thwart them.
Glumly, Abivard ordered the army to reestablish the camp it had just struck. He spent the next couple of hours pacing through it, doing his best to lift the soldiers' sagging spirits. He knew that best would have been better had his own spirits been anywhere but at the bottom of the sea. But he did not have to show the men that, and he didn't
At last he went back to his own pavilion. He didn't know exactly what he'd do there: getting drunk seemed as good a plan as any, since he couldn't come to grips with the Videssians. But when he got to the tent, he found Bozorg and Panteles waiting for him.
«I think I have the answer, eminent sir!» Panteles exclaimed in high excitement.
«I think this Videssian is out of his mind, lord: utterly mad,» Bozorg declared, folding his arms across his chest. «I think he wants only to waste your time, to deceive you, and to give the victory to Maniakes.»
«I think you are as jealous as an ugly girl watching her betrothed talking to her pretty sister,» Panteles retorted—not a comparison a Makuraner was likely to use, not in a land of sequestered women, but a telling one even so.
«I think I'm going to knock your heads together,» Abivard said judiciously. «Tell me whatever you have to tell me, Panteles. I'll judge whether it's trickery. If it is, I'll do as I think best.»
Panteles bowed. «As you say, eminent sir. Here.» He displayed a length of leather about as long as Abivard's forearm: most likely a piece cut from a belt. Joining the ends, he held them together with thumb and forefinger, then pointed to the resulting circle with his other hand. «How many sides does the strap have, eminent sir?»
«How many sides?» Abivard frowned. «What foolishness is this?» Maybe Bozorg had known what he was talking about. «It has two, of course: an inside and an outside.»
«And a strap across the Videssian's backside,» Bozorg added. But Panteles seemed unperturbed. «Just so,» he agreed. «You can trace it with your finger if you like.» He held the leather circle out so Abivard could do just that Abivard dutifully did, hoping against hope Panteles wasn't talking to hear himself talk, as Videssians often did. «Now—» Panteles said.
Bozorg broke in: «Now, lord, he shows you idiotic nonsense. By the God, he should be made to answer for his foolishness with the lash!»
Anything that could so anger the Makuraner mage was either idiotic nonsense, as he'd said, or exactly the opposite. «As I said, I will judge,» Abivard told Bozorg. He turned to Panteles. «Go on. Show me this great discovery of yours, or whatever it is, and explain how it ties up all our troubles like a length of twine around a stack of cured hides.»
«It's not my discovery, and I don't know if it ties up our troubles or not,» Panteles said. Oddly, Abivard liked him more for that, not less. The more spectacular a claim, the less likely it was to be justified.
Panteles held up the length of leather once more and again shaped it into a continuous band. This time, though, he gave it a half twist before joining the two ends together between his thumb and index finger. Bozorg gestured as if to ward off the evil eye, hissing, «Trickery.»
Panteles took no notice either of him or of Abivard's hand upraised in warning. The Videssian wizard said, «This was discovered in the Sorcerers' Collegium in Videssos the city some years ago by a certain Voimios. I don't know whether it's magic or not in any formal sense of the word. Maybe it's only trickery, as the learned Bozorg claims.» Like any Videssian worth his salt, he used irony as a stiletto. «Whatever it is, it's interesting. How many sides does the strap have now?» He held it up so Abivard could trace out his answer as he had before.
«What do you mean, how many sides does it have?» Abruptly, Abivard regretted doubting Bozorg. «It has to have two sides, the same as it did before.»
«Does it?» Panteles' smile was mild, benign. «Show me with your finger, eminent sir, if you'd be so kind.»
With the air of someone humoring a madman, Abivard ran his finger around the outside of the strap. A moment later, he would run it around the inside, and a moment after that he would give Panteles what he deserved for making him the butt of what had to be a foolish joke.
But in tracing the length of leather with his finger, he somehow found himself back where he'd begun after having touched every finger's breadth of it. «Wait a moment,» he said sharply. «Let me try that again.» This time he paid closer attention to his work. But paying closer attention didn't seem to matter. Again he traced the entire length of leather and returned to his starting point.
«Do you see, eminent sir?» Panteles said as Abivard stared down at his own finger as if it had betrayed him. «Voimios' strap—that's the name it took on at the Sorcerers' Collegium– has only one side, not two.»
«That's impossible,» Abivard said. Then he looked at his finger again. It looked as if it knew better.
«You just made a continuous line from your starting point back to your starting point,» Panteles said politely. «How could you do that if you went from one side to another? You just got there backward and were taken by surprise.»
As Panteles had doubtless meant them to, the words hung in the air. «Wait,» Abivard said. «Let me think. You're trying to tell me Maniakes' wizards have turned the canal into a strap of Voimios—is that what you called it?»
«Close enough, eminent sir,» Panteles said.
«Drivel!» Bozorg said. He snatched the leather strap out of Panteles' hand and threw it to the ground. «It's a fraud, a fake, a trick. There's no magic whatever to it, only deception.»
«What do you have to say to that?» Abivard asked Panteles.
«Eminent sir, I never claimed there was any magic in Voimios' strap,» the Videssian wizard answered. «I offered it as analogy, not proof. Besides—» He stooped and picked up the length of leather Bozorg had thrown down. «—this is a flat thing. To twist it so it has only one side, all you need do is this.» He gave it the deft half twist that turned it baffling. «But if you were going to make it so that something with length and width and height turned back on itself the same way, the only twist I can imagine to do such a thing is a magical one.»
Trying again and again to cross the canal and failing had already done more strange things to Abivard's imagination than he'd ever wanted. He turned to Bozorg. «Have you got a different idea how the Videssians could have turned us back on ourselves?»
«No, lord,» Bozorg admitted. «But the one this Videssian puts forward is ridiculous on the face of it. His precious Voimios probably got some of his horse's harness on poorly, then spent the next twenty years cadging cups of wine on the strength of it.»
«Are you denying what Panteles says is true, or are you only disparaging it?» Abivard asked pointedly.
The question had sharp teeth. Bozorg might have been furious, but he was no fool. He said, «What he said about the strap may be true, I suppose, no matter how absurd it sounds. But how could anyone take seriously this nonsense about twisting a canal back on itself?»
«I'd say some thousands of soldiers take the notion seriously, or would if they heard it,» Panteles shot back. «It happened to them, after all.»
«So it did,» Abivard said. «I was one of them, and thinking of it still makes me shiver.» He looked from Panteles to Bozorg and back again. «Do you think the two of you, working together—» He put special stress on those words. «—can find out whether what happened to the canal is the magical equivalent of a Voimios strap?»
Panteles nodded. A moment later, more grudgingly, Bozorg did, too. Panteles said, «Making a magic of this sort cannot have been easy for Maniakes' wizards. If the traces of the sorcery linger on this plane, we shall find them.»
«And if you do?» Abivard asked. «What then?»
«Untwisting the canal should be easier for us than twisting it was for them—if that's what they did,» Panteles answered. «Restoring a natural condition takes far less sorcery than changing away from what is natural.»
«Mm, I can see the sense in that,» Abivard said. «How soon will you be able to find out if Maniakes has turned the canal into a strap of Voimios?»
Bozorg stirred. Abivard looked his way. He said, «Lord, do you feel easy about using a Videssian to fight the Videssians?»
Abivard had been wrestling with that question since he had realized magic was holding him away from
