And if Taneem could learn, perhaps he could kill two lizards with one slash. "You," he called softly to her. "Gray K'da."
She cocked her head slightly to the side, her puzzlement deepening. "Yes, you," Draycos confirmed. "You—Taneem. Your name is Taneem now. Come here, Taneem."
Still looking uncertain, she nevertheless came to his side. "Take your friend," Draycos ordered her, unhooking his tail from the rogue K'da's crest. "Go ahead—wrap your tail around his crest and lead him back to the others. Can you do that?"
For a few seconds it seemed that he would have done as well to talk to one of the shrubs. Taneem stared unblinkingly at him, apparently trying hard to sort it all out. Then, to Draycos's mild surprise, she stepped to the other K'da's side and tentatively looped her tail around his crest. "That's right," Draycos said encouragingly. "Perfect. Now take him back to the others and stay there with him. I'll be back soon."
Again, it seemed to take her some time to work it through. Then, with a flick of her tongue she turned back toward the group, the other K'da in tow. With one final lingering look at Draycos over her shoulder, she disappeared around a clump of tall ferns.
Draycos didn't wait to see any more. If they made it, they made it. Turning to his left, he headed toward the distant human scent.
The telltale odor increased steadily as he traveled, but as near as he could tell the intruders were stationary. He kept going until he'd reached a spot perhaps a hundred feet away from them, then shifted to stalking mode. He covered the last bit of distance as silently and carefully as he could manage.
It was just as well that he did.
The primary line consisted of Malison Ring soldiers spaced about a hundred feet apart. All were dressed in camouflage outfits, all of them hidden inside patches of reeds or ferns where they were all but invisible. Sitting silently in concealment, they were waiting for Jack and Alison to walk right into their arms.
Under normal circumstances, Draycos would have had no trouble dealing with them. He would have simply climbed into the treetops, worked his way behind the line, and taken out the soldiers one by one.
But as Jack had warned, Colonel Frost knew what he and his men were up against. This time, they'd come up with a new twist.
Just behind the main picket line a second line had been set up in various tree branches twenty feet off the ground. If Draycos had carelessly gone with the standard approach, he would have ended up squarely in their line of fire.
And as an extra added touch, the upper line consisted of nonhumans of species Draycos hadn't yet encountered in his travels with Jack. Frost had probably hoped their unfamiliar scent would help conceal them.
Slowly, carefully, Draycos backed away, watching for any other surprises the enemy might have planned. But the double picket line appeared to be the full extent of their cleverness. At least for the moment.
He took the long way back to Jack and the others, paralleling the picket line at a cautious distance. After a quarter mile the double line ended, replaced by a single line of soldiers spaced much farther apart.
Apparently, Frost had followed Alison's same line of reasoning regarding the caves to the west. He was expecting the fugitives to head in that direction, and had arranged his forces with that in mind.
Still, even a thin picket line could be trouble, especially to a crowd of unstealthy Erassvas and Phookas. Draycos and Jack would have to find a way to slip the group past the sentries without being detected.
Draycos had worried a little that Alison might have made too much progress toward the hidden enemy in his absence. To his relief, he found everyone sitting or lying comfortably on the ground not far from where he'd left them.
Jack was walking the perimeter, his tangler ready in his hand. Draycos waited until he was looking in his direction, then lifted a paw into view. Jack changed direction, and half a minute later Draycos was once again pressed against his host's skin.
"You okay?" Jack murmured as he resumed his patrol.
"Yes," Draycos said. "Why have we stopped? Is it the bellwether's turn for a host?"
"No, not yet," Jack said. "I saw Taneem come back leading one of the other Phookas and figured you'd spotted trouble. I thought it might be a good idea to go to ground for a while, so I called a rest break."
"It was well that you did," Draycos said. "We have a problem."
Jack listened in silence as Draycos laid out the situation. "And you don't think we can slip past them even if we keep going north?" the boy asked when he'd finished.
"You, I, and Alison could," Draycos said. "But the others could not."
"So what we need is for all the soldiers to go away."
"Yes," Draycos said. For all the danger they were in, he felt a trickle of encouragement that the thought of abandoning the Erassvas and K'da had apparently not even crossed Jack's mind. The me-first attitude that Uncle Virgil had spent all those years hammering into the boy was fading away with gratifying speed. "Perhaps I can arrange a diversion."
Jack shook his head. "A K'da diversion is the first thing they'll expect," he said, chewing thoughtfully at his lip. "I wonder how clever they think we are. And how stupid."
"What do you mean?" Draycos asked.
"This." Reaching to his collar, Jack removed his comm clip. "I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but there's a way to gimmick comm clips so that they can be made to work as transmission scanners."
"With the ability to search for enemy transmissions?"
"Exactly," Jack said. "You usually can't actually eavesdrop on anyone, since most comm clips operate with full encryption. But if we had a clip like that we could estimate the strength of the mercs' own comm clip signals and get an idea of how close they were."
"Do we have such a device?" Draycos asked.
Jack shook his head. "There are a couple on the Essenay, but neither of the two I have with me can do that. But Frost has to know about the technique. If he thinks I'm clever enough, and if my comm clip suddenly goes on without me talking to anyone, he may think that's what I'm doing."
"But as Alison said earlier, turning it on may also give them the ability to locate us," Draycos warned.
"Right," Jack said, grinning tightly. "And that's the how-stupid-am-I part. How far away did you say you drove that herd of horn-headed plant-eaters?"
Draycos cracked his jaws open in a smile of his own. "Not far," he said. "How shall I attach it?"
"Use this," Jack said. He glanced toward Alison, then surreptitiously slid one of the cartridges out of his tangler. "If you pop off this cap, the netting will just slide free instead of blasting out."
Draycos lifted his head slightly from Jack's shoulder for a closer look. The technique seemed straightforward enough. "What about the electrical shock?" he asked.
"Good point," Jack said, frowning. "I'd better take out the capacitor."
"Or you could simply adjust its strength," Draycos suggested. "We don't wish to put the animal to sleep, but a small jolt may encourage him to leave his grazing and move away from the area more quickly."
Jack cocked his head in salute. "Good point number two," he said. "Let's see what I can do."
Three minutes later, the cartridge was ready. "Remember, just attach it and then get back here," Jack said. "And don't get him moving too fast. We don't want Frost wondering why Uncle Virgil trained me to be a thief instead of an Olympic distance runner."
"I know what to do," Draycos assured him. "Don't leave this place until I return."
"We won't," Jack promised. "Good luck."
CHAPTER 12
Silently, the dragon headed off into the woods. Jack gave him a thirty-count to make sure he was out of sight, then headed back to the resting herd.
Alison was sitting with her back against a tree, her gun in her lap. "All quiet on the western front?" she asked.
"Seems that way," he confirmed, carefully filtering the annoyance out of his voice. Alison had gotten into the habit of peppering her conversation with these obscure comment
s, obviously references to things he'd never heard of.
It was irritating, but he wasn't about to give her the satisfaction of letting her know that. He certainly wasn't going to ask what in blazes she was talking about.
"Good," she said. "Does that mean you're over your twitchies?"
"Being cautious in enemy territory is not being twitchy," Jack insisted stiffly. "And, no, I think we ought to stay here a little longer"
Alison peered up at the sky. "If we do, we may be here all night," she warned. "We don't have much daylight left."
"I think it's worth it," Jack said firmly. "I'm staying, anyway."
"Fine," Alison said, resettling herself against the tree. "You're in charge of this expedition. So how about telling me a story?"
Jack frowned. "What kind of story?"
"Colonel Frost called you Jack Morgan," she said. "Two months ago, when we were raw recruits sweating through basic in the Whinyard's Edge mercenaries, they all thought your name was Jack Montana. Was it you or them who got your name wrong?"
Jack hid a grimace. "Them," he said. "Probably a clerical error."
"Yeah, right," she said. "Come on, Jack. Like it or not, we're stuck here together. I need to know that I can trust you."
"Fine," Jack said. "In that case, you can go first."
Alison lifted her eyebrows. "Go first where?"
"You weren't any raw recruit," he reminded her, sitting down facing her with his back to another tree. "You could start by telling me what you were up to that made Sergeant Grisko ready to kill both of us."
She sighed, lowering her eyes. "It was all Dad's idea," she said reluctantly. "He had this crazy notion that merc groups who took teenagers probably didn't keep very good records on them. He figured he could keep indenturing me to one after another, collect the money and then help me get out, and they'd never catch on."
"Cute," Jack said. "More stupid than cute, actually. But no crazier than some of the scams my uncle and I pulled over the years."
"So you are a con artist?" she asked. "That's sort of what I figured."
"Reformed con artist," Jack corrected. "Trying to reform, anyway. So what were you doing in the Whinyard's Edge HQ that night?"
"I wanted to get a peek at their records on me," Alison said. "Just in case Dad's plan hadn't been as clever as he thought. I guess I should have waited until we were on Sunright."
"Or skipped it completely."
She made a face. "Dad wouldn't have liked that," she said. "He's—well, let's not go into that."
"Bad childhood?" Jack suggested.
Alison shrugged. "Mom and Dad and I never stayed in one place very long, if that's what you mean. Other than that . . . I don't know. I don't really have anything to compare it to."
"I know the feeling," Jack said ruefully, thinking back over his own life with Uncle Virge. "What kind of work do your parents do?"
"Whatever they can find," she said. "Dad's always chasing the Big One, as he calls it. The job that'll finally bring him fame and fortune and success."
"I gather he hasn't made it?"
She shrugged again. "There's been some success, I suppose. There hasn't been any fame. There certainly hasn't been any fortune."
Jack nodded. She was being evasive, but he could read between the lines as well as the next guy. Her father was a criminal like Uncle Virgil, though apparently not nearly as successful.
Which was ironic, considering that it was Uncle Virgil's spectacular career that had caught the attention of Arthur Neverlin in the first place, which was what had dragged Jack, and now Alison, into this mess. "Where are your parents now?" he asked. "Are they the ones you're expecting to pick you up?"
She shook her head. "These are some friends of theirs. Actually, I really don't know where Mom and Dad are. Like I say, they move around a lot. What's a K'da?"
With a supreme effort. Jack managed to keep his face expressionless. "A what?"
"A K'da," she repeated. "Frost said he didn't want you and your K'da to suffer the same fate as your uncle. Come on—I've told you about me. It's your turn."
"I have no idea what he meant by that," Jack said, feeling sweat break out on the back of his neck. He'd completely forgotten that last comment of Frost's just before he'd shut down his comm clip. This girl was way too observant for his taste. "Some slang term, I suppose."
She stared hard at him with those dark eyes. Jack held her gaze without flinching, and after a moment her lip twitched. "Fine," she said. "Don't tell me. Can I at least get your real name?"
"Jack Morgan," he said. "Raised by my uncle, Virgil Morgan."
"Virgil Morgan," Alison said thoughtfully. "I've heard that name. One of the great con men and safecrackers of our age, isn't he?"
"Certainly in his own mind," Jack said, feeling a ghostly echo of pain and loss. Even more than a year after Uncle Virgil's death, it still hurt sometimes. "No, that's not fair."
"Not if even half the stories are true," Alison agreed, an odd glint in her eye. "So you're Virgil Morgan's nephew."
"Yes, we've established that," Jack said, eyeing her suspiciously. Was there a hint of actual admiration in her voice? Or was it just more sarcasm? Whatever it was, he didn't like it. "And I'm reformed, remember?"
"Sure," she said, the faint admiration turning to equally faint amusement He liked that even less. "Well. That was fun, but we really ought to try to get a little more distance before sundown."
Ten yards behind her, Jack caught a glimpse of gold dragon scales. "If you insist," he said, wincing as he pushed himself up off the ground. Even during the brief rest break, his leg muscles had stiffened up considerably. "You still want to handle point?"
"I'm still the one with the gun," she said. "By the way, have you noticed that these Phookas can change color?"
Jack's first reaction was to wonder which of these animals could possibly have gotten riled up enough to go into K'da combat mode. He'd seen that effect a couple of times with Draycos, where some of the poet-warrior's heightened blood flow seeped into his gold scales and turned them black.
But a second later he realized what she was actually talking about. As one K'da left his Erassva host and a differently colored one took his place, Alison would naturally interpret that as the original Phooka changing colors. "No, I hadn't," he said. "Interesting."
"You should pay better attention to your surroundings," Alison said reprovingly as she got to her feet. If she was feeling stiff, it didn't show. "And try to keep them quiet. I'm guessing the Malison Ring will make some move before nightfall."
However Draycos had worked his end of the scheme, he'd clearly done a terrific job of it. The group reached the area he'd described as the site of the Malison Ring picket line to find it completely deserted.
Jack had gone perhaps twenty yards past the picket line when, from somewhere ahead and to the right, came a sudden crashing of branches and a distant howl of pain.
Ducking around trees and bushes, he ran toward the sound. Rounding one last stand of reeds, he nearly ran full tilt into Alison as she stood at the edge of another of the sharp drop-offs. "Watch it—watch it," she said, putting a hand out across his chest. "This whole ridge is crumbly."
"What happened?" Jack asked.
"We've lost one," she said grimly, nodding down the cliff. "Take a look. But be careful."
Holding on to a nearby tree branch, Jack eased up to the edge. Thirty feet down a steep slope, a dusky red Phooka was lying on his side, two of his legs thrashing weakly as he struggled to free himself from a tangle of vines. "Did you see what happened?"
"About what you'd expect," she growled. "Stupid thing wasn't watching where he was going and walked off the edge of the cliff. Question is, what do we do about it?"
Jack took a step back and looked around. Draycos was nowhere to be seen, probably still playing shepherd off to the left. "Let's start by asking Hren," he said. "Hren? Hren!"
"Yes, young Jack?" the Erassva's voice called from behind him.
"Come here a minute, will you?" Jack called back. "We've got an injured Phooka on our hands."
The fat alien appeared and stepped to the edge of the drop-off with what seemed to Jack to be a complete lack of caution. "How sad," he said as he peered down. "How very sad."
"Never mind the sadness," Jack said. "How do we help him?"
"Help him?" Hren seemed puzzled. "There is no help for him, young Jack. Not down there. A few hours and he will be gone." He turned to go.
"Wait a second," Jack said, grabbing his arm as he looked down at the injured Phooka. The creature's eyes were half-closed, but even in the fading light Jack could swear he was looking directly at him. "We've got some rope in these packs."
"We'd need more than just rope," Alison said. "These things are heavy, and we'd be dragging him against all that vegetation. At the very least we'd need a block and tackle."
"But we can't just leave him there to die," Jack protested.
Alison shrugged. "I'm open to suggestions."
Jack clenched his hands into fists. There had to be a way to do this. "How about if I go down to him?" he suggested.
"And do what?" Alison asked. "Hold his paw while he dies?"
"I was thinking more about carrying him to safety," Jack growled, pointing past the drop-off. "That cut goes around that low hill over there. If I can get through it, I should be able to get around the hill and meet you a little ways northwest of here."
"And what if you can't get through?" Alison countered. "It wouldn't be safe to leave the rope tied here—we might as well put up a sign telling the Malison Ring which way we've gone. If you can't get through, you'll be trapped."
"I'll get through," Jack said stubbornly, pulling off his backpack. "Just get me down there and take the herd around that hill. I'll do the rest."
"Jack—"
"And we're wasting time and light," Jack cut her off. "Give me a hand with this rope."
Alison hissed between her teeth. "Fine. It's your funeral."
The sky had darkened considerably by the time they were ready. "Just relax and walk your feet down the slope," Alison said, looping the rope around a thick tree trunk and pulling it taut. "I'll ease you down."