eminent sir?»
«What? Oh.» Alvinos Bagdasares laughed. «No, your Majesty, no need for that. I was thinking out loud. We have fresh water, and I have here—» He plucked a stoppered jar from its niche on the wall. «—sea salt, which, when mixed with that fresh water, gives an excellent simulacrum of the sea. And what is the business of magic, if not simulacra?»
Since Maniakes did not pretend to be a mage, he let Bagdasares do as he reckoned best. That, he had found, was a good recipe for successful administration of any sort: pick someone who knew what he was doing— and picking the right man was no small part of the art, either—then stand aside and let him do it.
Humming tunelessly, Bagdasares mixed up a batch of artificial seawater, then, praying as he did so, poured some of it into a low, broad silver bowl on the battered table. Then he used a sharp knife with a gold hilt to cut several roughly boat-shaped chips off an oak board. Twigs and bits of cloth gave them the semblance of rigging. «We speak of the Sailors' Sea,» he explained to Maniakes, «and so the ships must be shown as sailing ships, even if in literal truth they use oars, as well.»
«However you find out what I need to know,» the Avtokrator answered.
«Yes, yes.» Bagdasares forgot about him in the continued intense concentration he would need for the spell itself. He prayed, first in Videssian and then in the Vaspurakaner tongue to Vaspur the Firstborn, the first man Phos ever created. To the ear of a Videssian steeped in orthodoxy, that would have been heretical. Maniakes, at the moment, worried more about results. In the course of his troubles with the temples, his concern for the finer points of orthodoxy had worn thin.
Bagdasares went on chanting. His right hand moved in swift passes above the bowl that held the little, toylike boats. Without his touching them, they moved into a formation such as a fleet might use traveling across the sea. A wind Maniakes could not feel filled their makeshift sails and sent them smoothly from one side of the bowl to the other.
«The lord with the great and good mind shall favor us with kindly weather,» Bagdasares said.
Then, although he did not continue the incantation, the boats he had used in his magic reversed themselves and began to sail back toward the side of the bowl from which they had set out. «What does that mean?» Maniakes asked.
«Your Majesty, I do not know.» Bagdasares' voice was low and troubled «If I were to guess, I—»
Before he could say more, the calm water in the center of the bowl started rising, as if someone had grabbed the rim and were sloshing the artificial sea back and forth. But neither Bagdasares nor Maniakes had his hand anywhere near the polished silver bowl.
What looked like a spark that flew from two iron blades clashing together sprang into being above the little fleet, and then another. A faint mutter in the ear—was that what thunder might sound like, almost infinitely attenuated?
One of the boats of the miniature fleet overturned and sank. The rest sailed on. Just before they reached the edge of the bowl, Maniakes had—or thought he had—a momentary vision of other ships, ships that looked different in a way he could not define, also on the water, though he did not think they were physically present. He blinked, and they vanished even from his perception.
«Phos!» Bagdasares exclaimed, and then, as if that did not satisfy him, he swung back to the Vaspurakaner tongue to add, «Vaspur the Firstborn!»
Maniakes sketched Phos' sun-circle above his left breast. «What,» he asked carefully, «was that in aid of?»
«If I knew, I would tell you.» Bagdasares sounded like a man shaken to the core. «Normally, the biggest challenge a mage faces is getting enough of an answer to his question to tell him and his client what they need to know. Getting so much more than that—»
«I take it we'll run into a storm sailing back to Videssos the city?» Maniakes said in what wasn't really a question.
«I would say that seems likely, your Majesty,» Bagdasares agreed. «The lightning, the thunder, the waves—» He shook his head. «I wish I could tell you how to evade this fate, but I cannot.»
«What were those other ships, there at the end of the conjuration?» Maniakes asked. With the interpretation less obvious, his curiosity increased.
But Bagdasares' bushy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. «What 'other ships,' your Majesty? I saw only those of my own creation.» After Maniakes, pointing to the part of the bowl where the other ships had briefly appeared, explained what he had seen, the mage whistled softly.
«What does this mean?» Maniakes asked. Then he chuckled wryly. «I have a gift for the obvious, I fear.»
«Were the answer as obvious as the question, I should be happier—and so, no doubt, would you,» Alvinos Bagdasares said. «But questions about meaning, while easy to ask, have a way of being troublesome to wrestle with.»
«Everything has a way of being troublesome,» Maniakes said irritably. «Very well. I assume you can't tell me everything I would know. What can you tell me?»
«To meet your gift for the obvious, I would say it is obviously true my magic touched on something larger than I had intended.» Bagdasares replied. «As I said, you will have good weather sailing to Lyssaion. I would also say it is likely you will have bad weather sailing back.»
«I didn't ask you about sailing back.»
«I know that,» Bagdasares said. «It alarms me. Most times, magic does either what you want or less, as I told you a little while ago. When it does more than you charge it with, that is a token your spell has pulled back the curtain from great events, events with a power of their own blending with the power you bring to them.»
«What can I do to keep out of this storm?» Maniakes asked.
Regretfully, Bagdasares spread his hands. «Nothing, your Majesty. It has been seen, and so it will come to pass. Phos grant that the fleet pass through it with losses as small as may be.»
«Yes,» Maniakes said in an abstracted voice. As Avtokrator of the Videssians, ruler of a great empire, he'd grown unused to the idea that some things were beyond his power. Not even the Avtokrator, though, could hope to bend wind and rain and sea to his will. Maniakes changed the subject, at least slightly: «What about those other ships I saw?»
Bagdasares looked no happier. «I do not know, so I cannot tell you. I do not know if they be friends or foes, whether they come to rescue the ships from your fleet that passed through the storm or to attack them. I do not know whether the rescue or the attack succeeds or fails.»
«Can you try to find out more than you do know?» Maniakes said.
«Aye, I can try, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I will try. But I make no guarantees of success: indeed, I fear failure. I was not granted the vision, whatever it might have been. This suggests it might well have been meant for you alone, which in turn suggests reproducing, grasping, and interpreting it will be extraordinarily difficult for anyone but yourself.»
«Do what you can,» Maniakes said.
And, for the next several hours, Bagdasares did what he could. Some of his efforts were far more spectacular than the relatively uncomplicated spell Maniakes had first requested of him. Once, the chamber glowed with a pure white light for several minutes. Shadows appeared on the walls with nothing to cast them. Words in a language Maniakes did not understand came out of thin air.
«What does that mean?» he whispered to Bagdasares.
«I don't know,» the wizard whispered back. A little while later, he gave up, saying, «Whatever lies ahead is beyond my ability to unravel now, your Majesty. Only the passing of time can reveal its fullness.»
Maniakes clenched his fists. If he'd been willing to wait for the fullness of time, he wouldn't have asked Bagdasares to work magic. We sighed. «I know the army will get to Lyssaion without any great trouble,» he declared. «For now, I'll cling to that. Once I get there, once I punish the Makuraners for all they've done to Videssos, then I'll worry about what happens next.»
«That is the proper course, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. His large, dark eyes, though… his eyes were full of worry.
What looked at first glance like chaos filled the harbor of Kontoskalion. Soldiers filed aboard some merchantmen; grooms and cavalrymen led unhappy, suspicious horses up the gangplanks of others. Last-minute
