After making sure that Jason was sitting still, Slovotsky leaned back against the rough trunk of the tree and closed his eyes, letting his mind drift. It was just a bit too neat; it would have been easy to drop to the trail and backtrack to the side trail where they had stashed the horses. Walter Slovotsky, always conscious of the fact that his own tendency was to do things the easy way, was by policy suspicious of too-easy solutions.

Policy aside this was a situation worthy of some suspicion: The slavers had put out an advance party; was it beyond possibility that they had a detachment batting cleanup? Not at all.

Five minutes of silence pa.s.sed, and then ten. He nodded to himself and forced his eyes open, beckoning to the boy.

Hear that? Slovotsky mouthed, putting his hands behind his ears to pantomime listening carefully.

Jason wrinkled his brow as though to say, Hear what?

What is the strange thing that the dog did in the night, Watson? Slovotsky mouthed.

At the boy's puzzled look, Slovotsky was reminded again that these G.o.ddam kids had been brought up on This Side, with only traces of a proper cultural upbringing.

He put his lips next to Jason's ears. "We've been silent," he whispered, his voice pitched to carry no more than inches, "and we haven't been moving around; the forest noises should have returned by now."

But they haven't, the boy mouthed.

"Precisely my point, Watson." Slovotsky pointed down the trail in the direction from which the slaver party had come. "So keep your mouth shut and your eyes opena"and on the trail."

Thank you, squirrels and birds. The animals were keeping watch for them. Since they were still quiet, their keener senses had picked up something. Possibly somebody else using this rarely used trading trail through the forest. . . .

In another ten minutes, he could hear the clatter of hooves along the trail; moments later, a party of seventeen sharp-eyed men rode underneath.

Make that a hundred to eighty-seven. Still, not the worst odds he'd ever run across.

As the riders disappeared around the bend, Walter turned to Jason. The lesson had made an impression on the boy. He didn't even breathe heavily as he watched the heavily armed troop ride slowly down the trail, and he didn't make a move to leave when the troop rode out of sight.

Walter Slovotsky mouthed, See? I do know what I'm talking about, then breathed on his nails and buffed them across his chest.

Still, if we can get the jump on them, it should be a piece of cake, Walter Slovotsky said to himself. Then a wanton burst of self-honesty forced him to respond: Then why are you scared s.h.i.tless, as usual?

He shrugged off the question, and waited only a few more minutes before standing and stretching as the forest noises returned.

"Let's go get the horses, boyoa"we've got some hard riding to do."

Jason hesitated. "Uncle Walter?"

"Yes?"

"How did you know?"

"Well . . ." Walter Slovotsky could have mentioned the forest's silence, but he wasn't sure he wanted to let the boy in on all the trade secrets. Not yet, anyway; right now, Jason's being impressed was more importanta"besides, the tone of admiration in Jason's voice was a definite and pleasant improvement over the previous disdain. "Elementary, my dear Cullinane, quite elementarya"a little bird told me," he said, more or less truthfully.

"What?"

"Let's get moving; with a bit of luck, we can hook up with the team sometime tomorrow morning."

They were picked up by an outrider around noon, and Daherrin, upon the advice of Ahira, called a full midday halt in a nearby clearing. The horses were unsaddled and cooled, then brought down a side trail to a stream and watered, and then allowed to graze before being fed from the limited supplies of oats and barley.

Meanwhile, the raiding team ate a cold lunch of hard sausage and yet more of what was both the worst-smelling cheese that Walter Slovotsky had ever tasted and the worst-tasting cheese he had ever smelled, washed down with a bit of wine and quarts of cold stream water.

G.o.d, how he hated cold road food.

Most of the experienced warriors topped off lunch with a siesta; even after only a few days on the road, old habits were returning. You slept and you ate when you coulda"and as much as you coulda"because there might not be a chance later on.

Jilla, one of only two women with the team, lay stretched out under an improvised lean-to, snoring like a dwarf.

Aeia was the other woman, and while she wasn't really an experienced warrior, she had learned to sleep when possible. Napping, she huddled childlike under a blanket that Walter's fingers itched to pull up. Or simply to slip under and wake her for a quick non-nap.

Naughty, naughty, he chided himself, with no seriousness whatsoever. I am supposed to think with an entirely different organ altogether.

Meanwhile, the leadership and some of the newcomers were embroiled in a discussion. As was usuala"the team's leadership had to plan while the opportunity presented itself; the tyros hadn't yet learned to get food and rest whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Understandably, the group consisted of Ahira, Daherrin, Bren Adahan, and Valeran as the seniors, and Jason and a fifteen-year-old named Samalyn from the juniors. What surprised Walter was how Daherrin actually listened to the young ones; Walter's own tendency was to tell them to shut up and listen.

Daherrin shook his ma.s.sive head. "I don't like jumping 'em in the daytime." He tapped a stubby finger at his eye ridges. "Rather take advantage of darksight."

Ahira shook his head and spat. "There are only thirteen of the True People," he said in dwarvish. "Do you think we can kill all the slavers by ourselves?"

Jason Cullinane frowned. "Erendra or English," he half growled in the same language. "Your accent is too thick."

"Be still, Jason," Valeran said, trying on his in loco parentis role.

Bren Adahan hid a smile behind a hand. A human telling a dwarf that he didn't speak dwarvish right? He shook his head with clearly tolerant affection.

Daherrin nodded. "Jason is right."

Walter could have puked. First of all, Ahira had been part of the group since the beginning; if he figured that something needed to be said in dwarvish, then that was the way it was. A stripling boy had no business correcting him.

On the other hand, to Daherrin, Jason wasn't just a boy, not just an apprentice warrior and engineer; he was Karl Cullinane's son, and to Daherrin that meant a lot, perhaps too much.

Spoiled brat.

Daherrin frowned again. "I don't like not being able to jump them like normal. Could wait for 'em in a clearing, but then there's the problem of the advance ridersa""

"Forget that." Ahira shook his head. "There could easily be worse. It's entirely possible that they've got somebody riding about a day ahead of them, doing a reconnaissance."

Slovotsky nodded. "If you don't mind me trying my hand at a bit of brilliance, I think I may have it."

He picked up a stick and drew a ragged line in the dirt. "Here's the main traila"they're about here, right now. Our road forks here, and we'll take this turn . . . figure that we can push ourselves fast enough to intercept them about here, a day outside of Wehnest. This side trail leads off to a small farmholding; we can hide our main force a ways down it."

He picked up three stones and set them down in the dirt. "Here's their advance party. They ride past the trail, and get hit about . . . here by a quarter of our advance groupa"three, maybe four bowmen. They kill a few, maybe they just pin them down.

"Meanwhile, the other half of our advance groupa"maybe tena"hits them from the front, and forces them to dismount."

Daherrin smiled. "And then our main group hits them from the rear."

Valeran smiled too. "But that leaves their reserves."

Ahira turned to the grizzled warrior. "And why does that make you smile?"

"Because I know Walter Slovotsky." He turned to Slovotsky. "You have something clever saved for them."

"You betcha. Just as soon as the main body slips by the trail and the rest of you folks get to chasing after them, me and a couple others string rope across the trail, about head height. Then we duck back up the side trail and wait for the s.h.i.t to hit the fan."

Bren Adahan nodded a reluctant approval. "When the shots ring out, the slaver reserves break into a gallop; some of them might even get their necks broken by the fall." He clearly didn't like the way Slovotsky had been looking at Aeia, but that didn't stop him from a blunt a.s.sessment of the plan, or the situation.

"Good man." Slovotsky nodded. "We pick off a few, maybe toss in a grenade or twoa"and then just pin the rest down. Once you're done with the main body of slavers, Daherrin, you split your main force in three: one part to stay with the slaves and mop up any straggling slavers, the second group to rush forward and join with the ones taking on the advance, and the last and most important group to pull my tender fat out of the fire. a.s.suming it needs pulling, that is."

Daherrin looked around to the group. "Sounds good, 'cept for the part about the grenadesa"you'll kill the horses, and we can get a good price for them in Wehnest." He sat still for several minutes, his eyes distant, his face impa.s.sive. "I can't think of any other improvementsa"anybody?"

A few ideas were brought up involving changing the proportions of the team to be sent with each group, but Daherrin allowed only minor adjustments. Finally, he rose to his feet and slapped his hands together. "Wake up, everyone. We ride."

Unable to find a clearing as darkness fell, Daherrin ordered that they camp that night along the trail itself, then paired dwarf guards and human runners, and posted a set a mile away on each side of the main body of the party. Dwarves could see an approaching party perfectly adequately in this light; humans could carry back the news more rapidly.

In the chill of the dark, the leafy giants loomed darkly overhead, the light wind making them murmur both vague threats and unreliable benedictions into the night.

His gear and his weapons tucked under one arm, a lantern held aloft with the other, Walter Slovotsky walked a few hundred yards down the trail before slipping off into the woods. He didn't like sleeping in the company of a hundred others, and he far preferred not to have to tune out camp noises; much better for any strange noise or strange silence to waken him.

He hung his lamp on a projecting stub of a lower branch of a half-dead oak and cleared small plants from the mossy bed below before spreading a thin tarpaulin as a groundcloth, then covering that with two of his three blankets.

He chuckled to himself, remembering how he hadn't believed his scoutmaster's tip, way back when, about how it was more important to worry about insulation from the ground than from the air; the ground thieved warmth much more quickly than the air possibly could.

Walter Slovotsky had doubted the scoutmaster, of course, and when Walter's big brother Steven had soberly nodded and said that Mr. Garritty was telling the truth, Walter had been certain that he was being lied to.

He'd woken the next morning colder, and in more pain, than he would have thought possible.

He sighed as he stripped off his clothes and hung them over a branch before slipping under the third blanket. Sometimes those days seemed as if they had happened to another person. I wonder how Steve's doing? he thought, more conscious than he would have liked to concede that he hadn't thought of his brother in years. The two of them had been a study in contrasts; Steven was introverted and private where Walter was extroverted anda"

A rustling of branches sent him reaching for his oilskin-wrapped pistol.

"Walter?" Aeia's voice whispered from the night. "Are you out there?"

In the back of his mind, he had been wondering when this would happen, not if.

"Over here," he whispered back, waving as a beam of light from her lantern caught him. She was dressed in a heavy cotton shift that fell to her calves. "I hope you don't mind," she said, as she seated herself on his blankets, "but I felt like talking."

"No, you didn't."

"Well . . ." She eyed him calmly. "Yes, I do. Before. Or do you want me to leave?"

"I don't believe in coincidences," Walter said, quickly blowing out the lanterna"he didn't believe in getting caught, either. "Which leads me to believe that your adopted mother talks too much."

I hope you don't mind, but I felt like talking. Those had been exactly the words Andy had used, way back when, the night she had come to his cabin, the night that Karl had come within inches of killing him.

"Maybe." There was a rustle of cloth, and then she was warm in his arms. "Andrea once told me that the Other Side produced seven wonders, and that I was to keep my hands off one of them."

"Your dad?"

"Karl." She buried her face in his chest, her long, dark hair flowing over his chest and neck in a cool benediction. "I don't remember what the other ones were, except for you."

Her mouth was warm on his for a pleasant eternity, until they broke, leaving him half-breathless.

I may hate myself in the morning for this, buta" "Don't take this the wrong way, but what about Bren?"

"I don't know that that's any of your concern," she said, her voice holding a decided edge.

Definitely Andy's daughter, he decided. And yet another blow for environment over heredity.

"I'm going to marry Bren. I'm even going to sleep with him, eventually," she said firmly, "once he's properly broken in. And don't worry, I can handle him. If he finds out. Which he won't."

I seem to have heard that before.

She pushed away from him slightly. "Or don't you want me?"

Then again, a gentleman doesn't keep a lady waiting. "Don't be silly." He pulled her toward him. "Don't be silly."

CHAPTER SEVEN:.

A Walk in the Dark.

A councilor should not sleep the whole night through, for he is a man to whom the populace is entrusted, and who has many responsibilities.

a"Homer.

The silence bore down on Karl Cullinane's shoulders as he stepped out onto his balcony and stared out into the night.

The night was dark and damp, the sky overcast, a west wind promising rain and cold. The darkness was relieved by no playful faerie lights; the only break in the curtain of black was the lights of the castle itself, and distant glows in a few stray windows in the town of Biemestren.

Why couldn't he sleep? The night was half gone, and it had been all he could do to rest for a few moments.

Was there something threatening out there? Had he suddenly developed some paranormal danger sense?

Nah.

Don't be silly, Karl.