of inset sharp teeth ran along the striking edge of the wooden staff, making it a vicious-looking weapon.
An animal carcass roasted over a greenwood fire, filling the air with aromatic smoke. Paul had eaten only fruits and berries for the past several days, and the meat smelled delicious. The headwoman gestured for them to partake of chunks of meat, which they had to tear carefully from the hot, roasting animal with their bare fingers.
Paul didn’t quite understand how he and Duncan fit in among these people. They understood so little. How long would their welcome last? The two of them had been running for days, and Paul doubted they could convince the tribe members to lead them back to civilization.
The primitives had cut down the assassins’ bodies and dragged them through the forest. When the group reached the settlement, men and women fell upon the corpses, stripping them of valuables, as if this were any other day’s chore. With nimble hands they removed clothing, boots, and equipment belts. The primitives had no experience with the night-vision scopes, communicators, or intricate weapons. They squabbled over the objects, which they saw only as incomprehensible
Some women wore the bloodstained tunics of the dead assassins. They hung stolen trousers and jackets next to intricately patterned tapestries from the Sisters in Isolation. Paul was surprised to see how well they cared for the woven fabrics.
When the bodies of the assassins — all impolitely naked — were piled in a heap, Paul wondered what the primitives intended to do next. Would they make a bonfire to dispose of the corpses? He feared the wilderness tribes might have some previously unrecorded tradition of cannibalism, eating the flesh of their fallen enemies.
Duncan studied some of the technological equipment taken from the hunters, trying to glean useful information. Most of the devices were Ixian, obviously bought on the black market. The assassins’ clothes bore subtle but definite indications of Grumman manufacture.
“The Viscount has never been shy about taking credit for the harm he causes,” Paul observed. “He is proud of it.”
“True, but why would he be so blatant? What does he really hope to gain? Are we playing into his hands? He has to know that when he pushes the rules so far beyond their extremes, the Emperor is bound to respond.”
Looking at one of the bodies tangled in the pile, Paul spotted a red scar in the meat of his left deltoid. The mark was repeated on all of the cadavers. “Duncan, what’s that?”
Duncan sliced into the still-pliable shoulder, cutting with the point of his knife and twisting. He removed something that looked like a tiny metal spider with long fibrous legs that had extended into the muscle tissue. He held it up.
Even though it was covered with blood, Paul could clearly see what it was. A locator device. “They kept electronic trackers on their own assassins.”
The reclusive people, particularly the gray-haired headwoman, curiously watched the activities of Duncan and Paul, not comprehending why they would cut into the shoulders of their fallen enemies. Perhaps they assumed it was some victory ritual, like their own.
Duncan rolled the corpse off the pile and bent over another one, finding the same surgical mark, and dug into the flesh with his knife. “Hurry, Paul! We have to remove these trackers before it’s too late. Somebody may already be triangulating on them.”
12
The largest army and most thorough tactical plans can be made vulnerable by the smallest misplaced detail.
A dense seasonal fog rolled over the Elaccan continent, and Leto and Gurney crept in with it. The daily mists provided moisture for the fogtree forests. Basketlike cradles of branches grew upward to form intricate nests. The fogtrees were fragile things that reacted to the smallest environmental changes. Years ago, before Paul’s birth, an insidious biological blight had been unleashed upon Elacca, devastating the sensitive trees. House Moritani had been blamed, which had ignited an earlier flare-up of the feud.
The fogtrees, more than just an unusual natural growth, were considered an Elaccan art form. Artists, selected from across the Imperium for their telepathic abilities, could nurture the trees as saplings, using a focused mental vision to guide the branches into specific forms, sculpting them into fantastic shapes.
Vidal had built his palace stronghold within a prime-cluster of large fogtrees. The high branches had been groomed and shaped into a magnificent defensible residence ten meters above the ground. Seven large trunks stood in a circle, reaching up to the labyrinth of boughs that formed a warren of separated rooms, woven chambers for the Elaccan Duke and his household.
Vidal’s fogtree fortress was more than a kilometer from his massed military ships, the barracks and tents of rebel soldiers, and all the defensive weapons he had gathered. In the dense morning mist the thin interwoven branches looked like skeletal claws tangled in cotton. As Leto peered up at the eerie sight, Gurney cautioned him. “Vidal’s real guards would not stand around gawking like tourists.”
Leto shuffled along beside his companion, drawing no attention to himself. The two men wore uniforms stripped from the bodies of Elaccan rebels that had been killed while attempting to escape from the Archduke’s palace. It had taken only half a day for the palace tailors to launder and resize the enemy uniforms to fit Leto and Gurney, while document specialists altered the soldiers’ IDs.
The key to their infiltration was a detailed topographical projection that allowed Leto and Gurney to traverse the supposedly impenetrable wilderness near Vidal’s fogtree stronghold. Because Archduke Armand believed in natural science as much as commerce, he had long ago surveyed and mapped all the terrain on Ecaz, particularly the fertile cloud-forests and valleys of the Elaccan continent. With these high-resolution terrain maps, the two men had been able to slip through the densest groves and rocky valleys, weaving through difficult forest canyons, using byways that even Prad Vidal likely didn’t know. They crossed an enormous fallen log over a narrow gorge to reach the fogtree fortress.
It was shortly before daybreak with a high moon silvering the fog. Twenty guards patrolled the outer perimeter in pairs.
When they neared the prime-cluster of trees, Leto and Gurney walked together, alert, sidearms ready, posing as another two guards on patrol. Preoccupied with their apparent importance, they walked right past other pairs of gruff guards.
They circled the ring of seven trees, going about their business. While Gurney served as lookout, Leto quickly knelt beside one trunk, reached into his small pack, and withdrew a silver hemispherical disk from the bottom of which extended a pair of sharp prongs. He slapped the disk against the fogtree and worked the prongs into the bark. The green ready light winked on.
“All right, Gurney — let’s move.” Leto planted one of the silver blisters on the next trunk as well, followed by the next, circling the perimeter until all seven had been rigged.
By now, Gurney had mentally tracked the patterns of the other guards. “Three more minutes, my Lord, and they should be at their widest dispersal.”
The two intruders waited, and the mist seemed to thicken. Leto held the activator in his hand, and when Gurney nodded, he pressed the button.
The high-capacitance dischargers made almost no sound as they released a powerful static pulse into the tree trunks. The giant fogtree structures, sensitive enough to be guided by faint telepathy, were utterly vulnerable to such an intense burst. The willowy nested limbs twitched like the legs of a dying insect, then drew together to form the bars of a cage.
“Like shigawire bindings,” Gurney chuckled. “The more you struggle, the tighter they pull.”
The interlaced walls of the fogtree fortress now turned the separate rooms into prison cells. Though the Elaccan trees responded to any disturbance by coiling and clenching, they were not flimsy by any means. Fibers ran through their branches like plasteel cables. As the smaller rooms compressed, some of the sleeping people were
