Panteles said, «We have a fog ahead. We need Phos' holy light to pierce it.»
Since Bozorg kept quiet, Abivard made himself stay calm, too. Panteles incanted steadily and then, with a word of command that might not have been Videssian at all—that hardly sounded like any human language— stabbed out his finger at what lay ahead. Abivard expected something splendid and showy, perhaps a ray of scarlet light shooting from his fingertip. Nothing of the sort happened, so it seemed the sort of gesture a father might have used to send an unruly son to his room after the boy had misbehaved.
Then Bozorg grunted and staggered as if someone had struck him a heavy blow, though no one stood near him. «No, by the God!» he exclaimed, and gestured with his left hand. «Fraortish eldest of all, lady Shivini, Gimillu, Narseh—come to my aid!»
He straightened and steadied. Panteles repeated Phos' creed. The two wizards shouted together, both crying out the same word that was not Videssian—it might not have been a word at all, not in the grammarians' sense of the term.
Abivard was watching Tzikas. The renegade started to sketch Phos' sun-circle but checked himself with the motion barely begun. Instead, his left hand twisted in the gesture Bozorg had used. Almost forgot whose camp you were in, didn't you? Abivard thought.
But Tzikas' return to the Makuraner fold did not seem to have been a trap or a snare. He'd warned of magic ahead, and magic ahead there had been. He'd done Abivard a service the general could hardly ignore. The last time they'd seen each other, Tzikas had done his best to kill him. That had been a more honest expression, no doubt, of how the renegade felt—not that Abivard had any great and abiding love for him, either.
The wizards, meanwhile, continued their magic. At length Abivard felt a sharp snap somewhere right in the middle of his head. By the way the soldiers around him exclaimed, he wasn't the only one. Afterward the world seemed a little clearer, a little brighter.
«We have pierced the sorcerous fog, revealing it for the phantasm it is,» Panteles declared.
«And what lies behind it?» Abivard demanded. «What other magic was it concealing?»
Panteles and Bozorg looked surprised. In defeating the first magic, they'd forgotten for a moment what came next. More hasty incanting followed. In a voice that suggested he had trouble believing what he was saying, Bozorg answered, «It does not seem to be concealing any other magic.»
«Bluff!» Romezan boomed. «All bluff.»
«A bluff that worked, too,» Abivard said unhappily. «We've wasted a lot of time trying to break through that screen of theirs. We were almost on their heels, but we're not, not anymore.»
«Let's go after them, then,» Romezan said. «The longer we stand around jabbering here, the farther away they get.»
«That's so,» Abivard said. «You don't suppose—» He glanced over at Tzikas, then shook his head. The renegade would not have come to the Makuraner army Abivard commanded for the sole purpose of delaying it. Maniakes could not have forced that from Tzikas, not when he knew Abivard was as eager as the Avtokrator to dispose of him… could he?
Romezan's gaze swung to Tzikas, too. «What do we do about him now?»
«Drop me into the Void if I know. He said there was magic being worked, and there was. He's no wizard or he would have tried to murder Maniakes himself instead of hiring someone to do it for him.» That made Tzikas bite his lip. Abivard ignored him, continuing: «He had no way to know the magic wasn't worse than what it turned out to be, and so he warned us. That counts for something.»
«Far as I'm concerned, it means we don't torture him—just hew off his head and have done,» Romezan said.
«Your generosity is remarkable,» Tzikas told him.
«What do you think we should do with you?' Abivard asked, curious to hear what the renegade would say.
Without hesitation Tzikas replied, «Give me back my cavalry command. I did nothing to give anyone the idea I don't deserve it.»
«Nothing except slander me to Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase,» Abivard said. «Nothing except offer to slay me in single combat. Nothing except blunt my troops in battle and keep Maniakes from being wrecked. Nothing except—»
«I did what I had to do,» Tzikas said.
How slandering Abivard to Sharbaraz counted as something he had had to do, he did not explain. Abivard wondered if he knew. The most likely explanation was that aggrandizing Tzikas was indeed something Tzikas had to do. Whatever the explanation, though, it was beside the point at the moment. «You will not lead cavalry in my army,» Abivard said. «Until such time as I know you can be trusted, you are a prisoner, and you may thank the God or Phos or whomever you're worshiping on any particular day that I don't take Romezan's suggestion, which would without a doubt make my life easier.»
«I find no justice anywhere,» Tzikas said, melodrama throbbing in his voice.
«If you found justice, you would be short a head,» Abivard retorted. «If you're going to whine because you don't find as much mercy as you think you deserve, too bad.» He turned to some of his soldiers. «Seize him. Strip him and take away whatever weapons you find. Search carefully, search thoroughly, to make sure you find them all. Hold him. Do him no harm unless he tries to escape. If he tries, kill him.»
«Aye, lord,» the warriors said enthusiastically, and proceeded to give the command the most literal obedience imaginable, stripping Tzikas not only of his mail shirt but also, their pattings not satisfying them, of his undertunic and drawers as well, so that he stood before them clad in nothing more than irate dignity. Abivard groped for a word to describe his expression and finally found one in Videssian, for the imperials did more reveling in suffering for the sake of their faith than did Makuraners. Tzikas, now—Tzikas looked martyred.
For all their enthusiasm, the searchers found nothing out of the ordinary and suffered him to dress once more. Seeing that Tzikas was not immediately dangerous—save with his tongue, a weapon Abivard would have loved to cut out of him—the bulk of the army rode off in pursuit of Maniakes' force.
The Videssians, though, had used well the time their sorcerous smoke screen had bought them. «We aren't going to catch them,» Abivard said, bringing his horse up to trot beside Romezan's. «They're going to make their way down to Lyssaion and get away to fight next spring.»
He hoped Romezan would disagree with him. The noble from the Seven Clans was relentlessly optimistic, often believing something could be done long after a more staid man would have given up hope—and often being right, too. But now the wild boar of Makuran nodded. «I fear you're right, lord,» he said. «These cursed Videssians are getting to be harder to step on for good and all than so many cockroaches. They'll be back to bother us again.»
«We have driven them clean out of the land of the Thousand Cities,» Abivard said, as he had before. «That's something. Even the King of Kings will have to admit that's something.»
«The King of Kings won't have to do any such thing, and you know it as well as I do,» Romezan retorted, tossing his head so that his waxed mustaches flipped back and slapped against his cheeks. «He may, if his mood is good and the wind blows from the proper quarter, but to have to? Don't be stupid… lord.»
That came uncomfortably close to Abivard's own thoughts, so close that he took no offense at Romezan's blunt suggestion. It also sparked another thought in him: «My sister should long since have had her baby by now, and I should have had word, whatever the word was.»
Now Romezan sounded reassuring: «Had anything bad happened, lord, which the God forbid, rest assured you would have heard of that.»
«I won't say you're wrong,» Abivard answered. «Sharbaraz by now probably would be glad to get shut of any family ties to me. But if Denak had another girl—» If, despite the wizards' predictions, she'd had another girl, she would not get another chance for a boy.
Romezan's hand twisted in a gesture intended to turn aside an evil omen. That touched Abivard. The noble of the Seven Clans might well have resented his low birth and Denak's and not wanted the heir of the King of Kings to spring from their line. Abivard was glad none of that seemed to bother him.
«All right, if we can't catch up to the Videssians, what do we do?' Romezan asked.
«Return in triumph to Mashiz, of course,» Abivard said, and laughed at the expression on Romezan's face. «What we really need to do is pull back out of this rough country into the flood-plain, where we'll have plenty of supplies. Not much to be gathered here.»
