Stalking Darkness

Mirn sighed. “Sorry, Lieutenant, that’s about all there is to tell.”
    Beka shook her head. “Don’t apologize. You rest easy now.”
    Getting to her feet, she looked around at the others. “I figure we can’t be more than four or five days ride from Mycena. If we’re lucky, our side’s made some headway south by now. Ariani, I’m sending you back to the regiment with a verbal dispatch. Take thetwo best horses, ride as hard as you can, and get word back to Commander Klia about what we’ve seen.”
    Ariani snapped a proud salute. “I will, Lieutenant.”
    “Corporal Nikides, you’re in charge of taking back the wounded. We’ll rig up drag litters for Mirn and Gilly here. Steb, you’ll go with them. The rest of us will dog the column for a few more days.”
    Steb looked down at Mirn, clearly torn in his loyalties. “With all due respect, Lieutenant, that only leaves twelve of you. I can shoot and fight as well with one eye as ever I did with two.”
    “That’s why I need you to protect the wounded,” she told him, and saw his look of relief. “That goes for you, too, Nikides,” she added, seeing that the corporal was about to object. “Head north as fast as you can. You’re my secondary couriers in case Ariani doesn’t make it. The rest of us are staying to spy, not fight.”
    Leaving Braknil in charge, Beka made a wide circuit of the camp, coming to a halt at last on a west-facing outcrop downhill from the others. She could hear them grumbling among themselves. Those being sent away were none too happy about leaving the others behind; those staying wondered what more there was to be learned.
    Beka sighed heavily. She’d already wrestled with the decision to further fragment what was left of the turma. None of her superiors would fault her for turning back now.
    But what would they say about her reasons for staying? As her eye wandered north up the coastline she again felt the strange impression of familiarity and rightness that had come over her the night they’d first seen the comet.
    Whoever this Lord Mardus was, whatever he was up to with his necromancers and pointless marches to nowhere, newly honed instincts told Beka that she was too close to learning his secrets to leave off now.

47
J UST A S TAG IN THE D ARK
    C ries rang out behind him as Alec fled the little clearing. The voices of the Man and the Other mingled for a moment, then were silent. An inchoate sense of confusion stirred again, but his animal consciousness drove him on, deeper into the forest and away from the carrion reek. He scented other Men in the forest around him but they were easy enough to evade.
    The first time Nysander had cast the spell of intrinsic nature on him, all those months ago in the safety of the Orëska garden, Alec’s conscious identity had been so totally overwhelmed by that of his beast form that Nysander had hastily changed him back before he could harm himself or anyone else in the resulting confusion.
    It was the same this time, and it had been his overpowering animal flight instinct that had undoubtedly saved his life.
    The wind was alive with scent as he dashed headlong through the darkness. Heeding the warnings that came to his nose, he avoided the Plenimaran pickets, bounding through thickets and over gullies and deadfalls with unthinking ease. As he fled, his mind slowly recovered from the shock of the change, blending withthat of the stag into a state of heightened awareness that was neither animal nor human.
    Emerging from the trees onto a rocky sea cliff, he stopped for a moment, muzzle dark with foam. Below him the tide crashed against the rocks, sending up great fans of spray.
    The comet was burning across the sky and sight of it sent a fresh wave of panic through him. Every muscle trembled and twitched, every instinct screamed flight. But he remained still, long sensitive ears sharply forward, nostrils wide. As his strange blood slowly cooled, something new caught at his senses. Pawing the rock with one cloven hoof, he uttered a plaintive bellow, then stood motionless, listening.
    The answering call was nothing more than the faintest of whispers in the silence of his mind. There was no voice or scent or image, only the summoning of instinct.
    North, still north. Follow and trust
.
    Like a bird that suddenly recalls the route south after the first frost, Alec gave himself up to the pull of that faint glimmer, his mind still too clouded by the stag’s to question or doubt.
    With