At the Queen_s command cc-1 Page 15

  "Such things are long gone from Auropa."

  "Are they?" Kamiskwa smiled. "Or do they just now live in other places? Cannot one get lost in your cities, your forests?"

  A chill ran down Owen's spine. "There are always stories of children gone missing. In the Low Countries men vanished. We thought they deserted, but, perhaps…"

  He took another look around. "This land is even more dangerous than I can imagine, isn't it?"

  Nathaniel laughed. "I reckon, iffen that's the case, they done sent the wrong man to be scouting."

  Owen raised an eyebrow and fixed him with a stare.

  The Mystrian held a hand up. "Didn't say I thought it was true, Captain Strake. I was just supposing. Truth be told, you seen more in just a handful of days than most all your countrymen put together. You ain't whimpering for a return to Temperance, so you's likely the right man after all."

  Though he felt no real inclination toward it, he let Nathaniel's remark mollify him. It wouldn't do to get upset over a simple remark, especially when it was based in the truth. Owen had spent a great deal of time in school and the military fighting prejudice based solely on his being half-Mystrian. He was used to it. Being thought deficient for entirely different reasons caught him by surprise.

  As he thought about Nathaniel's remark-and reclaimed his hat from where a branch had knocked it yet again-he discovered the difference in criticisms. Norillians looked down upon him for something he could not control: the circumstances of his birth. Mystrians were judging him for something he could control: his lack of experience. Nathaniel and Kamiskwa were even helping him gain experience, and protecting him from perils he had no way of understanding. They might be wary of him, but they were also willing to give him a chance.

  He caught up with Nathaniel as they entered a narrow meadow at the base of a wooded valley. "I appreciate all the help you're giving me. I want you to know that."

  "That's kind of you." Nathaniel nodded solemnly. "I reckon I been a-judging you by other Norillians, and that weren't quite fair. My apologies, Captain."

  "Not necessary, sir."

  Ahead of them Kamiskwa slowed as he moved through the waist-high grasses. Nathaniel pressed a hand to Owen's chest.

  "What?"

  "Iffen we's gonna see a jeopard in these parts, this is the kind of place it likes." Nathaniel pointed off across the meadow toward a tree leaning against another at the edge of the woods. "Like this when we shot the Prince's jeopard. It was perched atop a log like that one over…"

  Woods whistled loud and Kamiskwa dove forward. The Mystrian brought his rifle up with no further warning. His thumb covered the firestone. Fire jetted from the muzzle. Thunder roared and smoke blossomed, half-blinding Owen.

  But not before he saw a puff of smoke in the distance, heard the blast of gunfire and the hiss of a ball scything through grasses before it knocked him flying.

  Chapter Twenty

  May 9, 1763

  Bounty, Mystria

  O wen's musket flew into the tall grasses. He spun away from it, landing on his left hip. Pain jolted through it. He glanced down. The ball had caught him there, but he didn't see a hole or much blood. By rights blood should have been gushing and the pain of a shattered pelvis should have left him screaming.

  Keening war cries and another gunshot eclipsed any chance to check his injuries. One of the Twilight People, this one with his face painted black save where a single white eye had been painted on his forehead, appeared at his feet. The warrior raised a warclub and shrieked.

  Owen rolled to the left as the club pounded the ground, just missing him. Then in one smooth motion, as the warrior spun and raised the club again, Owen drew the pistol from the small of his back. His thumb covered the firestone. The warrior's eyes widened.

  Owen invoked magick.

  Had it not been for long hours of drill and hot minutes spent in battle, he never could have triggered the spell. Panic and pain he'd long since learned to shunt away. Almost without thought, he conjured the formula then pumped it out through his right thumb. The energy burned into the firestone, igniting the brimstone.

  The warrior's face evaporated. The.50 caliber ball caught him right above the bridge of the nose, shattering bone. Scalp stretched, trapping the fragments, then the ball burst out the back. Blood and brains jetted in both directions. The shot lifted the man off his feet and dumped him in the long grasses.

  With no time to reload, Owen snatched up the dead man's warclub and stood. His hip held, but something wasn't quite right. The stiffness didn't matter, as another warrior drove forward. The man backhanded a warclub at Owen. Owen blocked the blow, then tipped his club forward and jabbed. The blade plowed into the warrior's chest.

  The Shedashee stepped back, fingers probing the wound, but Owen kept coming. Another jab smashed the hand holding the warclub. As it dropped, Owen buried the club in the man's stomach. The warrior pitched forward. Owen crashed the club into his skull. The warrior collapsed and lay still.

  Owen limped ahead. Kamiskwa blocked an overhand club blow with his rifle, then whipped the butt around. His opponent's face crumbled and teeth flew. Woods, rifle in his left hand, snapped his right hand forward. A bloody tomahawk spun through the air, catching another warrior in the flank. He'd been sneaking up on Kamiskwa. The Altashee Prince spun, whipping the rifle's butt around in a blow that dropped his assailant.

  Another shot rang out from the same spot as the first. Owen dove for cover. He found himself crouching near Nathaniel with a body between them. From other rustling Owen took it that Kamiskwa had also ducked out of sight.

  "The shot came from the fallen tree."

  "I saw. I'll get him once I reload."

  "Don't, he'll see you."

  The Mystrian laughed. "He would if I had to stand to load."

  Nathaniel grasped a lever that had previously sat flush in a groove on the stock. He forced it down and the whole firestone assembly at the base of the barrel slid back. A gimbaled cylinder tipped up. Nathaniel stuffed a paper powder cartridge into it, then seated a bullet in the opening. He pushed the cylinder back down, and worked the lever to advance the assembly and seal the chamber.

  Owen smiled. "Very quick work."

  "Thanks. Kamiskwa, you reloaded yet?"

  "By the time you miss I shall be, yes."

  Nathaniel grinned. "Reckon I cain't afford to miss."

  "I'll draw his fire." Owen heaved himself up and thrashed his way through the grasses. He cut at an angle to the tree so the shooter would have to track him. He bobbed up and down, his red coat contrasting vividly with the green grasses, waiting for the shot.

  The sniper obliged him. The bullet whizzed past Owen's head, leading him by a couple of feet. Then Nathaniel shot. Even with his rifle blast still echoing in Owen's ears, there was no mistaking screams of mortal agony from the fallen tree.

  Owen cut back to where he'd dropped the pistol and quickly reloaded it. He fed powder from a paper cartridge down the barrel, then rammed the paper and a ball home. He slid the ramrod back into its place beneath the barrel. "My pistol is ready."

  "I'm ready. Kamiskwa?"

  "I've been waiting on you."

  Owen found Nathaniel again. "How do we do this?"

  Nathaniel gestured to one of the bodies. "These are Ungarakii. They're part of the Seven Nations. They travel in packs of six or so. We got most all of them. The painted eyes say they were scouting. Probably for the Tharyngians."

  Owen looked toward the fallen tree. "Likely a Ryngian or two down there then."

  "Most like." Nathaniel pointed at him. "How's your hip?"

  Owen took his first good look at it. Wooden splinters peppered his hip and thigh. He plucked one out, then tossed it aside. "Ball must have hit my stock. Long range for a musket shot, so it just broke wood and knocked me down."

  "Stiffening up, is it?"

  "I'll limp for a bit." Owen paused. "Don't hear anything. He's dead or getting away."

  "I reckon we best do so
mething about that."

  Setting a pace that had more to do with caution than Owen's limp, they closed in on the fallen tree. Kamiskwa ranged out far on the right flank and circled around into the trees. Owen and Nathaniel, advancing and covering each other, moved in more directly. It took them the better part of an hour to reach the fallen tree.

  Owen stared down at the body of the man behind the tree. "Nice shot." The bullet had drilled through dirty leathers halfway between breastbone and navel.

  Nathaniel crouched, turned the man's face this way and that. The dead man hadn't shaved in a while and his ears looked odd. So did his nose.

  Owen frowned. "What happened to his face?"

  "Not sure. Cain't figure why he has a glove on his left hand neither." Nathaniel stood and waved Kamiskwa over. "He look familiar?"

  The Altashee nodded. "Pierre Ilsavont."

  Owen leaned back on the fallen log. "You know him?"

  "He cheats at cards. The shot that hit you was the best shot he ever made." Woods picked up the man's musket. "Fancy gun. New. Must have stole it. Ain't no way he bought it."

  "Let me have a look." Owen caught the musket and tipped it up to look at the butt plate. "Arondel et fils, Feris, 1762. Made last year. Maybe your man was lucky."

  "He'd have to be really lucky."

  "How so?"

  "Winter of 1761 came hard in these parts." Nathaniel nodded toward the body. "That's what's wrong with his face. Frostbite. See, Pierre here got drunk. He walked out into a freezing blizzard. Got hisself dead. Spring of '62 Kamiskwa and I wandered into the churchyard in Hattersburg and peed on his grave."

  "Are you sure that's him?"

  Woods shrugged. "Never did see him planted. And he died with lots of debts owing. Coulda been he figured himself better off pretend-dead and just laid low."

  Kamiskwa spat at the body. " Wendigo." He walked away and started to gather dead wood into a small pile.

  "What did he say?"

  " Wendigo. The Shedashee have this legend. Cannibal comes among them, kills and eats them. Pure evil, like a spirit, takes them over. It's supposed to do that during the winter, when food is scarce. He reckons Pierre was dead and the wendigo spirit brought him back."

  Owen raised an eyebrow. "You believe this?"

  "Don't know what I'm believing about Pierre here. Still and all, that same winter, Kamiskwa and me went to Trading Post Number Twenty-three up Queensland. Small place, palisade fence, main gate open, store open, snow drifted in. Five men in there, dead, froze-solid, half-eaten."

  Nathaniel looked down, his brows furrowed. "Most folks think it was a bear. Trapper up that way got a bear come spring, said he found a ring in the stomach. That was good enough for most folks.

  "But there weren't no bear tracks or scratches at Twenty-three. Weren't no bear awake then. Weren't no hands gnawed off."

  He toed the corpse. "I ain't saying it was Pierre here. Like as not it weren't. Don't know what it was. But I am willing to believe there is evil in the world, evil what will make a man crazy. If they want to call it wendigo, that's good enough for me."

  Part of Owen wanted to dismiss the wendigo as superstitious nonsense, but he'd seen things on the Continent that had driven men mad. He recalled having to fetch an officer out of the wine cellar of a chateau. The man had just packed himself into a corner and sat there weeping in the dark. He wasn't drunk; he was just seeing ghosts. That was one kind of madness, and Owen had seen the other, too, the bloodlust that never could be sated.

  Wendigo is as good an explanation as any.

  "What do we do?"

  "Grab an ankle." Nathaniel set his rifle down, and took hold of one leg. "We're going to drag him over to that pile of wood, light it up, and burn the wendigo out of him."

  They didn't have enough time to burn the body entirely since they wanted to be well away from the spot before nightfall. Kamiskwa said that only the head needed to be burned. Nathaniel produced a stone knife and took the head off a bit more efficiently than made Owen comfortable.

  They left the Ungarakii bodies where they lay, but stripped them of all weapons. They also cut off knotted bracelets, one of which each warrior wore. Each seemed to Owen to be of a different style, woven together out of a variety of colored threads and what looked to be hair.

  Kamiskwa let a finger bump along a series of knots. "The patterns indicate his family, clan, and societies. The colors are events. Blue for birth, red for battle, black for ceremonies. The hair is from men he has killed."

  Nathaniel plucked one from Kamiskwa's hand and measured its thickness against his own thumb. "Two inches, maybe three. That's worth a crown."

  "A bounty?"

  "That's right, Captain Strake. We get to Hattersburg and the six we collected here means we can live fancy for a while."

  "I wasn't aware Her Majesty's Government…"

  "It don't." Nathaniel tossed the bracelet back to Kamiskwa. "Frontier settlements have been asking a long time for some of you Redcoats to keep them safe. Them settlements don't have proper charters, so no troops come. Bounty-men will come, though, and hunt all manner of things, including the Ungarakii."

  In dealing with the Ungarakii bodies they found the remains of Owen's musket. A ball had shattered the stock. Owen removed the firestone assembly and the barrel, then tossed away what remained of the stock. He appropriated the dead man's musket. It took the same caliber shot as his musket, which saved Owen the need to recast bullets. More importantly it had a shorter barrel, trimming two pounds from the overall weight and a foot and a half from the length.

  The barrel, however, was the wrong shape to accept Owen's bayonet. And the shorter length meant it had a shorter effective killing range. In the woods this would not constitute much of a problem, since anything he could see would be well within the weapon's lethal range.

  By rights, Ilsavont never could have expected to hit any of us. Owen looked back at Nathaniel as they marched along. "You said he wasn't a good shot. Why did he shoot from that range?"

  "Been cogitating on that myself. I reckon he done seen your red coat and got to panicking. A mite skittish he always were."

  "That not withstanding, I am still going to be in uniform on this expedition." Owen scratched at the back of his neck. "His action would confirm his being in Tharyngian employ."

  Nathaniel shook his head. "Most like, but ain't no love lost 'tween the Altashee and the Ungarakii. Could be his boys seen us earlier and gathered here to get us."

  Kamiskwa turned and snorted. "Ungarakii cringe before the Altashee. They would not have dared hunt us. They were tracking the corpse we found."

  "Is that so?" Nathaniel scratched his chin. "They was heading in that direction."

  Owen frowned. Ilsavont was Ryngian. The Ungarakii were Ryngian allies and knew the area. The dead man's journal had been written in Ryngian and he was a scout himself. It made sense that someone might be sent to look for him.

  "If they were hunting the body, how did they do it? Neither of you saw any sign of the dead man's passing, did you?" Owen looked at Nathaniel. "You made a point of this being a big land. How would they expect to find one body in so huge a landscape?"

  Nathaniel shrugged. "I wished I had you an answer."

  Kamiskwa held a hand out toward Owen. "The corpse's ring, please."

  Owen dug it out of a pouch. "Do you think magick is involved?"

  The Altashee cupped the ring in his hands. His eyes closed. He remained very still for a moment, then his eyes snapped open. "Strong impressions. The feeble Ungarakii could not track them."

  "I don't recall Pierre being so all-fired powerful myself."

  "Kamiskwa, can you track this ring back to another impression?"

  The Altashee again closed his eyes, then snorted. "Yes."

  "Where?" Owen smiled. "It will lead us to du Malphias, I am sure."

  "It is faint and fading." Kamiskwa shook his head. "And would lead us back to Pierre."

  "Damn."

  Kamiskwa grun
ted. "We should push on. What I cannot detect, perhaps my father can."

  Owen rubbed at his hip. "Not sure how far I'm going to make it."

  Kamiskwa smiled. "No matter how far it is, we should walk with haste. We have the ring and though the wendigo no longer has a head, we do not want his body coming after us."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  May 9, 1763

  Saint Luke

  Bounty, Mystria

  T he thought of a headless body trailing them through the woods did create a sense of urgency. They pushed on into the dark until they'd crossed another large stream. They camped slightly upriver of some rapids and Kamiskwa insisted on sinking the ring into the river for the night.

  Nathaniel agreed. "Wisdom in action. The ring will make magick ripples in the water. The wendigo will follow it down stream and miss us by a mile."

  "That will really work?"

  Kamiskwa shrugged. "In the old stories something similar has been effective. Now we need to take care of your hip."

  Owen hobbled down to the stream's edge. His red coat might have made him a target, but it had cushioned the impact with his musket's stock and had absorbed many of the splinters. He pulled it off, then peeled his trousers down.

  As battle wounds went it wasn't that horrible. One splinter had stabbed about an inch deep. The rest had just peppered his flesh. He drew the long one out, starting blood flowing slowly from a hole he could plug with his thumb.

  Nathaniel appeared and handed him several of the fern fronds. "Chew."

  Owen stripped the leaves off the plant and stuffed them in his mouth. What started as sweet became bitter very quickly. Pieces of stem crunched between his teeth, releasing more sour liquid. He involuntarily swallowed a bit and his throat burned. He couldn't ever recall tasting anything more foul.

  Kamiskwa set down a hunk of moss and offered his cupped hands. Nathaniel slapped him on the back. "Spit." The frothy green mulch had the look of a freshly smashed grasshopper.

  Kamiskwa packed it into the wound and smeared it around the hip. He then clapped a hunk of moss over it. Using a strip cut from Owen's blanket, he bound the leg up.