cache was discovered, and destroyed, along with the nest of nomads that protected it. Two more months passed in fruitless search, and then another, spent chasing down false leads. The cho-ja brought word of an oasis gone dry, and the remains of a stock burrow that had been uprooted in apparent haste. The patrol who gave chase to see if they could overtake the nomads who had deserted the site exhausted themselves in a fruitless march. Of those who remained to investigate, two soldiers were injured when the ground gave way over a pit trap. Infection claimed the life of one; the other was sent back by litter. He would never walk again, and requested honourable suicide by the blade. Mara granted permission, and barely managed not to curse Chochocan for the waste of a fine man.
Another season passed without event. The Lady of the Acoma grew sharp-tempered with brooding.
'We should send out more soldiers,' she snapped to Kevin, while combing her hair with sweet oils, since water for baths was wasteful and one had to remove the dust somehow.
The Midkemian paused, then pointedly went back to restringing a broken lace on his sandal. This discussion had taken place repeatedly, and each time he had insisted that a march from the mountains in strength was what the enemy desired of them. The words had been said. But the one fact that would have lent his advice credence remained an unvoiced secret. Month after sun-blazing month, Kevin bit back any comment that might reveal his prior military experience. To admit that he had been an officer in command on the field in Midkemia was to ask for a sentence of death.
Yet even ignorant of his past, Mara did not discount his opinion entirely; though she was the more impetuous of the two family rulers charged with border patrol in Dustari, it was Lord Chipino who brought up the need for aggressive tactics at the last.
He came into her tent just past twilight, bringing the smell of charcoal fire and roast chal nuts that he had been sharing over coals with his Strike Leader. 'I've had word from the desert companies,' he opened without bothering with social ceremony. 'They captured a nomad trader, and I think we have a lead. At least, we know where large caravans from the other side of the desert have been leaving off grain parcels.'
Mara snapped her fingers for servants to set out warm tesh. 'My cho-ja say the same, but add that the sand smells of footsteps.' By now all had learned to trust the fact that the insects could scent traces of the oils the nomads used to cure their sandal leather. 'The caravans are no falsehood sent to lead us astray.'
She gestured to her sand table, which through nearly two weary years had come to dominate the front chamber of her command tent. Over the course of the campaign, the mountains had been levelled and re-formed to one side, allowing space for the broad, undulating valleys of desert dunes that lay beyond the border. The topography was done by a wizened old man with a squint, paid exorbitant rates to be absent from his large family and trade in llama. But on that table, paid out in pins with beaded heads, Mara knew the location of every one of her soldiers. 'Let us compare what we know,' she invited Lord Chipino in what had lately become an evening ritual.
But, in a departure from the routine, she and the Lord began a parley that lasted deep into the night. Their voices rose and fell with planning, over the moan of the wind across the tent ridges, and around the sigh of the draughts that rippled the hangings and fanned the embers in the light sconces scarlet. Lord and Lady reached an accord without argument: come the morning, they would each call up another company. Leaving two companies of mixed troops to keep the border, they would journey with the rest into the desert and join the army there. A faster patrol would hasten ahead, with orders to pursue the newest leads and locate the nomads' main supply caches.
'When we arrive with the two new companies,' Lord Chipino concluded, 'we will have an army of a thousand with which to formulate our attack.'
He rose, his multiple shadows thrown by the cho-ja lights Swooping across flame-patterned carpets. 'Better we attack in force than sit like poets in the heights. To wait out the year