But they hadn't … until today. Until two total strangers had met in a trackless wood. Met in fear and suspicion, and despite the strictures of the Accords, promptly slaughtered one another. Gadrial hadn't known Osmuna, but he'd seemed a bright enough fellow, dedicated to his duty in the Andaran Scouts. He'd seemed unhappy with Fifty Garlath, but proud to serve Hundred Olderhan, and Gadrial found it difficult to believe he would have thrown the Accords into the garbage can without extremely good cause.

Her gaze returned again and again to the silent grave while Jasak's men searched the camp for clues. Ten minutes elapsed in grim silence, punctuated by the sounds of angry men ransacking what had been an orderly camp, and their ugly mood frightened her. These men had blood in their eyes, looking for something?or someone?to rip apart in retaliation for a comrade's murder. She couldn't really blame them, but that made their anger no less frightening, and when she glanced at Jasak, she saw him frowning as he, too, watched the camp's destruction.

The facts they shook loose were few and far between.

"We're not looking at more than eighteen or nineteen people, at most," Chief Sword Threbuch reported to Jasak and Garlath. "There's damn near nothing here but spare clothes, sleeping rolls, and abandoned foodstuffs. We found more of those little metal things we recovered on the bank above Osmuna's body, though, and you're right, Sir. There is something inside."

He produced several shiny metal cylinders, each of which had a duller metal object stuffed into the top. They weren't all identical; some were larger, some smaller. Most of the metal caps were round-nosed, although some were flatter than others. All of those had hollows in their tips, but there were also three longer ones, each of which had a solid, sharply pointed tip.

"That looks like lead," Jasak frowned as he touched one of the round-nosed cylinders. "But this one?" he took one of the three pointy ones "?looks more like … copper?"

He glanced up at Threbuch, but the chief sword's expression was baffled. Jasak looked at Gadrial, who extended her hand. He laid the cylinder in her palm, and she turned it, examining it from all angles.

"It is copper," she agreed. "But look here." She tapped the end. "It's not solid copper. It's more like a jacket around something else. And I think you're right about that, too. The core is lead."

"I wonder …" Jasak murmured as he took the mysterious object back from her.

"Sir?" Threbuch asked.

"I wonder how much force it would take to propel this," Jasak tapped the cylinder's pointed cap with one fingernail, "across fifteen or twenty feet of space and drive it through a human body?"

Garlath lost color and made a strangled sound that drew Jasak's eyes to him.

"That?that's barbaric!" the fifty protested.

"But damned effective," Jasak pointed out.

"You can't be sure that's what happened," Garlath objected. "There's not enough of anything inside that little cylinder to do such a thing."

"Just because we can't imagine how to do it, Fifty Garlath, doesn't mean someone else couldn't figure out how to do it," Jasak observed.

Garlath flushed, the color looking even darker against his fearful pallor, and Jasak turned back to Threbuch.

"Go on, Chief Sword," he said, and Threbuch produced some other odd cylinders of metal. These were much larger, as broad as his palm, and six inches long.

"There's a whole stash of these, whatever they are, Sir. We found them in every tent. They don't seem to be weapons of any sort, but there something inside them. You can feel it slosh when you shake the thing."

"You shook one of them?" Jasak frowned, and Threbuch snorted.

"One of the men had already been shaking them, Sir. It didn't explode in his hand, so after I'd ripped him a new asshole?pardon, Magister." He glanced at Gadrial and colored slightly himself. "Anyway, I figured it was probably safe enough to handle them."

"See if someone can cut into one of them. But not here. Take it out to the woodline, just in case."

As the unhappy trooper who'd drawn that particular job headed out with the dense metal object and his short sword, Threbuch continued his situation report, such as it was.

"They haven't been here more than a couple of days, Sir. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this was a forward observation post, or a base camp of some kind. A relay station, maybe, for others to follow. They're no primitives, whoever they are and wherever they've come from. You've seen their metalwork. That matches ours, but it's just the beginning."

He motioned to another trooper, who brought over an armload of examples.

"Their cloth is high quality," he said, holding up a length of what looked like sturdy canvas. "If this wasn't machine-loomed, I'll?" he flicked another glance at Gadrial and amended the phrase on his tongue to "?eat my shirt."

The magister just grinned, which stained the hard-bitten noncom's cheeks pink once more. Then he jerked his gaze back to his commanding officer.

"The same pattern repeats everywhere you look, Sir," he said, doggedly ignoring the humor glinting in Hundred Olderhan's eyes, despite the tension of the moment. "We found high quality leather goods sewn on a machine. Metal mess kits, with eating utensils and plates tucked inside collapsible cookpots. Personal toiletry kits with combs and brushes that look like something manufactured for a mass market, not locally produced by some village shop."

"If they left dishes and combs behind, they left in a damned hurry," Garlath muttered.

"And they weren't too worried about replacing them, either," Threbuch replied. "That kind of gear's hard to replace when you're at the end of a long transit chain."

"They may not be at the end of a long chain," Jasak said quietly.

Utter silence reigned for a long moment, broken only by the wind and rustling leaves.

"They're running for the portal we came out here to find," he continued after a moment. "I'm certain of it. Not only did they abandon most of their gear so they could move faster, they abandoned the donkeys they used to carry it here, as well." He nodded toward the sturdy little beasts pinned in one corner of the camp behind a fence made of rope. "I'm betting they have another fortified base on the other side. Not a little camp like this, either. A large base, with plenty of troops."

The chief sword swore colorfully. Then he stopped himself abruptly. He looked at Gadrial again, started to say something apologetic, then obviously decided he had more serious things to worry about than her possible reaction to a little rough language.

"We can't afford to let them reach that portal ahead of us, Sir," he said. "If you're right, and if they get to a bigger fort before we get to them, we'll be outnumbered. Given what they did to Osmuna, and how fast they did it, I don't like that scenario. Not one damned bit."

He glanced at Gadrial again as he spoke, but this time his expression was very different. The tough-as-dragons-scales chief sword looked terrified. And not, she realized abruptly, for himself. He was horrified by the thought that someone would kill her the same way they'd killed Osmuna. She had to blink hard, and she looked away, unwilling to embarrass him with her abruptly watery emotions.

"Hundred Olderhan," Fifty Garlath said before Jasak could respond to Threbuch, "given the Chief Sword's astute analysis, I respectfully recommend a course of extreme prudence. The enemy has an unknown troop strength and a head start. They're moving fast and light, whereas we're burdened with considerable equipment, including the dragons. Magister Kelbryan's calculations suggest that the portal's close enough they'll undoubtedly reach it well ahead of us. And with Fifty Ulthar's platoon at the coast, instead of the swamp portal, we're badly understrength."