“Where are the warriors, then?” Arigh demanded, putting his hands on his hips. “If you tell me my scouts are going blind, you might as well cut your own throat now.”

  “Blind? Hardly—we’d be dead ten times over if they were. But still …” He eyed the peasant, who had given up moaning and was gazing at him in mute appeal. The physician’s trained glance caught the faint cloudiness of an early cataract in the man’s left eye. His mind made a sudden leap. “Not blind—but blinded? Magic could hide soldiers better than rubble or brush.”

  “That is a thought,” Arigh admitted. “If I’d taken this lout—” He stirred the peasant with his foot; the fellow groaned and covered his face, expecting to die the next instant. “—more seriously, I’d have sent a shaman to smell the place out.” He became the brisk commander once more. “All right, you’ve made your point. Get Tolui and round up a company of men, then go find out what’s going on.”

  “Me?” the Greek said in dismay.

  “You. This is your idea. Ride it or fall off. Otherwise I have no choice but to think Manure-foot here a spy, don’t I?”

  Arigh, Gorgidas thought, was getting uncomfortably good at making people do what he wanted. “A concealment spell?” Tolui said when the doctor found the shaman eating curded mares’ milk. “You could well be right. That’s not battle magic; whoever cast it could not mind if it fell apart as soon as his men burst from ambush.”

  He drew his tunic over his head and undid the drawstring of his trousers with a sigh. “In this weather the mask is a torment, and the robe is of thick suede. Ah, well, better by night than by day.”

  “Round up a company,” Arigh had said, but Gorgidas had no authority over the nomads, who did not fancy taking orders from an outsider. Tolui’s presence finally helped the Greek persuade a captain of a hundred to lead out his command. “A hunt for a ghost stag, is it?” the officer said sourly. He was a broken-nosed man named Karaton, whose high voice ruined the air of sullen ferocity he tried to assume.

  His men grumbled as they wolfed down their food and resaddled their horses. Karaton worked off his annoyance by swearing at Gorgidas when the physician was the last one ready. Still, it was not quite dark when they rode for the mound that had once been a city.

  Rakio caught up with them halfway there. He gave Gorgidas a reproachful look as he trotted up beside him. “If you go to fight, why not me tell?”

  “Sorry,” the physician muttered. In fact he had not thought of it; he always had to remind himself that his comrades did not share his distaste for combat. Rakio was as eager as Viridovix once had been.

  The hillock was ghostly by moonlight. Atop it Gorgidas could see stretches of wall still untumbled; his mind’s eye summoned up a time when all the brickwork was whole and the streets swarming with perfumed men dressed in long tunics and carrying walking sticks, with veiled women, their figures robed against strangers’ glances. The place would have echoed with jangling music and loud, happy talk. It was silent now. Not even night birds sang.

  Like a good soldier, Karaton automatically sent his men to surround the base of the hill, but his heart was not in it. He waved sarcastically. “Ten thousand hiding up there, at least.”

  “Oh, stop squeaking at me,” Gorgidas snapped, wishing he had never set eyes on the peasant in the first place. He hated looking the fool. In his self-annoyance he did not notice Karaton stiffen with outrage and half draw his saber.

  “Stop, both of you,” Tolui said. “I must have harmony around me if the spirits are to answer my summons.” There was not a word of truth in that, but it gave both men a decent excuse not to quarrel.

  Karaton subsided with a growl. “Why call the spirits, shaman? A child of four could tell you this place is dead as a sheepskin coat.”

  “Then fetch a child of four next time and leave me in peace,” Tolui said. Echoing from behind the devil-mask he wore, his voice carried an otherworldly authority. Karaton touched a finger to his forehead in apology.

  Tolui drew from his saddlebag a flat, murkily transparent slab of some waxy stone, which was transfixed by a thick needle of a different stone. “Chalcedony and emery,” he explained to Gorgidas. “The hardness of the emery lets a man peering through the clear chalcedony pierce most illusions.”

  “Give it to me,” Karaton said impatiently. He squinted up to the top of the mound. “Nothing,” he said—but was there doubt in his voice? Tolui took the seeing-stone back and handed it to Gorgidas. Things at the crown of the hillock seemed to jump when he put it to his eye, but steadied quickly.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There was a flicker, but …” He offered the stone to Tolui. “See for yourself. The toy is yours, after all; you should be able to use it best.”

  The shaman lifted the mask from his head and set it on his knee. He raised the stone and gazed through it for more than a minute. Gorgidas felt the backwash of his concentration as he channeled his vision to penetrate semblance and see truth.

  The physician had never thought much about Tolui’s power as a sorcerer. If anything, he assumed the shaman was of no great strength, as he had been second to Onogun until Bogoraz poisoned Arghun’s old wizard because he favored Videssos. Since then Tolui’s magic had always been adequate, but the Greek, not seeing him truly tested, went on reckoning him no more than a hedge-wizard mainly interested in herbs, roots, and petty divinations.

  He abruptly realized he had misjudged the shaman. When Tolui cried, “Wind spirits, come to my aid! Blow away the cobwebs of enchantment before me!” the night seemed to hold its breath.

  A howling rose above the hillock, as of a storm, but no wind buffeted Gorgidas’ face. Then Karaton shouted in amazement while his men drew bows and bared swords. Like a curtain whisked away from in front of a puppet-theater’s stage, the illusion of emptiness at the crest of the hill was swept aside. Half a dozen campfires blazed among the ruins, with warriors sprawled around them at their ease.

  The first arrows were in the air before Karaton could give the order to shoot. A Yezda pitched forward into one of the fires; another screamed as he was hit. A different scream went up, too, this one of fury, as the pair of wizards with the enemy felt their covering glamour snatched away.

  “Up and take them!” Karaton yelled. “Quick, before they get their wits about them and go for weapons and armor!”

  Shouting to demoralize the Yezda further, his men drove their ponies up the steep sides of the hill, then dismounted and scrambled toward the top on foot. Gorgidas and Rakio were with them, grabbing at shrubs or chunks of brick for handholds. Looking up toward the crest, the Greek saw the campfires and running figures of the Yezda shimmer and start to fade as their sorcerers tried to bring down the veil once more. But Tolui was still working against them, and the fear and excitement of their own men and the Arshaum ate at their magic as well. The fires brightened again.

  A pony thundered downhill past Gorgidas. A daredevil Yezda, seeing his only road to safety, took that mad plunge in the dark and lived to tell of it. His horse reached level ground and streaked away. “That is a rider!” Rakio exclaimed. A crash and a pair of shrieks, one human, the other from a mortally injured pony, told of a horseman who tried the plummet and failed.

  Several more mounted Yezda broke out down the path they would have taken to attack the Arshaum army. Most, though, stunned by the unexpected night assault, were still throwing saddles on their beasts or groping for sabers when Karaton’s men reached them.

  As he gained the top of the mound, Gorgidas stumbled over an upthrust tile. An arrow splintered against masonry not far from his head. Rakio hauled him to his feet. “You crazy are?” he shouted in the Greek’s ear. “Get out your sword.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, of course,” Gorgidas said mildly, as if being reminded of some small blunder in a classroom. Then a Yezda was in front of him, shamshir whistling at his head. He had no room for fine footwork. He parried the stroke, then another that would have gutted him. The Yezda feinted low, slashed high. Gorgidas did not feel the sting of the blade, but warm stickiness ran down the side of his neck, and he realized his ear had been cut.

  He thrust at the Yezda, who blocked and fell back awkwardly, confused by the unfamiliar stroke. Gorgidas lunged. At full extension he had a much longer reach than the nomad thought possible. His gladius pierced the Yezda’s belly. The man groaned and folded up on himself.

  Most of the enemy, outnumbered two to one, drew back for a stand at a small courtyard whose ruined walls were still breast high. The Arshaum hacked at them over the bulwark and sent arrows and stones into their crowded ranks. Unable to stand that punishment for long, the Yezda surged out again and with the strength of desperation broke through their foes’ lines. Karaton squalled in outrage as Yezda hurled themselves down the hillside with no thought for broken bones or anything but escape.

  Only a few got that far; the Arshaum cut down the greater part of them as they fled. One of the Yezda wizards, a shaman in robes hardly less fringed than Tolui’s, fell in that mad chase, a sword in his hand in place of the magic that had failed him.

  The other sorcerer was made of different, and harsher, stuff. Gorgidas thought he saw motion down a narrow alleyway and called out in the Arshaum tongue, “Friend?” He got no answer. Gladius at the ready, he stepped into the rubble-choked lane.

  A campfire flared behind him. The sudden brightness showed him that the alley was blind—and that it trapped no ordinary Yezda. For a moment the red robe and jagged tonsure meant nothing to the physician. Then ice walked up his spine as he recognized Skotos’ emblems.

  The wizard’s face, Gorgidas thought, would have revealed his nature even in the absence of other signs. A man who knows both good and evil and with deliberate purpose chooses the latter will bear its mark. The eyes of the dark god’s votary gave back the fire like a wolf’s. The skin was drawn taut on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth, pulling his lips back in a snarl of hate. But it was not directed at the Greek; he was sure the wizard wore it awake and asleep.

  The physician edged forward. He saw the other had only a short dagger at his belt. “Yield,” he called in Videssian and the Khamorth tongue. “I would not slay you out of hand.”

  As it focused on Gorgidas, the wizard’s sneer tightened. His hands darted out, his lips twisted in soundless invocation. Mortal fear lent his spell force enough to strike despite the chaos of battle. Gorgidas staggered, as if clubbed from behind. His sight swam; his arms and legs would not answer; the sword fell from his hand. The air rasped harshly in his throat as he struggled to breathe. He slipped to one knee, shaking his head over and over to try to clear it.

  The spell had been meant to kill; perhaps only the discipline of the healer’s art gave the Greek strength of will enough to withstand it even in part. He was groping for his blade as the sorcerer came up to him. The dagger gleamed in the wizard’s hand, long enough to reach a man’s heart.

  The wizard knelt for the killing stab, a vulpine smile stretched over his lean features. Gorgidas heard a dull thud. He thought it was the sound of the knife entering his body. But the Yezda sorcerer reeled away with a muffled grunt of pain. The power of the spell vanished as his concentration snapped.

  Gorgidas sprang for the wizard, but someone hurtled by him. A sword bit with a meaty thunk. The Yezda thrashed and lay still; Gorgidas smelled his bowels let go in death.

  “You crazy are,” Rakio said, wiping his blade on his sleeve. It was statement this time, not question. He seized the Greek by the shoulders. “Are you too stupid not to go wandering away from help and get caught alone?”

  “So it would seem. I’m new to this business of war and don’t do the right thing without thinking,” Gorgidas said. He drew Rakio into a brief embrace and touched his cheek. “I’m glad you were close by, to keep me from paying the price of my mistake.”

  “I would want you for me to do the same,” the Yrmido said, “but would you be able?”

  “I hope so,” Gorgidas said. But that was no good answer, and he knew it. They heard an Arshaum shout not far away and rushed to his aid together.

  Fewer than half the Yezda managed to get away or to hide well enough in the ruins to escape their enemies’ search. The rest, but for a couple saved to question later, were cut down; the Arshaum captured a good three dozen horses. The cost was seven dead and twice that many wounded.

  “That was a true lead,” Karaton said to Gorgidas, the nearest thing to an apology he would give a non-Arshaum. He lay on his belly while the Greek stitched up a gash on the back of his calf. The wound was deep, but luckily ran along the muscle instead of across it; it did not hamstring him. A clean, freely bleeding cut, it did not require the healing art to mend.

  Karaton did not flinch as the needle entered his flesh again and again, or even when the physician poured an antiseptic lotion of alum, verdigris, pitch, resin, vinegar, and oil into the wound. “You should have kept that wizard of theirs alive,” the commander of a hundred went on, his tone perfectly conversational. “He would have been able to tell us more than these no-account warriors we have.” Without liking the man, the Greek had to admire his fortitude.

  “I was almost sorry for having lived through the encounter myself,” he told Viridovix much later that night. The Celt was yawning, but Gorgidas was still too keyed up to sleep. Having seen the peasant who had warned them loaded with gold and sent home, he kept hashing over the fight.

  “The shindy would’ve been easier for you lads, I’m thinking, were you after having me along,” Viridovix interrupted. Most times he would have heard his friend out gladly, but his eyes were heavy as two balls of stone in his head.

  “Aye, no doubt you would have stomped the hill flat with one kick and saved us the trouble of fighting,” Gorgidas said tartly. “I thought you over your juvenile love for bloodletting.”

  “That I am,” the Gaul said. “But for one who prides himself on the wits of him, you’ve no call to be twitting me. If it was magic you suspected, now, couldna this glaive o’ mine ha’ pierced it outen the folderol and all puir Tolui went through?”

  “A plague! I should have thought of that.” Hardly anything annoyed Gorgidas worse than Viridovix coming up with something he had missed. Sitting back combing his mustaches with his fingers, the Celt looked so smug Gorgidas wanted to punch him.

  “Dinna fash yoursel’ so,” he said, chuckling. “Forbye, you won and got back safe, the which was the point of it all.” He laid a large hand on the Greek’s shoulder.

  Gorgidas started to shrug it away in anger, but had a better idea. He gave a rueful laugh and said, “You’re right, of course. I wasn’t very clever, was I?” Viridovix’ baffled expression made a fair revenge.

  The Yezda band slashed through Arigh’s cavalry screen, poured arrows into the Erzrumi still with his army, and fled before the slower-moving mountaineers could come to grips with them. Arshaum chased the marauders through the fields. Wounded men reeled in the saddle; as Gorgidas watched, one lost his seat and crashed headlong into the trampled barley. The locals, he thought, would find the corpse small compensation for the hunger those swathes of destruction would bring come winter.

  As the last of the Yezda were ridden down or got away, their pursuers returned. A couple led new horses, while more showed off swords, boots, and other bits of plunder. Even so, Viridovix clucked his tongue in distress over the skirmish. “Och, the more o’ the Hundred Cities we’re after passing, the bolder these Yezda cullions get. ’Tis nobbut a running fight the last two days, and always the Erzrumi they’re for hitting.”

  “It works, too.” Gloom made Pikridios Goudeles unusually forthright. Of the hillmen, all had seen enough of the lowlands, but for a couple of hundred adventurers from various clans and Gashvili’s sturdy band, who still reckoned themselves bound by oath. Casualties and desertions reduced their count by a few every day.

  “Tomorrow will be worse,” Skylitzes said. Hard times loosened his tongue as they checked Goudeles’. “The Yezda have our measure now. They know which towns we can reach and which are safe from us. The garrisons are coming out to reinforce the bushwhackers who’ve dogged us all along.”

  Viridovix did not like the conclusion he reached. “We’ll be fair nibbled to death, then, before too long. We havena the men to spare.”

  “We should have,” Goudeles said. “But for the mischance of battle on the steppe and for the squabbles among the Arshaum themselves, we would be twice our present numbers.”

  Skylitzes said, “I served under Nephon Khoumnos once, and he was always saying, ‘If ifs and buts were candied nuts, then everyone would be fat.’ ” His eyes traveled to Goudeles’ belly. “Maybe he was thinking of you.”

  Reminding the bureaucrat of their political rivalry back in Videssos proved unwise. “Maybe,” Goudeles said shortly. “I’m sure the good general’s philosophy is a great consolation to him now.”

  Appalled silence fell. Avshar’s wizardry had killed Khoumnos at Maragha. Goudeles reddened, knowing he had gone too far. He hurriedly changed the subject. “We’d also be better off if the Erzrumi had not proved summer soldiers, going home when things turned rough.”

  Some truth lay in that, but after his gaffe his companions were not ready to let him off so easily. “That is unjust,” Gorgidas said, doubly irritated because of the implied slur on Rakio’s countrymen. “They came to fight for themselves, not for us, and we’ve seen how the Yezda keep singling them out for special attention.”

  “Aye; to make them give up.” Goudeles was not about to abandon his point. “But when they do, they get off easy while we pay the price of their running out. Deny it if you can.” No one did.

  Gorgidas’ side of the argument, though, received unpleasant confirmation later that afternoon. The bodies of several Erzrumi who had been captured in a raid the week before were hung on spears in Arigh’s line of march. With the time to work on them, the Yezda had used their ingenuity. Among other indignities, they had soaked their prisoners’ beards in oil before setting them alight.