The stub of an arrow jutted from the outrider’s throat. His weapons had been taken, as had the vest of fine chain beneath the light tanned leather shirt. There was no sign of the Letherii’s horse. The buzz of the flies seemed preter-naturally loud.
Brohl Handar wheeled his mount round and guided it back up onto the ridge. He spoke to the Sollanta scout. ‘Tracks?’
‘Just his horse, Overseer,’ the warrior replied. ‘The ambusher was, I believe, on foot.’
Brohl nodded. This had been the pattern. The Awl were collecting horses, weapons and armour. The Atri-Preda had since commanded that no outrider scout alone. To this Redmask would no doubt add more ambushers.
‘The Awl rode southeast, Overseer.’
Days ago, alas. There was no point in pursuing.
Eyes narrowed against the harsh sunlight, Brohl Handar scanned the plain on all sides. How could a warrior hide in this empty land? The drainage gullies had seemed an obvious answer, and as soon as one was spotted a troop would dismount, advance on foot, and plunge into it seeking to flush out the enemy. All they had found were bedded deer and coyote dens.
Areas of high grasses were virtually attacked, both mounted and on foot. Again, nothing but the occasional deer bolting almost from the feet of some startled, cursing soldier; or ptarmigan or thrushes exploding skyward in a flurry of feathers and drumming wings.
The mages insisted that sorcery was not at work here; indeed, much of the Awl’dan seemed strangely bereft of whatever was necessary to shape magic. The valley known as Bast Fulmar had been, it was becoming clear, in no way unique. Brohl Handar had begun with the belief that the plains were but southern versions of tundra. In some ways this was true; in others it was anything but. Horizons deceived, distances lied. Valleys hid from the eye until one was upon them. Yet, so much like the tundra, a terrible place to fight a war.
Redmask and his army had disappeared. Oh, there were trails aplenty; huge swaths of trodden ground wending this way and that. But some were from bhederin herds; others were old and still others seemed to indicate travel in opposite directions, overlapping back and forth until all sense was lost. And so, day after day, the Letherii forces set out, their supplies dwindling, losing outriders to ambushes, marching this way and that, as if doomed to pursue a mythic battle that would never come.
Brohl Handar had assembled thirty of his best riders, and each day he led them out from the column, pushing far onto the flanks-dangerously far-in hopes of sighting the Awl.
He now squinted at the Sollanta scout. ‘Where have they gone?’
The warrior grimaced. ‘I have given this some thought, Overseer. Indeed, it is all I have thought about this past week. The enemy, I believe, is all around us. After Bast Fulmar, Redmask split the tribes. Each segment employed wagons to make them indistinguishable-as we have seen from the countless trails, those wagons are drawn from side to side to side, eight or ten across, and they move last, thus obliterating signs of all that precedes them on the trail. Could be a hundred warriors ahead, could be five thousand.’
‘If so,’ Brohl objected, ‘we should have caught up with at least one such train.’