the tone much.
With a sigh, Gerin turned to Rihwin. 'And what can I do for you?' His tone meant much, too, but in a far less gentle way.
Rihwin answered, 'Lord king, I should like to know what our next movement against the imperials will be.'
'Should you?' Gerin said. Rihwin nodded. With a grimace, Gerin went on, 'Well, by the gods, so should I. The only thing I can think of doing, though, is to keep on with what we're already doing, which is to say, retreating.'
'Back toward our own lands, you mean,' Rihwin said.
Gerin exhaled in exasperation. 'You must have been listening to that lackwit of a temple guard. It's very hard to retreat toward the enemy; the technical term for that is advance.'
'For which wisdom I thank you, O font of knowledge,' Rihwin said, not about to be outdone in sarcasm, 'but that was not precisely what I had in mind. As you know, only one road leads from the valley of Ikos to lands under your illustrious suzerainty, and it is a road perhaps something less than conducive to rapid travel.'
'Ah,' Gerin said, and nodded. 'Now I understand. You're not happy about the notion of traveling through the haunted woods, eh?'
'To put with as much abridgment as I can muster, lord king, no,' Rihwin said. 'Are you?'
'Not so you'd notice,' Gerin answered. 'But if it's a choice between that and staying here so the imperials can finish wrecking us, I know which direction I'll go. All I can do is hope my men and I come out on the other side. If we do, maybe we can smash in the head of the imperials' column as they come after us.'
'That would be good,' Rihwin said without much conviction. He didn't think it would happen, then.
'Better still,' Gerin said in a spirit of experimentation, 'would be meeting the imperials here in the valley of Ikos and driving them back.'
Plainly, Gerin didn't think that would happen, either. 'Yes, that would be better, lord king,' he agreed. 'Not likely, perhaps, but better without a doubt. How do you aim to produce a victory when lately we've known nothing but defeat?'
'I don't know,' Gerin admitted, which seemed to nonplus Rihwin more than anything else he might have said. 'The best we can hope for now, it seems to me, is to hope the imperials haven't the stomach for a long, hard campaign and give up and go home.'
'We might have had a better hope for that had we gained the aid of the lord of the sweet grape,' Rihwin said.
'That's not what Biton said, but then you've never been much interested in any opinion but your own.'
Rihwin scowled at him; a moment later, though, the eyes of the man from south of the High Kirs widened. 'You demon from the hottest hell,' he whispered. 'You let me go through the danger of summoning Mavrix hoping and expecting I would fail, and you said never a word.'
'I understand how surprising it must be for you to discover there are people who can on occasion keep their mouths shut,' Gerin replied sweetly. 'You really should try it sometime. It can be useful.'
'To the crows with utility, and to the crows with you, too,' Rihwin said. His effort to stalk off in impressive fury was hampered when he bumped into Van. Like everyone else who bumped into the outsized outlander, he bounced off. He kept stalking after that, but it wasn't the same.
Van shook his head. 'I see you were rattling his cage again.'
'Twice,' Gerin answered. Then he corrected himself. 'No, I take that back. He rattled his own cage once, when he figured out I wasn't too unhappy that he hadn't managed to get Mavrix to help us after all.'
'What did he do, say you were trying to use him as a sacrifice, the way the god of the Weshapar wanted Zalmunna to sacrifice his son?'
'He didn't use that example, no, but that was the general tone, as a matter of fact.' The Fox laughed. Laughing felt good. It also let him take his mind off the unpleasant fact that he still had no idea how to stop the imperials. But when he stopped laughing, that fact remained-and it seemed to be laughing at him, laughing and showing fangs as long as sharp as those of a longtooth.
Maybe it was laughing at Van, too. He said, 'Come morning, that Swerilas the Slimy is going to start nipping at our tails again.'
'Slippery,' Gerin said. 'Swerilas the Slippery, no matter how slimy he is. But…' He hesitated, then spoke in some surprise: 'I may just know what I'm going to do about him. Aye, by the gods-and by one god in particular-I may just.'
**
Sure enough, Swerilas pushed his men forward not long after the sun came up. The temple guards did resist them. So did a rear guard of Gerin's men. But the imperials were too many to be withstood for long, and in Swerilas had a leader who grew angry with anything less than victory.
Gerin fed more men into the fight, not so much in expectation of stopping Swerilas as to slow him down. And, had Swerilas not already been a suspicious sort, failure to try to hold him off would have made him one. Slowing him down also let Gerin's main force forage among the prosperous villages of the valley of Ikos as they retreated toward the Sibyl's shrine.
The temple guards peeled off to defend the temple from its marble outwalls. Gerin ordered his own men to keep on retreating. Dagref gave his father a curious look. Then, all at once, it vanished from his face. 'Biton's temple holds a lot of rich things, doesn't it?' he remarked.
'Oh, there might be a few in there, I suppose,' Gerin answered, his voice elaborately casual. 'Why? Do you think that might be interesting to the imperial soldiers and their officers?'
'It just might,' his son said, imitating his tone with alarming precision. 'The one thing about which the men of the northlands always complain is how the Elabonian Empire squeezed wealth out of them like a man squeezing whey out of a lump of cheese.'
'Biton isn't the sort of god who fancies being squeezed,' Van put in.
'You know that,' Gerin said. 'I know that. The question is, does Swerilas the Slippery know that? And the other question is, if he does know, does he care? He has wizards with him. He has the backing of the Elabonian gods, or thinks he does. Maybe he won't care a fig's worth, and think he can take whatever he pleases.'
'Wouldn't that be nice?' Van said dreamily. 'We've seen the plague Biton sends down on people who try robbing his shrine. All those blisters and things-it's not pretty, not even a little bit. Fox, don't you think this Swerilas would look mighty fine all blistered up?'
'Since I've never met him, I don't know how ugly he is already,' Gerin replied. 'But any old imperial covered in blisters would look pretty good to me right now.'
North of the Sibyl's shine lay the town that catered to visitors to the valley who came seeking oracular responses. The town was not what it had been in Gerin's younger days. Traffic for the Sibyl had diminished when the Elabonian Empire severed itself from the northlands, and diminished again after the earthquake that loosed the monsters on the earth. Many of the inns and taverns and hostels that had served travelers were empty. Some were wrecks that had gone unrepaired since the quake fifteen years before. Grass grew where others had once stood.
The innkeepers whose establishments survived viewed the arrival of Gerin's army with the same delight that serfs would have shown over the arrival of a swarm of locusts, and for similar reasons: they feared the troopers were going to eat them out of house and home, and they were right.
'Is this justice, lord king?' one of them wailed as Gerin's soldiers gobbled bread and roasted meat and guzzled ale.
'Probably not,' the Fox admitted. 'But we're hungry and we're here and we're bloody well going to eat. If we win this war, I'll pay you back next year-by all the gods I swear it. If we lose, you can send the bill to Crebbig I, the Elabonian Emperor.'
'Then I'll root for you,' the innkeeper said. 'You have a good name for not telling too many lies. I wouldn't wipe my arse with a promise from somebody on the far side of the mountains, not that I even have a promise
