Which, given the strength of her Talent and their marriage bond, might be exactly what she was doing.

Despite his determination to move with caution, Jathmar found himself speeding up. He couldn't help it. The forest was utterly normal, yet Shaylar's emotions were a goad, driving him faster with every passing minute.

He was never sure when he'd broken into a run, but he realized he was, in fact, running when he slid down a leaf-slick gully, thrashing through the underbrush, and found himself hurtling up the other side.

He paused at the top, panting, cursing his carelessness, and listened again. Still he heard nothing. Not a solitary, damned thing out of the ordinary. He checked his watch and tried to calculate how far he'd come. Half a mile, maybe. Jathmar grimaced, then set out again, opting for a compromise between the utter silence of caution and the pell-mell dash of panic.

Pushing through the dense underbrush along the stream was heavy work. The luxuriant growth's widespread, tangling limbs and brambles caught at his rugged clothing and slowed him down. He slogged through it, cursing its hindrance, then paused with another curse-this one directed at himself.

He was a Mapper, damn it. He was following the stream out of sheer habit, because it was the way he'd come on his way out. But the sense of direction which came with his Talent told him the precise bearing to the base camp, and he changed course, angling sharply away from the creek. The open forest floor away from the streambed's understory was vastly easier-and quicker-going, and his ability to See the terrain in front of him let him pick the best, fastest way through it.

I should've thought of this sooner, he told himself savagely. Guess I'm not quite as calm as I'd like to think I am.

There was no point in kicking himself over it, and he settled down to the steady lope the better going permitted.

It took Jathmar another thirty agonizing minutes to reach the campsite, where he found a rude surprise.

It was empty.

He stood in a screen of thick shrubs at the edge of the clearing, too uneasy to just step out into the open without taking a careful look first. The brushwork palisade stood silent in the glorious autumn sunlight, a circle of protection lacking only its gate. He could see the tents inside it, still pitched where they'd been this morning. The donkeys were still there, too, looking bewildered and lonely. But there wasn't a single person in sight, and not a single man-made sound anywhere in the clearing.

An icy fingertip touched Jathmar's heart. Deadly cold, unreasoning, it robbed him of breath for several shuddering, superstitious moments. Then his gaze, wandering in shock from one edge of the camp to the other, caught on something totally unexpected. His eyes jerked to a halt, fixed with sudden white-faced horror on something that shouldn't have been there.

It was a cairn.

Someone had piled rocks across something sickeningly man-sized and human-shaped. It lay at the top of the stream bank, in the shadow of the abandoned brush wall, and for a truly agonizing moment, Jathmar feared the worst. But then reason reasserted itself. He could still feel Shaylar through the marriage bond, closer than before. She was alive, not buried under that pile of cold stone. He shuddered and forced himself to push that terrifying image away, forced his mind to begin functioning once more.

He frowned. He'd heard a distant rifle shot, quite some time ago. Had someone accidentally shot one of their teammates? It was hard to credit. Every member of this crew, including Shaylar, knew weapons-handling inside and out. You didn't shoot at a target you couldn't see. You didn't point the muzzle at anything-like someone else on your team-that you didn't want a bullet to go through. You didn't carry your gun with a round chambered.

So who the hell was dead? And how? They hadn't even been felling timber, so there were no fallen trees to have crushed anyone.

He pondered for a moment longer, then moved cautiously into the open with the rifle butt snugged into the pocket of his shoulder, muzzle down, so no one could knock the barrel aside or rip it out of his hands. His finger was no longer outside the trigger guard. Instead, it rested on the trigger itself, ready to fire in an instant as Jathmar stepped through the unfinished gate.

Nothing stirred but the wind. The tent flaps, left open as though abandoned in a great rush, whiffled in the breeze that wandered in over the tops of the interwoven branches. Jathmar walked a quick perimeter recon inside the palisade, making sure no one was hiding out of sight in one of the tents. He felt like a fool, hunting for brigands who couldn't possibly be there. And he was right. No one was there. The camp was deserted.

He went back to chan Hagrahyl's tent. The expedition's leader had obviously raked hastily through his possessions, and Jathmar frowned again. What in the names of all the infinite number of Uromathian gods could have rattled chan Hagrahyl badly enough to simply abandon camp and run for the portal? That was an unheard of decision for any expeditionary leader. Teams only broke and ran from certifiable disasters: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, forest fires. Even when facing brigands, running was inherently more risky than standing one's ground in a prepared camp. Their team was large enough, and well enough armed, to have dealt with any typical band of border brigands. But the ex-soldier had run for the portal. Run so fast he'd left Jathmar behind.

Jathmar was so rattled by the implications that he found himself wondering why he was so convinced his team was, in fact, running.

Because, idiot, his common sense muttered in some exasperation, you're married to a Voice who's trying her damnedest to warn you to follow as fast as your big, flat feet will carry you.

A swift check of his own tent confirmed his suspicions. Shaylar had packed in the same haste evident from chan Hagrahyl's tent. She'd abandoned clothing, food supplies, cooking utensils-everything but her camp ax, guns, and charts. Or that was what he thought, until he suddenly spotted his own backpack leaning against his sleeping bag.

She'd pinned a note inside the flap, written in obvious haste.

Someone's murdered Falsan. We don't know who or how many there are or where they came from. Ghartoun says we can't wait for you. Head for the portal-and be careful, beloved.

That was all . . . and it was more than enough.

The shock burst between his ears like an artillery shell. Falsan had been murdered? His shoulder blades twitched as a chill crawled its way down his spine. He'd felt foolish, looking for someone in the abandoned camp, but his instincts had been correct. There was someone out here besides themselves. Someone who'd already killed once. Someone unknown.

"Dear gods above . . ." he whispered.

An unknown human contact?

No wonder chan Hagrahyl had bolted for the portal. They were in over their heads, way over, and Jathmar didn't hesitate a second longer. He paused only to swiftly check the contents of his pack, nodding approval at Shaylar's selections-rations for two days, pistol and rifle ammunition, and his camp ax. Every one of their charts and notebooks was missing, undoubtedly in her pack.

Jathmar slung the pack onto his back, abandoning the rest of their meager possessions, then filled his canteen at the stream and headed out at a hard jog. Falsan's killers might well be mere minutes behind him-it had been a long time since he'd heard that rifle shot-which made speed more important than caution.

He made no particular effort to cover his tracks. Any experienced tracker would have no trouble following their trail, regardless of anything he might do. The footprints, broken branches, and bruised leaves left behind by eighteen people in a hurry would be as easy to follow as a Ternathian imperial highway. The more quickly he left the vicinity, the safer he'd be, and if it came to a fight, his two guns might make the difference between survival and something else.

He refused to think about a pitched battle between Falsan's killers and their survey crew, with Shaylar caught in the middle of it. The very thought robbed him of breath he needed for running, and Jathmar was grateful-profoundly so-that Falsan's route this morning had been nearly a hundred and twenty degrees off the bearing directly back to the portal. Whoever had killed him would have to locate their camp first, before following their tracks back to the portal. If they ran fast enough, there was a chance they could reach Company-Captain Halifu's fort and its contingent of soldiers in time.

He found himself cursing silently in time with his strides. Eighty years! Sharonian expeditions had spent eighty years exploring the multiverse, and not once had they found a trace of other humans. Why now? Why them?

He stamped on the anger. He knew it was merely a smokescreen, a way to divert his mind from his own terror, and he couldn't afford to let either emotion distract him. Nor was there any point in railing at the multiverse for putting Shaylar in danger. He'd done that, fighting to get her included on the field teams.

Well, he told himself grimly, you got her into this, so you'll just have to get her out again.

The whisper of her presence through their marriage bond seemed to chide him for blaming himself. They'd both fought to put her out here, not just him. Jathmar grimaced, knowing she was right, and tried to stop kicking himself. But he couldn't help it. So he tried to at least seethe at himself more quietly as he followed the trail the others had left. He scanned for pitfalls ahead, where he might twist or even break an ankle if he put his foot wrong, and listened intently for any hint of pursuit.

The one thing he couldn't do, and wished bitterly that he could-was to See what was behind him. Or, rather, who. Unfortunately, Jathmar could See only the land itself, not animals or people moving across it. It wasn't like looking with his eyes. He didn't See the land as a faithful image of reality. He Saw contours, shapes, protrusions and depressions, dense places and less dense ones, that he had learned to recognize as streambeds, mineral deposits, soil types, and all the other features which made up the bones of the world. He would have given a great deal to be able to scan the terrain behind him for the people who'd murdered Falsan, but what they needed for that was a Plotter, or a Distance Viewer.

What they had was one outclassed and nervous Mapper.

He ignored the crawling itch between his shoulder blades, told his spine to stop anticipating a blow from concealment, and concentrated on moving as rapidly as possible.

The trail-of course-led uphill all the way. Jathmar was in excellent physical condition-anyone who spent as much time hiking as a survey crewman had to be in good shape-but he hadn't pushed himself this hard in a long time. His thighs and calves were feeling the strain, and his breathing was heavier than he would have liked it to be. His Model 70 grew heavier with every stride, but he gritted his teeth and kept going. He'd been running for the better part of fifteen minutes when he heard a low voice from behind a screen of wild spirea bushes just ahead.

"Jathmar!"

He slid to an instant halt, breathing hard and turning his head to follow the sound.

"Ghartoun?" he panted, and the stocky ex-soldier rose from a cautious crouch.

"Any sign of pursuit?" he asked, his voice urgent but quiet, and relief jellied Jathmar's knees. He shook his head, stiffening both weary legs in grim resolution.

"Not yet. The camp hadn't been disturbed when I got there. And I haven't heard anything behind me."

"That's something, at least," chan Hagrahyl muttered. "You made good time catching up to us. Let's hope to hell Falsan's killer doesn't do the same. All right, we're moving out."

Jathmar pushed through the spirea behind chan Hagrahyl, and Shaylar flung herself into his arms, holding on tightly. She wasn't quite trembling, but he felt the distress tightening her muscles, and spikes of emotion ripped through their bond.

"I was so scared," she whispered against his chest. "Thank all the gods you made it back to us!"

"Shhh." He lifted her chin and kissed her gently, then frowned as he glanced at her bulging pack. "That's too heavy for you."

"Yes, but I didn't dare leave any of this behind, in case . . ."

She swallowed hard, and he brushed a fingertip across her lips.

"Never say it, love. It didn't happen. Here." He slid off his pack, opened hers, and redistributed the weight. "That ought to help."

She gave a sigh of relief when he helped her shrug the straps back across her shoulders.

"Oh, that's lovely. Thanks."

"Don't mention it, M'lady," he said with a courtly bow, and her smile wavered only slightly as she squeezed his hand.

She headed out behind the others, and Jathmar followed, carefully placing himself between her and whatever might be coming up behind them. They moved at a rapid pace, not quite jogging, but the difference was so tiny as to hardly matter. The trail wasn't a friendly one. It still drove inexorably uphill, and it was littered with underbrush, deadfalls, and deep gullies that hindered their progress. It hadn't seemed like such rough country coming through in the other direction, he thought bitterly, then gave himself another mental shake.

Be fair, he told himself. It isn't that rough-you're just scared to death and trying to get through it five times as fast!

Chan Hagrahyl kept them moving for two hours without stopping. Shaylar strode grimly forward, outwardly holding her own, but Jathmar could feel her aching weariness and the need for rest that she managed to keep hidden from the others. He'd never been so proud of her, nor so frightened for her, but he wasn't surprised when chan Hagrahyl finally called a halt and she cast pride to the winds and simply sank to the ground, panting.

The stocky Ternathian who'd once been an imperial officer cast uneasy glances at the forest behind. Probing glances that tried to see into the shadows behind far too much underbrush, far too many trees. Barris Kassel and the other ex-soldiers spread themselves into a defensive ring without a word, silently standing guard while everyone gulped a few swallows of water and caught their breath. Shaylar had her breathing under control again, but he could feel the aching weariness in her.

She can't keep going hour after hour at this pace, Jathmar thought despairingly. Not all the way to the portal.

He wasn't sure the rest of them could keep up this wicked pace, for that matter. Jathmar already felt the strain, and Braiheri Futhai was at least as badly winded as Shaylar. Jathmar tried to keep his worries quiet, tried to keep Shaylar from catching them, but he didn't succeed. When she lifted her head, meeting his gaze levelly, he tried to smile, and her answering smile's courage, and the strength of her love, nearly broke his heart.

Being here with you is worth it, worth the risk and the danger, her smile told him, and he smiled back, aware that he'd never loved her more.

Far too soon, chan Hagrahyl gave the soft-voiced order to move out again.

Chapter Six.

"That's not a campsite, Sir. It's the next best thing to a godsdamned fortress," Chief Sword Threbuch breathed in Sir Jasak Olderhan's ear, and Jasak nodded grimly. It was an exaggeration . . . but not much of one.

They'd found no trace of where their quarry had gone after murdering Osmuna, which told Jasak that he'd turned back in the direction from which he'd come, keeping to the stream to throw off the scent. It also meant the only clue they had to follow was the trail he'd left on his way to the site of the murder.

So they'd backtracked him. It hadn't been especially difficult; whoever he was, he hadn't bothered to cover his tracks when walking towards his murderous rendezvous with Osmuna, so the trail itself was easy to pick up. On the other hand, that trail had wound its way through the underbrush along the stream like something a snake with epilepsy might have left behind, and after what had happened to Osmuna, Fifty Garlath's men moved with a certain understandable caution.

Jasak told himself the killer couldn't be very far in front of them now. Not when he was wounded and struggling through the boulder-strewn stream. Jasak had halfway expected to overtake the bastard somewhere along the creek, but they'd found no trace of him. And he had to admit that they'd taken at least two or three times longer than they ought to have to get their pursuit organized in the first place. He knew he could legitimately blame most of that delay on Garlath's inefficiency, but innate honesty forced him to admit that he'd been more than a little slow off the mark himself.

In fairness to himself-and Garlath-the sheer, stunning impossibility of what had already happened would have thrown anyone off stride. And despite the importance of finding the killer and anyone else who might be with him, Jasak knew he'd been right to take the time to try to learn everything he could before setting out in pursuit.

However little "everything" turned out to be in the end, he thought glumly, lying belly-down beside Threbuch with his chin on his folded forearms while they studied the natural clearing on the far side of the stream.

The camp in the middle of that clearing made it painfully obvious that whoever he was, Osmuna's killer wasn't out here alone. One man could never have built the palisadelike wall they were studying from their vantage point across the streambed. Not by himself. That high brush barrier of interwoven branches and cut saplings surrounded an area at least thirty yards in diameter, and it was too high to see over from their present position.

There was too much timber down around the edge of the clearing, too, all of it showing the white scar of newly cut wood, for one man to have felled it all. If he'd cut down that many branches and small trees by himself, the oldest cuts would have started losing that raw, pale look of just-hacked-down timber.

"At least fifteen or twenty, you think?" he murmured to Threbuch.

"Couldn't be much less than that, Sir," the chief sword replied. "Not from all the work the bastards've put in over there."

Jasak nodded again and thought some more.

If that estimate was accurate, First Platoon had the mysterious strangers substantially outnumbered. In addition to the fifty-seven men of his four line squads, Garlath had an attached six-man engineer section, four quartermaster baggage handlers, and a hummer handler. Adding Jasak himself, and Chief Sword Threbuch, that came to seventy men, which ought to provide Jasak with a comfortable superiority.

But he couldn't be sure of that. Threbuch's estimate was based on the minimum number the construction of that palisade would have required, but it was large enough to house a considerably bigger number. A simple division of labor could easily have put fifteen or so to work building it while others hunted for food, prospected for minerals-there was a substantial iron deposit in the area, Jasak knew-or even pillaged some nearby village unfortunate enough to have been targeted by pirates. There simply wasn't any way to know from out here how many people really were occupying that camp. Which meant someone had to go inside to find out. Yet Jasak didn't feel like rushing forward and risking the lives of more of his men unnecessarily.

The palisade was strong enough to repel anyone who wanted to get inside, unless he had a convenient field-dragon to blast it down with explosive spells, which Jasak didn't. The thick wall of saplings-cut from the stream bank where there was enough open sunlight to allow heavy shrubs and saplings to grow-had been interwoven with tough brush, much of it thorn-covered, to create a high, virtually impenetrable barrier. His scouts' infantry-dragons, far lighter than the field-dragons the artillery used, would find it extremely difficult to blow gaps in it.

Despite the chief sword's comment, it wasn't quite a fortification. But it was more than stout enough to keep out any wild animals, and the number of people who could have been concealed in the area inside that high, thorny wall was dismayingly large . . . especially when those people were equipped with whatever unknown sort of weaponry they'd used against Osmuna.

Worse, the camp had been placed by someone with an excellent eye for terrain. The land rose towards it from the streambed, not steeply but steadily, and that location and its wall-higher than necessary to stop any native predator, but perfect for hiding its interior from an aggressor and preventing him from seeing the placement of men and weaponry on the other side-spoke of military planning. That much was unmistakable, but who had built it? And-more to the point-why?

In the face of so many unknowns, Jasak was unwilling to assume anything. What he needed was hard evidence, the answers to at least his most pressing questions, and he had nothing. For all he knew, this might not even be the killer's encampment. It might belong to someone else entirely-someone the killer had been scouting, prior to attacking.

Yet Jasak didn't believe that for a moment. Indeed, he was becoming more and more convinced that what he was looking at was a base camp for another multi-universal civilization. The very notion was absurd, but no more absurd than what had already happened. And they were close to what Magister Halathyn and Gadrial strongly believed was a class eight portal. If they were right, no one could possibly have lived in the vicinity without literally stumbling across the thing. A class eight wasn't the sort of thing that could escape notice for very long. The class three portal leading to their own swampy encampment was almost four miles across; a class eight would be closer to twenty-five or even thirty.

With something that size and the swamp portal only a couple of days travel apart by foot, Jasak couldn't believe any natives in the general vicinity would have failed to notice them. Which meant they should have built cities, or at least villages and transportation systems, to take advantage of them. Yet all the Andaran Scouts had found was this tiny, semi-fortified camp.

Which meant Osmuna's killer had probably been doing much the same thing they were: mapping and exploring.

Jasak conscientiously ordered himself not to wed himself to any sweeping conclusions without more evidence. They could be in the middle of some noble's huge game preserve, after all. Whoever had killed Osmuna might have thought he was eliminating a locally born trespasser or poacher. Or Jasak and his men might have unknowingly trespassed upon sanctified or unsanctified ground, in which case Osmuna might have been killed for blasphemy. But however firmly he reminded himself of those possibilities, he kept coming back to the totally alien nature of whatever had been used to kill his man.

This isn't getting me anywhere, he told himself. And every minute I waste speculating is another minute for anyone inside that camp to make his ambush nastier, if he's planning one.

The problem was what to do about it. Anyone who stepped out into that open clearing would undoubtedly find out if there was someone waiting inside that palisade with a terror weapon in his hands. Getting holes blown through more of his troopers didn't exactly strike Jasak as the best way of going about finding out, though. Oh, for one lowly reconnaissance gryphon to do an aerial sweep!

That gave him an idea.

He caught Fifty Garlath's eye, which wasn't all that difficult since the platoon commander was staring at Jasak with something close to panic in his eyes. The hundred pointed silently toward the nearest tree, then upwards into its widespreading branches. It stood along the bank of the creek where they lay prone, and Garlath nodded convulsively, with a look of relief that would have been comical under other circumstances but managed to look mostly pathetic under these.

The fifty signaled to Sword Harnak, then pointed at the same tree. Harnak, in turn, signaled to Jugthar Sendahli, who nodded, tapped one of his squad mates on the shoulder, and disappeared into the concealing brush.

It took the two troopers the better part of six sweat-filled minutes to work their way around to the back of the tree through the brush. Its trunk was more than broad enough to conceal them when they finally reached it, and Jasak heard the slightest of rustles as Sendahli's squad mate boosted the garthan high enough to reach the lowest of the widespreading limbs.

The dark-skinned scout went up the tree in slow motion, each movement silent with caution, each toehold tested gently before he used it to boost himself higher. He scarcely jostled a single leaf on his way up, and Jasak gave an internal nod of approval, pleased that Garlath's tenure hadn't ruined the garthan yet. Jasak had recommended Sendahli for promotion, and he hoped it went through.

The man was Mythalan, but hardly shakira or even multhari. The garthan caste was the lowest of the low in Mythalan society, comprised of the vast masses born without any Gift at all. In most parts of the Union of Arcana, those born without the ability to use magic were simply ordinary citizens. They might not be able to aspire to the magistery like Gadrial, but they could look forward to ordinary careers and the same basic opportunity to earn a good living as anyone else.

But not in Mythal.

Jasak's jaw muscles knotted as he watched Sendahli's slow, skillful execution of his orders and felt his Andaran sense of civilized behavior towards other human beings rising up in fresh indignation. A garthan wasn't legally property any longer. Chattel slavery had been outlawed two centuries ago, under the Union of Arcana's founding accords. But the accords had only limited power inside a country's national borders, which meant most local laws had remained the same. And in countries which had embraced the Mythalan culture and its rigid stratifications, those born without the ability to use magic faced lives little if any better than those of a Hilmaran serf from Andara's first age of conquest.