Hell's Gate

"Begging your pardon, Sir," Threbuch muttered, "but whoever this bastard is, he would have done us a grand favor if he'd killed that asshole instead of poor Osmuna."

Jasak didn't respond. The chief sword was way too far out of line for a noncom of his seniority, and he knew it. Worse, though, he obviously didn't care. And, worse still, Jasak couldn't blame him. So he simply ignored the remark entirely and gave the order no commanding officer liked to give.

"Chief Sword, please see to it that someone collects Osmuna's personal effects. We'll have to forward them to his widow. Then find Kurthal. He's the best draftsman we have. Have him render a sketch of those wounds, front and back, to proper scale."

Threbuch nodded, and Jasak drew a shallow breath.

"When he's done," he said, his voice flat as the ice on Monarch Lake, "prepare Osmuna's body for field rites. We can't just leave him, and we can't spare anyone to take him back to camp."

"Yes, Sir."

The older man's expression told Jasak he was about as happy with those orders as Jasak was. Nobody enjoyed that particular duty, least of all Threbuch, who'd conducted field rites over the years for more troopers than any man cared to recall. Jasak's father had very nearly been one of those troopers, and something in the chief sword's eyes said he was determined to make certain Jasak didn't become one, either.

While Threbuch went to deal with that unpleasant chore, Jasak glanced across the stream to where Gadrial sat, unobtrusively watched over by troopers who stood a yard or so above her with loaded arbalests, their gazes roaming ceaselessly for possible danger. She was watching Jasak. Even at this distance he could practically see her blazing curiosity over what they'd found. Not out of any ghoulishness, but because she was worried. More than worried, however splendidly she was concealing the fear he knew she must be feeling.

There was no point keeping her in suspense, and he motioned for her to join him.

Gadrial rose from her perch on the boulder, waded carefully across the swiftly moving stream, and climbed the far bank to join Jasak. She carefully kept her face calm, her ma

She dug her boots into the soft earth of the stream bank, resisting the temptation to rub her posterior, which hadn't enjoyed its stony resting place. It was a steep scramble, but she finally reached the top, where Sir Jasak Olderhan stood watching her through hooded eyes.

Military secrets, she thought, and sighed mentally. He would tell her only what he thought she needed to know. Which wouldn't be much. That was going to be frustrating enough, but the slight chill in his ma

She hadn't looked at Osmuna as she waded the stream.

Sir Jasak didn't understand that, she was sure. Mired in his rigid Andaran codes of behavior, he probably thought she was being callous, possibly even coldhearted. He'd expected her to stare, perhaps blink on tears and bite her lip in an emotional display, because she wasn't Andaran, and therefore didn't share an Andaran woman's set of responses to such situations. He'd expected her to display curiosity, at the least, particularly since his men hadn't let her get close enough to see the wounds that had killed the poor man.

She had yet to meet any Andaran male who'd bothered to learn the attitudes held by other cultures' women on much of anything, let alone something as rigidly prescribed as the Andarans' views on death and the proper responses to it. Gadrial, on the other hand, wasn't particularly interested in learning the proper responses to death, because she held a profound respect for the sanctity of life, and murder violated that sanctity unforgivably.

Staring at a murdered person's remains was deeply disrespectful to the soul which had inhabited those remains. Worse, that soul was usually still there, confused by the sudden, brutal shift in its state and unwilling to move on until the shock had worn off. But more importantly even than that, her main concern?as always?was for the living, not the dead. There was nothing she could do to help Osmuna's brutalized soul, whereas there were a number of thing she could do to help Sir Jasak Olderhan and his soldiers. If Hundred Olderhan allowed her to help. Being a stiffnecked Andaran noble, he was far more likely to order her wrapped up in cotton gauze and protected like a child.

She bit back a sigh and scrambled up the last two feet of the bank to level ground. She found herself more upset than she'd expected to be by Jasak's cool ma

"Did you find anything?" she asked quietly.

"Nothing but more mysteries," he admitted. "That, and a trail to follow. More precisely, to backtrack. We're still looking for traces of where he went after he splashed into the stream."

"At least we've got something to follow," she said with a wan smile that lightened a little of the grim chill in his brown eyes. He studied her for a silent moment, then seemed to come to a decision.

"Ever see anything like this?"

He held a small metal cylinder on the palm of his hand. Gadrial peered closely without touching it, then frowned as she realized what she was seeing.

"Somebody burned something inside that," she said, and he nodded, one eyebrow flicking slightly upward.

"Yes, they did," he agreed.

"What?"

"I was hoping you might be able to tell me that."

The morning air felt suddenly colder. He didn't know what had killed Osmuna. He had no more idea than she did, and she stared at the object on his hand.

"It's so simple there's nothing you could use as a clue, trying to figure out what it does," she said. "Of course," she frowned, "someone who'd never seen a personal crystal might wonder what it was for, let alone how to retrieve any notes stored in it."

"Why do you say that?"

She looked up, a bit startled by the sharp edge in his voice and the sudden intensity of his eyes.

"What?"

"What in particular made you think about someone who'd never seen a PC before?" he amplified, and she pursed her lips.

"Well," she said, "the men under your command are scared. I mean, really scared. There's something wrong?terribly wrong?about Osmuna's death. None of you seem to know what caused the poor man to die, and now you're showing someone who isn't even a soldier an unknown device found near the dead man. That suggests to me that you have no idea who killed Osmuna, no idea how. And that means … "

Her voice trailed off as the full import of her own subconscious insight came sputtering up to the surface.

"That means somebody who isn't Arcanan did the killing," she said finally, slowly, and realized she was rubbing her arms in an effort to persuade the fine hairs to lie back down. She wanted desperately to stare into the woodline, and kept her gaze on Sir Jasak's face instead through sheer willpower.

"I'm right, aren't I? Otherwise, you wouldn't have asked me if I'd seen something like that."

He drew breath, visibly stepped back from whatever white lie he'd been about to utter, and nodded.

"Right on all counts," he said simply, and she shivered.

"You're sure it isn't a spell accumulator of some kind, Magister?" Chief Sword Threbuch asked. The question startled her, since she'd been concentrating too hard on what Sir Jasak was saying to realize the noncom had returned behind her.