Bembo nodded. Inside, he was laughing. Pesaro sounded tough, as if he’d be hauling in Kaunians himself instead of sending out ordinary constables like Bembo to do the job. The sergeant’s comment sparked another thought, an important one: “Who are you pairing with me?”

  “Have to check the roster.” Sergeant Pesaro ran a fat finger down it. “I’ve got you with Oraste. Does that suit?”

  “Aye,” Bembo said. “He’s not one to back away from trouble. And we’ve worked together before, in a manner of speaking—he helped me bring in that Balozio, remember?”

  “I didn’t, no, but I do now that you remind me of it,” Pesaro said. The doors to the station house swung open. In came Oraste, as broad through the shoulders as a Forthwegian. “Just the man I’m looking for!” Pesaro exclaimed happily, and explained to Oraste what he’d just told Bembo.

  Oraste listened, scratched his head, nodded, and said, “Give us the list, Sergeant, and we’ll get at it. You ready, Bembo?”

  “Aye.” Bembo wasn’t so ready as all that, but didn’t see how he could say anything else. He was glad to have Oraste at his side precisely because Oraste never backed away from anyone or anything. Oraste didn’t back away from duty, either.

  The first Kaunians on the list were Falsirone and Evadne. “Those don’t look like Kaunian names,” Oraste said, but then he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. If they’re Kaunians, they’re gone.”

  Falsirone and Evadne stared in dismay when the constables strode into their tonsorial parlor. They stared in horror when Bembo told them why the constables had come. Pointing a finger at him, Evadne shrilled, “You told us we wouldn’t get into trouble, you liar!”

  “You’re not in trouble for that,” Bembo said, strangling the guilt that crept out from the dark places at the bottom of his mind. “This is only a precaution, till the war is safely won.” He didn’t know that—no one had said anything of the sort—but it seemed a reasonable guess.

  Oraste smacked his club into the palm of his hand. “Get moving,” he said flatly.

  “But what about everything here?” Evadne wailed, waving an arm to show off the shop and everything in it.

  Bembo glanced at Oraste. Oraste’s face had not the slightest particle of give in it. Bembo decided he had better not show any give, either. “Hazard of war,” he said. “Now come along. We haven’t got all day here.”

  Still complaining loudly and bitterly—still acting very much as veritable Algarvians would have done—Evadne and Falsirone came. Bembo and Oraste led them to the park where Bembo had spent his unhappy hours as an emergency militiaman. More constables, and some soldiers as well, took charge of them there. “On to the next,” Oraste said.

  The next proved to be a prominent restaurateur. Bembo understood another reason why his superiors had sent constables out in pairs: it made them harder to bribe. With Oraste glaring at him as if looking for the smallest excuse to beat him bloody, the Kaunian didn’t even try, but came along meek as a lamb heading for sacrifice. Bembo let out a silent sigh. He would have been much more reasonable.

  When he and Oraste got to the third establishment on their list, they found it empty. Oraste scowled. “Some other bastards beat us to it,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” Bembo answered. “I think word’s out on the street. A lot of blonds will be figuring they ought to disappear.”

  “We’ll get ‘em,” Oraste said. “Sooner or later, we’ll get ‘em.”

  By nightfall, the constables had rounded up several hundred Kaunians. Almost an equal number, though, had not been there to round up. Despite that, Captain Sasso said, “Good job, men. The kingdom’s long overdue for a cleanup, and we’re the fellows who can take care of it. When we’re done, when the war is won, Algarve will be a better place.”

  “That’s right,” Oraste said, and Bembo nodded, too.

  Istvan longed for the days when the worst Sergeant Jokai could do to him was send him off to shovel dragon shit or to serve as a dowser’s beast of burden. Jokai was dead these days, smashed to bits when a Kuusaman egg burst too close to him. For all practical purposes, Istvan was a sergeant himself, though no officer had formally conveyed the rank on him. He was a veteran on Obuda, and the soldiers he led new-come reinforcements. Having stayed alive gave him moral authority even without rank.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to a clump of bushes. “These fruits stay good even when they’re dried out and wrinkled like that. Grab as many as you can; stars above only know when we’ll see any proper meals again.”

  “What are these fruits called?” asked one of the new men, a thin, bespectacled fellow named Kun.

  “Curse me if I know,” Istvan answered. “The Obudans have a name for ‘em, but I don’t know what it is. Names don’t matter, anyhow. What matters is, like I said, they’re good to eat. With the supply system all buggered up the way it is, I think I’d eat a goat if one came strolling up the path.”

  Some of the men laughed and nodded. Some of them looked revolted. Despite profane bravado, Istvan wasn’t sure if he would really eat goat. Only a starving Gyongyosian would even think of such a thing—a starving Gyongyosian or a depraved one. When he was a boy, four men in the next valley over from his had been caught at a ritual supper of goat stew after they’d murdered—and done worse things to—a pregnant woman. No clan feud had started when they were buried alive. Even their own families thought they deserved it, as much for the goat-eating as for their other crimes.

  Kun cleared his throat a couple of times and said, “Names always matter. Names are part of the fabric from which reality is woven. If your name were different, you would not be the man you are, nor I, nor any of us. The same must surely hold true for these fruits.”

  He was, as he seldom let anyone forget, a mage’s apprentice. He was also a bumbler, as tales said mages’ apprentices often were. Istvan marveled that he still lived when better men had died around him. Sometimes pretending not to understand him was the best way to stop him from going on and on. Istvan tried it: “If these fruits had a different name, I think I’d still be the man I am.”

  “That is not what I meant,” Kun said, giving him an indignant look over the top of those spectacles. “What I meant was—” He paused, looking foolish, as the possibility that Istvan might have been making a joke occurred to him. That took longer than it should have. Istvan was surprised it happened at all.

  Before he could finish the job of putting Kun in his place, eggs started falling not far away. The men he led had been on Obuda and in action long enough to know what that meant. Istvan thought he was the first to throw himself flat, but none of the rest was more than a moment behind him.

  The ground shuddered under him. Leaves and twigs fell on his back; someone close by cursed as a branch a good deal bigger than a twig came down on his leg. Through the din of bursting eggs and falling trees, Istvan shouted, “Now—is that us trying to kill the Kaunians or them trying to kill us?”

  “If you like, I will undertake a divination to find out,” Kun said.

  “Never mind.” Istvan shook his head, dislodging the end of a twig from his ear. “If one of those lands on us, we end up dead either way.” Kun couldn’t very well argue with that, and so, for a wonder, he didn’t.

  A dragon screeched, just above the treetops. It was, Istvan thought unhappily, more likely to be flown by a Kuusaman than by one of his own countrymen. The Kuusamans were able to bring dragons by the shipload from out of the east, where Gyongyos had to fly them from island to island to get them to Obuda. Because the Gyongyosian dragons inevitably arrived worn, the beasts from Kuusamo had the better of it in the air.

  “I wish we could drive the Kuusaman fleet out of these waters,” Istvan muttered, his face still in the dirt. He sighed. “I suppose the little slant-eyed sons of billy goats wish they could drive our fleet out of these waters.”

  Sometimes (mostly by night, for looking for a good view by day was asking a Kuusaman sniper to put a beam in one ear and out the other), he would look out at the warships tossing eggs and blazing at one another. Neither side, as yet, was able to keep the other from reinforcing its army on Obuda. A lot of ships had gone to wreckage and twisted metal trying, though. He wondered which side could go on throwing them into the fight longer than the other.

  More screeches overhead, and then the noise, like a dozen men all being sick at once, of a dragon flaming. The sound that followed was not a screech but a shriek. More sounds came: the sounds of a large body crashing down through the canopy of leaves and branches above the Gyongyosians and then thrashing about on the ground only a stone’s throw away.

  Istvan scrambled to his feet. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Let’s get rid of that cursed thing before it flames half the forest afire. Let’s see what we can do about the flier, too. He might not be dead—he didn’t fall that far.”

  “If he’s a Kuusaman, we’ll take care of that,” Szonyi said. He might not have done any fighting till the men from the far east invaded, but he was a veteran now.

  “Aye,” Istvan said. “Either we kill him or we send him back so our officers can squeeze him.” Normally, Istvan would have done the latter. As things were, he’d been on his own for a couple of days, and wasn’t sure where to send a captive if he got one.

  Getting one, he realized, wouldn’t be easy. That dragon might have been flamed out of the sky, but it was a long way from dead; branches must have done a better job than usual of cushioning its fall. It sounded as if it were trying to knock down every tree it could reach. It didn’t flame, though, which argued it still had a flier on its back: an unrestrained dragon would have vented its fury every way it could.

  Kun pointed ahead. “There it is,” he said unnecessarily: that great scaly tail could not have belonged to any other beast. At the moment, it was doing duty for a flail, smashing bushes to bits.

  “Surround it,” Istvan said. “Blaze for the eyes or the mouth. Sooner or later we’ll kill it. And watch out for the flier. He’s liable to be blazing at you while you’re blazing at the dragon.”

  “I find that highly unlikely,” Kun said. But he did as Istvan told him, so Istvan couldn’t come down on him for talking back. Istvan couldn’t come down hard on him for talking back, anyhow—a disadvantage of lacking formal rank.

  Spreading out to surround the dragon made the Gyongyosians cast their net widely indeed. The beast was still doing its best to level the woods. It couldn’t knock over large trees. With that exception, its best was quite good; a stampeding behemoth would have been hard pressed to match it.

  Istvan peered through the bushes toward it. Sure enough, it was a Kuusaman dragon, painted in sea green and sky blue. Its right wing and a stretch of the body behind the wing were charred and black. Without a doubt, a Gyongyosian dragon had won that duel in the air. But the Kuusaman still somehow astride it at the base of its neck seemed alert and not badly hurt. He had a stick in his hands and was looking now this way, now that, ready for anything that might happen to him.

  For a moment, Istvan wondered why he didn’t get off the dragon and make for the woods. Then he realized the dragon was liable to squash the flier if he dismounted. He raised his own stick to his shoulder and sighted along it. Before he could blaze, the Kuusaman did, but at someone off to the other side. A hoarse cry said the dragonflier hit what he’d blazed at, too.

  When Istvan blazed at the Kuusaman, the fellow jerked as if stung. But, even if Istvan’s beam bit, it didn’t knock the foe out of the fight. The fellow used his own stick as a goad, and the dragon, hurt though it was, obeyed the command he gave it. Its head swung toward Istvan. He blazed at it, but it kept turning his way. Its jaws opened enormously, preposterously, wide. Flame shot from those jaws, straight at Istvan.

  He thought he was a dead man. Though it was daylight, he looked up toward the heavens, toward the stars where he expected his spirit would go. But the sheet of flame fell short. Trees and bushes between the dragon and him began to burn. He threw his hands up in front of his face to protect himself from the blast of the heat, but the fire did not quite reach him. He stumbled backwards, his lungs feeling seared from the one breath of flame-heated air he’d drawn in.

  Coughing, he staggered off to one side of the fire. It would spread, but not quickly; Obuda had had a lot of rain lately, so the plants were full of juice. The dragon was swinging its head away from Istvan now. It flamed again. A shriek of anguish announced that whoever it flamed at this time hadn’t been far enough away to escape the fire.

  Istvan blazed at the dragonflier again. His comrades were doing the same now. At last, after what seemed like forever, the Kuusaman slumped down on his dragon’s neck, the stick slipping from his fingers. The dragon, with no one controlling it, began sending bursts of flame in all directions—until it had no flame left to send.

  After that, disposing of the great beast was relatively easy, for the Gyongyosians could approach without fear. When it opened its mouth and tried to flame Szonyi, he sent a beam through the soft tissue inside that maw and into its brain. Its head flopped down. The body kept thrashing a while longer, too stupid to realize right away that it was dead.

  Kun nodded to Istvan. Istvan nodded back, in some surprise; he thought the dragon had flamed the mage’s apprentice. Kun looked surprised, too. Pointing to the dead Kuusaman flier, he said, “You were right. Those little demons really can fight bravely.”

  “Too right they can,” Istvan answered. “If they couldn’t, don’t you think we’d have thrown ‘em off this island long since?”

  “We did throw ‘em off this island once,” Szonyi said. “The whoresons came back.” He paused. “I suppose that says something about them.”

  “Aye,” Istvan said. “They aren’t Gyongyosians—they aren’t warriors born—but they’re men.” He pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dragon’s carcass. “I’m going to worry a tooth or two, by the stars. When I go back to my valley one of these days, I’ll wear a dragon’s fang on a chain around my neck. That should keep some of the local tough boys quiet.” He smiled in anticipation.

  He wasn’t the only soldier who took a souvenir from the dragon, either. Kun cut several fangs from its mouth. “I ought to be able to get some sort of sorcerous use out of these,” he said. “And, as Istvan says, one worn around the neck will be a potent charm against bullies.”

  “We earned them, sure enough.” Szonyi’s hands were bloody, as were Istvan’s. They both kept rubbing them on the ground. Even a dragon’s blood burned.

  “Aye, we earned them,” Istvan said. “Now we have to hope we drive the Kuusamans off this stinking island and that we get off it ourselves.” A moment later, he wished he’d spoken as if that were assured. For better or worse, though, he’d seen too much fighting to fool himself for long.

  Leudast squelched through mud. What the Forthwegians called roads were hardly better than their Unkerlanter equivalents: good enough when dry, boggy when wet. “Wait till the snow starts falling,” Sergeant Magnulf said. “They’ll harden up again then.”

  “Aye,” Leudast said. “But winters are milder here than they are farther south, you know. It’s not always one blizzard after another. Only sometimes.”

  “That’s right—you’re from not far from these parts, aren’t you?” Magnulf said.

  “Farther west, of course,” Leudast answered. “Fifty, maybe a hundred miles west of what used to be the border between Forthweg and Unkerlant. Just about this far south, though, and the weather wasn’t a whole lot different than the way it is here.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” Magnulf said, which made Leudast and everybody else in the squad laugh. After he was done laughing, Leudast wondered why he’d done it. The weather in most of Unkerlant was worse than it was hereabouts, or in the part of the kingdom where he’d grown up.

  “One good thing about the rain,” a common soldier named Gernot said. “The cursed Algarvians aren’t going to jump on our backs for a while.”

  “They’ll drown in the muck if they try,” Leudast said, at which his companions nodded. Some of them laughed, too, but only some. Most realized they would also drown in the muck if the Algarvians attacked.

  Magnulf pointed ahead. “There’s the village where we’re supposed to billet ourselves. Miserable little hole in the ground, isn’t it?”

  Seen through spatters of rain, the village did look distinctly unappetizing. The thatch-roofed cottages weren’t much different from the ones in the village where he’d lived till the impressers dragged him into King Swemmel’s army. Two buildings were bigger than the rest. He knew what they’d be: a smithy and a tavern. The whole place, though, had a dispirited, rundown look to it. No one had bothered painting or whitewashing the houses for a long time. Sad clumps of dying grass stuck out of the ground here and there, like surviving bits of hair on the scalp of a man with a bad case of ringworm.

  “Powers above,” Gernot muttered. “Why would anyone want to live in a dump like this?” Unlike his comrades, he hadn’t been dragged off a farm, but from the streets of Cottbus. He was vague about what he’d done on the streets of Cottbus, which naturally made Leudast figure he had good reason to be vague.

  Magnulf said, “It’ll be better than spending time under canvas, anyway.”

  “Aye, so it will,” Leudast said, and wished he sounded more as if he believed it. Maybe it’s the rain, he thought. With the sun shining, the place had to look better. It could hardly have looked worse.

  A dog started barking as the Unkerlanter soldiers drew near the village, and then another and another, till they sounded like a pack of wolves in full cry. One of them, about as big and mean-looking as a wolf, stalked toward the soldiers stiff-legged and growling. They shouted and cursed at it. Somebody threw a glob of mud that caught it on the end of the nose. The dog let out a startled yip and sat back on its haunches.