“How would you know who it was?” Talsu asked.

  “I’d have a pretty good notion,” Smilsu said darkly. “Anyhow, I can think of a couple of people here who nobody would miss.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Talsu said, which made Smilsu laugh. Then Talsu looked back over his shoulder. He started whispering again, and urgently: “Here. Stuff one of the socks from my mother in it. An officer’s coming.”

  Smilsu’s mouth had been open to say more. He shut it with a snap and, alarm on his face, also turned to get a look at the newcomer. After a moment, he relaxed, at least to a degree. “It’s not exactly an officer,” he said. “It’s only a mage.”

  “Ah, you’re right,” Talsu said. Mages serving in the Jelgavan army wore officer’s uniform to show they had the authority to command ordinary soldiers, but did not wear officer’s badges, which would have shown they enjoyed that authority by right of birth. Instead, they used smaller, plainer badges that put them midway between true—noble—officers and the common herd of soldiers. Their authority was not a birthright, but rather a privilege granted by King Donalitu.

  Some sorcerers Talsu had seen enjoyed aping the arrogance of the nobility. Others realized they were just jumped-up commoners, and didn’t take themselves so seriously. This mage seemed a chipper enough fellow. As he drew near, he said, “You get on with your work, fellows, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll all stay happy.”

  Even Smilsu couldn’t find anything to complain about there. “Not so bad,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, and went back to digging.

  Grinning, the mage went on, “Of course, we’d all be happier still if the war weren’t on and we were sitting in a tavern drinking ale or wine laced with orange juice, but there’s cursed little we can do about that, eh?”

  “Powers above,” Talsu whispered in astonishment. “He’d better be careful, or people will think he’s a human being.”

  “What have they sent you up to the front for, sir?” Vartu asked the mage. By his tone, he wondered if the mage had been forced to come up as a punishment.

  If the sorcerer noticed that, he gave no sign, answering, “I’m going to see what I can do to make it harder for the Algarvians to detect exactly where these forward positions are. Can’t promise it’ll do any enormous amount of good, because the redheads will have mages, too, and what one mage can do, another can undo, but it may help some. The generals back on the other side of the mountains think so, anyhow.”

  “Fat lot of good magecraft did Valmiera,” Smilsu said, but the soldierly gripe came out sounding halfhearted: this was more, and friendlier, attention than the front-line soldiers had got up till now from the high nobles who led them.

  And Talsu answered, “That’s the point, I think. The king’s got to be scared green that what happened to Valmiera will happen to us, too. If he can find anything that’ll keep Algarve from riding roughshod over us, looks like he’s going to try it.”

  “Hitting the redheads harder from the start would have been nice, but you’ve been complaining about that for months,” Smilsu said. He pointed at the mage with his short-handled spade. “What’s he doing out there?”

  “Working magic, I expect,” Talsu said. “That’s what they pay him for, anyhow.” Smilsu snorted and flipped dirt on to his boots.

  Out in front of the trench line, the mage paced back and forth. Had the Algarvians been in an aggressive mood, they would have had their line up close to that of the Jelgavans, and could easily have blazed the blond sorcerer. But, for the time being, King Mezentio’s men were busy elsewhere, and seemed content to let the Jelgavans settle down in the foothills.

  As the Jelgavan mage paced, he waved a large, fine opal that gleamed blue and green and red as the sun struck it at different angles. The charm he chanted was in a Kaunian dialect so archaic that Talsu, who had learned the classical tongue as part of what schooling he’d had, could make out only a few words. That impressed him: great virtue would surely fill such an ancient spell.

  If it did, he couldn’t discern it. When the mage stopped chanting and returned the jewel to a trouser pocket, nothing seemed to have changed. Talsu still saw the rolling hills ahead of him, and out beyond them the plains of northern Algarve, the plains the Jelgavan army hadn’t quite reached.

  He wasn’t the only one who saw them, and saw they remained as they had been. A soldier farther down the trench line called, “Begging your pardon, sir, but what did you just do?”

  “Eh?” The sorcerer seemed worn, as his kind commonly did after working some considerable magic. Then he brightened. “Ah. Of course—you can’t see it from that side. Come out here and look at your position, those of you who care to.”

  Looking at the trenches was easier and more enjoyable than digging them. Talsu scrambled up on to level ground. So did a good many of his comrades. He walked backwards toward the mage, staring at the entrenchments. They kept right on looking like entrenchments. He wondered whether the wizard was as smart as he thought he was.

  Then Talsu’s backward peregrination carried him past the sorcerer. He and several other soldiers exclaimed, all more or less at the same time. He could still see the trenches he’d helped dig, but at the same time he also saw the ground undisturbed. He took another couple of steps away from the entrenchments, and they grew less distinct to his eye. He took a few more steps, and they almost vanished.

  “There’s a clever device—a Kuusaman discovery, actually—called a half-silvered mirror,” the mage said. “If what’s in front of it is brighter than what’s in back, it reflects like any other mirror. But if what’s in back of it is brighter than what’s in front, it lets light through and turns into a window instead. This is sorcery on the same principle.”

  Talsu said, “Pity we didn’t have something like this to protect us when we were moving forward against the Algarvians.”

  “No one’s ever been able to make it a kinetic sorcery,” the mage said. Seeing that Talsu didn’t understand, he explained: “One that can move along with a party of soldiers. It’s better suited to static defense. Even here, it’s far from perfect. At too close an approach or at strong search sorcery, it fails. But it’s better than nothing.”

  “Aye,” Talsu said. He walked back toward the entrenchments, which returned to clear view as he stepped within the inner limit of the spell. It was indeed better than nothing. It was certainly better than any protection he and his comrades had had up till now. More than anything else, that told him how worried King Donalitu and his counselors were.

  On the mainland of Derlavai, spring was giving way to summer. In the country of the Ice People, winter reluctantly admitted spring might be coming. Such chill, gloomy weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. He’d managed to smuggle King Penda of Forthweg out of Yanina, but the only ship on which he’d been able to gain passage for them had been one sailing south across the Narrow Sea to Heshbon, the chief town—indeed, almost the only town—in the seaside stretch of the austral continent that Yanina controlled.

  Here, Fernao was not Fernao. He styled himself Fernastro, and spoke Algarvian rather than Lagoan. Penda had shaved his beard and was going by the name of Olo, an Unkerlanter appellation. Forthwegian was close enough to the northeastern dialects of Unkerlanter to let him pass for one of King Swemmel’s subjects. Fernao had also worked small sorceries on them, so neither looked quite as he had in Yanina.

  Penda had not proved a good traveling companion. Used to palaces, he found distinctly less than appealing the grimy hostel in Heshbon where he and Fernao lodged. “Swemmel’s dungeon would be more comfortable,” he grumbled.

  Fernao answered in Forthwegian: “I am sure it could be arranged.”

  The fugitive king shuddered. “Perhaps I was mistaken.” His belly rumbled, loudly enough that he couldn’t pretend Fernao hadn’t heard it. Instead, he sighed and said, “We may as well go downstairs and eat something, if the kitchen can turn out anything worth eating.”

  “Or even if it can’t,” Fernao said.

  The odds, he knew, were not much better than even money. Yaninans ran the hostel. They did their best to cook in the hearty style of their homeland, but what they had to work with was what the Ice People ate: camel meat, camel milk, camel blood, and tubers that tasted like paste. They came up with all manner of stews, but few of them, to Fernao’s mind, were hearty.

  He ate, anyway, spooning up meat and boiled tubers, drinking a spirit the folk of Heshbon distilled from the tubers. It also tasted like paste, but kicked like a unicorn. He found he enjoyed most meals more with his tongue numbed.

  As quickly as they could, he and Penda left the hostel and headed for the market square. “Maybe today we shall find a caravan faring east,” Penda said, as he did every day when they headed for the market square.

  “Aye, maybe we shall,” Fernao answered absently. For one thing, he was tired of hearing Penda say that. For another, he was looking south, toward the Barrier Mountains. Whenever he was on the streets of Heshbon, he looked toward the mountains. Tall and jagged, they serrated the southern skyline. Snow and ice covered them from their peaks more than halfway down to the lower ground that ran toward the sea. Adventurers had died climbing those peaks. Others had pushed past them into the frigid interior of the austral continent. Some had escaped the Ice People and mountain apes and other, lesser, dangers and written books about what they’d found.

  About half the people on the street were short, swarthy Yaninans, most of them with wool cloaks over their big-sleeved tunics and tights. The rest, except for a scattering of aliens like Fernao and Penda, were Ice People. They wore hooded robes of fur or woven camel hair that covered them from head to foot. Their beards, which they never trimmed, grew up to their eyes; their hairlines started less than an inch above their eyebrows. The women, unlike those of other races, had faces no less hairy than those of the men.

  They never bathed. The climate gave them some excuse, but not, to Fernao’s mind, enough. Their stink filled the cold, crisp air, along with that of the camels they led. Those camels were as unlike those of Zuwayza as beasts sharing a name could be. They had two humps, not one, and thick coats of shaggy brown hair. Only their nasty tempers matched those of their desert cousins.

  Ice People had nasty tempers, too. A woman cursed a camel in her own guttural language. Fernao had no idea what she was saying, but it sounded hot enough to melt half the ice on the Barrier Mountains. Penda stared at her. “Do you suppose they’re that hairy all over?” Before Fernao could reply, he went on, “Who would want one of them enough to try to find out?”

  “I think they are,” Fernao told him. “And because they are, they’re all the go for a certain kind of customer, shall we say, at the very fanciest brothels in Priekule and Trapani and, I have to admit, in Setubal, too.”

  Penda looked revolted. “I wish you had not told me that, sir mage.” Fernao hid a smile. By his standards, Forthweg was a provincial land. Compared to this miserable stretch of semifrozen ground, though, Penda’s kingdom suddenly looked a lot better.

  Fernao sighed. “If it weren’t for the cinnabar here, the Ice People would be welcome to the whole miserable continent.”

  “Were there no Derlavaians here, we should have had a much harder time escaping from Yanina,” Penda said.

  “That is so.” Fernao admitted what he could scarcely deny. “Now, instead, we are having a hard time escaping from Heshbon.”

  They strode into the market square. It was something like the lively one in the center of Patras, the capital of Yanina, but only something. As in much of Heshbon, camels remained the dominant theme. Ice People and Yaninans bartered flesh, milk, cheese, hair, the beasts themselves, and what they brought into Heshbon on their backs: furs and cinnabar, which came packed in camel-leather sacks.

  Yaninans and Ice People dickered in different ways. Yaninans were, as usual, even more excitable, or more sincerely excitable, than Algarvians. They clapped their hands to their foreheads, rolled their eyes, jumped up and down, and often seemed on the point of suffering fits of apoplexy.

  “Call this cinnabar?” one of them roared, pointing to a sack full of the crushed orange-red mineral.

  “Aye,” answered the man of the Ice People with whom he was dealing. Every line of his body bespoke utter indifference to his opponent’s fury.

  That only made the Yaninan more furious. “This is the worst cinnabar in the history of cinnabar!” he cried. “A dragon would flame better if you fed him beans and lit his farts than if you gave him this stuff.”

  “Then don’t trade for it,” the man of the Ice People said.

  “You are a thief! You are a robber!” the Yaninan shouted. The nomad in the long dirty robe just stood there, waiting for the allegedly civilized man from Derlavai to make his next offer. After the Yaninan calmed down enough to stop screeching for a moment, he did.

  Penda said, “Most of the cinnabar the Yaninans buy here goes straight to Algarve.”

  “I know,” Fernao said unhappily. Before the Six Years’ War, Algarve had held trading towns along the coast of the austral continent, to the east of Heshbon. Now those towns were in the hands of Lagoas or Valmiera (although, with Valmiera fallen to King Mezentio’s men, who could guess what would happen to the towns the Kaunian kingdom had controlled?). If Fernao and Penda could get to Mizpah, the closest Lagoan-ruled town, they would be safe.

  If. The war on the mainland of Derlavai had disrupted caravan routes down here. Yanina remained formally at peace with Lagoas, but was so close to alliance with Algarve that she had all but cut off commerce with her larger neighbor’s foe.

  But there stood a man of the Ice People with laden camels he was not unloading in the market square. Fernao and Penda went up to him. “Do you speak this language?” Fernao asked him in Algarvian.

  “Aye,” the nomad answered. His dirty, hairy face was impossible to read.

  “Do you travel?” Fernao asked, and the man of the Ice People nodded. “Do you travel east?” the Lagoan mage persisted. The nomad stood silent and motionless. Given the way things were in Heshbon these days, Fernao took that for affirmation. He said, “My king will pay well to see my friend and me installed in Mizpah.”

  He did not say who his king was. If the man of the Ice People assumed he followed Mezentio, he was willing to let the fellow do that. After a moment’s thought, the fellow said, “The big talkers”—by which, Fernao realized, he meant the Yaninans—“will not make such a trip easy.”

  “Can you not befool them?” Fernao asked, as if inviting the man of the Ice People to share a joke. “And is profit ever easy to come by?”

  A light kindled in the nomad’s eyes. One of those questions, at least, had struck his fancy. He said, “I am Doeg, the son of Abishai, the son of Abiathar, the son of Chileab, the son of…” The genealogy continued for several more generations. Doeg finished, “My fetish animal is the ptarmigan. I do not slay it, I do not eat of it if slain by others, I do not allow those who travel with me to do it harm. If they do, I slay them to appease the bird’s spirit.”

  Ignorant, superstitious savage, the mage thought. But that was beside the point now. He asked, “Do you tell me this because my friend and I are traveling with you?”

  “If you wish it,” Doeg answered with a shrug. “If you pay enough to satisfy me. If you are ready to move before the sun moves far.”

  They dickered for some time. Fernao did his best not to burst into Yaninan-style hysterics. That seemed to make a good impression on Doeg. Good impression or not, the nomad was an implacable bargainer. Fernao fretted; what the man of the Ice People wanted was about as much as he had, and Doeg seemed uninterested in promises of more gold and silver after reaching Mizpah. He saw only what lay right before him. “I am a mage,” Fernao said at last, an admission he had not wanted to make. “Bring your price down by a quarter and I will work for you on that journey.”

  “You would anyway, if danger came,” Doeg said shrewdly. “But you may have some use, so let it be as you say. But be warned, man of Algarve”—a misapprehension Fernao did not correct—“your sort of sorcery may not work so well in this country as it does in your own.”

  “It works here in Heshbon,” Fernao said.

  “Heshbon is in my country. Heshbon is no longer of my country,” Doeg said. “So many Yaninans and other hairless folk”—his dark eyes swung to the clean-shaven Penda—“have come that its essence has changed. Away from the towns, the land is as it once was here. Sorcery is as it once was here. It does not look kindly on the ways of hairless ones.”

  Fernao didn’t know how seriously to take that. It accorded with his own experience, but not with what some of the theoretical sorcerers of Lagoas and Kuusamo had been saying just before the war broke out. He shrugged. “I will do what I can, whatever it proves to be. And you will be seeking to evade the Yaninans, whose magic is not so different from mine.”

  “This is true. This is good.” Doeg nodded. He thrust out his filthy hand. Fernao and, a moment later, Penda clasped it. The man of the Ice People nodded once more. “We have a bargain.”

  Krasta was going from one shop on the Avenue of Equestrians to the next when the Algarvian army staged its triumphal procession through Priekule. That the procession could have anything to do with her had not crossed her mind. She was glad she had so many of the shops to herself, but annoyed that about every third one was closed.

  She had just bought an amber brooch from a shop girl obsequious enough to suit even her and was coming out on to the sidewalk with the new bauble pinned to her tunic when a blast of martial music made her turn her head. Here came the Algarvians, the band at the head of the procession blaring away for all it was worth. The sun gleamed off their trumpets and the metal facings of their drums. Like a jackdaw, Krasta was fascinated with bright, shiny things. She started to stare because of the reflections from the instruments. She kept staring because of the soldiers who carried those instruments.