"Surely the base you speak of will serve as ample protection of our claims! You can leave a force to hold the fortress until the fleet returns with more men!"
"I fear your understanding of tactics is not as great as your counting of numbers, my good assessor." The commander spoke gently, hoping to humiliate the accountant rather than browbeat him. Captain Daggrande grinned at the jibe, but Cordell was mildly alarmed to note that several other captains seemed to be taking Kardann all too seriously. "Were we to abandon this shore now," he pressed, "we would stand to lose all that we have gained so far. These people will only understand our mastery if we hold it before them, not just for a day or a week but for months, perhaps years!"
Kardann started to sputter, but Cordell silenced him with a look. "By the time that happens, I intend to have the entire land under the banner of the Golden Legion!" He paused to make sure they understood the depth of his commitment.
"Make the most of your day here," he suggested breezily. "We toil again very soon, this time upon the building of Helmsport!"
Gultec's stomach growled again, and the lanky jaguar rose and stretched in feline bliss. He rested upon a massive bough, high above the jungle floor. Sitting up, he cleaned himself thoroughly. His hunger was present, but not yet urgent.
Eventually the spotted cat sauntered down the branch, springing easily to a lower limb, and down again into the crotch of a neighboring tree. His nostrils twitched, alert for the spoor of game.
Gultec made his way along the middle level of jungle branches, avoiding the tangle upon the ground but remaining well camouflaged among thick foliage. For perhaps an hour, he hunted, catching the scent of nothing edible.
Lengthening shadows stretched through the small open patches in the deep jungles of Far Payit. The jaguar's spotted form moved among the shadows, his orange and black pelt blending perfectly with the gathering darkness. His stomach started to growl uncomfortably.
By now the great cat skulked through forests far removed from Ulatos. He had worked his way southward, hunting and prowling and sleeping as occasion demanded. Now he was farther south than he had ever been before, in a region of Payit little known to the city dwellers of Ulatos.
Gultec began to move with unaccustomed urgency, for the hunting had been lean for several days now. Hunger prodded him along, sometimes through the trees and occasionally along the twisting trails below. He pounced on a small rodent and devoured it in one gulp, but the tiny meal did little to sate his appetite.
Perhaps it was the urgency of his hunger that made him careless. It had been many days since he had encountered any sign of humans, and thus his vigilance was relaxed. The great cat need worry about no other enemies, for even the powerful hakuna generally took no note of another feline predator.
In any event, Gultec slipped silently along a trail as night fall settled around him. His padded paws fell silently on the soft grass of the ground. Every few steps, the great cat paused to sniff the air and look around.
Impatient, he picked up his pace to a trot. Once an irritated growl even rumbled from his throat before he recalled the need for stealth. As he paced along the trail, he heard something rustling ahead. A current of breeze carried to him the delightful scent of a plump turkey — food enough to fill the great cat's belly.
Gultec crouched and crept forward, slinking soundlessly on his belly. There! He saw the turkey, standing oddly still at the base of a great tree. The bird fluttered and twisted, but it did not move from its location. Even Gultec's keen eyes did not see the narrow tether holding the bird in place.
With one lightning bound, Gultec sprang toward the bird. His attack was planned perfectly. He would land once, ten feet from the bird, and instantly spring again for the kill.
His paws settled to earth, already preparing to push him forward, but the earth proved yielding, crashing away beneath his weight. With a screech of feline rage and panic, Gultec fell through the network of branches concealing the deep pit and plummeted to the bottom with a heavy thud.
Instantly the jaguar sprang at the sides of the pit, his powerful muscles carrying him upward a prodigious distance before the steep, smooth walls sent him tumbling back down. Again and again the cat hurled himself toward the top of the pit, and again and again he fell back.
Finally, exhausted and ravenous, he settled into a crouch. His unblinking eyes stared upward at the night sky, beginning to sprout stars above his pit. For all his rage and all his strength, Gultec could not deny that he was trapped.
Several dozen men remained in Ulatos, while the rest of the legion moved to the sheltered anchorage barely three miles away. There construction of Fort Helmsport began as two hundred legionnaires, armed with pick and shovel, assaulted the rocky crest a short distance from the sandy shore. Darien used a powerful earth-moving spell to begin a jetty out into the lagoon, and now men labored with wheelbarrows and shovels, extending the pier into deeper water. The wizard and the captain-general, meanwhile, moved from the palace to their quarters aboard the Falcon.
Late at night in this luxurious cabin, two figures lay in the great bed. Cordell snored deeply, while Darien lay wide awake, her pale eyes staring across the cabin, her elven senses seeing everything despite the pitch darkness.
A sense of danger gripped the elf woman, and she sat up in the bed. Something unseen warned her of attack, and she placed her feet on the floor. Her robe, with its many packets of spell components, hung beside her.
Suddenly a gust of wind rushed through the crack under the cabin door. Darien's keen vision, unnaturally sensitive to such conjured creatures as the invisible stalker, recognized the thing instantly. In the next moment, she perceived its intent.
The stalker reached out for her, a sudden gust of wind whirling in the cabin, extending invisible but powerful tendrils of air toward Darien. She sensed immediately that it wanted to kill her.
But Darien's spell was ready. She spat, her saliva flying toward the invisible attacker. " Dyss-ssymmi!" she cried, raising both hands before her face.
With a horrible sucking sound, the wind twisted into a vortex and whirled in an ever smaller cyclone in the center of the room. It writhed as it shrank and then puffed into nothingness. Her spell of dismissal, she knew, had sent it back to the plane of air.
Cordell had awakened at the sound of her spell, and now he stretched an arm around the elf woman, amazed and impressed by her calm demeanor.
"What was that?" he asked. He sat up in the bed, blinking. He had seen nothing of the attacker, though he had heard the wind.
"My stalker. It has failed to kill Halloran, thus it sought me out instead. It is a risk of the spell." Darien shrugged, the attack already forgotten except for its implications.
"And this means Halloran still lives. If he had perished from the poison, the stalker would not have come after me. It would simply have gone away."
Cordell flopped backward with a sigh. "Helm's damnation! That lad makes things very difficult."
Darien squinted in anger, an expression Cordell could not see. "Difficult, perhaps. But he will not escape!"
"What makes you so certain?"
"Where can he go? We have control of Ulatos, and through the city, we can keep tabs on the entire nation. Sooner or later, someone is bound to report him. He'll probably leave a whole wealth of stories behind everywhere he goes." Darien leaned over Cordell, gently pressing him back on the bed.
He grinned. "Come closer. I'd like to hear you scheme some more." And he pulled her down to him.
"There is no way that I can repay the kindness you have shown me. It has meant my life, and much more, to me." Poshtli bowed deeply to Luskag, blinking and finally looking to the side. The golden dot still burned before his eyes.