“Maybe I’d better be happy with things the way they are now,” Annore said.

  Garivald snorted. “You think I’d make a lousy baron.” He scratched. He was probably lousy now. People got that way when winter closed down on the land. Nobody bathed often enough to hold the nasty little pests at bay. Sitting in the steam bath till you couldn’t stand being baked any more and then running out and rolling in the snow felt wonderful—once a week, or once every other week. More often than that, it felt like death. And that often wasn’t enough to kill lice and nits. Garivald scratched some more. Can’t be helped, he thought.

  Annore didn’t answer him, which might have been just as well. Instead, she put Leuba on her shoulder till the baby rewarded her with a belch. “There’s a good girl,” Annore said. “Don’t you feel better now that that’s out?” She seemed to feel better now that she’d got her complaints out, too.

  “Winter,” Garivald said, more to himself than to anyone else. Here he was, in the house with his family and his livestock, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere—or nowhere far, and not for long—for quite a while. Neither would Annore. No wonder she felt like complaining sometimes.

  One of the cows dropped more dung on the floor. The only thing Annore said was, “Clean that up, Syrivald.”

  She still held Leuba. Syrivald knew better than to think that meant she wouldn’t get up and wallop him if he didn’t hop to it. He’d made that mistake a couple of times. He wouldn’t make it any more.

  “Just as well Waddo and Herka don’t have a crystal,” Garivald said. “We’d get endless yattering about the war against the black people up in the north, and how we’d won another smashing battle.” He snorted again. “Don’t they know we know the war would be over by now if it were really going well? And besides”—he added the clincher—“if they had a crystal, the inspector and impressers would be able to give them orders without bothering to come out here.”

  “Powers above!” Annore exclaimed. “We wouldn’t want that. I think I am happier with things the way they are now.”

  “I think I am, too.” Garivald knew perfectly well he was happier with things as they were. He couldn’t imagine a peasant in Unkerlant who wasn’t happier with things as they were. The only thing change and fancy magic got Unkerlanter city folk was going right under King Swemmel’s thumb. Nobody could want that. He was sure of it.

  9.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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