“The stick,” Leudast muttered, and scurried over to grab it. He didn’t know how much power his own had left. This far from a ley line, with no first-rank mage close by, when that power was gone, it was gone. Good to have a second stick handy.

  He scowled at the Gyongyosian’s body, from which rose a faint smell of burnt meat along with the latrine odor of suddenly loosed bowels. The bastard was already dead, sure as sure. A mage didn’t have to be of the first rank to draw energy from a sacrifice. Soldiers who gave themselves up to power their comrades’ sticks won the Star of Efficiency—posthumously, of course—but expending a captive was more efficient still.

  It didn’t matter, not here. For one thing, he had no captive, only a corpse. For another, no mages, first-rank or otherwise, were around. He crawled back behind his boulder and waited for the Gyongyosians to press the attack.

  For several minutes, they didn’t. Maybe they weren’t sure how much damage the dragon attack had done. Or maybe they weren’t any more enthusiastic about the war than Leudast was. He listened to somebody, presumably an officer, haranguing them in their unintelligible twittering language. Knowing what an Unkerlanter officer would say in such a spot, Leudast guessed the fellow was telling them they’d get worse from him than from their foes if they didn’t start moving.

  Here they came, the fuzzy bastards, some of them blazing, others darting forward while the rest made the Unkerlanters keep their heads down. Leudast popped up, took a couple of blazes with his beam, and then ducked again before the Gongs could puncture him as he’d punctured their trooper.

  When he heard more of them getting around to his right, he fell back. A beam came horrifyingly close to him, lighting up a rock just in front of his face. But then he was in good cover again, and blazing back at the enemy.

  And then, rather to his own surprise, more Unkerlanters came moving up from the rear, shouting King Swemmel’s name as they advanced. The Gyongyosians shouted, too, in dismay. Their chance was gone, and they knew it. The reinforcements even had a small portable egg-tosser with them. How the Gongs howled when they were on the receiving end of eggshells full of light and fire!

  “Forward, men!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted. “Let’s drive them out of the mountains and into the flat. King Swemmel and efficiency!”

  As far as Leudast was concerned, thinking a couple of platoons of soldiers could drive Gyongyos out of the Elsung Mountains wasn’t very efficient. He lay panting behind his heap of rocks. He’d been in the mountains for a while. No overeager fool was going to get him killed, not when he’d just come through a skirmish in one piece. “Staying alive is efficient, too,” he muttered, and sat tight.

  Fernao stood at the bow of the Leopardess as she bounded north and west across the waves from Setubal, the capital of Lagoas, toward the Algarvian port of Feltre. The mage felt harassed. Not only did he have to bear in mind the pattern of ley lines on the sea—harder to read than they were on land—but he also had to be alert for any trace of Sibian warships, and perhaps for those of Valmiera, too.

  Captain Rogelio came up to him. “Anything?” he asked.

  “No, sir.” Fernao shook his head, and felt the ponytail flip back and forth on his neck. Like most Lagoans, he was tall and on the lean side. In some lights, his hair was auburn; in others, a rich brown. His narrow eyes, with a fold of skin at the inner corners that made them look set at a slant, told of Kuusaman blood. “All seems as quiet as if we were still at peace.”

  Rogelio snorted. “Lagoas is at peace, I’ll thank you to remember. It’s all the other fools who’ve thrown the world into the fire.” He twiddled at his mustache: he wore a big waxed swashbuckler, in Algarvian style.

  “As if the world were at peace.” Fernao accepted the correction; like any mage worth his salt, he craved precision. After a moment, he went on, “In the Six Years’ War, we chose sides.”

  “And a whole great whacking lot of good it did us, too,” the captain of the Leopardess said with another snort. “What did we get out of it? Thousands—tens, hundreds of thousands—dead, even more maimed, a war debt we’re just now starting to get out from under, half our shipping sunk—and you want to do it again? Here’s what I think of that.” He spat—carefully, over the leeward rail.

  “I never said I wanted to do it again,” Fernao replied. “My older brother died in the woods in front of Priekule. I don’t remember much about him; I was only six or seven. I lost an uncle—my mother’s younger brother—and a cousin, and another cousin came home short a foot.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not anything special. Plenty of families in Lagoas have worse stories to tell. Too many families simply aren’t, after the Six Years’ War.”

  “That’s the truth,” Rogelio said with an emphatic nod. Everything he did was emphatic; he aped Algarvian style in more than his mustache. “So why do you sound so cursed glum about staying at peace, then?”

  “I’m not glum about our staying at peace,” Fernao said. “I’m glum about the rest of the world going back to war. All the kingdoms of eastern Derlavai suffered as much as we did.”

  “And Unkerlant,” Rogelio put in. “Don’t forget Unkerlant.”

  “Unkerlant is a kingdom of eastern Derlavai … in a manner of speaking,” Fernao said with a thin smile. The smile soon slipped. “Thanks to the Twinkings War, they hurt themselves worse than Algarve ever managed, and Algarve hurt them plenty.”

  Rogelio’s lip curled scornfully. “They were efficient at hurting themselves.”

  Fernao’s chuckle had a bitter edge. “King Swemmel will make the Unkerlanters efficient about the time King Gainibu makes the Valmierans shy.”

  “But Gainibu has a little sense—as much as you can expect from a Valmieran, anyhow,” Rogelio said. “He doesn’t try to make his people into something they’re not.” The captain waved a hand. “There! You see, my friend? Between us, we’ve solved all the problems in the world.”

  “All but one: how to get the world to pay any attention to us,” Fernao said. His sardonic streak made a good counter to Rogelio’s extravagances.

  When it came to running the Leopardess, though, the captain was all business. “If we are sailing an evasive course, my sorcerous friend, should we not be shifting ley lines soon?”

  “If we really wanted an evasive course, we would sail, with canvas and masts, as they did in the days of the Kaunian Empire,” Fernao said. “If we did that, we could slip by Sibiu close enough to spit, and we’d never be noticed.”

  “Oh, aye, no doubt,” Rogelio said, arching his eyebrows. “And if a storm blew up at the wrong time, it’d fling us on to the Rocks of Cluj, too. No, thank you! They might have been men in those days, but they were madmen, if anybody wants to know what I think. Sailing by wind and by guess, without the earth’s energy matrix to draw on? You’d have to be a madman to try that.”

  “No, just an ignorant man—or a yachtsman,” Fernao said. “Not being either of those myself…” He drew from around his neck an amulet of lodestone and amber set in gold. Holding it between the palms of his hands, he felt of the energy flowing through the ley line along which the Leopardess cruised. He could not have put into words the sensation that passed through him, but he understood what it meant. “Three minutes, Captain, perhaps four, before our line intersects the next.”

  “Time enough for me to get to the wheel myself, then,” Rogelio said. “That chucklehead of a helmsman we’ve got would likely be picking his nose or playing with himself when you signaled, and then we’d just keep barreling along, probably right down the Sibs’ throats.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he hurried away. Fernao knew he was maligning the helmsman. He also knew Rogelio knew he was being outrageous, and that the captain always used the fellow with great courtesy when they were together. Extravagant Rogelio was; simple, no.

  And then the mage forgot about Rogelio, forgot about everything but the sensation trickling out of the amulet and through him. He was not so much its interpreter as its conduit, in the same way that the ley line was a conduit for the energy the amulet sensed. He leaned a little as the trickle shifted, then thrust his right hand high into the air.

  The Leopardess swung to starboard, the deck heeling under Fernao’s feet. No mere sailing ship could have turned so sharply; the motion was almost as if a geometer had scribed a right angle. Fernao could not see the crossing of the ley lines, but he did not need to see them. He had other senses.

  As soon as he was sure the turn was good and true, he slid the amulet’s chain back over his head, returning the familiar weight to where it normally rested, just above his heart. From the bridge, Rogelio waved to him. He waved back. He took pride in what he did, and in doing it well.

  And then, suddenly, he frowned. He yanked out the amulet once more and held it between his hands. He waved to the bridge again, urgently this time. “Captain!” he shouted. “We’re going to have company.”

  “What’s toward?” Rogelio shouted back, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to make a megaphone.

  “Quiver in the ley line, Captain—no, quivers.” Fernao corrected himself. “Two ships on this line, heading our way. Maybe an hour out from us, maybe a little less.”

  Rogelio cursed. “They’ll know we’re here, too?” he demanded.

  “Unless their mages are asleep, yes,” Fernao answered.

  More curses came from the captain of the Leopardess. Then he grasped for a bright side to the unwelcome news. “They wouldn’t by any chance by Algarvian ships come to escort us into port?”

  Fernao frowned once more; that hadn’t occurred to him. He concentrated on the amulet. “I don’t think they’re Algarvian,” he said at last, “but I can’t be sure. Sibiu and Algarve use about the same ley magic, not much different from ours. They aren’t Valmierans; I’m sure of that. Valmiera and Jelgava have their own style.”

  Rogelio came forward, to be able to talk without screaming. “They’re going to be Sibs, all right,” he said. “Now life gets interesting.”

  “We’re neutrals,” Fernao said. “Sibiu needs our trade more than Algarve does: those islands don’t come close to raising everything the Sibians want. If they try to block us, they go under embargo. You’d have to be a lackwit to think King Vitor would say something like that without meaning it, and the Sibs aren’t lackwits.”

  “They’re in a war,” Rogelio said. “You don’t think straight when you’re in a war. Anyone who doesn’t know that is a lackwit, too, my dear mage.”

  “As may be.” Fernao bowed with exquisite courtesy. “I tell you this, though, my dear captain: if Sibiu interferes very much with Lagoan shipping, Vitor won’t just embargo them. He will go to war, and that fight is one Sibiu can’t win.”

  “The Sibs against Algarve and us?” Rogelio pursed his lips, then nodded. “Well, you’re right about that, though I’m hanged if I fancy the notion of allying with King Mezentio.”

  “We wouldn’t be allies, just people with the same enemies,” Fernao said. “Unkerlant and Kuusamo are both fighting the Gyongyos, but they aren’t allies.”

  “Would you ally with the Unkerlanters? I’d almost sooner pucker up and kiss Mezentio’s bald head,” Rogelio returned. Then he bared his teeth in a horrible grimace. “If the Sibs could talk Kuusamo into jumping on our backs, though—”

  “That won’t happen,” Fernao said, and hoped he was right. He had reason to think so, anyhow: “Kuusamo won’t get into two wars at the same time.”

  Rogelio grunted. “Mm, maybe not. I wouldn’t want to be in two wars at once. By the king’s beard, I wouldn’t even want to be in one war at once.”

  A hail from the crow’s nest made him turn: “Two ships on the western horizon, sir! They look like Sibian frigates.”

  Rogelio dashed for the bridge. Fernao peered west. The lean shark shapes swelled rapidly: Sibian frigates sure enough, bristling with sticks and with egg-tossers whose glittering spheroids could disable a ship at a range of several miles. The Leopardess could neither fight them nor outrun them.

  “Master mage, they’re hailing us,” Rogelio called. “You speak Sibian, don’t you? Mine is foul, and the bastard I’m talking to doesn’t know much Lagoan.”

  “Yes, I speak it.” Fernao hurried toward the bridge. Sibian, Algarvian, and Lagoan were related tongues, but the first two were brothers, with Lagoan a distant cousin that had dropped inflections the others shared and borrowed words from both Kuusaman and the Kaunian languages. The mage stared into the Leopardess’s crystal at a man in a sea-green Sibian naval uniform. Fernao identified himself in Sibian, then asked, “Who are you, and what do you require?”

  “I am Captain Propatriu of the Impaler, Royal Sibian Navy,” the man replied, the words echoing from the glass. “You are to stop for boarding and inspection.”

  Rogelio shook his head when the mage translated. “No,” Fernao said. “We are on our lawful occasions. You trifle with us at your peril.

  “You are bound for Algarve,” Captain Propatriu said. “We will search you.”

  “No,” Fernao repeated. “King Vitor has ordered us to allow no interference with our commerce with any kingdom, on pain of embargo or worse against the violator. Can Sibiu afford that?”

  “Stinking, arrogant Lagoans,” Propatriu muttered. Fernao pretended not to hear. The Sibian naval officer gathered himself and spoke directly into the crystal once more: “You will wait.” The polished gem went blank.

  “What’s he doing?” Rogelio asked.

  “Calling home for instructions, unless I’m wrong,” Fernao answered. If he was wrong, things were liable to get sticky in a hurry.

  But Captain Propatriu reappeared in the crystal a couple of minutes later. “Pass on,” he growled, looking and sounding as if he hated Lagoans. He added, “My curses go with you,” and vanished once more. Rogelio and Fernao let out sighs of relief. The Leopardess slid between the two Sibian frigates and sped on toward Algarve.

  2.

  Hajjaj rode from King Shazli’s palace to the Unkerlanter ministry in Bishah with all the eagerness of a man going to have a tooth pulled. He, like King Shazli, like all Zuwayzin with a barleycorn’s weight of sense in their heads, regarded Zuwayza’s immense southern neighbor with the wary attention any house cat might give a lion living next door.

  The sun blazed down almost vertically from a blue enamel sky: Zuwayza projected farther north than any other kingdom of Derlavai. Despite that tropic brilliance, most of the men and women on the streets wore only sandals and broad-brimmed hats, with nothing in between. With their dark brown skins, they took even the fiercest sun in stride.

  In deference to Unkerlanter sensibilities, Hajjaj had donned a cotton tunic that covered him from neck to knee. He’d never seen any sense to clothes till his first winter at the university in Trapani, before the Six Years’ War broke out. He still didn’t see any sense to them in Bishah’s climate, but reckoned them part of the price he paid for being a diplomat.

  Unkerlanter soldiers stood guard outside the ministry. They wore tunics, too, dull gray ones jarringly out of place in a city of whitewash and glowing golden sandstone. Sweat stained and darkened the tunics under the men’s arms and across their chests. Though suffering in what was for them dreadful heat, they held themselves motionless—all but their eyes, which hungrily followed every pretty young Zuwayzi woman walking past. Hajjaj laughed, but only inside, where it did not show.

  King Swemmel’s minister to Zuwayza was a dour, middle-aged man named Ansovald. Maybe he had a magic that prevented sweat, or maybe he was just too stubborn to permit any such merely human failing. However he managed it, his tunic and his forehead remained dry.

  “In the name of my king, I greet you,” he said to Hajjaj after a servant had escorted the Zuwayzi foreign minister to his chamber. “That you are so punctual shows your efficiency.”

  “I thank you. And in the name of my king, I greet you in return,” Hajjaj replied. He and Ansovald spoke Algarvian, in which they were both fluent. Hajjaj thought Swemmel would have been efficient to send to Bishah a minister who spoke Zuwayzi, but saying as much struck him as undiplomatic. He himself understood more of the Unkerlanter language than he let on. As would any Zuwayzi in similar circumstances, he thought, I understand more Unkerlanter than I want.

  “Well, what is the point of this meeting?” Ansovald demanded.

  Abrupt as an Unkerlanter was a common Zuwayzi phrase. Had Hajjaj been visiting one of his countrymen, they would have shared tea and wine and cakes and small talk before eventually getting down to business. Had Ansovald come to the palace, Hajjaj would also have gone through the leisurely rituals of hospitality, as much to annoy Swemmel’s envoy as for the sake of form. Here, though, Unkerlanter rules prevailed. Hajjaj sighed, not quite invisibly.

  “The point of this meeting, your Excellency, is to convey my sovereign’s displeasure with recent provocations along the border between our two kingdoms,” Hajjaj said. King Shazli was hopping mad and scared green, both at the same time. Displeasure suggested that as diplomatically as possible.

  Ansovald’s massive shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “I deny that any such provocations have taken place,” he said.

  Hajjaj reached into a leather case and produced a short scroll. “Your Excellency, I have here a list of Zuwayzi border guards and soldiers killed, border guards and soldiers wounded, and Zuwayzi property on Zuwayzi territory destroyed during Unkerlanter incursions this season, and Unkerlanter buildings and encampments erected on land rightfully under the rule of King Shazli.”

  Ansovald read through the document—written, like most diplomatic correspondence, in classical Kaunian—and then shrugged again. “All of these alleged incidents took place on Unkerlanter soil,” he said. “If anyone is the provocateur here, it is Zuwayza.”

  “Now really, your Excellency!” Hajjaj exclaimed, indignation overcoming diplomacy for a moment. He pointed to the map of Zuwayza on the wall behind Ansovald. “Please look again. Some of these incidents occurred as much as ten or fifteen miles north of the border between our two kingdoms established by the Treaty of Bludenz.”