Book II. Chapter 135. Onevaar

“Quiet,” Rita hissed at one of her subordinates. “I’m not racing Captain Skofsky through the forest again like I did last week. Unlike him, I don’t have a mug that terrifying.”

“That depends on how you look at it, Rita,” Bors put in. Like everyone else, he lay on his stomach beneath the sloping overhang of the ravine wall. “They painted you up something fierce.”

Rita hissed something in reply and peered through the binoculars again. Ard, of course, had no need for them, so he could see perfectly well what was happening on the far side of the ridge. Long ago, small mountains might have stood here. But after the ancient cataclysm that spawned the Great Glacier, only rocky ridges remained, their sharp stone hands wrapped around the swift streams that fed Cold Lake and a smaller lake nearby with the unexpectedly literal name: Lesser Cold Lake.

“I wonder what they taste like.”

“Damn it, Orni, all you care about is stuffing something in your mouth!”

“Not in my mouth. In my stomach.”

“Just shut up, you two,” Rita hissed again.

At first, Ardan had been badly mistaken about why Rita wore a wrap over the lower half of her face. He had assumed that Rita, a seasoned hunter, used it to hide a prosthetic or some other less-than-pretty by-product of her profession. In fact, Rita’s chin, lips, cheeks, and even her earlobes were covered in black tattoos. They were nothing like Alexander Ursky’s, either.

Ardan didn’t know Rita’s surname and wasn’t especially curious about it. She bore the symbols of one of the tribes of Kargaam on her body. Where had she gotten them, and why? As with her surname, Ardi had no idea and was in no hurry to find out.

If experience was any guide, women in professions like this were every bit as dangerous as the exposed core of a live Ley-cable. Then again, so were the men. Ardi wasn’t exactly eager to get close to people he hoped he’d never see again. That wasn’t because they were “bad” or anything like that. It was simply that seeing them again would mean their paths had crossed once more in the line of duty.

“What are they doing over there?”

“Grazing,” Rita replied, pressing the binoculars’ soft rubber eyecups more firmly against her face. “Probably.”

Ardan squinted slightly. A herd of Onevaar, to use the Fae word, was making its way across the stream and up the ridge. In Galessian, that translated as... Onevaar. Because the word simply had no meaningful translation.

The creatures themselves looked like a cross between the Shaggyer, a dog, a deer, and a porcupine. They had massive bodies covered in fur made, quite literally, of ice. Tangled, ragged clumps of that fur hung from their blue bodies, soaked with their own sweat. Because of some peculiar alchemical reactions inside the creatures’ bodies, their sweat turned to ice the instant it met the air. That was why the Onevaar jingled faintly as they walked, setting down their paws the way dogs do, though theirs were several times larger and sturdier.

When danger threatened, the Onevaar gave themselves a shake, again just like a dog that had climbed out of the water. Their fur tore free of their skin and instantly became a very dangerous weapon. And if that wasn’t enough, they lowered their equally ice-crusted horns toward the ground, horns capable not merely of crushing plate armor but of punching straight through it.

Now, of course, no steel-clad knights troubled them, while poachers, if they made it into the Park, preferred rifles or concussion charges. But the Hunters’ Guild records still contained centuries-old notes from a time when these creatures caused a great deal of trouble for villages and hamlets. The land around the Great Glacier was hardly fertile, so the Onevaar treated every carefully tended human crop as an exquisite dessert.

They could travel hundreds of kilometers to feast on turnips or millet, or simply devour everything in a vegetable garden. At that size (males could reach two meters at the shoulder and weigh up to a ton), the Onevaar ate prodigious amounts.

In the wild, however, they survived by drinking water. A great deal of water. Thanks to their mutated digestive and circulatory systems, they could survive for weeks without solid food. A few berry bushes a month were enough to keep them going.

“Beats me how they haven’t butchered every last one of them for meat up north by now,” Bors ground out. “They stink so bad I’m starting to feel sick even this far away.”

“Aren’t we delicate,” Rita snorted.

The Onevaar sweated constantly, so with the wind just right, even a human could smell them coming long before they arrived. The stench of putrid water, oily fish gone sour in a barrel, and something else. Something musky and clinging that made your mouth fill with foul-tasting saliva.

Still, Bors was right. Modern Star Biology held that the Onevaar had arrived on the western continent from the Northern Continent. They had once inhabited only what is now Skaldavin and Urdavan. Then, before Urdavan’s mages created the Isthmus of Titans during the Northern War, joining the two halves of their country, the Onevaar crossed the Strait of Titans whenever it froze over in winter and entered present-day Tazidahian.

Their migration took hundreds of thousands of years, of course, and they came south for one reason: the cataclysm that created the Great Glacier and warped the Paarlax Field itself. The warp was so severe that it created the Reverse Ocean and left the weather and seasons the same in the southern and northern hemispheres, though only on the western continent.

Then again, all of this had happened before elves existed at all—not just modern elves, but even the higher elves. Perhaps only the Fae would remember the details of events from such a distant past.

“Are we drawing lots?” Orni asked.

Orni, the scrawny Hunter, was the only other survivor of Bors’s group after the incident halfway through the month. Ardan didn’t know exactly what had happened, but Bors and Orni had returned from an assignment to Second Station a full day late. Their funerals had already been held. But they came back.

Wounded, broken, but alive. Rita hadn’t left Bors’s bedside for nearly thirty hours while the Station’s mages and doctors put the Hunters back together. In the end, what little slipped out suggested that Bors had been unlucky enough to attract the attention of the Two-Headed Moles. And despite the funny name, they were truly nasty creatures even by the standards of Star Magic.

“Was it ever any different?” Rita shot back, then took several sticks from her pocket, all the same length, along with one extra, shorter stick.

“But those clearly aren’t the Winged-Horned,” Ernest protested. “They’re the ones we’re looking for.”

“Ernest, I swear by the Angels, one of these days I’m going to shoot you,” Rita growled. “Are you going to remind us of that every single time the Old Hag gets it into her head to send us out collecting shit from yet more of the Fae bastards’ shitspawn?”

Ardan didn’t so much as open his mouth to correct Rita. For one thing, she really might fire, only this time she’d be firing at him. Most likely, Rita didn’t give a damn that “shitspawn” wasn’t even a word. And he certainly had no business trying to make the entire Guild understand that the Anomalies hadn’t appeared because of the Fae at all.

The theory still had considerable support in scholarly circles. More and more scholars, Professor Kovertsky among them, were coming to believe that the Anomalies had evolved naturally, shaped by distortions in the Paarlax Field, but they were still struggling to dislodge a conviction Star mages had held for centuries: that every magical creature on the planet was the result of interbreeding between the Fae and beasts.

And the existence of creatures like Poplar probably only reinforced that conviction.

The Old Hag was what they called Miss Ostrozhskaya behind her back. After only a month at Second Station in the Park, she had already earned such a reputation that her first stint beyond the Northern National Park’s invisible boundary might well be her last.

“We spent two days tracking that herd, even though every sign made it clear from the start that they weren’t the Winged-Horned,” Ernest continued, still indignant. “What the hell, Rita? It reeks so bad over there my brain’s about to leak out my ass.”

“If only there were anything to leak out...”

“I’m serious, Rita!” Ernest insisted. “The Old Hag has completely lost her mind! That theory of hers that the Winged-Horned may not migrate on their own but follow someone else... There are as many different herds out here as there are lunatic notions rattling around in that madwoman’s head.”

“Enough. I’m tired of listening to you.”

Rita slipped the straws back into her pocket, keeping only the short one. She tucked it behind Ernest’s ear.

“We drew straws. You lost.”

“Rita...”

“I mean it, Ernest. Keep talking and you’ll regret it.” Rita lowered the binoculars from her eyes and fixed him with a very hard stare. He shrank a little under it. “This isn’t Metropolis, Ernest. Parliament doesn’t call the shots here. I do. And if you think you’re a scientist, not a hunter, then transfer to another post in the Guild. But while you’re in my squad, you’ll do what I tell you. Do you understand?”

Ernest sighed heavily.

“Understood,” he drawled. “Sorry, Commander.”

“There, that’s better. Now grab the jar and hustle down there. And scoop up a heaping jarful of their shit, since the Old Hag is so eager to dig around in it.”

“But I already apologized!”

“I need tangible proof of your profound sorrow, Ernest. In the form of Onevaar shit.”

Ernest muttered something unintelligible, took the jar, then unslung his rifle and the bundle containing his sleeping bag and meager supplies. He crawled over the rim of the ravine and started down toward the ridge.

“You’re hard on him, Rita,” Bors whispered once Ernest was a respectful distance away.

“Then he shouldn’t have ruined the fried eggs this morning,” Rita shot back.

They were already three days into the assignment. Normally, Ardan didn’t join the hunters on their forays. After all, he had nothing to do with either their Guild or their expedition. He was merely accompanying Taisia, who was as wily as ever.

The only exceptions came when Miss Shpritz went through “dear Chaz” to wrangle herself a place on an outing. Unfortunately, over the past month, Taisia had managed to pull that off alarmingly often. But the last time, exactly a week earlier, they had ended up fleeing through the forest from an entire herd of griffins.

As a result, Taisia had hurt her leg quite badly and was staying in camp, while Ardan...

“Don’t forget to snap away, Captain,” Rita snorted.

“Ah, yes, that’s right...” Ardi said, belatedly remembering. “Thanks, Rita.”

Ardan slipped the cloth hiking pack from his shoulder and pulled a hard brown case into the light. Its edges were sharp enough to cut you, yet it was roomy enough to hold several bulky grimoires. But the snug straps inside held something else entirely.

Ard found a small rectangular box a little larger than his palm, covered in dark, almost chocolate-brown leather stretched taut over a wooden body and neatly stitched at the corners. He pressed lightly, and the camera’s front panel folded down into a support platform. From deep inside, leather bellows slid out like an accordion. Black and ribbed, gathered into ten symmetrical folds, they looked vaguely like a caterpillar.

At the end of the bellows, a lens sat in a gleaming brass mount, with tiny aperture and shutter-speed graduations engraved around its dark glass eye.

Above the lens was a small optical viewfinder resembling a glass barrel in a nickel-plated frame. A delicate shutter-release lever gleamed beside it. Recessed into the leather on top of the camera were two knurled wheels, one for winding the film and the other for winding the curtain mechanism. Each was about half the size of a coin and had tiny tick marks around its rim. On one side, the box had a folding handle fashioned from a real leather strap, allowing the camera to be carried over the shoulder. A threaded tripod socket was set into the leather-covered bottom.

Ardi didn’t much care to imagine how much such a piece of Non-Stellar engineering might cost, but he suspected it was roughly as much as a good arithmometer. The arithmometer, at least, didn’t have to be loaded with spools of film. That was something you could never do in the light, under any circumstances.

While she was in the field hospital, Miss Shpritz had reminded Ard of this particular detail several times.

“Damn... A Star mage with a camera held up to his mug... I’ll probably never see anything funnier as long as I live.”

“You’d better pray that’s exactly how it turns out, Bors,” Rita said, sounding oddly glum.

While Ardan photographed the grazing herd, Ernest was already collecting Onevaar dung in a vial. He kept turning away, and every so often he bit his lower lip so hard that saliva and even blood ran down his chin. The smell was, in fact, one of the Onevaar’s defense mechanisms, and it was enough to deter the more squeamish hunters.

After exactly twelve clicks, Ardan carefully put the camera back into its case, then returned the case to his rucksack. By then Ernest had returned and was holding the vial out to his boss.

“Get that filth away from me, Ernest!” Rita whispered sharply, jerking away.

“And away from me, too.”

“And while you’re at it, get the hell out of here.”

“Eternal Angels... why do the smelliest missions always fall to us?”

“This is all because Rita told the Old Hag to her face a couple of weeks ago that she had sand in her cu—”

“Pack up. We’re leaving.” Rita cut them off. “The sooner we get back to the Station, the sooner we can wash this stink off.”

The hunters murmured their agreement and crawled down into the ravine. At the bottom, they got to their feet, though they still kept low.

For a while they picked their way through dense deadfall: dry trees toppled by the wind and probably by beasts the size of a Kargaam elephant. Magister Tikhonov had shown Ardan pictures of one.

Not that they had become friends, but in the evenings Ardi sometimes invited Evlampiy, a good-natured mage, to sit with him for a while. Evlampiy never refused. They talked about science, and Ardi may have learned every bit as much theory from Evlampiy as he did from Professor Kovertsky. No offense to Professor Kovertsky.

The copy you see came from without consent; the author publishes the chapter there, where readers can support them.

All in all, the month flew by almost unnoticed. Some days Ardan stayed in camp with little to do, stealing odd hours for his own research; on others, he went out on forays after Taisia managed to wrangle places for them.

The numbers spoke for themselves: all those hunters versus a decidedly modest number of scholars. Of all the mages, only Rogov and Melin ever left the grounds of the Second Station.

Actually, no.

There was one exception. Gomar Zvonkov, Senior Magister and chief Anomalies researcher at the central branch of the Hunters’ Guild, returned to the First Station on that very first day. He gave some useful guidance, spent a little time posing for Miss Shpritz’s camera, then rode back to the City with the drivers in their mechanical carriages.

The two captains were assigned only to the most dangerous forays. And that, essentially, was life in camp.

Fifteen teams of five hunters each would head into the Park for several days at a time on assignments from the scholars, then return with observations or physical samples. Mostly clumps of fur and excrement, though sometimes bones or particularly strange plants the hunters couldn’t remember seeing in the Guild’s catalog.

The finds were marked on the map, cataloged, and either stored in special containers or handed over to Magister Tikhonov, who was in charge of the equipment. Miss Ostrozhskaya, meanwhile, was regarded as more or less the expedition’s brains.

She may have had deep knowledge and a lively mind, but she possessed neither restraint nor wisdom. So even Ard kept his distance from her and never once spoke to her directly. A couple of times, the Senior Magister tried to speak to him and even give him an order, but each time Miss Shpritz stepped in.

And by the Sleeping Spirits, even hunters laid up in the field hospital instead of their own pavilions and tents would gather to watch them spar. Yes, the forays were often dangerous, but aside from what had happened to Bors, the camp had made it through without any other disasters.

Which, according to Magister Tikhonov, counted as a clear success for a month-long expedition in the depths of the Park.

“Captain,” Rita called out to Ard. “If you spot something nasty again, say something right away. This time I’ll believe you’re not just Concussed but lucky too.”

Ardan nodded. Last time, thanks to what Shali and Guta had taught him, or perhaps to his instincts as a Speaker, he’d sensed beforehand that they had crossed paths with some very dangerous hunters.

Rita hadn’t believed him. Neither had Miss Shpritz. As a result, Miss Shpritz had already spent several days recuperating in the hospital.

The sun shone overhead, its rays piercing the dense canopy. The hunters returned to their clearing without a word, giving the reeking, glum Ernest a wide berth.

“Pack up,” Rita ordered tersely.

While the others struck the tent and filled in the fire pit, Bors and Orni began dismantling the “fence.” That was what they called a simple device designed by the Hunters’ Guild. A few metal posts linked by Ley-cable, with a pair of blanks powering it. Something like a miniature version of the barrier that divided the Park into sectors and kept anomalies out of the Avenue and the Streets.

Ardi quickly pulled the poles from his little tent, shook the brush and twigs off it, then rolled it into a tight bundle. He wrapped the bundle in the thick groundsheet to keep snakes from slithering inside. Maybe snakes back on the Alcade steppe knew better than to try. Here in the north, who knew how the wildlife behaved?

Ardan knew very little even about the local anomalies, beyond a few generalities. After all, the matabar really were a deeply insular people. They cut one another’s throats with abandon in endless intertribal wars, usually over hunting trails. And you couldn’t read all the scrolls and books of the Atta’nha, not even over several lifetimes.

He finished packing before everyone else. If working as an assistant to the cowboys had taught him anything, it was to be quick about making camp for the night and equally quick about breaking it down.

“Sometimes I start to doubt that you ever served in the Foothill marshals’ corps, Captain.” Rita stood beside him, chewing a wad of special tobacco that turned her saliva brown. “But every time I watch you cook or pitch a tent, I stop doubting it. I’ve always liked working with steppe folk. You certainly have a gift for working with your hands.”

“Mm-hm,” Ardan grunted. By now, the need to maintain his cover had thoroughly worn him down.

It wasn’t only the cover, either. There was also the “Water Mask,” and Taisia Shpritz, and the unfamiliar north, and the feeling that he was flat-out wasting his time.

Over the past month he’d spent at the Second Station, he had spoken with literally every member of the expedition. He’d exchanged a word or two with some, spent a minute with others, and sometimes talked for half an hour. Ardi listened to their hearts, watched their eyes, read their scents, and… found not a single reason to suspect that any of them had a connection to the Puppeteers.

Hunters, no different from any others. Ordinary working folk who, instead of a factory floor, a port warehouse, or an office, had chosen the saddle, gunpowder, iron, and an entire repertoire of uniquely inventive obscenities.

The mages, meanwhile, more or less confirmed the prejudice most citizens of the Empire had toward anyone in Star regalia. Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky thought very highly of himself and was obsessed with sex. Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya shared Lord Aversky’s flaw and was convinced she was exceptional.

Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov was shy, yet secretly believed he knew his field better than anyone else, and wrote five pages to his wife every evening. Since there was no mail service here at the Second Station, it would be at least another month before he could send off the whole stack of pages he’d filled.

Ardan rarely crossed paths with Captains Alton Rogov and Unmir Melin. They were rough, brusque former soldiers, forever haggling over pay, even over an extra ex or two. Even so, they took the work seriously and went beyond what was required.

A month. A whole month, oh Sleeping Spirits, and Ardan hadn’t found a single lead! Not so much as a clue that might make him stop and think about what was happening. A textbook expedition into the Park in every respect.

To Ard’s genuine surprise, even their equipment hadn’t malfunctioned once.

That meant four weeks had already passed since they’d arrived in the Park, and roughly six weeks since Ardan had left the Metropolis, yet the case had gone nowhere. Most galling of all, Lieutenant Shosa should have delivered the message to the Black House by now.

And the fact that operatives hadn’t overrun the Park meant the geniuses at the Second Chancery hadn’t found a connection between the illegal laboratory in Bear’s Rift and the Puppeteers.

Sleeping Spirits.

To be honest, Ardi couldn’t see the connection either. No matter how he looked at it. And he’d looked at it from all sorts of angles. There simply wasn’t anything else to do at the Second Station except think, doze, and, whenever a fresh idea came along, work it through in his head.

Unfortunately, with no new literature, no access to a testing ground, and none of his old notes, fresh ideas didn’t come to Ard very often.

“...strange.”

Ardan jerked in surprise and looked at Rita.

“I said, it’s just strange, the way you handle yourself in the woods,” Rita repeated. “Are you listening to me at all, Captain Skofsky?”

“Sorry.” Ardan’s apology was sincere. “I got lost in thought.”

Rita said something that sounded very much like “Concussed,” then continued.

“I’ve worked with the Ranger corps before, and your skills in the woods aren’t far behind theirs.”

“Thanks,” was Ardan’s only reply, since she hadn’t actually asked him a question.

Rita frowned at him and was about to say something else, but by then the rest of the Hunters had gathered around them, including Bors.

“We’re heading back,” Rita ordered. “Nobody falls behind. If you notice the person behind you slowing down, pass word up the line. I’ll personally piss on the grave of every idiot who decides to die. Clear?”

“Understood,” the Hunters chorused.

They spaced themselves out in a line, a few meters apart, and plunged back into the dense forest. They moved quietly and carefully. Now and then, a branch they brushed against creaked, or the forest floor crunched underfoot. The Guild’s Hunters knew how to move without giving even Shali anything to complain about. Maybe that was why Rita had begun wondering where Ard-Skofsky had learned to slip through the woods as stealthily as the rest of them.

But when the choice was between blowing his cover and breaking his own neck, Ardan chose the former. Besides, with every passing day he grew more certain that the thread they’d been following led nowhere.

Milar had warned him that this could happen in an investigation: a theory might lead nowhere, not because it was wrong so much as because it had nothing to do with the case from the outset.

Around them, the forest rustled. Old, but still strong. Full of a power no formula could quantify and no instrument of Star science could detect. And if anything kept Ard’s gloom at bay, perhaps it was the pleasure of breathing pine needles and moss instead of fuel oil and diesel, of leaving the dead Ley behind for the quiet, almost imperceptible whisper of the high treetops.

“Skofsky,” Rita whispered as she came up beside Ard. “What does that concussed head of yours make of it?”

Ardan cast a quick glance around. People didn’t live near the Park, at least not in the usual sense, and here, far from the Avenue and the Streets, no footpaths cut through the vegetation. No packed earth underfoot, no torn-up turf, nothing to ease passage through the thickets.

Now and then there were animal trails leading to water or places where animals bedded down, but they weren’t fit for human travel. Especially not in a place inhabited by hundreds of Anomalies. So the Hunters navigated by compass and by the landmarks shown on their own maps. A Hunter who had learned to read the forest by watching its wildlife could find hundreds of trails like these, but unless you were after prey, none of them led anywhere useful.

But Ardan saw a little more.

Now and then, at the edge of his vision, he glimpsed bushes crouched a little oddly, their twigs bowed over a small gully. From the gully, a ribbon of moss in a slightly different shade ran on ahead. But whenever he turned and looked straight at the “trail,” it vanished at once. It happened again and again, far more than ten times.

Skusty would have said that “the world knocked at the two-leg’s hollow, but it stayed deaf.” In truth, this was how the Speaker’s heightened senses responded, detecting what his eyes could not see. And when Ardi listened for what his ears couldn’t hear, he could make out voices from far away without anyone noticing. Just as he had last time. With the griffins. When they should have veered off course.

“Everything’s all right,” he replied.

“Good, then.” Rita nodded and quickened her pace.

For a while longer, Ard kept “watching” one of those trails without turning his head. Something different emanated from that insubstantial thread, barely discernible in the gloom of the undergrowth and framed by the bowed twigs of a young hazel. Something that plastered itself over his face like a wet rag. It crawled over his eyes, drew his lips tight, and pulled his head back, trapping the air in his lungs, which were already raw from the damp.

Something sticky doused his skin in hot pitch and pressed a liquid fire of suffocating agony against his chest. It seeped from the moss, the roots, and the trunks of warped trees and settled on the tip of his tongue, bitter as rust.

But the moment Ard turned, the illusion vanished, and the pain-soaked little trail dissolved into the ordinary forest around him.

“Don’t fall behind,” Bors urged him.

They returned to the Second Station after several hours of walking through the forest. As always, a broad clearing greeted them, though in places the forest kept trying to reclaim what people’s axes had taken. Here and there, little firs poked up through the hard-packed earth, trying to shoulder aside the numerous tents and pavilions. Elsewhere, patches of young turf showed through the dusty soil, plainly resentful of the channels dug into the ground. Within those channels, beneath plank decking, Ley-cables carried voltage from the generators.

The Second Station’s only building, a somewhat flimsy-looking shed, housed the generators, which looked every bit as out of place as a cow on New Times Avenue. They hummed and growled, and empty iron canisters kept multiplying beside the generator bay as the machines burned through their fuel to produce Ley-energy.

The largest generators were rarely turned on, and then only when the complex equipment had to be used at full power. A small generator, however, ran constantly to keep the camp operating and the protective barrier up.

Every few days, Magister Tikhonov went into the shed to check all the gauges and add more fuel. Only he and Mr. Nalensky had keys to the generator bay. The “heart” of the Second Station was off-limits to everyone else.

If not for the Ley-cables and the posts set into the ground around the perimeter and strung with wire, you might have thought you were in the middle of a logging camp. The same greenish tents; the same massive pavilions, patched and restitched in places, sometimes several times over; the same outdoor kitchen with its stove, the chimney fitted with a sleeve of fireproof cloth that ran down into a separate pit.

Poachers used exactly the same arrangement to keep their smoke from giving them away. The scientists, though, worried about harming the natural habitat of creatures that were rare and, in many cases, endangered.

According to Mr. Tikhonov, by the time the next century was a quarter over, there would most likely be no Shaggyers left in the Alcade steppe, for example, and no Onevaar south of the Northern Continent.

“Excellent work,” Rita concluded. “Let’s go report to the Old Hag. And you, Captain... thanks for coming along.”

They said their goodbyes. Ardan headed toward Taisia’s tent along plank walkways fitted with low rails at knee height. Her tent stood a little apart, to the right of Ard’s own. Ard’s was not the tent he’d used since his days working on the farm, but one the Black House had provided. It served as a kind of screen, separating Ard’s corner of the camp from Senior Magister Nalensky’s pavilion. What was more, Nalensky had deliberately waited for Taisia to choose her spot, and only then told the Hunters where to set up his temporary home.

All around Ard, the field camp went about its now-familiar routine. Someone sat with a group of campmates, playing guitar beside a fire pit dug into the ground. Others washed in a makeshift shower, using water they had collected during the recent rains. In the kitchen, the cooks were hard at work while Hunters just back from their night rounds hurried them along.

Since men made up almost the entire camp, no one worried much about modesty or privacy. At times, that led to amusing scenes. Amusing because everyone had already grown used to this routine, this way of life. Everyone except Mrs. Ostrozhskaya. She kept insisting that the “shower” needed doors, and that the latrine pit needed something more convenient than a perch behind a flimsy, slapped-together wall separating the camp from the place of... deep thoughts.

Ardan tapped on the canvas wall of Miss Shpritz’s tent, no different from the walls of the other tents.

“Come in.” The voice from inside sounded a little livelier than it had before.

Ardan ducked under the heavy outer flap, unbuttoned the inner one, and climbed inside. Because their tents were meant for long-term use, they offered far more room inside than the shelters the cowboys crowded into. At times, though, the cowboys made do without tents altogether. Especially during the dry season.

Taisia lay on a folding cot that had been brought over for her from the infirmary. Under a thin blanket, she leafed through a book and smoked.

“How’s your leg?” Ardan asked, setting the bag containing the portable camera on a small table.

Instead of answering, Taisia merely tugged the edge of the blanket aside, revealing her leg wrapped in bandages and immobilized in a sturdy, well-made splint. Judging by the swelling and black-and-blue bruising, the injury would clearly keep Miss Shpritz laid up for a few more days.

After that, she would be on crutches for about a week.

“How’s your... work going?” Taisia asked as she closed the book and propped herself up against the pillow, undisguised hunger in her voice. “Don’t keep me in suspense, Captain. I’m wasting away in here.”

Ardi fought to keep his expression stony. Taisia truly was suffering because of her injury. Partly because it limited what she could do and where she could go, but probably far more because of “dear Chaz.”

Chaz saw Miss Shpritz’s predicament as the perfect opportunity to win her heart (or perhaps not exactly her heart). His strategy, however, was a peculiar one: he visited Taisia’s tent several times a day to chat. Chaz did most of the chatting, while Miss Shpritz practiced her truly inexhaustible powers of theatrical restraint.

“Nothing, Taisia.”

Miss Shpritz frowned, plainly about to launch into another scathing tirade, so Ardan hurried to clarify:

“I’m serious, Miss Shpritz.” Ardi held up his hands. “Nothing but the forest, Anomalies, and Hunters who can’t string two words together without cursing.”

Taisia answered with a filthy curse and sank back onto the pillow.

“A month, Captain... a whole month,” she said, drawing out the words as she covered her face with one hand.

“And no trace. Not even a corruption trail.” Ardan nodded.

“There’s more than enough corruption.” Miss Shpritz waved a hand. “They’ve written off nearly all their equipment as factory rejects, then taken subsidies from the Treasury as though it were new and fully operational. Every document I managed to obtain is forged. Not very well, either. As for the trail... damn it, Captain! A month in Nudsky’s company! Oh, the Light. I’ve never been so wrong.”

“If it’s any consolation, Taisia, we were all wrong.”

Miss Shpritz made an obscene gesture without even looking up at Ard.

They were silent for several minutes. Taisia lay beneath a blanket on the folding cot while Ardan sat in a chair, leafing through his own grimoire. Over those six weeks, he could have mastered Ice Tail. He could even have begun developing Blue Star modifications to his existing spells. To do that, of course, he would have had to work through a stack of the necessary reading, but...

Sleeping Spirits.

Six weeks!

And all for nothing.

He couldn’t even say he was particularly interested in Anomalies. And if he was being completely honest, he wasn’t interested in them at all.

“So what now?” Taisia asked after a while.

Ardan sighed.

“I wish I knew, Miss Shpritz, because…”

Ardan broke off. He heard the familiar heavy tread outside, the wooden planks creaking beneath it. He checked that the Water Mask was in place, then pretended to focus on the grimoire.

Taisia took the hint and opened her book at once. She made it just in time: only a few moments later, without the slightest ceremony, the tent flap was yanked aside again. This time, Zalessky appeared in the tent’s makeshift doorway, his prosthetic eye unmistakable.

“Captain Skofsky.” Mr. Zalessky, head of the Hunters, offered a curt greeting. “We’re meeting in my tent in five minutes. That’s an order.”

Taisia propped herself up on one elbow.

“Zalessky, has all this fresh air gone to your head?” Taisia demanded. “What right do you have to order my bodyguard around?”

Zalessky usually avoided arguing with Miss Shpritz and behaved as though she didn’t exist. This time, he met her gaze squarely.

“Under military regulations, I’m the ranking officer on this expedition, and retired or not, Captain Skofsky is an Imperial mage.”

“And why should I care, Zalessky?”

Ardan turned toward Zalessky.

“Because in a military emergency,” Ardan said slowly, almost one syllable at a time, “Mr. Zalessky assumes full authority as the senior commander on the scene until the appropriate command authority arrives, including authority over every mage. But to invoke that particular article…”

Ardan faltered.

“What’s left of Marat’s squad has returned.” Zalessky nodded, then added, “Bring everything you’ll need, Captain. Five minutes. My tent. If you fail to report, you’ll face a tribunal under wartime law.”

Without another word, Zalessky left the tent.

“What… what does all this mean, Captain?” Miss Shpritz asked, sounding slightly bewildered.

Ardan got to his feet, then retrieved his staff from where it leaned against the small table.

“Zalessky can invoke that provision of the charter only if foreigners have attacked the expedition,” Ardan said in a hollow voice.

“Foreigners?” Taisia echoed. “But we’re a long way from the border with either Fatia or Ngia. What are they doing here?”

Ardan turned toward Miss Shpritz, just for a moment. She looked surprised. Too surprised. In all the time they had spent together, Ardi had never seen the world-famous journalist Taisia Shpritz look so taken aback.

What did that mean?

“I have no idea,” Ardi said, answering both questions at once, his own and hers. Then he set off to catch up with Zalessky.

Milar had warned him, after all, never to say or even think that everything was going too well!