“You sound surprised, Regiment-Captain,” Therman Ulthar said, looking down from his own saddle with a tired, crooked smile. “Someone might almost think you hadn’t expected to get here.”
“They might, might they?” Velvelig cocked his head to give the young Arcanan a moderate glare. “Can’t imagine why they should’ve.”
“Neither can I,” Ulthar assured him, and swung down from his unicorn.
A growl rumbled deep in the beast’s muscular throat, and the fifty swatted its nose with a casual assurance Velvelig still found disturbing. He wasn’t accustomed to “horses” with five-inch fangs capable of effortlessly removing a man’s hand…or his head, for that matter. That wicked ivory horn was equally daunting; he’d seen spears that were less sharply pointed, and the thing was over two feet long. It would never have done for an Arpathian septman to admit fear of anything that went on four feet, but he knew damned well he wasn’t the only Sharonian in the column who hadn’t entirely come to grips with the notion of riding a seven or eight hundred-pound carnivore. Nor had any of them developed the degree of comfort-or the confidence to smack them to remind them who was in charge-Ulthar and the other Arcanans demonstrated.
Yet whatever reservations he might retain, he’d become devoutly thankful for their presence. Without them, the mutineers and escaped prisoners would never have made it this far, and certainly not this quickly. The unicorns were just as fast and just as hardy as Ulthar and Jaralt Sarma had assured him they were. Keeping them fed was a greater challenge than simply grazing a horse or a mule normally presented, but given the season and the speed with which they’d been moving, the chore wasn’t that much worse than hauling along fodder would have been. And little though the horse lover in him cared to admit it, he suspected that something with a predator’s instincts probably made a better combat mount than a creature whose best natural defense to a threat was to run away from it. Of course, there were downsides, and one thing he’d observed was that unicorn dung had the reek of carnivore excrement, rather than the homier scent of horse manure. Fortunately, that hadn’t been much of a factor on their open air jaunt, but he really didn’t like to think about mucking out a stable full of unicorns.
He smiled wearily at the thought and uncased his binoculars as he gazed at the portal between Thermyn and New Uromath.
And however…unpleasant that might be, the critters really are tough as hill demons, he reflected. They aren’t as sensitive to sudden climate changes as horses are, either. More of that damned magic, I’ll bet. They sure as hell didn’t grow any sudden furry coats along the way!
And that was one more thing to be profoundly grateful for, he acknowledged. For that matter, although their gait took some getting used to-a man who’d learned to post on a horse had required quite a bit of minor adjustment before his mount had stopped complaining and his own arse and thighs had acclimated-it was actually smoother than any he’d ever before experienced. And those clawed feet made them incredibly surefooted and nimble in rough terrain. The Arpathian in him resisted being seduced away from the horses he’d always loved, but he couldn’t deny there were profound advantages to these unnatural beasts.
He raised the binoculars and suppressed a desire to wince as the skin around his eyes made contact with the rubber eye shields and his gloved fingers adjusted the focusing knob. At this time of year, the average temperatures here on what should have been the location of Wyrmach ought to have averaged well above freezing, but that was an average temperature. Daily highs and lows peaked twenty or thirty degrees outside that range, and the town was subject to occasional bouts of bitter cold…one of which they-of course-had arrived in the middle of. And just to make the situation even better, the Thermyn side of the portal was a thousand feet higher than the New Uromath side. Although this portal was old enough for the portal wind to have stabilized quite a lot, the current of air pouring through from New Uromath remained far too powerful to call a “breeze,” and while that would normally have been a good thing, the weather on the far side of the portal had decided to drop well below its normal range, as well. It was marginally warmer than the Thermyn side, but not enough to evoke any handsprings of delight.
He gazed through the binoculars, sweeping his gaze steadily across as much of the fourteen-mile wide portal as he could see from his present location. The combination of the way the woods straggled off and the nice, flat terrain around Wyrmach meant he could see most of it, which didn’t make him especially happy as he contemplated the small cluster of chinked-log structures parked on a low rise almost squarely in the center of the portal’s arc.
Miserable as it might have been to cross, the rugged terrain between Bitter Lake and Fort Ghartoun had given a lot of cover. The fact that the best land route-indeed, the only truly practicable land route, especially this time of year-had wandered far afield from the straight-line route available to dragons had helped even more. Despite which, Valnar Rohsahk, Ulthar’s “recon crystal specialist,” had detected six separate overflights by dragons. Rohsahk was what the Arcanans called a “javelin,” according to the literal translation their talking crystals provided. That was roughly the equivalent of a junior-armsman, and despite his youthfulness, the Arcanan-who was from what ought to have been the Republic of Syskhara in New Ternath-had the solid, unflappable competence Velvelig normally associated with strongly Talented noncoms. The regiment-captain had no idea how the Arcanans’ “spellware” worked, but he was willing to take their word that it did. They had as much to lose as the Sharonians did if they were overtaken, after all, so they had no vested interest in pretending it could accomplish things it couldn’t. And it didn’t hurt his confidence in their abilities any that Under-Armsman Haryl chan Byral, his own junior headquarters clerk-specialist (who was even younger than Rohsahk), had been assigned as Fort Ghartoun’s Distance Viewer. Despite his youth, chan Byral was powerfully Talented, and twice he’d Seen the passing dragon Rohsahk had detected.
Fortunately, none of them had flown directly overhead, and apparently none of them had been actively seeking the fugitives at the time they passed. All of those near escapes had occurred in the first few days of their flight, however. By Ulthar and Sarma’s most optimistic estimates, Thalmayr must have gotten his story into someone senior’s hands by now, which meant any additional overflights were unlikely to be benignly negligent. And the terrain had been depressingly open for the last four or five hundred miles. In fact, here in the approaches to Wyrmach, it reminded Velvelig of a pocket-ball table, and he felt remarkably like the strike-ball as he stood surveying the portal. He’d done his best to keep clear of that straight-line flight path between here and Fort Ghartoun, but trying to balance the extra time to circle wide of crossing dragon traffic against the threat that orders to find them might come racing down-chain from Two Thousand Harshu at any moment had been a nerve-racking business.
Now, unfortunately, they had no choice but to move squarely back onto the flight path. The portal was the critical bottleneck, the funnel through which they had to pass to reach New Uromath…and through which any Arcanan traffic, whether specifically searching for them or not, must also pass.