When he was mounted at the join of his dragon’s neck and shoulders, when he spurred the soft skin there and the beast sprang into the air, when the ground fell away beneath him and the dragon’s wings thundered, he could understand for a moment why some people sighed over the great beasts. When the dragon twisted and tried to bite till he whacked it in the snout with a long-handled goad, he cursed those people, who knew nothing about real dragons, as a pack of fools.

  The Elsung Mountains formed the land border between Unkerlant and Gyongyos. Precisely where they formed the border was a matter on which King Swemmel of Unkerlant and Ekrekek Arpad of Gyongyos had trouble agreeing. Because they had trouble agreeing, some thousands of young men from each of the two kingdoms were settling the question for them.

  Leudast wished he were back on his farm, not far from the Forthwegian border, rather than sitting around a campfire here in the rock-strewn middle of nowhere. As far as he was concerned, Arpad was welcome to every one of these boulders if he was crazy enough to want them.

  He didn’t mention his opinion. Sergeants took a dim view of such sentiments. Officers took an even dimmer one. From what people said (whispered, actually), King Swemmel took the dimmest view of all. Having finally won the long civil war with his twin brother, Kyot, Swemmel thought anyone who disagreed with him a traitor. A lot of people had disappeared because Swemmel held that opinion. Leudast did not want to add his name to the list.

  He leaned forward to toast a piece of sausage skewered on a stick over the fire. He twirled the stick between the palms of his hands to get the hard, peppery sausage done on all sides. His sergeant, a veteran named Magnulf, nodded approval, saying, “Very efficient, Leudast.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.” Leudast beamed. That was high praise. He’d never heard the word efficiency before the impressers pulled him off his farm and put him in a rock-gray uniform tunic, but King Swemmel was wild for it, which meant everyone beneath Swemmel was wild for it, too. Along with learning how to slaughter the foes of Unkerlant, Leudast had learned to mouth the phrases: “Time and motion—least and fewest.”

  “Least and fewest,” Magnulf agreed around a mouthful of his own sausage. Leudast had a little trouble understanding him, but waiting to swallow would have been inefficient. Magnulf scratched his formidable nose—though it was less formidable than those of Leudast and half the other troopers in his squad—and went on, “The stinking Gongs are liable to try something tonight. That’s what we hear from prisoners, anyhow.”

  Leudast wondered how they’d squeezed out the news. Efficiently, without a doubt. His stomach did a slow flipflop as he thought about how efficient interrogators could be.

  One of his squadmates, a fellow named Wisgard who was slim by Unkerlanter standards, spoke up: “Back home, it would be midnight or so, and here the sun’s barely down.”

  “We are a great kingdom.” Magnulf thumped his broad chest with a big, thick-fingered fist. “And we are going to be a greater kingdom still, once we drive the Gongs off the mainland and over to the islands they’ve taken to infesting.”

  “That’d be easier if they hadn’t stolen this stretch of land from us during the Twinkings War,” a trooper named Berthar said.

  “Proves how important efficiency is,” Magnulf said. “A kingdom gets on fine with one king—that’s efficient. Try to put two in the space meant for one, and everything goes to pieces.”

  That wasn’t efficiency, not the way Leudast saw things. It was just common sense. If either Swemmel or Kyot had admitted he was the younger twin, Unkerlant would have been spared a lot of grief. Armies had marched and countermarched across Leudast’s farm—it had been his father’s then, for he’d been born just as the civil war was finally petering out—stealing what they could and burning a lot of what they couldn’t. The countryside had been years recovering.

  And now, when it finally had recovered, here was another war on the far frontier of the kingdom. For the life of him, Leudast couldn’t see the efficiency of that. Again, though, he could see the inefficiency of saying so.

  Captain Urgan came up to the fire and said, “Be alert, men. The Gyongyosians are planning something nasty.”

  “I’ve already warned them, sir,” Magnulf said.

  “Efficient,” Urgan said crisply. “I have more news, too: over in the far east, all of Algarve’s neighbors have jumped on her back.”

  “His Majesty was as efficient as all get-out to stand aside from that war,” Magnulf said. “Let all those tall bastards kill each other.”

  “Forthwegians aren’t tall bastards,” Berthar said with fussy precision.

  Magnulf gave him a glare undoubtedly practiced in front of a mirror. “They may not be tall bastards, but they’re bastards just the same,” the sergeant growled. “If they weren’t bastards, they wouldn’t have thrown off Unkerlanter suzerainty during the Twinkings War, now would they?”

  His tone strongly suggested that giving any kind of answer would be inefficient. Berthar didn’t need to be a first-rank mage to figure that out. He kept his mouth shut. Captain Urgan added, “And Forthweg has its own share of Kaunians. They’re tall bastards, every bit as much as the lousy Algarvians.”

  Berthar did his best to look as if he’d never been so rash as to open his mouth. Leudast wouldn’t have been so rash himself. He did ask, “Sir, any word on what the Gongs have in mind?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Urgan said. “I don’t look for anything overwhelming, though—with so few ley lines charted in this powersforsaken stretch of the world, and with even fewer properly improved, they have as much trouble moving men and supplies as we do. This isn’t the most efficient war ever fought, but Gyongyos started it, so we’ve got to respond.”

  A brief hiss of cloven air was the only warning Leudast had before an egg burst about fifty yards from the campfire. The blast of light and heat from the energies it released knocked him off his feet and made him wonder if he’d been blinded: all he saw for a moment were purple smears in front of his eyes.

  He did not need to hear the screech of a swooping dragon to know it would attack the men around the fire. Nor did he need to see it to know it would be able to see him if he stayed close by the flames. He rolled away, bumping over rocks and over little spiky-leafed mountain shrubs whose name he did not know: before the impressers took him away, he’d always been a man of the flatlands.

  He saw the flame that burst from the dragon’s jaw, saw it and smelled the brimstone reek, too. Somewhere behind him, Wisgard shrieked. A moment later, a pale, thin beam of light shot from the ground toward the dragon. Leudast wished he’d had his own stick slung on his back. Then he could have blazed at the enemy, too, instead of seeking only to hide.

  But the Gyongyosians, like the folk of most other realms these days, were sly enough to silver their dragons’ bellies and the undersides of their wings. The beam that would have burned a hole in man was harmlessly reflected away. The dragon belched forth fire again. Another scream arose. No one blazed back at the beast as it flew off to the west. The wind from its great wingbeats blew Leudast’s hair all awry.

  Blinking frantically, he scrambled toward the sticks. As he groped for his own, Magnulf and Berthar came crawling up. “Where’s the captain?” Leudast asked.

  “Back there, toasted like bread you forget over the fire,” Magnulf answered. Somewhere west of them, someone kicked a rock. Magnulf cursed. “And here come the Gongs. Let’s see how expensive we can make ourselves. Spread out—we don’t want them getting around our flank.”

  Leudast scuttled toward a boulder fifteen or twenty feet away. A beam like the one poor Captain Urgan had aimed at the dragon zipped close to him, but did not strike. He dove behind the boulder, almost knocking the wind out of himself. Then, peering out into the night, he tried to find the spot from which the enemy had blazed at him.

  The big disadvantage to using a stick at night was that, if you missed, the flash of light could tell the enemy where you were. If you were smart, you didn’t stay there long. If you moved, though, you were liable to expose yourself, or to make some noise.

  Leudast heard some noise off to his right: running footsteps. He whirled. Straight at him came a Gyongyosian trooper who must have noted the thud and clatter he’d made diving for cover. With a gasp, Leudast thrust his forefinger into the recess at the base of his stick.

  As much by luck as by good aim, his beam caught the Gong square in the chest. Just for a moment, Leudast saw the enemy’s broad, staring face, made animal-like—at least to a clean-shaven Unkerlanter—by a bushy yellow beard. The fellow let out a grunt, more of surprise than of pain, and toppled.

  “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.