coward in battle, whatever else you want to say about him. Arrange for him to meet about a regiment's worth of Videssians with maybe half a troop of his own at his back. That'll settle him once and for all.»
Abivard pondered the idea. It brought a good deal of temptation with it. In the end, though, and rather to his own surprise, he shook his head. «It's what he would do to me were our places reversed.»
«All the more reason to do it to him first,» Turan said.
«Thank you, but no. If you have to become a villain to beat a villain, the God will drop you into the Void along with him.»
«You're too tenderhearted for your own good,» Turan said. «Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, would have done it without blinking an eye, and he wouldn't have needed me to suggest it to him, either.»
That was both true and false. Sharbaraz, these days, could be as ruthless as any man ever born when it came to protecting his throne… yet he had not put Abivard out of the way when he had had the chance. Maybe that meant a spark of humanity did still lurk within the kingly facade he'd been building over the past decade and more.
Turan looked sly. «If you want to keep your hands clean, lord, I expect I could arrange something or other. You don't even have to ask. I'll take care of it.»
Abivard shook his head again, this time in annoyance. If Turan had quietly arranged for Tzikas' untimely demise without telling him about it, that would have been between his lieutenant and the God. But for Turan to do that after Abivard had said he didn't want it done was a different matter. What would have been good service would have turned into villainy.
«You've got more scruples than a druggist,» Turan grumbled as he walked off, as disappointed with Abivard as Abivard was with him.
The next day Tzikas returned to camp to give Abivard the details of his skirmish with the Videssians. «The enemy, at least, thought I was a man of Makuran,» he said pointedly. « 'There's that cavalry general of theirs, curse him to the ice,' they said. A good many of them have fallen into the Void now, eternal oblivion their fate.»
He said all the right things. He'd let his beard grow out so that it made his face seem more rectangular, less pinched in at the jaw and chin. He wore a Makuraner caftan. And he still was, to Abivard, a foreigner, a Videssian, and so not to be trusted because of who he was, let alone because of his letters to Sharbaraz King of Kings.
But he'd done decent service here. Abivard acknowledged that, saying, «I'm glad you beat them back. Knowing a cavalry regiment is here and able to do its job will make Maniakes think twice about getting pushy so late in the year.»
«Yes,» Tzikas said. «Your magic helped there, too, even if not quite so much as you'd hoped.» His lips twisted in a grimace no Makuraner could have matched, an expression of self-reproach that was quintessentially Videssian: he was berating himself for being less underhanded than he would have wanted. «Had the magic I essayed worked even half so well, I, not Maniakes, would be Avtokrator now.»
«And I might be trying to figure out how to drive you from me land of the Thousand Cities,» Abivard answered. His gaze sharpened. Here was a chance to get a look at the way Tzikas' mind worked. «Or would you have tried such a bold thrust if you had the Videssian throne under your fundament?»
«No, not I,» Tzikas said at once. «I would have held on to what I had, strengthened that, and then begun to wrest back what was mine. I would have had no need to hurry, for I could have held out in Videssos the city forever, so long as my fleet kept you from crossing over from the westlands. Once my plans were ripe, I'd have struck and struck hard.»
Abivard nodded. It was a sensible, conservative plan. That mirrored the way Tzikas had opposed Makuran back in the days when he'd been the best of the Videssian generals in the westlands—and the one who had paid the most attention to fighting the invaders and the least to the endless rounds of civil war engulfing the Empire after Genesios had murdered his way to the Videssian throne. Only in treachery, it seemed, was Tzikas less than conservative, although by Videssian standards, even that might not have been so.
«But Maniakes has thrown us back on our heels,» Abivard argued. «Would your scheme have done so much so soon?»
«Probably not,» Tzikas said. «But it would have risked less. Maniakes, whining pup that he is, has a way of overreaching that will bring him down in the end—you mark my words.»
«I always mark your words, eminent sir,» Abivard answered. Tzikas scowled at his use of the Videssian title. Abivard didn't care. He also didn't think Tzikas was right. Maniakes, unlike a lot of generals, kept getting better at what he did.
«By the God,» Tzikas replied, again reminding Abivard that he had bound himself to Makuran for better or for worse—or until he sees a chance for some new treachery, Abivard thought– «we should push straight at Maniakes with everything we have and force him out of the land of the Thousand Cities.»
«I'd love to,» Abivard said. «The only problem with the plan is that everything we have hasn't been enough to force him out of the Thousand Cities.»
Tzikas didn't answer, not with words. He simply donned another of those characteristically Videssian expressions, this one saying that, had he been in charge of things, they would have gone better.
Before Abivard could get angry at that, he realized there was another problem with the scheme the Videssian renegade had proposed. Like Tzikas' plan for fighting Makuran had he been Avtokrator, this one lacked imagination; it showed no sense of where the enemy's real weakness lay.
Slowly Abivard said, «Suppose we do force Maniakes away from the Tutub. What happens next? Where does he go?»
«He falls back into the westlands. Where else can he go?» Tzikas said. «Then, I suppose, he makes for the coast, whether north or south I couldn't begin to guess. And then he sails away, and Makuran is rid of him till the spring campaigning season, by which time, the God willing, we shall be better prepared to face him here in the land of the Thousand Cities than we were this year.»
«My guess is he'll go south,» Abivard said. «To reach the coast of the Videssian Sea, he'd have to skirt Vaspurakan, where we have a force that should be coming out to hunt him anyhow, and he controls none of the ports along that coast. But he's taken Lyssaion, which means he has a gateway out on the coast of the Sailors' Sea.»
«Clearly reasoned,» Tzikas agreed. From a Videssian that was no small praise. «Yes, I suppose he likely will escape to the south, and we shall be rid of him—and we shall not miss him one bit.»
«Do you play the Videssian board game?» Abivard asked, continuing, «I was never very good at it, but I liked it because it leaves nothing to chance but rests everything on the skill of the players.»
«Yes, I play it,» Tzikas answered. By the predatory look that came into his eyes, he played well. «Perhaps you would honor me with a game one day.»
«As I say, you'd mop the floor with me,» Abivard said, reflecting that Tzikas would no doubt enjoy mopping the floor with him, too. «But that's not the point. The point is, you can hurt the fellow playing the other side, sometimes hurt him a lot, just by putting one of your pieces between his piece and where it's trying to go.»
«And so?» Tzikas said, right at the edge of rudeness. But then his manner changed. «I begin to see, lord, what may be in your mind.»
«Good,» Abivard told him, less sardonically than he'd intended. «If we can set an army on his road down to Lyssaion, that will cause him all manner of grief. And unless I misremember, delaying him on the road to Lyssaion really matters at this season of the year.»
«You remember rightly, lord,» Tzikas said. «The Sailors' Sea turns stormy in the fall and stays stormy through the winter. No captain would want to risk taking his Avtokrator and the best soldiers Videssos has back to the capital by sea, not in a few weeks, not when he'd know he was only too likely to lose them all. And that would mean—»
«That would mean Maniakes would have to try to cross the westlands to get home,» Abivard said, interrupting not from irritation but from excitement. «He'd have to capture each town along the way if he wanted to encamp in it, and the winter there is hard enough that he'd have to try—he couldn't very well live under canvas till spring came. So if we can get between him and Lyssaion, we don't even have to win a battle—»
«A good thing, too, with these odds and sods under your command,» Tzikas broke in. Now he was being
