It was, on the whole, a delightful and exhilarating time to be alive. He grinned and pulled out his field notebook and pencil, making careful notations that included compass headings, then set out again, eager to finish the routine work so they could get to the iron deposit.
Jathmar's Talent was strained to its utmost, feathered-out edge, feeling out the contours of the iron deposit he couldn't quite See from its distortions of the magnetic field, when it struck.
The psychic blow was so savage that he literally lost stride, stumbled, and went to one knee.
Shaylar!
He exploded back to his feet and whirled, blindly seeking the source of his wife's abrupt anguish, and his hand blurred toward his hip. Steel hissed with an angry-snake sound in the suddenly menacing silence as the H amp;W cleared leather. But there was nothing to shoot. He was miles from camp. Whatever was happening, he couldn't possibly get there in time to do anything about it. Fright chittered along his nerves while the rest of him stood frozen for long, soul-shaking moments.
Shaylar's terror and shock rolled across him in battering waves, but Jathmar wasn't a telepath. He didn't know what was happening. Couldn't glean the tiniest detail from the jagged emotions tearing through him. Every nerve in his body quivered with the need to run towards camp, but he bit down on the panic and remained where he was, forcing himself to breathe deeply.
You can't help anyone if you go crashing through the trees in a headlong charge.
The steel in that mental voice, put there by years of intense training and hardscrabble field experience, steadied him. It was hard to do?the hardest thing he'd ever done?but he managed to disassociate himself from the tidal wave of Shaylar's emotions. He stood silent for several more moments, just listening to the forest, but he couldn't detect anything out of the ordinary. The birds still chirruped and called through the trees. Squirrels and chipmunks still frolicked like happy children on a scavenger hunt. Wind rustled in the glorious crimson-golden foliage high overhead, and rattled through the thickets of blackberry brambles. The stream still bubbled its way across the rocks, splashing from one boulder to the next on its long journey to the sea.
In all that ordinary sound, Jathmar could detect not one single, solitary thing that might have threatened Shaylar. And, by extension, the entire camp, since Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl would never have permitted Shaylar to wander away from the base camp's protection. Nor was she foolish enough to do so. All of which meant one simple thing; if he wanted to find out what was wrong, he would have to return. Immediately.
Jathmar eased his slung rifle off his shoulder, holding the pistol one-handed while he clicked the safety off the long gun. There was no sign of danger in his immediate vicinity, but Jathmar wasn't taking any chances. He holstered the revolver and worked the lever on the rifle, chambering a round in one easy, fluid motion.
The metallic sound of the action was profoundly reassuring. The Sherthan Model 70 had been designed as a short, handy saddle gun, but it was still a powerful weapon. Chambered for a .48 caliber, three hundred-grain round based on the old Ternathian Army Model 9's. Its muzzle velocity was lower then the military weapon's, due to its shorter barrel, but with the new "smokeless powder," it still pushed the heavy, hollow-pointed round at over nineteen hundred feet per second, producing a muzzle energy of over two thousand foot-pounds. That gave the weapon a nasty kick, but it was also sufficient to blow a hole right through a man and lethal enough to deal with anything short of one of the huge grizzlies.
At the moment, Jathmar found that thought comforting. Very comforting.
Some survey crewmen routinely carried their rifles pre-chambered, so a bullet was available to fire instantly if a man needed to shoot in a hurry. Jathmar had more shooting experience than most scouts, however. He could load, lock, and fire a rifle or handgun in a fraction of a second, in total darkness or blinding rain, and under normal circumstances a round carried in the chamber was an accident waiting to happen.
This, however, was not a normal circumstance.
So he loaded the chamber, then moved forward cautiously, Model 70 in both hands (and trigger finger outside the trigger guard), senses alert for the slightest hint of danger. The emotional link with Shaylar had shifted. Horror had faded away into a sense of desperate urgency that threatened to swamp his hard-won calm. He literally could not imagine what was happening at their base camp, but he commanded himself once again not to panic and moved forward at a steady pace.
He forced himself to move more slowly than he would have preferred, repeating to himself the Authority mantra that coolheadedness was both a survey scout's first line of defense and his most effective weapon. Yet the urgency in the bond tugged at him, urged him forward as it grew stronger. It felt almost as though Shaylar was shouting "Hurry!"
Which, given the strength of her Talent and their marriage bond, might be exactly what she was doing.
Despite his determination to move with caution, Jathmar found himself speeding up. He couldn't help it. The forest was utterly normal, yet Shaylar's emotions were a goad, driving him faster with every passing minute.
He was never sure when he'd broken into a run, but he realized he was, in fact, running when he slid down a leaf-slick gully, thrashing through the underbrush, and found himself hurtling up the other side.
He paused at the top, panting, cursing his carelessness, and listened again. Still he heard nothing. Not a solitary, damned thing out of the ordinary. He checked his watch and tried to calculate how far he'd come. Half a mile, maybe. Jathmar grimaced, then set out again, opting for a compromise between the utter silence of caution and the pell-mell dash of panic.
Pushing through the dense underbrush along the stream was heavy work. The luxuriant growth's widespread, tangling limbs and brambles caught at his rugged clothing and slowed him down. He slogged through it, cursing its hindrance, then paused with another curse?this one directed at himself.
He was a Mapper, damn it. He was following the stream out of sheer habit, because it was the way he'd come on his way out. But the sense of direction which came with his Talent told him the precise bearing to the base camp, and he changed course, angling sharply away from the creek. The open forest floor away from the streambed's understory was vastly easier?and quicker?going, and his ability to See the terrain in front of him let him pick the best, fastest way through it.
I should've thought of this sooner, he told himself savagely. Guess I'm not quite as calm as I'd like to think I am.
There was no point in kicking himself over it, and he settled down to the steady lope the better going permitted.
It took Jathmar another thirty agonizing minutes to reach the campsite, where he found a rude surprise.
It was empty.
He stood in a screen of thick shrubs at the edge of the clearing, too uneasy to just step out into the open without taking a careful look first. The brushwork palisade stood silent in the glorious autumn sunlight, a circle of protection lacking only its gate. He could see the tents inside it, still pitched where they'd been this morning. The donkeys were still there, too, looking bewildered and lonely. But there wasn't a single person in sight, and not a single man-made sound anywhere in the clearing.
An icy fingertip touched Jathmar's heart. Deadly cold, unreasoning, it robbed him of breath for several shuddering, superstitious moments. Then his gaze, wandering in shock from one edge of the camp to the other, caught on something totally unexpected. His eyes jerked to a halt, fixed with sudden white-faced horror on something that shouldn't have been there.