The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

All is not as it Seems

Lash jerked a nod. At least it wasn't the veteran nestari commander. A fact that, oddly enough, the big vampire was relieved at.

A quick glance revealed that Narcist too had relaxed a little at discovering it wasn't Truk.

"So you thought it might've been him as well, then," he observed and Narcist looked up from the tablet and gazed at him for a long moment before nodding.

"It was logical," she said before looking back at the tablet. "He put together the team, had access to comms to let anybody waiting for us know that we were coming. And access to Lady van Tallert." A slight smile touched her lips briefly. "But, as you said with me, it was almost too obvious a choice."

Lash's lips thinned.

"I'm starting to wonder if that's deliberate," he growled.

"Deliberate? What do you mean, Wolf?"

"I mean, the team's composition, Truk's hand in creating it notwithstanding, may have been manipulated into putting enough obvious people in place that it would be difficult to detect the actual mole until it was too late."

"Ah. I see where you're going there. We would've been guessing and discarding multiple times before coming up with the right vampire." Then she tapped the tablet. "Whoever set this whole thing up didn't think we'd figure out the lojack signal even though we managed to backtrack the signal from the cell."

"No, they did not," Lash tautly agreed. He didn't like being played, and certainly not from a shadowy outside player working beyond his ability to see. Which, of course only brought him back to his unspoken question from earlier: was there another player on the board? One that was neither vampire nor psionic? Once more he had to silently thank the Dark Father for guiding him to Mordecai where he learned to think about such things like lojack signals.

A sign came into view ahead, telling him they were approaching the turn they would need to make to go up into the mountains.

"We're making our last turn," he indicated. "An hour or two up into the mountains and we'll reach Magnar's estate." His expression tightened slightly. "Once we're regrouped and equipped, we'll deal with our mole before heading to the castle itself. Hopefully before it tells our enemies that we're coming!"

As predicted, the ride up into the hills in which the Lord Commander's castle was nestled took about an hour and a half. As they traveled, Lash vacillated between planning on how to take out the mole before they could raise the alarm. And silently marveling at the landscape around them.

For good reason: while the veteran Qos Viran commander had been to the castle dozens of times, the trip had always been made at night. Possessing the keenest of night vision, vampires nevertheless could see deep into the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum, a trait that helps them hunt their warm-blooded prey, which had significantly poorer vision at night.

Unfortunately that ability to see beyond the visible light spectrum didn't grant them enough clarity that they could see details in the landscape beyond what was immediately close. Why would they need to? As long as they could tell a tree was a tree, and a hole was a hole, they could navigate well enough in blackout conditions that they easily ran their prey down.

So, seeing the hills above Galway for the very first time with the sunlight allowing him to pick out even the glint of crystal in the worn granite, the dozens of shades of green between the grasses, bushes, and trees, and even how clear the blue sky above them was a vision that was almost too intoxicating for his nearly overwhelmed senses to comprehend. He was forced to pull his eyes away from the vision or run the risk of driving right off the road, distracted as he was. Only by periodically focusing on how to deal with the mole kept his mind from wandering too far afield.