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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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