Rulers of the Darkness

Three

Winter was the rainy season in Bishah. The capital of Zuwayza rarely got much in the way of rain, but what it got, it got in winter. Sometimes, at this season, it also got cool enough at night to make Hajjaj think wearing clothes might not be the worst idea in the world.

The Zuwayzi foreign minister's senior wife patted his hand when he presumed to say that out loud. "If you want to put on a robe, put on a robe," Kolthoum told him. "No one here will mind if you do." Her tone suggested than anyone living in Hajjaj's home who did mind any eccentricity he happened to show would answer to her, and would not enjoy doing it.

But he shook his head. "My thanks, but no," he said. "No for two reasons. First, the servants would be scandalized, no matter what they said. I'm an old man now. I've been through too many scandals to invite another one."

"You're not so old as all that," Kolthoum said.

Hajjaj was far too courteous to laugh at his senior wife, but he knew better. His hair, having gone from black to gray, was now going from gray to white. (So was Kolthoum's; they'd been yoked together for almost fifty years. Hajjaj didn't notice it in her, for he saw her through the eyesight of a shared lifetime, where today and the lost time before the Six Years' War could blur into each other at a blink.) His dark brown skin had grown wrinkled and leathery. When it did rain here, his bones would ache.

He went on, "The second reason is even more compelling: so far as I know, we haven't got any clothes here. I have this style and that- short tunics and long ones and kilts and trousers and who knows what useless fripperies- in a closet next to my office down in the city, but I don't need to bother with such foreign nonsense in my own home."

"If you're feeling chilly, it isn't nonsense," Kolthoum said. "I'm sure we could have a maidservant fix you something out of a blanket or curtains or whatever would suit you."

"I'm fine," Hajjaj insisted. His senior wife looked eloquently unconvinced, but stopped arguing. One of the reasons they'd got on so well for so long was that they'd learned not to push each other too far.

Tewfik, the majordomo, walked into the chamber where they were sitting. Next to him, Hajjaj truly wasn't so old as all that: Tewfik had served his father before him. Bowing, the clan retainer said, "Sorry to disturb you, lad" -he was the only man Hajjaj knew who could call him that- "but a messenger from the palace just brought you this." He handed Hajjaj a roll of paper sealed with King Shazli's seal.

"I thank you, Tewfik," Hajjaj replied, and the majordomo bowed again. Hajjaj wasn't upset that he hadn't heard the messenger arrive; sheltering behind thick sandstone walls, his home, like any clanfather's, was a compound well on its way to being a little village. He put on his spectacles, broke the royal seal, unrolled the paper, and read.

"Can you speak of it?" Kolthoum asked.

"Oh, aye," he said. "His Majesty summons me to his audience chamber tomorrow morning, that's all."

"But you'd see him tomorrow anyhow," his senior wife observed. "Why does he need to summon you?"

"I don't know," Hajjaj admitted. "By tomorrow morning, though, I should find out, don't you think?"

Kolthoum sighed. "I suppose so." She reached out and patted her husband on the thigh, a gesture having more to do with sympathy than with desire. It had been a long time since they'd made love. Hajjaj couldn't remember just how long, in fact, but their companionship hardly needed physical intimacy anymore. One of these days, he would have to wed a new junior wife if he sought such amusements. Lalla, recently divorced, had been more expensive and more temperamental than she was worth. One of these days. As he neared seventy, lovemaking seemed less urgent than it had a couple of decades earlier.

He fortified himself with strong tea the next morning before his driver took the carriage down from the foothills and into Bishah proper. It hadn't rained lately, which meant the road wasn't muddy. It also wasn't dusty, a more common annoyance.

Men shouted back and forth on the roof of the royal palace. They weren't guards; the Zuwayzin liked King Shazli well. They were roofers: when the rains came, even the royal roof leaked. Unlike his citizens, Shazli didn't have to wait his turn to get things set right.

As he'd said he would, the king awaited his foreign minister in the audience chamber, a less formal setting than the throneroom. Shazli was about half Hajjaj's age. Hajjaj thought well of him: for a man so young, he was no fool. Only a gold circlet showed the king's rank- the Zuwayzi custom of nudity made display harder.

Bowing, Hajjaj said, "How may I serve your Majesty?"

"Before we talk business, we can take refreshment," Shazli answered, by which Hajjaj knew the business wasn't a desperate emergency- the king, unlike his subjects, could put aside the rules of hospitality if he chose. Shazli clapped his hands. A serving woman brought in tea and date wine and honey cakes enlivened with chopped pistachios.

While they nibbled and sipped, Shazli and Hajjaj were limited to polite small talk. Presently, the wine drunk and the cakes diminished, the maidservant came back and carried off the silver tray on which she'd fetched them. Hajjaj watched her swaying backside with appreciation but without urgency. That wasn't just his years; he'd seen so much bare flesh, it didn't inflame him as it did most Derlavaian folk.

"You will be wondering why I summoned you." Rituals completed, Shazli could with propriety get down to business.

"So I will, your Majesty," Hajjaj agreed. "As always, though, I expect you will enlighten me."

"Always the optimist," King Shazli said. Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. He'd been his kingdom's foreign minister since Zuwayza regained her freedom from an Unkerlant embroiled in the Twinkings War after the earlier ravages of the Six Years' War. Few men who'd spent their whole careers as diplomatists retained much in the way of optimism by the time they got old. Shazli's wry chuckle said he did know that. He reached under a pillow next to the one against which he reclined and pulled out a sheet of paper. Passing it to Hajjaj, he said, "This was brought to our line under flag of truce and, once its import was recognized, flown straight here by dragon."

Like any Zuwayzi, Hajjaj carried a large leather wallet to make up for his dearth of pockets. As he had for Shazli's summons, he took out his spectacles so he could read the document. When he was through, he peered over the lenses at his sovereign. "Unkerlant has never been a kingdom renowned for subtlety," he remarked. "The Unkerlanters would always sooner order than persuade, and they would sooner threaten than order… as we see here."

"As we see here," the king agreed. "All-out war against us- 'war to the knife' was the phrase they used, wasn't it? -unless we leave off fighting them and go over to their side against Algarve. They graciously allow us three days' time before our reply is due."

Hajjaj read the document again. Shazli had accurately summarized it. Inclining his head, the foreign minister inquired, "And what would you have of me in aid of this, your Majesty?"

"Can Swemmel do as he threatens?" Shazli demanded. "If he can, can we hope to withstand him if he hurls everything he has against us?"

"I hope you are also asking General Ikhshid these same questions," Hajjaj said. "I am not a soldier, nor do I pretend to be."

"I am consulting Ikhshid, aye." King Shazli nodded. "And I have some notion of what you are and what you are not, your Excellency. I'd better, after all these years. I want your view not as a man of war but as a man of the world."

Reclining against cushions didn't make even a seated bow easy, but Hajjaj managed. "You do me too much credit," he murmured, thinking nothing of the sort. After a few seconds, he shook his head. "I don't believe King Swemmel can do it," he said. "Aye, the Unkerlanters crushed Algarve at Sulingen, but they're still locked with Mezentio's men from the Narrow Sea in the south to the Garelian Ocean here in the tropic north. If they pull enough men from their lines to be sure of crushing us, the Algarvians are bound to find a way to make them pay. Algarve can hurt them worse than we'd ever dream of doing."

"Ikhshid said the same thing when I asked him last night, which does somewhat relieve my mind," Shazli said. "Still… My next question is, is Swemmel so mad for revenge against us that he'd do anything to harm us, not caring what might happen to his own kingdom?"

Hajjaj clicked his tongue between his teeth and sucked in a long, thoughtful breath. No, his sovereign was no fool. Far from it. Though a rational man himself, Shazli knew Swemmel of Unkerlant wasn't, or wasn't always. Swemmel did some unbelievably foolish things, but he also did some unexpectedly clever ones, not least because nobody else could think along with him.

After a second longish pause, Hajjaj said, "I don't believe Swemmel will forget the war against Algarve just to punish us. I would not swear by the powers above, but I don't believe so. The Algarvians, over the past year and a half, have made themselves very hard for any Unkerlanter to forget."

"This is also General Ikhshid's view," King Shazli said. "I am glad the two of you speak with a single voice here, very glad indeed. If you disagreed, I would have more hesitation about rejecting the Unkerlanter demands out of hand."

"Oh, your Majesty, you mustn't do that!" Hajjaj exclaimed.

"How not?" Shazli asked. "Will you tell me I misunderstood you, and that you want Zuwayza to bow down to Unkerlant after all? If you will tell me that, I shall have certain things to tell you: of that you may rest assured."

"By no means," Hajjaj said. "All I ask is that you not send Swemmel a paper as hot as the ultimatum he has given you. In fact, you might be wisest not to send him any reply at all. Aye, I believe that's best. Do nothing to inflame him, and our kingdom will stay safe."

By the nature of things, Zuwayza would never be a great power in Derlavai. The kingdom had not enough people, not enough land- and much of the land it did have was sun-blasted desert, in which thornbushes and lizards and camels might flourish but nothing else did. Hajjaj's ancestors had been nomads who roamed that desert waste and fought other Zuwayzi clans for the sport of it. Though generations removed from a camel-hair tent, he'd learned the old songs, the brave songs, as a boy. Counseling prudence came hard. But he reminded himself he was no barbarian but a civilized man. He did what needed doing.

And King Shazli nodded. "Aye, what you say makes good sense. Very well, then. If you will be so kind as to let me have that,…" Hajjaj passed the paper back to the king. Shazli tore it to pieces, saying, "Now we rely on the Algarvians to keep Unkerlant too busy to worry about the likes of us."

"I think we may safely do that," Hajjaj replied. "After all, the Algarvians have the strongest incentive to fight hard: if they lose, they're likely to get boiled alive."

Colonel Sabrino shook his head like a wild beast, trying to get the snow off his goggles. How was he supposed to see down to the ground if he couldn't see past the end of his nose? The Algarvian officer was tempted to take off the goggles and just use his eyes, as he did in good weather. But even then, his dragon could fly fast enough to make tears stream from his eyes and ruin his vision. The goggles would have to stay.

The dragon, sensing him distracted, let out a sharp screech and tried to fly where it wanted to go, not where he wanted it to. He whacked it with his long, iron-shod goad. It screeched again, this time in fury, and twisted its long, snaky neck so that it could glare back at him. Its yellow eyes blazed with hatred. He whacked it again. "You do what I tell you, you stupid, stinking thing!" he shouted.

Dragons were trained from hatchlinghood never to flame their riders off them. As far as humans were concerned, that was the most important lesson the great beasts ever learned. But dragonfliers knew how truly brainless their charges were. Every once in a while, a dragon forgot its lessons…

This one didn't. After another hideous screech, it resigned itself to doing as Sabrino commanded. He peered down through scattered, quick-scudding clouds at the fight around Durrwangen.

What he saw made him curse even more harshly than he had at his dragon. The Unkerlanters had almost completed their ring around the city. If they did, he saw nothing that would keep them from serving the Algarvian garrison inside as they'd served the Algarvian army that reached- but did not come out of- Sulingen.

Could Algarve withstand two great disasters in the southwest? Sabrino didn't know, and didn't want to have to find out. He spoke into his crystal to the squadron leaders he commanded: "All right, lads, let's give Swemmel's men the presents they've been waiting for."

"Aye, my lord Count." That was Captain Domiziano, who still seemed younger and more cheerful than he had any business being in the fourth year of a war that looked no closer to an end than it had the day it started: further from an end, perhaps.

"Aye." Captain Orosio didn't waste words. He never had. The other two squadron commanders also acknowledged the order.

Sabrino's laugh was bitter. He should have led sixty-four dragonfliers; each of his squadron commanders should have had charge of sixteen, including himself. When the fight against Unkerlant began, the wing had been at full strength. Now Sabrino commanded twenty-five men, and there were plenty of other colonels of dragonfliers who would have envied him for having so many.

Back in headquarters far from the fighting, generals wrote orders a full wing would have had trouble meeting. They always got irate when the battered bands of dragonfliers they had in the field failed to carry out those orders in full. Sabrino got irate, too- at them, not that it did him any good.

All he could do was all he could do. Having spoken through the crystal, he used hand signals, too. Then he whacked his dragon with the goad again. It dove on a large concentration of Unkerlanters below. The dragonfliers in the wing followed him without hesitation. They always had, since the first clashes with the Forthwegians. Good men, one and all, he thought.

A few of the Unkerlanters blazed up at the diving dragons. A few tried to run, though running in snowshoes wouldn't get them very far very fast. Most just kept on with what they were doing. Unkerlanters were a stolid lot, and seemed all the more so to the excitable Algarvians.

Sabrino's dragon carried two eggs slung beneath its belly. He released them and let them fall on the foe. The other dragonfliers in his wing were doing the same. Bursts of suddenly released sorcerous energy flung snow and Unkerlanters and behemoths in all directions. Whooping, Sabrino ordered his dragon high into the air once more. "That's the way to do it, boys," he said. "We can still hit 'em a good lick every now and again, curse me if we can't."

He knew a moment's pity for the Unkerlanter footsoldiers. He'd been a footsoldier, toward the end of the dreadful slaughters of the Six Years' War a generation before. Having somehow come through alive, he'd vowed he would never fight on the ground again. Dragonfliers knew terror, too, but they rarely knew squalor.

Captain Domiziano's smiling face appeared in Sabrino's crystal. "Shall we go down and flame some of those whoresons, too?" the squadron leader asked.

Reluctantly, Sabrino shook his head. "Let's go back to the dragon farm and load up on eggs again instead," he answered. "It's not like flying down to Sulingen was- we can get back here again pretty fast. And that'll save on cinnabar."

Along with brimstone, the quicksilver in cinnabar helped dragons flame farther and fiercer. Brimstone was easy to come by. Quicksilver… Sabrino sighed. Algarve didn't have enough. Algarve had never had enough. Her own sorcery had turned and bit her, helping Lagoas and Kuusamo drive her from the land of the Ice People, from which she'd imported the vital mineral. There were quicksilver mines aplenty in the Mamming Hills south and west of Sulingen- but the Algarvians had never got to them. And so…

And so, as reluctantly, Domiziano nodded. "Aye, sir. Makes sense, I suppose. We'll save the dragonfire we've got for fighting with Unkerlanter beasts in the air."

"My thought exactly," Sabrino agreed. "We don't always get to do what we want to do. Sometimes we do what we have to do."

Surely King Mezentio had been doing what he wanted to do when he launched the Algarvian armies against Unkerlant. Until then, Algarve had gone from one triumph to another: over Forthweg, over Sibiu, over Valmiera, over Jelgava. Sabrino sighed again. The first summer's campaigns against the Unkerlanters had been triumphant, too. But Cottbus hadn't quite fallen. A year later, Sulingen hadn't quite fallen, and neither had the quicksilver mines in the Mamming Hills. And now Mezentio's men did what they had to do in Unkerlant, not what they wanted to do.

No sooner had that gloomy thought crossed Sabrino's mind than dour Captain Orosio's face replaced Domiziano's in the crystal. "Look down, sir," Orosio said. "Curse me if our soldiers aren't pulling out of Durrwangen."

"What?" Sabrino exclaimed. "They can't do that. They've got orders to hold that town against everything the Unkerlanters can do."

"You know that, sir," Orosio answered. "I know that. But if they know that, they don't know they know it, if you know what I mean."

And he was right. Durrwangen was an important town, and the Algarvians had put a sizable army into it to make sure it didn't fall back into Unkerlanter hands. And now that army, men and behemoths, horse and unicorn cavalry, was streaming out of Durrwangen through the one hole in the Unkerlanter ring around it, tramping north and east along whatever roads the soldiers and animals could find or make in the snow.

"Have they gone mad?" Sabrino wondered. "Their commander's head will go on the block for something like this."

"I was thinking the same thing, sir." But Orosio hesitated and then added, "At least they won't be thrown away, like the men down in Sulingen were."

"What? I didn't hear that." But Sabrino was arch; he'd heard perfectly well. And he could hardly deny that his squadron commander had a point. So far as he knew, not a man had come out of Sulingen. The Algarvians down here would live to fight another day- but they were supposed to have been fighting in Durrwangen.

"What do we do, sir?" Orosio asked.

Sabrino hesitated. That needed thought. At last, he answered, "We do what we would have done even if they'd stayed in the city. We go back, get more eggs, and then come and give them whatever help we can. I don't see what else we can do. If you've got a better answer, let me hear it, by the powers above."

But Orosio only shook his head. "No, sir."

"All right, then," Sabrino said. "We'll do that."

News of the Algarvians' retreat from Durrwangen had already reached the dragon farm by the time Sabrino's wing got back to it. Some of the dragon handlers said the commander in Durrwangen hadn't bothered asking for permission before pulling out. Others claimed he had asked for permission, been refused, and pulled out anyway. They were all sure of one thing. "His head will roll," said the fellow who tossed meat covered with powdered brimstone and cinnabar to Sabrino's dragon. He sounded quite cheerful about the prospect.

And Sabrino could only nod. "His head bloody well deserves to roll," he said. "You can't go around disobeying orders."

"Oh, aye," the dragon handler agreed. But then, after a pause, he went on, "Still and all, though, that's a lot of boys who can do a lot of fighting somewhere else."

"Everybody thinks he's a general," Sabrino said with a snort. The dragon handler tossed his mount another big gobbet of meat. The beast snatched it out of the air and gulped it down. Its yellow eyes followed the handler as he took yet another piece of meat from the cart. The dragon was far fonder of the man who fed it than of the man who flew it.

Despite his snort, Sabrino remained thoughtful. He and Orosio had said about the same thing as the dragon handler had. Did that mean they were on to something, or were they all daft the same way?

In the end, it probably wouldn't matter. Regardless of whether his move proved foolish or brilliant, the general in charge of the Algarvian forces breaking out from Durrwangen would be in trouble with his superiors. Being right was rarely an excuse for disobeying orders.

As soon as his beasts were fed and had fresh eggs slung beneath them, Sabrino ordered them into the air once more. He hoped they wouldn't meet Unkerlanter dragons. They'd been flying too much lately. They were tired and far from at their best. He wished they could have had more time to recover between flights. But there were too many miles of fighting and not enough dragons to cover them. The ones Algarve had needed to do all they could.

As if drawn by a lodestone, Sabrino led his dragonfliers back toward the Algarvian soldiers breaking out of Durrwangen. They were doing better than he'd thought they would be. Their retreat, plainly, had caught the Unkerlanters by surprise. Swemmel's men were swarming into the city they'd lost the summer before. Most of them seemed willing to let the soldiers who'd defended it go.

Sabrino and his dragonfliers punished the Unkerlanters who did attack the retreating Algarvians. Corpses, some in long, rock-gray tunics, others in the white smocks that made them harder to see against the snow, sprawled in unlovely death. Sabrino snorted at that, this time mocking what passed for poetry in his mind. He'd seen too much fighting in two different wars, and the next lovely death he found would be the first.

Down below, the Algarvian army kept falling back. It retreated in excellent order, without the slightest sign of disarray from the men. But if they were in such good spirits, why had their leader ordered them out of Durrwangen in the first place? Couldn't they have held the important town a good deal longer? Sabrino had plenty of questions, but no good answers to go with them.

On the defensive. Sergeant Istvan didn't like the phrase. Gyongyosians were by training and (they said) by birth a warrior race. Warriors, by the nature of their calling, boldly stormed forward and overwhelmed the foe. They didn't sit and wait inside fieldworks for the foe to storm forward and try to overwhelm them.

So said most of the men in Istvan's squad, at any rate. They'd come into the army to force their way through the passes of the Ilszung Mounts and through the endless, trackless forests of western Unkerlant. They'd done a good job of it, too. Unkerlant was distracted by her bigger fight with Algarve thousands of miles to the east, and never had put enough men into the defense against Gyongyos- never till recently, anyhow. Now…

"We just have to wait and see if we can build up reinforcements faster than those stinking whoresons, that's all," Istvan said. "If you haven't got the men, you can't do the things you could if you did."

"Aye, he's right," Corporal Kun agreed. Kun always looked more like what he had been- a mage's apprentice- than a proper soldier. He was thin- downright scrawny for a Gyongyosian- and his spectacles gave him a studious seeming. He went on, "Istvan and I had to put up with this same kind of nonsense of Obuda, out in the Bothnian Ocean, when the Kuusamans had enough men to get the jump on us."

"And me," Szonyi said. "Don't forget about me."

"And you," Istvan agreed. They'd all been on Obuda together. Istvan went on, "We've seen the kinds of things you have to do when you haven't got enough men to do everything you want. You sit and you wait for the other bugger to make a mistake and then you try and kick him in the balls when he does."

Kun and Szonyi nodded. The two of them- weedy corporal and burly common soldier with tawny hair and curly beard that made him look like a lion- understood how to play the game. So did Istvan. The rest of the men in the squad… he wasn't so sure of them. They listened. They nodded in all the right places. Did they really know what he was talking about? He doubted it.

"We are a warrior race. We shall prevail, no matter what the accursed Unkerlanters do." That was Lajos, one of the new men. He was as burly as Szonyi, a little burlier than Istvan. In the small bits of action he'd seen since coming up to the front, he'd fought as bravely as anyone could want. He was nineteen, and sure he knew everything. Who was there to tell him he might be wrong? Would he believe anyone? Not likely.

Istvan took off his gloves and looked at his hands. His nails were raggedly trimmed, with black dirt ground under them and into the folds of skin at his knuckles. He turned his hands over. Thick calluses, also dark with ground-in dirt, creased his palms. Scars seamed his hands, too. His eyes went, as they always did, to one in particular, a puckered line between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

Kun had a scar as near identical to that one as made no difference. So did Szonyi. So did several other squadmates, the men who'd served under Istvan for a while. Captain Tivadar had cut them all. The company commander would have been within his rights to kill them all. They'd eaten goat stew. They hadn't known it was goat; they'd killed the Unkerlanters who'd been cooking it. But knowledge didn't matter. They'd sinned. Istvan still didn't know if his expiation was enough, or if the curse on those who ate of forbidden flesh still lingered.

Someone approached the timber-reinforced redoubt in which Istvan and his squad waited. "Who comes?" he called softly.

"The fairy frog in the fable, to gulp you all down."

With a chuckle, Istvan said, "Come ahead, Captain."

Tivadar did, slipping from tree to tree so he didn't show himself to any Unkerlanter snipers who might be lurking nearby. Nodding to Istvan, he slid down into the redoubt. "Anything that looks like trouble?" he asked.

"No, sir," Istvan answered at once. "Everything's been real quiet the past couple of days."

"That's good." Tivadar checked. He wasn't much older than Istvan- he couldn't have been thirty- but he thought of everything, or as close to everything as he could. "I hope that's good, anyhow. Maybe Swemmel's boys are brewing up something nasty out of sight." He turned to Kun. "Anything that feels like trouble, Corporal?"

Kun shook his head. "Nothing I can sense, Captain. I don't know how much that's worth, though. I was only an apprentice, after all, not a mage myself." In the squad, he put on airs about the small spells he did know. Putting on airs with the company commander didn't pay.

"All right," Tivadar said. "The last time they struck us with sorcery, even our best mages didn't know what they'd do till they did it, curse them."

He was all business. Having purified Istvan, Kun, Szonyi, and the rest, he acted as if they were ritually pure, and never mentioned that dreadful night. Neither did any of them, not where anybody not of their number might hear. The shame was too great for that. Istvan thought it always would be.

Kun usually mocked whenever he saw the chance. He was a city man, and his ways often seemed strange and slick and rather repellent to Istvan, who like most Gyongyosians came from a mountain valley where the people were at feud with some neighboring valley when they weren't at feud among themselves. But Kun didn't mock now. In tones unwontedly serious, he said, "That was an abomination. The stars will not shine on men who murder their own to power their magecraft."

"Aye, you're right," Lajos boomed. "The Unkerlanters fight filthy. It's worse than eating goat's flesh, if you ask me."

He waited for everyone to nod and agree with him. In most squads, everybody would have. Here, the agreement was slow and halfhearted. It was badly acted by men who wanted to seem normal Gyongyosians but had trouble doing so. Lajos didn't realize that. Istvan hoped the motions of the stars would grant that he never did. The young trooper grunted and shifted uncomfortably, knowing things had gone wrong and not understanding why.

Szonyi said, "Captain, when can we take the fight to Swemmel's men again? We drove 'em through the mountains and we drove 'em through the woods. We can still do it, any time we get the orders."

Tivadar answered, "If the men set over me tell me to go forward, go forward I shall, unless I should die serving Gyongyos, in which case the stars will cherish my spirit forevermore. But if the men set over me tell me to wait in place, wait in place I shall. And if the men set over you, Trooper, if they tell you to wait in place, wait in place you will. And they do. I do."

"Aye, sir." Szonyi dipped his head in reluctant acquiescence. He was a man of his kingdom- and, like Istvan, a man of the countryside. Given his way, he would go straight at a foe, without subtlety but without hesitation, and keep going till one or the other of them couldn't stand up anymore.

"Remember, boys, you have to stay alert all the time," Tivadar warned. "The Unkerlanters are better in the forest than we are. We couldn't have come so far against 'em if we didn't have 'em outnumbered. They don't always need magic to have a go at us- sometimes sneakiness serves 'em just as well."

He climbed out of the redoubt and headed off along the line to the next Gyongyosian strongpoint. Istvan wished his countrymen had enough men to cover all the line through the forest they held. They didn't, especially in winter, where staying out alone might so easily lead to freezing to death.

"The captain is a pretty good officer," Lajos said.

"Aye, he is," Istvan agreed, and all the other veterans in the squad chimed in, too. Lajos let out a small sigh of relief. Not everyone thought he was an idiot all the time, anyhow.

Kun said, "If we can keep what we hold now when the war is over, we'll have won the greatest victory against Unkerlant in almost three hundred years."

"Is that a fact?" Istvan said, and Kun nodded in a way that proclaimed it was not only a fact, it was a fact anyone this side of feeblemindedness should have known. Istvan sent his corporal a look a little less than warm. Kun returned it: not quite so openly this time, for Istvan outranked him, but unmistakably nonetheless.

Szonyi sniffed, for all the world like a hound taking a scent. "More snow coming," he said. "Won't be long, either. You can taste the wind."

Istvan had plenty of practice gauging the weather himself. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, as if he were taking bites out of the air. The chill of the wind- a wind that had suddenly picked up- the feel of the moisture it carried… He nodded. "Aye, we're for it. Coming out of the west, from behind us."

"Blowing right into the Unkerlanters' faces," Szonyi said. "Seems a shame not to hit 'em when we've got that kind of edge. We could be like mountain apes, gone before they even knew we were there."

"Aye, I see the resemblance, all right." Kun planted the barb with a self-satisfied smirk. Szonyi glowered at him. Istvan kept the two of them from quarreling any worse than they usually did.

Whether right about striking or not, Szonyi was right about the storm. It blew in that night, snow swirling around the trees and through their branches till Lajos, on sentry-go, complained, "How am I supposed to see anything? King Swemmel and his whole court could be out there drinking tea, by the stars, and I wouldn't know it unless they invited me to have some."

"If Swemmel was out there, he'd be drinking spirits." Istvan spoke with great conviction. "And the son of a whore wouldn't invite anybody to share." But he could see no farther than Lajos. If the Unkerlanters were gathering in the forest not far away, he might not know it till too late. He might not, but Kun would. He shook the onetime mage's apprentice out of his bedroll.

"What do you want?" Kun asked irritably, yawning in his face.

"You've got that little magic that tells when somebody's moving toward you," Istvan answered. "Don't you think this would be a good time to use it?"

Kun eyed the snowstorm and nodded, though he warned, "The spell won't say whether the men it spies are friends or foes."

"Just work it," Istvan said impatiently. "If they're coming toward us from out of the east, they're no friends of ours."

"Well, you're bound to be right about that," Kun admitted, and worked the tiny spell. A moment later, he turned back to Istvan. "Nothing, Sergeant. Remember, the snow gives the Unkerlanters as much trouble as it gives us."

"All right." Istvan used a brisk nod to hide his relief. He knew he shouldn't have been so relieved; it wasn't proper for a man from a warrior race. But even a man of a warrior race might have been excused for being unwilling to wait and receive a blow from the enemy.

Kun said, "We'll get through another day. That will do." He sounded none too fierce himself, but Istvan didn't reprove him.

Now that Vanai dared go out onto the streets of Eoforwic once more, she wished she could find some books written in classical Kaunian. But they'd long since vanished from all the booksellers' shops, those dealing in new and secondhand volumes alike: the Algarvians forbade them. The redheads had aimed to destroy Kaunianity even before they'd started destroying Kaunians.

Vanai suspected she might have been able to get her hands on some had she known which booksellers to trust. But she didn't, and she didn't care to ask questions that might draw notice to herself. She made do with Forthwegian books.

My magecraft makes me look like a Forthwegian, she thought. Even Ealstan sees me this way almost all the time. I speak Forthwegian almost all the time. People call me Thelberge, as if I really were a Forthwegian. Am I still Vanai?

Whenever she looked in a mirror, her old familiar features looked back at her. Her sorcery didn't change the way she saw herself. In the mirror, she still had fair skin, a long face with a straight nose, and gray-blue eyes. But even in the mirror, her hair was black. Like any Kaunian with a grain of sense, she'd dyed it to make it harder for the Algarvians to penetrate her disguise.

Am I still Vanai, if the world knows me as Thelberge? If the world knows me as Thelberge for long enough, will the Vanai inside me start to die? If Algarve wins the Derlavaian War, will I have to go on being Thelberge for the rest of my life?

She didn't want to think about things like that, but how could she help it? If the Algarvians won the war, would Eoforwic stay shabby and battered, its people- even real Forthwegians- scrawny, for the rest of her life? She didn't want to think about that, either, but it looked like being true.

A lot of the graffiti that said SULINGEN had been painted over, but Vanai knew what rectangles of fresh whitewash meant. She smiled fiercely every time she saw one. The Algarvians had pasted recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund's Brigade everywhere they could, as if to mask the importance of the defeat they'd suffered from the Forthwegians and maybe from themselves.

Up on the hill at the heart of the city stood the royal palace. Vanai hadn't thought about King Penda very often back in the days before the war. She hadn't thought much of him, either, but that was a different story. Like most Kaunians in Forthweg, she hadn't been enamored of the rule of a man not of her blood, and a man who strongly preferred those who were of his own blood.

These days, a large Algarvian flag, red, green, and white, flew about the palace. An Algarvian governor ruled Forthweg in Penda's stead. Things surely had been less than ideal before the war. Now they were a great deal worse than that. Vanai shook her head. Who could have imagined such a thing?

Eoforwic had several market squares. It needed them, to keep so many people fed. The one closest to her block of flats was perhaps the smallest and meanest in the city, which meant it was larger than the one in Gromheort and dwarfed the tiny square back in Oyngestun.

Vanai bought barley and beans and turnips: food for hard times, food that would keep people going when nothing better was to be had. Even the beans and barley were in short supply, and more expensive than they should have been. If Ealstan hadn't brought home good money from casting accounts, the two of them might have gone hungry. By the pinched and anxious looks on the faces of a lot of people in the square, hunger was already loose in Eoforwic.

She stayed watchful and wary as she carried her purchases back toward her flat. She'd heard stories of people knocked on the head for the sake of a sack of grain. She didn't intend to be one of them.

A blocky Forthwegian man stood in the middle of the sidewalk, staring east and pointing up into the sky. Vanai had to stop; there was no polite way around him. But she didn't turn and look. For all she knew, he'd come up with a new way to distract people and then steal from them. If that did him an injustice, then it did. Better safe than sorry ran through her mind.

Then the Forthwegian shouted something that made her change her mind: "Dragons! Unkerlanter dragons!"

She was just starting to whirl when the first eggs fell on Eoforwic. "Get down!" screamed somebody who must have gone through such horror before. Vanai hadn't- the Algarvians hadn't reckoned Oyngestun important enough to waste eggs on it- but she wasted no time in throwing herself flat on the slates of the sidewalk… and on top of the precious food she'd bought. Even with dragons overhead, she couldn't afford to lose that.

More eggs burst, seemingly at random, some far away, others only a couple of blocks off. Along with the roars from the bursts came the almost musical tinkling of shattered glass hitting walls and pavements and shattering further and the screams of men and women either wounded or terrified.

Now Vanai did look up. The dragons were hard to see. It was a cloudy day, and their bellies were painted a gray that made them look like nothing so much as moving bits of cloud themselves. The eggs their dragonfliers released were easier to spy. They were darker, and fell straight and swift.

One seemed to fall straight toward Vanai. It got bigger and bigger- and burst only half a block away, close enough to pick her up and slam her back down to the ground with shocking and painful force. Her ears were stunned, deafened, she hoped not forever. A tiny sliver of glass tore a cut in the back of her left hand. But a full-throated scream drowned out her yelp.

The man who'd warned of the Unkerlanter dragons lay writhing on the sidewalk. His hands clutched at his belly, from which blood poured: a flood, a torrent, a deluge of blood. Vanai stared in helpless, dreadful fascination. How much blood did a living man hold? More to the point, how much could he lose before he stopped being a living man?

His shrieks faded. His hands relaxed. The blood poured off the edge of the sidewalk into the gutter. Vanai gulped, fighting sickness.

Almost as soon as it began, the Unkerlanter attack ended. The dragons had flown a long way. They couldn't carry very many eggs, or very heavy ones. As soon as they'd dropped what cargo of death they could bring, their dragonfliers guided them back toward the west once more.

Vanai picked up her groceries and hurried past the stocky man's corpse toward her block of flats. A couple of other bodies lay beyond that one. She tried not to look at them, either. A wounded woman cried out, but someone was already tending to her. Vanai went on without feeling the bite of conscience.

Eoforwic boiled like an anthill stirred by a stick. People who'd been inside their homes and shops when the eggs started falling came rushing out to see if loved ones and friends were all right or simply to see what had happened. People who'd been on the street rushed toward their homes and shops to make sure those were still standing. Here and there, physicians and mages and firefighting crews had to push their way through the chaos to do their duty.

All things considered, the Algarvian constables on the streets did a pretty good job of opening the way so help could get where it was going. They weren't subtle or gentle about it: they screamed abuse in their language and in broken Forthwegian and Kaunian, and they used their bludgeons to wallop anyone who proved even a split second slow in grasping what they meant. But Vanai didn't think Forthwegian constables would have acted differently. They did what needed doing on the spur of the moment; whys and wherefores could wait.

Vanai let out a great sigh of relief when she found her block of flats undamaged but for a couple of broken windows and no fires burning anywhere close by. She carried the barley and turnips and beans up to her flat, set down the sacks in the kitchen, and poured herself a large cup of wine.

She'd got halfway down it, a warm glow beginning to spread through her, when she started worrying about Ealstan. What if he didn't come back? What if he couldn't come back? What if he were injured? What if he were…? She wouldn't even think the word. She gulped down the rest of the wine instead.

Hour followed hour. Ealstan didn't come. There's no reason for him to come, Vanai told herself, over and over again. He's doing what he has to do, that's all. That made perfect sense. Eoforwic was a big city. The Unkerlanter raid had killed or wounded a relative handful of people. The odds that Ealstan was one of them were vanishingly small. Aye, it all made perfect logical sense. It didn't stop her heart from racing or her breath from whistling in her throat with anxiety.

And it didn't stop her from leaping in the air when she heard the coded knock at the door, or from crying out, "Where were you?" when Ealstan came inside.

"Casting accounts. Where else would I be?" he answered. Vanai's expression must have been eloquent, for he added, "None of the eggs fell anywhere near me. See? I'm right as rain."

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he just didn't want her to worry. She didn't say anything about the cut on her hand, for fear he would worry. What she did say was, "Powers above be praised that you're safe." She squeezed the breath out of him.

"Oh, aye, I'm fine. All things considered, it wasn't much of a raid. I wonder if any of those dragons will get home again." Ealstan sounded dispassionate, but his arms tightened around her.

She squeezed him again. "Why did the Unkerlanters bother, if they didn't do Eoforwic any harm?"

"Oh, I didn't say that," Ealstan answered. "Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?" Now Vanai wanted to shake him. "I was bringing groceries home when it happened, and I came straight here afterwards. How could I have heard anything?"

"All right. All right. I'll talk," Ealstan said, as if she were a constable pounding the truth out of him. "Most of their eggs fell around the ley-line caravan depot, and a couple of them smashed it up pretty well. The Algarvians will have some trouble moving soldiers through there for a while."

"Soldiers or… anybody else," Vanai said slowly. She couldn't bring herself to come out and mention by name the Kaunians the Algarvians sent west to be sacrificed so their life energy could power the redheads' sorceries.

"Aye, or anybody else." Ealstan understood what she meant. He set a hand on her shoulder. "With that sorcery you worked out, you've done more to make that hard for Mezentio's men than all the Unkerlanter dragons put together."

"Have I?" Vanai considered that. It was a pretty big thought. "Maybe I have," she said at last. "But even if I have, it's still not enough. The Algarvians shouldn't have been able to do what they did in the first place."

Ealstan nodded. "I know that. Anybody with any brains knows it. They never would have been able to, either, if so many Forthwegians didn't hate Kaunians." He gave Vanai a quick kiss. "You need to remember that not all Forthwegians do."

She smiled. "I already knew that. I'm always glad to hear it again, though- and to see proof." This time, she kissed him. One thing led to another. They ended up eating supper later than they'd intended to. They were both young enough to take that kind of thing for granted, even to laugh about it. Vanai never stopped to wonder how rare and fortunate it was.

Commander Cornelu guided his leviathan out of the harbor at Setubal and into the Strait of Valmiera. The leviathan was a fine, frisky beast. Cornelu patted its smooth, slick skin. "You may be as good as Eforiel," he said. "Aye, you just may."

The leviathan wriggled its long, slim body beneath him. It was far more sinuous, far more graceful, than its blocky cousins, the whales. It didn't understand what he'd said- he didn't think it would have understood even if he'd spoken Lagoan rather than his native Sibian- but it liked to hear him speak.

He patted it again. "Do you know what kind of compliments I'm paying you?" he asked. Since the leviathan couldn't answer, he did: "No, of course you don't. But if you did, you'd be flattered, believe me."

He'd ridden Eforiel from Sibiu to Lagoas after the Algarvians overran his island. Going into exile in Lagoas was vastly preferable to yielding to the invaders. Without false modesty, he knew Sibian-trained leviathans were the best in the world. Eforiel could do things no Lagoan leviathan-rider could hope to get his mount to match.

But Eforiel was dead, slain off his home island of Tirgoviste. After making his way back to Lagoas again, he'd had this new beast for a while, and he'd worked hard to train it up to Sibian standards. It was getting there. It might even have already arrived.

The leviathan darted to the left. Its jaws opened for a moment, then closed on a mackerel. A gulp and the fish was gone. Those great tooth jaws wouldn't have made more than two bites of a man- maybe only one. Like dragonfliers, leviathan-riders had, and needed to have, great respect for the beasts they took to war. Unlike dragonfliers, they got respect and affection in return. Cornelu wouldn't have wanted anything to do with dragons.

"Nasty, stupid, bad-tempered beasts," he told the leviathan. "Nothing like you. No, nothing like you."

With a flick of its tail, the leviathan dove below the surface. Magecraft, grease, and a rubber suit protected Cornelu from the chill of the sea. More magecraft let him breathe underwater. Without that spell, leviathan-riding would have been impossible. His mount could stay submerged far longer than he could.

Veterinary mages kept promising a spell to let leviathans breathe underwater, too. That would have changed warfare on the sea. Despite endless promises, though, the spell had yet to make an appearance. Cornelu didn't expect it during this war or, indeed, during his lifetime.

One stretch of ocean looked very much like another. Cornelu thanked the powers above that the day was clear: he had no trouble guiding his leviathan north, toward the coast of Valmiera. Along with him, the beasts carried two eggs hung under its belly. The Algarvians thought they could ship more or less safely in the waters off Valmiera. His job was to show them they were wrong.

Every so often, he glanced up at the sky. Ever since Mezentio's men seized Valmiera, their dragons and the Lagoans' had clashed above the strait that separated the island from the mainland. Now one side seized the upper hand, now the other. He'd had too many Algarvian dragonfliers attack him to want to let another one see him before he spied the enemy dragon.

Each time he looked today, the sky was empty. The Lagoans said a lot of Algarvian dragons had flown out of Valmiera lately, headed west. Maybe they were right, though Cornelu had trouble trusting them a great deal further than he trusted Mezentio's men. If they were, the war in Unkerlant was making the Algarvians forget about everything else.

Toward evening, the Derlavaian mainland rose up out of the sea ahead of Cornelu. He tapped his leviathan in a particular way. As it had been trained to do, it lifted its head out of the sea, standing on its tail with powerful beats of its flukes. Cornelu rose with the leviathan's head, and could see much farther than he could while closer to the surface.

Seeing farther, however, didn't mean seeing more here. No Algarvian freighters or warships glided along the ley lines. No Valmieran fishing boats used the ley lines, either, nor did any sailboats scud along without the power bigger vessels drew from the earth's grid of sorcerous energy.

Cornelu cursed under his breath. He'd sunk an Algarvian ley-line cruiser, along with other, smaller craft. He wanted more. With the Algarvians holding down his kingdom with a hand of iron, he hungered for more. The Sibian exiles fighting out of Lagoas were among the fiercest, most determined foes the Algarvians had.

But what a man wanted and what he got were not always, or even very often, one and the same. Cornelu had learned that painful lesson all too well. For this foray, he carried not one but two crystals. Making sure he'd chosen the one attuned to the Lagoan Admiralty, he murmured the activating charm he'd learned by rote and spoke into it: "Off the coast of Valmiera. No vessels visible. Proceeding with second plan." He'd also learned the phrases by rote. Lagoan was related to Sibian, but not too closely: its grammar was simplified, and it had borrowed far more words from Kuusaman and classical Kaunian than had his native tongue.

In the crystal, he saw the image of a Lagoan naval officer. Lagoan uniforms were darker, more somber, than the sea-green he'd worn while serving Sibiu. The Lagoan said, "Good luck with second plan. Good hunting with first." He'd evidently been briefed that Sibiu spoke his language imperfectly. After a small flare of light, the crystal returned to blankness.

The leviathan twisted in the water to catch a squid. Cornelu didn't let the motion disturb him as he replaced the first crystal in its oiled-leather case and drew out the second one from its.

Again, he murmured an activation charm. He spoke this one with much more confidence. It was in Algarvian, and Algarvian and Sibian were as closely related to each other as a couple of brothers, closer even than Valmieran and Jelgavan. He didn't know how the Lagoans had come by an Algarvian crystal: taken it from a captured dragonflier, perhaps, or brought it back from the land of the Ice People, from which Mezentio's men had been expelled.

However they'd got it, he had it now. He didn't speak into it, as he had into the one attuned to the Admiralty. All he did was listen, to see what emanations it would pick up from other Algarvian crystals aboard nearby ships or on the mainland.

For a while, he heard nothing. He cursed again, this time not under his breath. He hated the idea of going back to Setubal without having accomplished anything. He'd done it before, but he still hated it. It seemed a waste of an important part of his life.

And then, faint in the distance, he caught one Algarvian talking to another: "-cursed son of a whore slipped through our fingers again. Do you suppose his sister really is tipping him?"

"Not a chance- you think she's not watched?" the second Algarvian replied. "No, somebody slipped up, that's all, and won't admit it."

"Maybe. Maybe." But the first Algarvian didn't sound convinced. Along with the crystals, Cornelu had along a slate and a grease pencil. He scribbled notes on the conversation. He had no idea what it meant. Someone back in Setubal might.

After sunset, sea and sky and land went dark. As the Lagoans doused lamps to keep Algarvian dragons from finding targets, so Mezentio's men made sure Valmiera offered nothing to beasts flying up from the south. Cornelu found himself yawning. He didn't want to sleep; he'd have to orient himself again when he woke, for his leviathan would surely go wandering after food.

A fish leaped out of the sea and splashed back into the water. The tiny creatures on which fish fed glowed in alarm for a moment, then faded. Cornelu yawned again. He wondered why people and other animals slept. What earthly good did it do? Nothing he could see.

His captured Algarvian crystal started picking up emanations again. A couple of Mezentio's soldiers- Cornelu gradually realized they were brothers or close cousins- were comparing notes about their Valmieran girlfriends. They went into richly obscene detail. After listening for a while, Cornelu wasn't sleepy anymore. He didn't take notes on this conversation; he doubted the Lagoan officers who eventually got his slate would be amused.

"Oh, aye, she aims her toes right at the ceiling, she does," one of the Algarvians said. The other one laughed. Cornelu started to laugh, too, but choked on his own mirth. Back in Tirgoviste town, some Algarvian whore-hounds like these two had seduced his wife. He wondered if Costache would present him with a bastard to go with his own daughter if he ever got back there again. Then he wondered how he would ever get back to Tirgoviste- or why he would want to.

Along with frustrated lust, frustrated fury made sure he wouldn't fall asleep right away. At last, to his relief, the two Algarvians shut up. He lay atop his leviathan's back, rocking gently on the waves. The leviathan might have been dozing, or so he thought till it chased town and caught a good-sized tunny. He liked tunny's flesh himself, but baked in a pie with cheese, not raw and wriggling.

Maybe the chase changed the emanations that reached his crystal. In any case, a new Algarvian voice spoke out of it: "Everything ready with this new shipment? All the ley lines south cleared?"

"Aye," another Algarvian answered. "We've been leaning on the cursed bandits who make life such a joy. Nothing will go wrong this time."

"It had better not," the first voice said. "We haven't got any Kaunians to spare. We haven't got anything to spare, not here we don't. Everything gets sucked west, over to Unkerlant. If we don't bring this off now, powers above only know when we'll get another chance, if we ever do."

Cornelu wrote furiously. He wondered if the Lagoans back in Setubal would be able to read his scrawl. It didn't matter too much, as long as he was there along with the notes. Mezentio's men were planning murder, somewhere along the southern coast of Valmiera- murder doubtless aimed across the Strait of Valmiera at a Lagoan or Kuusaman coastal city.

Then a new voice interrupted the Algarvians: "Shut up, you cursed fools. The emanations from your crystals are leaking and someone- aye, someone- is listening to them."

If that wasn't a mage, Cornelu had never heard one. And the fellow would be doing everything he could to learn who and, even more important, where the eavesdropper was. Quickly, Cornelu murmured the charm that took the crystal down to dormancy again. That would make the Algarvian mage's work harder for him. Cornelu was tempted to throw the crystal into the sea, too, but refrained.

He did rouse the leviathan and send it swimming south again, as fast as it would go. The sooner he got away from the Valmieran coast, the tougher the time Mezentio's minions would have finding him and running him down. He glanced up at the sky again. He would have trouble spotting dragons, but dragonfliers wouldn't enjoy looking for his leviathan, either.

After a while, he activated the crystal that linked him to Lagoas. The same officer as before appeared in it. Cornelu spoke rapidly, outlining what he'd learned- who could guess when the Algarvians might start slaying?

The Lagoan heard him out, then said, "Well, Commander, I daresay you've earned your day's pay." A Sibian officer would have kissed him on both cheeks, even if he was only an image in a crystal. Somehow, though, he didn't mind this understated praise, not tonight.

Skarnu had got out of the habit of sleeping in barns. But, having escaped the latest Algarvian attempt to grab him in Ventspils, he'd gone out into the country again. A farmer risked his own neck by putting up a fugitive from what the redheads called justice.

"I'll help with the chores if you like," he told the man (whose name he deliberately did not learn) the next morning.

"Will you?" The farmer gave him an appraising look. "You know what you're doing? You talk like a city man."

"Try me," Skarnu answered. "I feel guilty sitting here eating your food and not helping you get more."

"Well, all right." The farmer chuckled. "We'll see if you still talk the same way at the end of the day."

By the end of that day, Skarnu had tended to a flock of chickens, mucked out a cow barn, weeded a vegetable plot and an herb garden, chopped firewood, and mended a fence. He felt worn to a nub. Farmwork always wore him to the nub. "How did I do?" he asked the man who was putting him up.

"I've seen worse," the fellow allowed. He glanced at Skarnu out of the corner of his eye. "You've done this before a time or two, I do believe."

"Who, me?" Skarnu said, as innocently as he could. "I'm just a city man. You said so yourself."

"I said you talked like one," the farmer answered, "and you cursed well do. But I'll shit a brick if you haven't spent some time behind a plow." He waved a hand. "Don't tell me about it. I don't want to hear. The less I know, the better, on account of the stinking Algarvians can't rip it out of me if it's not there to begin with."

Skarnu nodded. He'd learned that lesson as a captain in the Valmieran army. All the stubborn men- and women- who kept up the fight against Algarve in occupied Valmiera had learned it somewhere. The ones who couldn't learn it were mostly dead now, and too many of their friends with them.

Supper was black bread and hard cheese and sour cabbage and ale. In Priekule before the war, Skarnu would have turned up his nose at such simple fare. Now, with the relish of hunger, he ate enormously. And, with the relish of exhaustion, he had no trouble falling asleep in the barn.

Lanternlight in his face woke him in the middle of the night. He started to spring to his feet, grabbing for the knife at his belt. "Easy," the farmer said from behind the lantern. "It's not the stinking redheads. It's a friend."

Without letting go of the knife, Skarnu peered at the man with the farmer. Slowly, he nodded. He'd seen that face before, in a tavern where irregulars gathered. "You're Zarasai," he said, naming not the man but the southern town from which he'd come.

"Aye." "Zarasai" nodded. "And you're Pavilosta." That was the village nearest the farm where Skarnu had dwelt with the widow Merkela.

"What's so important, it won't wait till sunup?" Skarnu asked. "Are the Algarvians a jump and a half behind you, hot on my trail again?"

"No, or they'd better not be," "Zarasai" answered. "It's more important than that."

More important than my neck? Skarnu thought. What's more important to me than my neck? "You'd better tell me," he said.

And "Zarasai" did: "The Algarvians, powers below eat them, are shipping a caravanload- maybe more than one caravanload; I don't know for sure- of Kaunians from Forthweg to the shore of the Strait of Valmiera. You know what that means."

"Slaughter." Skarnu's stomach did a slow lurch. "Slaughter. Life energy. Magic aimed at… Lagoas? Kuusamo?"

"We don't know," answered the other leader of Valmieran resistance. "Against one of them or the other, that's sure."

"What can we do to stop it?" Skarnu asked.

"I don't know that, either," "Zarasai" replied. "That's why I came for you- you're the one who managed to get an egg under a ley-line caravan full of Kaunians from Forthweg one of the other times the stinking Algarvians tried this. Maybe you can help us do it again. Powers above, I hope so."

"I'll do whatever I can," Skarnu told him. When he'd buried that egg on the ley line not far from Pavilosta, he hadn't even known the Algarvians would be shipping a caravanload of captives to sacrifice. But the egg had burst regardless of whether he'd known that particular caravan was coming down the ley line. Now his fellows in the shadow fight against King Mezentio thought he could work magic twice when he hadn't really done it once. I'll try. I have to try.

"Come on, then," the irregular told him. "Let's get moving. We have no time to waste. If the redheads get them to a captives' camp, we've lost."

Skarnu paused only to pull on his boots. "I'm ready," he said, and bowed to the farmer. "Thanks for putting me up. Now forget you ever saw me."

"Saw who?" the farmer said with a dry chuckle. "I never saw nobody."

A carriage waited outside the barn. Skarnu climbed up into it, picking bits of straw off himself and yawning again and again. "Zarasai" took the reins. He drove with practiced assurance. Skarnu asked, "Which ley line will the redheads be using?"

Sounding slightly embarrassed, the other man replied, "We don't quite know. They've been acting busy at three or four different places down along the coast, running a caravan to this one, then another to that one, and so on. They're getting sneakier than they used to be, the miserable, stinking whoresons."

"We've caused 'em enough trouble to make 'em realize they have to be sneaky," Skarnu observed. "It's a compliment, if you like." He yawned again, trying to flog his sleepy wits to work. "Whatever they're doing with this sacrifice, they think it's important. They've never put this much work into trying to fool us before."

"Zarasai" grunted. "I'm glad I came for you. I hadn't thought of it like that. I don't think anybody's thought of it like that." He flicked the reins to make the horse move a little faster. "Doesn't mean I think you're wrong, on account of I think you're right. Powers below eat the Algarvians."

"Maybe they already have," Skarnu said, which kept his companion thoughtfully silent for quite a while.

Had an Algarvian patrol come across the carriage, it would have gone hard for the two irregulars, who were traveling far past the curfew hour. But Mezentio's men, and even the Valmierans who helped them run the occupied kingdom, were spread thin. Dawn was making the eastern sky blush when "Zarasai" drove into a village that made Pavilosta look like a city beside it: three or four houses, a tavern, and a blacksmith's shop. He tied the horse in front of one of the houses and got down from the carriage. Skarnu followed him to the front door.

It opened even before "Zarasai" knocked. "Come in," a woman hissed. "Quick. Don't waste any time. We'll get the carriage out of sight."

Fancier than a farmhouse, the place boasted a parlor. The furniture would have been stylish in the capital just before the Six Years' War. Maybe it was still stylish here in the middle of nowhere. Skarnu didn't know about that. He didn't have much of a chance to wonder, either, for his eye was drawn like iron to a lodestone in the direction of the half dozen crystals on the elaborately carven table in the middle of that parlor.

"We can talk almost anywhere in the kingdom," the woman said, not without pride.

"Good," Skarnu said. "Just don't do too much of it, or you'll have the Algarvians listening in." The woman nodded. Despite his words, Skarnu was impressed. Down on the farm near Pavilosta, he'd often wondered if his pin-pricks meant anything to the Algarvians, and if anyone else in Valmiera was doing anything against them. Seeing with his own eyes how resistance spread across the whole kingdom felt very fine indeed.

"Zarasai" went back into the kitchen and returned with a couple of steaming mugs of tea. He passed one on to Skarnu, waited till he'd sipped, and then said, "All right- you're in charge. Tell us what to do, and we'll do it."

Maybe having served as a captain fitted Skarnu to the role thrust on him. Having wrecked the one caravan didn't, as he knew too well. Doing his best to think like a soldier, he said, "Have you got a map with ley lines marked? I want to see the possibilities."

"Aye," the woman said matter-of-factly, and pulled one from the bureau drawer.

Skarnu studied it. "If they're after Setubal again, they'll send the captives to the camp by Dukstas, the one they used before when the Lagoans raided them."

The irregular from Zarasai nodded. "We figure that one's the most likely. They'd dearly love to serve Setubal as they served Yliharma. All these other camps are smaller and farther east. Setubal's the best target they've got. I don't see that they'd want to hit Kuusamo again and leave Lagoas untouched."

"No, I wouldn't think so, either," Skarnu agreed. But he frowned. "Dukstas is the obvious place to send the captives."

"Of course it is," "Zarasai" said. "That's why they're doing all these dances, isn't it? -to keep us from seeing what's obvious, I mean."

"Maybe." Skarnu shrugged. "It could be, aye. But I just don't know…" He cursed under his breath. "Can we try to sabotage the ley lines into all of these camps?"

"We can try doing them all." The other irregular sounded dubious, and explained why: "Odds are, some of the people we send in will get caught. They've got lots of soldiers and lots of cursed Valmieran traitors guarding the ley lines. They want to get these captives through, that's plain."

"That means something really big," Skarnu said. "Setubal or… something else." His frown turned into a scowl. "What could be bigger than Setubal, if they can bring it off? But Setubal doesn't feel right to me- do you know what I mean?"

"It's your call," the man from Zarasai answered. "That's why you're here."

"All right." Skarnu nodded to the woman who did duty for a crystallomancer. "As much in the way of sabotage on every ley line we can reach that leads to one of those camps. I'm not convinced the captives are going to Dukstas. Maybe we'll see where they are going when we seen which ley lines the redheads defend hardest."

"Sabotage all the ley lines we can," the woman repeated. "I shall pass the word." Pass it she did, one crystal at a time. Having given his orders, Skarnu could only wait to see how things far away turned out. That was new for him: he'd been a captain before, aye, but never a general.

Reports started coming back around midday, some from raiders who had planted eggs, others from bands that failed because their stretch of ley line was too strongly protected. A couple of bands never reported back at all. Skarnu worried about that. Eyeing the map, "Zarasai" said, "Well, the buggers won't ship 'em into Dukstas, and that's flat."

"So it is." Skarnu felt a certain satisfaction himself. A few hours later, word came that the Algarvians had succeeded in moving the Kaunian captives into a seaside camp, but one far, far to the east. He cursed, but made the best of things: "They may manage something, but we kept them from doing their worst."