Darkness Descending

Eleven

Rain splashed down outside the tailors shop in Skrunda where Talsu helped his father. The bad weather pleased Traku, who said, “We’ll have some wet people coming to buy cloaks today.”

“Aye, but half of them will be Algarvians,” Talsu answered.

His father made a sour face. “They’re the ones with the money,” he said. “If it weren’t for them, we’d have had a lean time of it.” He let out a long, slow exhalation. “I keep telling myself it’s worth it--and telling myself, and telling myself.”

“You keep telling yourself what?” Talsu’s mother asked, coming down the stairs from the living quarters above the shop.

“That you’re nosy, Laitsina,” Traku replied.

Laitsina snorted. “Why do you keep saying that? If you have so much trouble remembering it, it can’t be true.” Before Traku could answer, his wife went on, “Out with it, now.”

Talsu smiled. His mother was nosy. She knew it, too, but that didn’t make her stop. After a couple of wordless grumbles, his father said, “Oh, all right, all right.” He usually did. That was safer than really annoying Laitsina by not telling her what was going on.

When Traku was done, Laitsina said, “Well, we’ll sit around getting lean tonight if you or Talsu don’t go over to the grocer’s and buy some dried chickpeas and some olives and some beans.”

“I’ll do it,” Talsu replied at once.

His mother and father both laughed. “Are you sure you want to head out in the rain?” Traku said. “I can go a little later, if it lets up.”

“That’s all right,” Talsu answered. “I don’t mind. I don’t mind a bit.”

Traku and Laitsina laughed again, louder this time. Shaking a finger at Talsu, his mother asked, “Would you be so keen about getting wet if the grocer didn’t have a pretty daughter?”

That made Talsu’s parents laugh harder than ever. His ears heated. “Just let me have the money and I’ll go,” he muttered.

Traku pulled coins from his pocket. “Here you are,” he said. “I remember how much soap I used to buy because the soapmaker had a pretty daughter.” He grinned at Laitsina, who waved her hand as if to say she’d never imagined such a thing. Traku added, “I must’ve been the cleanest fellow in Skrunda in those days.”

“Oh, there were some others buying plenty of soap, too,” Laitsina said. “But I do think you got the most. Probably the reason I chose you--I can’t think of any other, not after all these years.”

Leaving his parents to their good-natured bickering, Talsu grabbed his own cloak from a peg near the door and headed down the street toward the grocery, which wasn’t far from the market square. His fellow Jelgavans hurried wherever they were going, with hats pressed low on their foreheads or hoods drawn up from their cloaks. Rain didn’t come to Skrunda all that often even in wintertime; save that it made the crops grow, they looked on it as a nuisance.

Four or five Algarvian soldiers came up the street toward Talsu. A couple of them looked as miserable to be out in the wet as any man of Skrunda. The rest, though, seemed perfectly content even though water dripped from the broad brims of their felt hats and ruined the jaunty feathers in their hatbands. Talsu had heard it rained all the time in the forest country of southern Algarve. Maybe those redheads had got used to bad weather there. On the other hand, since they were Algarvians, maybe they just didn’t know any better.

He had to press himself against a stone wall to give them room to pass. That got him wetter. They took no notice--though they would have if he hadn’t gotten out of the way. He glared at them over his shoulder. Fortunately for him, none of them looked back.

With a sigh of relief at escaping the rain, he flipped back his hood as he ducked into the grocer’s shop. With even more relief, he saw that the fat old fellow who ran the place wasn’t behind the counter, and his daughter was. “Hello, Gailisa,” Talsu said, swiping at his hair with his hand in case the cloak had left it in disarray.

“Hello,” Gailisa answered. She was a year or two younger than Talsu; they’d known each other since they were both small. But Gailisa hadn’t been so nicely rounded then, and her hair hadn’t shone so golden--or if it had, Talsu hadn’t noticed. He did now: he made a point of noticing. She went on, “I’m glad you’re not an Algarvian.”

“Powers above, so am I!” Talsu exclaimed.

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “You don’t always keep trying to handle the merchandise.”

For a moment, he didn’t understand exactly what she meant. When he did, he wanted to kill every lecherous Algarvian soldier in Skrunda. He couldn’t, but he wanted to. “Those miserable . . .” he began, and then had to stop again. He couldn’t say what he thought of the redheads, either. A soldier’s ripe vocabulary was the only one that fit, and Gailisa wouldn’t have cared to listen to it.

She shrugged. “They’re Algarvians. What can you do?”

Talsu had already thought of one of the things he’d like to do. He would also have liked to handle the merchandise himself. If he tried, though, he was gloomily certain Gailisa would do her best to knock his head off. He wasn’t a conquering soldier, just a fellow she’d known forever.

“What can I get you?” she asked. He told her what his mother wanted. She frowned. “How much of each? It makes a difference, you know.”

“I know that, aye,” he said, flustered. “I don’t know how much, though.”

“You chowderhead,” she said. She’d called him worse than that when he got orders mixed up. “Well, how much money did you get to buy this stuff?”

He had to fish the coins his father had given him out of his pocket and look at them before he could tell her, which only made him feel more foolish. “As far as I’m concerned, you can give me mostly olives,” he said. “I like ‘em.”

“And then tomorrow I can explain to your mother why she couldn’t make the stew she wanted.” Gailisa rolled her eyes. “No, thank you.” She dipped up some salted olives from a jar: enough to fill a waxed-paper carton. Then she beckoned to him and gave him a couple of olives to eat. “Nobody has to know about these.”

“Thanks.” He popped them into his mouth, worked the soft, tasty pulp off the pits with his teeth, and spat the pits into the palm of his hand. Gailisa pointed to a basket next to the counter. He tossed the pits into it. “More?” he asked hopefully.

Gailisa gave him another one. “When my father asks why we’re not making any money, I’ll tell him it’s your fault,” she said. She dipped beans and chickpeas out of barrels and into larger cartons. “There you are, Talsu. Now you’ve spent all your silver; I’ll give you three coppers’ change.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “Let me have three coppers’ worth of dried apricots instead.”

“I love those, but right after olives?” Gailisa made a face. She gave him the little handful of dried fruit, though.

He ate one apricot, just to see her make another face. Then he pushed the rest of them back across the counter. “Here, you take them. You enjoy them more than I do, anyhow.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said. “I can reach into the crate any time I please, and I know times are tight for everybody.” Talsu looked out through the doorway at the rainy street, as if he hadn’t heard a word she said. “You’re impossible!” she told him, and he thought she’d got angry. But when he turned around, she was eating an apricot.

He took the groceries and hurried home through the rain. When he got back, he found his father arguing with an Algarvian military mage. He took the beans and olives and chickpeas up to his mother, then went back down to see if his father needed any help. The mage was gesturing violently. “No, no, no!” he exclaimed in excellent, excitable Jelgavan. “That is not what I said!”

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Traku said stubbornly.

“What’s going on?” Talsu asked. His father seldom got that worked up when talking with an Algarvian. For one thing, Traku didn’t think it was worth the effort most of the time. For another, arguing with redheads was dangerous.

Bowing, the Algarvian military mage turned to Talsu. “Perhaps you, sir, can explain to your . . . father, is it? ... that I am not saying he ought to do anything that would in any way violate his conscience. I only suggested--”

“Suggested?” Traku broke in. “Powers above, this fellow says I don’t know how to run my own business, when I’ve been at it as long as he’s been alive.” That was an exaggeration, but not by much; the mage was somewhere in his thirties, about halfway between Traku and Talsu.

“I was seeking to buy a new tunic,” the Algarvian told Talsu with dignity, “and I discovered the handwork your father proposed to put into it, and I was appalled--appalled!” He made as if to tear his hair to show how appalled he was.

Stiffly, Traku said, “That’s what makes fine tailoring, by the powers above: handwork. You want ready-to-wear, you can get that, too, and it’s just as ready to fall apart before very long. No, thank you. Not for me.”

“Handwork, aye,” the mage said. “But needless handwork? No, no, and no! I know you are a Kaunian, but must you work as folk did in the days of the Kaunian Empire? I will show you this is not needful.”

Traku stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “How?”

“Have you got a tunic--of any style--cut out and ready to be sewn and spelled together?” the Algarvian asked. “If I ruin it, two gold pieces to you.” He took them out of his belt pouch and dropped them on the counter. They rang sweetly.

Talsu’s eyes widened. He’d seen Algarvian arrogance before, but this went further than most. “Take him up on it, Father,” he said. “You’ve got a couple of tunics under the counter.”

“So I do,” Traku said grimly. He took out the pieces for one and glared at the mage. “Now what?”

“Sew me a thumb’s width of your finest seam, anywhere on the garment,” the redhead told him. “Then lay out thread along all the seams, as you would before you use your own spells.”

“That’s not near enough handwork,” Traku warned, but he did it.

The Algarvian praised his work, which made him no happier. Then the mage murmured his own spell. It had rhythms not far removed from those Jelgavan tailoring sorcery used, but quicker and more urgent. The thread writhed as if alive--and the tunic was done. “Examine it,” the mage said. “Test it. Do as you will with it. Is it not as fine as any other?”

Traku did examine it. Talsu crowded up beside him to do the same. He held the seams close to his face to look at the work. He tugged at them. The mage was scribbling something on a scrap of paper. Reluctandy, Talsu turned to his father. “I don’t quite know how it’ll wear, but that’s awfully good-looking work.”

“Aye.” The word came out of Traku’s mouth with even greater reluctance. His eyes were on those gold pieces, the ones he couldn’t claim.

Even as he eyed them, the mage scooped them up again. He set down the paper instead. “Here is the spell, sir. It is in common use in Algarve. If that is not so here, you will have more profit from it than these two coins, far more. A pleasant day to you--and to you, young sir.” He bowed to Talsu, then swept out of the shop.

Traku snatched up the spell and stared at it. Then he stared out the door, though the Algarvian was long gone. “No wonder they won the war,” he muttered.

“Oh, they’re always coming up with something new,” Talsu said. “But they’re still Algarvians, so a lot of the new is nasty, too. It’ll bite ‘em in the end, you wait and see.”

“I hope so,” his father said. “It’s already bitten us.”

After so long away, after so long at the leading edge of the war, where its teeth bit down on land previously peaceful, Sabrino found Trapani curiously unreal, almost as if it were a mage’s illusion. Seeing people going about their business without a care in the world felt strange, unnatural. His eyes kept going to the cloudy sky, watching out for Unkerlanter dragons that would not come.

Oh, the war hadn’t disappeared. It remained the biggest story in the news sheets. Commentators spoke learnedly on the crystal. Soldiers and occasional sailors showed off far more uniforms than would have been on the streets in peacetime. But you could ignore all that. Over in Unkerlant, the war was not to be ignored.

Sabrino didn’t want to ignore it even though he’d got leave. He’d come to the capital to enjoy himself, aye, but he’d fought too hard to forget the fighting just because he wasn’t at the front. “Big announcement expected!” a news-sheet vendor shouted. “Big news coming!” He waved his sheets so vigorously, the colonel of dragonfliers couldn’t make out the headlines.

“What’s the news?” Sabrino demanded.

“It’s three coppers, that’s what it is,” the vendor answered cheekily. He checked himself. “No, two to you, sir, on account of you’re in the king’s service.”

“Here you are.” Sabrino paid him. He walked down the boulevard reading the news sheet. It was coy about giving details, but he gathered that King Mezentio was about to announce the fall of Cottbus. Sabrino let out a long sigh of relief. If die Unkerlanter capital fell, the Derlavaian War was a long step closer to being over. He could think of nothing he wanted more.

A small boy looked up at him, reading the badges on his uniform tunic. “Are you really a dragonflier, sir?” he asked.

“Aye,” Sabrino admitted.

“Ohhh.” The boy’s hazel eyes grew enormous. “I want to do that when I grow up. I want to have a dragon for a friend, too.”

“You’ve been listening to too many foolish stories,” Sabrino said severely. “Nobody has a dragon for a friend. Dragons are too stupid and too mean to make friends witli anybody. If you didn’t teach them to be afraid, they’d eat you. They’re even dumber--a lot dumber--than behemoths. If you want to serve the kingdom and ride animals you can make friends with, pick leviathans instead.”

“Why do you ride dragons, then?” the kid asked him.

It was a good question. He’d asked it of himself a fair number of times, most often after emptying a bottle of wine. “I do it well,” he said at last, “and Algarve needs dragonfliers.” But that wasn’t the whole answer, and he knew it. He went on, “And maybe I’m about as mean as the dragons are.”

He watched the boy think that over. “Huh,” he said at last, and went on his way. Sabrino never did find out what the effect of his telling the truth was.

He went into a jewelers. “Ah, my lord Count,” said the proprietor, a scrawny old man named Dosso. He started to bow, then cursed and straightened, one hand going to the small of his back. “Forgive me, sir, I pray you--my lumbago is very bad today. How may I serve you?”

“I have here a ring with a stone that has come loose from the setting.” Sabrino took from his belt pouch a gold band and a good-sized emerald. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to restore it while I wait. And can you also size the ring so that it will fit on Fronesia’s finger?”

“Let me see; let me see.” Dosso took a loupe from a drawer under the counter and clipped it onto his spectacles. Sabrino gave him the ring and the emerald. The jeweler examined them. Without looking up, he said, “Unkerlanter work.”

“Aye,” Sabrino admitted, faintly embarrassed. “One way or another, I happened to get my hands on it.”

“Good for you,” Dosso said. “I’ve got a son and two grandsons out in the west. My boy is a second-rank mage, you know; he’s repairing the ley lines when Swemmel’s forces wreck them. His son rides a behemoth, and my daughter’s boy is a footsoldier.”

“Powers above keep them safe,” Sabrino said.

“All hale so far,” Dosso answered. He pointed to the ring. “You’ve got one good prong here--”

“I should hope I do, my dear fellow,” Sabrino exclaimed.

He won a snort from the jeweler. Dosso continued, “That will help, for I can use the law of similarity to shape the others. Magecraft--my son would laugh to hear me call it that; he’d reckon it just a trick of the trade--is faster than handwork, and will serve just as well here. And your lady ... let me see, she’s a size six and a half, eh? Aye, I can do that. I’ll size the ring first, and use the gold I take out to make up what’s missing from the broken prongs. That way, I won’t have to charge you for it, as I would if I used gold of my own.”

“That’s kind of you, very kind indeed.” Sabrinos back didn’t pain him; he bowed himself almost double. He’d been coming to Dosso for many years, not least because the jeweler thought of things like that.

“Have a seat, if you like,” Dosso said. “Or you can go round the corner and drink a glass of wine, if you’d rather do that. Don’t drink two, or I’ll be done before you finish the second unless you really pour it down.”

“I’ll stay, by your leave,” Sabrino answered. “The company is apt to be better here than any I’d find in that tavern.” He perched on one of the wooden stools in front of the counter, almost as if he were at a bar.

Dosso snipped gold from the ring opposite the prongs that held the stone, then reshaped it in Fronesia’s size, using a blowtorch to heat the ends and weld them together. After he’d finished shaping the metal and it had cooled, he held up the ring. “I defy you to tell me where the join is, my lord Count.”

Sabrino looked at the gold circlet. He ran his finger around it, touch often being more sensitive than sight in such matters. “I’d like to catch you out, but I can’t do it.”

“Now for the prongs.” Dosso held out his hand. Sabrino gave him back the ring. Dosso set it down so that it lay on top of the gold he’d snipped. He used a thin gold wire to touch first the good prong, then the extra gold, and last one of the two damaged prongs. As he did that, he muttered to himself.

The little chant didn’t sound like Algarvian. After a moment, Sabrino realized it wasn’t: it was classical Kaunian, with some of the words turned into nonsense syllables from who could say how many generations of rote repetition. A chill ran through the dragonflier.

But those endless repetitions had made the charm extremely effective, even if some of the words were ground into meaninglessness. As Sabrino watched, the damaged prong reshaped itself. Dosso slid the emerald into place between what were now two good prongs. As he repeated his ritual, the third one grew out and embraced the stone. With a grunt of satisfaction, Dosso handed Sabrino the restored ring. “I hope it pleases your lady.”

“I’m sure it will. She’s fond of baubles.” Sabrino paid the jeweler and went off well pleased with himself.

When he let himself in, Fronesia greeted him with a hug and a kiss that told without words how long it had been since they’d seen each other. Then she asked the question he’d known she would: “And what have you brought me?”

“Oh, a little something,” he said, his voice light, and slipped the ring onto her finger.

Fronesia stared at him. The emerald was of an even deeper green than her eyes. Part of that stare was simple admiration; part of it was a calculated assessment of how much the piece was worth. “It’s lovely. It’s splendid,” she whispered, both sides of her character evidently satisfied.

“You’re lovely,” he said. “You’re splendid.” He meant it. Her hair glinted in the lamplight like molten copper. Her nose had a little bend in it, just enough to make it interesting; her mouth was wide and generous. Her short tunic displayed perfectly turned legs. She was within a couple of years either way of thirty. That gave him more than a twenty-year head start on her, a truth he would sooner have forgotten. “I hoped you’d like it.”

“I do, very much.” One of her carefully plucked eyebrows rose. “And what did you bring your wife?”

“Oh, this and that,” he said casually. The countess knew about Fronesia, of course, but hadn’t asked Sabrino what he’d got her. Maybe that was the restraint of noble blood. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t want to know.

“Have you seen her yet?” Fronesia asked.

That took it further and faster than she usually went. “Aye, I have,” he replied. “It is good form, you know.” Algarvian nobles ran on form hardly less than their Valmieran or Jelgavan counterparts.

Fronesia sighed. Form was harder on mistresses than it was on wives. Sabrino found that fair: mistresses were supposed to be having more fun than wives. Nobles married for money or for family alliances far more often than for love. If they wanted love--or, sometimes, even a physical approximation of it--they looked elsewhere.

Sabrino asked, “And what have you been doing while I’ve been . . . away?” Trying not to get myself killed didn’t sound right, even if it was what he meant.

“Oh, this and that,” Fronesia answered--casually. She wasn’t a pretty fool. Sabrino wouldn’t have been interested in her had she been. Well, I wouldn’t have been interested in her for long, he thought. He wasn’t blind to a pretty face or a pleasing figure: far from it. But gaining his interest was one thing. Holding it was another.

“And with whom have you been doing it?” he asked. Her letters hadn’t said much about her friends. Did that mean she didn’t get out much, or that she knew when and what to keep quiet?

“Some of my set,” she answered, her voice light and amused. “I don’t think there’s anyone you know.” Sabrino had more practice than she might have thought at reading between the lines. That couldn’t mean anything but, Everyone else I know is younger than you.

Was she doing more than going to feasts and parties with her set? Was she being unfaithful to him? If he found out she was, if she made him notice she was, he’d have to turn her out of this fancy flat or at least make her find someone else to pay for it. He was glad he hadn’t had to pay anything for the emerald ring but the cost of repair. The Unkerlanter noble from whose house he’d taken it wouldn’t worry about rings--or anything else--ever again.

Fronesia turned it this way and that, admiring the emerald. Suddenly, she threw her arms around his neck. “You are the most generous man!” she exclaimed. Maybe she hadn’t thought he might be bringing back loot rather than spending money on her. He didn’t bother pointing that out. Instead, though his back groaned a little, he picked her up and carried her to the bedchamber. He’d come to Trapani to enjoy himself, after all, and enjoy himself he did. If Fronesia didn’t, she was an artist at concealing it.

She made him breakfast the next morning. Fortified by sweet rolls and tea with milk, he went off to greet his wife. The countess would know where he’d spent the night, but she wouldn’t let on. That was how the nobility played the game. The new day was bright, but very chilly. That didn’t keep vendors on the street from shouting about a special announcement due at any time. They were still shouting it when Sabrino took his wife to dinner that night, and the next morning, and the day after that.

Pekka had helped bring Kuusamo into the Derlavaian War, but the war had not yet come home to Kajaani. Oh, not much shipping was down at the harbor, but not much shipping would have been down at the harbor in the middle of any year’s winter. The sea hadn’t frozen--that didn’t happen every winter--but enough icebergs rode the ocean to the south to make travel by water risky.

And few additional men had yet been called into the service of the Seven Princes. That would happen; she knew it would. It would have to. So far, though, the war remained as theoretical as applications of the relationship between the laws of contagion and similarity.

War was its own experiment and gave its own results. It asked questions and answered them. Her experiment with the acorns had asked new questions of the sorcerous relationship. Ilmarinen’s brilliant insight had suggested the direction in which the answer might lie. Now she needed more experiments to see how far she could push magecraft in that direction.

Examining her latest set of notes, she thought she knew what needed trying. She smiled as she rose from her squeaky office chair and headed for the laboratory. Professor Heikki would not come complaining about her spending too much time and too much of the department’s budget there, not any more she wouldn’t. Professor Heikki, these days, left Pekka severely alone.

“Which suits me fine,” Pekka murmured as she went into the laboratory. Theoretical sorcery was most often a lonely business. Here, when it was linked so closely to Kuusaman defense, it grew lonelier still. She couldn’t even talk about her work with Leino, though her husband was a talented mage in his own right. That did hurt.

Several cages of rats sat on tables by one wall of the laboratory. All the animals--some young and vigorous, others slower, creakier, their fur streaked with gray--crowded forward when the door opened. They knew that was a sign they might be fed.

Pekka did feed them, a little. Then she took out two of the old, gray-muzzled rats and ran them, one after the other, through the maze a college carpenter had knocked together out of scrap lumber. They both found the grain at the end of it with no trouble at all. She’d spent weeks training all the old rats to the maze. They knew it well.

She let the second one clean out the grain set in the little tin cup once he’d got to it. Then she gave him a honey drop as an extra reward. He was a happy old rat indeed when she put him back in his cage and carried it over to a table on which, once upon a time, an acorn had rested.

She made careful note of which rat he was, then searched among the cages housing young rodents. Finding his grandson didn’t take long. The law of similarity strongly bound kin. The younger rat went on the other table that had once held an acorn.

Again, Pekka noted the rat she had chosen. When this experiment was over, she would either have ensured her fame (which she didn’t care about) and learned something important (which she cared about very much) or ... She laughed. “Or else I’ll have to start over again and try something else,” she said. “Powers above know I’ve had to do that before.”

Despite laughter, she remained nervous. She took a deep breath and recited the ritual words her people had long used: “Before the Kaunians came, we of Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came, we of Kuusamo were here. After the Kaunians departed, we of Kuusamo were here. We of Kuusamo are here. After the Lagoans depart, we of Kuusamo shall be here.”

As always, the ritual helped calm Pekka. Whether this experiment succeeded or failed, her people would endure. Confident in that, she could go on with more assurance. She raised her hands above her head and began to chant.

The spell she used was a variant of the one she’d employed with the two acorns, the spell that had made one of them grow at a furious pace while the other disappeared. Ilmarinen’s inversion suggested an answer to what had happened to that acorn. After a good deal of thought, Pekka had--or hoped she had--come up with a way to find out if the inversion was merely clever mathematics (anything Ilmarinen did would be clever, regardless of whether it was true) or if it described something in the real world at which she could point.

She had to tell herself not to look at either of the cages while she was incanting. If something did happen, she wouldn’t see it while she was shaping the spell, only afterwards. The old rat scrambled about in his cage, which sat on the table that had held the disappearing acorn. The young rat peered out through the bars of his cage, which sat on the table that had held the acorn that sprouted at preternatural speed.

Don’t make a mistake, she told herself again and again. How many discoveries had been delayed because of chance errors in spells? On and on she went, watching herself perform as if she were an outsider. Everything was going as it should. Her tongue hadn’t stumbled. She wouldn’t let it stumble. I won’t, she thought. No matter what, I won’t.

“So may it be!” she exclaimed at the very end, and slumped forward, utterly spent. Performing magic was much harder work than considering how it might be performed. She wiped sweat from her forehead, though the laboratory was cool and the ground outside covered with snow.

So may it be, she thought, wondering what would be, what had become. Now she could examine the cages, and the rats inside them. Make sure you see what’s really there, she thought. Don’t see what you wish were there.

The first thing she saw was that both cages still held rats. That was a relief; she didn’t know what she would have done if one of the little beasts had vanished, as one acorn had during her earlier experiment. She supposed she’d have gone back, weakened her spell some more, and tried again.

She examined the older rat first. The changes in him, if there were any, would be easier to spot than those in his grandson. He looked up at her, his little black eyes shining, his whiskers quivering. His muzzle, which had been flecked with gray, was as dark as that of any rat for which a housewife had ever set a trap.

Heart pounding, Pekka noted the changes in appearance she saw. Then she went to the cage that housed the other rat. He’d had a sort of awkward gangliness about him, a sense of being not quite comfortable in a full-sized body about him. Adolescent rats and people were similar, at least in that. Now.. .

Now he looked like a mature rat, a rat of about the same apparent age as his grandfather. “Powers above,” Pekka said softly. “That is what it does.” She checked herself. “I think that’s what it does.” But had the spell rejuvenated the older rat at the expense of the younger one, or had it sent both of them traveling through time in opposite directions? Ilmarinen’s work suggested the first, but didn’t rule out the second.

Pekka had a way to find out. She’d built one into the experiment. She took the grandfather rat out of his cage and took him over to the maze. If he had trouble running it, she would know he’d been carried back through time to a point in his personal lifeline before he’d learned which route led to the food. If he didn’t, he would show he was essentially the same rat with a newer body.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Come on, rat, tell me.” She set him down in the maze and waited to see what he would do.

For a moment, he did nothing at all. He sat there at the beginning of the path, his little black nose twitching, his tail wiggling. Had Pekka found him in her kitchen, she would have tried to land him with a frying pan. As things were, she gave him an indignant look. His indecision was liable to make her have to repeat the experiment.

She wondered if poking him to get him started would distort her results. As if the rat sensed what she was thinking, he started to move. He went through the maze with as much assurance as he had before she subjected him to magecraft. Pekka had forgotten to refill the grain cup that served as his reward. Now he looked indignantly at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and gave him what he wanted, and another honey drop to boot.

After he’d eaten, she picked him up and returned him to his cage. He was, at the moment, the most valuable rat in the world, though of course he didn’t know it. She and her colleagues would have to repeat the experiment a good many times, but if the results held. . . . If they hold, we’re going somewhere at last, Pekka thought. Where that might be, she didn’t know, but the research, whatever else one said about it, was stalled no more.

She went back to her office, carrying her notebooks with her. There she activated her crystal and attuned it to that of one of the men waiting to hear what she had done. A moment later, Siuntio’s image, tiny but perfect, appeared in the depths of the sphere. “Ah,” he said, smiling as he recognized her in his crystal. “What have you got to tell me?”

“Master, the famous Lagoan navigator has just landed on the tropical continent,” she answered. Should some mage be tapping their emanations, that would confuse him.

Fortunately, it didn’t confuse Siuntio. His smile got broader. “Is that so? Were the natives friendly?”

“Everyone landed safe and happy.” Pekka cast about for a way to continue the improvised code, and found one: “He seems to have discovered the bigger part of the continent, not the smaller one.” That would tell Siuntio Ilmarinen’s more probable set of results looked to be true, not the less probable grouping.

In the crystal, Siuntio nodded. “And does the man who made the compass know what the navigator did with it?”

“Not yet,” Pekka said. “I wanted to tell you first.”

“You flatter me, but he should be the one to hear this news,” Siuntio said. With a wave of farewell, he broke the attunement between their crystals.

Pekka did call Ilmarinen then. She used the same phrases to get the news across to him as she had with Siuntio. He also understood them; she’d expected nothing less. But where Siuntio had seemed pleased with the news, Ilmarinen’s mobile features twisted into a scowl. “We’re so cursed good at finding answers these days,” he said morosely. “If only we could find the questions to go with them.”

“I don’t follow you, Master,” Pekka said.

Ilmarinen’s scowl got deeper. “Suppose I’m your grandfather,” he said, and put on a quavery old man’s voice nothing like his real one as he pointed to her: “Sweetheart, I’m running out of years. Can I take five from you? You won’t miss ‘em; you’ve got plenty left.” He resumed his natural tones to add, “We can do that now, you know. You’ve just shown us how. And will the rich start buying--or going out and stealing--years from the poor?”

Pekka stared in horror. All at once, she felt like burning her notebooks. But it was too late for that. What had been found once would be found again, sure as the sun would--briefly--rise tomorrow.

In the crystal, Ilmarinen pointed at her. “And I assume your spell used all convergent elements. It would have, with the setup you’d want to check things with your mice.” Before Pekka could correct him about the animals, he went on, “Try it with a divergent series--but calculate some of the possible energy releases before you start incanting. Powers above keep you safe.” He waved. His image disappeared from the crystal. Pekka began to wonder why she’d ever thirsted after abstract knowledge.

Cornelu was splitting lumber with an axe when he saw the Algarvian patrol trudging up the road from Tirgoviste town and its harbor. His grip tightened on the axe handle. What were King Mezentio’s men doing, coming up into the hilly heart of Tirgoviste island? Till now, they’d mostly been content to hold the harbor and let the rest of the island take care of itself.

He wasn’t the only one to have spotted them, either. “Algarvians!” Giurgiu called, and the rest of the woodcutters took up the warning.

“What do they want?” Cornelu demanded. “They can’t be looking for rebels.” He’d been looking for rebels ever since he splashed back up onto his home island. He’d found plenty of people who despised the Algarvian occupiers, but almost no one who despised them enough to want to pick up a stick and blaze at them.

King Mezentio’s soldiers seemed to feel the same way about that as he did. They tramped along in easy open order. Had irregulars been lurking in the woods, the Algarvians wouldn’t have lasted a heartbeat, but they had nothing to fear from woodcutters.

Their leader, a young lieutenant with mustaches waxed to sharp spikes, waved to Giurgiu. The big, burly lumberman took no notice of him. Cornelu snickered. Giurgiu didn’t love Algarvians; Cornelu knew that.

“You, there!” the lieutenant called. Giurgiu pretended to be deaf as well as blind. That was a dangerous game; Algarvians were famous for their short tempers. The lieutenant went on, “Aye, you, you great ugly lout!”

“Better answer him,” Cornelu said softly. “He’ll use that stick if you push him too far.”

Giurgiu looked up from his work. It was as if he were seeing and hearing the Algarvian officer for the first time. He made a better actor than Cornelu had thought he could. When he did answer, it was in upcountry dialect: “What you want, eh?” Even Cornelu, who’d grown up on Tirgoviste, had trouble following him. To the lieutenant, his words were likely gibberish, though most Algarvians and Sibians could understand one another with a little work.

“We’re looking for somebody,” the lieutenant said, speaking slowly and clearly.

“What say?” Giurgiu kept right on acting like a moron--an outsize and possibly dangerous moron, for he leaned on the handle of an axe bigger and heavier than those of the other woodcutters.

“We’re looking for someone,” the Algarvian repeated. He sounded as if his patience was wearing thin. Staring from one woodcutter to another, he asked, “Does anybody here speak Algarvian or even a civilized dialect of Sibian?”

No one admitted to that. Under other circumstances, Cornelu might have, but not now. He wondered which man in particular Mezentio’s soldiers were looking for. He didn’t think the Algarvians knew he was here, but. ..

“What say?” Giurgiu repeated, in dialect even broader than before. He didn’t crack a smile. He didn’t even come close. Cornelu admired his straight face.

“Bunch of bumpkins, sir,” one of the Algarvian troopers said. “Bunch of ugly, stupid bumpkins.”

Maybe he was just saying what he thought. Maybe he was trying to make the Sibians angry enough to show they understood Algarvian. Maybe he was doing both at once; Cornelu wouldn’t have put it past him.

Whatever the trooper was doing, the officer shook his head. “No,” he said in tones of cheerful unconcern. “They’re just lying. They can follow me well enough, or some of them can. Well, we’ll pay plenty of silver if they bring us this chap called Cornelu. And if they don’t, we’ll hunt him down sooner or later. Come on, boys.” He gathered up the soldiers by eye and headed up the track past the woodcutters.

We’ll hunt him down sooner or later. Cornelu fumed at the Algarvian’s arrogance. But the fellow was a pretty good officer. He’d sown the seeds of betrayal. He was probably doing that everywhere he went. Now he would wait to see where they ripened.

The woodcutters returned to work. Cornelu kept on splitting rounds of lumber. He didn’t look up from what he was doing. He seldom did, but now even less than usual. Whenever he straightened and looked around, he found other men’s eyes on him. Cornelu wasn’t the rarest Sibian name, but it was a long way from the most common.

At supper--a big bowl of oatmeal mush with a little salt pork stirred in--Giurgiu strode over and sat down beside him on a fallen pine. “You the fellow Mezentio’s hounds are sniffing after?”

“I don’t know.” Stolidly, Cornelu spooned up some more oatmeal. “I could be, I suppose, but maybe not, too.” He wished he’d given a false name when he joined this gang.

Giurgiu nodded. “Thought I’d ask. Fellow who fights like you likely learned how in the army or navy. Somebody who learned there might be somebody those loudmouthed fools’d want to work over.”

“Aye, that’s so.” Cornelu still didn’t look up from his oatmeal. He didn’t want to meet Giurgiu’s eyes--and he was hungry enough to make such bad manners seem nothing out of the ordinary. All the woodcutters ate like that; the work they did made them eat like that. Between a couple of mouthfuls, Cornelu added, “I’m not the only one who knows those tricks, though. There’s you, for instance.”

“Oh, aye, there’s me, all right.” Giurgiu’s big head bobbed up and down, almost as if he were once more making himself out to be more rustic than he really was. “But that Algarvian didn’t know my name. He knew yours.”

Anger flared in Cornelu. “Turn me in, then. If I’m the one they want, they’ll probably pay you plenty. They’d like us to be sweet. ‘Sibians are an Algarvic folk, too.’ “ With savage sarcasm, he quoted the broadsheet he’d seen down in Tirgoviste town.

“Bugger that with an axe handle,” Giurgiu said. “If they loved us so bloody much, they shouldn’t have invaded us. That’s how I see things, anyway. But there’s liable to be some as see ‘em different.”

“Traitors,” Cornelu said bitterly.

Giurgiu didn’t argue with him. All he said was, “They’re there. You try and pretend they aren’t, it’ll cost you.” He got to his feet, towering over Cornelu. “Try to stay warm tonight. I’ve got a feeling the weather’s going to turn nasty by sunup.”

Cornelu had the same feeling. He wouldn’t have expected it in a man who spent all his life on land. The weather was often bad at this season of the year; Tirgoviste lay far to the south, and they were well up in the hills. Even on rare clear days, the sun hardly seemed to have risen before it set again in the northwest. When clouds covered the sky, murk and night were hardly distinguishable.

Like everyone else, Cornelu had plenty of thick wool blankets. He swaddled himself in them, curling up close to the cookfire. On nights like this, it burned till daybreak, even if that meant throwing on timber the woodcutters might otherwise have sold.

Snow started falling a couple of hours after he fell asleep, borne on the wings of a wind doubtless whipping whitecaps on the seas surrounding Sibiu. Cornelu woke, pulled a length of blanket over his head, and went back to sleep.

When morning came, the world was white. Down in Tirgoviste town, Cornelu knew, it probably wouldn’t be snow. It would be sleet or freezing rain: to his mind, even nastier. He wished he were down there, back in his own house, making love with Costache in front of a crackling fire--a fire made from wood he hadn’t cut himself. As an afterthought, he remembered Brindza. Fitting her into all that, he wished her asleep in a cradle, or wherever toddlers of that size slept.

Did the cook give him an odd look while dishing out the morning oatmeal? He couldn’t be sure, and didn’t dwell on it. He did dwell on shoveling down the oatmeal as fast as he could so it would put a little extra warmth in his belly. He gulped two mugs of herb tea, too, for the same reason, even though the stuff tasted nasty.

“Get moving, dears,” Giurgiu called to his men, voice full of false solicitude. “Down by the sea, they’ll be wanting what we’ve got to sell, that they will. I know you don’t care to get your fingers cold, but it can’t be helped. Remember what brave fellows you are, that’s all.”

Instead of going back to work on the rounds of lumber he’d been chopping up the day before, Cornelu got called over to help bring down a big fir. Before long, he was sweating in spite of the snow and the wind that was blowing it. He let out a grunt of intense satisfaction when the tree crashed down, throwing up a brief, blinding cloud of snow when it did. Woodcutting had its points; he could actually see what he was accomplishing through the strength of his arms.

He walked along the trunk, methodically lopping off the big branches one after another. Work felt good in weather like this. If he hadn’t been working, he would have been freezing. He swung the axe again and again, breathing in great gulps of resin-and sap-scented air, breathing out great clouds of steam and fog. Losing himself in the labor, he might have been mechanism, not man.

Losing himself in the labor, he forgot about what Vlaicu, the other man who’d felled the tree, might be doing. He was reminded when he heard a boot crunch in the snow in back of him. That was almost too late. He’d just raised his arms for another axe stroke . . . and the other woodcutter tackled him from behind.

Vlaicu had probably hoped to get Cornelu down and get him hogtied before he could do anything about it. He’d lost his fight with Giurgiu, after all. But Giurgiu knew all the tricks of the trade, and was bigger and stronger besides. Vlaicu didn’t, and he wasn’t far from Cornelu’s size.

Cornelu went down on his knees, but not to his belly. Hanging on to his axe with his right hand, he used his left to break the other woodcutter’s grip on him, then drove an elbow into Vlaicu’s midsection. It wasn’t perfectly placed, but it forced a grunt of pain from his foe. Cornelu threw another elbow, twisted, and scrambled to his feet.

Vlaicu leaped back, almost stumbling in his haste to recover his own axe. He could have killed Cornelu instead of jumping him, but the Algarvians had seemed to want him alive, and so he’d tried to make him a captive instead. But since that hadn’t worked, a head might do as well. Cornelu made an awkward leap away from a stroke that would have cut him in two.

Then he surged forward again, chopping at his foe. Dimly, he heard more woodcutters shouting as they came up. So did Vlaicu, who bored in, swinging wildly. He must have realized most of the others wouldn’t favor him. Cornelu ducked, straightened, and slammed the side of his axehead against Vlaicu’s temple. The other woodcutter tottered, then fell like the fir, Blood stained the snow.

Giurgiu bent beside him, but only briefly. “Dead. You caved in his skull,” he told Cornelu.

“He jumped me. He was going to give me to the Algarvians,” Cornelu answered.

But Vlaicu had friends on the crew, too. “Liar!” they cried. “Murderer!” Other woodcutters shouted at them. More axes were raised.

“Hold!” Giurgiu roared. Such was his might that they did hold, instead of leaping at one another. “I think Cornelu’s telling the truth. Why else get in a fight now?” But Vlaicu’s friends kept on shouting, and he had quite a few of them--more than the dismayed Cornelu had thought. Giurgiu jerked a thumb at the trail that led out of the hills and down to Tirgoviste. “You’ve always been wanting to go into town. You know what’s good for you, you’d better get out of here now,” he told Cornelu. “I’ll make sure you have a start.”

Looking at those furious faces, Cornelu knew he wouldn’t last a day--or, more to the point, a night--if he stayed. “Aye,” he said bitterly. After an ironic salute, he shouldered his axe as if it were a stick and trudged north, toward the seashore.

Snow poured down on Thalfang. Fire and smoke rose up from the burning Unkerlanter town. Tealdo crouched in a doorway, ready to blaze anything that moved. His whole company had been thrown into the meat grinder here. He didn’t know how many men were still alive, but he did know the company would never be the same again after it came out the other side of the town--if it ever did.

From the next doorway over, Trasone called, “Maybe we’ll make it to Cottbus after all if we can take this stinking place first.”

“How much do we have left to take it with?” Tealdo answered. “Not a whole lot of reinforcements behind us, that’s for cursed sure. And where are our behemoths? I’ve hardly seen any the past few days.”

“We came past some that were frozen to death, remember?” Trasone said.

Tealdo did remember, and wished he didn’t. He also wished his comrade wouldn’t be quite so sardonic. He said, “I was hoping I’d see some that would do us some good.”

“With this much snow on the ground, the powers below might as well be pulling at the beasts’ feet,” Trasone commented. “How are they supposed to go forward in weather like this? How are we, for that matter?” He risked a quick look around the corner to make sure no Unkerlanters were sneaking up, then turned back to Tealdo. “And I wouldn’t mind a few more dead blonds helping the mages push us forward, either.” He scowled at Tealdo, as if defying him to disagree.

With a shrug, Tealdo answered, “Hard getting ‘em up here these days, what with the weather and with the Unkerlanters playing games with the ley lines. Besides, Swemmel keeps on killing his own, too.”

He didn’t know what Trasone would say to that. Before Trasone could say anything, the Unkerlanters started lobbing eggs at the forwardmost Algarvians. Tealdo huddled in his doorway, making himself as small as he could. King Swemmel’s men had a great swarm of egg-tossers north of Thalfang.

And the Algarvians did not respond so readily or so strongly as they would have a few weeks or even a few days before. Pulled by horses or mules or behemoths, egg-tossers had an ever-harder time keeping up with footsoldiers as they pushed the front forward. Tealdo hoped for dragons, but the cold and the snow were hard on them, too.

After about a quarter of an hour, the eggs stopped falling as abruptly as they’d begun. In the sudden silence, Captain Galafrone raised a shout: “Forward, men! The Unkerlanters are still getting ready to hit us. We’ll cursed well hit them before they are ready.” He shouted again: “Mezentio!”

“Mezentio!” Tealdo yelled, and sprang up from his hiding place. Other officers were shouting their men forward, too; more than half a year of war had taught them how their foes fought. And, sure enough, they caught King Swemmel’s soldiers out of their holes and gathering for their own attack. That made the white-smocked Unkerlanters easier targets than they would have been resting in the soot-streaked snow or scurrying from house to house.

Tealdo blazed a couple of enemy troopers. More fell to beams from his comrades’ sticks. But the rest, instead of retreating, surged forward. Tealdo dove behind a snow-covered pile of bricks. He came up blazing and knocked over another Unkerlanter. In an abstract way, he might have admired the courage King Swemmel’s men showed. They’d shown it ever since the fighting started. They’d been forced back, but they hadn’t given up on themselves the way the Valmierans and Jelgavians had. He wished they would have despaired. In that case, Algarve would be victorious, and he wouldn’t have to worry about getting killed any more.

“Forward!” Captain Galafrone shouted again. “Once we break out ofThalfang, they won’t have anything left to stop us.”

Tealdo didn’t know whether the Algarvians could break out ofThalfang and kept thinking about all the eggs the Unkerlanters had thrown at them. But he scrambled to his feet. He sprinted for the next bit of cover he saw--an overturned wagon in the middle of the street. He crouched behind it, blazing at the Unkerlanters. Their attacking force melted as the snow hereabouts wouldn’t do till spring.

Trasone ran past him. “Come on,” Tealdo’s burly friend called. “Do you want to be late for the party?”

“Can’t have that.” Tealdo got up and advanced again. As he ran, he realized something had changed. He needed a moment to know what it was. Then he exclaimed in glad surprise: “The snow’s stopped!”

“Oh, happy day!” That wasn’t Trasone; it was Sergeant Panfilo. “Any minute now, the sun will come out, and then you can go climb a fornicating palm tree, just like they’ve got in fornicating Siaulia.”

A few minutes later, the sun did come out. Tealdo saw no palm trees, fornicating or otherwise. All he saw was a battered Unkerlanter town; sunshine made it dazzling without making it beautiful. Ahead lay a broad expanse of empty, snow-covered ground. “The market square!” Tealdo shouted. “We’re halfway through this stinking place, anyway.”

“Aye, so we are,” Trasone answered. “And there’s half as many of us as there were when we got here, too.”

Tealdo nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. He was staring northwest, across the market square, across the rest of the ruins ofThalfang, toward higher ground in the distance. He pointed. “Curse me if those aren’t the towers or whatever they call them of King Swemmel’s palace.”

Trasone stopped and stared, too. “You’re right,” he said, his rough voice softened for once. “We’ve come all this cursed way, and there it is, close enough to reach out and touch.” He stretched out a hand, then shook his head and laughed. “Of course, we’ve still got a few Unkerlanters to go through.”

“Aye, a few.” Tealdo nodded. “They know they can’t afford to lose this town. And I’m not looking forward to crossing the square. They’re bound to have snipers on the far side, and we’re not decked out in white like they are. Makes us too easy to spot.”

“Ought to cut the balls off whoever didn’t think to lay in white smocks for us,” Trasone growled. “Some bespectacled whoreson in a nice warm office back in Trapani probably figured we’d lick the Unkerlanters before we needed them, so he didn’t bother having any made.”

“Come on, boys! There’s Cottbus ahead!” Captain Galafrone pointed in the direction of King Swemmel’s palace. “It’ll be as easy to grab as a whore’s snatch now. Forward!” As if spying the towers had sorcerously restored his youth, he charged out into the market square. Every Algarvian within the sound of his voice followed.

Thalfang’s square was bigger than the one an Algarvian town with about as many people would have had. Not being so crowded in their kingdom, the Unkerlanters could and did use space more lavishly. And slogging through deep snow made the market square seem bigger still.

Something moved, there in one of the streets leading into the market square from the far side. Tealdo blazed at it, but couldn’t be sure whether he’d hit it or not. Then eggs came whistling into the square out of the north and west. They burst all around the advancing Algarvians. Wounded men screamed and flopped in the snow like newly landed fish.

Tealdo threw himself down. “The captain’s hit!” somebody yelled--Tealdo thought it was Trasone, but he couldn’t be sure, not with his ears stunned from so many bursts close by. The Unkerlanters had more left than anyone had thought they did, and they were throwing in every bit of it to try to hold Thalfang.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before fresh shouts of dismay rose from some of the Algarvians caught in the open. “Behemoths!” Raw terror edged those cries. “Unkerlanter behemoths!”

Into the market square they came. Tealdo lifted his head and blazed at them. Now he knew what he’d seen, there in the street across the square. He expected to have all the time in the world to pick off their crewmen, even if he couldn’t do anything much to the beasts themselves. If Algarvian behemoths bogged down in snowdrifts, surely Unkerlanter behemoths would do the same.

But they didn’t. They came forward almost as swiftly as they would have over dry ground in summer. Gaping, Tealdo saw that they had wide, net-laced contraptions strapped to their feet. Snowshoes, he thought numbly. The Unkerlanters have tricked out their cursed behemoths in snowshoes. Why didn’t we come up with something like that?

He got no time to brood about it. The behemoth began tossing eggs with deadly accuracy. Beams from heavy sticks hissed like giant serpents when they struck snow, kicking great clouds of steam up into the frosty air. Some of that steam was tinged with red; those beams boiled a man’s blood as readily as a snowbank.

Behind the behemoths came white-smocked Unkerlanter soldiers, also on snowshoes. Unlike the Algarvians, they didn’t flounder through the drifts, but strode along atop them. And there were so cursed many of them! Captain Galafrone had said that, once the Algarvians got past Thalfang, not much stood between them and Cottbus. From somewhere or other, King Swemmel had found reserves Galafrone hadn’t known about.

Well, Galafrone was already down. Tealdo didn’t know how badly he was hurt, or whether he realized how wrong he’d been. Along with the behemoths, the Unkerlanters were throwing a couple of brigades at a banged-up battalion’s worth of Algarvians. And how many more soldiers did they have flooding into Thalfang from the north?

Those behemoths were terrifyingly close now. They’d already passed--or run over--the forwardmost Algarvians. Did they intend to trample Mezentio’s men as well as tossing eggs at them and blazing them with heavy sticks? Tealdo rose a little to blaze down an Unkerlanter behemoth-rider who was fitting an egg to his tosser. But other behemoths were already past him, with footsoldiers close behind them. Cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” mingled and began to drown those of “King Mezentio!”

Tealdo didn’t feel the beam that burned its way through his middle, not at first. All he knew was that his legs didn’t want to work anymore. Then he found himself face down in the snow. And then, a couple of heartbeats later, he began to scream.

“Tealdo!” Trasone cried. His voice seemed to come from very far away.

From even farther away, Sergeant Panfilo shouted in despair: “Back! We have to fall back!”

Dimly, Tealdo knew the sergeant was right. Despair filled him, too, despair and anguish. Thalfang wasn’t going to fall. If it didn’t, Cottbus wouldn’t, either. If Cottbus didn’t fall, what would the war look like then? It’ll look a lot harder, that’s what, Tealdo thought as he tried to use his arms to crawl back toward the edge of the square from which he’d set out. He left a trail of red behind him in the white.

He looked around for his stick. It was gone . .. somewhere. Color washed out of everything, leaving only gray fading toward black. However the war turned out, he wouldn’t know about it. He lay in the square in burning Thalfang. Unkerlanters on snowshoes shuffled past him, and his countrymen retreated.

Rain pattered down on Bishah and on the surrounding hills. That happened every winter--several times in a wet winter--but always seemed to take the Zuwayzin by surprise. Hajjaj had been through winters in Algarve. He’d even seen winter in Unkerlant. He knew how lucky his kingdom was to enjoy a warm climate, and also knew it needed what rain it got. All the same, watching drops splash down on the flagstones of his courtyard, he wished the rain would go away.

Tewfik came up behind him. Hajjaj knew that without turning his head; no one else’s sandals scraped across the floor the same way. The crusty old majordomo stopped, waiting to be noticed. Hajjaj was not so rude as to keep him waiting. “How now, Tewfik?” he asked, glad to turn away from the wet outside.

“Well, lad, they’ve found another leak in the roof.” Tewfik spoke with a certain morose satisfaction. “I’ve sent a runner down to the city to lay hold of the roofers, provided he doesn’t break his neck in the mud.”

“My thanks,” Hajjaj said. “The trouble is, everyone’s roof leaks when it rains, because no one bothers fixing a roof when the sun shines. Powers above only know when our turn with the roofers will come.”

“It had better come soon, or I’ll have a thing or two to say about it,” Tewfik declared. “Everyone’s roof may leak, but not everyone is the foreign minister of Zuwayza.”

“All the other clanfathers are just as grand as I am,” Hajjaj answered. “And all the rich merchants in the city are closer to the roofers than we are.”

Tewfik’s first sniff said he cared little for the pretensions of Zuwayzi nobles not fortunate enough to have him serve them. His second sniff said he cared even less for any merchants’ pretensions. “I know what’s required, and the roofers had cursed well better, too,” he growled.

Arguing with him was pointless, so Hajjaj yielded: “All right. How are the walls holding up?”

“Well enough,” Tewfik said grudgingly. “The wind’s not too bad, so the eaves keep the water away.”

“They’d better,” Hajjaj said. Like most Zuwayzi houses, his was made of thick bricks baked only by the sun. If they got soaked, they turned back into the mud from which they’d been made. In every rainstorm, people died when their houses fell in on them.

A serving woman came into the chamber where Hajjaj and Tewfik stood. “Excuse me, your Excellency,” she said, bowing to Hajjaj, “but General Ikhshid awaits in the crystal. He would speak with you.”

“Ikhshid himself? Not an aide-de-camp?” Hajjaj asked. The maidservant nodded. One of Hajjaj’s graying eyebrows rose. “Something’s gone wrong somewhere, then. I’ll speak with him; of course I will.”

He hurried to the crystal’s chamber, next to the library, and took care to shut the door behind him; he didn’t want the servants listening in. Sure enough, there in the crystal was the reduced image of General Ikhshid. “Good day, your Excellency,” the plump old soldier said when he saw the foreign minister. “Keeping dry?”

“As best I can,” Hajjaj replied. “Harder now than when I saw you last down in the desert near the old border with Unkerlant. What’s toward?” With crystals, as opposed to face-to-face meetings, coming straight to the point was good form.

Ikhshid said, “It might be best if you drove down to the palace. No matter how tight our control spells are, you never can tell who’s liable to pick up the emanations from a crystal.”

Hajjaj weighed that. “Is it really so bad?”

“If it weren’t, would I ask you out in the rain?” Ikhshid returned.

You’d better not, Hajjaj thought. If I come down there and it’s not important, you’ll be sorry. Ikhshid came from a powerful clan; Hajjaj had known him for upwards of forty years, and judged him a pretty good officer. If the news wasn’t important, he’d make him sorry even so. Meanwhile . .. The foreign minister sighed. “I’m on my way.”

“Good.” Ikhshid’s image disappeared. Light flared, and then the crystal was merely a transparent globe once more.

Tewfik yowled like a scalded cat when he found out Hajjaj proposed leaving the house while it was still raining. “You’ll catch your death, lad, from inflammation of the lungs,” he said. When he found Hajjaj obdurate, he stood out in the rain, naked as any Zuwayzi, lecturing the driver on his responsibility to get Hajjaj to and from the palace safely. Though a good many years older than the foreign minister, he didn’t worry about the possibility of coming down with pneumonia himself.

The driver took longer than Hajjaj would have liked. The roadway, usually rock solid, was full of gluey mud. And once the carriage got into Bishah, it moved slowly even on paved roads. A couple of tangles on rain-slick cobbles had created snarls that would take hours to unknot.

At last, Hajjaj raised an umbrella--far more often used as a parasol--above his head and walked into the palace. Several servitors exclaimed in surprise at seeing him there. He didn’t tell them why he’d come. Of course, they would start guessing, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

He made his way through the winding corridors that led to General Ikhshid’s office (and past a couple of pots with water dripping into them, proving not even the royal roof was exempt from leaks). Then he went through the inevitable ritual of tea and wine and cakes, until, finally, he could ask, “And what is it you would not speak of through the crystal?”

Ikhshid wasted few words: “The Algarvians have begun falling back from Cottbus.”

“Have they?” Hajjaj murmured. For a moment, ice ran through him, as if an Unkerlanter winter lived in his belly. Then he rallied: “Is it very bad?”

“Well, your Excellency, it’s not what you’d call good,” the general answered. Like most Zuwayzi soldiers, he felt more passion for the alliance with Algarve than did Hajjaj, who saw the need for it but, these days, found little more to love in King Mezentio’s followers than in King Swemmel’s. Ikhshid went on, “If Cottbus doesn’t fall, Unkerlant doesn’t fall, you know.” He gave Hajjaj an anxious glance, as if uncertain whether the foreign minister really did know that.

“Oh, aye,” Hajjaj said absently. “The fight just got harder, in other words.” General Ikhshid nodded. He’d served in the Unkerlanter army in the Six Years’ War; he knew about hard fighting. At the moment, he looked thoroughly grim. Hajjaj found another question: “How do we know this? Are you sure it’s true?”

“How?” Ikhshid said. “The Unkerlanters are trumpeting it so loud, it’s a bloody wonder you need a crystal to hear them, that’s how.”

“The Unkerlanters,” Hajjaj observed with delicate understatement, “have been known to trifle with the truth.”

“Not this time.” Ikhshid sounded positive. “If they were lying, the Algarvians would be yelling even louder than they are. And the redheads aren’t. Except for saying there’s heavy fighting, they’re keeping real quiet.”

Hajjaj clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Quiet from the Algarvians is never a good sign. They boast even more than Unkerlanters.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Ikhshid checked himself; he was at bottom an honest man. “Well, maybe I would, but they aren’t so obnoxious to listen to.”

“Something to that,” Hajjaj said. “They’re more like us--they want to impress with how they say things, too. But never mind that. If we start talking about why foreigners are the way they are, we’ll be at it for the next year. We have more important things to worry about. For instance, have you told his Majesty yet?”

Ikhshid shook his head. “No. I thought you’d better find out first.”

Hajjaj made another clicking noise. “Not good, General. Not good. King Shazli needs to know these things.”

“So do you, your Excellency,” Ikhshid said. “It could even be that you need to know more than he does.”

That had truth written all over it, no matter how impolitic it was. But truth, Hajjaj was convinced, held many layers. “Would your heart be gladdened if I undertook to tell him?”

“It would, I’ll not deny,” Ikhshid replied at once.

“I’ll tend to it, then,” Hajjaj said, trying not to sound too resigned. Getting him to tell the king of the Algarvians’ misfortune was liable to be more than half the reason the general had summoned him down from his hillside home in the rain.

Being who he was, he had no trouble gaining audience with King Shazli. “Beastly weather, isn’t it?” the king said after Hajjaj had bowed before him. He sent his foreign minister a curious look. “What brings you down from your nice, dry house on a day like this, your Excellency?”

“My house leaks, too, your Majesty,” Hajjaj answered. “When duty called, I answered--which seems to be more than one can say of roofers.”

“Heh,” Shazli replied. The curious look hadn’t gone away. “And what sort of duty was it?” He shook his head. “No, don’t tell me now. Let’s refresh ourselves with tea and wine and cakes before you get into it.”

Being the king, Shazli had the right to interrupt the rituals of hospitality. The foreign minister wished he would have exercised it. Holding in such important news felt wrong.

But, as Hajjaj nibbled on a cake flavored with honey and pistachios, as he sipped first tea and then date wine, he decided it didn’t matter so much after all.

Shazli was no fool. He would realize the duty that had brought Hajjaj down from the hills didn’t involve good news. Presently, the king repeated his earlier question.

“General Ikhshid summoned me on the crystal,” Hajjaj told him. “He convinced me I ought to hear his news straight from his mouth to my ear.”

“Did he?” King Shazli still had wine left in his goblet. He drank it off now. “Let me guess: Mezentio’s men have fallen short of Cottbus.”

“So it would seem, your Majesty.” Hajjaj inclined his head to the king. No, Shazli was not a fool. “The Unkerlanters have declared it and the Algarvians haven’t denied it, which means it’s likely true.”

Shazli let out a long sigh. “Things would have been so much simpler if they’d driven King Swemmel howling into the uttermost west of Unkerlant.”

“That they would,” Hajjaj said. “Things are seldom so simple as we would wish, though.” He wondered if King Shazli really understood that. Not only was Shazli still a young man, he’d had whatever he wanted since he was very small. Who could be surprised if things looked simple to him?

But he said, “We have got as much as we could out of this war now--would you not agree? The best thing we can hope for now is to keep as much of it as we can.”

That struck Hajjaj as a good, sensible attitude. It was, in fact, not so far removed from his own attitude. He said, “Your Majesty, I’ll do everything I can to make sure we manage exactly that.”

“Good,” Shazli said. “I know I can rely on you.”

Hajjaj inclined his head once more. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured, and hoped he was being overmodest.