After a little discussion, someone located a pair of boots for Valder, which he pulled on gratefully. They even fitted him fairly well.
The brown-clad officer in charge of the party asked him a few questions — who he was, how he came to be where he had been found, and whether he knew anything about enemy positions. Not feeling up to long explanations, he briefly gave his name, rank, and unit, explained that he had been cut off months earlier, and said that the only enemy position he had seen was the small encampment he had passed through a day’s walk to the northwest.
With that, the officer seemed to lose interest in him. Valder hesitated and then asked, “Sir, who are you people? What are you doing here? I thought I was still behind the northern lines.”
The officer looked back at him. “I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “You might be a spy.”
Valder had to admit that that would seem like a reasonable possibility. He said, “Oh.”
Seeing his disappointment, the officer took pity on him. “I suppose it won’t do any harm,” he said, “to tell you that, as far as we know, there no longer are any northern lines around here to be behind.”
Valder was not sure whether he was glad to have this tidbit of information or not, since it opened up vast areas of speculation. He lapsed into silence and stood waiting for instructions while the officer considered something.
A young soldier, one of the group that had found Valder, came up and saluted, the back of his hand tight to his shoulder in parade-ground style. “Sir,” he said, “That dead northerner — he’s shatra.”
The officer looked up. “What?” “The corpse we found this man standing over — it’s shatra. No doubt of it. And the body’s still warm.”
The officer looked at Valder with renewed interest. “Care to explain that, scout?”
Valder shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “He followed me, I think from that camp I mentioned. I killed him, just before you found me.”
“You killed a shatra?”
“Yes.”
“Single-handedly?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“With my sword; it’s enchanted.” He gestured in Wirikidor’s direction.
The officer followed Valder’s gesture, then turned back and eyed him carefully. “What’s a scout doing with an enchanted sword?” he demanded.
“Oh, it wasn’t enchanted when it was issued. I ran into a wizard in a marsh two sixnights or so north of here; he put a few spells on it to help me get back to my unit.”
The officer did not bother to hide his disbelief, and Valder realized just how stupid his story must sound. Before he could say anything further, however, the officer said, “All right, your sword’s enchanted. In that case you’re not my problem; the general’s magicians can decide what to do with you. Sergeant Karn! You and your detail will take this man and his belongings back to camp with you!”
That dealt with, he turned away and attended to other matters. Valder no longer concerned him.
Sergeant Karn was a black-haired giant of a man, well over six feet tall and heavily muscled; his detail consisted of five young soldiers, whom Valder guessed to be new recruits. Their green kilts were unworn, their breastplates still bright, and the oldest looked no more than eighteen. Valder greeted them, hoping to strike up a conversation, but the sergeant quickly stifled that. “He might be a spy,” he reminded his men.
Within ten minutes of being given the order, Karn had Valder’s weapons and belongings gathered together and added to the bundles his men already carried and was leading his little party southward along a newly made path through the tall grass. This path was merely the simplest and narrowest of trails at first, nothing more than the place a dozen or so men had trampled their way along; most of the advancing Ethsharitic line had been spaced out across the plain, but the commanding officer and his attendants had traveled in a tight little group, leaving the path behind them.
As Karn’s party moved on to the south, however, they passed an assortment of people heading north — supply wagons, fresh troops, messengers, and even curious civilians. They passed captured northerners and wounded men traveling south more slowly than themselves and were passed in turn by hurrying messengers. By the time they had gone a league, the path had become a road, the grass trodden into the dirt. This was a welcome relief for Valder’s tired feet after so long trampling his own paths — though any sort of walking was not something he welcomed. It did not help any that the soldier carrying Wirikidor kept stumbling and bumping into him.
Shortly after that they passed the smoking ruins of a small northern outpost; Valder stared in fascination, but the others, obviously not interested, hurried him on.
The sun was down and the light fading when Karn called a halt. “All right, boys,” he said. “We’ll take a break and see if we can hitch a ride on a supply wagon going back empty. Once the men at the front have had their dinner, there should be a few.”
“We aren’t stopping here for the night?” Valder asked.
Kam looked at him scornfully, the expression plain even in the gathering dusk. “No, we’re not stopping for the night. We’re on campaign, soldier!”
“I’m not,” Valder protested. “I’ve been barefoot for two sixnights or more and walking for three months, and I need my rest!” “Rest in the wagon, then.” Karn turned away.
As he had predicted, an empty wagon came trundling southward perhaps half an hour later, as Karn was showing his men how to make torches of the tall grass. Valder had refused to help with the instruction, so that he was the first to see the wagon’s own torches.
Once they were aboard the wagon, the rest of the journey was almost pleasant; the road was smooth enough that even a springless ox-drawn cart did not jolt excessively, and Valder was able to sleep off and on until dawn.
They reached the camp early in the afternoon. The first sight of it, as they topped a final hill, was impressive indeed; lines of dull green tents reached to the horizon in three directions amid hundreds of streamers of smoke from cooking fires, broken here and there by an open space. Of course, the camp lay in a narrow depression, so that the horizon was not as far away as it might have been, but Valder was impressed nonetheless. Certainly the encampment was far larger than any he had seen before; he judged that it must hold more than fifty thousand men, and at least one of the open spaces held a tethered dragon. Some of the others held horses or oxen.
He had several minutes to look it over as the wagon made its way up over the hill and paused, while the sentries at the perimeter met them with a perfunctory challenge. They were quickly allowed through and moved on down the slope past the outermost line of tents. At the third row, Sergeant Karn signaled the driver, who slowed the oxen to a halt and allowed his passengers to disembark.
After that, the party split up; besides escorting their prisoner, the detail had brought an assortment of papers and captured materials that were to be delivered to various places. Three of the soldiers were selected to take Valder and an assortment of magical or possibly magical devices to the magicians’ section, while Karn and the others went elsewhere.
Valder was led back into the depths of the camp, up over another hill, and around a corner, where he found himself looking, not at yet more straight lines of identical military-issue green, but at a circle of bright tents in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, clustered around a large area of open ground.
His escort stopped at a chalked line a dozen paces from the outer edge of the circle; Valder stopped as well, though he saw no reason to. The four of them stood and waited for several minutes. Valder was growing restless when a middle-aged woman in a blue gown came hurrying over to them.