Darkness Descending

Sixteen

Marshal Rathar gnawed on chewy barley bread and knocked back a slug of raw spirits that made his hair try to stand on end under his fur cap. The campfire by which he sat sent a plume of black smoke up into the air. The Unkerlanter soldiers with whom he ate had dug several holes close by in case that plume attracted a marauding Algarvian dragon.

He swigged again from the tin canteen of spirits. “Ah, by the powers above, that takes me back a few years,” he said to the men in rock-gray sitting around the fire. “Does me good to get back in the field, it truly does. I swilled this rotgut all through the Twinkings War. The breath it gives you, you think you’re a dragon yourself.”

None of the youngsters said anything, though a couple did risk smiles. They saw the big stars on his collar tabs and couldn’t imagine him as anything but a marshal. They had no idea what getting older meant, or how it could change a man--they hadn’t done that yet. He’d been young and remembered what it was like.

He emptied the canteen, then belched and thumped himself on the chest with a clenched fist. That made a couple of more soldiers grin. He could feel the spirits snarling inside his head. Getting back into the field felt so good! Getting away from Cottbus, getting away from the palace, getting away from Bang Swemmel, felt even better.

“Are we going to lick these Algarvian whoresons right out of their boots?” he asked.

Now the soldiers spoke: “Aye!” It was as much a growl, a fierce hungry growl, as a word.

“Are we going to run ‘em out of Unkerlant, out of the Duchy of Grelz here, with their tails between their legs?”

“Aye!” the soldiers repeated, as fiercely as before. They’d been pouring down spirits, too. Asking Unkerlanters not to drink was like asking roosters not to crow at daybreak. Officers did have some chance of not letting them drink too much.

“Are we going to show this so-called Bang Raniero that Bang Mezentio stuck on the throne that wasn’t his to give away to begin with that we’d sooner hang him--or better yet, boil him alive--than go down on our bellies before him?” Rathar did his best to keep his tone light, but worried even so. Some Grelzers were perfectly content obeying a foreign oppressor, no doubt because, in the person of King Swemmel, they had been compelled to obey a domestic oppressor.

But the soldiers--several of them Grelzers--shouted, “Aye!” once more. They were dirty and ill-shaven, but they’d been moving forward ever since the weather got bad, and there was nothing like advancing to put a soldier’s pecker up.

Rathar looked for the officer in charge of the unit--looked for him and didn’t find him. Then he looked for a fellow wearing a sergeant’s three brass triangles on each collar tab. Sergeants had had to command companies during the Six Years’ War, and sergeants had been worth their weight in gold in the desperate fight between Swemmel and Kyot. Some who’d started as sergeants had risen high, Rathar highest ofall.

Finding his man, the marshal said, “Tell me your name, Sergeant.”

“Lord Marshal, I’m called Wimar,” the fellow answered. By his accent, he was out of some village in the Duchy of Grelz.

“Well, Wimar, step aside with me,” Rathar said, rising to his feet. “I want to know what you think about things, and I hope you’ll give me straight answers.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” Wimar said as he also got up. He followed Rathar away from the fire. The eyes of the men he commanded followed them both. Rathar hid a smile. No one would give the sergeant any back talk for a while, not after the marshal of Unkerlant asked for his opinions.

Pointing east toward the front not too far away, Rathar asked, “What sort of shape are the Algarvians in right now?”

“Cold, frostbitten, miserable,” Wimar answered at once. “They never once expected to have to do this kind of fighting. You’ll know about that better than I do, sir. But they don’t break to pieces, powers below eat them. You make the least little mistake against ‘em and they’ll cut off your dick and hand it to you with a ribbon tied around it. Uh, sir.” By his expression, he didn’t think he should have been that frank. By his breath, he’d had enough, he’d had enough spirits to talk before he did a whole lot of thinking.

“I’m not angry,” Rathar said. “They’ve come too cursed close to cutting off the kingdom’s dick, Sergeant, and they may do it yet unless we figure out how to stop them once and for all. Any notions you have, I’ll gladly listen to.”

Wimar needed a moment to believe what he was hearing. At last, he said, “I don’t know how we’ll fare when spring comes.”

“All the more reason to push hard now, while we still hold the advantage, don’t you think?” Rathar asked.

“Oh, aye,” Wimar answered. “We push them back now, then see how far they push us back later.”

King Swemmel had demanded that the Algarvians be pushed out of Unkerlant altogether by the coming of spring. That hadn’t happened. It wouldn’t happen. Not a quarter of it would happen. In the palace, Swemmel could demand whatever he pleased, and it would be his at once. Here in the real world, unfortunately, the redheads also had a good deal to say about the business.

Made bold by Rathar’s forbearance, Wimar said, “Ask you something, sir?” Forbearing still, Rathar nodded. The sergeant licked his lips, then continued, “Sir, can we really beat ‘em?”

“Aye, we can.” The marshal spoke with great conviction. “We can. But we have no promise from the powers above that we will. The Algarvians may have been too confident when the fighting started.” The dismal way some Unkerlanter armies had performed would have gone a long way toward making them overconfident, but he didn’t mention that. “I think I can guarantee that the redheads won’t be too confident this spring. We’d better not be, either.”

“Anybody who thinks anything against Mezentio’s buggers will ever be easy is a cursed fool, anybody wants to know the way it looks to me,” Wimar said. When he was expressing strong emotion, his Grelzer accent got thicker.

Before Rathar could answer, the Algarvians started tossing eggs into the area, as if they’d decided to underscore the sergeant’s words. Rathar had huddled behind burning rocks when he went up to Zuwayza to get that bungled campaign moving forward once more. Now he dove into a hole with a dusting of snow on the mud at the bottom. He knew a certain amount of pride that he got in there before Wimar could.

The sergeant cursed in disgust. “Their tossers have been short of eggs lately. They must have got a couple of caravans through.”

An egg burst close enough to make the ground shudder under Rathar. “Be glad it was eggs and not Kaunian captives,” he said as dirt rained down on the sergeant and him.

“Oh, aye, there is that,” Wimar answered. “Of course, they might have brought eggs and Kaunians both. Have we got any old folks and convicts ready to slaughter in case they did bring up some of those poor whoresons--or even if they didn’t, come to that? Every little bit helps, is what folks say.”

“Every little bit helps,” Rathar repeated in a hollow voice. Wimar thought of his countrymen the same way Swemmel did: as weapons, or perhaps tools, in the struggle against Algarve, nothing more. Rathar wondered what the people the king’s inspectors routed from their villages thought. Whatever it was, it did them no good. Unkerlanter mages used their life energy as readily as the redheads stole that of the Kaunians.

More eggs fell, a heavier plastering than before. Wimar cursed again. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say the stinking redheads were getting their ducks in a row for a counterattack,” he said.

“Why do you know better?” Rathar asked, genuinely puzzled. “They’ve done plenty of counterattacking this winter.”

“If they were going to counterattack, I expect they’d already be killing Kaunians,” the sergeant answered. “We’d have to get out of this hole, too. It’d be a death trap.”

“Ah.” The marshal inclined his head. “I should have thought of that. But you have more experience in the field against them than I do.”

“More than I want, sir--I’ll tell you that,” Wimar said.

Before the marshal could reply, cries rang out from the front: “The redheads!” “The Algarvians!” And another shout, more alarmed and more alarming than the rest: “Behemoths!”

Maybe Mezentio’s men hadn’t been able to bring any Kaunians to this part of the line. No matter what Wimar had expected, they were throwing themselves into the fight without much magic to back them up. And--Rathar looked around--there were no Unkerlanter behemoths anywhere close by.

All through the long, hard winter in Unkerlant, the Algarvians had lost a great many behemoths. Without snowshoes, the beasts had trouble in deep snow. Some the redheads had killed when they couldn’t keep up with the retreating footsoldiers to keep the Unkerlanters from capturing them. Others had frozen. Still others had been lost in action. Mezentio’s men couldn’t have very many more left down here in Grelz.

Because of all that, Rathar would have thought the Algarvians would use the behemoths they had left with caution. But doing things by halves was not the Algarvian way. When the redheads attacked, they still came at their foes with as much panache as they had when the war was new.

Peering out of the hole, Rathar saw half a dozen behemoths--animals that must have already broken through the Unkerlanters first line--bearing down on the company Sergeant Wimar commanded. In the style they’d perfected, Algarvian footsoldiers followed the great beasts, advancing through the hole they’d created. “Mezentio!” the Algarvians yelled, as cheerful as if they were breaking into Cottbus after all. Most of them wore white; they were learning.

And Algarvian dragons dove out of the sky, dropping eggs ahead of the behemoths and spreading more chaos among the Unkerlanters. Wimar turned to Rathar. “Sir, if we don’t fall back, they’re going to trample us.”

One of the things of which coming into the field reminded Rathar was how fast everything could turn upside down. “You have my leave, Sergeant,” he said. “And if you think I’m ashamed to retreat with you, you’re daft.”

He scrambled back from one hole in the snow to another. Several times, spurts of steam rose from the snow not far away: the Algarvians were blazing at him. He blazed back whenever he got the chance. He thought he knocked down a redhead or two, but he wasn’t the only Unkerlanter with a stick.

Just when he was wondering whether the powers below were going to eat this whole stretch of line, Unkerlanter dragons came flying up in force. They drove away the Algarvian dragons and began to drop eggs on the enemy’s behemoths. Where nothing else had, that made the big beasts slow down and let the Unkerlanters bring up enough men to stop Mezentio’s soldiers.

“Well, we only lost a couple of miles here,” Wimar said as twilight deepened. “Could have been worse, but it could have been better, too, if our dragons had got here sooner.”

“Aye,” Rathar agreed mournfully. Over and over, he’d seen how much more flexible and responsive than his own forces the Algarvians were. “We need more crystals. We need more of everything. And we need it all yesterday, too.” He’d been saying that since the beginning of the war against Algarve. He wondered how long he’d have to keep saying it, and how much finding out would cost.

“Come on,” Ealstan urged Vanai. “If you wear a hooded tunic instead of your Kaunian clothes, no one at the performance will pay you any mind.”

“I don’t want to wear Forthwegian clothes,” she said, and he could tell she was getting angry. “They’re fine for you, but I’m not a Forthwegian.” She stuck out her chin and looked stubborn.

I’m not a barbarian, lingered under the surface of the words. Ealstan felt irritated, too. There were, he was discovering, all sorts of reasons why matches between Forthwegians and Kaunians had trouble. But he was stubborn, too, and he had some notion why her thoughts traveled the ley line they did. Switching from his own language to Kaunian, he said, “I am certain your grandfather would agree with you.”

“That’s not fair,” Vanai snapped, also speaking Kaunian. But then she paused, as if trying to figure out how to put into words why it wasn’t fair.

Sensing his advantage, Ealstan pressed ahead: “Besides, you will enjoy yourself. My brother would hold his breath till he turned blue to get into one of Ethelhelm’s performances, and this one will not even cost us anything.”

Vanai’s shrug told him he not only hadn’t gained any ground, he’d lost some. “Forthwegian music isn’t really to my taste,” she answered. He thought she was trying to sound polite, but condescending came closer.

“He’s very good, and he’s sharp, too,” Ealstan said, returning to Forthwegian. “He’d been casting his own accounts for a while till he hired me, and he could have kept on doing it, too--he has the skill. He just couldn’t find enough hours in the day.”

“I’d be about as interested in watching him do that as I would in listening to his band play music,” Vanai said.

Ealstan really did want her to come along. He had one card left to play. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to play it, but he did: “Did you know Ethelhelm is supposed to have a Kaunian grandmother?”

He’d done some fishing in the Mereflod, the river that ran past Gromheort, and he could tell when he got a nibble. He had one now. “No,” Vanai answered. “Does he really?”

“Aye, I think he does,” Ealstan said with a solemn nod. “You can’t tell it by his coloring, but he’s put together more the way a Kaunian would be: he’s a little taller, a little skinnier, than most Forthwegians.”

He watched Vanai. She was intrigued, all right. “Do you think I could get out every once in a while if I wore Forthwegian clothes?”

‘“Every once in a while’ is probably about right,” Ealstan answered, “but people will be paying more attention to the music at Ethelhelm’s performance than to anything else. I can get you a tunic, if you like.” He didn’t have to worry about precise size; Forthwegian women’s tunics were always cut on the baggy side. That was one reason Forthwegian men leered at Kaunian women in their close-fitting trousers.

“All right, then,” Vanai said abruptly. “I’ll go. I’m so sick of staring at these walls. And”--her eyes twinkled--”my grandfather would fall over dead if he ever heard I’d got out of my trousers--and no, I don’t mean like that.” Having headed him off--she was learning how his mind worked, too--she added, “I still don’t think I’ll like the music very much.”

“You may be surprised,” Ealstan told her. Then he had to speak quickly, before she could tell him it wasn’t likely: “And you’ll be out and about in Eoforwic.” She couldn’t help but nod there.

On the way home the next evening, he bought a plain green hooded tunic of medium weight. Vanai tried it on in the bedchamber. When she came out into the front room, she asked, “What do I look like? We don’t have a mirror big enough to let me get a good look at myself.”

Ealstan studied her. Even with her bright hair pulled back inside the hood and her face shadowed, she didn’t really look too much like a Forthwegian woman. But she wasn’t so obviously a Kaunian as she was in her own people’s clothing. Ealstan said, “I like your shape more when I can see it better.”

“Of course you do--you’re a man,” Vanai said with a snort. “But will I do?”

“Aye, I think so,” he answered. “We’ll be out at night, after all, and that will help.” Just for a moment, he let himself think about the dreadful things that could happen if someone recognized Vanai for what she was. Were those things worth, could they be worth, risking all on an evening of music? He wondered how foolish he’d been in suggesting it to her.

Even as he was worrying, Vanai said, “All right, then, I’ll go. I’d do anything to get out of here for a while, even wear this drafty tunic.” The second thoughts Ealstan might have voiced flew out the window. Vanai went on, “And if going to a concert of Forthwegian music doesn’t count as anything, I don’t know what does.”

They left for the performance later than Ealstan would have done had Ethelhelm not assured him of a couple of good seats. The advantages of connections, he thought. Back in Gromheort, his father had a lifetime’s worth. But he used them only sparingly, so they’d be more reliable when he really needed them.

Ealstan was glad to find the night cool. Lots of people wore their hoods up, so Vanai didn’t stand out because of that. She kept looking around; she hadn’t seen much of Eoforwic before she started hiding in their flat. There wasn’t much to see. No street lamps glowed. No buildings had light streaming out through their windows. Unkerlanter dragons sometimes sneaked this far west. The redheads didn’t care to offer them nighttime targets.

At the hall--only an angular shape in the darkness--he and Vanai had to pass through two black curtains before coming into the light. When he finally did, what seemed a sudden harsh glare made his eyes momentarily fill with tears. He gave his name at the entrance, Vanai hanging back while he talked to the fellow there.

After checking a list, the gatekeeper shouted for a flunky. “Take these people down front,” he said. “They’re friends of the band.” Ealstan preened. He wished he could let the whole world see what a pretty girl he had with him. Unfortunately, that would have let the whole world see Vanai was a Kaunian. He took her hand and hurried after the impatient youth who led them to where they were supposed to sit.

“Here you go, buddy,” the kid said to him, and waited expectantly. As soon as Ealstan tipped him, he hustled away.

“The seats couldn’t be better,” Vanai said. Ealstan nodded. Two steps and they could have scrambled up onto the stage. Some of the halls where Ethelhelm played allowed dancing; this one, with permanent seats fixed to the floor, didn’t. Ealstan waited for Vanai to add something like, Now if only I wanted to see the show, but she didn’t.

A lot of people filling up the first row had more money than Ealstan had dreamt of even when he was living back in Gromheort, where his family had been prosperous.

Men wore fur-trimmed cloaks; jewels glittered on women. Some of those people gave him and Vanai curious looks, as if wondering how they’d managed to get the seats they had. Vanai kept tugging at her hood, to show as little of her features as she could.

And then, to Ealstan’s relief, the house lamps faded, leaving only the stage awash in light. The roar of the crowd packing the hall behind him washed forward. When Ethelhelm and his band stepped into the light, the noise redoubled again.

One by one, the men on trumpet and flute, on viol and double viol, began tuning up. When the piper added his instrument’s whining drone, Vanai nodded; bagpipes were part of the classical Kaunian tradition, too. Crouched behind his drums, Ethelhelm seemed shorter and more solid than he had striding out onto the stage.

But then he stood up again, and used to good advantage the height his Kaunian ancestry gave him. Stretching out his hands to the crowd, he asked, “Are you ready?”

“Aye!” The shout--in which Ealstan joined--was deafening. But Ealstan noticed that Vanai sat quiet beside him.

Ethelhelm nodded to the rest of the band, once, twice, three times. He brought his drumsticks down hard as they went into their first song. Forthwegian music didn’t have the thumping beat that characterized Kaunian tunes. Neither was it one aimless tootling and tinkling noise after another, which was how Algarvian music struck Ealstan’s ears. Strong and sinuous, it had a power all its own--at least, as far as he was concerned.

He couldn’t see much of Vanai’s face: she still kept the hood pulled forward.

But the way she sat told him she was anything but entranced with the music. He sighed. He wanted her to enjoy what he enjoyed.

The first several songs the band played were old favorites. One of them, King Plegmund’s Quickstep, went back four hundred years, back to the days when Forthweg was mightier than either Unkerlant or Algarve. Hearing it made Ealstan proud and worried at the same time: this was the Plegmund after whom the Algarvians had named their puppet brigade. Now Ealstan didn’t want to know what Vanai was thinking.

But after the Quickstep was done, Ethelhelm grinned and called, “Enough of the stuff they put your granddad to sleep with. Do you want to hear something new now?”

“Aye!” This time, the crowd roared even louder than it had when asking the band to begin. Again, though, Vanai sat on her hands.

She stayed indifferent through the first couple of new tunes, even though they were the ones that had put the band on the map. But then, as Ethelhelm flailed away at his drums, his voice went low and raspy as he broke into a brand-new song, one so new Ealstan had never heard it before:

The beat was strong and insistent, about as close to a Kaunian style as Forthwegian music came. People who wanted to could lose themselves in that beat and pay no attention to the words Ethelhelm was singing. Ealstan almost did, but only almost. And Vanai... Vanai leaned forward as if drawn by a lodestone.

She turned to Ealstan. “He can’t say that!” she exclaimed. “What’s going to happen to him if he says things like that? Doesn’t he think the Algarvians are listening? Doesn’t he think some of the people in here will tell them every word he sings? He’s mad!” But she was smiling. For the first time in the performance, she was smiling. “He’s mad, aye, but, oh, he’s brave.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Ealstan said. But then, he wasn’t a Kaunian or even part Kaunian. To Vanai, a song that said whether you were blond or dark didn’t matter had to hit with the force of a bursting egg. And such a song had to hit hard in Eoforwic, too: Forthwegians and Kaunians had both rioted against the redheads here.

When the song ended, Vanai cheered louder than anyone though she stayed careful of her hood. She turned and gave Ealstan a quick kiss, saying, “You were right after all. I’m very glad I came.”

Setubal felt different from the way it had during Cornelu’s last time of exile there. Then Lagoas had been at war with Algarve, aye, but hadn’t seemed to take the fight seriously. Her navy and the Strait of Valmiera protected her from invasion, and she’d been looking east as well as toward Sibiu and the mainland of Derlavai, fearful lest Kuusamo spring on her back if she committed herself to the fight against Mezentio. It had been enough to drive Cornelu and his fellow Sibian refugees wild.

No more. If Lagoas didn’t have an army fighting on the mainland, she did have one fighting in the land of the Ice People. And she and Kuusamo were assuredly on the same side now--and what had happened to Yliharma made everyone in Setubal shudder. The Algarvians could have attacked the capital of Lagoas instead. For that matter, they could attack Setubal yet. Maybe they were just pausing to gather more Kaunians to kill.

“It is good to see the Lagoans worried,” Cornelu said to Vasiliu, another exile, as they sat together in the barracks assigned to Sibian naval men who’d managed to escape their kingdom.

“It is always good to see Lagoans worried,” his countryman answered. They both chuckled, neither with much humor. Lagoas had stayed neutral in the Derlavaian War till the Algarvians overran Sibiu. That rankled. And, though Lagoas and Sibiu had fought on the same side in the Six Years’ War, they were old enemies and rivals, being too much alike to make good friends. Lagoas, however, had for the past couple of hundred years been bigger and stronger.

“To be just, we should be worried here, too,” Cornelu said. “If these Algarvians unleash their sorcery against Setubal, do you think it will spare us because we were born in Sibiu?”

“Nothing Mezentio does is meant to spare Sibians,” Vasiliu snarled. Like Cornelu, like most from the five islands off the southern coast of Algarve, he had a long, dour face, a face on which anger and worry fit more readily than good cheer. He was scowling now. “What I wonder is whether the happy-go-lucky Lagoans are doing anything to stop Mezentio from serving them as he served Yliharma.”

“I wonder if they can do anything--short of slaughtering people, I mean,” Cornelu said. “And if they start slaughtering people, how are they different from Mezentio’s cursed mages?”

“How? I’ll tell you how, by the powers above: they’re on our side,” Vasiliu answered. “Swemmel won’t let the Algarvians kick him without kicking back. Why should anyone else?”

“We’ll all be monsters by the time this war ends, if it ever does.” Cornelu rose from his cot. With training that had been enforced with switches during his cadet days, he smoothed the blanket so no one could see the wrinkles his backside had made. “And the Lagoans won’t kill Kaunians like Mezentio, and they won’t kill their own like Swemmel. So what does that leave them?”

“A kingdom in trouble,” Vasiliu said at once.

Cornelu paced back and forth, back and forth. “They ought to be able to do something? he said, though he knew that wasn’t necessarily so: sometimes--too often--there was no help for a situation. The image of Costache burned through his mind. He wondered which of the Algarvian officers quartered on her she was sleeping with. He wondered if she was sleeping with all of them. He wondered if he would have to greet a bastard or two when he came back to Tirgoviste, if he ever did.

Vasiliu pulled him back to the here-and-now by bluntly asking, “What?”

“Curse me if I know. I’m no mage,” Cornelu replied. “And if I were a mage with an answer, I’d go to King Vitor, not to you.” He paused. “I knew a Lagoan mage who might give me answers, though, if he’s got any. I brought him back from the land of the Ice People on leviathan-back.”

“If he doesn’t give you anything you want after that, visiting the austral continent has frozen his heart,” Vasiliu exclaimed. “A ghastly place, by everything I’ve ever heard and read.”

“What I saw of it doesn’t make me want to argue with you,” Cornelu agreed. “I’ll see if I can hunt up this Fernao.”

Cornelu remained a puzzle piece that didn’t fit after his long-delayed and unexpected return from Tirgoviste. Till the Lagoans figured out how they were going to try to get him killed next, his time was his own. He sighed as he left the barracks where the Sibian exiles were quartered. Inside, he had his own language, his own countrymen. Outside was another world, one where he didn’t feel he belonged.

Even the signs were strange. Aye, Lagoan was an Algarvic language like Sibian and Algarvian, but unlike its cousins it had borrowed heavily from both Kaunian and Kuusaman and swallowed most of the declensions and conjugations the other two languages used. That meant Cornelu could pick out words here and there, but had trouble deciphering whole sentences.

He went up to a constable, waited to be noticed, and asked, “Guild of Mages?” He would have had no trouble putting the question in Algarvian, but that probably would have got him arrested as a spy. Whenever he tried speaking Lagoan, he had to hope he was making himself understood.

The kilted constable frowned, then brightened. “Oh, the Guild of Mages,” he said. To Cornelu, the Lagoan’s words sounded the same as his own. Evidently, they didn’t to the constable. The fellow launched into a long explanation, of which Cornelu got perhaps one word in five.

“Slowly!” he said, in more than a little desperation.

For a wonder, the Lagoan did slow down. In fact, he began speaking as if to an idiot child. No doubt that was patronizing. Cornelu didn’t mind. After two or three repetitions, he learned which caravan line he needed to take to get to the Guild’s headquarters. He bowed his thanks and went off to the corner--three blocks up, one block over, as the constable had said, and said, and said--at which the ley-line caravan would stop.

More ley lines came together in and around Setubal than anywhere else in the world. That was one reason why Setubal was the commercial capital of the world. But Setubal had been the greatest trading city in the world even back in the days of sailing ships and horse-drawn wains. It boasted a grand harbor, the Mondego River offered communication inland, and the Lagoans were not in the habit of disrupting their kingdom with internecine strife.

Too bad, Cornelu thought. Sibiu would have been stronger if they were. It was a relief when the caravan car came gliding up; he didn’t have to go on with such gloomy reflections. He stepped up into the car, threw a copper in the fare box--the conductor’s watchful eye made sure he did--and sat down on one of the hard, not particularly comfortable seats.

Ten minutes later, he got off the caravan car and crossed the street to the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. It was a splendid white marble building in uncompromising neoclassical style, as were the statues in front of it. Had they and the hall been painted instead of remaining pristine, they might have come straight from the heyday of the Kaunian Empire.

The splendor inside the Grand Hall proclaimed louder than words that the Guild of Mages had been very successful for a very long time. When Cornelu asked the first mage he saw in what he thought was Lagoan how to find Fernao, the fellow stared at him in incomprehension, then put a return question to him: “Sir, do you speak Kaunian?”

“Badly,” Cornelu answered. Scholars kept it alive to use among themselves, but he was a navy man and had forgotten most of what he’d learned. Frowning in concentration, he tried to ask the question in the classical tongue.

He was sure he’d made a hash of the grammar, but the mage didn’t criticize him. Instead, still speaking Kaunian, the Lagoan said, “I think you had better come with me.” Cornelu wasn’t sure he’d got that, but then the fellow turned and gestured, a language more universal even than Kaunian.

Instead of getting his question answered, Cornelu found himself conducted to a very impressive office with an even more impressive door, at the moment closed. Sitting in front of it, behind a desk wide as a ship’s desk, was a clever-looking man going through papers. He looked up and exchanged words in Lagoan with Cornelu’s guide. The Lagoan mage turned back and spoke in Kaunian: “Sir, this is Brinco, secretary to Grandmaster Pinhiero. He will help you.”

Cornelu bowed. “My thanks.”

He’d spoken only a couple of words, but Brinco looked alert. “Sibian?” he asked, and Cornelu nodded. Brinco switched languages, saying, “You will speak Algarvian, then,” and Cornelu nodded again. This time, so did the secretary. “Good. We can talk. I read your tongue, but can’t claim to speak it, and you have trouble with mine. What is it that you want with Fernao?”

“It does not have to be him, your Excellency--” Cornelu began.

“I am not an excellency,” Brinco said. “Grandmaster Pinhiero is an Excellency.”

“However you like,” Cornelu answered. “But Fernao and I have met each other, so I thought I could ask him how you Lagoans will keep Algarve from doing to Setubal what she did to Yliharma.”

“It is a good question,” Brinco agreed. “But Fernao is not here to answer it; he is with his Majesty’s forces on the austral continent.”

“Ah,” Cornelu said. “He was there, and came off, and now is back. I pity him. All right, sir, since I have been brought before you, I will ask you the question I would have asked him and hope to learn from your answer.”

“My answer is, we are doing everything we can, and we think it will help,” Brinco said. “And my further answer is that I have no further answer. I pray you will forgive me, sir, for pointing out that, until my distinguished colleague brought you hither, I had not had the honor of making your acquaintance, even if Fernao did mention you in the report he prepared on his return to Lagoas.”

“You do not trust me, you mean,” Cornelu said slowly.

Brinco inclined his head. “It grieves me to say that is exactly what I mean. I intend no disrespect, but I will not put my kingdoms secrets in the hands of those whose trustworthiness I know less well than I might like. Such is life in these troubled times, I fear.”

By his expression, he half expected Cornelu to take the matter further, perhaps through seconds. But the exiled Sibian officer gave back the same sort of seated bow he had received. “You make good sense, sir,” he said, to Brinco’s obvious relief. “Lagoans have a name among us for loose talk.” Lagoan women had a name for looseness, too--but, after Costache, Cornelu preferred not to dwell on that. He went on, “I am glad to see this name is not altogether deserved.”

“No, not altogether.” Brinco’s voice was dry. “We do the best we can.”

“May it be good enough,” Cornelu said. His best back home hadn’t been good enough. Now he was back in the war. For that, at least, he’d been trained.

Back in Kajaani, Pekka wished she’d never gone north to Yliharma. It wouldn’t have made any difference, of course: the Algarvians would have sorcerously assailed the capital of Kuusamo even if she hadn’t been there to try her experiment. When she thought logically, she understood that. But logic went only so far. She still had the prickles-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that King Mezentio’s mages had known what she was doing and timed their attack to foil her.

“That’s nonsense,” her husband said. “If they’d been after you then, they’d still be after you. They haven’t been, so they weren’t.”

Leino was calm and logical, excellent traits in a mage--and an excellent mage he was, too, of a far more practical bent than Pekka. Most of the time, his solid good sense would have reassured Pekka, as it was meant to do. Now, though, it irritated her. “I know that,” she snapped. “Up here, I know it.” She tapped her forehead. “Down here, though”--she rubbed her belly--”it’s a different business.”

Wisely, Leino changed the subject. “When do you think you’ll be ready to run your experiment again?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I just don’t know. I’ll need Siuntio and Ilmarinen to back me up, and powers above only know when they’ll both be able to get down here. And even if they do . . .” Her voice trailed away. She looked unhappy.

“Things would be better if the fall of the palace up there hadn’t caught Prince Joroinen, wouldn’t they?” Leino asked gently.

Pekka nodded. That was part of what ate at her, sure enough. “He was the one who really brought us all together,” she said. “He was the one who believed we could do it, and who made other people believe it, too. Without him, our funds are liable to dry up.” She rolled her eyes. “Without him, I’m already starting to have trouble with the distinguished Professor Heikki again.”

The mage who presided over thaumaturgical studies at Kajaani City College was a specialist in veterinary sorcery. The next new idea she had would be her first. Irked that she couldn’t learn more about the work Pekka was doing, she’d tried to cut off the theoretical sorcerer’s experimental budget. Prince Joroinen had put a stop to that and made Heikki remember for a moment that there was more to being a mage than attending departmental meetings. With him gone, the department head was already starting to reexert her petty authority.

Before Pekka could say anything more, a crash from the other end of the house sent her and Leino running to see what had made it. They almost ran over their son--Uto was coming their way as fast as they were going his. He barely had the chance to assume his usual look of almost supernatural innocence before his father snapped, “What was that noise?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, sounding as self-righteous as only a six-year-old could.

Pekka took up the challenge: “Well, what were you doing in the kitchen?”

“Nothing,” Uto replied.

Leino took him by the shoulder and turned him around, saying, “That’s what you always tell us, and it’s never true. Let’s go have a look.”

Everything looked fine .. . till Pekka opened the pantry door. Somehow or other, a whole shelf had fallen down there, with all the groceries on it, and made quite a mess. “How did this happen?” she asked in tones of mingled horror and admiration.

“I don’t know,” Uto repeated in tones like a silver bell.

“You’ve been climbing again,” Leino said. “You knew what would happen if you went climbing again.”

Of course, Uto knew. Of course, he’d never thought it would matter. He’d no doubt managed to convince himself he’d never get caught no matter how often he did what he wasn’t supposed to do. Amazing how much like grownups children are some ways, Pekka thought.

And, now that he had been caught, Uto reacted just as an adult would have. “Don’t do it, Father!” he wailed, recalling all too well the promised punishment. “I’ll be good. I promise I will.”

“You’ve already promised,” Leino told him. “You broke your promise after you made it. That’s not something Kuusamans should ever do. And so your stuffed leviathan will go up on the mantel for a week.” He started for his son’s bedchamber.

“No!” Uto howled, and burst into tears. “It’s not fair!”

“Aye, it is,” Pekka said. “You didn’t keep your word. How can we trust you if you don’t keep your word?”

Uto was paying no attention to her or to anything but his catastrophic loss. “I can’t sleep without my tiny leviathan under my chin!” he cried. “How can I go to sleep without my leviathan?” He stamped his foot.

“You’ll have to find out, won’t you?” Pekka said evenly. She dreaded putting him to bed without his special toy, too, but she didn’t want him to see that. “Maybe next time you’ll think a little more before you do something we’ve told you not to.”

“I’ll be good!” Uto sounded as desperate as a bureaucrat caught with his hand in the till. Leino’s footsteps coming up the hall announced the imminence of the tragedy ahead. Uto ran off to try to tackle him. “My leviathan!”

Following her son, Pekka wished her sister’s husband had never bought Uto the stuffed toy. But if Olavin hadn’t given him that one, he would have grown attached to some other stuffed animal: he had a good many. “It’s over. It’s done,” Leino told him. “Go back to your room till you can go around without snot and tears dribbling down your face.”

“I won’t ever stop crying! Not ever!” Uto shouted, but off he went. A silence, as of a battlefield after the fighting has moved on, filled the front room.

“Whew!” Leino said, and made as if to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I’m going to get myself a thimble of brandy. I’ve earned it. That could have been him crashing down as easily as the shelf, you know.”

“I certainly do,” Pekka said. “As long as you’re heading back toward the kitchen, pour me one, too, will you? Sooner or later, I’ll think about putting the pantry to rights, but not just yet.”

Noisy grief still came from Uto’s room. Some of it was real, some sent forth at the top of the little boy’s lungs to make his parents as unhappy as he was. Leino and Pekka both ignored him. Her sister and brother-in-law lived next door; if they heard Uto making a horrible racket, they would figure he had it coming, not that his parents were thrashing him to within an inch of his life.

Leino came back with two shots of pear brandy. He handed one to Pekka, then raised the other high. “Here’s to all of us living through another one.”

“I’ll gladly drink to that,” Pekka said. The pear brandy ran down her throat like sweet fire. She glanced over toward the stuffed leviathan, now lying dejected above the hearth, and started to laugh. But the laughter didn’t want to come: she was thinking not only of Uto’s outburst but also of the disaster the Algarvians had visited upon Yliharma. She’d come through that, and so had her sorcerous colleagues, but far too many in the capital hadn’t.

Something of what was going through her mind must have shown on her face, for Leino said, “I’m glad you lived through that one,” and gave her a hug.

“You’re not the only one,” she said fervently. She held Leino for a moment, just doing that, not thinking about anything else. But then, even with his arms around her, she shook her head. “So much work wasted. If only they’d chosen to wait another day. But they didn’t, and so ...” She shrugged.

Leino squeezed her again, then let her go. He still didn’t know exactly what she was working on but had no trouble figuring out that it was something important. He did his best to reassure her, saying, “I still don’t believe the Algarvians know or care what you’re about.”

“Why?” she demanded. “How can you know, any more than I can?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he admitted, “but I still don’t believe it. And I’ll tell you why: look how many talented mages they must be using to forge the spells that use the life energy they release when they kill Kaunians. And their very best mages must be busy devising those spells. How could they have anything much left to try to travel along other ley lines?”

Pekka pondered that. Slowly, she nodded. “It makes sense,” she said, but then checked herself. “It makes sense to me. Whether it makes sense in Trapani, I couldn’t begin to say.”

“If the Algarvians cared about what makes sense, they never would have started slaughtering Kaunians in the first place,” her husband said. Pekka nodded again. But Leino, like a lot of Kuusamans, had the knack of seeing the other fellow’s point of view. “I suppose they thought they’d only have to do it a couple of times, and then the war would be as good as won. But it didn’t work out that way.”

“No. Things too often don’t work out the way you think they will.” Pekka pointed down the hall. “That’s what Uto found out just now.”

“He’s quieted down some,” Leino said in no small relief.

“He couldn’t stay that loud for very long, not even for his leviathan,” Pekka said. “A good thing, too, or he’d drive us all mad.” She cocked her head to one side, listening. “He’s very quiet. I wonder if he’s fallen asleep in there.”

“Either that or he’s getting ready to burn the house down and doesn’t want us bothering him till after the fire starts.” Leino sounded as if he were joking, but also as if he wouldn’t necessarily put it past his son.

Pekka found herself sniffing. When she realized what she was doing, she made a face at her husband. “Uto!” she called. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing,” he answered, as sweetly as he always did when he didn’t feel like admitting what he was up to. He wasn’t asleep, anyhow. And he couldn’t get into too much mischief in his own room, or Pekka hoped not. She sniffed again. No, she didn’t smell smoke.

Someone knocked on the door. As she wouldn’t have done if she and Leino hadn’t been talking about the Algarvians, Pekka looked out the window before she worked the latch. No redheaded assassins stood out there on the snowy walk: only her sister Elimaki and Olavin, the giver of the stuffed leviathan. They went back and forth with Pekka and Leino all the time. Elimaki took care of Uto when the two mages worked, too.

Olavin had sharp eyes. He spotted the leviathan on the mantel and said, “Oh, dear. What’s my nephew gone and done now?”

“Tried to destroy the pantry,” Leino answered. “He almost did it, too.”

“Can’t have that,” Olavin agreed. “You’d need to borrow from me to put things right if he really did do the job.” He was one of Kajaani’s leading bankers.

“Maybe we could put Uto up as collateral,” Leino said. Pekka gave him a severe look. That was going too far--and Pekka happened to know he’d been a terror when he was a little boy, too.

“Anyhow,” Olavin said, “can you turn him loose long enough to let me say good-bye?”

“Good-bye?” Pekka and Leino exclaimed in the same breath. “Where are you going?” Pekka added.

“Into the service of the Seven Princes,” her brother-in-law answered. “They’re going to put a uniform on me, fools that they are.” He shrugged. “I’d just get men killed if I tried to lead them in the field, but I ought to make a decent paymaster. I hope so, anyhow.”

“Don’t listen to him when he goes on like that,” Elimaki said. “He’s so proud, it’s a wonder his tunics still fit him.” She sounded proud, too, proud and worried at the same time.

“A lot of people are serving the Seven these days,” Pekka said. “Algarve might have done better to leave Yliharma alone. We would have got ready to fight slower than we are now.”

Leino set a hand on her shoulder. “The two of us have been in the service of the Seven for a while now.” She nodded. Leino raised his voice: “Uto! Come out and say good-bye to Uncle Olavin.”

Out Uto came, as sunny as if he’d never been in trouble. “Where are you going, Uncle?” he asked.

“Into the army,” Olavin answered.

“Wow!” Uto’s eyes glowed. “You have to kill lots of Algarvians for me, because I’m still too little.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Olavin said solemnly. Elimaki squeezed his hand and didn’t seem to want to let go. Pekka sighed. She wished war--she wished everything--were as simple as it looked through the eyes of a six-year-old child.

Krasta was in a vile temper this morning. Krasta was in a vile temper a good many mornings. Had she tried to justify herself--unlikely, since she was convinced she had a perfect right to her moods--the Valmieran noblewoman would have denied the peevish fury with which she faced the world was her fault. Other people’s failings inflamed her. Had those around her done better--which is to say, done exactly what she wanted--she was convinced she would have been mild as milk. She’d always been good at fooling herself.

At the moment, the failings exercising her were her maidservant’s. The woman had had the presumption not to appear the instant Krasta called. “Bauska!” she shouted again, louder and more sharply this time. “Confound it, where are you hiding? Get in here this instant, or you’ll be sorry.”

The door to her bedchamber opened. In came the serving woman, moving as fast as she could with a bulging belly that warned she would be having the baby inside before long. “Here I am, milady,” she said with an ungainly curtsy. “How may I serve you?”

“Took you long enough,” Krasta grumbled. Bauska’s belly cut no ice with her, not when a half-Algarvian bastard was growing in there. Said bastard’s father was Captain Mosco, Colonel Lurcanio’s aide. That left Krasta half scornful, half jealous: Bauskas Algarvian lover was younger and handsomer than her own, even if of lower rank.

“I am sorry, milady.” Bauska dipped her head. She’d suffered through a great many of her mistress’ moods. “I was on the pot, you see.” She put her hands on her swollen abdomen; her smile had a wry edge to it. “Seems like I’m on the pot all the time these days.”

“It certainly does,” Krasta snapped. She suspected Bauska of camping on the pot so she wouldn’t have to work. She knew all about servants’ tricks. Well, the wench was here now, so Krasta could get some use out of her. “I’m going to wear these dark green trousers today. Pick out a tunic that goes with them for me.”

“Aye, milady,” Bauska said, and waddled to the closet where Krasta kept her tunics (she had another one for trousers). After pawing through them, she held out two. “Would you rather have the cinnamon or the gold?”

Left to her own devices, Krasta would have dithered for an hour, maybe more, fuming all the while. Faced with a simple, clearcut choice, though, she was all decision. “The gold,” she said at once. “It plays up my hair.” She stepped out of the thin silk tunic and trousers in which she’d slept--leaving them on the carpet for Bauska to pick up--and got into the more substantial daywear. That done, she let her maidservant brush out her shining blond locks. After studying her reflection in a gilt-edged mirror, she nodded. She was ready to face the morning.

Bauska hurried downstairs ahead of her to let the cook know she would want a cheese-and-mushroom omelette with which to break her fast. She wasn’t wild about mushrooms. She wanted them as much to annoy Lurcanio as for any other reason; like most Algarvians, he had no use for them at all. She intended to dwell lovingly on them when she saw him, almost as if she were a mushroom-mad Forthwegian.

After the omelette and a slice of sweet roll stuffed with apples and a cup of tea, she went into the west wing of the mansion. She might as well have entered another world. Kilted Algarvians dominated--messengers bringing word of doings all over Priekule, clerks making sure those words went to the right official or file, and soldiers and military police who turned words into action.

The redheads eyed her as she went by--she would have been disappointed, or more likely insulted, if they hadn’t--but kept their hands to themselves. Unlike those Algarvian louts on the Avenue of Horsemen, they knew without having to be told whose woman she was.

But when she got to the antechamber in front of Colonel Lurcanio s office, the officer there was not Captain Mosco but a stranger. “You are the marchioness, is it not so?” he said in slow, careful classical Kaunian, and rose from his seat to bow. “I do not speak Valmieran, I am sorry to say. Do you understand me?”

“Aye,” Krasta answered, though her own command of the classical tongue was considerably worse than this redhead’s. “Where are, uh, is Mosco?”

The Algarvian bowed again. “He is not here.” Krasta could see that for herself; her temper kindled. Before she could say anything, though, the officer added, “I am replacing him. He is not returning.”

“What?” Krasta exclaimed--in Valmieran, for she was startled out of classical Kaunian.

With yet another bow, the Algarvian said, “Colonel Lurcanio will be making it plain to you. I am to tell you you are to go in to him.” He waved her through the antechamber, bowing one last time as he did so.

Even before Lurcanio looked up from the memorandum he was drafting, Krasta demanded, “Where’s Captain Mosco?”

Lurcanio set down his pen. As the stranger in Mosco’s place had before him, he got to his feet and bowed. “Come in, my dear, and sit down. You are here, and I am here, and that is more than we can say for the unfortunate captain.”

“What do you mean?” Krasta asked as she sat in the chair in front of his desk. “Has something happened to him? Is he dead? Is that what that fellow out there meant?”

“Ah, good--you made some sense of Captain Gradasso’s Kaunian,” Lurcanio said. “I wasn’t sure how much you would be able to follow. No, Mosco is not dead, but aye, something has happened to him. He won’t be here again, I fear, not unless he is luckier than seems likely.”

“Did he have an accident? Did footpads set on him?” Krasta scowled. “I hate it when you beat around the bush.”

“And, if it suits you, you hate it when I don’t,” Lurcanio replied. “Still, I will answer your questions: no and no, respectively. Although I suppose you might call what happened to him an accident, a most unfortunate accident. He has been ordered to the west, you see, to Unkerlant.”

“What will he do about the baby when it comes?” Krasta asked: as always, what affected her sprang most readily to her mind.

One of Lurcanio’s eyebrows twitched sardonically. “I doubt that is the first thing on his mind right now,” the Algarvian colonel said. “I only guess, mind you, but I would say he is most worried about not getting killed and next most worried about not freezing to death. In all the time he has left over from that, he may possibly give a thought to the little bastard yet to come. On the other hand, he may not, too.”

“He promised to support that baby, or we would let his wife know about the games he was playing,” Krasta snapped. “If you think we won’t do that.. .”

Lurcanio’s shrug was a masterpiece of its kind. “He will do as he will do, and you and your wench will do as you will do,” he answered. “I don’t know what else to say--except that, should you find yourself with child, do not seek to play these games with me.”

Krasta’s head came up. “Are you saying you have no honor? Honest of you to admit it.”

Lurcanio got to his feet and set his hands on the desk, leaning across it toward her. He wasn’t much taller than she, but somehow made it seem as if she were looking up at him from out of a valley. In spite of herself, she shivered. No one else she had ever met could put her in fear like that. Very quietly, the Algarvian said, “If you are foolish enough to speak such words again, you will regret them to your dying day. Do you understand me?”

He is a barbarian, Krasta thought. That brought with it another shiver of fright. With the fright, not for the first time, came a surge of desire. The bedchamber was the only place where she had any control over Lurcanio, though even there she had less than she would have liked, less than she would have had with most men. Luckily for the way she thought of herself, the idea that she amused her Algarvian lover never once entered her mind.

“Do you understand me?” Lurcanio asked, more softly still.

“Aye,” she said with an impatient nod, and turned away. Lurcanio had a wife; Krasta knew that. The woman probably amused herself back in Algarve the same way as her husband was doing here in Priekule. Algarvian slut, Krasta thought, and did not dwell on what others might call her for lying with Lurcanio.

“Well, then, is there anything else?” Lurcanio said, now in the tones he used when he wanted to get back to his work.

Instead of answering, Krasta walked out of his office. He didn’t laugh to speed her going, as he’d been known to do. Instead, he seemed to forget about her as soon as she started to leave, an even more daunting dismissal. She strode past Captain Gradasso. He tried to put some compliments into classical Kaunian; she didn’t stay to listen to them.

With a sigh of relief, she returned to the part of the mansion that still belonged to her and her retainers. When she saw Bauska, she frowned. But the frown didn’t last long. Here, after all, was another chance to pay back the maidservant for bedding the redhead she would have preferred to the one she had. Of course, now she would have to maintain the brat after it was born, but still. . . . “Come here,” she called. “I have news for you.”

“What is it, milady?” Bauska asked.

“Your precious captain is off getting chilblains in Unkerlant,” Krasta answered.

Bauska had always been very fair. Since getting pregnant, she’d become paler yet; she was not one of those women who glowed because of the new life within them. Now she went white as the wall behind her. “No,” she whispered.

“Oh, aye,” Krasta said. “Don’t you dare faint on me, either; there’s too much of you to catch. I have it straight from Lurcanio, and he has himself a new aide, a fiddle-faced son of a whore who mumbles in the ancient language. If you plan on taking this fellow to bed, too, you’ll need to bring along a lexicon.”

That did make Bauska turn red. “Milady!” she cried reproachfully. “They’ve sent Mosco off to be killed, and that’s all you can say?”

Krasta disliked any histrionics but her own. “Maybe he’ll come back after the Algarvians finally beat Unkerlant,” she said, trying to calm the servant or at least make her shut up.

Bauska astonished her by laughing in her face. “If the Algarvians were going to beat Unkerlant just like that”--the serving woman snapped her fingers--”why do they all dread being sent west so much?”

“Why? Because they aren’t lucky to stay in Priekule anymore, of course,” Krasta answered. Bauska rolled her eyes. If she hadn’t been carrying a baby, Krasta would have hauled off and belted her for her insolence. As things were, it was a near-run thing. “Get out of my sight,” the noblewoman snarled, and Bauska lumbered away.

Staring after her, Krasta muttered a curse. What a ridiculous notion, that the Algarvians might not win the Derlavaian War! If they’d beaten Valmiera, they would surely smash the Unkerlanter savages . . . wouldn’t they? To hold sudden confusion and worry away, Krasta shouted for her driver and headed off to the Boulevard of Horsemen to shop.

Spring came early, up in Bishah. The only real mark of it was that the rain that came occasionally during fall and winter stopped altogether. The weather would have done for high summer in more southerly lands. But the breezes that blew down off the hills and onto the capital of Zuwayza promised far more heat ahead. Hajjaj knew the promise would be kept, too.

He had, at the moment, other sorts of heat with which to contend. He had eaten sweet cakes with King Shazli, drunk date wine, and sipped delicately fragrant tea. That meant that, by Zuwayzi custom old as time, the king could at last begin talking business. And Shazli did, demanding, “What are we to do now?”

The Zuwayzi foreign minister wished his sovereign would have chosen almost any other question. But Shazli was still a young man--only about half Hajjaj’s age--and sought certainty where his minister had long since abandoned it. With a sigh, Hajjaj answered, “Your Majesty, our safest course still appears to be the one we are following.”

King Shazli reached up and tugged at the golden circlet he wore to mark his rank. It was his only mark of rank; it was, but for some other jewelry and his sandals, his only apparel. Shifting among the cushions on which he lolled, he said, “This leaves us still shackled to Algarve.”

“Aye, your Majesty, it does.” Hajjaj’s mouth twisted; he liked that no better than did the king. “But our only other choice is to be shackled to Unkerlant, and King Mezentio’s chains are longer and looser than the ones King Swemmel would have us wear.”

“Curse it, we are Zuwayzin--free men!” Shazli burst out. “Our ancestors did not suffer themselves to be tied to other kingdoms. Why must we?”

That was the heroic version of Zuwayzi history. Hajjaj too had grown up hearing minstrels and bards sing of it... but, when he had grown up, Zuwayza was a province--a disaffected province, aye, but a province nonetheless--of Unkerlant. Later, he’d gone to an excellent university in Trapani and had got a different view of how and why things had gone as they had for his people.

“Your Majesty, our clan chiefs love freedom so well, even now they grudge bending the knee to you,” he said. “They would sooner fight among themselves than listen to anyone who tells them they must not. That, of course, is how Unkerlant was able to conquer us: when one clan’s holdings fell, the other chiefs did not join together against the foe but often laughed and cheered to see their neighbor and old enemy beaten.”

“I am not sure I see your point,” Shazli said.

“It is very simple, your Majesty,” the foreign minister said. “By trying to hold on to too much freedom, our ancestors lost all they had. They were so free, they ended up enslaved. We, now, have less freedom than we might like, but less freedom than we might like is better than no freedom at all.”

“Ah.” The king smiled. “You are at your most dangerous, I think, when you speak in paradoxes.”

“Am I?” Hajjaj shrugged. “We are still free enough to make choices about who our friends should be. Things could indeed be worse, as you say; we might have no choices left to call our own. And we have taken back all the land the Unkerlanters stole from us when they conveniently forgot about the Treaty of Bludenz--and more besides, to make the revenge sweeter still.”

“Aye, for the time being we are victorious.” Shazli stretched out a long, slim forefinger to point at his foreign minister. “But if you were so proud of our victories as all that, would you have tried to pull us out of the war?”

“Our victories depend on Algarve’s victory,” Hajjaj replied. “True, Algarve makes us a better ally than Unkerlant--we’re farther from Trapani than we are from Cottbus, after all. If I had a choice, though, I would sooner not be bound to a pack of murderers. That is why I tried to escape.”

Shazli’s laugh was bitter as the beans Zuwayzin sometimes chewed to stay awake. “We’ve picked the wrong war for principle, haven’t we? King Mezentio slaughters his neighbors; King Swemmel slaughters his own. Hardly a pretty choice facing us, is it?”

“No, and I rejoice that you understand as much, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said, respectfully inclining his head toward his sovereign. “Since principle is dead--since principle was murdered to power magecraft--all we can do is look out for ourselves. That we have done, as well as we are able.”

King Shazli nodded. “The kingdom is in your debt, your Excellency. Without your diplomacy, Unkerlant would still be occupying much that is ours--and would have taken more in the fighting.”

“You are gracious to me beyond my deserts,” Hajjaj said, modest as any sensible man would be at praise from his king.

‘And you, Hajjaj, you are one of the largest pillows lying beneath the monarchy,” Shazli said. “I know it, as my father knew it before me.”

Other Derlavaians would have spoken of pillars, not pillows. Hajjaj, far more cosmopolitan than most of his countrymen, understood as much. His years at the university in Algarve and his travels since sometimes made him look on Zuwayza’s customs as an outsider. He could see foibles other Zuwayzin took for granted. But so what? he thought. It wasn’t as if foreigners had no foibles of their own.

Shazli said, “We continue, then, and hope Algarve triumphs so that our own advances are not written on sand?”

An Algarvian or a man from the Kaunian kingdoms--likely an Unkerlanter, too--would have said written on water. But water, in Zuwayza, was scarce and precious, while the sun-blasted desert kingdom had an enormous superabundance of sand.

Hajjaj shook his head. He was woolgathering again. He did it more and more as he got older and hated it. Was it the first sign of drifting into senility? He dreaded that more than the physical aches and pains of old age. To be trapped inside a body that would not die, while he forgot himself one piece at a time . . . He shuddered. And he was woolgathering again, this time about woolgathering.

Vexed, he gave the answer that should have come sooner: “If the powers above were kind, we would watch from the north until the last Algarvian and the last Unkerlanter beat in each other’s heads with clubs.” His shrug was mournful. “Life is seldom so convenient as we would wish.”

“There, your Excellency, you touch on a great and mysterious truth, one that holds even for kings,” Shazli said. He got to his feet, a sign he had given Hajjaj all the time he intended to spare today.

Grunting, his knees clicking, the foreign minister also rose and bowed to the king. As kings went these days, Shazli was a good sort: not a sharp-tempered martinet like Mezentio, much less a tyrant fearful of his own shadow like Swemmel. But then, the clan chiefs of Zuwayza ceded fewer powers to their kings than did the Algarvian nobles, while the old Unkerlanter nobility, these days, was largely deceased, replaced by upstarts. Swemmel had so much power because no one around him had any.

After formal farewells that used up another quarter of an hour, Hajjaj made his way through the corridors of the palace to the foreign ministry. The building was as cool a place as any in Bishah: its thick walls of sun-dried brick could challenge even the Zuwayzi climate.

“Nothing new to report to you, your Excellency,” Hajjaj’s secretary Qutuz said when the foreign minister poked his head into his office.

“I thank you,” Hajjaj replied. He eyed Qutuz, a solid professional, with a wariness he hoped he kept covert. He’d trusted the man’s predecessor, who’d proved to be in the pay of Unkerlant. No matter how well his new secretary performed, Hajjaj knew he would be far slower in warming to him, if he ever did. He said, “So long as things are quiet, I think I shall knock off early for the afternoon. Would you be so good as to summon my driver?”

“Of course, your Excellency,” Qutuz said. Before long, Hajjaj’s carriage was rolling up a narrow, twisting road into the hills above Bishah. Houses perched here were young fortresses, dating back to the days when any clan’s hand was likely to be raised against its neighbor.

Hajjaj’s home was no exception to the rule. Back in the days before mages learned to liberate great blasts of sorcerous energy, it could have stood siege for months. Even now, his large household included gate guards; no telling when some local lord might try to settle a score that had simmered, unavenged but unforgotten, for half a dozen generations.

After the guards let the carriage roll through the entranceway, Hajjaj’s major-domo Tewfik came waddling up to meet him. “Hello there, young fellow,” Tewfik said, bowing to Hajjaj. He was the only man alive entitled to greet the foreign minister thus. He had been in the household longer than Hajjaj had been alive. Hajjaj thought he was about eighty-five, but he might have been older. As surely as Hajjaj ran Zuwayza’s foreign affairs, Tewfik ran Hajjaj s domestic ones.

Returning the majordomo’s bow, Hajjaj asked, “And how are things here?”

“Well enough, lord,” Tewfik answered with another creaking bow of his own; his back didn’t bend very far these days. “Peaceful, one might even say, now that that woman is no longer here.”

That woman, Lalla, had until recently been Hajjaj’s juniormost wife: a pretty amusement with whom to while away some time every now and then. She’d become an increasingly willful and expensive amusement. Finally, to the relief of everyone else in the household, she’d become too expensive and willful for Hajjaj to stand anymore, and he’d sent her back to her own clanfather. Formerly respected for her position, she’d become that woman in the blink of an eye.

Tewfik said, “The lady Kolthoum will be glad to see you, your Excellency.”

“And I, of course, am always glad to see my senior wife,” Hajjaj answered. “Why don’t you run along ahead and let her know I will attend her shortly?”

“Aye.” And off Tewfik went, not running but plenty spry for a man of his years. Hajjaj followed more slowly through the buildings and courtyards and gardens that filled the space within the household’s outer wall. Kolthoum would be irked if he didn’t give her enough time to prepare herself and to ready refreshments for him.

When he did step into her chamber, she was waiting with tea and wine and cakes, as he’d known she would be. He embraced her and gave her a peck on the lips. They rarely slept together these days, the scrawny diplomat and his large, comfortable wife, but they were unfailingly fond of each other. Kolthoum understood him better than anyone else alive, save possibly Tewfik.

“Is it well?” she asked him, as usual cutting straight to the heart of things.

“It is as well as it can be,” he answered.

His senior wife raised an eyebrow. “And how well is that?”

Hajjaj considered. “I simply don’t know right now. Ask me again in a few months, and I may have a better notion.”

“You don’t know?” Kolthoum said. Hajjaj shook his head. Kolthoum raised both eyebrows. “Powers above help us!” This time, Hajjaj nodded.