They paused, listening carefully. There was no sound from inside. There was always the chance that this place had been chosen by the brigands to hide out in. ‘Brigands’ was what the officers were calling them, but the sergeant had never known such country for bandits. The Lowlands was said to be a violent and divided place, but there seemed to be hundreds of armed men just waiting for imperial scouts to come their way. In the sergeant’s view that was the organized behaviour of an army, not a rabble of bandits, but he would not dream of stating such an opinion before his superiors.

However obvious it seemed.

Yet, if it was an army, it was an army that would not fight – that would not even be found. Scouts went out regularly and found dead trails, cold ash where fires had been. Or sometimes they went out and did not come back. This loss of scouting squads had become so draining that at first the officers had started sending their scouts out in larger and larger forces, but even squads of fifty or seventy men had seemed able to disappear without trace in the barren, rocky land between the Seventh Army’s camp and the Ant city of Sarn, vanishing amongst the stands of forest and the creek-cut gullies.

Later, they had tried sending no scouts at all beyond clear view of the main army, and thus the force had crawled on and found bridges smashed, terrain spiked with caltrops, wells poisoned. The army’s progress, mere days from the camp, had slowed to a crawl. So they had started sending out scouts again.

This did not inspire confidence, and everyone knew General Malkan was spitting fire about it. Two days before they had captured a couple of men believed to be part of the bandit army, whereupon Malkan had personally overseen their questioning, racking them pitilessly until they divulged the location of a camp.