“ Doing all right?” Rias patted her on the back as Bocrest stomped away.
“ I’m fine. Do you always volunteer women to lead the way with you into potentially dangerous situations?”
He winked. “Only if I know they can handle it.”
Not for the first time, she wondered if he thought too highly of her.
When Rias pulled Tikaya over the edge, she knelt to catch her breath. Even with his help, the climb had been taxing.
The first thing she noticed was the dead man. The second thing she noticed was that he had not died the same way the marines in the fort had. An enormous amount of blood spattered the snow around him, and methodical cuts marked the body. Bocrest already stood over it, arms crossed, lips dragged down in a scowl.
“ Tortured,” he said. “Same as the one in the fort.”
“ Nurian?” Tikaya asked.
Bocrest was too busy cursing under his breath to answer.
The ledge, similar to the one below, offered another ideal view of the tundra-and the fort. A second cliff to the rear shadowed a tent and a fire pit. The source of the black metal Tikaya had spotted rested near the edge: a flat circle mounted on tripod legs. A shaft tilted upward from the disk and appeared the right size for cradling the rocket. The launching apparatus was not large, but it would have taken more than one man to carry it up there. Or a telekinetics practitioner.
Tikaya walked over to look at the body. “Uh.”
“ Uh?” Rias asked.
“ I recognize this one too.”
“ Can’t be a practitioner,” Rias said. “He looks Turgonian.”
“ He is Turgonian. That’s Lancecrest.”
“ The fort commander?” Bocrest asked. “He’s too young.”
“ No, the Lancecrest I told you about. And actually I think he did study the mental sciences at the Polytechnic. Along with archaeology.” She filled Rias in with the information she had given Bocrest the night before.
“ Huh,” Rias said. “That he’s here is not wholly mystifying-Colonel Lancecrest could have taken command, found out about the tunnels, seen an opportunity for the family to improve its fortunes, and told his little brother to prepare for a relic hunt. But why would the younger Lancecrest have launched a rocket at his older brother’s fort? And why is he now up here tortured and dead? This is…unexpected.”
Bocrest spat. “If something expected happens at any point in this mission, I’ll shit myself in shock.”
Tikaya shook her head at the lurid speech. “Is he truly married?” she asked Rias.
“ Last I heard.” Rias knelt to examine the body more closely. “The empire has failed to keep me apprised of the latest gossip surrounding its officers.”
“ It’s hard to imagine that tongue wooing a woman.” Tikaya headed for the launch pad.
Bocrest dropped his arms. “Was that an insult? Did she just insult me?”
“ I believe she did,” Rias said.
“ I never know with her. She gives insults in the same tone as a scientist analyzing an experiment.”
Tikaya dug out her journal. “You do remind me of the lab rats they keep in the science wing of the Polytechnic.”
“ That was definitely an insult,” Rias said.
“ I know,” Bocrest said. “It’s hard to be offended, though. She’s so civilized when she delivers them. Tidy job on Lancecrest. Whoever ran the torture session was experienced.”
Tikaya scratched her head at the abrupt topic shift. Only Turgonians could go from casual chit chat to analyzing dead people in the same breath.
“ Body’s stiff but this doesn’t look like it happened long ago,” Rias said. “Yesterday maybe.”
“ There’s a mess in the tent,” Bocrest said. “Like someone searched it, same as the colonel’s office in the fort.”
Rias leaned over the ledge. “Koffert, come up. We need your tracking skills.”
Bocrest frowned at this presumptive order giving. Tikaya wondered when Rias had found the opportunity to learn people’s names and skill sets.
Long before the tracker reached the top, the launch device swallowed her attention. Runes ran down the tripod legs, giving her plenty to study. She sat in the snow with her journal, gloves off. Not knowing how much time Bocrest would give her, she risked the cold to make copying the symbols easier. The men’s conversations faded from her awareness as she worked. She brushed her fingers along a complex grouping of seventeen symbols, and a faint hum teased the edge of her mind. It startled her, and she dropped her journal. Surely the sensation did not come from the launch pad. The artifacts had not yet made her suspect the mental sciences were involved in their creation. Yet something here teased her sixth sense, reminding her of the communications pendant on the Nurian ship. The residual tingle of a practitioner-made device.
“ Tikaya?” Rias touched her shoulder. “The tracker is done. Are you ready to leave?”
She blinked and stood, surprised by the stiffness in her limbs. How long had she sat? Rias removed his gloves and held her hand in his warm ones, and she noticed white tipping her fingers.
“ Frost nip.” He rubbed her hands and raised an eyebrow. “Keep your gloves on. You’d have a hard time taking notes if you lost your fingers.”
“ Sorry, that was dumb. I needed to use the pencil, and, uhm.” She blushed. Of all people, he could probably understand an absent-minded streak, but she still avoided his eyes.
“ What I don’t understand is how someone else found this ledge,” Bocrest said, apparently resuming a conversation she had missed. The tracker stood before him, a sergeant with a lined face and beaky nose. “How many math geniuses are roaming around up here?” Bocrest added.
“ Perhaps our mystery man saw the rocket being launched,” Rias said.
Despite his suggestion that she keep her gloves on, Rias had not released Tikaya’s hands. Calluses hardened his palms, but his touch was gentle as he rubbed her skin. She made no move to pull away.
“ Wouldn’t he have died from the gas, too, then?” she asked. “And how do you know our torture-loving person is a man? The Nurians have female warriors.”
“ Walks like a man, pisses like a man,” the tracker said.
“ Uhm. All right.” Tikaya knew nothing about tracking, but supposed squatting and standing would indeed leave different yellow-snow signatures. “But what about the gas?”
Rias gazed east. “The pass is that way and at a higher elevation. The rocket released its load in the air above the fort, so perhaps that means the gas-or whatever it is exactly-was heavier than air and wouldn’t have affected someone above the detonation point. This camp, after all, is well within the twenty mile radius.”
“ Perhaps?” Bocrest asked. “You’re just guessing?”
“ Yes,” Rias said.
“ Good steel used for the torture,” the tracker said.
Rias and the captain nodded, though it took Tikaya a minute to follow. Right. The good steel and the possible entrance through the pass implied a Turgonian. And hadn’t the men in the dungeon suggested the same thing? That the torture was done by the book? The Turgonian book?
“ So, you’ve got an ally up here?” Tikaya asked. “Maybe he’ll show himself, and we can share your applejack with him.”
She smiled. The others did not. Rias and Bocrest appeared more grim than anything.
“ Ally,” Rias murmured, then found Bocrest’s gaze. “Did the emperor say anything about sending help?”
“ He made it clear he wanted the mission accomplished.”
Tikaya wondered if Rias derived more from that answer than she did.
“ You find anything useful on that rocket, Komitopis?” Bocrest asked.
“ I’m getting some fantastic data. If we find more samples in this scientific vein, I believe the shared contexts will allow me to-”
Bocrest hissed in frustration and jerked his hand up, much as he had to halt Rias’s explanation of the altitude calculations. “When I ask you a question, I want a yes or no response.”
