Into the Darkness

9.

Marshal Rathar peered north across the Zuwayzi desert. Had King Swemmel let him use the plan his aides had long since developed, he might well have been in Bishah by now. So he reminded the king in every despatch he sent him. Maybe King Swemmel would pay attention and not start his next war too soon. Rathar sighed. Maybe dragons would stand up and start giving speeches, too, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for that, either.

And Rathar might well not have been in Bishah by now. He’d been forcibly made aware of that, though not a hint of it got into the letters he sent Swemmel. The Zuwayzin had had plans of their own, and they might have made them work even against the full weight of the Unkerlanter army.

Unkerlant had not had to fight a desert campaign since bringing Zuwayza under the rule of Cottbus. No one was left alive from those days, and the art of war had changed a good deal since. The Unkerlanter officer corps had not figured out how best to apply all the changes: the plan with which Unkerlant had gone to war involved nothing more complicated than hammering at Zuwayza till she broke.

“The black men know us better than we know them,” Rathar muttered discontentedly. That the Zuwayzin should have a good notion of what Unkerlant intended made all too much sense. Unkerlanters had been overlords in Zuwayza for more than a hundred years. Their resentful subjects had had to learn to know them well. The reverse, unfortunately, did not apply. All the Unkerlanters had done in Zuwayza was give orders. That hadn’t encouraged them to try to understand the dusky people on the other end of those orders.

A messenger came up and stood to attention, awaiting Rathar’s notice.

At last, Rathar nodded to him. The fellow said, “My lord, I have the honor to report that General Werpin’s force is ready for the attack over the Wadi Uqeiqa.” His tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables, so different from those of Unkerlanter.

“Good,” Rathar said, nodding. “I shall order the attack tomorrow morning, as planned. Go back to the crystals and tell General Werpin to keep a tight watch for camels on his flank.”

“Camels on his flank,” the messenger repeated. “Aye, my lord; just as you say.” He saluted and hurried away.

“Camels,” Rathar said, mostly to himself. “Who would have imagined camels could cause so much trouble?”

For more than a generation, the emphasis in most armies—all armies that could afford them—had been on great herds of behemoths. Behemoths could carry men and weapons and armor enough to make them invulnerable to a footsoldier’s stick. That made them the nearest terrestrial equivalent to warships. In the hands of the Algarvians, they’d smashed the Forthwegian army to bits. Rathar and his underlings were still studying how the redheads had done that.

Zuwayza, though, was proving less than ideal country for behemoths. They ate a lot. They drank even more. That wasn’t good, not in a landscape with many more wadis—dry riverbeds—than rivers. Even in winter, the allegedly wet season hereabouts, the wadis stayed dry. Winter was also allegedly the cool season hereabouts. That didn’t keep behemoths from falling over dead, cooked inside their own armor.

Till King Swemmel ordered him to strike at Zuwayza, Rathar hadn’t paid much attention to camels. Unicorns, aye. Behemoths, aye. Horses, aye. Camels? For the life of him, he hadn’t seen much use to camels.

Now he did. In terrain where wadis outnumbered rivers, where poisoning wells was a useful stratagem, camels looked a lot less ugly than they did anywhere else. Zuwayzi camel dragoons kept appearing out of nowhere, almost as if by magecraft. They would strike stinging blows to the Unkerlanters’ flanks, ravage supply columns, and then vanish as swiftly and unexpectedly as they’d struck. It was maddening.

For quite a while, Rathar had been too busy responding to Zuwayzi raids—some of which reached a startling distance back into Unkerlant—to carry on his own campaign in anything like proper fashion. He hoped he was turning the corner there. Any minute now, he’d find out.

When, after half an hour, he still hadn’t heard from General Droctulf, who commanded the eastern prong of the army, he went over to the crystallomancers’ tent to find out what was going on with that part of the force and whether it would be ready to move at the time he had appointed. “I will call his headquarters, my lord,” said the young specialist to whom he gave his requirements. “I remind you also to speak with care. The Zuwayzin are liable to be listening in spite of all our spells to keep these talks secret.”

“I understand,” Rathar said. “I have reason to understand; they’ve hurt us more than once with what they’ve stolen. Somehow, we haven’t had the same luck with them.”

“No, lord,” the crystallomancer agreed. “They tell so many lies, it’s hard for us to sort out the truth. And their masking magic is very good, very sneaky. I wish ours were half so effective.”

Rathar sighed. If he had a copper for every time he’d heard someone wish Unkerlant did something or other as well as its neighbors, he wouldn’t have needed the salary King Swemmel paid him. “We just have to learn to be more efficient,” he said, and the crystallomancer nodded.

The man did his job well enough; before long, Rathar saw the face of one of Droctulf’s crystallomancers staring out of the globe in front of him. “My superior needs to speak to your superior,” Rathar’s crystallomancer said. If the Zuwayzin were listening, they would have trouble sorting out who was who.

Droctulf’s crystal man had trouble sorting out who was who. “Who is your superior?” he demanded in haughty tones. Some of that toploftiness vanished when Rathar bent low and made his image appear beside his crystallomancer’s. Gulping, the other crystal man stammered, “I—I—shall fetch my superior.”

“Next time, do it without any backtalk,” Rathar growled. But Droctulf’s crystallomancer had already disappeared. By the last expression Rathar had seen on his face, he’d wished he could vanish permanently.

In a gratifyingly short time, Droctulf’s own image filled the crystal in front of Rathar. Droctulf’s appearance, however, did not gratify the marshal. The general looked like a peasant who’d been whiling away the winter with a jug of something potent. “A good day to you, my lord,” he said in what, even though a crystal, Rathar recognized as a careful voice: one Droctulf didn’t want to make too loud for fear of hurting his own head.

“Will your men be ready to push across their present line at the appointed hour?” Rathar snapped without preamble.

“I think they will,” Droctulf answered. “They ought to be able to.” He stared owlishly at Rathar’s image.

“General, I relieve you,” Rathar said crisply. “You will report here for reassignment. Let me speak to General Gurmun, your second-in-command.”

“My lord!” Droctulf exclaimed. “Have mercy, my lord! When word reaches the king that I was not so efficient as I might have been, what will he do to me?”

“I suggest you should have thought of that before you got drunk,” Rathar replied. “If our attack fails because of your inefficiency, what will the king have to say of me? You are relieved, General. Get me Gurmun.”

Droctulf disappeared from the crystal. Rathar wondered if he would have to send soldiers to enforce his subordinate’s relief. If he did, he thought Droctulf’s head would answer for it. King Swemmel did not tolerate anything that smacked of rebellion. The marshal sighed again. He and Droctulf had fought for Swemmel during the Twinkings War. Droctulf had liked his drink then, too. Now, though, this war had already gone on too long. Swemmel would not stomach any more delay. Rathar could not stomach any more, either.

General Gurmun appeared in the crystal. “How may I serve you, my lord?” He was younger than either Droctulf or Rathar, younger and, in some indefinable way, harder. No, not indefinable after all: he looked as if he really believed in King Swemmel’s efficiency campaign rather than giving it polite lip service.

“You are familiar with the plan of attack?” Rathar asked. Gurmun nodded, a single up-and-down motion. “You can be certain your half of it goes in at the proper time and at full strength?” Gurmun nodded again. So did Rathar. “Very well, General. That half of the army is yours. Unkerlant expects nothing but victory from us, and has already been disappointed too often.”

“I shall serve the kingdom as efficiently as I may,” Gurmun said.

Rathar nodded to his crystallomancer, who broke the link with the eastern army. Here in the field, away from King Swemmel, Rathar was supreme. Everyone yielded to his will, even a veteran campaigner like Droctulf. Droctulf had survived all of Swemmel’s massacres during and after the Twinkings War. But he could not survive his own inefficiency.

The next morning, precisely on schedule, both wings of the Unkerlanter army attacked. The racket from the thump of bursting eggs reached back to Rathar’s headquarters. He had a swarm of dragons in the air, both to drop still more eggs on the Zuwayzin and to keep an eye out for yet another of their assaults against his flanks. On camelback or afoot, they ranged through the desert like ghosts.

Despite the pummeling his egg-tossers gave the enemy, Zuwayzi resistance remained fierce. He had expected nothing less. Both Werpin and Gurmun started screaming for reinforcements. Rathar had expected nothing less there, either. He had the reinforcements ready and waiting—his logistics had finally caught up with King Swemmel’s impetuosity—and fed them into the fight.

The Zuwayzin did everything they could to hold the line of the Wadi Uqeiqa. Rathar had been sure they would; if he could secure a lodgement north of the dry riverbed, that would set him up to take a long step toward the valley in which Bishah lay. As he’d looked for the black men to do, they sent out a flanking column of camel riders to hit his reinforcements before the Unkerlanters could reach the front.

Dragons rose with a thunder of wings. For once, the Zuwayzin weren’t going to catch him with his drawers down in this desert country. He didn’t have so many crystals with the troops as he would have liked; with more, he could have done a better job of coordinating his attacks. The Algarvians had shown themselves dangerously good at that.

This time, though, he had enough. One of the dragonfliers reported raking the Zuwayzin with eggs and with the dragons’ own fire. The blacks pressed the attack anyhow, those who were left. His reinforcing column, forewarned, gave them a savage mauling and pressed on toward the Wadi Uqeiqa.

And, while the Zuwayzin threw everything they had into stopping Werpin’s army, they didn’t have enough to stop Gurmun’s force at the same time. Getting them to that point had taken longer and cost much more than Rathar expected, but now it was done. He ordered Gurmun to swing his advance to the west and come in behind the Zuwayzin who still stalled Werpin. Droctulf might have done brilliantly—or he might have botched things altogether. Gurmun handled everything with matter-of-fact competence, which, under the circumstances Rathar had worked so hard to create, proved more than adequate.

Studying the maps, Rathar smiled a rare smile. “We’ve broken them,” he said.

Ignoring the weight of the heavy pack on his back, Istvan watched in fascination as the dowser prowled the west-facing beach on the island of Obuda. The dowser, whose name was Borsos, aimed his forked branch out toward the sea. “I thought dowsers found water,” Istvan said. “Why did they bring you out here, into the middle of all the water in the world?”

Borsos threw back his head and laughed; his tawny yellow curls bounced in rhythm to his mirth. “A man from the days when the Thököly Dynasty ruled Gyongyos might have asked the same question,” he said, where a man from the far east of Derlavai would have spoken of the days of the Kaunian Empire. “Dowsers are much more than water-sniffers nowadays, believe you me.”

“Well, sir, I do understand that,” Istvan replied, a trifle testily. “Even in my little valley up in the mountains, we had dowsers who’d look for lost trinkets, and others who’d point herders after a lost sheep. But if things went missing in water or near it, they wouldn’t find them: the water kept them from sensing anything else. Why doesn’t that happen to you?”

“A different question altogether,” Borsos said. “A better one, too, if you don’t mind my saying so. You can understand I can’t give you all the details, not unless you promise to take off your head and throw it away after I’m done. Military sorcery has even more secrets than any other kind.”

“Aye, that’s plain enough,” Istvan said. “Tell me what you can, if you’d be so kind. It’ll be more than I know now, that’s sure.” He hadn’t been so curious before coming to Obuda. But there wasn’t much to do here, and his underofficers didn’t give him much time to do what he could. Without quite intending to, he’d picked up a lot of dragon lore. Learning about dowsing might be interesting, too.

Borsos said, “Ever since the early days, the days of stone and bronze, dowsing has stood apart from the rest of magecraft. Dowsers have done what they could do, and no one thought much about how they did it.

That isn’t so any more. The past few generations, people have started applying the laws of sorcery to dowsing, the same as they have to other kinds of magic.”

Istvan scratched his head. “How? If a magic works, aren’t you likely to ruin it by looking at it too close?”

Borsos laughed again. “You do come from back in the mountains, don’t you, soldier? That’s old doctrine, outmoded, disproved. It’s all in the way you look at things, not in the act of looking. And, by turning the law of similarity on its head, modern magecraft lets a dowser look for anything in water but the water itself, if you take my meaning.”

“Maybe,” Istvan said. “None of the dowsers in my valley knew anything about that, though. Water stymied them.”

“It doesn’t stymie me,” the dowser said. “All of this chatter, though, this is liable to be another story.”

He wore the three silver stars of a captain on each side of his collar, which meant he could have been much ruder than that. Knowing as much, Istvan shut up. Borsos went about his business. He aimed his dowsing rod—the straight length wrapped with copper wire, one fork with silver, the other with gold—at an Obudan fishing boat out near the edge of visibility. The rod quivered in his hand. He grunted, presumably in satisfaction.

“Seems to be performing as it should,” he said. “I got rushed out here in a hurry, you know, after Algarve jumped on Sibiu with sailing ships. Nobody wanted anyone pulling the same trick on us. The ordinary mages are good enough to spot ships coming down the ley lines, but those galleons slid right past them. They won’t get past me.”

“That’s good,” Istvan answered easily. “Of course, I don’t expect a lot of Algarvian warships out here in the Bothnian Ocean.”

Borsos wheeled on him and started to scorch him for an idiot. Then the dowser caught the gleam in his eyes. “Heh,” Borsos said. “Heh, heh. You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? I’ll bet all your friends think you’re the funniest fellow around. What does your sergeant think when you get funny?”

“Last time it happened, sir, he put me to shoveling dragon shit for a week,” Istvan answered, doing his best not to gulp. He really did have to remember to keep his mouth shut. Borsos wasn’t merely a sergeant. If he so desired, he could make Istvan’s life most unpleasant indeed.

But all he did was grunt again. “Sounds about like what you would have deserved,” he said. “Were you as clever then as you were with me just now?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” Istvan admitted, his voice mournful. One way to duck punishment was to sound as if you’d already figured out you’d been a cursed fool.

It didn’t always work. This time, it did. Borsos turned away from him and aimed the forked staff at another Obudan fishing boat. It quivered again. As far as Istvan was concerned, the rod acted the same way for the second boat as it had for the first. That was why Borsos was a dowser and he wasn’t. The newcomer to Obuda pulled out a pen and tablet and scribbled some notes.

“What are you writing, sir?” Istvan reckoned it safe to remind Borsos of his existence. And he truly was curious. Unlike a lot of the young men from his valley, he could read and write, provided no one expected anything too hard along those lines from him.

“I’m beginning to compile a distance and bearing table,” the dowser replied. “I have to do that every place I go, for the waters are always different, and I get a different feel in the rod, depending on the waters.” He raised an eyebrow. “And if you crack wise about the feel your rod gives you, soldier, I’ll kick your arse off this beach and into the ocean. Have you got that?”

“Aye, sir.” Istvan made himself into the picture of innocence—no easy feat. “I didn’t say a thing, sir. I wasn’t going to say a thing, sir, and you can’t prove I was.”

“And a good thing for you I can’t, too.” Borsos pointed to the pack on Istvan’s back. “Turn around, if you please. I want to get something out of there.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan repeated, and turned his back on the dowser. He suspected Sergeant Jokai had assigned him as Borsos’s beast of burden to make his life miserable. There, for once, the sergeant had miscalculated. Istvan enjoyed being able to shoot the breeze with the dowser, even being able to pick his brain a little, more than the ordinary routine of soldiering. Lugging Borsos’s equipment about was the price he paid for the privilege.

Borsos rummaged through the pack till he found whatever he was looking for. After the dowser closed up the oiled-leather pack, Istvan turned back around to see what he’d taken. Borsos was stripping the bright copper wire from most of its length of his dowsing rod. He replaced it with wire with a green patina.

Seeing Istvan’s eye upon him, he condescended to explain: “I think the greened wire here will give me better accuracy for a couple of reasons. For one, its color, like that of the sea, enhances the effects—both positive and negative—of the law of similarity. And, for another, it got that color by being soaked in seawater. That also gives it a greater affinity for the ocean here.”

“I see,” Istvan said, which was more or less true. “If all that’s so, though, sir, why didn’t you have the sea-soaked wire on the rod from the start?”

Borsos’s eyes were green as the wire he’d wrapped around the rod. They widened slightly now. “You’re not a fool, are you?” the dowser said in some surprise. “I didn’t have that wire on the rod because I’ve been doing lake work, and because, as I said before, they rushed me out here in a tearing hurry. I didn’t have the chance to adjust everything perfectly.”

And, unless I miss my guess, you were hoping the regular wire would do well enough. But Istvan didn’t say that out loud. He’d already tried Borsos’s patience once. He might not get by with it twice.

The dowser aimed the forked staff at the Obudan fishing boats once more. He nodded, as if he’d proved himself right. Then he scrawled more notes on the pad. “I did think so,” he said, more to himself than to Istvan. “The correction factor makes enough difference to be worth taking into account.”

“I’m glad you did it, then, sir,” Istvan said.

His speaking recalled him to the dowser’s mind. “Magecraft isn’t like carpentry, soldier,” Borsos said. “If you don’t vary your methods depending on where you are, you won’t get the results you should. My own view is, the laws of magecraft change a little, too, from one place to another.”

“How could that be?” Istvan asked. “A law is a law, isn’t it?”

Borsos was aiming the dowsing rod at yet another little fishing boat, and didn’t answer right away. At last, he said, “Carpentry just deals with things. Magecraft deals with forces, and some forces have minds of their own. If you don’t keep that in your own mind, you may start out to be a mage, but you won’t last long in the craft. Everyone will tell your widow and your clan head how sad it was you had an accident.”

“I see,” Istvan said again. What he thought he saw was the mage making his work out to be harder and more dangerous than it really was. A carpenter might do something like that, or a blacksmith. Soldiers would do it, too, especially when they were bragging in front of civilians. Istvan knew how deadly dull most of a soldier’s life really was.

Farmers, now, farmers never made their work out to be harder than it was. Istvan understood why, too, having grown up on a farm. No matter what a farmer said about his work, he couldn’t make it seem harder than it was.

Borsos pointed the rod due west. Seeing no fishing boats in that direction, Istvan asked, “Are you searching out past the horizon, sir?”

“That’s right.” The dowser’s head bobbed up and down, very much as his rod was doing in his hand. “I can feel boats out there—out farther than I can see, I mean—but they all move like the fishing boats I can see, so I don’t have to worry about them much. If I felt them heading straight toward this island from out of the west, I’d be shouting my head off.”

Istvan pointed to a dragon wheeling high overhead. “They’re on watch up there, too,” he remarked. His stints with dragons had given him a certain sympathy with—and for—the men who flew them. He wondered whether Borsos had been sent out to Obuda because he was valuable or because some officer back on the mainland had had a brainstorm.

“They’re watching up there, too,” the dowser agreed. “They have their uses, but I also have mine. They can’t see at night, but I can still sense danger then. When winter weather closes down, they won’t be able to see so well by daylight, either. I don’t need good weather.”

“Ah,” Istvan said, one syllable that meant, Maybe he’ll be worth having here after all. Borsos laughed out loud, which embarrassed Istvan, for he hadn’t wanted the translation of that one syllable to be so obvious. Trying to make amends, he remarked, “There’s a place up in Sorong—the village, I mean, not the mountain—where the girls are friendly. I’ll take you there, if you like.”

“Duty first,” Borsos said, stern as if he were a true Gyongyosian warrior and not a dowser wearing the stars of rank to give him authority over ordinary soldiers like Istvan. “Duty first. But then…”

Pekka scribbled a calculation. With the inexorable logic of mathematics, the next step was plain before she wrote it down. She didn’t write it down, not then. Instead, she looked out the window at the snow dancing in the wind. In her mind’s eye, she saw not the next step, but where the whole sequence was leading.

“It does all fit together,” she breathed. “When you get to the bottom of it, the very very bottom of it, all of magic everywhere has the same essence.”

She couldn’t prove that, not yet. She didn’t know if she would ever be able to prove it. Seeing where the mathematics led and getting there were two different things. Even if she did get there, she didn’t know for certain what she might do with the knowledge. Leino’s magecraft was concrete, definite, practical; if her husband and his colleagues discovered something new, they could quickly apply it.

But Pekka couldn’t escape the feeling that, if she ever got down to the bottom of her theoretical sorcery, the yield would be a lot bigger than improved armor for behemoths. Her mouth twisted wryly. She couldn’t prove that, either, and everything about it depended on proof.

She abruptly realized her teeth were chattering. That proved something, all right: it proved she was a fool. She’d been so far off in the world of theory, she hadn’t noticed she was starting to freeze. She got up, scooped coal out of the scuttle, and fed the stove in the corner of her office.

The room was just getting back to tolerable warmth when someone knocked on the door. Pekka thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand, again recalled to the real world. “Leino’s going to clout me!” she said as she leaped to her feet.

Sure enough, it was her husband standing there in the hall. He didn’t clout her; that sort of behavior was for Unkerlanters and Algarvians (though Algarvians were likely to slip on a glove before hitting a woman). He did give her a severe look, which, among Kuusamans, more than sufficed. “Have you forgotten the reception at your sister’s tonight?” he demanded.

“I had, aye,” Pekka answered, hoping she sounded as embarrassed as she felt. “I hate acting out a cliche: the absent-minded mage. But since you remembered, I’m sure we’ll be there in good time. Here, let me get my cloak.”

Mollified, Leino grumbled only a little more as they crossed the Kajaani City College campus and took the ley-line caravan to the stop nearest their house. Not enough snow lay on the ground to give the caravan any trouble. The real storms hadn’t started roaring in out of the south. Drifts sometimes got as high as the top of a floating caravan car, not the base.

Slogging up the hill to take Uto back from Elimaki, Pekka didn’t want to think about snowdrifts. “Powers above be praised, you’re here!” Elimaki exclaimed when she and Leino got to the door.

Leino laughed. “I don’t need to be a mage to divine that you felt like stuffing our son and heir into the rest crate today, do I?”

“Well, no,” Pekka’s sister said, adding defensively, “It is hard to clean house with a small boy underfoot.”

“It’s not hard—it’s impossible,” Pekka said. “Come on, Uto. Let’s get you out of here.” Elimaki let out a small, involuntary sigh of relief. Pekka rounded on her son. “What have you been doing today?”

“Nothing.” Uto, as usual, was the picture of innocence. Pekka, as usual, found him unconvincing. So did Leino, but his obvious amusement didn’t help instill discipline in the boy.

They took Uto next door, fed him salty venison sausage—one of his favorites—and put him to bed. When he did sleep, he slept like a log. He was a risk to do a great many appalling things, but getting up in the middle of the night and making trouble wasn’t one of them. With sorcerous wards in and around the house—commercial ones, Leino’s, and her own—and with her husband and herself only a door away, Pekka didn’t feel nervous about leaving Uto asleep by himself. If anything went wrong, she and Leino would know, and would be back in seconds. But she didn’t expect anything to go wrong. Kuusamans were, on the whole, an orderly, law-abiding folk.

Pekka changed out of the long, drab wool tunic she’d worn to Kajaani City College while Leino was taking off his own shorter tunic and trousers. Being of neither Algarvic nor Kaunian stock, Kuusamans wore what they pleased and what pleased them, and did not turn tunics and kilts and trousers into politics. Pekka put on a long skirt of sueded deer-hide and a high-necked white wool tunic heavily embroidered with bright, colorful fantastic animals: a costume out of Kuusamo’s past. Leino’s nearly matched it, save that his skirt was knee-length and he wore woolen leggings beneath it. They both wore sensible modern boots.

“Let’s go,” Leino said. Pekka nodded. They wouldn’t even be late, or not very. And no one with any social graces showed up on time for a reception.

Elimaki’s husband was a short, burly fellow named Olavin. Being one of Kajaani’s leading bankers, he earned more by himself than Pekka and Leino did together. He never tried to rub their noses in his gold, though, for which Pekka was duly grateful.

After handclasps and embraces, Olavin said, “I’m very glad you could come tonight.”

“We wouldn’t miss it,” Pekka said loyally.

“It’s not as if we have far to come, either,” Leino added with a smile. “No, indeed.” Olavin laughed. “But I am particularly glad you could come tonight. I am not certain, you understand, but I have hopes that Prince Joroinen may join us. You should be here for that, if it happens.”

“Husband of my sister, you are right.” Pekka’s eyes sparkled. “And you are truly coming up in the world if you expect one of the Seven Princes to visit your home. No wonder Elimaki wanted to wallop Uto.”

“I don’t expect it. I hope for it.” In some ways, Olavin was as precise as a theoretical sorcerer. “I learned at the bank that he would be in Kajaani for a few days, and took the chance of tendering the invitation. We have met before, he and I, and done some business together, so there is some reasonable chance he will accept.”

“I would like to meet him,” Pekka said.

Leino nodded agreement, adding, “I would like to find out which way Kuusamo is likely to go now that Lagoas has joined the war against Algarve.” His chuckle was wry. “Husband of my wife’s sister, you need not look alarmed. I don’t look for an answer on the spot. If the Seven Princes argue about where they should meet, they will argue about higher things as well.”

“Even so.” Olavin laughed again. He worked hard at being jolly, perhaps because bankers had a name for being anything but. “As I say, he may be here and he may not. Either way, we will have interesting people here—besides the two of you, I mean—and there is plenty to eat and drink.”

“I am not shy,” Pekka declared. “I am not the most outgoing person in the world, but I am not shy.”

As if to prove it, she marched past her brother-in-law into the parlor of the house he shared with Elimaki. Leino followed in her wake. Pekka got herself a mug of hot spiced ale—Kuusamo was not a land where cold drinks flourished—and a plate of mushrooms stuffed with crab meat. Her husband chose mulled Algarvian wine and seaweed-wrapped boiled shrimp in a mustard sauce.

Some of the people at the reception were kin to Pekka and Elimaki, others to Olavin; some were neighbors; some were bankers; some were merchants and artisans who dealt with the banking firm Olavin served. Talk ranged from raising children to importing wine (Kuusamo’s climate did not encourage fine vintages, or even rough ones) to the war with Gyongyos.

“If anyone wants to know what I think,” one of Olavin’s cousins said, obviously sure everyone wanted to know what he thought, “I think we ought to cut our losses against the Gongs and get ready to pitch into the fight on the mainland of Derlavai.”

“On which side?” somebody asked. Pekka thought that a good question. With Lagoas in the war, Kuusamo could jump on her island neighbor’s back and regain land lost centuries before. If she did, though, Algarve would likely win the war on the mainland and dominate eastern Derlavai. No one had done that since the days of the Kaunian Empire. Pekka wondered if anyone should.

Olavin’s cousin had no doubts. Olavin’s cousin, apparently, had no doubts about anything, including his own wisdom. “Why, King Mezentio’s, of course,” he said. “A man like that doesn’t come along every day. We could use someone with that kind of energy, with that kind of vision, right here at home.”

Pekka thought of King Swemmel, and of what he had done with—and to—Unkerlant. But before she could mention the efficient monarch, Olavin gave his cousin an even more efficient comeuppance, saying, “I have the great honor to announce the presence of Prince Joroinen, not least among the Seven of Kuusamo.” None of the Seven was least, nor most. The arrangement, like Kuusamo itself, endured.

Men bowed from the waist. Like the other women, Pekka went to one knee for a moment. That gesture of respect had an earthy history behind it. Pekka didn’t let it offend her. The meaning had changed over the centuries. No one knew better than a theoretical sorcerer that symbols were only what people made of them.

Joroinen said, “Let the thought be taken for the deed for the rest of the evening,” which made him sound like a theoretical sorcerer himself. He went on, “One of the longstanding traditions of Kuusamo is that we pay attention to the longstanding traditions of Kuusamo only when it suits us.” Pekka blinked, then grinned. Maybe the prince wasn’t a theoretical sorcerer. Maybe he was an oracle instead.

Unlike Swemmel or Mezentio or Gainibu, Joroinen did not bother with the outward trappings of royalty. He wore an outfit of warm wool and leather much like Leino’s, if rather finer. He mingled with the crowd as if he were a banker or merchant himself. After a couple of minutes, everyone took his presence for granted.

He got hot ale and smoked salmon on flatbread from the refreshments table, then made Pekka’s acquaintance by stepping on her foot. “I beg your pardon,” he said, as if he were a commoner.

“No harm done, sir,” she said, and introduced herself and Leino.

Joroinen’s gaze sharpened. He was in his mid-forties, his black hair marked by the first few silver threads. “Ah, Elimaki’s sister and her husband,” he said, impressing Pekka. “The mages at the city college,” he added, impressing her more. Then, instead of impressing her, he astonished her: “I was hoping to meet the two of you here tonight. You’re one—or rather, two—of the reasons I accepted Olavin’s kind invitation.”

“Sir?” Pekka and Leino said together. Leino sounded as surprised as she was.

“Aye.” Prince Joroinen nodded. To Leino, he said, “Everyone is pleased and excited at your research. Very good things will come of it, I think, and soon. You have served Kuusamo well; we of the Seven shall not be ungrateful.”

“I thank you, sir,” Leino said, sounding as if he’d had several mugs of spiced wine, not just one. Pekka set a hand on his arm, proud of what he’d achieved.

Joroinen turned to her, saying, “I also know somewhat of your present work, if less than I might like. I bear you a message from others who know more than I, some of them examining related areas.” Pekka raised an eyebrow, waiting. The prince leaned close to her and spoke in a low voice: “For the sake of the safety of the realm, it is strongly suggested that you seek to publish no further findings.”

Pekka’s other eyebrow flew upwards. “Why ever not?” she demanded. A scholar who could not publish was like a singer forced into a vow of silence.

“For the safety of the realm, I said,” Prince Joroinen answered. “I shall say no more, not here, not now. But of this please let me assure you: I do not speak lightly.”

Fernao felt trapped in Patras. Fernao was trapped in Patras. With Lagoas and Algarve now at war, he would have had trouble leaving Yanina even without King Penda. Yanina inclined strongly toward Algarve. The only other possible course for King Tsavellas would have been to incline strongly toward Unkerlant. He preferred his eastern neighbors to those to the west. Fernao was glad he didn’t have to make such an unpleasant choice himself.

He had very little else about which to be glad. Since Shelomith’s untimely demise, he’d lived with an eye on every copper. No doubt Shelomith had had friends in Patras who were helping him get Penda out of the palace. But Fernao had met only a couple of them, and Varvakis and Cossos were about as eager to aid him as they would have been to wash a leper’s sores.

That didn’t mean they weren’t aiding him. Varvakis fed him delicacies from his gourmet emporium, not least because Fernao had hinted he would sing a song to Tsavellas’s men if the fancy grocer didn’t feed him. Blackmail was a language Yaninans understood.

These days, Fernao wore clothes he’d got from Varvakis, too. He consoled himself with the notion that tights were more nearly hose than trousers, but found the Yaninan tunics with their puffy sleeves almost laughably absurd. Local costume didn’t go far as disguise, either. His height, his red hair, and his narrow, slanted eyes all made him stand out from the Yaninans, who were generally small, swarthy, and big-nosed.

Nor did he need to be the first-rank mage he was to divine that Varvakis was a great deal less than delighted to see him when he walked into the fellow’s shop. “Good day,” Fernao said in Yaninan, of which he’d picked up a fair smattering since getting stuck in these parts.

“And to you, good day,” Varvakis answered grudgingly. Most places, from what Fernao had seen, learning the local language made the locals like you better. His learning Yaninan hadn’t ingratiated him to Varvakis, who growled, “The day would be even better if you weren’t here.”

“Aye,” Fernao said. He dropped back into Algarvian, which he still needed to get complex ideas across: “If you take me to see Cossos one more time, maybe I won’t be here much longer after that.”

Varvakis glared at him. “Too much to hope for. Better I should take you to see King Tsavellas’s bodyguards instead.”

Better I should betray you, he meant. Fernao smiled. “Let’s go. I’ll see them, all right. They’ll talk with me. I’ll talk with them, too.” Betray me and I betray you. “Mages can be very hard to kill outright, you know.” I’ll make a point of betraying you.

Could looks have killed, Varvakis would have sorely tested his assertion. Had the fancy grocer kept a stick in his shop, he might have tested it another way. As things were, he snapped, “Ah, very well—once more.” He waved a sausagelike finger in Fernao’s face. “But only once more, you understand me?”

“I understand you,” Fernao said. Varvakis was a great many things, but never unclear.

“You had better,” he said now. “Come back tomorrow night. Either I take you to him then, or I tell you when I can take you to him.”

“It is good,” Fernao said in Yaninan. He wasn’t sure whether it was good or not. Varvakis might be setting up an ambush. But Varvakis could have done that several different times, could have and hadn’t. And, by now, Fernao had acquired by one means or another some specialized sorcerous gear. He’d lost what he’d brought from Lagoas when Shelimoth got killed. Replacing all of it would have been impossible. Replacing even a small part of it would have been impossible had the Yaninans who sold him this and that realized they were selling him sorcerous paraphernalia. But the art had traveled different roads in Lagoas and Yanina, and the Lagoans had traveled rather farther along theirs.

When Fernao returned to the fancy grocery the next evening, then, he was ready for trouble. But Varvakis, despite mutterings and mumblings his mustache muffled, led him to the palace. By then, Fernao had given up on expecting any Yaninan to do anything without grumbling. As soon as Varvakis saw Fernao and Cossos clasp hands, he departed. “I do not know what you do here,” he said. “I do not wish to know what you do here.”

Cossos studied Fernao with no great friendliness. “I do not know that we will do anything here,” the palace steward said. “I cannot get you in to see Penda: my own head would answer for it. Things have tightened up. And with your kingdom at war with Algarve …” He shook his head. “Why don’t you just go away?”

“But if I went away, think of all the bribes you would lose,” Fernao answered mildly. Cossos scowled. Bribery was a way of life in Yanina. Talking about it, though, was very bad form.

Fernao did not care. Now he mumbled to himself, at the same time clutching a dried dormouse’s tail he carried in a tunic pocket. Cossos might have taken the mumble for Lagoan. It wasn’t. It was classical Kaunian, a tongue less widely studied in Yanina than in many other kingdoms. The spell was ancient, too: the primitive ancestor of the ones on which rest crates and much of modern medicine depended.

As a dormouse falls asleep for the winter, so Cossos fell asleep now. But it was not a natural sleep. He did not breathe. His heart barely beat. Had he been battling a soldier of the Kaunian Empire, he would have been killed without knowing he was dead. As things were, he merely toppled over. Fernao left the chamber where they’d been talking and hurried toward the wing of the palace in which King Penda was imprisoned.

He walked quickly, confidently. He had reason for his confidence. The servitors and nobles he passed saw him, aye. One or two, those of uncommon cleverness and strong will, even turned to look after him, perhaps to start to speak. Then they, like the rest, forgot about him and went on with their business. He smiled a small, slow smile. Among the Yaninans, as among most peoples, wormwood was a flavoring, and easy enough to obtain. The Valmierans brewed a nasty brandy with it; Varvakis stocked the stuff. But the Yaninans did not use it in sorcery. Lagoans did, not least for spells of temporary oblivion.

Had Fernao passed a mage, the spell would not have sufficed. He assumed Penda’s quarters were sorcerously as well as physically watched and warded. He touched the dormouse tail again. This was a different spell, one only a first-rank Lagoan mage was likely to use (although Fernao did hope Tsavellas relied on native Yaninan wizards; an expert from Algarve might have recognized and countered the sorcery).

People around him slowed down, as if they were dormice settling in for a long winter’s nap. That was an illusion, an inversion of the law of similarity. In fact, he had sped up. It was not a magic to use without great need; under it, he aged twice as fast as usual. But he passed out of the ken of those around him.

He started casting about for Penda like a hound seeking a fox’s scent. The trail was obscure, even though he moved above and beyond, so to speak, the ordinary plane of reality. Maybe Yaninan mages weren’t quite the bunglers he had come to reckon them.

But Penda’s trace was harder to hide than an ordinary man’s would have been. Fernao set his thumb on the obverse of a Forthwegian silver bit he carried with his other specialized sorcerous gear. The coin bore Penda’s tough, blunt profile. Both the law of similarity and, at several removes, the law of contagion linked it to the Forthwegian king.

Fernao found him in a bedchamber. He lay asleep beside a Yaninan woman; his captivity, evidently, was not of the most onerous. Fernao tapped him on the shoulder. At the tap, the Forthwegian king not only woke but also sped to Fernao’s level of living. He had less time to spare than the mage; gray filled his beard. No help for it, though, not now.

“Your Majesty, I have come to get you away from here,” Fernao said in Forthwegian.

“Whither shall we go?” Penda did not seem to care what the answer was, for he sprang naked from the bed and threw on the first clothes he found. “So long as it be not Cottbus or Trapani, I am with you.”

“By no means,” Fernao said. “I aim to bring you to Setubal.”

“It is good.” Now the king of Forthweg did hesitate. “Or rather, it may be good. How do I know I can trust you? I expected to be rescued ere this. Whence came the long delay?”

“How do you know you can trust me? You don’t,” Fernao replied. “If you would rather, I will remove this spell from you and you can go back to bed. And you might have been rescued sooner, your Majesty, had the fellow with whom I came from Lagoas not got himself slightly murdered. He had the connections in Patras. I’ve had to make mine. And so—will you come, or will you not come?”

“I am answered,” Penda said. “I am answered, and I shall come.” He eyed Fernao from under lowered lids. “And I would have known you for a Lagoan not by your looks, not by your accent, but by your studied lack of respect for those set above you.”

“Your Majesty, you are not set above me; you are set above Forthweg,” Fernao answered evenly, refraining from pointing out that, at the moment, Algarve and Unkerlant were set above Forthweg. “And if you will come, you had better come. This spell requires much sorcerous energy. Were we not so close to a power point, I could not use it. Even now, it will not hold long, not for two.”

Penda, for a wonder, argued no further. He followed Fernao out of the bedchamber without a glance back at the woman with whom he’d been sleeping. That told Fernao something he hadn’t known but had suspected about royalty. It made him a little sad. He wondered if the woman would be sad when she woke, sad or just relieved. He knew what he would guess.

As soon as King Penda and he were out of the wing of the palace in which Penda had been held, he relaxed the spell that seemed to slow the rest of the world to the pace of a sleepy dormouse. He sighed with relief of his own; had he not let go of that spell, it would soon have let go of him, with results likely to be unpleasant. The forgetfulness spell with the wormwood he retained. It cost him much less wear and tear than the other—and, had he dropped it, he and Penda would have been captured at once. He was opposed to that.

More Yaninans looked back over their shoulders at Penda and him than had turned back when he walked the corridors alone; spread to cover two men, the magic was a little less effective. But it held. The palace servitors scratched their heads, shrugged shrugs even the melodramatic Algarvians might have envied, and went back to whatever they were doing.

Once out of the palace, Penda peered this way and that, then nodded in slow wonder. “I had almost forgotten there were wider vistas than rooms and hallways,” he remarked.

“Well, your Majesty, if you want to keep on enjoying them, you’d better get moving,” Fernao said, setting a brisk pace away from the palace and into Patras.

King Penda matched him stride for stride. “Tell me now, sir mage,” the fugitive Forthwegian monarch said, “how you purpose spiriting me out of Yanina and into Lagoas, where I may hope to breathe free even if in exile.

Fernao wished Penda had not picked this moment to ask that question. He gave it the only answer he could: “Your Majesty, right now I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Behind a Zuwayzi soldier carrying a spear point downward in token of the truce now in force between his army and that of Unkerlant, Hajjaj advanced across battered, broken ground toward the Unkerlanter lines. Both the soldier and he wore wide-brimmed hats and long mantles, not just to salve Unkerlanter sensibilities but also to ward off the rain that leaked from a dirty-gray sky.

An Unkerlanter soldier in rock-gray hooded cape and tunic came forward to meet them. He too carried a spear with its point aimed at the ground. To Hajjaj’s surprise, the fellow spoke Zuwayzi: “Your Excellency, you come with me,” he said, his speech slow but clear. “I take you to Marshal Rathar.”

He seemed stuck in the present indicative. Hajjaj didn’t mind. Hearing his own language from the Unkerlanter was more courtesy than his kingdom had got from King Swemmel’s since the war began. “I will come with you,” Hajjaj said.

Rathar waited less than a blaze behind the forwardmost Unkerlanter positions. As his reputation said he would, he looked solid and steady. After bows and what were, by Unkerlanter standards, polite, leisurely greetings, he spoke in his own tongue: “I am sorry, but I do not know Zuwayzi. Do you speak Unkerlanter?”

“Only a few words,” Hajjaj answered in that language. He shifted speeches: “I know Algarvian well enough, and I have heard you also do. Is this so?”

“Aye, it is,” Rathar answered in Algarvian. He was indeed fluent in that speech, continuing, “I wish to congratulate you on the brave resistance you Zuwayzin have offered to the armies under my command.”

“It was not enough.” Hajjaj had been sure from the beginning of the war that it would not be enough, though the Unkerlanters’ blunders had raised even his almost unraisable hopes once or twice. “Now, Marshal, I have come at the bidding of King Shazli to inquire of you what Unkerlant’s terms will be for converting this truce into a peace.”

Rathar looked astonished. “Your Excellency, I have no authority to treat with you in this matter. It took all the authority I had to create the present truce, and even then I had to confirm it with my sovereign. If you seek peace, I must send you to Cottbus, for only there will you obtain it.”

Hajjaj sighed. He had hoped for better, but had not expected it. “If it must be so, so it must be,” he said. “Let me go back to my side of the truce line, that I may use a crystal there to let King Shazli know what you require. I shall return here, I hope, within an hour’s time.”

“Very well,” Rathar said. “A cart will be waiting to take you south to the closest functioning caravan. Efficiency. In aid of which, my compliments to your soldiers on the highly professional way in which they sabotaged the local ley lines. They made our campaign much more difficult than we expected.”

“It was not enough,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister repeated. Rathar struck him as being as efficient as King Swemmel wanted to make everyone in his kingdom. Hajjaj found efficient Unkerlanters even more alarming than the usual sort.

On returning to his own side of the truce line, he had a crystallomancer link him to his sovereign up in Bishah. Shazli’s image, tiny and perfect and unhappy, stared at him out of the crystal. “Go where you must go. Do what you must do. Save what you can,” the king said. “If war resumes, we can still hurt the Unkerlanters, but, my generals warn me, we cannot be certain even of holding them out of Bishah. Therefore, war must not resume.”

“Even so, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said. He remembered the days when Zuwayza was an Unkerlanter province. Shazli, who’d been a child then, really didn’t. He thought an Unkerlanter conquest would be dreadful. Hajjaj knew it would.

As Rathar had promised, a carriage was waiting. It fought its way along a muddy track and over a wooden bridge laid across the roaring torrent now filling the Wadi Uqeiqa. Even with the rain beating down, the stench of death was everywhere. Hajjaj recalled it from the Six Years’ War and the chaos afterwards. He would have been just as well pleased—better than just as well pleased—not to have his memory jogged. The Zuwayzin had indeed fought hard. Would they end up any better off than if they had not fought at all?

At last, after what seemed forever, the carriage reached the ley-line caravan, and Hajjaj seemed to return from the distant past to the present—or, at least, to the not too distant past, for the caravan cars had plainly seen better decades. An Unkerlanter in the lead car spoke to Hajjaj in Algarvian: “I am Zaban, from our foreign ministry. You will be in my charge until you return to Bishah.” He did not say to Zuwayza; Zuwayza might not be a kingdom on Hajjaj’s return. Zaban went on, “I see you are wearing nothing warm. Fortunately, I can supply your needs. Efficiency.”

“I thank you, Zaban.” Hajjaj spoke crisply, not with the flowery politeness that would have been automatic were he speaking Zuwayzi. In their arrogance, Unkerlanters took that politeness as weakness and a sign of submission. He was weak and would have to submit, but he did not have to advertise it.

He climbed up into the wagon. The caravan sat where it was for most of another hour before starting to move. “Efficiency,” Hajjaj remarked to Zaban. The official from the foreign ministry gave him a dirty look, but said nothing. That suited Hajjaj fine.

As he traveled south, he found himself moving into winter. The caravan wagon boasted a coal-fired stove. It had been burning even down in Zuwayza, which struck Hajjaj as a typical piece of Unkerlanter “efficiency.” By the middle of the night, though, he was glad of the warmth. Snow had started to dapple the ground before darkness fell. By the time day returned, white blanketed the rolling Unkerlanter prairie. The caravan stirred up the snow as it glided above the ground, making an icy wake that had Hajjaj thinking wistfully of ships on the warm ocean.

He had traveled down to Cottbus before, but not in a good many years and never in winter. Somehow, the snow only made the plains of Unkerlant seem more immense than they did in good weather. Looking out the dirty windows of his caravan car, Hajjaj thought he could see to the edge of the world, or even a little over the edge.

Every so often, the caravan would glide past or through a village or town. However big the place might be, it seemed tiny when set against the vastness of the plain. And when it was gone, it was gone as if it had never been, as if the flatlands had swallowed it up when Hajjaj turned his head for a moment. Even the woods that grew more frequent as the caravan got farther south felt like interlopers on the endless plain.

The caravan reached Cottbus in the late afternoon, a little more than a day after leaving Unkerlantcr-occupied southern Zuwayza. The Unkerlanter capital sat at the junction of Cottbus and Isartal Rivers. Both had ice floating on them, which chilled Hajjaj’s blood. Zaban took it in stride, saying, “The season is early yet. They haven’t frozen over from bank to bank.” The Zuwayzi foreign minister shivered at the mere idea.

He had something like a revelation as a carriage took him from the caravan station to his lodging. He needed it, too, for cold struck at his nose and ears—almost all the flesh he exposed to it—like a viper. “You built your roofs so steep here to let the snow slide off them!” he exclaimed.

“Well, of course,” Zaban replied, giving him an odd look. But it wasn’t of course to Hajjaj, any more than making sure you drank plenty of water was of course to Unkerlanters in Bishah.

King Swemmel chose to put Hajjaj up in a hostel near his palace. The rooms were large enough to suit him, though by Zuwayzi standards very indifferently clean. The bed boasted heavy wool blankets and fur coverlets; a stove sat in a corner of the bedroom. Hajjaj heartily approved of all that, and of the enormous hot bowl of beef-and-barley soup the servants fetched him. He thought—he hoped—he wouldn’t freeze to death before morning after all.

Nor did he. Another servant brought in an enormous omelette—eggs and ham and sausage and onions and cheese—for his breakfast. Eating such a thing down in Bishah, he might have keeled over on the spot. In Cottbus’s ghastly climate, he gobbled up every crumb and wished for more.

As soon as he’d finished eating and robed and caped himself against winter, Zaban took him downstairs for the journey to the palace. He traveled in an enclosed carriage, for which he was thankful. He peered out through foggy windows at Unkerlanters taking the cold in stride. Some of them paused to look back at him, and at his carriage. Most went about their business. People didn’t stop to greet one another and chat, as they would have on the streets of Bishah. That had nothing to do with the cold, as at first he thought it might. Unkerlanters simply seemed less outgoing than his own folk.

It was decently warm inside the palace. Before he could go in to meet with Swemmel, the bodyguards began to feel him up as if he were a ripe maiden, not a skinny old man. “Tell them to wait,” he said to Zaban, who was enduring the same sort of search. Hajjaj got out of his clothes and stood unconcernedly naked while the guards, when they weren’t gaping at him, went through the garments till they were satisfied. Then he dressed again and accompanied Zaban into King Swemmel’s audience chamber.

Zaban prostrated himself before his sovereign. Hajjaj bowed low, as he would have done with King Shazli. King Swemmel spoke in Unkerlanter. Hajjaj followed fairly well, but waited to respond till Zaban translated his words into Algarvian: “You are insolent. All Zuwayzin are insolent, we think.”

“We have our own opinion of Unkerlanters,” Hajjaj replied. He intended to yield as little as he could, here or anywhere else. “Our opinion is lower now that Unkerlant has broken the Treaty of Bludenz.”

“Kyot made that treaty,” Swemmel said. His eyes bored into Hajjaj. “Kyot is dead, slowly dead, horribly dead. Less than he deserved. And Zuwayza is beaten. Would you be here, were Zuwayza less than beaten?”

He might well have been mad. Mad or not, he was right. Hajjaj did his best not to acknowledge it, saying, “We have hurt you. If you press us too hard, we can hurt you more, much more. Your ultimatum was too harsh. If your demands now are too harsh, we will go on fighting. You may, perhaps, eventually gain all of what you want, but you will pay an enormous price for it. Would you not rather settle for a bit less, knowing you do not have to pay so much?”

That was sensible, rational, reasonable. Glancing at King Swemmel, Hajjaj realized with a shiver that none of those words was apt to apply to him. Swemmel’s eyes seemed made of obsidian, with the thinnest layer of glittering Unkerlanter ice above. The king said. “We do not care what we pay. We want what is ours.”

I will not give way to despair, Hajjaj thought, and then wondered why. He started to form another polite, diplomatic reply. He rejected the words before they passed his lips. Whatever Swemmel responded to, it was not polite diplomacy. Hajjaj tried a different tack: “Your Majesty, it is even so with us of Zuwayza. Were it not, why would we have risen against Unkerlant so often, even with little hope of victory?”

He watched Swemmel carefully. The king’s eyes narrowed, then widened. The ice, or some of it, melted. The hard, shiny stone beneath remained. But Hajjaj had got through to him, at least to some degree, for he said, “Aye, you arc a stubborn folk,” and said it in the tones of a man doling out a grudging compliment. He stabbed out a forefinger at Hajjaj. “You may be stubborn, but you are beaten. Else you yourself would not be here.”

“We are beaten.” The Zuwayzi foreign minister conceded what he could hardly deny. “We are beaten badly enough to have to yield you some of what you demand of us. We are not beaten so badly as to have to yield it all.”

“Shall we treat Shazli the pretender as we treated Kyot the usurper?” Swemmel asked.

“Zuwayzi lords know how to die,” Hajjaj said, as steadily as he could. Again, he gave the king the directness Swemmel did not look to get from his own subjects: “Unkerlant has given them much practice in the art.”

Zaban looked at him with a face the color of whey. No, no one in Cottbus spoke to King Swemmel so. Hajjaj gestured harshly. The man from the Unkerlanter foreign ministry did translate accurately; Hajjaj knew enough of his language to be sure of that. He waited on Swemmel. The Unkerlanter king might want to find out how well he died. That violated every law of diplomacy, but King Swemmel was a law unto himself.

Swemmel hunched forward on his high seat, like a hawk about to spring into the air from a falconer’s wrist. In a voice harsh as a hawk’s, he said, “We shall dicker.” Hajjaj breathed again, but tried not to let the king of Unkerlant see him do it.

Krasta was angry. Krasta was frequently angry, but most often at people she knew, not at whole kingdoms. Now her outrage stretched far enough to encompass all of Valmiera.

“Will you look at this, Bauska?” She waved the news sheet in the serving woman’s face. “Will you look at it?”

“I see it, milady.” Bauska kept as much of herself from her voice as she could, leaving Krasta next to nothing to seize on.

But Krasta needed next to nothing. “Unkerlant has won another war,” she snarled. “The western barbarians have won two wars now, against Forthweg and against this Zuwayza place, wherever it may be. The Unkerlanters have won two wars. Has Valmiera won even one war? Has it, Bauska?”

“No, milady,” the servant answered. But then, no doubt rashly, she added, “Unkerlant hasn’t fought the Algarvians, though.”

Krasta tossed her head. A golden curl escaped the pins Bauska had put in her hair earlier in the morning and slid under her nose, as if she’d suddenly grown a mustache. Sniffing, she brushed it aside. Sniffing in a different way, she said, “The Algarvians are barbarians, too. They should have stayed in their forests a long time ago, and not come out to bother civilized people.” By that, of course, she meant people of Kaunian blood, her notion of civilization extending no further.

“No doubt, milady,” Bauska said. Having got away with one additional comment, she tried another: “They may be barbarians, but they’re monstrously good at war.”

“We’ve beaten them before,” Krasta said. “They didn’t win the Six Years’ War, did they? Of course they didn’t. Valmiera won the Six Years’ War. Oh, we had a little help from Jelgava, but we won it.” Jelgavans were of Kaunian stock, too; she acknowledged their existence. Sibian? Lagoans? Unkerlanters? They’d fought side by side with Valmiera, too. As far as she was concerned, they might as well have stayed out of the war. How it would have ended had they stayed out never entered her mind.

“Powers above grant we win this war, too, milady,” Bauska said. “And powers above grant that your brother comes home safe from it.”

“Aye,” Krasta said; the serving woman had hit on a way of mollifying her, at least for the moment. “As of his last letter, Skarnu was well.” She paused. She might have let it go there, but she still held the news sheet. Seeing it rekindled her anger. “Skarnu is well, but we have not broken through into Algarve. How can we hope to win this miserable, inconvenient war if we can’t break through?” Her voice rose to a shout once more.

“Milady, I know not. How can I know? I am a maidservant, not a warrior.” Bauska bowed her head. In a barely audible voice, she asked, “Have I your leave to go, milady?”

“Oh, very well,” Krasta said in some annoyance; she usually got more sport out of baiting her servant. Bauska retreated much faster than the Algarvian army had fallen back before Valmiera’s foes. But she did not retreat fast enough. Krasta snapped her fingers. “No. Wait.”

“Milady?” Bauska froze near the doorway. Her voice might have been a fragment of winter wind let loose within the mansion.

“Come here. I have a question for you,” Krasta said. The serving woman came much more slowly than she had gone. Krasta went on, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this for some little while now, but it keeps slipping my mind.”

“What is it, milady?” Bauska still looked alarmed, which was good, and also curious, which was acceptable.

“When you are with your sweetheart, do you ever pleasure him by taking his member in your mouth?” Krasta asked her question as matter-of-factly as she would have asked a farmer about stockbreeding. In her mind, the differences between livestock and servants were not large.

Bauska’s fair skin flushed bright red. She coughed and turned away, but she did not dare flee the chamber again, not unless Krasta told her she might. When at last she spoke, it was in a prim near-whisper: “Milady, I have not got a sweetheart, so I do not know what to say to you.”

Krasta laughed in her face, knowing a servant’s evasions when she heard them. “Curse it, have you ever pleasured a man so?” she demanded.

Bauska got even redder. Her eyes down on the floor, she said, “Aye.” Krasta had to watch the way her lips shaped the word, for she could not hear it. Then, more loudly, the servant repeated, “Have I your leave to go?”

“No, not yet.” Krasta’s voice was sharp. Valnu, curse him—curse him horribly—had not lied to her after all. She wanted to go clean her teeth yet again. Instead, probing the depths of commoners’ iniquity, she asked, “And your friends—I suppose servants have friends—do they do likewise?”

“Aye, milady, or I know of some who do, or who have,” Bauska answered, still looking down at the intricate pattern of birds and flowers on the thick, handwoven carpet beneath her feet.

Krasta made an angry noise, back deep in her throat. Like most of her class, she’d always assumed commoners just fornicated, as animals did, and that other, related, delights were beyond them. Discovering she’d been wrong disgusted her. She wanted to share as little with those below her as she could.

Something else occurred to her. “And your sweethearts—when you have them—do they pleasure your secret places with their tongues?”

“Aye, milady,” Bauska answered in a resigned whisper. But then, in what seemed a sudden access of spirit, she added, “Not likely we’d do for them if they didn’t do for us, is it? Fair’s fair.”

Fairness was something about which Krasta rarely had to worry, especially when dealing with servants. Her elegantly sculpted nostrils flared in exasperation. “Go on, get out of here,” she said. “What are you doing, hanging about like this?”

Bauska left. Bauska, in fact, all but flew. Krasta hardly noticed; having dismissed the serving woman, she forgot about her till she might need her again. She thought about going into Priekule for a tour of the shops, but in the end decided not to. Instead, she had her coachman drive her to the royal palace. If she was going to complain about the way the war against Algarve was going, venting her spleen at a servant would do no good. She wanted to talk to a soldier.

Finding the war ministry took her a while. She couldn’t simply bark demands in the palace, as she could on her estate; too many of the people going through the corridors were nobles, and they were often hard to tell from servitors in fancy dress. To avoid giving offense, Krasta had to ask polite questions, an art for which she had little inclination and scant practice.

At last, she found herself standing in front of a desk behind which sat a rather handsome officer; a placard identified him as Erglyu. “Please sit, milady,” he said, waving her to a chair. “Will you drink tea? I regret that I am not permitted to offer you anything stronger.”

She let him pour her a cup; she would let anyone serve her at any time, reckoning it no less than her due. As she sipped, she asked, “And what is your rank?”

“I am a captain, milady.” Some of Erglyu’s smiling urbanity slipped. “You may read as much on the placard there.”

“No, no, no,” Krasta said impatiently, wondering whether the war ministry wasn’t doing a better job against Algarve because it hired idiots. “What is your rank, Captain?”

“Ah.” Erglyu’s face cleared. Maybe he’s not an idiot, Krasta thought with what passed for charity from her. Maybe he’s only a moron. The captain went on, “I have the honor to be a marquis, milady.”

“Then we are well met, for I am a marchioness.” Krasta smiled. Erglyu might be a moron, but he was of her class. She would give him the same courtesy she granted any member of her circle, courtesy a commoner, no matter how clever, would never know. With a vivacious gesture, she said, “I want to tell you, we are going about this war altogether wrong.”

Captain Erglyu leaned forward, his face the picture of polite, even fascinated, interest. “Oh, milady, I do so wish you would show me how!” he exclaimed. “All our best generals have been wracking their brains over it for weeks and months, and the results have not been perfectly satisfactory.”

“I should say they have not,” Krasta said. “What we need to do is strike the redheaded barbarians such a blow, they will flee before us as they did in the ancient days. I can’t imagine why we haven’t done it yet.”

“Neither can I, not when you put it so clearly.” Erglyu reached into his desk and pulled out several sheets of paper, a pen, and a squat bottle of ink. “If you would but give the kingdom the benefit of your insight, I am certain all Valmiera will soon hail you as its benefactress and savior.” He pointed to a table and chair—both of severely plain make—set against a side wall of his office. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to set forth your strategic plan in as detailed a form as you can, that I may share it with my superiors.”

“I will do that.” Krasta took the writing tools and went over to the table. Once there, though, she stared down at the first blank leaf with the same angry despair she’d always known in the women’s finishing academy. After gnawing on the end of the pen, she wrote, We need to hit the Algarvians as hard as we can. We need to do it where they do not expect it.

She started to add something more, then savagely scratched it out. More pen gnawing followed. She sprang to her feet and slapped the piece of paper on to Captain Erglyu’s desk. He glanced down at it, then said, “I am certain King Gainibu himself will be grateful to you for what you have done here today.”

“Why can’t anyone else in the kingdom think clearly?” Krasta demanded. Without waiting for an answer, she headed out toward her carriage. She noticed she’d got ink on one finger. With a snort of annoyance, she rubbed it off.