She paused, eyebrow quirked as if to ask if Honor was with her, and Honor nodded.

“All right. Gheerinatu’s from the north—his clan’s part of the Hyniarch… well, I guess we’d call it a clan federation. Anyway, he’s heading south for the winter, but he’s got relatives all over the northern hemisphere, and he dropped by to tell me that one of those relatives from up near the Mossybacks sent him a message. It wasn’t a very specific message, but Gheerinatu thought we should hear about it. Roughly translated, it was a warning that the Delta would be an unwise place for Gheerinatu and his herds to pass the winter.”

Honor’s face tightened, and Dame Estelle nodded.

“Exactly what I was thinking, but it’s the first whisper we’ve heard from the native side, and, as I say, it was pretty darn unspecific. That’s why I didn’t pass it on to you—until this other thing came up.” The commissioner nodded at her own pickup, her eyes turning to the side of her screen which held Isvarian’s image. “You want to take it from here, Barney?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Isvarian shifted in his chair and looked straight at Honor. “I’m over in the clinic we run up by Dauguaar on the Three Forks, Captain,” he said. Honor thought for a moment, summoning up a mental map of the Delta, then nodded. The Three Forks River was well up to the north, and Dauguaar was about the farthest north of all the city-states. Which meant it was also closest to the Mossybacks.

“We got a call late this morning,” Isvarian went on, once she had the geography in mind. “A nomad had staggered up to the city gates and collapsed, and the city guard had dragged him to the clinic and turned him over to us. The duty medic recognized the symptoms immediately—mekoha poisoning, and a pretty advanced case, at that—but he also noticed that the nomad had an unusual-looking belt pouch. He opened it up while his native orderlies carted the nomad off.” Isvarian reached for something beyond the field of the pickup, then showed Honor a leathery-looking pouch. He opened it, and her mouth tightened as she saw the dull gleam of bullet-shaped lead projectiles.

“He had a powder horn, too,” Isvarian resumed grimly. “No one saw any sign of a rifle, but that was enough to sound all the alarms and get me out here as fast as I could move an aircar. Fritz here—” he gestured at Montoya, who gave his captain a tired smile “—wanted to come with me to see mekoha poisoning first-hand, so I brought him along. The two of us spent most of the time since sitting by his bedside, listening to him babble till he died about ten minutes ago.”

The NPA man shrugged, and his eyes were unhappy.

“He was pretty far gone. Mekoha doesn’t leave a lot of IQ when you get to such an advanced stage, and his motor control was shot, which made him even harder to understand, but I got enough to scare the hell out of me, Captain. He kept going on about new weapons—the rifles—and some nomad shaman whose ‘hands overflow with holy mekoha.’ That’s pretty near a direct translation.”