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Kalcyr reached down and took it, letting it lie in his palm. Then he looked back at the man from whom it had been taken.
"So, you're a Voice."
Kersai kept his mouth shut.
It wasn't easy. His heart raced, and he could feel the air fluttering in and out of his lungs. He knew now what was coming, and he felt the sweat beading on his brow.
A part of him wanted desperately to answer the Arcanan's question's truthfully. Another part wanted even more desperately to lie. But the truth would probably have been useless ... and the lie would probably have been detected.
He clenched his fists at his side, standing between the two men who had searched him and who still held his elbows. There was a reason he'd brought that badge along. He'd hoped it would never be needed, that this moment would never come. But the moment had come, and he found himself clinging to his love for his son and his wife as he gazed silently up at the hard-faced, hard-eyed Arcanan.
"So, the gryphon's got your tongue, has it, 'civilian'?" Kalcyr demanded. The Sharonian only looked back up at him, and the senior sword felt a cold, hard sense of satisfaction. The man's very silence was proof he was exactly what Kalcyr had been sent out here to find. Not that denying the truth would have done him any good in the face of the verifier spells Five Hundred Neshok had loaded to Kalcyr's crystal.
"Not so talkative now, I see," he said, sliding the PC back into his pocket now that it was no longer needed. Still the Sharonian only looked at him, and Kalcyr shrugged.
The senior sword wasn't going to shed any tears over what needed to be done. For that matter, he wasn't going to pretend he didn't take an intense, personal satisfaction out of it. But unlike the Sharonians who'd murdered their Arcanan prisoners, Kalcyr saw no need for brutality.
He looked at the two men flanking their prisoner and nodded.
Quick and clean, he thought approvingly as the blood fountained from the Voice's slashed throat. Quick and clean.
He looked down at the crumpled body, which seemed smaller, the way dead men almost always did, then looked up at the sky, remembering another day, other bodies.
"Leave him. Mount up," he said flatly, and the dismounted troopers hesitated only for a moment before they obeyed. Kalcyr gave the corpse one more look, then reined his unicorn's head around and started back the way they'd come, leaving the body for the buzzards.
If it was good enough for Fifty Narshu and his men, it's good enough for that bastard, he thought, and never looked back even once.
"Overall, I like your attack plan, Klayrman," Two Thousand Harshu said. "The only thing I wonder about is whether it wouldn't be better to go ahead and commit the gryphons first. They were certainly effective enough at Fort Ghartoun."
"Yes, they were, Sir," Toralk agreed. "But we also lost over a dozen of them."
"Practically all to that one damned lunatic with the—the what-do-you-call-it? The shotgun," Harshu pointed out.
"True." Toralk nodded. "Still, it did cost us ten percent of our total gryphon strength. I'd like to conserve that, especially if we end up needing it for Fort Salby."
Harshu cocked his head, then frowned slightly while the command tent's canvas flapped gently in the brisk early afternoon breeze.
"That's a logical argument, Klayrman. Why do I think it's not the only one?"
"There is one other thing," Toralk admitted slowly, reminding himself once again that there was a keenly intelligent, highly observant brain behind those intense eyes. "I wouldn't call it a 'logical argument,'
exactly, but it is causing me a little concern."
"Well? What is it?"
"It's just that some of the gryphon-handlers are reporting that the compulsion spells don't seem to be working with one hundred percent effectiveness."
"What?" Harshu's eyes narrowed. "What do they mean?"
"That's just it, Sir. They don't seem able to point to any one area in which the spells are malfunctioning.
In fact, it's more of a ... a feeling, I guess you'd say, than anything else."
Harshu looked more than mildly incredulous, and Toralk shrugged.
"I didn't say I'd observed any problems, Sir. I just said the gryphon-handlers are expressing concerns.
Some of them, at any rate. And, to be completely honest, I've never been a gryphon-handler. I know that anyone who does that job successfully for very long has to develop particularly acute instincts where the gryphons are concerned, though, so they could well be seeing something I'm not. Whatever's happening, it's making them a bit worried. Let's face it, Sir—it's not exactly a safe job."
This time, Harshu nodded slowly. In fact, gryphon-handling was one of the more dangerous Air Force specializations. Not a year went by that at least one gryphon-handler wasn't turned upon by his attackgryphons.
People who did the job for very long had to develop a feel for when one of the hyperaggressive creatures was hovering on the brink of breaking the compulsion spells which normally kept its ferocity under control.
"Do you think there really is a problem?" the two thousand asked. "Or do they just think there is?"
"Honestly, Sir, I don't know. I onlyknow there's a certain level of anxiety, and I'd just as soon let them stay where they are for right now. If we need them, we can use them, but if we don't need them, then why not let the handlers settle down a bit before we have to commit them somewhere else?"
"I don't suppose I can argue with that," Harshu conceded. "Especially when the fellow arguing in favor of it is the one who's successfully punched out every fort we've encountered so far."
Toralk nodded slightly at the implied compliment, then waved one hand at the map on the table.
"As you see," he said, indicating a red push pin, "our advance party's located an appropriate oasis for our forward staging point. We're still going to have to fly in a lot of water, though, Sir. That's going to cut into our total lift capability. That's why my assault plan calls for leaving the heavy cavalry cavalry behind, at least temporarily. They're going to be of limited utility in taking out the fort itself, under the proposed operations plan, and leaving the heavy cav behind gives us the best trade-off for hauling water."
"Agreed." Harshu nodded.
"It's going to cost us a couple of days before we can move on Fort Salby, you understand, Sir? We're going to have to use up some additional transport flights leapfrogging them forward to Fort Mosanik before we can ship them the rest of the way to Traisum."
"Understood," Harshu said.
"Then that only leaves the question of exactly what we do about this after we punch out Mosanik."
Harshu tapped another push pin, then looked up at his commanding officer. "I've viewed the imagery from the recon-gryphons, Sir. These people may not have magic, but seeing the kind of engineering they're capable of is ... well, it's impressive as hell, is what it is, Sir. I'd like your guidance on exactly how we want to approach it."
"I wish I were going with you, Iftar," Therman Ulthar said quietly as he watched his brother-in-law strapping up his backpack.
"Don't be silly." Iftar Halesak looked up at him and shook his head. "You've sure as hell earned a little more rest, Therman!"
"Maybe."
Ulthar moved his newly healed shoulder gingerly. His stint as a prisoner of war of people who didn't have magistrons had given him a whole new appreciation for modern medicine. The fact that he'd recovered the shoulder's full range of motion literally overnight would have been wonderful enough, but it was also the first time he'd been truly pain-free in literally months. He luxuriated in the sensation, but even as he delighted in the absence of pain, that very delight brought home the thing that most concerned him.
"It's not the rest I'm worried about," he admitted, and Halesak frowned.
"What is worrying you?" the garthan asked. "You're not still feeling guilty over what that bastard Neshok did, are you?"
"Actually, I am." Ulthar's expression was profoundly unhappy. "I should have said something, stopped him—"
"By the time you were out of the healers' hands and knew what the hell was going on, Two Thousand Harshu and Thousand Toralk had already put a stop to it," Halesak pointed out. "This time, at least," he added.
Ulthar's mouth tightened, and Halesak shook his head.
"I'm telling you, Therman. Let it lie, for now, at least. I don't know what else is going on, but it looks to me like the Two Thousand's decided to put a muzzle on Neshok. If that's the case, then he's not going to be torturing or murdering any more POWs. Which means you don't have to play the noble Andaran paladin in shining armor and maybe get your fool self killed trying to stop it."
"Not trying to stop Neshok, anyway," Ulthar muttered.
"And what does that mean?" Halesak demanded.
"They're leaving Thalmayr in command here."
"Thalmayr?" Halesak frowned in surprise. "Who had that brainstorm?"
"I think it was Five Hundred Isrian."
"Oh, wonderful." Halesak looked as disgusted as he sounded. Chalbos Isrian was one of Two Thousand Harshu's senior battalion commanders. He was also one of the officers who'd argued most forcefully in support of Neshok's plan for dealing with the Voicenet.
"Exactly."
"It may not be that bad," Halesak said, but he sounded as if he were arguing with himself, not his brotherin- law, and he knew it.
"I hope not," Ulthar said bleakly. "But the fact is, Thalmayr is a frigging idiot at the best of times. And I've got a feeling—a really bad feeling, Iftar—that he's just been biding his time. He blames the Sharonians for what happened to us, instead of blaming his own stupidity. And I think—"
He broke off with a shrug.
"You think what?" Halesak asked sharply.
"I think he'll never believe the Sharonians were really trying to help him. I know their healers testified that they were under verifier, and as far as I know, no one's ever been able to fool the verification spells.
I know I'm convinced they were doing their best to help me. But I don't think there's enough evidence in the multiverse to convince Thalmayr of that. And what really scares me is how stupid he proved he could be before he was wounded. Gods alone know how much stupider he's capable of being now!"