“Quenten, you’re in charge of the magic-folk; get your mages. Find out everything you can, and keep us cloaked.” Daren turned his horse and rode off in search of the scouts before he had a chance to hear Quenten’s eager assent.

All right, Ancar, you bastard, he couldn’t help thinking, with a kind of fierce exultation, I am about to visit a little retribution on you and yours.

Ancar’s reserves were pathetically unaware of any danger—but after all, they were deep inside their own territory, and had no reason to suspect any threat. Daren himself went out with the scouts to the river-valley where they camped to get a good look at enemy, and at the way they were conducting themselves.

What he saw fit in very well with Quenten’s theory of mind-control. Only about a quarter of the men down there were moving about or acting in any kind of a normal fashion. The rest might as well have been puppets; in fact, watching them was rather disturbing. They moved listlessly, when they moved at all, and none of them were idle—yet they wasted no time on their chores, picking up one task, carrying it to the end, picking up another. And all without exchanging a single word with anyone, or taking a single step out of the way. Nothing was cooked, except at the camps of the officers; a small group of men handed out the tasteless ration-bread Rethwellan no longer used because of complaints from the men. These fighters took the bread, ate it methodically, and went back to their chores.

By nightfall, the camp was utterly quiet. No socializing around campfires, no idle games of chance—nothing. The men simply rolled up in their blankets, and went to sleep; except for the officers and mages, who had tents, and were presumably doing things inside them.

It was an entirely unnerving sight to someone who knew what a camp should look and sound like, because of the complete unnaturalness of it—although Daren had to admit to himself that there were times when he’d wished his men would—

He stopped the thought before he could complete it, chillingly aware of how close he’d come to thinking that he’d wanted his men to be like this. Was that what those mages meant, when they said it was a short step from knowing to wanting?

Horrible thought....

He closed his eyes on the too-quiet camp below him for a moment, then opened them. No, he deliberately decided. I’ve never wanted that. It’s worse than slavery; at least a slave has his own thoughts. These poor creatures don’t even have that much. It’s as bad to destroy or enslave a mind as it is to kill a body. Maybe worse, if the mind is aware of what has happened to it.