Through the Darkness

Seventeen

Snow clung to the branches of pine and fir and spruce in the endless woods of western Unkerlant. Snow covered the leaves fallen from birch and beech and poplar. Snowflakes danced in the air. They were very pretty-for anyone who could take the time to watch them. Istvan couldn’t. “Have a care,” he called to the men of his squad. “The Unkerlanters will be able to spy our trails.”

“We’ll see theirs, too, Sergeant,” Szonyi said. “And we’ll make them pay for it.”

Corporal Kun took off his spectacles so he could blow a snowflake from one of the lenses. When he set them back on his nose, he cursed. “They’re fogged up,” he grumbled. “How am I supposed to see when they’re fogged up?”

“What difference does it make?” Istvan asked. “Half the time, you don’t pay attention to what you do see.” He grinned at Kun.

“For one thing, that’s a lie.” Kun wasn’t grinning. He enjoyed ruffling other people’s feathers, but didn’t care to have his own ruffled. “For another, I see more than you know.” He peered at Istvan through the possibly befogged spectacles, doing his best to look clever and mysterious.

That best only made Istvan snort. “You were a mage’s apprentice, Kun, not a mage on your own hook. If you saw as much as you want us to think you do, you’d have all the privileges of an officer, like that dowser named Borsos back on Obuda.”

“I can see some things about you.” Kun sounded hot. “For instance-”

Istvan’s temper kindled, too. “Can you see that I’m a sergeant? You’d better be able to see that. By the stars, you couldn’t even see that. .” He looked around. Everyone within earshot already know, was already part of, the dread secret the squad shared. “You couldn’t even see we were eating goat before we did it.”

“Don’t you blame me for that,” Kun said furiously. “You were the one who wanted to knock over the Unkerlanters for what they had in their stewpot.”

“Stuff a legging in it, both of you,” Szonyi hissed. “Somebody’s coming up to the line.”

Kun and Istvan fell silent at once. Istvan hoped his secret would stay secret till he took it to the grave-and afterwards, too, for they sometimes exhumed goat-eaters and scattered their remains. He knew a certain amount of relief when he saw Captain Tivadar coming up to the front. He couldn’t betray the secret to his company commander, for Tivadar already knew it.

But the captain had someone with him, a tubby fellow who looked nothing whatever like Kun but put Istvan in mind of him even so. As soon as Istvan saw the sorcerer’s star pinned to the stranger’s tunic, he understood why. “What’s up, sir?” he asked Captain Tivadar.

“I don’t know,” Tivadar answered. “Nobody knows, not exactly. But the Unkerlanters are up to something. That’s what’s brought Colonel Farkas here up to the front: to see if he can find out what it is.”

A mage with the nominal rank of colonel was an important fellow indeed. Istvan wasted no time in saluting. He said, “We haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, sir.” His eyes slid to Kun, who’d been bragging about how much he could see. Kun had the grace to look down at the snow between his boots.

Breath smoking as he spoke, Szonyi asked, “It’s not the horrible magecraft the Unkerlanters threw at us a while ago, is it? When we looked like breaking through, I mean.” He sounded anxious. As far as Istvan was concerned, he had a right to sound anxious. Istvan couldn’t imagine any man wanting to go through that terrible sorcery twice. He couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to go through it once, either, but he’d had no choice about that.

Farkas’ jowls wobbled as he shook his head. “No, I do not think this would be so dramatic as the accursed, murderous spell Swemmel’s men used there. This would be something subtler, something more devious, something the average man, even the average mage, might have trouble noting till too late.”

Kun sent Istvan a look that said, There! Istvan ignored him. He said, “Sir, the Unkerlanters are a lot of different things, but devious isn’t any of them, not the way you mean. They’re sneaky fighters, but their mages don’t know about anything but hitting us over the head.”

“I do not think this is an Unkerlanter spell,” Colonel Farkas answered. “I fear it may be the same one the Kuusamans used this past summer to help drive us off the island of Obuda.”

Istvan, Kun, and Szonyi all exclaimed then. It was the first any of them had heard that Gyongyos had lost the island. Tivadar was nodding; he must have already known. To Farkas, he said, “These men previously fought on Obuda.”

“I see,” the mage said. “But they have been here in the east for some time?” Tivadar nodded. Farkas looked disappointed. “Too bad. They might have helped me detect the cantrip were things otherwise.”

“How did the Unkerknters get their hands on this spell, sir, if the Kuusamans were the ones who made it?” Istvan asked.

Farkas scowled. “All our foes hate us. All our foes plot against us. It was to be hoped that our Algarvian allies, who also war on Kuusamo and Unkerlant both, would have been able to keep them from joining hands to harm us, but such was not the case. Whether by way of the broad oceans of the north or through the Narrow Sea, the evil knowledge was passed.”

“What is the nature of the spell, sir?” Kun asked.

Farkas seemed to notice him for the first time. “You have some small measure of the gift,” he said. It was not a question. Kun bowed, showing the military mage more respect that Istvan had ever seen him give anyone else. Farkas said, “Perhaps you can assist me.”

“Sir, it would be an honor,” Kun replied.

Farkas tugged at his beard, which showed gray streaks in the midst of the golden brown. “Aye, perhaps you can indeed. You have not met the spell, but you have come to know this great, brooding wood.”

“Tell me what you would have me do, and I will do it with all my heart,” Kun said. Istvan hadn’t heard him sound so eager, either.

Farkas tugged at his beard again, considering. After a moment, he nodded, and his jowls shook again. “Very well. It is not without risk, but risk you are acquainted with. A lucky star must have shone on your captain when he chose to bring me here. Now hearken to me. As I said before, the nature of the spell is subtle. It is a lulling, a dimming, a weakening of the senses, so that the deceitful foe may glide past our outposts and seize positions of advantage.”

“The Unkerlanters ought to use it against Algarve, then, not just us,” Szonyi said. “Why have we got all the luck?”

“Because it was crafted against us.” Behind the curly tangle of Farkas’ beard, the corners of his mouth turned down. “The Algarvians are strong in certain sorceries, weak in certain others, as are we. In most cases, the differences between what one folk and another knows are of little import. Here …” His expression grew more sour still. “Here the Kuusamans are strong where we are weak, and exploited our weakness with nasty cunning.”

“Have we learned how to cope with it since they turned it on us?” Istvan asked. He cared nothing for the fancy details, but he had a good eye for what really mattered.

Farkas’ voice was dry: “We have hope, Sergeant. Aye, we have hope.”

“Would they have brought the distinguished colonel here if he could not stop the miserable Unkerlanters?” Captain Tivadar asked in reproving tones.

Who knows? Istvan thought. Back there in Gyovvar, does Ekrekek Arpad have any notion of the kind of war we ‘re fighting here, so far away? He didn’t know the answer to that question. He did know he’d end up in trouble if he opened his mouth out of turn. And so he only shook his head and waited to see what the high-ranking mage would do.

What Farkas did, at first, was put his head together with Kun. The sorcerer’s apprentice pointed east and a little south. Farkas nodded. He said, “Aye, I gauge that to be the proper direction, too. Now-you will be so good as to procure for me a spiderweb.”

Behind the lenses that helped them see better, Kun’s eyes widened. He gestured at the snowy landscape. “In this, sir?”

Farkas merely looked impatient. “Will you help me with all your heart, as you said, or will you fume and complain?”

Off Kun went, muttering under his breath, to paw through ferns and bushes and examine pine boughs. Istvan guessed he would be a long time volunteering again. To the sergeant’s amazement, he did find a web. “Here you are, sir,” he said, turning the mage’s title of respect to one of reproach.

Farkas said, “My thanks,” as if he’d expected nothing less from Kun. Istvan wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of the look Kun blazed at Farkas. But the military mage got to work without even noticing it. That made Kun angrier than ever. It would have angered Istvan, too. As far as the rich and powerful were concerned, common folk might as well have been beasts of burden.

Holding the scrap of web above his head, Farkas looked up to the sky through it. Part of his chant was in the old hieratic language of Gyongyos, which Istvan recognized but did not understand. Part was in another tongue altogether. In an interested voice, Captain Tivadar asked, “Is that Kaunian, from out of the east?”

“Aye,” Farkas answered, on reaching a point where he could stop. “It is a subtle tongue, and painful experience on the islands has taught us that we need subtlety to detect and neutralize this sorcery.”

He kept looking through the spiderweb. Istvan wondered if it let him see the holy stars despite daylight and cloud cover. If it did, what were the stars showing him?

Istvan got the answer to that in short order. “There are mages familiar with the nasty Kuusaman spell on that bearing.” Farkas pointed toward the southeast, not quite in the same direction Kun had before. He did some more incanting, this time all in hieratic Gyongyosian. Kun joined him in a few of the responses. If there was risk in what he did, Istvan couldn’t see it. At last, Farkas said, “The distance is just over a mile. Have we egg-tossers far enough forward to reach them?” His tone said Tivadar had better be able to produce such egg-tossers.

And Tivadar nodded. “Sir, we do.” He took a map from his belt pouch, studied briefly, and made a mark on it. When he showed Farkas the mark, the military mage nodded. Tivadar gave Szonyi the map. “Take this back to the tossers in the clearing. Tell ‘em to pound that spot with everything they have.”

“Aye, Captain.” Szonyi saluted and hurried away, the map clutched in his big fist.

Farkas said, “I notice that several men here have the identical scar on their left hands. What does it mean. Sergeant, would you tell me?” His golden-brown eyes speared Istvan.

Istvan spluttered and stammered. Ice walked up his back. Telling the truth was the last thing he wanted to do. His face heated; taken by surprise, he had trouble coming up with a plausible lie. Captain Tivadar did it for him, speaking in casual tones: “Some few of these veterans have sworn blood brotherhood, one with another. You see the marks from the wounds that went with the oaths.”

“Ah.” Farkas inclined his head in grave approval. “The marks of warriors.” “The marks of warriors.” Istvan found his tongue. “Aye, sir.” A few minutes later, eggs started bursting on-he hoped they were on-the Unkerlanter position. He hoped they slew those devious mages. Even so, he had the feeling he’d escaped worse danger from Farkas than anything the Unkerlanters could have given him. Goat-eater. No, the mark inside him would never go away.

Leudast’s leg twinged under him. He had the feeling he would be able to foretell bad weather with his wound as long as he lived. He still limped. But he could get around on the leg, and so the Unkerlanters had handed him a stick and thrown him back into the fight against the invaders.

As a sergeant, he’d been given a platoon, here in the low, rolling hills northeast of Sulingen. His company commander was a very young lieutenant named Recared. Recared was either impeccably shaved where most of his countrymen were bristly, or else, more likely, couldn’t raise a beard no matter what. Leudast missed Captain Hawart, missed him and wondered if he still lived. He doubted he’d ever find out.

Recared liked to hear himself talk. As night slowly and reluctantly yielded to day, he said, “You men know that, when the sun rises behind us, we attack.”

“Aye,” Leudast chorused along with the rest of the soldiers Recared was haranguing. He wished the lieutenant would shut up. If they didn’t know what they were supposed to do by now, one more lecture wouldn’t get it through their heads.

But Recared went right on. Maybe he used lecturing to fight the fear that went with battle. “We attack to the west,” he said. “We-not the cursed Algarvians. We and all the egg-tossers and behemoths and dragons we could gather here, brought through the Mamming Hills and up over the Wolter. We attack to the west. . and Marshal Rathar’s other army, miles and miles away, will attack to the east. We will meet in the middle, and cut off all the stinking redheads down in Sulingen.”

“Aye,” the men chorused again, this time with fierce hunger in their voices. If everything went the way it should, they would make Mezentio’s men sorry they’d ever thrust their noses into Unkerlant. If… But with Algarvians, you never could tell. Leudast had seen that too often, to his sorrow and nearly to his destruction.

That made him think of something else. He stuck up his hand. “May I say a word, sir?”

Recared didn’t look happy at the idea of anyone else talking, but nodded. “Go ahead, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir.” Leudast turned to the waiting soldiers. “Remember, boys, what we’ve got in front of us isn’t Algarvians. We have a big kingdom here, and they’re stretched too thin to hold all the line themselves. It’ll be Yaninans and whatever other odds and sods they can scrape up. I’ve fought those buggers, and I’ve fought the Algarvians, too. Give me Yaninans any day.”

The soldiers who’d gone against King Tsavellas’ men nodded and began telling their friends what cowards the Yaninans were. Recared slapped Leudast on the shoulder. “That was well said,” he told him. A moment later, the lieutenant turned and looked back over his shoulder. He pointed to a tiny gleam seen for a moment through clouds. “The sun!” he cried.

Leudast wasn’t sure it really was the sun, but officers higher than Recared must have thought so, too. Egg-tossers began hurling death at the Yaninans huddled in their tents and holes and trenches. Leudast’s eyebrows flew up at the number of eggs bursting on the enemy. Neither his own folk nor the Algarvians had managed to put so many tossers on one narrow stretch of line very often.

Dragons painted rock-gray flew low overhead. Some had eggs slung beneath their bellies. Others flew unburdened, to protect their comrades and to flame the luckless Yaninans. Leudast took off his fur hat and waved it at the dragonfliers. Every enemy soldier they and the egg-tossers killed or wounded was an enemy who couldn’t kill or wound him.

Chainmail clattering with every “great stride they took, behemoths lumbered forward. Leudast waved his hat at their crews, too. He knew his countrymen had been gathering them, as Lieutenant Recared had said. As with the egg-tossers, he hadn’t known so many had made their way here. But then, he hadn’t been here very long himself.

Recared proved himself an officer by blowing a long, piercing blast on the whistle he wore round his neck. “Forward!” he shouted.

“Forward!” Leudast echoed. He had no whistle, but he’d long since got used to doing without. “King Swemmel! Urra!”

“Urra!” the Unkerlanter soldiers echoed as they swarmed out of their trenches. “Swemmel! Urra!”

Some men linked arms with their comrades and charged on together, doing their best to keep up with the behemoths. What had been the Yaninan lines were now a smoking, cratered jumble. After the pounding they’d taken, Leudast couldn’t see how anything could remain alive in them.

But his countrymen started falling-not in’ enormous numbers, as happened when an attack went wrong, but here and there, now one, now another. Egg-tossers on the behemoths pounded positions where the Yaninans held out in some strength. Footsoldiers overran the rest.

“Urra!” Leudast roared, and jumped down into a battered trench. He landed on a dead Yaninan, noticing only because he didn’t hit the ground so hard as he thought he would. A moment later, a live Yaninan came out of a hole, his hands high, terror twisting his face. Leudast took what food he had-- black bread and moldy sausage-and let him live. “Urra!” he shouted again, and ran on.

Every so often-almost surely in the places where they had good officers- the Yaninans fought hard. But Tsavellas’ men had next to no behemoths, and few heavy sticks that might penetrate the armor the Unkerlanter beasts wore. Few enemy dragons flew, either.

Leudast looked around a little past noon and was astonished at how far he’d come. Recared had come all that way, too. “It’s a rout, sir!” Leudast exclaimed. He sounded drunk, but he hadn’t had enough spirits in his water bottle to get him high. This is what victory feels like, he thought dazedly.

He’d fought Yaninans before. He’d beaten them before. But that had been only a skirmish, and part of the Unkerlanter army’s long retreat to Sulingen. His comrades and he weren’t retreating any more. They were moving forward, and the Yaninans could not stand in their way.

King Tsavellas’ men fought more bravely now than they had then. They kept trying to hold back the Unkerlanter flood, and they forced pauses- but never for long. Behemoths and dragons and eggs raining down from fast-moving tossers soon overwhelmed them. It was, Leudast thought, the way the Algarvians had won so many victories against his own countrymen. Curse me if our officers haven’t learned something after all.

But, especially after their first lines were breached, most of the Yaninans either ran away or threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. They went into captivity with smiles on their faces-relieved smiles at still being alive or sheepish smiles at being captured in a kingdom that didn’t belong to them.

“Not my war,” one of them said in oddly accented Unkerlanter as he surrendered to Leudast. “Algarve’s war.” He spat on the dirt. “This for Algarve.”

“Aye, that for Algarve.” Leudast spat, too. “So what were you doing fighting for the redheads, then?”

“I no fight, they blaze me,” the Yaninan answered. To Unkerlanter eyes, he was a sorry, scrawny little man, with a mustache too big for his face. He shrugged and shivered. “I fight. Till now.”

“Go on.” Leudast pointed back toward the east. Lots of scrawny little Yaninans were shambling off into captivity. They held their hands high to keep King Swemmel’s advancing soldiers from blazing them.

Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the Yaninan. He hadn’t wanted to go into the Unkerlanter army, either. When the impressers grabbed him, though, he’d had no choice. King Swemmel’s servants might not have been so gentle as just to blaze him had he tried to tell them no.

That night, he and Lieutenant Recared and half a dozen soldiers crowded into an abandoned peasant hut. Recared was jubilant. “We have them on the run, by the powers above,” he said. “They can’t hold us back. Once we broke through this morning, we sealed their fate.”

“Aye, so far, so good,” Leudast agreed, rubbing his leg. It ached; he hadn’t expected to use it so hard. He wished he could rest it come tomorrow. But he’d be marching just as hard then, and he knew it. He also didn’t want Recared making too much of what the army had accomplished. “You have to remember, these are only Yaninans. It’ll be a lot tougher when we have to deal with the redheads.”

Most of the men in the hut had seen more action than Recared. Several of them nodded. But Recared said, “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. Aye, the Algarvians are tough, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. If we break through these weak sisters, we can cement our positions and make the Algarvians try to bang their way out of Sulingen against us.”

Leudast didn’t like the prospect of Algarvians trying to bang their way out of anywhere, especially not if they were going to try to do it through a position he was holding. They’d already pulled off too many astounding and appalling things. Why wouldn’t they be able to manage one more?

But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a possible answer occurred to him. Thoughtfully, he said, “There’s already snow on the ground. Mezentio’s men don’t do so well in snow.”

He didn’t love snow himself. But if he wasn’t better in it than any Algarvian ever born, what good was he? He rolled himself in his blanket, huddled up against the rest of the Unkerlanters in the tumbledown shack, and slept, if not well, then well enough.

Recared roused the soldiers before sunup. “We go hard today,” he said. “We go as hard tomorrow. Then, with luck, the next day-we win glory for our king. This is the most efficient attack we’ve ever carried out.”

There Leudast could hardly argue with him. Most of what he ate for breakfast was what he’d stolen from Yaninans. That was efficient, too. He wiped his hands on his tunic, left the hut, and tramped east.

Till noon, or a little after, everything went as it had the day before. Scattered and stubborn regiments of Yaninans fought hard. Their countrymen went right on giving up by the hundreds, by the thousands. Then the first Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. Some of them dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters. Others attacked their footsoldiers and, wherever they could, their behemoths.

Staring at the burnt carcass of a behemoth roasted in its own chainmail, Leudast cursed. “I knew we weren’t going to have it all our own way,” he told the cloudy sky.

He waited for Algarvian footsoldiers to stiffen the Yaninans, too. But no redheads came to the rescue of King Tsavellas’ men. And there were more Unkerlanter dragons in the air than those belonging to their enemies. The Algarvian dragonfliers stung the Unkerlanter army in a few places. Without steady soldiers on the ground to back them up, they could do no more than sting.

Recared had guessed four or five days. He was young. He believed things always went just as planned. That made him overoptimistic. But, just over a week after the Unkerlanters started their push, Leudast saw men coming toward him who did not shy away as the Yaninans did. They were solid, blocky men in long tunics, men who shouted in delight when they saw him.

He folded one of them into a bear hug. “By the powers above, we’ve got the redheads in a sack!” he shouted, and tears of joy streamed down his grimy, unshaven cheeks.

“Step it up, there!” Sergeant Werferth shouted. “It’s not a game, you lugs. We don’t get to start over. Move, curse you all!”

Sidroc did some cursing of his own. He was cold and tired and hungry. He wanted to hole up somewhere with a bottle of brandy and a roast goose. He hadn’t fully realized when he joined Plegmund’s Brigade that there was no such thing as time off. When the underofficers and officers set over him told him to do something, he had to do it. He’d already seen the sorts of things that happened to men who didn’t do as they were told. He wasn’t interested in having any of those things happen to him.

He scratched. He itched, too. He itched everywhere. When he complained about it, the trooper nearest him, the ruffian named Ceorl, started to laugh. “You’re a lousy whoreson, just like the rest of us.”

He meant it literally. Sidroc needed a moment to realize that. When he did, he started cursing all over again. He’d grown up in a prosperous household in Gromheort. Lice were for filthy people, for poor people, not for the likes of him.

But he was filthy. He could hardly help being filthy. When he slept indoors at all, he slept in huts that had belonged to filthy Unkerlanter peasants. If they had lice-and they likely did-how could he help getting them? For that matter, he was poor. Nobody got rich on the pay in Plegmund’s Brigade.

“Come on!” Werferth shouted again, with profane embellishment. “Swemmel’s bastards went and gave Algarve a boot in the nuts, and now it’s up to us to pay ‘em back. And we’ll do it, too, right?”

“I’m going to pay somebody back for making me slog through this miserable, freezing country,” Sidroc growled.

Ceorl laughed again, even less pleasantly than before. “You think it’s cold now, wait a couple months. Your joint’ll freeze off when you whip it out to take a leak.”

“Powers below eat you, too.” But Sidroc made sure he spoke lightly. Ceorl was not a man to curse in earnest unless you intended to back up the words with fists or knife or stick.

An Algarvian captain swaggered along, looking altogether superior to the Forthwegians around him. Sidroc didn’t think he was lousy; no lice would have dared crawl through that perfectly combed coppery hair. But even the officer looked worried. As Werferth had said, the Unkerlanters had hit Algarve where it hurt.

“Up to us to save their bacon, boys,” the sergeant said. “But it’s our bacon, too. That army in Sulingen goes up in flames, we burn with it.”

Where nothing else had, that got Sidroc’s attention. He didn’t want to die anywhere. He especially didn’t want to die here in the chilly wastes of southern Unkerlant. “I see how Swemmel’s men got to be such whoresons,” he said to Ceorl. “If I lived in this miserable place, I’d be mean, too.”

The ruffian laughed, the smoke from his breath puffing out as he did. “I’m from Forthweg, by the powers above, and I’m the meanest whoreson around. Anybody who says different, I’ll deal with him.”

“Shut up, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “You want to be a mean son of a whore, take it out on the Unkerlanters, not on my ears.”

Ceorl scowled at him. But Werferth was not only a tough customer himself, he was also a sergeant. If Ceorl tangled with him, he didn’t tangle with him alone, but also with the entire structure of Plegmund’s Brigade-and ultimately with the Algarvian army, to which the brigade was attached.

“Keep your eyes open. Ears, too,” Werferth added. “We’re liable to run into irregulars-and we’re liable to run into real Unkerlanter soldiers, to boot. Since they came swarming out at us, powers above only know where they’re all at right now.”

Sidroc’s head swiveled now to one side, now to the other. All he saw were snow-covered fields. By the way his sergeant and the Algarvian officers had warned the brigade, those fields might hold thousands of bloodthirsty Unkerlanters in white smocks, every one of them ready to spring to his feet and charge with a roar of “Urra!”

They might. Sidroc didn’t believe it, not for a minute. The fields were just fields, the bare-branched woods farther away just woods. He didn’t see any Unkerlanters anywhere. Nobody rose up out of the fields with fierce shouts of “Urra!”-or with any other shouts, for that matter. The countryside, having been fought over, was as empty and dead as it looked.

And that suited him. Like most soldiers, he was no more anxious to fight than he had to be. He’d enjoyed terrorizing peasant villages back in the Duchy-no, the Kingdom-of Grelz. That was about his speed. He would have been perfectly happy to go right on doing it. But the Unkerlanters had pissed in the stewpot of the Algarvian campaign, and so here he was, soldiering for real.

“Dragons!” someone exclaimed in alarm, pointing south.

Sidroc stared that way in no small alarm himself, but only for an instant. The next thing he did was look around for a hole into which he might dive. He wasn’t thrilled with real soldiering, but he’d learned what mattered.

“They’re ours,” Werferth said in some relief.

Ceorl challenged him: “How do you know?” He might not want to brawl with the sergeant, but he didn’t mind giving him a hard time.

But Werferth had an answer for him: “Because they’re turning away from us instead of dropping eggs on our heads.”

Thin and faint in the distance, several eggs burst, one after another. Sidroc laughed. “No, they’re dropping ‘em on the Unkerlanters instead. Those bastards deserve it. I hope they all get smashed to bits.”

“They won’t.” Sergeant Werferth spoke with gloomy certainty. “And it’ll be up to the likes of us to stop the ones who’re left. You can count on that, too.” Now he pointed south. “Wherever those eggs are bursting, that’s where Swemmel’s men are at. If we can hear the eggs, they aren’t that far away. You want to go home to mother in one piece, stay awake.”

Going home to mother was not a choice Sidroc had. An Algarvian egg had taken care of that, back when the redheads overran Gromheort. And here he was, doing his best to get the Algarvians out of the soup. He shook his head as he trudged along. He’d watched Mezentio’s men ever since they entered his kingdom. They were strong. They had style. They’d smashed Forthweg into the dust. By joining them, didn’t he make himself strong and stylish?

What he’d made himself so far was cold and nervous. He trudged up to the top of a low rise and got the chance to do some pointing himself. “Isn’t that a village up ahead, here on this side of the stream?”

“That is a village.” An Algarvian officer behind him had heard his question, and chose to answer it. He spoke his own language, expecting Sidroc to understand. “The name of the village is Presseck. The stream is also the Presseck. There is a bridge over the Presseck in the village. We will occupy the village. We will hold the bridge. We will keep the Unkerlanters from crossing it.”

“Aye, sir,” Sidroc said. The redheads liked polite soldiers. They had plenty of ways to make you sorry if you weren’t polite, too. Sidroc had learned that back in his first training camp, outside of Eoforwic.

A few Unkerlanter peasants-old men and boys-came out of their huts to gape at the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade. Their women stayed in hiding, or maybe they’d run away. Presseck looked to be as miserable a place as any other Unkerlanter village Sidroc had seen. The Presseck, however, was more nearly a river than a stream, and the bridge that spanned it a solid stone structure.

Sergeant Werferth pointed to that bridge. “You see why we may have to hold this place, boys. The Unkerlanters could put behemoths over it easy as you please, and we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun if they did.”

Along with his comrades-except for the two squads the Algarvian officers ordered across to the south side of the Presseck-Sidroc ransacked the village. The women had fled. There wasn’t much food in Presseck, either. By the time the soldiers finished, there was less.

Mist rose from the stream as the sun set and day cooled toward evening. It spread through the village, turning the shacks into vague ghosts of themselves.

“Stay alert,” Werferth told his squad. “Anybody the Unkerlanters kill, he’ll answer to me.” The troopers had to work that one through before they chuckled or snorted.

Sidroc drew sentry duty just before dawn. He paced the narrow, filthy streets of Presseck, wishing he could see farther through the fog. Once he almost blazed one of his own countrymen who’d taken on too much in the way of spirits and was looking for a place to heave.

It got lighter, little by little, without clearing much. Sidroc was beginning to think about breakfast and maybe even a little sleep when, from the south, he heard heavy footfalls and the jingle of chainmail. “Behemoths!” he exclaimed, and ran toward the bridge. He couldn’t see a thing, though.

He wasn’t the only one there to try. The Algarvian officer who’d told him the name of the village stood staring across the Presseck. The redhead couldn’t see anything, either. “Whose beasts are those?” he called urgently to the men on the south side of the stream. When they didn’t answer fast enough to suit him, he ran across the bridge to see for himself. His boots clattered on the stone.

He hadn’t got more than halfway across when a glad cry rang out: “They’re ours, sir.” The Algarvian kept running. A moment later, he too shouted happily.

Staring through the fog, Sidroc saw several great shapes moving toward him on the bridge. Sure enough, the lead behemoth wore Algarvian-style chainmail and was draped in banners of green, red, and white. So was the second. The third. .

With sunrise, the breeze picked up. The mist swirled and billowed. When Sidroc got a good look at the third behemoth, he froze for a moment in horror worse than any he’d ever imagined. Then he shouted, as loud as he could: “It’s a trick! They’re Unkerlanters!”

He was right. It did him no good whatever. By then, the first behemoth, which wore captured armor and false colors, had almost reached his end of the bridge. Its crew-who, he saw, had even dyed their hair to make the imposture better-started tossing eggs into Presseck. Those bursts woke men Sidroc’s shout hadn’t: woke them, too often, to terror and torment.

Sidroc blazed at the Unkerlanters. But they, like their behemoths, were well armored. The beast thundered forward, onto the north bank of the Presseck. Then the one behind it, also disguised, gained the northern bank. After them came a long column of behemoths honestly Unkerlanter. A heavy stick started a fire in one of the huts in Presseck.

The men of Plegmund’s Brigade fought the Unkerlanters as hard as they could. They slew a good many of the men aboard the behemoths, and even a couple of the massive animals themselves. But they had no hope of holding the bridge or driving the foe back over the Presseck. Along with his comrades, Sidroc battled on till hope, and a good many of the men, died. And at the last, he and the rest of the troopers still alive did what they had to do: they fled.

Cornelu patted his leviathan: not a command, a gesture of affection. “Do you see how lucky we are?” he said to the beast. “We get to go north for the winter.”

Back in the lost and distant days of peacetime, many people from Lagoas and Kuusamo-aye, and from Sibiu, too-had gone on winter holiday to the subtropic beaches of northern Jelgava, to lie on the sand burdened by a minimum of clothing if by any at all and to drink the citrus-flavored wines for which the kingdom was famous. Love affairs in Jelgava had filled the pages of trashy romances. But if anyone went on holiday there these days, it was Algarvian soldiers recuperating from the dreadful cold of Unkerlant.

As far as the leviathan was concerned, cold wasn’t dreadful. It preferred the waters of the Narrow Sea to those off the coast of Jelgava. Why not? Plenty of blubber kept it warm. And the Narrow Sea swarmed with fish and squid. Pickings were thinner in these parts.

But the leviathan didn’t go hungry here. When a fat tunny swam past, it gave chase and ran the fish down. It was a big tunny; the leviathan had to make two bites of it. The water turned red. That might draw sharks, but they would be sorry if they came.

At Cornelu’s signal, the leviathan stood on its tail so he could see farther. Two mountains were visible to his right, one to his left. One of the mountains to his right had a notch in its slope. He nodded and signaled that the leviathan might relax back into the water.

“We are where we’re supposed to be,” he said, urging his mount closer to the shore. Before long, he could hear waves slapping the beach.

He halted the leviathan at that point, not wanting to get so close as to risk stranding it. He hadn’t come all the way to the far north; with luck, the beach would be deserted-except for the man he was supposed to pick up.

After inflating a small rubber raft, he told the leviathan, “Stay,” and used the taps on the animal’s smooth, slick hide that turned the order into something it could grasp. Such a command wouldn’t hold it there indefinitely, but he didn’t intend to be gone long. Then he struck out for the shore.

At first, he thought the beach altogether empty. That wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. He wondered if something had gone wrong. If the Algarvians had nabbed the man he was supposed to get, they were liable to be lying in wait for him, too. He wished his line of work had no risks attached, but things didn’t work that way. He kept on pushing the raft toward the beach.

Some of the waves were bigger than they’d looked from out to sea. Riding them on the raft gave him some hint of what a leviathan felt like when gliding effortlessly through the water. Certain savages on the islands of the Great Northern Sea, he’d read, rode the waves upright, standing on boards. He’d thought that barbaric foolishness when he saw it in print. Now he realized it might be fun.

Then a wave curled over him and plunged him into the water, knocking away the raft. Had he not been fortified with a leviathan-rider’s spells, he might have drowned. He clawed his way to the surface and recaptured the raft. Maybe those wave-riding savages weren’t so smart after all.

Water dripping from his rubber suit, he splashed up onto the beach. Overhead, a gull mewed. Sandpipers scurried by the ocean’s edge, now and then pecking at something or other in the wet sand. As far as he could tell, he had the beach to himself but for the birds.

“Hallo!” he called, ready to fight or to dive back into the sea and try to escape if Algarvians answered him. On that wide, empty strand, his cry seemed as small and lost as the gull’s.

And then, a moment later, an answering “Hallo!” floated to his ears. Almost a quarter of a mile to the north, a small figure came up over the top of a sand dune and waved in his direction. Waving back, he walked toward the other man. He waddled awkwardly because of the rubber paddles on his feet.

“Call me Belo,” he said, the Lagoan phrase he’d been given back in Setubal.

“Call me Bento,” the other man replied, also in Lagoan. Cornelu didn’t think the other fellow was a Lagoan, though. Small and slight and swarthy, with black hair and slanted eyes, he looked like a full-blooded Kuusaman. Whatever he was, he was no fool. Recognizing the five-crown emblem on the left breast of Cornelu’s rubber suit, he said, “Sib, eh? How much Lagoan do you speak?”

“Not much.” Cornelu switched languages: “Classical Kaunian will do.”

“Aye, it generally serves,” the man who called himself Bento said in the same tongue. “Leaving will also do, and do nicely. I don’t think they are on my track, but I don’t care to wait around and find out I am wrong, either.”

“I can see how you would not.” Cornelu pointed back toward the raft. “We can go. You are sorcerously warded against travel in the sea?”

“I came here by leviathan,” Bento said. “I have not been here long enough for the protections to have staled.” Wasting no more time on conversation, he stripped off his tunic and trousers and started toward the raft.

Pushing it out through the booming waves proved harder than riding it to the beach had been, but Cornelu and Bento managed. After they’d reached the calmer sea farther from shore, Cornelu helped the smaller man into the raft, then swam toward the waiting leviathan, pushing Bento ahead of him. As he swam, he asked, “Why did they send a Kuusaman down into Jelgava?”

“Because I knew what needed doing,” Bento answered placidly. That might even have been his real name; it sounded almost as Kuusaman as Lagoan.

“Could they not have found someone of Kaunian blood who knew the same things, whatever they are?” Cornelu said. He knew better than to ask spies about their missions. Still. . “You are not the least conspicuous man in Jelgava, looking as you do.”

Bento laughed. “In Jelgava, I did not look this way. To eyes there, I was as pale and yellow-haired as any Kaunian. I abandoned the sorcerous disguise when I needed it no longer.”

“Ah,” Cornelu said. So Bento was a mage, then. That came as no real surprise. “I hope you put sand in the Algarvians’ salt.”

A Lagoan might have bragged. Even a Sibian might have. Bento only shrugged and answered, “I sowed some seeds, perhaps. When they will come to ripeness, or if they will grow tall, is anyone’s guess.”

“Ah,” Cornelu said again, this time acknowledging that he recognized he wouldn’t get much out of Bento. He looked around for the leviathan, which obligingly surfaced just then, not more than fifty yards away.

“A fine animal,” Bento said in tones that implied he knew leviathans. “But Lagoan, not Sibian-or am I mistaken?”

“No, that is so,” Cornelu said. “How did you know?” How strong a mage are you? was the unspoken question behind the one he asked.

But Bento only chuckled. “I could tell you all manner of fantastic lies. But the truth is, the animal wears Lagoan harness. I have seen what Sibiu uses, and it attaches round the flippers rather differently.”

“Oh.” Well, Cornelu had already seen that Bento didn’t miss much: the fellow tabbed him for a Sibian right away. “You notice things quickly.”

“They are there to be noticed,” Bento replied. Cornelu grunted in response to that. The Kuusaman laughed at him. “And now you are thinking I am some sort of sage, subsisting on melted snow and-” He spoke a couple of words of classical Kaunian Cornelu couldn’t catch.

“What was that?” the leviathan-rider asked.

“Reindeer dung,” Bento answered in Lagoan, which jerked a startled laugh from Cornelu. Returning to the language of scholarship, Bento continued, “It is not so. I like roast beef as well as any man, and I like looking at pretty women-and doing other things with them-as well as any man, too.”

“Some of the Jelgavan women are pretty enough,” Cornelu observed.

Bento shrugged. “You would be likelier to think so than would I, because Kaunian women look more like those of Sibiu than like those of Kuusamo. To me, most of them are too big and beefy to be appealing.”

Cornelu shrugged, too. He’d been married to a woman who suited him fine. The trouble was, she’d suited the officers the Algarvians billeted in his house, too. Of course, Sibians and Algarvians were closest kin. Maybe that proved Bento’s point. Cornelu wished he could stop thinking about Costache. Thinking about Janira helped. But even thinking about the new woman in his life couldn’t take away the pain of the old one’s betrayal.

He couldn’t ask Bento much about what he’d been doing in Jelgava. Instead, he chose a question that had to do with occupation, which was also on his mind whenever he thought of Costache: “How do the Kaunians up here like living under Algarvian rule?”

“About as well as you would expect: they do not like it much,” Bento answered. “Kaunians like it even less than other folk, because of what the redheaded barbarians in kilts are doing to their people in Forthweg.” He raised an eyebrow. “No offense intended, I assure you.”

“None taken,” Cornelu said dryly. Redheaded barbarians in kilts could apply to Sibians as readily as to Algarvians. The Kaunians of imperial days doubtless had applied it impartially to Cornelu’s ancestors, and to Lagoans, and to other Algarvic tribes that no longer kept their separate identities. Cornelu said, “Were you helping them feel even happier about living under Algarvian rule?”

“Something like that, perhaps,” Bento said, smiling at the irony. “If Mezentio needs more men to garrison Jelgava, he will have a harder time getting enough for Unkerlant. And what is the latest from Unkerlant, if I may ask? The news sheets in Jelgava have been very quiet lately, which I take to be a good sign.”

“By what I heard before I left Setubal, Swemmel’s men have cut off the Algarvians in Sulingen from the rest of their forces,” Cornelu answered. “If they cannot force their way out-or if the Algarvians farther north cannot force their way in-Mezentio’s dragon will have a big fang pulled from its jaw.”

“I am surprised you did not say, ‘Mezentio’s leviathan,’ “ Bento remarked.

“Not I,” Cornelu said. “I care what happens to leviathans. Dragons are nasty beasts. For all of me, they can lose plenty of fangs.”

“Fair enough.” The Kuusaman looked back over his shoulder. “No one pursues. Aye, I may have got away clean.”

“Did you expect otherwise?” Cornelu wondered how close he’d come to sticking his head into a trap.

“One never knows,” Bento said primly.

“That is true,” Cornelu agreed. He thought of everything in the war that hadn’t gone the way people-people outside Algarve, anyhow-expected. And now, down in southern Unkerlant, Mezentio’s men were learning the same hard, painful lesson. “One never knows.” The leviathan swam on, south toward Setubal.

“Come on, lads,” Colonel Sabrino called to his men. “We’ve got to get into the air again. If we don’t, our chums down in Sulingen are going to give us a hard time once we finally win this stinking war.”

If his wing of dragons didn’t get into the air-and if a lot of other important things didn’t happen-the Algarvians in Sulingen would be massacred, and in no position to give anybody a hard time about what he did or didn’t do. And if a lot of those other important things didn’t happen, the war would become that much harder to win.

That was as close as Sabrino cared to come to thinking the war might be lost. He didn’t think that. He wouldn’t think that. “Come on,” he said again, and his dragonfliers hurried out to their beasts.

He shivered as he went, though his clothes were warm enough even for southern Unkerlant in winter-dragons flew high enough to make warm clothing a necessity. That was one of the few advantages to being a dragonflier he could see. But the cold made the beasts he and his fellow fliers rode even more bad-tempered than they were in warm weather.

He’d been flying his own mount since the days when the war was new. That was more than three years now. It wasn’t long enough to make the miserable beast sure it recognized him as he came up to it. He could have waited an eternity for that, and been disappointed at the end of it. The dragon screamed and lifted its head on the end of its snaky neck and made as if to flame him.

But, of all the training it had got, being forbidden to flame except on command had been beaten into it most thoroughly. And Sabrino whacked it on the nose with his goad and shouted, “No! No, you stupid, vicious, brainless thing!”

Still screeching, the dragon subsided and suffered Sabrino to perch at the base of its neck. All over the makeshift dragon farm, fliers were cursing and beating their beasts into submission. Sabrino hated dragons with the intimacy of long acquaintance. He didn’t know a dragonflier who felt otherwise.

A handler trotted up and released the chain that held the dragon to its stake. The beast shrieked at him, too, even though he fed it. Looking around, Sabrino saw most of the flight free. He whacked his dragon with the goad, once to the left, once to the right. For a wonder, the dragon remembered what the signal meant. Its great batwings thundered as it beat them again and again until it hurtled itself into the sky.

Sabrino’s wing numbered thirty-one. Back in Trapani, the generals who’d never been to the fighting front no doubt assumed he led sixty-four men and beasts. He did on paper, after all. And, when the generals back in Trapani gave him orders, they assumed paper and reality matched, and told him to do things he would have had trouble doing even with a full complement of men and dragons. He wished wars were fought on paper. They would have been a lot easier.

This war was being fought on the pocked, battered, snow-streaked plains of southern Unkerlant. Swemmel’s men had a ring around Sulingen, and the Algarvians were trying to scrape together enough men to break through the ring and either get reinforcements to the army pinned down there or, that failing, to get the soldiers out before the noose tightened unbearably.

Looking down, Sabrino saw scattered units of footsoldiers and behemoths who flew banners of red and green and white to keep Algarvian dragonfliers from flaming them and dropping eggs on them by mistake. Where they were going to magic up enough soldiers for an attack, especially in this weather, was beyond him. They’d have to come from somewhere, though. He couldn’t imagine Sulingen left to wither on the vine.

On flew the dragons. The sun came out from behind a cloud, spreading a cold, clear light over the countryside. Clad all in white, the Unkerlanters and their behemoths were hard to see from any height. They couldn’t do anything about the long shadows they cast, though. Sabrino spotted a column of behemoths moving north and west from the Presseck River, as intent on widening the ring around Sulingen as the Algarvians were on breaking it.

He pulled out his crystal and spoke to his squadron commanders: “See ‘em down there, boys? Let’s cook up some of those ambling roasts in their own pans.”

“Aye, Colonel.” Captain Domiziano still sounded boyish. A bold swoop down on the foe was just his meat.

But the Unkerlanters had seen the Algarvian dragons, too. Sabrino bore a healthy respect for the heavy sticks Unkerlanter behemoths carried. One of them could blaze a dragon out of the sky-if the crew aboard the behemoth could bring it to bear. Down on the ground, the crews of those behemoths were going to try.

“Dive!” Sabrino shouted. He thwacked the dragon with the goad.

The dragon folded its wings and plummeted. The order to dive was one it obeyed with a better temper than most others, because even its feeble brain had learned that the order to flame would soon follow. If the dragon enjoyed doing anything, it enjoyed killing.

Wind whipped past Sabrino’s face. Without his goggles, it would have blinded him. He steered the dragon toward a behemoth with a heavy stick. The Unkerlanters riding that behemoth frantically slewed the stick toward him. If they got it pointed in the right direction before he came close enough to flame … In that case, his mistress would have to find someone else to keep her in her fancy flat, and his wife might be unhappy, too. On the other hand, she might not.

“Now!” he shouted as he thwacked the dragon again. It roared out a great gout of fire-not quite such a long gout as Sabrino would have liked, for cinnabar was in short supply. But the flame proved long enough. It washed over the behemoth, and its crew, and the stick. As Sabrino flew past overhead, he heard the drying groans and shrieks of the beast and the men who had ridden it.

He hit the dragon with the goad again, urging it to gain height for another pass against the Unkerlanters. His dragonfliers, veterans all, had had the same idea he had: they’d gone for the behemoths mounting heavy sticks, because those were the ones that were dangerous to them. And now, as best he could see, all those behemoths lay on the cold ground, either dead already or thrashing in mortal agony.

A dragon lay on the cold ground thrashing in mortal agony, too. Sabrino cursed: one behemoth crew had been a heartbeat faster than the first dragon that assailed them. He wondered who’d gone down. Whoever it was, the wing couldn’t afford the loss. One of the things Sabrino, like most Algarvians, hadn’t fully realized was how vast Unkerlant really was, how many men and dragons and behemoths and horses and unicorns King Swemmel could summon to war. Any losses against such numbers hurt.

“Second round,” he told his squadron commanders. “We’ve got rid of the ones who could really hurt us-now we deal with the rest.”

Behemoths carrying egg-tossers were deadly dangerous to footsoldiers, but not to dragonfliers. Hitting a dragon with an egg was possible, but anything but likely. And the behemoth crews’ personal sticks weren’t strong enough to blaze down dragons unless they caught one in the eye. Of course, if they blazed a dragonflier instead, his dragon turned back into a wild animal on the instant.

The Unkerlanters knew all that as well as he did. The column broke up, behemoths lumbering off in every direction. The more scattered the target they presented, the harder time the dragon would have hunting them down.

As Sabrino’s mount flew over the road where his wing had first assailed the column, a stink of burnt flesh filled his nostrils for a breath. Sure as sure, they’d roasted the behemoths in their own pans. They’d roasted some Unkerlanters in their own armor, too; charred man’s-flesh was part of the stench.

During the winter before, Algarvian footsoldiers had eaten slain behemoths, eaten them and been glad to have them. Sabrino’s dragon, and others in the wing, had fed on such flesh, too. As a dragonflier, he hadn’t had to eat of it himself. Rank and prestigious service had their privileges.

Choosing an Unkerlanter behemoth, he urged his dragon along after it. The behemoth was running as hard as it could, snow and dirt flying up from its feet at every bound. Compared to the speed a dragon made, it might as well have been standing still. Sabrino drew close enough to see that the Unkerlanters even covered the beast’s tail in a sleeve of rusty chainmail. That might have warded it against a footsoldier’s stick, but not against dragonfire.

Again, the tongue of fire his mount loosed wasn’t long enough to suit Sabrino. But he’d deliberately waited till he was almost on top of the behemoth before freeing the dragon to flame. That meant he had to lie low along the beast’s neck to present as small a target as he could to the Unkerlanters. He’d done that before; he did it again now.

After a couple of stumbling steps, the behemoth went down. Sabrino looked around for another one to pursue, and hoped his dragon had enough flame left to do what needed doing. He’d just spotted a beast he thought he could reach when Captain Domiziano’s visage appeared in his crystal. “Unkerlanters dragons,” the squadron commander said. “They’re coming up out of the south, and closing fast.”

Sabrino’s head whipped around. Domiziano was right. King Swemmel’s dragonfliers were getting closer in a hurry. Sabrino cursed again-they were already closer than they should have been. The rock-gray paint the Unkerlanters slapped on them made them demonically hard to spot.

Still cursing, Sabrino said, “We’ll have to pull up and deal with them. Then, if we can, we’ll get back to the behemoths.”

Once he’d given the order, his men knew what to do. They were better trained than the Unkerlanters opposing them, and they flew better-trained dragons, too. But Swemmel kept throwing fresh dragonfliers and fresh men into the fight, and Algarve didn’t have so many of either.

For a couple of minutes, the skies above the plains of southern Unkerlant were a mad melee. The Unkerlanter dragons might not have been well-trained, but they were well-rested. And the flames that spurted from their jaws proved their meat had been dusted with plenty of brimstone and quicksilver. Two Algarvian dragons plummeted to the ground in quick succession.

Then Sabrino’s wing, though outnumbered, rallied. Two of their dragons would attack one Unkerlanter. When the Algarvians were attacked, they came to one another’s aid quickly and without any fuss. Sabrino blazed an Unkerlanter flier, whose dragon promptly attacked the rock-gray beast closest to it.

By the time the Unkerlanters had lost half a dozen dragonfliers, they decided they’d had enough. Off they flew, back the way they’d come. “A good day’s work,” Domiziano said in the crystal. “We made ‘em pay.”

“Aye.” But Sabrino’s agreement felt hollow. His wing had smashed up the column of Unkerlanter behemoths, and they’d given better than they got in the air. At the level Domiziano was talking about, that did make a good day’s work. But did it bring the Algarvians much closer to being able to break through to Sulingen? Not that Sabrino could see. To him, that was the level that mattered. At that level, the wing had hardly done anything at all.

Rain pattered down on Hajjaj’s roof. And, as it had a way of doing almost every winter, rain pattered down through Hajjaj’s roof. The Zuwayzi foreign minister stood with hands on hips, watching the leaks plop into pots and pans servants had set out. Turning to his majordomo, he said, “Refresh my memory. Did we or did we not have the roofers out here last year?”

“Aye, young fellow, we did,” Tewfik answered in his usual gravelly tones.

“And what sort of lying excuse will they give when we ask them why we have to call them out again?” Hajjaj waved his hands above his head, a perfect transport of temper for him. “They’ll say the roof never leaks as long as it doesn’t rain, that’s what they’ll tell us!”

“More likely, they’ll just say they didn’t fix this particular stretch.” Tewfik raised one white, shaggy eyebrow. “That’s what they always say.”

“Powers below eat them and their lying excuses both,” Hajjaj snapped.

“We need the rain,” the majordomo said. “Getting so much of it at once is a bloody nuisance, though.”

By the standards of more southerly lands, what the hills outside Bishah got wasn’t much in the way of rain. Hajjaj knew that. In his university days in Trapani, he’d found a land so moist, he’d thought he would grow mold. Buildings in other kingdoms were made really watertight, because they had to be. In Zuwayza, heat was the main foe, with rain treated as an inconvenient afterthought-when builders bothered to think of it at all, which they didn’t always.

“When the roofers do get here-if they ever choose to come-I aim to give them a piece of my mind,” Hajjaj said, his tone suggesting he wasn’t so far removed from his desert-warrior ancestors after all.

Before he could go into bloodthirsty detail, one of his servants came up, bowed low before him, and said, “Your Excellency, the image of your secretary has appeared in the crystal. He would speak with you.”

Qutuz lived down in Bishah, and could not use the rain as an excuse for staying away from the foreign ministry. He also knew better than to disturb Hajjaj at home unless something important had come up. With a sigh, Hajjaj went from bloodthirsty nomad to suave diplomat. “Thank you, Mehdawi. Of course I will speak with him.”

“Good day, your Excellency,” Qutuz said when Hajjaj sat down in front of the crystal. “How is your roof? The one over my head here at the palace leaks.”

“So does mine,” the foreign minister replied. “I trust that is not the reason for this conversation?”

“Oh, no.” Qutuz shook his head. “But Iskakis’ secretary has just paid a call on me, asking if you could possibly meet the Yaninan minister here this afternoon, a little before the hour for tea. He is waiting in the outer office-which also leaks-to take your reply back to his principal.”

“Well, well. Isn’t that interesting? I wonder what he might want to say to me.” Hajjaj rubbed his chin. “Aye, I’ll see him. I’d better find out what’s in his mind.” I’d better find out if anything is in his mind. His opinion of the Yaninan was not high.

Tewfik made the predictable complaints when Hajjaj proposed going out in the rain. Having got them out of his system, the majordomo made sure the carriage was ready. In truth, the journey down to the city on a road muddy rather than its usual dusty self was slow and unpleasant, but Hajjaj endured it.

Roofers were banging overhead when he reached the foreign ministry. As always, the palace could call on their services with some hope of actually getting them. No one else could. “Miserable day, isn’t it?” Qutuz said.

“It is, and seeing Iskakis does nothing to improve it,” Hajjaj answered. “Still and all, if I have to wear clothes, I’d sooner do it in winter than in summer.”

“Have you got a Yaninan outfit in the closet, your Excellency?” Qutuz asked.

“No, I’ll dress in Algarvian clothes,” Hajjaj said. “That will show Iskakis I do remember we have the same allies.” And, right this minute, I expect we both find the Algarvians equally unpalatable.

He put on the tunic and kilt-their cut was years out of fashion, which worried him not at all-and waited. He had a considerable wait; despite having set the hour for the meeting, Iskakis was late. When the Yaninan minister finally did arrive, Hajjaj exacted a measure of revenge by stretching out the Zuwayzi ritual of wine and tea and cakes as long as he could.

As he sipped and nibbled, he watched the Yaninan fume. Iskakis was in his fifties, short and bald and swarthy for a light-skinned man, with a big gray mustache and big gray tufts of hair sticking out of his ears. In Algarvian, the only tongue they shared, Hajjaj said, “I trust the lovely lady your wife is well?”

That was a commonplace of the small talk which had to accompany wine and tea and cakes. It was also a barb. Iskakis’ wife was lovely, and couldn’t have been more than half his age. Maybe she didn’t know the minister preferred pretty boys, but everyone else in Bishah did. “She is very well,” Iskakis said grudgingly. He shifted on the mound of pillows he’d built for himself. The pompoms that decorated his shoes wobbled back and forth. Hajjaj watched them in fascination. He never had been able to figure out why the Yaninans found them decorative.

At last, any further delay would have been openly rude. Qutuz carried off the silver tray on which he’d brought in the refreshments. Suppressing a sigh, Hajjaj got down to business: “And how may I serve you, your Excellency?”

Iskakis leaned forward. His dark eyes bored into Hajjaj’s. “I want to know your view of the course of the war,” he said, his tone suggesting he would tear that view from Hajjaj if the foreign minister didn’t give it to him. Kaunians and Algarvians who shared his tastes would more likely than not have seemed effeminate. Instead, he affected an exaggerated masculinity. That was familiar to Hajjaj, for most Zuwayzi men who preferred their own sex did the same.

“My view?” Hajjaj said. “My view is as it has always been: that the war is a great tragedy, and I wish it had never begun. As for how it will turn out, I can only hope for the best.”

“The best being an Algarvian triumph,” Iskakis said, again sounding as if he might spring on Hajjaj if the Zuwayzi presumed to disagree.

“Algarve is a better neighbor for us than is Unkerlant, not least because Algarve is a more distant neighbor,” Hajjaj said.

“Not for us,” Iskakis said bitterly, and Hajjaj had to nod. Yanina lay sandwiched between Algarve and Unkerlant, an unenviable position if ever there was one. With a scowl, Iskakis went on, “Things are not so good down in the southwest.”

“I have heard this, aye.” Hajjaj had heard it from his own generals, from boasts by the Unkerlanters in the broadsheets they sometimes rained down on Zuwayzi soldiers, and from the Algarvian minister. Marquis Balastro had been profanely inventive in explaining that things had gone wrong north of Sulingen not least on account of Yaninan cowardice. Hajjaj wondered if Balastro had been as inventive-and as profane-to Iskakis’ face. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

“What are we to do if the Algarvians piss away all the victories they have won?” Iskakis demanded.

He said nothing about the Yaninan army’s part in the Algarvians’ misfortunes, but then he wouldn’t. No matter what he didn’t say, the question was good. Hajjaj answered, “What other choice would we have but to make the best terms we could with Unkerlant?”

Iskakis tapped the back of his neck. “This is what Swemmel would give us.” The gesture made Hajjaj sure the Yaninans used an axe or headsman’s sword to dispose of miscreants. The minister tapped again. “This if we were lucky. Otherwise, we would go into the stewpot.”

Hajjaj would have been happier had Iskakis been wrong. He would also have been happier had the Algarvians made more pleasant allies. He doubted Iskakis cared about Kaunians one way or the other. On the other hand, King Mezentio’s men undoubtedly had a much tighter grip on Yanina than they did on Zuwayza. Hajjaj said, “I have no easy answers for you. What else is there to do but ride the camel we mounted till it will go no farther?”

“Together, have we not enough power to stop this war?” Iskakis said.

“No,” Hajjaj said bluntly. “We can hurt Algarve, aye, but how likely is Swemmel to show proper gratitude?”

That got through. Iskakis grimaced. He said, “I shall pass your words on to my sovereign.” Before Hajjaj could have even raise a finger, the Yaninan minister added, “You may rest assured, I shall pass them carefully.”

“You had better,” Hajjaj said. Yaninans were good at intrigue, better than they were at war. But the Algarvians had to know their allies felt restive.

Iskakis got to his feet, bowed, and left as grandly as if his kingdom’s soldiers had won triumphs by the dozen instead of embarrassing themselves far and wide. Hajjaj was still pondering the report he would give to King Shazli when Qutuz came in and said, “Your Excellency, Marquis Balastro is fain to speak to you by crystal.”

“Is he?” Hajjaj was anything but fain to speak to the Algarvian minister, but no one had asked his opinion. Having no real choice, he said, “I’m coming.”

Formal manners and polite delays went over the side in conversations by crystal. Without preamble, Balastro demanded, “Well, what did the little bald bugger want from you?”

“My recipe for a camel’s-milk fondue,” Hajjaj replied blandly.

Balastro said something uncharitable about camels-young male camels- and Iskakis. Then he said, “If Tsavellas stabs us in the back, Hajjaj, that doesn’t do you any good.”

“I never claimed it did,” Hajjaj replied. “But I also never said a word about what Iskakis discussed with me, nor do I intend to.”

“What else would a Yaninan talk about, especially when things have gone sour down in the south?” Balastro didn’t bother hiding his scorn.

“If you run low on Kaunians, perhaps you will be able to repair the front with the life energy you get from slaughtering the people of Patras or some other Yaninan town,” Hajjaj suggested, not in the least diplomatically.

Balastro glared. “Perhaps we will.” His voice was as cold as winter in Sulingen. “Perhaps you will recall on whose side you are, and whose friendship has let you-helped you-take back what is rightfully yours.”

That was, unfortunately, a straight blaze. “King Tsavellas, unlike my sovereign, is your ally only because he fears Swemmel more than you,” Hajjaj said. “We Zuwayzin like Algarvians-or we did, till you began what you began.” Many-maybe even most-of his people still did, but he forbore to mention that.

“If Tsavellas tries to diddle us, we’ll give him reason to fear us, by the powers above,” Balastro snarled. His eyes bored into Hajjaj’s. “And the same goes for King Shazli, your Excellency. You would do well to remember it.”

“Oh, I do,” Hajjaj said. “You may rest assured, I do.” He wasn’t sure Balastro heard that; the Algarvian minister’s image had disappeared after he delivered his threat. Hajjaj cursed softly. He would have loved to abandon Algarve. The only trouble was, King Shazli also feared Swemmel of Unkerlant more than Mezentio-and he too had good reason to do so.