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.