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.”
“ Then, yes,” Tikaya said.
Rias chuckled and squeezed her hands.
“ Although if you’d listen to all I had to say, you’d learn that there’s some science about the device.”
“ Science?” Bocrest’s expression blanked.
“ Magic,” Rias said.
“ Oh,” Bocrest said. “How?”
“ I’m not sure yet,” Tikaya said. “Give me a moment.”
She started to bend down again, but Rias stepped in front of the launch pad. He picked up her gloves and handed them to her. Not until she stuffed her numb fingers back into the fur-lined interiors did he move aside.
“ Thank you,” she said.
Rias saluted her with a wink. Bocrest heaved a sigh.
She touched the launch pad again, checking several spots. It was weak, but she did sense something, especially close to the ground. On a whim, she tried to lift one of the legs. She expected the black metal to weigh too much, but she raised it with relative ease, revealing a leather-bound book flattened into the snow. Her heart sped up in anticipation. Rias grabbed the leg, so she could retrieve her find.
A pen was stuck in the spine, and it felt warm beneath her fingers. That was it: the practitioner-imbued item, probably crafted to never run out of ink or some simple thing. As far as she could tell, the book-no, journal-was mundane. She flipped it open, but had scarcely read the first couple words when someone tore it from her grip.
“ Our people will vet this and decide if it’s suitable for a foreigner to read,” Bocrest said.
“ Bocrest…” Rias started, but Tikaya lifted her chin and spoke.
“ Then I hope you brought someone who reads Kyattese, because the writing isn’t in your tongue.”
Bocrest flipped through a few pages and his lip curled into a snarl. “Kyattese?” His eyes narrowed. “Why would there be a notebook up here in your language?”
“ He spoke Kyattese.” Tikaya nodded at Lancecrest’s body.
“ Is it possible that journal is what our ‘ally’ was searching for?” Rias asked.
Bocrest jerked his head down, eyes scouring the pages as if he could translate them through will. With a disgusted grunt, he thrust the book at Tikaya.
“ You tell us,” he said.
She skimmed the opening pages and practically bounced at the massive number of the language samples within. Notes, mostly speculation, surrounded drawings of symbols she had not yet seen. No firm translations yet. “I’ll need time to read over everything, but it’s definitely Lancecrest’s journal, and it looks like he’s been in your tunnels a while. There are hundreds of pages here and dates go back almost a year.”
She turned to a dog-eared page, and her hand froze. Launch instructions for the rocket. It appeared Lancecrest had discovered how to operate the weapon through trial and error rather than true understanding of the language. Nonetheless, the instructions were there. And suddenly she knew: this book was exactly what their mysterious stranger was searching for, here in the tent and perhaps in the colonel’s office as well. It could explain the torture sessions too. He had been trying to locate these very instructions, but the Nurian had not known and Lancecrest must have held out to the end.
“ Find something?” Rias asked.
She flinched, knowing she had been silent too long to brush it off. “Just an interesting take on what the prime groupings imply.” She hated lying to Rias, but she was not going to hand Bocrest directions for launching the rockets. She could only assume there were more of the devices in the tunnels.