beside each of the twelve longest hatch lines. There were three needles on this device: a short one which scarcely seemed to move at all; a long one which moved slowly; and a very thin one that moved continuously, sweeping around the dial in endless circles.
Its purpose, too, came in a flash of understanding as the slow, audible click-click of the long needle reminded him of the changing numbers in his personal crystal's digital time display. Yet this was no spell-powered device, either. Or, he didn't think so, at any rate. He discovered a small knob at one side which could be pulled out slightly to change the positions of the needles, or simply turned in place. Turning it without pulling it out resulted in a slight clicking sound inside the device, and a gradually stiffening resistance which increased the pressure needed to turn the knob. He stopped before it got too stiff to turn at all, lest he damage it by trying to force it.
He laid the two halves of the case in his lap, gazing down at them in the firelight, and frowned in unhappy contemplation. He was no magister, but his touch of Gift should have been enough to at least recognize the presence of any sort of spellware. Yet he hadn't detected even the slightest twitch of magic. He would have liked to believe that that meant the weapons he'd examined had exhausted whatever powered them, but he knew that wasn't the case.
Instead, what he had was a weapon which had amply proved its deadly efficiency; a navigation device which, for all its simplicity, looked damnably effective; and another device which obviously kept very precise track of time, indeed.
And none of them—not one of them—depended on spellware or a Gift. Which meant they would work for anyone, anytime, anywhere.
The night wind blew suddenly chill, indeed.