The Thousand Cities

VI

One of the lessons Abivard's father, Godarz, had drilled into him was not asking the God for anything he didn't really want, because he was liable to get it anyhow. He'd forgotten that principle on this campaign, and now he was paying for it.

The look on Turan's face probably mirrored the one on his own. His lieutenant asked, «Shall we welcome them, lord, or order the attack?»

«A good question.» Abivard shook his head, as much to suppress his own temptation as for any other reason. «Can't do that, I'm afraid. We welcome them. Odds are, Tzikas doesn't know I know he sent those letters complaining of me to Sharbaraz.»

If the Videssian renegade did know that, he gave no sign of it. He rode out in front of the ranks of his own horsemen and through the foot soldiers-who parted to give him a path-straight up to Abivard. When he reached him, he dismounted and went down on one knee in what was, by Videssian standards, the next closest thing to an imperial greeting. «Lord, I am here to aid you,» he declared in his lisping Makuraner.

Abivard, for his part, spoke in Videssian: «Rise, eminent sir. How many men have you brought with you?» He gauged Tzikas' force. «Three thousand, I'd guess, or maybe a few more.»

«Near enough, lord,» Tzikas answered, sticking to the language of the land that had adopted him. «You gauge numbers with marvelous keenness.»

«You flatter me,» Abivard said, still in Videssian; he would not acknowledge Tzikas as a countryman. Then he showed his own fangs, adding, «I wish you had been so generous when you discussed me with Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase.»

A Makuraner, thus caught out, would have shown either anger or shame. Tzikas proved himself foreign by merely nodding and saying, «Ah, you found out about that, did you? I wondered if you would.»

Abivard wondered what he was supposed to make of that. It sounded as if in some perverse way it was a compliment. However Tzikas meant it, Abivard didn't like it. He growled, «Yes, I found out about it, by the God. It almost cost me my head. Why shouldn't I bind you and give you to Maniakes to do with as he pleases?»

«You could do that.» Though Tzikas continued to speak Makuraner, even without his accent Abivard would have had no doubt he was dealing with a Videssian. Instead of bellowing in outrage or bursting into melodramatic tears, the renegade sounded cool, detached, calculating, almost amused. «You could-if you wanted to put the realm in danger or, rather, in more danger man it's in already.»

Abivard wanted to hit him, to get behind the calm mask he wore to the man within… if there was a man within. But Tzikas, like a rider controlling a restive horse, had known exactly where to flick him with the whip to get him to jump in the desired direction. Abivard tried not to acknowledge that, saying, «Why should removing you from command of your force here have anything to do with how well the troopers fight? You're good in the field, but you're not so good as all that.»

«Probably not-not in the field,» Tzikas answered, sparring still. «But I am very good at picking the soldiers who go into my force, and, brother-in-law to the King of Kings, I am positively a genius when it comes to picking the officers who serve under me.»

Abivard had learned something of the subtle Videssian style of fighting with words while in exile in the Empire and later in treating with his foes. Now he said, «You may be good at picking those who serve under you, eminent sir, but not in picking those under whom you serve. First you betrayed Maniakes, then me. Beware falling between two sides when both hate you.»

Tzikas bared his teeth; that had pierced whatever armor he had put around his soul. But he said, «You may insult me, you may revile me, but do you want to work with me to drive Maniakes from the land of the Thousand Cities?»

«An interesting choice, isn't it?» Abivard said, hoping to make Tzikas squirm even more. Tzikas, though, did not squirm but merely waited to see what Abivard would say next-which required Abivard to decide what he would say next. «I still think I should take my chances on how your band performs without you.»

«Yes, that is what you would be doing,» the renegade said. «I've taught them everything I know-everything.»

Abivard did not miss the threat there. What Tzikas knew best was how to change sides at just the right-or just the wrong- moment. Would the soldiers he commanded go over to Maniakes if something-even something like Maniakes, if Abivard handed Tzikas to him-happened to him? Or would they simply refuse to fight for Abivard? Would they perhaps do nothing at all except obey their new commander?

Those were all interesting questions. They led to an even more interesting one: could Abivard afford to find out?

Reluctantly, he decided he couldn't. He desperately needed that cavalry to repel the Videssians, and Tzikas, if loyal, made a clever, resourceful general. The trouble was, he made a clever, resourceful general even if he wasn't loyal, and that made him more dangerous than an inept traitor. Abivard did his best not to worry about that. His best, he knew, would not be good enough.

Hating every word, he said, «If you keep your station, you do it as my hunting dog. Do you understand, eminent sir? I need not give you to the Avtokrator to be rid of you. If you disobey me, you are a dead man.»

«By the God, I understand, lord, and by the God, I swear I will obey your every command.» Tzikas made the left-handed gesture every follower of the Prophets Four used. He probably meant it to reassure Abivard. Instead, it only made him more suspicious. He doubted Tzikas' conversion as much as he doubted everything else about the renegade.

But he needed the horsemen Tzikas had led down from Vaspurakan, and he needed whatever connections Tzikas still had inside Maniakes' army. Treachery cut both ways, and Tzikas still hated Maniakes for being Avtokrator in place of someone more deserving-someone, for instance, like Tzikas.

Abivard chuckled mirthlessly. «What amuses you, lord?» Tzikas asked, the picture of polite interest.

«Only that one person, at least, is safe from your machinations,» Abivard said. One of Tzikas' disconcertingly mobile eyebrows rose in silent question. With malicious relish Abivard explained: «You may want my post, and you may want Maniakes' post, but Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, is beyond your reach.»

«Oh, indeed,» Tzikas said. «The prospect of overthrowing him never once entered my mind.» By the way he said it and by his actions, the same did not apply to Abivard or Maniakes.

Abivard watched glumly as, off in the distance, another of the Thousand Cities went up in flames. «This is madness,» he exclaimed. «When we took Videssian towns, we took them with a view to keeping them intact so they could yield revenue to the King of Kings. A burned city yields no one revenue.»

«When we went into Videssos, we went as conquerors,» Turan said. «Maniakes isn't out for conquest. He's out for revenge, and that changes the way he fights his war.»

«Well put,» Abivard said. «I hadn't thought of it in just that way, but you're right, of course. How do we stop him?»

«Beat him and drive him away,» his lieutenant answered. «No other way to do it that I can think of.»

That was easy to say, but it had proved harder to do. Being uninterested in conquest, Maniakes didn't bother garrisoning the towns he took: he just burned them and moved on. That meant he kept his army intact instead of breaking it up into small packets that Abivard could have hoped to defeat individually.

Because the Videssian force was all mounted, Maniakes moved through the plain between the Tutub and the Tib faster than Abivard could pursue him with an army still largely made up of infantry. Not only that, he seemed to move through the land of the Thousand Cities faster than Abivard's order to open the canals and flood the plain reached the city governors. Such inundations as did take place were small, hindered Maniakes but little, and were repaired far sooner that they should have been.

Abivard, coming upon the peasants of the town of Nashvar doing everything they could to make a broken canal whole once more, angrily confronted the city governor, a plump little man named Beroshesh. «Am I to have my people starve?» the governor wailed, making as if to rend his garment. His accented speech proclaimed him a local man, not a true Makuraner down from the high plateau to the west.

«Are you to let all the Thousand Cities suffer because you do not do all you can to drive the enemy from our land?» Abivard returned.

Beroshesh stuck out his lower lip, much as Abivard's children did when they were feeling petulant. «I do as much as any of my neighbors, and you cannot deny this, lord. For you to single me out-where is the justice there? Eh? Can you answer?

«Where is the justice in not rallying to the cause of the King of Kings?» Abivard answered. «Where is the justice in your ignoring the orders that come from me, his servant?»

«In the same place as the justice of the order to do ourselves such great harm,» Beroshesh retorted, not retreating by so much as the width of a digit. «If you could by some great magic make all my fellow officials obey to the same degree, this would be another matter. All would bear the harm together, and all equally. But you ask me to take it all on my own head, for the other city governors are lazy and cowardly and will not do any such thing, not unless you stand over them with whips.»

«And what would they say of you?» Abivard asked in a mild voice. Beroshesh, obviously convinced he was the soul of virtue, donned an expression that might better have belonged on the face of a bride whose virginity was questioned. Abivard wanted to laugh. «Never mind. You needn't answer that.»

Beroshesh did answer, at considerable length. After a while Abivard stopped listening. He wished he had a magic that could make all the city governors in the Thousand Cities obey his commands. If there were such a magic, though, Kings of Kings would have been using it for hundreds of years, and rebellions against them would have been far fewer.

Then he had another thought. He sat up straighter in his chair and took a long pull at the goblet of date wine a serving girl had set before him. The stuff was as revoltingly sweet as it always had been. Abivard hardly noticed. He set down the goblet and pointed a finger at Beroshesh, who reluctantly stopped talking. Quietly, thoughtfully, Abivard said, «Tell me, do your mages do much with the canals?»

«Not mine, no,» the city governor answered, disappointing him. Beroshesh went on, «My mages, lord, are like you: they are men of the high country and so do not know much about the way of this land. Some of the wizards of the town, though, do repair work on the banks now and again. Sometimes one of them can do at once what it would take a large crew of men with mattocks and spades days to accomplish. And sometimes, magic being what it is, not. Why do you ask?»

«Because I was wondering whether-» Abivard began.

Beroshesh held up his right hand, palm out. Bombastic he might have been, but he was not stupid. «You want to work a magic to open the canals all at once. Tell me if I am not correct, lord.»

«You are right,» Abivard answered. «If we gathered wizards from several cities here, all of them, as you say, from the land of the Thousand Cities so they knew the waters and the mud and what to do with them…» His voice trailed away. Knowing what one wanted to do and being able to do it were not necessarily identical.

Beroshesh looked thoughtful. «I do not know whether such a thing has ever been essayed. Shall I try to find out, lord?»

«Yes, I think you should,» Abivard told him. «If we have here a weapon against the Videssians, don't you think we ought to learn whether we can use it?»

«I shall look into it,» Beroshesh said.

«So shall I,» Abivard assured him. He'd heard that tone in functionaries' voices before, whenever they made promises they didn't intend to keep. «I will talk to the mages here in town. You find out who the ones in nearby cities are and invite them here. Don't say too much about why or spies will take the word to Maniakes, who may try to foil us.»

«I understand, lord,» Beroshesh said in a solemn whisper. He looked around nervously. «Even the floors have ears.»

Considering how much of the past of any town hereabouts lay right under one's feet, that might have been literally true. Abivard wondered whether those dead ears had ever heard of a scheme like his. Then, more to the point, he wondered whether Maniakes had. The Avtokrator had surprised Makuran and had surprised Abivard himself. Now, maybe, Abivard would return the favor.

Abivard had never before walked into a room that held half a dozen mages. He found the prospect daunting. In his world, with the mundane tools of war, he was a man to be reckoned with. In their world, which was anything but mundane, he held less power to control events than did the humblest foot soldier of his army.

Even so, the wizards reckoned him a man of importance. When he nerved himself and went in to them, they sprang to their feet and bowed very low, showing that they acknowledged he was far higher in rank than they. «We shall serve you, lord,» they said, almost in chorus.

«We shall all serve the King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase,» Abivard said. He waved to the roasted quails, bread and honey, and jars of date wine on the sideboard. «Eat. Drink. Refresh yourselves.» By the cups some of the mages were holding, by the gaps in the little loaves of bread, by the bird bones scattered on the floor, they hadn't needed his invitation to take refreshment.

They introduced themselves, sometimes between mouthfuls. Falasham was fat and jolly. Glathpilesh was also fat but looked as if he hated the world and everyone in it. Mefyesh was bald and had the shiniest scalp Abivard had ever seen. His brother, Yeshmef, was almost as bald and almost as shiny but wore his beard in braids tied with yellow ribbons, which gave him the look of a swarthy sunflower. Utpanisht, to whom everyone, even Glathpilesh, deferred, was ancient and wizened; his grandson, Kidinnu, was in the prime of life.

«Why have you summoned us, lord?» Glathpilesh demanded of Abivard in a voice that suggested he had better things to do elsewhere.

«Couldn't you have found that out by magic?» Abivard said, thinking, If you can't, what are you doing here?

«I could have, aye, but why waste time and labor?» the wizard returned. «Magic is hard work. Talk is always easy.»

«Listening is easier yet,» Falasham said so good-naturedly that even dour Glathpilesh could not take offense.

«You know the Videssians have invaded the land of the Thousand Cities;«Abivard said. «You may also know they've beaten the army I command. I want to drive them off, if I can find a way.»

«Battle magic,» Glathpilesh said scornfully. «He wants battle magic to drive off the Videssians. He doesn't want much, does he?» His laugh showed what he thought of what Abivard wanted.

In a creaking voice Utpanisht said, «Suppose we let him tell us what he wants? That might be a better idea than having us tell him.» Glathpilesh glared at him and muttered something inaudible but subsided.

«What I want is not battle magic,» Abivard said with a grateful nod to Utpanisht. «The passion of those involved will have nothing to do with diluting the power of the spell.» He laughed. «And I won't try to explain your own business to you anymore, either. Instead, I'll explain what I do want.» He spent the next little while doing just that.

When he was finished, none of the magicians spoke for a moment. Then Falasham burst out with a high, shrill giggle. «This is not a man with small thoughts, whatever else we may say of him,» he declared.

«Can you do this thing?» Abivard asked.

«It would not be easy,» Glathpilesh growled.

Abivard's hopes soared. If the bad-tempered mage did not dismiss the notion as impossible out of hand, that might even mean it was easy. Then Yeshmef said, «This magic has never been done, which may well mean this magic cannot be done.» All the other wizards nodded solemnly. Mages were conservative men, even more likely to rely on precedent than were servants of the God, judges, and clerks.

But Utpanisht, whom he would have expected to be the most conservative of all, said, «One reason it has not been done is that the land of the Thousand Cities had never faced a foe like this Videssian and his host. Desperate times call out for desperate remedies.»

«Can call out for them,» Mefyesh said. To Abivard's disappointment, Utpanisht did not contradict him.

Kidinnu said, «Grandfather, even if we can work this magic, should we? Will it not cause more harm than whatever the Videssian does?»

«It is not a simple question,» Utpanisht said. «The harm from this Maniakes lies not only in what he does now but in what he may do later if we do not check him now. That could be very large indeed. A flood-» He shrugged. «I have seen many floods in my years here. We who live between the rivers know how to deal with floods.»

Kidinnu bowed his head in acquiescence to his grandfather's reasoning. Abivard asked his question again: «Can you do this thing?»

This time the wizards did not answer him directly. Instead, they began arguing among themselves, first in the Makuraner language and then, by the sound of things because they didn't find that pungent enough, in the guttural tongue the folk of the Thousand Cities used among themselves. Mefyesh and Yeshmef didn't find even their own language sufficiently satisfying, for after one hot exchange they pulled each other's beards. Abivard wondered if they would yank out knives.

At last, when the wrangling died down, Utpanisht said, «We think we can do this. All of us agree it is possible. We still have not made up our minds about what method we need to use.»

«That is because some of these blockheads insist on treating canals as if they were rivers,» Glathpilesh said, «when any fool- but not any idiot, evidently-can see they are of two different classes.»

Falasham's good nature was fraying at the edges. «They hold flowing water,» he snapped. «Spiritually and metaphorically speaking, that makes them rivers. They aren't lakes. They aren't baths. What are they, if not rivers?

«Canals,» Glathpilesh declared, and Yeshmef voiced loud agreement. The row started up anew.

Abivard listened for a little while, then said sharply, «Enough of this!» His intervention made all the wizards, regardless of which side they had been on, gang up against him instead. He'd expected that would happen and was neither disappointed nor angry. «I admit you are all more learned in this matter that I could hope to be-».

«He admits the sun rises in the east,» Glathpilesh muttered. «How generous!»

Pretending he hadn't heard that, Abivard plowed ahead: «But how you work this magic is not what's important. That you work it is. And you must work it soon, too, for before long Maniakes will start wondering why I've stopped here at Nashvar and given up on pursuing him.» Before long Sharbaraz King of Kings will start wondering, too, and likely decide I'm a traitor, after all. Or if he doesn't, Tzikas will tell him I am.

Kidinnu said, «Lord, agreeing on the form this sorcery must take is vital before we actually attempt it.»

That made sense; Abivard wasn't keen on the idea of going into battle without a plan. But he said, «I tell you, we have no time to waste. By the time you leave this room, hammer out your differences.» All at once, he wished he hadn't asked Beroshesh to set out such a lavish feast for the mages. Empty bellies would have sped consensus.

His uncompromising stand drew more of the wizards' anger. Glathpilesh growled, «Easier for us to agree to turn you into a cockroach than on how to breach the canals.»

«No one would pay you to do that to me, though,» Abivard answered easily. Then he thought of Tzikas and then of Sharbaraz. Well, the wizards didn't have to know about them.

Yeshmef threw his hands in the air. «Maybe my moron of a brother is right. It has happened before, though seldom.»

Glathpilesh was left all alone. He glared around at the other five wizards from the Thousand Cities. Abivard did not like the look on his face-had being left all alone made him more stubborn? If it had, could the rest of the mages carry on with the conjuration by themselves? Even if they could, it would surely be more difficult without their colleague.

«You are all fools,» he snarled at them, «and you, sirrah-» He sent Yeshmef a look that was almost literally murderous."-fit for nothing better than bellwether, for you show yourself to be a shambling sheep without ballocks.» He breathed heavily, jowls wobbling; Abivard wondered whether he would suffer an apoplectic fit in his fury.

He also wondered whether the other wizards would want to work with Glathpilesh after his diatribe. There, at least, he soon found relief, for the five seemed more amused than outraged. Falasham said, «Not bad, old fellow.» And Yeshmef tugged at his beard as if to show he still had that which enabled him to grow it «Bah,» Glathpilesh said, sounding angry that he had been unable to anger his comrades. He turned to Abivard and said «Bah» again, perhaps so Abivard would not feel left out of his disapproval. Then he said, «None of you has the wit the God gave a smashed mosquito, but I'll work with you for no better reason than to keep you from going astray without my genius to show you what needs doing.»

«Your generosity, as usual, is unsurpassed,» Utpanisht said in his rusty-hinge voice.

Glathpilesh spoiled that by swallowing its irony. «I know,» he answered. «Now we'll see how much I regret it.»

«Not as much as the rest of us, I promise,» Mefyesh said.

Falasham boomed laughter. «A band of brothers, the lot of us,» he declared, «and we fight like it, too.» Remembering the fights he'd had with his own brothers, Abivard felt better about the prospects for the mages' being able to work together than he had since he'd walked into the room.

Having wrangled about how to flood the canals, the wizards spent a couple of more days wrangling over how best to make that approach work. Abivard didn't listen to all those arguments. He did stop in to see the wizards several times a day to make sure they were moving forward rather than around and around.

He also sent Turan out with some of the assembled garrison troops and some of the horsemen Tzikas had brought from Vaspurakan. «I want you to chase Maniakes and to be obvious and obnoxious about doing it,» he told his lieutenant. «But by the God, don't catch him, whatever you do, because he'll thrash you.»

«I understand,» Turan assured him. «You want it to look as if we haven't forgotten about him so he won't spend too much time wondering what we're doing here instead of chasing him.»

«That's it,» Abivard said, slapping him on the back. He called to a servant for a couple of cups of wine. When he had his, he poured libations to the Prophets Four, then raised the silver goblet high and proclaimed, «Confusion to the Avtokrator! If we can keep him confused for a week, maybe a few days longer, he'll be worse than confused after that.»

«If we make it so he can't stay here, he might have a hard time getting back to Videssos, too,» Turan said with a predatory gleam in his eye.

«So he might,» Abivard said. «That would have been more likely before we had to pull our mobile force out of Videssos and into Vaspurakan last year, but…» His voice trailed away. What point was there to protesting orders straight from the King of Kings?

Turan's force set out the next day with horns blowing and banners waving. Abivard watched them from the city wall. They looked impressive; he didn't think Maniakes would be able to ignore them and go on sacking towns. Stopping that would be an added benefit of Turan's sortie.

From up there Abivard could see a long way across the floodplain of the Tutub and the Tib. He shook his head in mild bemusement. How many centuries of accumulated rubbish lay under his feet to give him this vantage point? He was no scholar; he couldn't have begun to guess. But if the answer proved less than the total of his own toes and fingers, he would have been astonished.

The vantage point would have been even more impressive had there been more to see. But the plain was as flat as if a woman had rolled it with a length of dowel before putting it on the griddle to bake-and the climate of the land of the Thousand Cities made that seem possible. Here and there, along a canal or a river, a few lines of date palms rose up above the fields. Most of the countryside, though, was mud and crops growing on top of mud.

Aside from the palms, the only breaks in the monotony were the hillocks on which the cities of the floodplain grew. Abivard could see several of them, each crowned with a habitation. All were as artificial as the one on which he stood. A great many people had lived in the land between the Tutub and the Tib for a long, long time.

He thought of the hill on which Vek Rud stronghold sat. There was nothing man-made about that piece of high ground: the stronghold itself was built of stone quarried from it. Here, all stone, right down to the weights the grain merchants used on their scales, had to be brought in from outside. Mud, Abivard thought again. He was sick of mud.

He wondered if he would ever see Vek Rud domain again. He still thought of it as home, though it had scarcely seen him since Genesios had overthrown Likinios and given Sharbaraz both the pretext and the opportunity he had needed to invade Videssos. How were things going up in the far northwest of Makuran? He hadn't heard from his brother, who was administering the domain for him, in years. Did Khamorth raiders still strike south over the Degird River and harass the domain, as they had since Peroz King of Kings had thrown away his life and his army out on the Pardrayan steppe? Abivard didn't know, and throughout his early years he'd expected to live out his whole life within the narrow confines of the domain and to be happy doing it, too. As he seldom did, he thought about the wives he'd left behind in the women's quarters of Vek Rud stronghold. Guilt pierced him; their confines were far narrower than those he would have known even had he remained a dihqan like any other. When he'd left the domain, he'd never thought to be away so long. And yet, many if not most of his wives would have taken a proclamation of divorce as an insult, not as liberation. He shook his head. Life was seldom as simple as you wished it would be.

That thought made him feel kinder, toward the wrangling wizards who labored to create a magic that would make the canals of the floodplain between the Tutub and the Tib spill their waters onto the land. Even the little he understood about sorcery convinced him they were undertaking something huge and complex. No wonder, then, if they quarreled as they figured out how to go about it.

Things they would need for the spell kept coming in: sealed jars with water from canals throughout the land of the Thousand Cities, each one neatly labeled to show from which canal it had come; mud from the dikes that kept the canals going as they should; wheat and lettuce and onions nourished by the water in the canals.

All those Abivard instinctively understood-they had to do with the waterways and the land they would inundate. But why the wizards also wanted oddments such as several dozen large quail's eggs, as many poisonous serpents, and enough pitch to coat the inside of a couple of wine jars was beyond him. He knew he'd never make a mage and so didn't spend a lot of time worrying about the nature of the conjuration the wizards would try.

What did worry him was when the wizards would try it. Short of lighting a bonfire under their chambers, he didn't know what he could do to make them move faster. They knew how important speed was here, but one day faded into the next without the spell being cast

As he tried without much luck to hustle the wizards along, a messenger arrived from Mashiz. Abivard received the fellow with something less than joy. He wished the wizards had flooded the land of the Thousand Cities, for that would have kept the messenger from arriving. The timing was right for Sharbaraz King of Kings to have heard of his defeat at Maniakes' hands.

Sure enough, the letter was sealed with the lion of the King of Kings stamped into red wax. Abivard broke the seal, waded through the grandiose titles and epithets with which Sharbaraz bedizened his own name, and got to the meat of the missive: «We are once more displeased that you should take an army and lead it only into defeat. Know that we question your judgment in dividing your force in the face of the foe and that we are given to understand this contravenes every principle of the military art. Know further that any more such disasters associated with your name shall have a destructive and deleterious effect on our hopes and expectations for complete victory over Videssos.»

«Is there a reply, lord?» the messenger asked when Abivard had rolled up the parchment and tied it with a bit of twine.

«No,» he said absently, «no reply. Just acknowledge that you gave it to me and I read it.»

The messenger saluted and left, presumably to make his return to Mashiz. Abivard shrugged. He saw no reason to doubt that the canals would remain unflooded till the man had returned-and maybe for a long time afterward, too.

He undid the twine that bound up Sharbaraz' letter and read it over again. That brought on another shrug. The tone was exactly as he'd expected, with petulance the strongest element. No mention-not even the slightest notion-that any of the recent reverses might have been partly the fault of the King of Kings. Sharbaraz' courtiers were undoubtedly encouraging him to believe he could do no wrong, not that he needed much in the way of encouragement along those lines.

But the letter was as remarkable for what it didn't say as for what it did. In with the usual carping criticism and worries lay not the slightest hint that Sharbaraz was thinking about changing commanders. Abivard had dreaded a letter from the King of Kings not least because he'd looked for Sharbaraz to remove him from his command and replace him, perhaps with Turan, perhaps with Tzikas. Could he have taken orders from the Videssian renegade? He didn't know and was glad he didn't have to find out. Did Sharbaraz trust him? Or did the King of Kings merely distrust Tzikas even more? If the latter, it was, in Abivard's opinion, only sensible of his sovereign.

He took the letter to Roshnani to find out whether she could see in it anything he was missing. She read it through, then looked up at him. «It could be worse,» she said, as close as she'd come to praising Sharbaraz for some time.

«That's what I thought.» Abivard picked up the letter from the table where she'd laid it, then read it again himself. «And if I lose another battle, it will be worse. He makes that clear enough.»

«All the more reason to hope the wizards do succeed in flooding the plain,» his principal wife answered. She cocked her head to one side and studied him. «How are they coming, anyhow? You haven't said much about them lately.»

Abivard laughed and gave her a salute as if she were his superior officer. «I should know better than to think being quiet about something is the same as concealing it from you, shouldn't I? If you really want to know what I think, it's this: if Sharbaraz' courtiers were just a little nastier, they'd make pretty good sorcerers.»

Roshnani winced. «I hadn't thought it was that bad.»

All of Abivard's frustration came boiling out. «Well, it is. If anything, it's worse. I've never seen such backbiting. Yeshmef and Mefyesh ought to have their heads knocked together, that's what my father would have done if I quarreled like that with a brother of mine, anyhow. And as for Glathpilesh, I think he delights in being hateful. He's certainly made all the others hate him. The only ones who seem like good and decent fellows are Utpanisht, who's too old to be as useful as he might be, and his grandson, Kidinnu, who's the youngest of the lot and so not taken seriously-not that Falasham would take anything this side of an outbreak of pestilence seriously.»

«And these were the good wizards?» Roshnani asked. At Abivard's nod, she rolled her eyes. «Maybe you should have recruited some bad ones, then.»

«Maybe I should have,» Abivard agreed. «I'll tell you what I've thought of doing: I've thought of making every mage in this crew shorter by a head and showing the heads to the next lot I recruit. That might get their attention and make them work fast.» He regretfully spread his hands. «However tempting that is, though, gathering up a new lot would take too long. For better or worse, I'm stuck with these six.»

He supposed it was poetic justice, then, that only a little while after he had called the six mages from the land of the Thousand Cities every name he could think of, they sent him a servant who said, «Lord, the wizards say to tell you they are ready to begin the conjuration. Will you watch?»

Abivard shook his head. «What they do wouldn't mean anything to me. Besides, I don't care how the magic works. I care only that it works. I'll go up on the city wall and look out over the fields to the canals. What I see there will tell the tale one way or the other.»

«I shall take your words to the mages, lord, so they will know they may begin without you,» the messenger said.

«Yes. Go.» Abivard made little impatient brushing motions with his hands, sending the young man on his way. When the fellow had gone, Abivard walked through Nashvar's twisting, crowded streets to the wall. A couple of garrison soldiers stood at the base to keep just anyone from ascending it. Recognizing Abivard, they lowered their spears and stepped aside, bowing as they did so.

He had not climbed more than a third of the mud-brick stairs when he felt the world begin to change around him. It reminded him of the thrum in the ground just before an earthquake, when you could tell it was coming but the world hadn't yet started dancing under your feet.

He climbed faster. He didn't want to miss whatever was about to happen. The feeling of pressure grew until his head felt ready to burst. He waited for others to exclaim over it, but no one did. Up on the wall sentries tramped along, unconcerned. Down on the ground behind him merchants and customers told one another lies that had been passed down from father to son and from mother to daughter for generations uncounted.

Why was he, alone among mankind, privileged to feel the magic build to a peak of power? Maybe, he thought, because he had been the one who had set the sorcery in motion and so had some special affinity for it even if he was no wizard. And maybe, too, he was imagining all this, and nobody else felt it because it wasn't really there.

He couldn't make himself believe that. He looked out over the broad, flat floodplain. It seemed no different from the way it had the last time he'd seen it: fields and date palms and peasants in loincloths down in a perpetual stoop, weeding or manuring or gathering or trying to catch little fish in streams or canals.

Canals… Abivard looked out at the long straight channels that endless labor had created and more endless labor now maintained. Some of the fishermen, tiny as ants in the distance, suddenly sprang to their feet. One or two of them, for no apparent reason, looked back toward Abivard up on the city wall of Nashvar. He wondered if they had some tiny share of magical ability, enough at any rate to sense the rising power of the spell.

Would it never stop rising? Abivard thought he would have to start pounding his temples with his fists to let out the pressure inside. And then, all at once, almost like an orgasm, came release. He staggered and nearly fell, feeling as if he'd suddenly been emptied.

And all across the floodplain, as far as he could see, the banks of canals were opening up, spilling water over the land in a broad sheet that sparkled silver as the sunlight glinted off it. Thin in the distance came the cries of fishers and farmers caught unaware by the flood. Some fled. Some splashed in the water. Abivard hoped they could swim.

He wondered how widely through the land of the Thousand Cities canal banks were crumbling and water was pouring out over the land. For all he knew for certain, the flood might have been limited to the narrow area he could see with his own eyes.

But he didn't believe it The flood felt bigger than that. Whatever he'd felt inside himself, whatever had made him feel he was about to explode like a sealed pot in a fire, was too big to be merely a local marvel. He had no way to prove that-not yet-but he would have sworn by the God it was so.

People began running out of Nashvar toward the breached canals. Some carried mattocks, others hoes, others spades. Wherever they could reach a magically broken bank, they started to repair it with no more magic than that engendered by diligent work.

Abivard scowled when he saw that. It made perfect sense-the peasants didn't want to see their crops drowned and all the labor they'd put into them lost-but it took him by surprise all the same. He'd been so intent on covering the floodplain with water, he hadn't stopped to think what the people would do when that happened. He'd realized that they wouldn't be delighted; that they'd immediately try to set things right hadn't occurred to him.

He'd pictured the land between the Tutub and the Tib underwater, with only the Thousand Cities sticking up out of it on their artificial hillocks like islands from the sea. With the certainty that told him the flood stretched farther than his body's eyes could reach, he now saw in his mind's eye men-aye, and probably women, too-pouring out of the cities all across the floodplain to repair what the great conjuration had wrought.

«But don't they want to be rid of the Videssians?» Abivard said out loud, as if someone had challenged him on that very point.

The folk who lived-or had lived-in cities Maniakes and his army had sacked undoubtedly hoped every Videssian ever bom would vanish into the Void. But the Videssians had sacked but a handful of the Thousand Cities. In all the other towns, they were no more than a hypothetical danger. Flood was real and immediate-and familiar. The peasants wouldn't know, or care, what had caused it They would know what to do about it.

That worked against Makuran and for Videssos. The land between the Tutub and the Tib would, Abivard realized, come back to normal faster than he had expected. And, during the time when it wasn't normal, he would have as much trouble moving as Maniakes did. Maybe, though, Turan could strike a blow at some of the Videssians if they'd grown careless and split their forces. Less happy than he'd thought he'd be, Abivard descended from the wall and walked back toward the city governor's residence. There he found Utpanisht, who looked all but dead from exhaustion, and Glathpilesh, who was methodically working his way through a tray of roasted songbirds stuffed with dates. Fragile bones crunched between his teeth as he chewed.

Swallowing, he grudged Abivard a curt nod. «It is accomplished,» he said, and reached for another songbird. More tiny bones crunched.

«So it is, for which I thank you,» Abivard answered with a bow. He could not resist adding, «And done well, in spite of its not being done as you first had in mind.»

That got him a glare; he would have been disappointed if it hadn't Utpanisht held up a bony, trembling hand. «Speak not against Glathpilesh, lord,» he said in a voice like wind whispering through dry, dry straw. «He served Makuran nobly this day.»

«So he did,» Abivard admitted. «So did all of you. Sharbaraz King of Kings owes you a debt of gratitude.»

Glathpilesh spit out a bone that might have choked him had he swallowed it. «What he owes us and what we'll get from him are liable to be two different things,» he said. His shrug made his flabby jowls wobble. «Such is life: what you get is always less than you deserve.»

Such a breathtakingly sardonic view of life would have annoyed Abivard most of the time. Now he said only, «Regardless of what Sharbaraz does, I shall reward all six of you as you deserve.»

«You are generous, lord,» Utpanisht said in that dry, quavering voice.

«Just deserts, eh? Glathpilesh said with his mouth full. He studied Abivard with eyes that, while not very friendly, were disconcertingly keen. «And will Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase-» He made a mockery of the honorific formula."-reward you as you deserve?»

Abivard felt his face heat. «That is as the King of Kings wishes. I have no say in the matter.»

«Evidently not,» Glathpilesh said scornfully.

«I am sorry,» Abivard told him, «but your wit is too pointed for me today. I'd better go and find the best way to take advantage of what your flood has done to the Videssians. If we had a great fleet of light boats… but I might as well wish for the moon while I'm at it.»

«Use well the chance you have,» Utpanisht told him, almost as if prophesying. «Its like may be long in coming.»

«That I know,» Abivard said. «I did not do all I could with our journey by canal. The God will think less of me if I let this chance slip, too. But-» He grimaced. «-it will not be so easy as I thought when I asked you to flood the canals for me.»

«When is anything ever as easy as you think it will be?» Glathpilesh demanded. He pointed to the tray of songbirds, which was empty now. «There. You see? As I said, you never get all you want.»

«Getting all I want is the least of my worries,» Abivard answered. «Getting all I need is another question altogether.»

Glathpilesh eyed him with sudden fresh interest and respect «For one not a mage-and for one not old-to know the difference between those two is less than common. Even for mages, need shades into want so that we must ever be on our guard against disasters spawned from greed.»

To judge from the empty tray in front of him, Glathpilesh was intimately acquainted with greed, perhaps more intimately acquainted than he realized-no one needed to devour so many songbirds, but he'd certainly wanted them. The only disaster to which such gluttony could lead, though, Abivard thought, was choking to death on a bone, or perhaps getting so wide that you couldn't fit through a door.

Utpanisht said, «May the God grant you find a way to use our magic as you had hoped and drive the Videssians and their false god from the land of the Thousand Cities.»

«May it be as you say,» Abivard agreed. He was less sure it would be that way now than he had been when he had decided to use the flood as a weapon against Maniakes. But no matter what else happened, the Videssians would not be able to move around on the plain between the Tutub and the Tib as freely as they had been doing. That would reduce the amount of damage they could inflict.

«It had better be as Utpanisht says,» Glathpilesh said. «Otherwise a lot of time and effort will have gone for nothing.»

«A lot of time,» Abivard echoed. The wizards, as far as he was concerned, had wasted a good deal of it all by themselves. They, no doubt, would vehemently disagree with that characterization and would claim they had spent time wisely. But whether wasted or spent, time had passed-quite a bit of it. «Not much time is left for this campaigning season. We've held Maniakes away from Mashiz for the year, anyhow.»

That was exactly what Sharbaraz King of Kings had sent him out to do. Sharbaraz had expected he'd do it by beating the Videssians, but making them shift their path, making them fight even if he couldn't win, and then using water as a weapon seemed to work as well.

«As harvest nears, the Videssians will leave our land, not so?» Utpanisht said. «They are men; they must harvest like other men.»

«The land of the Thousand Cities grows enough for them to stay here and live off the countryside if they want to,» Abivard said, «or it did before the flood, at any rate. But if they do stay here, who will bring in the harvests back in their homeland? Their women will go hungry; their children will starve. Can Maniakes make them go on while that happens? I doubt it.»

«And I as well,» Utpanisht said. «I raised the question to be certain you were aware of it»

«Oh, I'm aware of it,» Abivard answered. «Now we have to find out whether Maniakes is-and whether he cares.»

With the countryside flooded around them, the Videssians no longer rampaged through the land of the Thousand Cities. Not even their skill at engineering let them do that. Instead, they stayed near the upper reaches of one of the Tutub's tributaries, from which they could either resume the assault they had carried on through the summer or withdraw back into the westlands of their own empire.

Abivard tried to force them to the latter course, marching out and joining up with Turan's force before moving-sometimes single file along causeways that were the only routes through drowned farmlands-against the Videssians. He sent a letter off to Romezan up in Vaspurakan, asking him to use the cavalry of the field force to attack Maniakes once he got back into Videssos. The garrisons holding the towns in the Videssian westlands weren't much better equipped for mobile warfare than were those that had held down the Thousand Cities.

Word came from out of Videssian-held territory that Maniakes' wife, Lysia-who was also his first cousin-not only was with the Avtokrator but had just been delivered of a baby boy. «There-do you see?» Roshnani said when Abivard passed the news to her. «You're not the only one who takes his wife on campaign.»

«Maniakes is only a Videssian bound for the Void,» Abivard replied, not without irony. «What he does has no bearing on the way a proper Makuraner noblewoman should behave.»

Roshnani stuck out her tongue at him. Then she grew serious once more. «What's she like-Lysia, I mean?»

«I don't know,» Abivard admitted «He may take her on campaigns with him, but I've never met her.» He paused thoughtfully. «He must think the world of her. For the Videssians, marrying your cousin is as shocking as letting noblewomen out in public is for us.»

«I wonder if that's part of the reason he's brought her along,» Roshnani mused. «Having her with him might be safer than leaving her back in Videssos the city while he's gone.»

«It could be so,» Abivard said. «If you really want to know, we can ask Tzikas. He professed to be horrified about Maniakes' incest-that's what he called it-when he came over to us. The only problem is, Tzikas would profess anything if he saw as much as one chance in a hundred that he might get something he wants by doing it.»

«If I thought you were wrong, I would tell you,» Roshnani said. She thought for a moment, then shook her head. «If finding out about Lysia means asking Tzikas, I'd rather not know.»

Abivard gave the Videssian renegade such praise as he could: «He hasn't done anything to me since he came here from Vaspurakan.»

Roshnani tempered even that: «Anything you know of, you mean. But you didn't know everything he was doing to you before, either.»

«I'm not saying you're wrong, either, mind you, but I am learning,» Abivard answered. «Tzikas doesn't know it, but slipping a few arkets to his orderlies means I read everything he writes before it goes into a courier's message tube.»

Roshnani kissed him with great enthusiasm. «You are learning,» she said.

«I should be clever more often,» Abivard said. That made her laugh and as he'd hoped, kiss him again.

The closer his army drew to Maniakes' force, the more Abivard worried about what he'd do if the Videssians chose battle instead of retreat. Tzikas' regiment of veteran cavalry stiffened the men he already had, and half of those garrison soldiers had fought well even if they had lost in the end. He was still leery of the prospect of battle and suddenly understood why the Videssians had been so hesitant about fighting his army after losing to it a few times. Now he felt the pinch of that sandal on his foot.

In the fields the peasants of the Thousand Cities worked stolidly away at repairing the damage from the breaches in the canals he'd had the wizards make. He wanted to shout at them, try to make them see that in so doing they were also helping to turn Maniakes loose on their land once more. He kept quiet. From long, often unhappy experience, he knew a peasant's horizon seldom reached farther than the crop he was raising. There was some justification for that way of thinking, too: if the crop didn't get raised nothing else mattered, not to the peasant who stood to starve.

But Abivard saw farther. If Maniakes got loose to rampage over the land between the Tutub and the Tib once more, these particular peasants might escape, but others, probably more, would suffer.

He found himself glancing at the sun more often than usual. Like anyone else, he looked to the sky to find out what time it was. Nowadays, though, he paid more attention to where in the sky the sun was rising and setting. The sooner autumn came, the happier he would be. Maniakes would have to withdraw to his own land men… wouldn't he?

If he did intend to withdraw, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he sent out horsemen to harass Abivard's soldiers and slow their already creeping advance even further. With Abivard's reluctant blessing, Tzikas led his cavalry regiment in a counterattack that sent the Videssians back in retreat.

When the renegade tried to push farther still, he barely escaped an ambush Maniakes' troopers set for him. On hearing that, Abivard didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. Seeing Tzikas fall into the hands of the Avtokrator he'd tried to slay by sorcery would have been the perfect revenge on him even if Abivard had decided not to hand him over to Maniakes.

«Why can't you?» Turan asked when Abivard grumbled about that «I wish you would have after he came down here, no matter what he said about his regiment.» He paused thoughtfully. «The cursed Videssian's not a coward in battle, whatever else you want to say about him. Arrange for him to meet about a regiment's worth of Videssians with maybe half a troop of his own at his back. That'll settle him once and for all.»

Abivard pondered the idea. It brought a good deal of temptation with it. In the end, though, and rather to his own surprise, he shook his head. «It's what he would do to me were our places reversed.»

«All the more reason to do it to him first,» Turan said.

«Thank you, but no. If you have to become a villain to beat a villain, the God will drop you into the Void along with him.»

«You're too tenderhearted for your own good,» Turan said. «Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, would have done it without blinking an eye, and he wouldn't have needed me to suggest it to him, either.»

That was both true and false. Sharbaraz, these days, could be as ruthless as any man ever born when it came to protecting his throne… yet he had not put Abivard out of the way when he had had the chance. Maybe that meant a spark of humanity did still lurk within the kingly facade he'd been building over the past decade and more.

Turan looked sly. «If you want to keep your hands clean, lord, I expect I could arrange something or other. You don't even have to ask. I'll take care of it.»

Abivard shook his head again, this time in annoyance. If Turan had quietly arranged for Tzikas' untimely demise without telling him about it, that would have been between his lieutenant and the God. But for Turan to do that after Abivard had said he didn't want it done was a different matter. What would have been good service would have turned into villainy.

«You've got more scruples than a druggist,» Turan grumbled as he walked off, as disappointed with Abivard as Abivard was with him.

The next day Tzikas returned to camp to give Abivard the details of his skirmish with the Videssians. «The enemy, at least, thought I was a man of Makuran,» he said pointedly. «'There's that cavalry general of theirs, curse him to the ice, they said. A good many of them have fallen into the Void now, eternal oblivion their fate.»

He said all the right things. He'd let his beard grow out so that it made his face seem more rectangular, less pinched in at the jaw and chin. He wore a Makuraner caftan. And he still was, to Abivard, a foreigner, a Videssian, and so not to be trusted because of who he was, let alone because of his letters to Sharbaraz King of Kings.

But he'd done decent service here. Abivard acknowledged that, saying, «I'm glad you beat them back. Knowing a cavalry regiment is here and able to do its job will make Maniakes think twice about getting pushy so late in the year.»

«Yes,» Tzikas said. «Your magic helped there, too, even if not quite so much as you'd hoped.» His lips twisted in a grimace no Makuraner could have matched, an expression of self-reproach that was quintessentially Videssian: he was berating himself for being less underhanded than he would have wanted. «Had the magic I essayed worked even half so well, I, not Maniakes, would be Avtokrator now.»

«And I might be trying to figure out how to drive you from me land of the Thousand Cities,» Abivard answered. His gaze sharpened. Here was a chance to get a look at the way Tzikas' mind worked. «Or would you have tried such a bold thrust if you had the Videssian throne under your fundament?»

«No, not I,» Tzikas said at once. «I would have held on to what I had, strengthened that, and then begun to wrest back what was mine. I would have had no need to hurry, for I could have held out in Videssos the city forever, so long as my fleet kept you from crossing over from the westlands. Once my plans were ripe, I'd have struck and struck hard.»

Abivard nodded. It was a sensible, conservative plan. That mirrored the way Tzikas had opposed Makuran back in the days when he'd been the best of the Videssian generals in the westlands-and the one who had paid the most attention to fighting the invaders and the least to the endless rounds of civil war engulfing the Empire after Genesios had murdered his way to the Videssian throne. Only in treachery, it seemed, was Tzikas less than conservative, although by Videssian standards, even that might not have been so.

«But Maniakes has thrown us back on our heels,» Abivard argued. «Would your scheme have done so much so soon?»

«Probably not,» Tzikas said. «But it would have risked less. Maniakes, whining pup that he is, has a way of overreaching that will bring him down in the end-you mark my words.»

«I always mark your words, eminent sir,» Abivard answered. Tzikas scowled at his use of the Videssian title. Abivard didn't care. He also didn't think Tzikas was right. Maniakes, unlike a lot of generals, kept getting better at what he did.

«By the God,» Tzikas replied, again reminding Abivard that he had bound himself to Makuran for better or for worse-or until he sees a chance for some new treachery, Abivard thought- «we should push straight at Maniakes with everything we have and force him out of the land of the Thousand Cities.»

«I'd love to,» Abivard said. «The only problem with the plan is that everything we have hasn't been enough to force him out of the Thousand Cities.»

Tzikas didn't answer, not with words. He simply donned another of those characteristically Videssian expressions, this one saying that, had he been in charge of things, they would have gone better.

Before Abivard could get angry at that, he realized there was another problem with the scheme the Videssian renegade had proposed. Like Tzikas' plan for fighting Makuran had he been Avtokrator, this one lacked imagination; it showed no sense of where the enemy's real weakness lay.

Slowly Abivard said, «Suppose we do force Maniakes away from the Tutub. What happens next? Where does he go?»

«He falls back into the westlands. Where else can he go?» Tzikas said. «Then, I suppose, he makes for the coast, whether north or south I couldn't begin to guess. And then he sails away, and Makuran is rid of him till the spring campaigning season, by which time, the God willing, we shall be better prepared to face him here in the land of the Thousand Cities than we were this year.»

«My guess is he'll go south,» Abivard said. «To reach the coast of the Videssian Sea, he'd have to skirt Vaspurakan, where we have a force that should be coming out to hunt him anyhow, and he controls none of the ports along that coast. But he's taken Lyssaion, which means he has a gateway out on the coast of the Sailors' Sea.»

«Clearly reasoned,» Tzikas agreed. From a Videssian that was no small praise. «Yes, I suppose he likely will escape to the south, and we shall be rid of him-and we shall not miss him one bit.»

«Do you play the Videssian board game?» Abivard asked, continuing, «I was never very good at it, but I liked it because it leaves nothing to chance but rests everything on the skill of the players.»

«Yes, I play it,» Tzikas answered. By the predatory look that came into his eyes, he played well. «Perhaps you would honor me with a game one day.»

«As I say, you'd mop the floor with me,» Abivard said, reflecting that Tzikas would no doubt enjoy mopping the floor with him, too. «But that's not the point. The point is, you can hurt the fellow playing the other side, sometimes hurt him a lot, just by putting one of your pieces between his piece and where it's trying to go.»

«And so?» Tzikas said, right at the edge of rudeness. But then his manner changed. «I begin to see, lord, what may be in your mind.»

«Good,» Abivard told him, less sardonically than he'd intended. «If we can set an army on his road down to Lyssaion, that will cause him all manner of grief. And unless I misremember, delaying him on the road to Lyssaion really matters at this season of the year.»

«You remember rightly, lord,» Tzikas said. «The Sailors' Sea turns stormy in the fall and stays stormy through the winter. No captain would want to risk taking his Avtokrator and the best soldiers Videssos has back to the capital by sea, not in a few weeks, not when he'd know he was only too likely to lose them all. And that would mean-»

«That would mean Maniakes would have to try to cross the westlands to get home,» Abivard said, interrupting not from irritation but from excitement. «He'd have to capture each town along the way if he wanted to encamp in it, and the winter there is hard enough that he'd have to try-he couldn't very well live under canvas till spring came. So if we can get between him and Lyssaion, we don't even have to win a battle-»

«A good thing, too, with these odds and sods under your command,» Tzikas broke in. Now he was being rude but not inaccurate.

«And whose fault is it that Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, wouldn't trust me with better?» Abivard retorted. The prospect of discomfiting Maniakes made him better able to tolerate Tzikas, so that came out as badinage, not rage. He went on, «If you think they're bad now, you should have seen them when I first got them. Eminent sir, they're brave enough, and they are starting to learn their trade.»

«I'd cheerfully trade them for a like number of real soldiers nonetheless,» Tzikas said, again impolite but again correct.

Abivard said, «It's settled, then. We advance against Maniakes and demonstrate in front of him, with luck making him abandon his base here. And as he moves south, we have a force waiting to engage him. We don't have to win; we simply have to keep him in play till it's too late for him to sail out of Lyssaion.»

«That's it,» Tzikas said. He bowed to Abivard. «A plan worthy of Stavrakios the Great.» The Videssian renegade suddenly suffered a coughing fit; Stavrakios was the Avtokrator who'd smashed every Makuraner army he had faced and had occupied Mashiz. When Tzikas could speak again, he went on: «Worthy of the great heroes of Makuran, I should have said.»

«It's all right,» Abivard said magnanimously. In a way he was relieved Tzikas had slipped. The cavalry officer did do an alarmingly good job of aping the Makuraners with whom he'd had to cast his lot. It was just as well he'd proved he remained a Videssian at heart.

Abivard wasted no time sending a good part of his army south along the Tutub. Had he seriously intended to defeat Maniakes as the Avtokrator headed for Lyssaion, he would have gone with that force. As things were, he sent it out under the reliable Turan. He commanded the rest of the Makuraner army, the part demonstrating against Maniakes in his lair.

His force included almost all of Tzikas' cavalry regiment. That left him nervous in spite of the accord he seemed to have reached with the Videssian renegade. Having betrayed Maniakes and Abivard both, was he now liable to betray one of them to the other? Abivard didn't want to find out.

But Tzikas stayed in line. His cavalry fought hard against the Videssian horsemen who battled to hold them away from Maniakes' base. He reveled in fighting for his adopted country against the men of his native land and worshiped the God more ostentatiously than did any Makuraner.

Maniakes once more took to breaking canals to keep Abivard's men at bay. Flooding was indeed a two-edged sword. Wearily, Abivard's soldiers and the local peasants worked side by side to repair the damage so the soldiers could go on and the peasants could save something of their crops.

And then, from the northeast, the smoke from a great burning rose into the sky, as it so often had in the land of the Thousand Cities that summer. More wrecked canals kept Abivard's men from reaching the site of that burning for another couple of days, but Abivard knew what it meant: Maniakes was gone.