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scanning the water and forest. The view was flat, as though he was looking
through a telephoto lens.
That didn't bother him. The trouble was that it looked far too easy. By now,
the slavers would be trying to trap him; there would be a backup.
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"So, let's find the backup."
It took him five hard minutes of scanning to find it: another pair of slavers,
hidden in a blind built into a nearby tree, visible only momentarily when the
more skittish one would shift position.
He still didn't like it, though. Ahrmin was clever; there was probably a
second backup, at least, but a half hour of intense scrutiny, making minuscule
motions to barely move the Eye, didn't reveal it.
Karl Cullinane sighed. He probably wasn't going to be able to hit that target.
Not tonight. There had to be backups, or bobby traps on the approaches to such
a tempting target; until he could figure out exactly what the slavers were up
to, he'd have to give this target a pass. The next step had to be to persuade
the slavers to pull their men in close, defensively. Pull all the outlying
guards into one camp, and huddle together there.
So that Karl Cullinane could blow them to bits with guncotton bombs. He
smiled. Just a little more, he thought. Just a few more deaths, and the
slavers would gather together for him. And then, boom. Cut them down to size,
then cut them to pieces.
Back to work.
Maybe he could spot the traps here. It would be nice to take apart a
three-level trap; that would mean killing at least five slavers. Not a bad
night's work at all. If he could do it.
He spun the view and looked westward down the beach, scanning slowly until a
motion caught his eye. He zoomed in, yet again, and spotted three dark figures
moving single-file along the treeline.
Not a bad job of skulking, he decided. The slavers wouldn't be visible except
from the sea, and except for their own ship, there were no ships in
evidence even a keen observer wouldn't have been able to spot them from the
island, not without the Eye.
Too bad for them that the slavers didn't know about the Eye.
Wait. He shook his head.
That hadn't looked right. There was something about the walk of one of them.
He zoomed in closer, but they were gone; they had probably ducked back into
the trees. He scanned the Eye farther down the beach, and saw two others,
trailing the first three by about a hundred meters. The hunting team's backup,
probably, looking for traces of him, wisely figuring that Karl wasn't going to
be skulking inside the forest itself at night, for the same reason that the
slavers weren't: Only a few dozen meters inside the forest, the overgrowth of
leaves blocked out all light.
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But... that didn't make sense. Maybe they would put out one man as a Judas
goat Ahrmin seemed to have little concern for his men; likely most were hired
mercenaries and not guild slavers but not three, not with two following. To
justify using three men as bait, there would have to be a much larger party
waiting to spring the trap.
Granted, the two following looked to be fairly tough: two large men, one half
crouching as he followed their trail, the other holding two loaded crossbows.
But still. It didn't make sense at all. Unless...
Karl spun the view again, leaving the two hunters while he searched for their
quarry.
He found them. Three figures, hiding in darkness. Not hiding well enough.
The three came to a spot where a wide trail led away into the trees. The right
move would have been to go into the forest, and cross the trail under cover.
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Even Karl knew that; Walter Slovotsky had taught him.
You didn't cross open spaces, not if you didn't have to.
They crossed the open space.
"No!" His heart pounded in his chest as he zoomed in tight on their faces, his
fingers automatically making the minor corrections to keep them in view.
It was Aeia, Tennetty, and Bren Adahan. What were they doing here?
Getting themselves killed, in just a few minutes, if Karl didn't do something.
Wait a minute, he thought, and then smiled. If they were here, that meant that
Jason had been found; they'd still be looking for the boy, otherwise. This had
to mean that they'd found the boy;
they were here to pull Karl's head out of the noose.
He knew how Atlas felt after his shrug.
Change of plans, Ahrmin, Karl thought. "I, Karl Cullinane, hereby cancel my
last run, and promise to get my butt out of here in one piece, if at all
possible."
He would take another try at Ahrmin, and soon, but with better odds than were
offered here and
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Now, to rescue his rescuers....
He ran to his gear and pulled out his bowie, then went into one of the leather
sacks and produced a dozen gun cotton sticks, each carefully sealed for
watertightness. He dug into the small bag for sealed packets of detonators,
igniters, and fuses, putting all of the retrieved explosives and equipment in
a canvas rucksack. His guns, powder, and sword were cached in the woods with
his boots; he hadn't wanted to expose his guns to the water, and, once having
tried swimming with a sword, had no intention of swimming with it and other
gear.
His clothes were still wet, but dark clothes would provide more cover in the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]