Selethen shook his head. 'It's one of the screen. They must have seen something up ahead,' he told them. The rider was closer now and they could make out detail. He swerved his horse slightly as he made out the tall figure of the Wakir and rode directly towards him.
'Vultures,' said Gilan suddenly. While the others had been intent on the rider approaching, his keen eyes had sought ahead of them. Halt looked up now but Gilan's eyes were younger than his. He thought that perhaps he could see black specks circling high in the sky ahead of them. Or it could just be his mind telling him he could see them now that Gilan had said they were there.
Any doubt was removed when the rider came closer, reining in his horse in a sliding cloud of dust.
'Excellence, we've seen vultures ahead,' he reported. Selethen waited. His men were well trained and he knew there would be more to the report.
'I've sent Corporal Iqbal and two men ahead to reconnoitre,' the man continued. 'In the meantime, I've halted the forward screen.'
Selethen nodded acknowledgement. 'Good. We'll continue until we come up with the screen. By then Iqbal might have something to report. Return to your post,' he added. The messenger wheeled his horse, touching mouth, brow and mouth in a hasty salute, then clattered away back the way he had come, raising, more of the fine dust. Selethen glanced at the two Rangers.
'Better safe than sorry. Those vultures mean there's something dead up ahead. There's no knowing if whatever it was that killed them is still around.'
Halt nodded agreement. It made sense. The desert was a dangerous place to travel, he realised. Selethen was too good a soldier to go blundering in unprepared to see what had attracted the vultures.
'There's a lot of them,' Gilan pointed out. 'That could mean there's been a lot of killing.'
'That's what I'm afraid of,' Selethen replied.
His fears were well founded. They came up to the scene of the battle an hour later. Not that it had been much of a battle – it was more of a massacre. Horse, mules, camels and men were scattered about the desert, lifeless shapes surrounded by darkening patches of dried blood that had soaked into the sand.
It was the trading party from Al Shabah, and they had been wiped out to a man.
As the new arrivals cantered in among them, the heavy black vultures left their feasting and flapped lazily into the air. Halt motioned for Evanlyn and Horace to wait behind. He and Gilan dismounted and walked among the bodies with Selethen.
The men and animals had been killed, and then hacked in a senseless frenzy. There was barely a body with just a single killing wound. The freight packs had been ripped open and their contents scattered on the ground. Anything of value had been taken. Then the predators had done their awful work.
'When, do you think?' Halt asked. Selethen looked around, his normally impassive face dark with rage and frustration.
'Earlier this morning, I'd say,' he replied and Gilan, kneeling beside one of the bodies, nodded confirmation to Halt.
'The big predators, the cats and jackals, haven't got to them yet,' Selethen explained. 'They tend to prowl at night, so it must have been after dawn today. And the vultures are still gathering.'
Halt had walked away as Selethen was talking, studying the scene more closely. Selethen glanced up at the slowly wheeling black birds above them, riding effortlessly on the currents of heated air that rose from the desert floor.
'Any idea who might have done it?' Gilan asked and Selethen studied him for a moment, regaining control of his emotions.
'The Tualaghi,' he said briefly, almost spitting the word out. 'All this… ' He indicated the hacked bodies. '… is typical of their handiwork.' He shook his head, puzzled. 'But why? Why would they attack a well-armed party? There were over twenty soldiers in the escort. Usually the Tualaghi prey on small parties. Why this?'
'Maybe someone paid them,' said Halt as he returned from his survey of the desolate scene. The Wakir looked at him now, frowning.
'Who? Who'd pay them?' he challenged.
'Whoever betrayed Erak in the first place,' Halt told him. 'Take a look around. There's no sign of him. Whoever killed your men took him away with them.'
Chapter 25
Will's mistakes were beginning to compound. As they did, the danger grew progressively greater.
The first mistake, and the one that led to all the others, he was still unaware of. That was the fact that for the greater part of the first day, misled by his inaccurate Northseeker, he had been travelling far to the east of his intended course. When the influence of the iron deposits in the Red Hills was finally behind him, and his Northseeker returned to a true heading, the damage was already done. With every kilometre, he had diverged farther from the course that he thought he was taking. Now he was travelling parallel to it, but kilometres from where he thought he was.
His second mistake was to convince himself that he had seen the landmarks he was seeking. Admittedly, he had seen no flat-topped hill. But he told himself that he must have passed it without recognising it, rationalising to himself the fact that its shape had undoubtedly changed over the years from the distinctive profile that Selethen's chart indicated.
The low bank that he had seen late the previous afternoon bore no real resemblance to a line of cliffs. But, needing to believe that he had seen the cliffs, he convinced himself that he really had. He had seen no caves, and the chart showed that the cliffs had been honeycombed with them. Instead, he reassured himself that the caves were invisible because they had been shrouded in late afternoon shadow.
Now, to settle the question once and for all, he should see a balancing rock formation some time in the next few hours – a formation where a large rock balanced precariously on top of a smaller. At least, he told himself with a growing sense of foreboding, a feature like that would be unmistakable.
Unless the big rock had fallen off the smaller one overnight, he added grimly.
He needed to see that formation because his water supply was becoming alarmingly depleted. The first water-skin was empty. The second was less than half full. He had tried to ration himself severely but the heat simply drained energy from him so that he had to drink or fall senseless to the ground.
He consoled himself with the thought that, once he saw the balancing rocks and fixed his position, the water problem would be solved. A few kilometres from those rocks, a soak was marked on the chart – a small depression in a dried-up river-bed where water seeped slowly to the surface. Once there, all he would have to do was dig down a metre or so and wait while water filled the hole. It might be muddy and unpleasant, he knew. But it would be drinkable. And with his waterskins refilled and his location established once and for all, he would be able to strike out for one of the wells.
Sometime in the next few hours, he simply had to see the balancing rock formation or he was lost – figuratively as well as literally. As a result, he had to trust his map and his Northseeker and continue to believe that sooner or later, he would see those rocks. He simply had no alternative course of action.
It was this growing fatalism that led to his final, and most serious, mistake. Obsessed with the need to find the balancing rocks, and validate his course of action so far, he continued to ride through the hottest hours of the day.
Experienced desert travellers like Selethen didn't do this, he knew. But again, he rationalised. Selethen could navigate by the stars and didn't need daylight to sight landmarks and reference points. That meant he could afford the time spent resting in the middle of the day. But Will had an urgent need to find that water soak and surely a few hours of heat wouldn't do too much harm.
So he rode on, the heat battering down on him like a physical force as the sun rose higher in the sky. The air itself was superheated so that it almost scorched his throat and lungs when he breathed it in. It seemed that the all-pervading heat had sucked the very oxygen out of the air so that he gasped and panted for breath.