Krispos the Emperor

'I'm sure they do,' Krispos said. 'Here's what I have in mind, then: suppose we detach, say, fifteen hundred men from this force, take 'em back to the coast, and put 'em on board ship. Don't tell them where to land in advance; let the drungarios in charge of the fleet pick a coastal town—Tavas, Nakoleia, or Pityos—after they've set out. The detachment would be big enough to do us some good when it landed, maybe big enough to force Livanios to concentrate quickly against it ... at which point, the good god willing, we'd be close enough to hit him with the rest of the army. Well?' He knew he was an amateur strategist, and wasn't in the habit of giving orders for major moves till he'd talked them over with professionals.

Sarkis absently popped another olive into his mouth. 'It would keep the spies from knowing what was going on, which I like. But you ought to pick out the target town in advance and give it to the drungarios as a sealed order —'

'Sealed magically, too,' Zaidas put in, 'to prevent scrying as well as spying.'

'Aye, sealed magically, by all means,' Sarkis said. 'No one would see the order save you and. say, one spatharios—' He glanced over at Katakolon. '—until the drungarios opened it. That way you could make sure the main army was at the right place at the right time.'

'Thank you, eminent sir; you've closed a loophole. We'll do it as you suggest. What I mostly want is to make the Thanasioi react to us for once instead of the other way round. Let them counter our mischief for a change.'

Krispos looked from Sarkis to Zaidas to Katakolon. They all nodded. His son asked, 'Which town will you choose for the landing?'

Sarkis turned away from Katakolon so the youth would not see him smile. Krispos saw, though. Gently he answered. 'I'm not going to tell you, because this tent just has cloth walls and I don't know who's walking by with his ear bent. The less we blab, the less there is for unfriendly people to learn from us.'

'Oh.' Katakolon still had trouble realizing this wasn't a large, elaborate game. Then he said, 'Couldn't you have Zaidas create a zone of silence around the pavilion?'

'I could,' Krispos said. 'But I won't, because it's far more trouble than it's worth. Besides, another mage would be apt to notice the zone of silence and wonder what we were brewing up behind it. This way, everything stays nice and ordinary and no one suspects we have anything sneaky in mind—which is the best way to pull off something sneaky, assuming you want to.'

'Oh,' Katakolon said again.

Without warning, Syagrios came through the door into Phostis' little cubicle in the keep at Etchmiadzin. 'Get your imperial backside out of bed,' he growled. 'You've got work to do.'

Phostis' first muzzy thought on waking was relief that Olyvria wasn't lying on the pallet beside him. His next, as his head cleared a little, was curiosity. 'Work?' he said. 'What kind of work?' He crawled out from under the blanket, stretched, and tried to pull wrinkles out of his tunic. He'd slept on his beard wrong; parts of it were sticking out from his face like spikes.

'Come down and get some wine and porridge in you and we'll talk,' Syagrios said. 'No point to telling you anything now—you don't have any brains before breakfast.'

Since that was more or less true, Phostis answered it with as dignified a silence as he could muster. The dignity would have been easier to maintain had he not made a hash of buckling one sandal. Syagrios laughed raucously.

On the way downstairs, the ruffian asked, 'How's the arm?'

Phostis raised it and bent it at odd angles till he caught his breath at a sharp stab of pain. 'It's still not perfect, not by a long shot,' he answered, 'but I'm getting to where I can use it well enough.'

'Good,' Syagrios said, and then nothing more until he and Phostis were down in the kitchens. If he'd hoped to pique Phostis' interest, he succeeded. The younger man would have gone through his morning porridge twice as fast had he not kept pestering Syagrios with questions. The ruffian, who drank more breakfast than he ate, was gleefully noncommunicative until Olyvria came in and joined the two of them at table. Seeing her made Phostis stop asking so many questions, but didn't make him eat any faster.

'Have you told him?' Olyvria asked Syagrios.

'No, he hasn't told me,' Phostis said indignantly; were curiosity an itch, he would have been scratching with both hands.

Syagrios gave him an evil leer before he answered Olyvria. 'Not a word. I figured I'd let him stew in his own juice a while longer.'

'I think I'm done to a turn now,' Phostis said. 'What in the name of the lord with the great and good mind is going on? What are you supposed to tell me, Syagrios?' He knew he was being too eager, but couldn't help himself.

'All right, boy, you want to know that bad, you oughta know,' Syagrios said. But instead of telling Phostis whatever it was he wasn't saying, he got up and, with slow deliberation, poured himself another mug of wine. Phostis looked a mute appeal to Olyvria, but she didn't say anything, either. Syagrios came swaggering back, sat down again, and noisily swigged from the mug. Only when he was through did he come to the point. 'Your father, lad, is getting cute.'

Phostis had heard his father described in many ways. Till that moment, cute had never been one of them. Cautiously, he asked, 'What's he done?'

'That's just it—we don't quite know.' By Syagrios' scowl, he thought he had every right to know everything Krispos did. He went on, 'He's sent a force out of the Videssian Sea, same as he did last fall when we snagged you. This time, though, we don't know ahead of time which town he's gonna land at.'

'Ah.' Phostis hoped he sounded wise. But he wasn't all that wise, for he had to ask another question. 'What has that to do with me?'

'Suppose you're an imperial soldier,' Syagrios said. 'That makes you pretty fornicating dumb to start with, right? All right, now suppose you land in a town and you're getting ready to do whatever they tell you to do and here comes the Avtokrator's son, saying to the ice with your officers and come on and join the gleaming path. What you gonna do then?'

'I ... see,' Phostis said slowly. And he did, too; had he been as enamored of the gleaming path as Syagrios thought he was, he could have done his father a lot of harm. But he also saw a problem. 'You said you didn't know