Krispos of Videssos

VI

Krispos shaded his eyes with a hand as he looked northward. The horizon ahead was still smooth. He sighed and shook his head. "When I start seeing the mountains, I'll know I'm close to the country where I grew up," he said.

"Close also to where the trouble is," Sarkis observed.

"Aye." Krispos' brief nostalgia deepened to true pain and anger. The summer before, Harvas' raiders had gone through the village where he'd grown up. His sister, her husband, and their two girls had still lived in the village. No one lived there now.

Ungreased wheels squeaked—sometimes screamed—as supply wagons rattled along. Horses, mules, and men afoot kicked up choking clouds of dust. Soldiers sang and joked. Why not? Krispos thought. They're still in their own country. If they sang as they came home again, he would have done something worth remembering.

Sarkis said, "The riders we sent ahead toward Mavros' army should get back to us in the next couple of days. Then we'll know how things stand."

"They'll get back to us in a couple of days if all's gone well and Mavros has pressed forward," Mammianos said. "If he's taken a reverse, they won't have had so far to travel to meet up with him, so they'll be back sooner."

But none of them—Mammianos, Sarkis, or Krispos—expected the riders to begin coming back that afternoon, the third of their march out from Videssos the city. Yet come back they did, with horses driven to bloody-mouthed exhaustion and with faces grim and drawn. And behind them, first by ones and twos, then in larger groups, came the shattered remains of Mavros' army.

Krispos ordered an early halt for his troops as evening neared. Advancing farther would have been like trying to make headway against a strong-flowing stream. A stream, though, did not infect with fear the men who moved against it. Seeing what had befallen their fellows, Krispos' soldiers warily eyed every lengthening shadow, as if screaming northern warriors might erupt from it at any moment.

While the army's healer-priests did what they could for the wounded, Krispos and his generals questioned haler survivors, trying to sift fragments of order from catastrophe. Not much was to be found. A young lieutenant named Zernes told the tale as well as anyone. "Majesty, they caught us by surprise. They waited in the brush along either side of the road south of Imbros and hit us as we passed them by."

"By the good god!" Mammianos exploded. "Didn't you have scouts out?" He muttered something into his beard about puppies who imagined they were generals.

"The scouts were out," Zernes insisted. "They were, by the lord with the great and good mind. The Sevastos knew he was not fully trained to command and left all such details to his officers. They might not have been so many Stavrakioi come again, but they knew their craft. The scouts found nothing."

Mammianos wheezed laughter at the lieutenant's youthful indiscretion. Krispos had ears only for the long string of past tenses the man used. "The Sevastos knew? He left these details? Where is Mavros now?"

"Majesty, on that I cannot take oath," Zernes said carefully. "But I do not think he was one of the people lucky enough to break free from the trap. And from what we saw, the Halogai wasted time with few prisoners."

"May he bask in Phos' light forevermore," Mammianos said. He sketched the sun-sign over his breast.

Mechanically Krispos did the same. The young officer's words seemed to reach him from far away. Even with the foreboding he'd had since he learned Mavros was on campaign, he could not believe his foster brother dead. Mavros had been always at his side for years, had fought Anthimos with him, had been first to acknowledge him as Avtokrator. How could he be gone?

Then he found another question, a worse one because it dealt with the living. How was he to tell Tanilis?

While he grappled with that, Mammianos asked Zernes, "Were you pursued? Or don't you know, having fled so fast no foes afoot could keep up with you?"

The lieutenant bristled as he set a hand to the hilt of his saber. He forced himself to ease. "There was no pursuit, excellent sir," he said icily. "Aye, we were mauled, but we hurt the northerners, too. When they broke off with us, they headed back toward the mountains, not south on our tails."

"Something," Mammianos grunted. "What of Imbros, then?"

"Excellent sir, that I could not say, for we never reached Imbros," Zernes answered. "But since Agapetos was beaten north of the town and we to the south, I fear the worst."

"Thank you, Lieutenant. You may go," Krispos said, trying to make himself function in the face of disaster. First Mavros throwing his life away, now Imbros almost surely lost... Imbros, the only city he'd ever known till he left his village and came south to the capital. He'd sometimes sold pigs there, and thought it a very grand place, though the whole town was not much larger than the plaza of Palamas in Videssos the city.

"What do we do now, your Majesty?" Mammianos asked.

"We go on," Krispos said. "What other choice have we?"

As the army advanced, scouts not only examined stands of brush and other places that might hold an ambush—they also shot arrows into them. Some of the lesser mages who served under Trokoundos rode with the scouting parties to sniff out sorcerous concealments. They found none. As Zernes said, Harvas' army had headed back to its northern home after crushing Mavros.

Flocks of ravens and vultures and crows, disturbed from then-feasting, rose into the air like black clouds when Krispos' men came to that dolorous field. The birds circled overhead, screeching and cawing resentfully. "Burial parties," Krispos ordered.

"It will cost us the rest of the day," Mammianos said.

"Let it. I don't think we'll catch them on this side of the frontier anyhow," Krispos said. Mammianos nodded and passed the command along. As the soldiers began their grim task, a twist of breeze brought Krispos the battlefield stench, worse than he had ever smelled it before. He coughed and shook his head.

He walked the field despite the stench, to see if he could find Mavros' body. He could not tell it by robes or fine armor; Harvas' men had stayed long enough to loot. After several days of hot sun and carrion birds, no corpse was easy to identify. He saw several that might have been his foster brother, but was sure of none.

The soldiers were quiet in camp that night, so quiet that Krispos wondered if pausing to bury Mavros' dead had been wise. A sudden attack might well have broken them. But the night passed peacefully. When morning came, priests led the men in prayers of greeting to Phos' new-risen sun. Perhaps heartened by that, they seemed in better spirits than they had before.

Before the morning was very old, a pair of scouts came galloping back to the main body of men. They rode straight to Krispos. Saluting, one said, "Majesty, ahead is something you must see."

"What is it?" Krispos asked.

The scout spat in the dust of the roadway, as if to show his rejection of Skotos. "I won't dirty my tongue with the words to tell you, your Majesty. My eyes have been soiled; let my mouth stay clean." His comrade nodded vigorously. Neither would say more.

Krispos traded glances with his officers. After a moment he nodded and urged Progress forward. The Halogai of the imperial guard came with him. So did Trokoundos. The wizard muttered to himself, choosing charms and readying them in advance against need.

"How far is it?" Krispos asked the scouts. "Round this bend in the road here, your Majesty," answered the horseman who had spoken before. "Just past these oaks." While the fellow was not watching, Krispos made sure his saber was loose in its scabbard. A troop of guardsmen pushed ahead of him as the party swung past the trees. Even so, from atop his horse he could see well enough.

First he noticed only the bodies, a hundred or so, and that their gear proclaimed them to be Videssian soldiers. Then he saw that each man's hands had been tied behind his back. The dead soldiers' feet were toward him, so he needed a few seconds more than he might have otherwise for his eyes to travel beyond the bodies to the neat pyramid of heads that lay beyond them. "You see, your Majesty," said the scout who liked to talk. "I see," Krispos answered. "I see helpless prisoners butchered for the sport of it." He clutched Progress' reins so hard, his knuckles whitened.

"Butchered, aye. That is well said, Majesty." Krispos had never heard a Haloga recoil from war and its consequences.

Now Geirrod did. Without prompting, the guardsman explained why: "Where is the honor, where even is the rightness, in using captives so? This is the work of one more used to slaying cattle than men."

"It's of a piece with what we've seen from Harvas and those who follow him." Krispos hesitated before he went on, but what he had to say needed saying sooner or later. "Most of those who follow Harvas come out of Halogaland. Will you have qualms about fighting them?"

The guardsmen shouted angrily. Geirrod said, "Majesty, we knew this. We talked among ourselves, aye we did, on how such a fight might be, swapping axe strokes with our own kind. But no man who could slaughter so, or stand by to see others slaying, is kin of mine." The other northerners shouted again, this time in loud agreement.

"Shall we start burying this lot, Majesty?" the scout asked.

Krispos slowly shook his head. "No. Let the whole army see them, and with them the sort of foe we fight." He knew he was running a risk. The massacred prisoners had been set in the road to terrify, and his men were none too steady after listening to the survivors from Mavros' force. But he thought—he hoped— this cold-blooded killing would raise in all his soldiers the same fury he and the Halogai felt.

A few minutes later the head of the long column rounded that bend in the road. Krispos gave the guards quick orders. They formed up in the roadway and directed the leading horsemen off the track and onto the grass and shrubs that grew alongside. Some of the troopers began to argue until they saw Krispos with the Halogai, also waving them off.

He watch closely as his men came upon the grisly warning Harvas had left behind. They all stared. Horror filled their faces, as was only natural, but on most outrage soon ousted it. Some soldiers swore, others sketched the sun-sign; not a few did both at once.

Their eyes swung from the bodies—and from that ghastly pyramid beyond them—to Krispos. He raised his voice. "This is the enemy we have loose in our land. Shall we run back to Videssos the city now, with our tails between our legs, and let him do as he likes in the northlands?"

"No." The word came, deep and determined, from many throats at once, like the growl of some enormous wolf. Krispos wished Harvas could have heard it. Soon enough, in effect, he would. Krispos set clenched right fist over his heart to salute his soldiers.

He stayed by the slain Videssians until the last wagon jounced past. The troops from the middle and back of the column had an idea of what lay ahead of them; if armies traveled at the speed of whispers, they could cross the Empire in a day and a night. But knowing and seeing were not the same. Company by company, men stared at the sorry spectacle—first, even knowing, in disbelief, then with ever-growing anger.

"Now we may bury them," Krispos said when everyone had seen. "They've given us their last service by showing what our enemy is like." He saluted the dead men before he rode on to retake his place in the advance.

The mood in camp that night was savage. No speech Krispos made could have inspired his troops like the fete of their fellows. Hoping against hope, he asked his generals, "Is there any chance we'll catch up with Harvas' men on our side of the mountains?" Mammianos plucked at his beard as he examined the map. "Hard to say. They're footsoldiers, so we move faster than they do. But they have some days' start on us, too."

"Much depends on what's happened at Imbros," Sarkis added. "If the garrison there still holds firm, that might helpdelay the raiders' retreat."

"I think Imbros still stands," Krispos said. "If it had fallen, wouldn't we be seeing fugitives from the sack, the way we did from Mavros' army?" Even now, a day after he knew the worst, he found himself forgetting his foster brother was dead, only to be brought up short every so often when he was reminded of it: As if he had taken a wound, he thought, and the injured part pained him every time he tried to use it.

Rhisoulphos said, "My best guess is that you're right, your Majesty. There are always refugees from a city that falls: the lucky; the old; sometimes the young, if an enemy has more mercy than Harvas looks to own." His mouth tightened as he went on, "That we've seen no one from Imbros at all tells me its people are still safe behind their wall." He waved to a plan of the town. "It seems well enough fortified."

"It's like your holding, Rhisoulphos," Mammianos said. "On the border, we still need our walls. Some of the towns in the lowlands in the west, though, where they haven't seen war for a couple of hundred years, they've knocked most of 'em down and used the stone for houses."

"Fools," Rhisoulphos said succinctly.

Krispos turned the talk back to the issue at hand. "Suppose we find Harvas' men, or some of them, still besieging Imbros? What's the best way to hurt them then?"

"Pray to Phos the Lord who made the princes first that we catch them so, your Majesty," Sarkis said; the strange epithet he used for the good god made Krispos recall his Vaspurakaner blood. He went on, "If we do, they'll be smashed between our hammer and an anvil of the garrison."

"May it be so," Krispos said. All the generals murmured in agreement.

Pragmatic as usual, Rhisoulphos had the last word. "One way or the other, we'll know for certain in a couple of days."

Half a day south of Imbros, the land began to look familiar to Krispos. That was as far as he'd ever traveled, back in the days before he set out for Videssos the city. He took it as a signal to order the army to full battle alert. That brought less change than it might have under other circumstances, for the men had kept themselves ready to fight since they'd seen the slaughtered prisoners.

Scouts darted ahead to sniff out the enemy. When they returned, their news brought a sober smile to Krispos' face, for they'd spied hundreds, perhaps thousands of people outside Imbros. "What could that be, save Harvas' besieging force?" he exulted. "We have them!"

Trumpets shouted. Krispos' army knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean. The Videssian soldiers, thoroughgoing professionals the lot of them, waved their lances and yowled like so many horse nomads off the steppes of Pardraya. Against a foe Like Harvas, even professionals grew eager to fight.

Smooth with long practice, the troops swung themselves from column to line of battle. Forward! cried horns and drums. The army surged ahead, wild and irresistible as the sea. Officers shouted, warning men to keep horses fresh for combat.

"We have them!" Krispos said again. He drew his saber and brandished it over his head.

Mammianos stared, a trifle goggle-eyed at the ferocity the soldiers displayed. "Aye, Majesty, if Harvas truly did sit down in front of Imbros, we just may. I'd not reckoned him so foolish."

The general's words set off a warning bell in Krispos' mind. Harvas had shown himself cruel and vicious. Never yet, so far as Krispos could see, had he been foolish. Counting on his stupidity now struck Krispos as dangerous.

He said as much to Mammianos. The fat general looked thoughtful. "I see what you mean, Majesty. Maybe he wants us to come haring along so he can serve us as he did Mavros. If we miss an ambush—"

"Just what I'm thinking," Krispos said. He called to the musicians. Soldiers cursed and shouted when At a walk rang out. Krispos yelled for Trokoundos. When the mage rode up, he told him, "I want you out in front of the army. If you can't sense sorcerous screening for an ambush, no one can."

"As may be so, your Majesty," Trokoundos answered soberly. "Harvas has uncommon—and unpleasant—magical skill. Nevertheless, I shall do what I can for you." He clucked to his horse, using reins and his boot heels to urge the animal into a trot. With the rest of the army walking, he was soon up among the scouts. The advance continued, though more slowly than before.

No cunningly hidden sorcerous pit yawned in the roadway. No hordes of Halogai charged roaring from the shelter of brush or trees. The only damage was to the fields the army trampled as it moved ahead in line of battle. Looking off to left and right, Krispos saw ruined villages and suspected few farmers were left to work those fields in any case.

A gray smudge on the northern horizon, light against the green woods and purple mountains behind it: Imbros' wall. Now it was Krispos' turn to yowl. He turned to Mammianos and showed his teeth like a wolf. "We're here, excellent sir, in spite of all our worries."

"By the good god, so we are." Mammianos glanced first to Krispos, then to the musicians. Krispos nodded. "At the trot, gentlemen," Mammianos said. The musicians passed along the command. The soldiers cheered.

Imbros drew nearer. Krispos saw in the distance the people outside the walls that his scouts had reported. His wolf's grin grew wide ... but then slipped from his face. Why did Harvas' men simply hold their position? If he saw them, surely they had seen him. But no one around the walls moved, nor did anyone seem to be on those walls.

Up ahead with the scouts, Trokoundos suddenly wheeled his horse and galloped back toward Krispos. He was shouting something. Over the noise any moving army makes, Krispos needed a few seconds to hear what it was. "Dead! They're all dead!"

"Who? Who's dead?" troopers yelled at the wizard. Krispos echoed them. For a heady moment, he imagined disease had struck down Harvas' host where they stood. They deserved nothing better, he thought with somber glee.

But Trokoundos answered, "The folk of Imbros, all piteously slain." He reined in, leaned down onto his horse's neck, and wept without shame or restraint.

Krispos spurred his horse forward. After Trokoundos' warning, after the way the wizard, usually so self-controlled, had broken down, he thought he was braced for the worst. He needed only moments to discover how little he had imagined what the worst might be. The people of Imbros were not merely slain. They had been impaled, thousands of them—men, women, and children—each on his own separate stake. The stakes were uniformly black all the way to the ground with old dried blood.

The soldiers who advanced with Krispos stared in disbelieving horror at the spectacle Harvas had left behind for them. They were no strangers to dealing out death; some of them, perhaps, were no strangers to massacre, on the sordid but human scale of the butchered prisoners farther south. But at Imbros the size of the massacre was enough to daunt even a monster of a man.

Sarkis swatted at the flies that rose in buzzing clouds from the swollen, stinking corpses. "Well, your Majesty, now we know why no fugitives came south from Imbros to warn us of its fall," he said. "No one was able to flee."

"This can't be everyone who lived in Imbros," Krispos protested. He knew his heart was speaking, not his mind; he could see how many people squatted on their stakes in a ghastly parody of alertness.

In a way, though, he was proven right. As the army made its way through the neat concentric rows of bodies to Imbros' wall, the men soon discovered how Harvas' warriors had entered the city: the northern quadrant of those walls was cast down in ruins, down to the very ground.

"Like Develtos," Trokoundos said. His eyes were red; tears still tracked his cheeks. He held his voice steady by force of will, like a man controlling a restive horse. "Like Develtos, save that they must have been hurried there. Here they had the time to do their proper job."

When Krispos entered Imbros, he found what had befallen the rest of the folk who had dwelt there. They lay dead in the streets; the town had been burned over their heads after they fell.

"Mostly men in here, I'd say," Mammianos observed. "And look—here's a mail shirt that missed getting stolen. These must have been the ones who tried to fight back. Once they were gone, looks like Harvas had his filthy fun with everyone else."

"Aye," Krispos said. Calmly discussing the hows and whys of wholesale slaughter as he went through its aftermath struck him as grotesque. But if he was to understand—as well as an ordinary man could ever grasp such destruction—what else were he and his followers to do?

He walked the dead streets of the murdered city, Trokoundos at his side and a troop of Halogai all around him to protect against anything that might lurk there yet. The northerners peered every which way, their pale eyes wide. They muttered to themselves in their own tongue.

At last Narvikka asked, "Majesty, why all this—this making into nothing? To sack a town, to despoil a town, is all very well, but for what purpose did our cousins slay this town and then cast the corpse onto the fire?"

"I'd hoped you could tell me," Krispos said. The guardsman, as was the Haloga way, had stripped the problem to its core. War for loot, war for belief, war for territory made sense to Krispos. But what reason could lie behind war for the sake of utter devastation?

Narvikka made a sign with his fingers—had he been a Videssian, Krispos guessed he would have drawn the sun-circle over his heart. That guard said, "Majesty, I cannot fathom the minds of the men who fought here. That they are of my folk raises only shame in me. Renegades and outlawed men would not act so, much less warriors from honest holdings." Other northerners nodded.

"But they did act so," Krispos said. Every time he breathed, he took in the miasma of dead flesh and old smoke. He let his feet lead him through Imbros; even after so many years away, they seemed to remember how the bigger streets ran. Before long, he found himself in the central market square, looking across it toward the temple.

Once he'd thought that temple the grandest building he'd ever seen. Now he knew it was but a provincial imitation of Phos' High Temple in Videssos the city, and not a particularly impressive one, either. But even fire-ravaged as it was now, it still raised memories in him, memories of awe and faith and belief.

Those memories clashed terribly with the row of impaled bodies in front of the temple, the first he'd seen inside Imbros who had received that treatment rather than the quicker, cleaner death of axe or sword or fire. What with the stains of blood and smoke, he needed a moment to realize those victims all wore the blue robe. He sketched the sun-sign.

So did Trokoundos beside him. "Did I not hear they were savage to priests in Develtos, as well?" the wizard asked quietly.

"Aye, so they were." Krispos' boots clicked on flagstones as he walked across the square toward the temple. He stepped around a couple of corpses of the ordinary, crumpled sort. By now, numb with the scale of the butchery here, he found them hardly more than obstacles in his path.

But what the priests had suffered penetrated even that numbness. Though some days dead, their bodies still gave mute testimony to those special torments. As if impalement were insufficient anguish, some had had their manhood cut away, other their guts stretched along the ground for the carrion birds, still others their beards—and their faces—burned away.

Krispos turned his back on them, then made himself look their way once more. "May Phos take their souls into the light."

"So may it be," Trokoundos said. "But Skotos seems to have had his way with their bodies." Together, he and Krispos spat.

Krispos said, "All this ground will have to be blessed before we can rebuild. Who would want to live here otherwise, after this?" He nodded to himself. "I'll suspend taxes for the new folk I move in, and keep them off for a while, to try another way to make people want to stay once they've come."

"Spoken like an Emperor," Trokoundos said.

"Spoken like a man who wants Imbros to be a living city again soon," Krispos said impatiently. "It's a bulwark against whoever raids down from Kubrat, and in peacetime it's the main market town for the land near the mountains."

"And now, Majesty?" Trokoundos said. "Will you pause to bury the dead here?"

"No," Krispos said, impatient still. "I want to come to grips with Harvas as soon as I can." He glanced toward the sun, which stood low in the west—days were shorter now than they had been while he laid siege to Petronas. Again he cursed the time he'd had to spend in civil war. "There's not a lot of summer left to waste."

"No denying that, your Majesty," Trokoundos said. "But—" He let the word hang.

Krispos had no trouble finishing for him. "But Harvas knows that, too. Aye, I'm all too sure he does. I'm all too sure he has some deviltry brewing, too, just waiting for us. I trust my soldiers to match his. As for magic—how strong can Harvas be?"

Trokoundos' lips twisted in a grin that seemed gayer than it was. "I expect, your Majesty, that before too long I shall find out."

More eager for fighting than any army Krispos had known, his force stormed north up the highway after Harvas' raiders. "Imbros!" was their cry; the name of the murdered city was never far from their lips.

The Paristrian Mountains towered against the northern horizon now, the highest peaks still snow-covered even in later summer. Some of the men from the western lowlands exclaimed at them. To Krispos they were—not old friends, for he remembered the kind of weather that blew over them through half the year, but a presence to which he was accustomed all the same.

Everything hereabouts seemed familiar, from the quality of the light, paler and grayer than it was in Videssos the city, to the fields of ripening wheat and barley and oats—worked now only by the few farmers lucky enough to have escaped Harvas' men— to the way little tracks ran off the highway, now to the east, now to the west.

Krispos pulled Progress out of the line of march when he came to one of those roads. He stared west along it for a long time, his mind ranging farther than his eyes could reach.

"What is it, Majesty?" Geirrod asked at last. He had to speak twice before Krispos heard him.

"My village lies down this road," Krispos answered. "Or rather it did; Harvas' bandits went through here last year." He shook his head. "When I left, I hoped I'd come back with money in my belt pouch. I never dreamed it would be as Avtokrator— or that the people I grew up with wouldn't be here to greet me."

"The world is as it is, Majesty, not always as we dream it will be."

"Too true. Well, enough time wasted here." Krispos tapped Progress' flanks with his heels. The big bay gelding walked, then went into a trot that soon brought Krispos back to his proper place in the column.

The road ran straight up toward the gap in the mountains, past empty fields, past stands of oak and maple and pine, past a small chuckling stream, and, as the ground grew higher, past more and more outcroppings of cold gray stone. Though Krispos had not seen it since he was perhaps nine years old, the gray landscape seemed eerily familiar. He and his parents and sisters had come down this road after Iakovitzes ransomed them and hundreds of other Videssian peasants from captivity in Kubrat. He must have been keyed up almost to fever pitch then, for fear the Kubratoi would change their minds and swoop down again, for everything on that journey remained as vivid in his mind as if he'd lived it yesterday. The way water splashed from that clump of rocks in the stream had not changed at all in the two decades since, save that frogs had perched on them then.

The mountains themselves ... I've always been happier to see them getting smaller, Krispos thought. They were not getting smaller now, worse luck. Krispos peered up and ahead. Now he could see the opening of the pass that led to Kubrat. Agapetos got through with less force than I have, he thought. I will, too.

When he said that aloud, Mammianos grunted. "Aye, Agapetos got through, but he couldn't maintain himself north of the mountains.' And Harvas beat him again on this side, then came down first on Imbros and then onto Mavros' army. Strikes me he's been able to defeat us in detail, if you know what I mean."

"Are you telling me I shouldn't attack?" Krispos asked, scowling. "After all he's done to us, how can I halt now?"

The image of thousands of bodies, each gruesomely buggered by its own stake, shoved itself forward in his mind. With it came a new vision, that of hundreds of men matter-of-factly cutting and sharpening those stakes. How could they have kept to their work, knowing what the stakes would be used for? Even Kubratoi would have gagged on such cruelty, he thought. And Halogai, judging by long experience with the imperial guards, were harsh but rarely vicious. What made Harvas' men so different? Mammianos' reply brought him back to the here-and-now. "All I'm saying, your Majesty, is that Harvas strikes me as dangerous enough to need hitting with everything the Empire has. The more I see, the more I think that. What we have with us is strong, aye, but is it strong enough?"

"By the good god, Mammianos, I aim to find out," Krispos said. Mammianos bowed his head in submission. He could suggest, but when the Avtokrator decided, his lot was to obey. Or to mutiny, Krispos thought. But Mammianos had seen plenty of better chances than this for mutiny. His disagreement with Krispos lay in how best to hurt Harvas, not whether to.

The army camped just out of bowshot of the foothills that night. Peering north in the darkness, Krispos saw the slopes of the mountains ahead dimly illuminated by orange, flickering light. He summoned Mammianos and pointed. "Does that mean what I think?"

"Bide a moment, Majesty, while the campfire glare leaves my eyes." Like Krispos, Mammianos stood with his back to the imperial camp. At last he said, "Aye, it does. They're encamped there, waiting for us."

"Forcing the pass won't be easy," Krispos said.

"No, it won't," the general agreed. "All kinds of things can go wrong when you try to barge through a defended pass. A holding force at the narrowest part will plug it up while they roll rocks down from either side, or maybe come charging down from ambush—that'd be easy for Harvas' buggers, because they're footsoldiers."

"Perhaps I should have listened to you before," Krispos said.

"Aye, Majesty, perhaps you should," Mammianos said—as close to criticism of the Emperor as he would let himself come.

Krispos plucked at his beard. He could not pull back, not having come so far, not having seen Imbros, not unless he wanted to forfeit the army's faith in him forevermore. Going blindly forward, though, was a recipe for disaster. If he had some idea of what lay ahead ... He whistled to one of his guardsmen. "Fetch me Trokoundos," he said.

The wizard was yawning when he arrived, but cast off sleepiness like an old tunic when Krispos explained what he wanted. He nodded thoughtfully. "I know a scrying spell that should serve, your Majesty, one subtle enough that no barbarian mage, no mage not formally trained, should even be able to detect it, let alone counteract it. Against Petronas it would not have sufficed, for Skeparnas was my match, near enough. But against Harvas it should do very well; however strong in magic he may be, he is bound to be unschooled. If you will excuse me—"

When Trokoundos returned, he held in his hand a bronze bracelet. "Haloga workmanship," he explained as he showed it to Krispos. "I found it outside of Imbros; I think we may take it as proven that one of Harvas' raiders lost it. By the law of contagion, it is still bonded to its one-time owner, a bond we may now use to our advantage."

"Spare the lecture, sir mage," Mammianos said. "So long as you learn what we need to know, I care not how you do it."

"Very well," Trokoundos said stiffly. He held the bracelet out at arm's length toward the north, then started a slow, soft chant. The chant went on and on. Krispos was beginning to get both worried and annoyed when Trokoundos finally lowered the bracelet. As he turned, the campfire shadowed the lines of puzzlement on his face. "Let me try again, with a variant of the spell. Perhaps the owner of the bracelet was slain; nonetheless, it remains affiliated, albeit more loosely, with the army as a whole."

He began to chant once more. Krispos could not tell any difference between this version of the spell and the other, but was willing to believe it was there. But he found no difference in the result: after some time, Trokoundos halted in baffled frustration.

"Majesty," he said, "so far as I can tell by my sorcery, there's no one at all up ahead."

"What? That's absurd," Krispos said. "We can see the fires—"

"They could be a bluff, your Majesty," Mammianos put in.

"You don't believe that," Krispos said.

"No, your Majesty, I don't, but it could be so. I tell you what, though: I'll send out a couple of scouts. They'll come back with what we need to know."

"Good. Do it," Krispos said.

"Aye, do it," Trokoundos agreed. "By the good god, excellent sir, I hope it is a bluff ahead, as you say. The alternative is believing that Harvas has a renegade Videssian mage in his service, and after Imbros I would sooner not believe that." The wizard made a sour face, decisively shook his head. "No, it can't be. I'd have sensed that my spell was being masked. I didn't have that feeling, only the emptiness I'd get if there truly were no men ahead."

The scouts slipped out of camp. They looked to be ideal soldiers for their task; had Krispos met them on the streets of Videssos the city, he would have unhesitatingly guessed they were thieves. Small, lithe, and wary, they carried only daggers and vanished into the night without a sound.

Yawning, Krispos said, "Wake me as soon as they get back."

Worn though he was, he did not sleep well. Thoughts of Imbros would not leave his mind or, worse, his dreams. He was relieved when a guardsman came in to rouse him and tell him the scouts had returned.

A thin crescent moon had risen in the east; dawn was not far away. The scouts—there were three of them—prostrated themselves before him. "Get up, get up," he said impatiently. "What did you see?"

"A whole great lot of Halogai, your Majesty," one of them answered in a flat, up-country accent like the one Krispos had had before he came to Videssos the city. The other two scouts nodded to confirm his words. He went on, "And you know how the pass jogs westward so you can't see all the way up it from here? Just past the jog, they've gone and built themselves a breastwork. Be nasty getting past there, your Majesty."

"Their army's real, then," Krispos said, more than a little surprised. Trokoundos would not be pleased to learn his sorcery had gone astray.

"Majesty, we sneaked close enough to smell the shit in their slit trenches," the scout answered. "You don't get a whole lot realer than that."

Krispos laughed. "True enough. Two goldpieces to each of you for your courage. Now go get what rest you can."

The scouts saluted and hurried off toward their tents. Krispos thought about going back to bed, too, decided not to bother. Better to watch the sun come up than to toss and turn and think about stakes ...

The eastern rim of the sky grew gray, then the pale bluish-white that seems to stretch the eye to some infinite distance, then pink. When the sun crawled above the horizon, Krispos bowed to it as if to Phos himself, recited the creed, and spat between his feet to show he rejected Skotos. Most of the time, he hardly thought about that part of the ritual. Not now. Imbros reminded him of what he was rejecting.

The camp stirred with the sun, at first slowly, blindly, like a plant's silent striving toward light, but then with greater purpose as horns rang out to rout sleepers from tents and prod them into the routine of another day. They lined up with bowls in front of cookpots where barley porridge bubbled; gnawed at hard bread, cheese, and onions; gulped wine under the watchful eyes of underofficers who made sure they did not gulp too much; and tended to their horses so the animals would also be ready for the day's work ahead.

Krispos went back to his tent and armed himself. He swung himself up onto Progress and rode over to the musicians. At his command, they played Assemble. The troopers gathered before them. Krispos raised a hand for silence and waited until he had it.

"Soldiers of Videssos," he said, hoping everyone could hear him, "the enemy waits for us ahead. You've seen the kind of foe he is, how he loves to slay those who can't fight back." A low growl ran through the army. Krispos went on, "Now we can pay Harvas back for everything, for the slaughters in Develtos last year and Imbros now, and for Agapetos' men, and Mavros', too. Will we turn aside?"

"No!" the men roared. "Never!"

"Then forward, and fight bravely!" Krispos drew his saber and held it high overhead. The soldiers whooped and cheered. They were eager to fight; Krispos needed no fancy turns of phrase to inspire them today. That was as well—he knew Anthimos, for instance, had been a far better speaker than he would ever be. He owned neither the gift nor the inclination for wrapping around his ideas of the flights of fancy that Videssian rhetoric demanded. His only gift, such as it was, was for plain thoughts plainly spoken.

As the army left camp, Krispos told Sarkis, "We'll want plenty of scouts out in front of us, and farther ahead than usual."

"It's taken care of, your Majesty," the Vaspurakaner officer said with a small, tight smile. "The country ahead reminds me all too much of the land where I grew up. You soon learn to check out a pass before you send everyone through, or you die young." He chuckled. "I suppose, over the generations, it improves the breed."

"Dismount some of those scouts, too," Krispos said as a new worry struck him. "We'll want to spy out the sides of the pass, not just the bottom, and they can't very well do that very well from horseback." He stopped, flustered. So much for plain thoughts plainly spoken. "You know what I mean."

"Aye, your Majesty. It's taken care of," Sarkis repeated. He sketched a salute. "For one who came so late to soldiering, you've learned a good deal. Have I told you of the saying of my People, 'Sneaky as a prince—?' "

Krispos cut him off. "Yes, you have." He knew he was rude, but he was also nervous. The scouts had just followed the western jog of the pass and disappeared from sight. He clucked to Progress, leaned forward in the saddle, and urged the gelding up to a fast trot with the pressure of knees and heels.

Then he rounded that jog himself. The breastwork, of turf and stones and brush and whatever else had been handy, stood a few hundred yards ahead, blocking the narrowest part of the pass.

Behind it, Krispos saw at last the warriors who had ravaged the Empire so savagely.

The big, fierce, fair-haired men saw him, too, or the imperial banner that floated near him. They jeered and brandished— weapons? No, Krispos saw; Harvas' men were holding up stout stakes carved to a point at both ends—impaling stakes.

Fury filled him, rage more perfect and absolute than any he had ever known. He wanted to slay with his own sword every marauder in front of him. Only a wild charge by all his men seemed a bearable second best. He filled his lungs to cry out the order.

But something cold and calculating dwelt within him, too, something that would not let him give way to impulse, no matter how tempting. He thought again and shouted, "Arrows!"

Bowstrings thrummed as the Videssian archers went to work from horseback. Instead of their stakes, the Halogai lifted yard-wide shields of wood to turn aside the shafts. They were not bowmen; they could not reply.

Here and there, all along the enemy line, men crumpled or lurched backward, clutching at their wounds and shrieking. But the raiders wore mail shirts and helms; even shafts that slipped between shields and over the rampart were no sure kills. And however steeped in wickedness they might have been, Harvas' followers were not cowards. The archery stung them. It could do no more.

By the time he saw that, Krispos had full control of himself once more. "Can we flank them out?" he demanded of Mammianos.

"It's steep, broken ground to either side of that breastwork," the general answered. "Better going for foot than for horse. Still, worth a try, I suppose, and the cheapest way to go about it. If we can get in their rear, they're done for."

Despite his doubts, the general yelled orders. Couriers dashed off to relay them to the soldiers on both wings. Several companies peeled off to try the rough terrain on the flanks. Harvas' Halogai rushed men up the slopes of the pass to head them off.

The northerners had known what they were about when they built their barricade; they had walled off all the ground worth fighting on. The horses of their Videssian foes had to pick their way forward step by step. Afoot, Harvas' men were rather more agile, but they, too, scrambled, stumbled, and often fell.

Some did not get up again; now that the foe was away from cover and concerned more with his footing than his shield, he grew more vulnerable to archery. But the Videssians could not simply shoot their way to victory. They had to force the northerners from their ground. And at close quarters, the footsoldiers gave as good as they got, or better.

Saber and light lance against axe and slashing sword— Krispos watched his men battle the Halogai who followed Harvas. Sudden pain made him wonder if he was wounded until he realized he had his lip tight between his teeth. With a distinct effort of will, he made himself relax. A moment later the pain returned. This time he ignored it.

For all the encouragement he shouted, for all the courage the Videssian cavalry displayed, the terrain proved too rugged for them to advance against determined foes. Krispos wished Harvas' northerners were less brave than his own guardsmen. They did not seem so. He watched a Haloga with a lance driven deep into his side hack from the saddle the man who had skewered him before he, too, toppled.

"No help for it," Mammianos bawled in his ear. "If we want 'em, we'll have to go through 'em, not around."

"We want 'em," Krispos said. Mammianos nodded and turned to the musicians. They raised horns and pipes to their lips, poised sticks over drums. The wild notes of the charge echoed brassily from the boulders that studded both slopes of the pass. The Videssians in the front rank raised a cheer and spurred toward the breastwork that barred their way north.

The front was too narrow for more than a fraction of the imperial army to engage the enemy at once. Rhisoulphos, who led the regiments just behind the van, shouted for his troops to hold up. A gap opened between them and the men ahead.

When Krispos looked back and saw that gap, his own suspicions about his father-in-law and Dara's warning came together in a hard certainty of treason. He slapped a courier on the shoulder. "Fetch me Rhisoulphos, at once. If he won't come, either drag him here or kill him." The rider stared, then set spurs to his horse. With an angry squeal, the beast bounded away.

Krispos' fist gripped the hilt of his saber as tightly as if that were Rhisoulphos' neck. Leave the head of the army to face Harvas' howling killers by itself, would he? Krispos was so sure Rhisoulphos would not willingly accompany his courier that, when his father-in-law did ride up to him, the best he could do was splutter, "By the good god, what are you playing at?"

"Giving our troops room to retreat in, of course, your Majesty," Rhisoulphos answered. If he was a traitor, he did it marvelously well. So what? I already know he's good at that, Krispos thought. But Rhisoulphos went on, "It's a standard ploy when fighting Halogai, your Majesty. Feigning a withdrawal will often lure them out of their position so we can wheel about and take them while they're in disorder."

Krispos glanced over at Mammianos. The fat general nodded. "Oh," Krispos said. "Good enough." His ears were hot, but his helmet covered them so no one could see the flame.

The Videssians at the barriers slashed and thrust at Harvas' men, who chopped at them and their horses both. The shrieks and oaths dinned through the pass. Then above them rose a long, mournful call. The horsemen wheeled their mounts and broke off combat.

The northerners screamed abuse in their own language, in the speech of the Kubratoi, and in broken Videssian. A couple of men started to scramble over the breastwork to pursue the retreating imperials. Their own comrades dragged them back by main force.

"Oh, a plague on them!" Mammianos said when he saw that. "Why can't they make it easy for us?"

"That's better discipline than they usually show," Rhisoulphos said. "The military manuals claim that tactic hardly ever fails against the northerners."

"I don't think Harvas shows up in the military manuals," Krispos said.

One corner of Rhisoulphos' mouth twitched upward. "I suspect you're right, your Majesty." He pointed. "But there he stands, whether he's in the manuals or not."

Krispos' eyes followed Rhisoulphos' finger. Of course that tall figure behind the enemy line had to be Harvas Black-Robe; none of his followers was garbed in similar style. Despite the chieftain's sobriquet, Krispos had looked for someone gaudily clad—a ruler needed to stand out from his subjects. So Harvas did, but by virtue of plainness rather than splendor. Had his hooded robe been blue rather than black, he could have passed for a Videssian priest.

Regardless of how he dressed, no doubt he led. Halogai heavily ran here and there at his bidding, doing their best to ignore the weight of mail on their shoulders. And when Harvas raised his arms—those wide black sleeves flapped like vultures' wings—the northerners held their places. For Halogai, that was the more remarkable. Mammianos glowered at the northerners as if their good order personally affronted him. With a wheezy sigh, he said, "If they won't come out after us, we'll have to get in there nose to nose with them and drive them away." The words plainly tasted bad in his mouth; getting in there nose to nose was not a style of fighting upon which the subtle imperials looked kindly.

But when subtlety failed, brute force remained. As captains dressed their lines and troopers reached over their shoulders to see how many arrows their quivers held, the fierce notes of the charge rang out once more. The Videssians thundered toward the breastwork ahead. "Krispos!" they shouted, and "Imbros!"

Harvas raised his arms. This time he pointed not toward his soldiers or their rampart, but up the slope of the pass. Not far from Krispos, Trokoundos reeled in the saddle. "Call the men back, Majesty!" he cried, clinging to his seat more by determination than anything else. "Call them back!"

Krispos and his generals stared at the mage. "By the good god, why should I?" Krispos demanded angrily.

"Battle magic," Trokoundos croaked. The roar of boulders bounding downslope drowned him out.

Because he was looking at Trokoundos, Krispos did not see the first great stones leap free of the ground on which they had placidly rested for years, perhaps for centuries. That night one of the soldiers who had seen them said, "You ever watch a rabbit that's all of a sudden spooked by a hound? That's what those rocks were doing, except they didn't jump every which way. They came down on us."

The noise the boulders made as they crashed into the Videssian cavalrymen was the noise that might have come from a smithy in the instant a giant stepped on it. Horses went down as if scythed, pitching riders off their backs. The beasts behind them could not stop fast enough and crashed into them and into the stones. That only made the chaos worse.

The men and horses of the very foremost ranks were almost upon the breastwork when the avalanche began. Soldiers turned their heads to gape at what had happened to their comrades. Some drew rein in consternation; other pressed on toward the barricade. Now the Halogai, howling with ferocious glee, swarmed over it to meet them. The imperials at the head of the charge fought back desperately. No one could come to their aid through the writhing tangle behind them.

Krispos watched and cursed and slammed a fist against his thigh as Harvas' northerners overwhelmed his men one by one.

Harvas raised his arms and pointed again. More boulders sprang from their proper places and crashed down on the Videssian army's van.

"Make them stop!" Krispos screamed to Trokoundos.

"I wish I could." The wizard's face was haggard, his eyes wild. "He shouldn't be able to do this. The stress, the excitement of combat weaken magic's grip, even if the sorceries are readied in advance. I've tried counterspells—they go awry, as they should."

"What can we do, then?"

"Majesty, I have not the power to stand against Harvas, not even with my colleagues here." Trokoundos sounded as if admitting that cost him physical pain. "Perhaps with more mages, masters from the Sorcerers' Collegium, he may yet be defeated."

"But not now," Krispos said.

"No, Majesty, not now. He screened his encamped army so I could not detect it, he works battle magic so strong and unexpected that it almost broke me when he unleashed it ... Majesty, a good many years have passed since I owned myself daunted by any sorcerer, but today Harvas daunts me."

Ahead at the barricade, almost all the Videssians were down. They and the crushed soldiers behind them blocked the army's way forward. Krispos' glance slid to the slopes of the pass. Who could guess how many more boulders needed only Harvas' sorcerous command to smash into the imperials, or what other magics Harvas had waiting?

"We retreat," Krispos said, tasting gall.

"Good for you, your Majesty," Mammianos said. Startled, Krispos turned in the saddle to stare at him. "Good for you," the fat general repeated. "Knowing when to cut your losses is a big part of this business. I feared you'd order us to press on regardless, and turn a defeat into a disaster."

"It's already a disaster," Krispos said.

Even as the call to retreat rang mournfully through the pass, Mammianos shook his head. "No, Majesty. We're still in decent order, there's no panic, and the men will be ready to fight another day—well, maybe another season. But if that he-witch ahead does much more to us, they'll turn tail every time they see his ruffians, whether he's with 'em or not."

Cold comfort, but better—a bit better—than none. Krispos' own Halogai closed around him as rearguard while the army withdrew from the pass. If the northerners wanted to slay him and go over to their countrymen, they would never have a better chance. The imperial guardsmen looked back only to shake fists at Videssos' foes.

And yet, in a way, the guards were the least of Krispos' worries. His eyes, like those of so many others with him, kept sliding up the sides of the pass while he wondered whether more great stones would smash men and horses to jelly. If Harvas had time to ready stones through the whole length of the pass, disaster great enough to satisfy even Mammianos' criteria might yet befall the army.

Somehow, retreat did not become rout. The boulders on the slopes held their places. At last those slopes grew lower and farther apart as the pass opened out into the country below the mountains. "Back to our old campsite?" Mammianos asked.

"Why not?" Krispos said bitterly. "That way we can pretend today never happened—those of us who are still alive, at any rate."

Mammianos tried to console him. "We can't do these little tricks without losses."

"Seems we can't even do them with losses," Krispos said, to which the general only grunted by way of reply.

Any camp is joyless after a defeat. Wounded men scream round winners' tents, too, but they and their comrades who come through whole know they have accomplished what they set out to do. Losers enjoy no such consolation. Not only have they suffered, they have suffered and failed.

Failure, Krispos remembered, made Petronas' army break up. He ordered stronger sentry detachments posted south of the camp than to the north. The officers to whom he gave the command did not remark on it, but nodded knowingly as they saw to carrying it out.

Krispos walked to the outskirts of the camp, where badly wounded men lay waiting for healer-priests to attend to them. The soldiers not too far gone in their own anguish saluted him and tried to smile, which made him feel worse than he had before. But he made sure he saw all of them and spoke to as many as he could before he went back to his own tent.

Darkness had fallen by then. Krispos wanted nothing more than to sleep, to forget about the day's misfortunes, if only for a few hours. But a duty harder even than visiting the wounded lay ahead of him. He'd kept putting off writing to Tanilis of Mavros' death; he'd hoped to be able to say he had avenged it. Now that hope had vanished—and how much, in any case, would it have mattered to her? Her only son was gone. Krispos inked his pen and sat staring at the blank parchment in front of him. How to begin?

"Krispos Avtokrator of the Videssians to the excellent and noble lady Tanilis: Greetings." Thus far formula took him, but no farther. He needed the smooth phrases that came naturally to anyone who had the rhetorical training that went with a proper education. He did not have them, and would not entrust this letter to a secretary.

"Majesty?" Geirrod's deep voice came from outside the tent.

"What is it?" Krispos put down the pen with a strange mixture of relief and guilt.

The guardsman's reply warned him he had known relief too soon. "A matter of honor, Majesty."

The last Haloga to speak of honor in that tone of voice had been Vagn, talking about killing himself. Krispos ducked out through the tent flap in a hurry. "What's touched your honor, Geirrod?" he asked.

"Not my honor alone, your Majesty, but the honor of all my folk who take your gold," Geirrod said. Krispos was tall for a Videssian. He still had to look up at Geirrod as the stern northerner went on, "I am chosen to stand for all of us, since I was first to bow before you as lord."

"So you were," Krispos agreed, "and I honor you for that. Do you doubt it?" Geirrod shook his massive head. Exasperated, Krispos snapped, "Then how have I failed you—aye, and all the other Halogai, too?"

"By not sending us forth in combat this day against those who follow Harvas, and holding us back despite what we told you on the road south of Imbros," Geirrod said. "It struck many among us as a slur, as a token you lack trust in us. Better we fare home to Halogaland than carry our axes where we may not blood them. Videssians delight in having troops for show. We took oath to fight for you, Majesty, not to look grand in your processions."

"If you truly think I held you back for fear you would betray me, blood your axe now, Geirrod." Not without second thoughts—the Halogai could be grimly literal—Krispos bent his head and waited. When no blow came, he straightened up and looked at Geirrod again. "Since you do not think so, how can you have lost any honor on account of me?"

The guardsman stiffened to attention. "Majesty, you speak sooth. I see this cannot be so. I shall say as much to my countrymen. Any who doubt me may measure their doubt against this," He hefted his axe.

"Good enough," Krispos said. "Tell them also that I didn't send them forward because I hoped I could clear the Halogai— Harvas' Halogai, I mean—away from the barricade with archery. If it had worked, we would have won the fight without costing ourselves too dear."

Geirrod let out a loud snort. "You may think partway as we Halogai do, Majesty, but I see that at bottom you're a Videssian after all. As it should be, I guess; can't be helped, come what may. But a fight has worth for its own sweet sake. The time for reckoning up the cost is afterward, not before."

"As you say, Geirrod." To Krispos, the northerner's words were insanely reckless. He knew the Halogai knew most Videssians thought as he did, and also knew the Halogai reckoned imperials overcautious at best in war, at worst simply dull. The Halogai fought for the red joy of it, not to gain advantage. That, he supposed, was why no Videssians served a northern chieftain as bodyguards, nor likely ever would.

As he went back into the tent, Geirrod resumed his post outside, evidently satisfied with their exchange. Krispos allowed himself the luxury of a long, quiet sigh. He hadn't lied to Geirrod, not quite, but he had entertained doubts about the Halogai. But by asking Geirrod if he believed his countrymen were held back from fear of treachery, Krispos had taken the onus off himself. The next time he faced Harvas' men, though, he did not think he would have to hold back his guardsmen.

He sat down at the little folding table that served him for a desk in the field. Parchment and pen were where he'd left them when Geirrod called. But for the salutation, the parchment remained blank. Krispos sighed again. He wished Trokoundos knew a spell to make unpleasant letters write themselves, but that probably went beyond sorcery into out-and-out miracle-working.

After one more sigh, Krispos inked the pen again. As was his habit, he plunged straight ahead with what he had to say. "My lady, while I was fighting Petronas in the westlands, Mavros heard Agapetos had been beaten and took an army north from Videssos the city to stop Harvas Black-Robe from moving farther forward. I grieve to have to tell you that, as you foresaw, your son was also beaten and was killed."

Setting down the words brought back to him afresh the loss of his foster brother. He studied what he'd written. Was it too bald? He decided it was not. Tanilis approved of straightforward truth ... and in any case, he thought, she might well already know Mavros was dead, being who and what she was.

He thought for a while before he wrote more. "I loved Mavros as if he were my brother by birth. I would have kept him from attacking Harvas if I'd known that was in his mind, but he hid it from me till too late. You will know better than I do that going ahead no matter what was always his way."

He spread fine sand over the letter to dry the ink. Then he turned over the parchment and wrote on the reverse, "The excellent and noble lady Tanilis, on her estate outside Opsikion." He sanded those words dry, too, then rolled the letter up into a small tube with them on the outside. After tying it shut, he let several large drops of sealing wax fall across the ribbon that closed it. While the wax was still soft, he pressed his signet into it. He stared at the imperial sunburst for a long time. It remained as perfect as if his armies had won three great victories instead of being thrashed three times running and seeing a city sacked and its populace destroyed.

He stuck his head out of the tent to call for a courier. As the fellow stuffed the letter into a waterproof tube, Krispos promised himself that before the war with Harvas was done, the Empire would again become as whole and complete as its seal. He was glad he'd made the vow, but would have felt easier about it had he been surer he could bring it to pass.