Maniacis shook his head. "We lost the battle some time ago," he said. "So now we're having to borrow money from foreigners; the merchants, banks in the old country, even the Cure Doce. We'll pay it all back as soon as the new fiscal year starts, of course, but they'll screw us rotten for interest. That's politics for you. Your bloody Foundrymen, running scared of the Drapers."

"We didn't start it," Psellus replied automatically. "Well, anyway, I'm here to make things worse for you. We've got to expedite supplies for the new army, so I'm here on the scrounge."

Maniacis clicked his tongue. "Not sure I can help you," he said. "How much do you need?"

When Psellus told him, he opened his eyes wide and blinked.

"I know," Psellus said. "It's a lot of money."

Maniacis rested his chin on his fingertips and thought for a moment. "There's no way I can raise that much just by fiddling the books," he said. "Either we borrow it from the savages or you'll have to go to Assembly for a levy."

"Can't do that," Psellus said immediately. "For one thing it'd take too long. For another - like I said, I'm out of touch, but I can't see it getting through without blood on the floor."

"Quite so." Maniacis shook his head. "With so many workers taken out and put on war work, production generally's right down the drain. That's not all; all the available shipping's tied up ferrying men and supplies, so goods are piling up in the warehouses with no ships to carry them. If we don't deliver, we don't get paid. This war's bloody terrible for business, which is the exact opposite of how it was supposed to be. If I was a Foundryman, I'd be looking for heads to roll on my management committee."

"Be that as it may," Psellus said sharply, "looks like you'll need to raise a loan. How long's that going to take?"

Maniacis shrugged. "Not very long, actually," he said. "Just so happens, we've negotiated a line of credit with our new best friends, just in case things look like they're getting out of hand. Luckily they have plenty of money and their interest rates are not at all bad."

Psellus caught something in his friend's tone of voice. "There's a catch, isn't there?"

"Depends how you look at it," Maniacis replied, with a humorless grin. "The way we're viewing it in this department, there isn't a problem, but we can see how other people - you lot, for instance - might not like it very much. Which is why we haven't got around to telling anybody yet."

Something dropped into place, and Psellus winced, as though he'd turned his ankle or cut himself. "It's the Vadani, isn't it?" he said. "That's who you're borrowing all this extra money from."

Maniacis looked at him. "You're perfectly at liberty to speculate," he said. "I'm not saying anything. But if you want money for your grocery bill, I'd be obliged if you kept your face shut and your wild guesses to yourself." He looked away and said to the wall: "One thing the Vadani have got plenty of is silver. All they've got to do is dig it out of the sides of the mountains. The bad thing is, we've run projections of what the final cost is likely to be, once we've taken Civitas Eremiae and finished the mopping-up. I won't bore you with details, but it's going to be tight. So much so that I don't see us being able to pay back these emergency loans next year or any time soon. In fact, unless we get lucky and find treasuries stuffed with gold and silver in the ruins of Orsea's palace, we're going to be in hock to our new best friends for a very long time. Now I don't understand politics, I'm proud to say, so I don't have to bother my silly little head about the implications of that. Instead, I can leave it to the likes of you, so you can start planning ahead. I seem to remember an old proverb about holding a wild boar by its bollocks; holding on is no fun at all, but letting go would probably be worse." He sighed, leaned back, stretched. "Let me have a formal writ of requisition as soon as you can," he said. "While you're doing the paperwork, I'll talk to my bosses and we can get everything set up. You know," he added sourly, "if only your precious Guildsmen had put locks on your office windows, none of this mess would've happened in the first place."

General Melancton received the news that the supply train had been dispatched and was on its way with a mixture of relief and skepticism. He'd been taught in war school that fighting on two fronts is a bad thing, and of the two enemies he currently faced, the Mezentine Guilds worried him slightly more than the Eremians. He was, after all, allowed to kill the Eremians, assuming he could get close enough without being shot to ribbons by the artillery the Perpetual Republic had assured him he'd never have to face. Also, he felt confident that he could predict how they were likely to behave. The Guilds, on the other hand, were something he couldn't begin to understand. The one thing he knew about them was that if it suited them to do so, they'd strand him in the mountains without supplies or send him to his certain death without a second thought. It was a shame the savages were so poor; on balance, he'd far rather be fighting for them.

He sat in his tent studying the map. The ill-fated Captain Eiconodoulus had told him a few things about Mezentine cartography before they'd shipped him back home, and Melancton was inclined to take the captain's word over his employers'. This meant that he was obliged to rely increasingly on his scouts, the Cure Hardy light cavalry. He'd have preferred a company of properly trained surveyors from home, but there wasn't time to send for any; and the Cure Hardy, possibly because they were nomads and therefore used to constant and painstaking reconnaissance, seemed to be doing a perfectly adequate job. It didn't matter at all that he didn't like them much; and he only disliked them because he found them more or less impossible to understand, even though they spoke quite passable Mezentine. But he couldn't figure out what they wanted; why they were here, risking their lives on behalf of him and his employers. Money didn't seem to interest them, in the same way fish aren't interested in music. They weren't here for the glory, he was pretty sure of that. In his time in the military he'd come across men who went to the wars simply because they liked to fight, but the Cure Hardy took great and laudable pains to avoid the enemy. Therefore they remained a mystery, one of very many, and that bothered him, on the rare occasions when he had time and leisure to dwell on it.

Today, however, they had particularly interesting news. There was a path (maybe thirty years ago it could have been called a road, but a lot of heather can grow and a lot of dirt and rock can be washed away in thirty years) that appeared to lead round the side of the foothills of Civitas Mountain, bypassing the obvious place for a final pre-siege pitched battle; and as far as the scouts could see, this path was completely clear of the enemy. Melancton was a realist, with a healthy distrust of cleverness. Someone with pretensions to tactical genius would be thinking in terms of fooling the enemy into making a stand at the obvious place by feinting at it with cavalry and light infantry, while sending the bulk of his army round by the cunning path to take them from the rear and slaughter them like sheep. As far as he was concerned, that would be a first-class way to lose the war at a stroke; something would go wrong with timing or communications, he'd find himself losing the pitched battle through lack of numbers while his encirclement party walked straight into an ambush on the hidden path. He stroked his beard and scowled. He was getting too old to play games.

He looked up. His chief of staff, Tachista Pantocrator, had arrived with the duty roster, which meant it was noon already and he still hadn't made up his mind. "Tachista," he said, "if you were Duke Orsea, what'd you be most worried about?"

Pantocrator thought for a moment. "Losing," he said.

Not as silly an answer as it sounded. "What's the most likely way you'd lose?" he asked.

"Easy. Sheer weight of numbers."

Melancton nodded slowly. "So you'd be thinking it'd be nice to even things up by slaughtering a few thousand of the bastards before they even get to the city."

"It wouldn't hurt."

"No. But we're contemplating what's losing you sleep."

"I see. Well, in that case, I'd be scared stiff of throwing away such advantages as I've got."

That made sense too. "And your best advantage?"

"Geography," Pantocrator replied immediately. "Superb defensive site, impregnable walls, and now I've got something approaching parity in artillery."

"So if you're smart," Melancton said, "what're you going to do?"

"Spend my time on the defenses of the city, and laying in as much food and materials as I can before the siege starts."

Melancton smiled. "And you're not going to risk wasting men in a field battle out in the open, when they'll be much harder to kill standing behind your wonderful city walls."

"I'd have to be stupid, wouldn't I?"

"Of course. In that case, tell the scouts to check out a day's march along the main road. I don't think they're going to come out to play. I think they'll stay in the city and wait for us until we're at the foot of their rotten hill. What do you think?"

Pantocrator shrugged. "That's what I'd do, probably," he said. "But then, I lack imagination. You said so in my last assessment."

"Fuck imagination," Melancton replied.

Hardening steel was the real problem. They'd run out of ordinary plain iron too, but the city was full of the stuff, in various shapes and forms. With the backing of the Ducas, Ziani had organized platoons of soldiers with nothing better to do into browsing parties, scouring the streets for frivolous and non-essential ironwork - door-hinges, gates, railings, lamp-standards, fire-dogs, boot-scrapers, sign-brackets, anything that could be drawn down, jumped up or hammer-welded together to make up bar stock. Hardening steel, on the other hand, had always been a rare and expensive commodity. Cart springs were the obvious resource, but he'd already stripped the city bare of them; likewise pitchfork tines, spade and shovel blades, they were even prising perfectly good horseshoes off soundly shod hoofs just to feed the furnaces. As if that wasn't ridiculous enough, they were eking out the hardening steel by pattern-welding it into billets two to one with wrought iron, so that each twelve-by-three-by-three that went to be drawn through the plates into spring wire had been forge-welded, twisted, folded and welded again and again like the finest swords of ancient heroes. If you looked closely at the finished wire you could actually see the patterns - pool-and-eye, maidenhair, hugs and kisses. It was ludicrous and a truly desperate way of going about things, but they had no choice. Pattern-welded springs, though; if that wasn't an abomination, then the term had no meaning.

As he shuttled between the factory and the ramparts where the scorpions were being set up, Ziani felt like a newlywed wife getting ready to entertain her in-laws to dinner for the first time. He wanted everything to be perfect for the Mezentines when they arrived. Every scorpion had to be aligned exactly in its cradle and zeroed at each of the set distances, the dampening struts clamped down tight, the sliders and locks greased, every nut and wedge retightened after twenty trial shots. He had a team of four hundred volunteers doing nothing all day but retrieving shot bolts from the targets and bringing them back up to the wall. He wanted to be everywhere, doing everything himself; instead he had to watch half-trained, half-skilled Eremians doing each job more or less adequately, which was torture. Finally, he decided he'd had enough. If he had to watch one more thread being stripped or cradle-truss warped out of line, he'd go mad. With a tremendous effort he turned his back on the lot of them and walked slowly down the stairs to the street.

Someone was waiting for him; a tall, broad, bald man with a ferocious gray mustache. "You Vaatzes?" he asked.

It was too stupid a question to risk replying to, so he nodded. "Who're you?"

"Framea Orudino, sergeant-at-arms to the lesser Ducas," the bald man replied, puffing his chest out like a frog. "You wanted fencing lessons. I've been trying to find you all day, but nobody knew where you'd got to."

Ziani grinned. "You found me," he said. "Right, let's get to it. What do I have to do?"

Orudino studied him for a moment, as though he was a consignment of defective timber. "Follow me," he said.

Orudino led him down the inevitable tangle of narrow, messy streets, alleys and snickets until they reached a gray door in a sand-yellow brick wall. To Ziani's surprise, the door didn't open into a beautiful secret garden or a cool, fountain-strewn courtyard. Instead, they were inside a building that reminded him of all the warehouses he'd ever seen. The walls were bare brick, washed with lime. The floor was gray stone flags, recently swept. In one corner was a stout wooden rack, in which he saw about a dozen matching pairs of long, thin swords.

"Foils," Orudino explained. "The point's been blunted and wrapped in twine, so it can't hurt you, unless you get stuck in the eye. But I'm good enough not to hit where I don't want to, and you'll never be good enough to hit me unless I want you to, so there's no problem."

Ziani decided he didn't like Sergeant Orudino, but that hardly mattered. "What comes first?" he asked.

"We'll get you standing right," the sergeant said. "Now then. Over there, see, painted on the floor are two footprints. Put your feet on them, and that's your basic stance."

Orudino was bored, making the little speeches he'd made hundreds of times before, plodding through the stages of the lesson like a mule turning a flywheel. That was unfortunate, because Ziani found the whole business completely alien, and needed to have each step explained and demonstrated over and over again. The footwork in particular he found almost impossible to master; it was almost as bad as dancing, and he'd never been able to dance. Maybe he could have managed it if he'd been able to look down and see where he was putting his feet, but the sergeant wouldn't let him, on the grounds that in a real fight he'd need to keep his eyes fixed on the other man's sword-point to the exclusion of everything else. So Ziani stumbled, blundered, tripped over his feet, fell over twice, with nothing to spur him on but his rapidly burgeoning hatred for the loud, pompous, bullying bald man with the bored voice and the supercilious grin. If anything, he loathed his condescending praise on the rare occasions when something went right more than his martyred patience with the bungles and mistakes. He kept himself going by chanting in his head, if this shithead can do it, so can I; and slowly, gracelessly, he tightened up the tolerance, while his arms and legs and wrists and forearms and neck and back screamed pain at him, and the tip of the sergeant's foil stung him like a wasp.

He learned the four wards (high, side, low, middle); the steps ordinary and extraordinary; the advance, the retreat, the pass, the lunge; the wide and the narrow measure; the counter in time and double time; the disengage, the block, the beat; the mastery of the enemy sword and the slip-thrust, the stop-thrust, the tip-cut and the sidestep riposte in time. He learned to feint and to read feints, to wait and to watch, to move hand and foot together, to keep his kneecap over his toe in the lunge, to fend with his left hand and to close to disarm. Orudino killed him six dozen times, with thrusts to his throat, heart, stomach and groin, with draw-cuts and tip-cuts and the secret cut of the Ducas (a wrap with the false edge to sever the knee-tendon). Every death was a chore to the sergeant, and most of them were disappointments, because a child of twelve should have been able to master the relevant defense by now.

"You're thrashing about like a landed fish," the sergeant said, as Ziani lunged at him and missed. "It's no good if you can't land a thrust where it'll do some good. Come over here, I'll show you." He led Ziani to the middle of the floor, where a piece of string hung from a rafter. From his finger he pulled a heavy ring, brass with a little silver plate still clinging to it, and tied it to the string. Then, with a mild sigh, he lunged. The tip of his foil passed through the middle of the ring without touching it.

"Right," he said sadly. "You try."

Hopeless, of course. A couple of times he managed to swat the string, like a kitten batting at wool. Otherwise he missed outright. The sergeant laughed, took down the ring and replaced it with a small steel hoop about the size of an outstretched hand. "Come on," he said, "you ought to be able to hit that"; but Ziani tried and couldn't. The best he could do was slap into the string, setting the hoop swaying.

"Don't they practice fencing where you come from, then?" Orudino asked. Ziani shook his head.

"We aren't allowed to have weapons," he replied. "It's against the law."

The sergeant looked at him with contempt. "Doesn't stop you picking on the likes of us, though," he said. "Well, you aren't at home now. Concentrate. Fix your eyes on where you want to hit, and it should just come naturally."

Did it hell. After a long time and a great many attempts, the sergeant stopped him, took down the hoop and said, "Let's stick to the basic defenses for now. Right, high guard, sword-hand in First, watch what I'm doing and step in to block and push away."

The defenses were slightly better than the attacks, but they still weren't easy. At last, however, he grasped the idea of taking a step back or to the side to keep his distance. Try as he might, however, he couldn't organize himself well enough to counter each attack with a simultaneous attack of his own. One thing at a time, his brain insisted, defend and then attack; but by the time he'd blocked, deflected or avoided, there wasn't time to hit back. There was always another attack on the way, and pretty soon he found himself backed into a corner with nowhere to go.

"We're just not getting anywhere," the sergeant said. "I've been teaching fencing for twenty years, I've taught kids of ten and old men of sixty, and I've never had a complete failure, not till now. Sorry, but I don't think I can help you. Best thing you can do is buy yourself a thick padded coat or a breastplate, and try and stay out of trouble."

Ziani leaned against the wall. His legs were weak and shaky from the effort, his elbows and forearms hurt and he had a blinding headache. He hated the sergeant more than anybody he'd ever met. "Let's give it one more go," he said. "Don't try and teach me the whole lot. Let's just concentrate on one or two things."

The sergeant shrugged. "I've got nothing better to do," he said. "But I think you're wasting your time. All right, then, let's have a middle guard in Third. No, bring your back foot round more, and don't stick your right hand so far out, not unless you're trying to draw me in on purpose."

Slowly, bitterly, with extraordinary effort, Ziani learned to defend from the middle guard. "It's better than nothing," the sergeant told him. "Forget about countering for now, just concentrate on distance. If you aren't there, you can't be hit. Simple as that."

The sergeant wanted to leave it at that, but Ziani refused. "I want just one thing I can use," he said. "Like the hedgehog in the proverb."

"I don't know any proverbs about hedgehogs." The sergeant shrugged. "All right," he said, "we'll try the back-twist. Actually it's a pretty advanced move, but for anybody sparring with you, it'd come as a complete surprise. Now; middle guard in Third, like normal; and when I thrust at you on the straight line, you bring your back foot a long step behind your front foot, till you've almost turned away from me. That takes you right out of the way of my attack, and you can stab me where you like as I go past."

To the complete surprise of both of them, Ziani got it almost right on the third attempt. "It's like I always say," the sergeant told him, "if someone can't learn the easy stuff, teach him something difficult instead. You'd be surprised how often it works."

So they practiced the back-twist many, many times, until Ziani was doing it without thinking. "It's actually a good one to learn," the sergeant said, "because if you get it right, that's the fight over before it starts. It's half a circle instead of a straight line. All right, a couple more times and then I'm calling it a day."

It was a glorious relief to get away from him, out of his bare brick box into the open air. Ziani only had a very vague idea of where in the city he was, but he didn't care. He was content to wander, choosing turnings almost at random to see where they led. Almost perversely, he had no trouble finding a way home.

Cantacusene was in the main gallery, shouting at someone for ruining a whole batch of springs. He waited till he'd finished, then called him over.

"You know about swords and things," he said. "Where's the best place to buy one?"

Cantacusene frowned. "Depends," he said, predictably. "What do you want?"

"A side-sword," Ziani replied, "or a short rapier, preferably with a bit of an edge. Imported," he added quickly. "Nothing flashy, just something simple and sturdy."

Cantacusene told him a name, and where to find a particular stall in the market. "You can say I sent you if you like," he added. "She's my second cousin, actually."

"Thanks. What was that about a batch of springs, then?"

The next day, early, he went to the market and found Cantacusene's cousin; a tall, fat woman with a pleated shawl over her red bodice and gown. For some reason, she seemed to think he wanted something very expensive with a swept hilt, fluted pommel and ivory grip; it took him quite some time to convince her otherwise, but he managed it in the end and came away with a short rapier, slightly browned with age, in a battered scabbard. He left it propped against the wall of his tower room and went back to work.

Not long after midday, a messenger arrived, from Miel Ducas: could Vaatzes come immediately, please. He followed the messenger (he was getting tired of having to be led everywhere, like a blind man) to the Ducas house. Miel Ducas was waiting for him in a small room off the main cloister. He was sitting behind a table covered with maps, letters, lists and schedules, and he looked exhausted.

"Bad news," the Ducas said straight away. "They've bypassed the Barbuda gate - that's here," he added, jabbing his forefinger at some squiggle on a map, "and at the rate they're going, they'll be down there in the valley this time day after tomorrow. I'm taking three squadrons of cavalry to give them a bit of a hard time at a place I know, but really that's just to show willing. Fact is, the war's about to start. How ready can you be by then?"

Ziani shrugged. "I'm ready now," he said. "We've run out of hardening steel and we're nearly out of ordinary iron. I'm still making machines by bodging bits together, but I don't suppose I've got enough material for another full day's production. Really, we're as ready as we'll ever be. I've already got four hundred and fifty scorpions installed and ready; actually, it'd be a bit of a struggle to fit any more in on the wall."

"I see," the Ducas said. "Is that going to be enough?"

Ziani smiled. "No idea," he said. "When you're dealing with the Republic, there's no such thing as enough. It's like saying, how many buckets will I need to empty the sea? But," he went on, as the Ducas scowled at him, "they're going to need a bloody big army if they don't want to run out of men before we run out of scorpion bolts."

That seemed to cheer the Ducas up a little. He sighed, and nodded his head. "You've done very well," he said. "I'm grateful, believe me. If we get out of this ghastly mess in one piece, I'll see to it that you're not forgotten." He shrugged. "You know," he said, "there's a part of me that still doesn't really believe that all this can be happening. Try as I might, I can't understand why they're doing it. Doesn't make sense, somehow."

Ziani smiled wryly. "That's because you think it's about you," he said. "It isn't. It's really an internal matter; Guild politics, that sort of thing. I don't suppose that's any consolation."

The Ducas shook his head. "I don't imagine it'll be much comfort to the poor bastards on the wrong end of your scorpion bolts," he said. "Tell me, what on earth possesses them to sign up, anyway? Isn't there any work for them back wherever they come from?"

"No idea," Ziani said. "All I know about the old country is that we came here to get away from them, a long time ago, and now we do a lot of business with them, mostly textiles, farm tools and domestic hardware. The general impression I've got over the years is that they're a practically inexhaustible supply of manpower, but I can't remember them ever getting slaughtered like sheep before. It's possible they may not want to keep coming if that happens."

"Well, quite." The Ducas grinned. "It's getting so difficult to find good help these days."

He didn't seem to want anything else, so Ziani made his excuses and took his leave. He felt a strong urge to look back over his shoulder, but he resisted it. Thanks to the Ducas, he'd learned a valuable lesson about compassion, and its deceptive relationship to love. With every step he took away from the place, he found it easier to bring to mind the fact that it was Duke Orsea who'd taken pity on him, on the day when he'd been dying in the mountains, and that the Ducas had been all in favor of having him quietly killed, or left to die. Not that it mattered, as things had turned out. The Ducas had paid him back many times over. Besides, compassion at first sight is generally like love at first sight; both of them are dangerous instincts, often leading to disaster.

He turned up the long, wide street whose name he could never remember (it was something to do with horses, not that that helped much) and followed it uphill toward the center of the city. At the lower crossroads he paused. If he turned right, he could go to his patron Calaphates' house. He hadn't spoken to his benefactor for a long time, let alone sent him any accounts, or a statement of his share of the profits. Calaphates had been kind to him, though largely out of self-interest; he owed him some consideration, the bare minimum required by good manners. Or he could turn left and take the wide boulevard lined with stunted cherry trees that led to the inner wall, and beyond that, the Duke's palace. If he owed a duty to his patrons, he certainly ought to make time to report to Duke Orsea, who'd shown him kindness even though he was an enemy, at a time when anybody would have forgiven him for doing the exact opposite. The thought made him smile, though part of him still regretted all of it, deeply and with true compassion. He went left. At the palace gatehouse he asked to see the chamberlain. After a shorter wait than he'd anticipated, he was seen and granted an interview with the Duke, at noon precisely, the day after tomorrow. It occurred to Ziani that if the Ducas was right, that would be the day before the Mezentine army was due to arrive. Couldn't be better, he decided.

After he'd seen Vaatzes, Miel Ducas spent an hour going over the plans for the cavalry raid one last agonizing time. He was sure there was at least one fatal flaw in his design, probably two or three, and that anybody with a faint trace of residual common sense would be able to spot it, or them, in a heartbeat. It was as though he could hear voices in the next room and knew they were discussing the disastrous failure of the coming raid, and how it had ultimately led to the fall of Eremia, but he couldn't quite make out what they were saying.

The same voices haunted him all evening. He took them with him when he went to bed (very early, since he had to be up well before dawn the next day) and they kept him awake until he was at the point where sleep would do him more harm than good. When the footman woke him up with hot water and a light breakfast he felt muzzy and cramped, with a tight feeling at the sides of his head that wanted to be a really nasty headache when it grew up.

It wasn't a good day for headaches; nor for stomach upsets, but he had one of them too. When he clambered awkwardly onto his horse, well behind schedule, he felt as though some malicious person was twisting his intestines tightly round a stick. Nerves, he promised himself; also he knew for a fact that there couldn't possibly be anything inside him left to come out.

As was only proper for the Ducas going to war, he wore a middleweight gambeson with mail gussets under a heavyweight coat of plates with full plate arm and leg defenses, right down to steel-soled sabatons on his feet. Because he was the commander in chief and therefore under an obligation to keep in touch with what was going on around him, he'd substituted an open sallet for the full great-helm, but someone had failed to check to see whether the Ducas crest (which was essential as a means of identification in the field) would fit the sallet's crest-holder. It didn't, so the sallet had to go back and the great-helm came out instead. Inside it, of course, he could barely see, hear or breathe; so he compromised by giving it to his squire to carry and going bare-headed.

He rode with only his squire for company as far as the Horse-fair, where he was joined by half a dozen mounted men in full armor, hurrying because they were running late. They slowed down when they saw it was him; one of them joked that he must've got the time wrong, because he was sure the muster had been set for half an hour earlier.

At the gate he found everybody else waiting for him. Cousin Jarnac had apparently assumed temporary command in his absence. Jarnac, of course, looked the part so much more than he did. The battle harness of the lesser Ducas was blued spring steel, with a single-piece placket instead of the coat of plates, and a bevored sallet with an eighteen-inch boiled leather crest in the form of a crouching boar. If he hadn't known better he'd have followed Jarnac unquestioningly; so, he suspected, would everybody else.

All told, the armored contingent numbered over four hundred; the rest of his army was made up of five hundred mounted archers and eight hundred lancers, middleweight-heavy cavalry in munition-grade black-and-white half-armor. Dawn was soaking through the dark blue sky, and a trace of mist hung round the main gate as, feeling horribly self-conscious about his appearance, horsemanship and perceived lack of any leadership ability whatsoever, Miel Ducas led the way out of the city and down the long road to the valley floor.

Because they were late starting, there was nothing for it but to take the old carters' road, Castle Lane, round the side of the hog's back crossed by the main road. That would save an hour, assuming it wasn't blocked by a landslide or fallen trees, and they'd come out five hundred yards from the fork where the Packhorse Drove branched off. The drove would take them down into the wooded combe that ran parallel to the road; at the Merebarton (assuming it wasn't a swamp after the late rain) they'd split into two and try and bottle the enemy up in the Blackwater Pass. Even if everything went perfectly they'd only be able to hold the two ends of the pass for a short while, but every Mezentine they killed today was one they wouldn't have to deal with later. At the council of war where the plan had been discussed, someone had described this approach as trying to empty a river with a tablespoon. Thinking about it, it had been Miel himself who said that, and nobody had contradicted him.

Castle Lane proved to be reasonably clear, and they made good time. Halfway down Packhorse Drove, however, they came almost within long bowshot of an enemy scouting party, who took one look at them and galloped away. Disaster; if the scouts got back to the main army, the whole plan would be ruined. Miel's first instinct was to send a half-squadron of lancers after them, but fortunately he didn't give in to it. God only knew how the enemy were managing to raise a gallop on the rock-and-mud surface of the drove; their horses must have iron hoofs and no bones in their legs. Trying to catch them or match their pace would be impossible for mere mortal horses, and the fewer men he sent charging around the landscape at this stage, the better. The only thing for it was to cut up diagonally across the rough to the road instead of taking the deer-trails he'd planned on using. That way, with luck, his men would stay between the scouts and their army, so they wouldn't be able to deliver their message. They'd come up a quarter-mile away from the gates of the canyon on the south side, but (with more luck) they'd be able to close that distance before the enemy got there. The northern wing would have to take its time getting into position. First screw-up of the day, Miel acknowledged sourly, and highly unlikely to be the last.

Cutting across the rough sounded fine when you said it, briskly and confidently, to your cool, eager staff officers. Putting the order into practice was something else entirely. Even the perfectly trained and schooled horses of the Ducas house weren't happy about leaving the path and crashing about through holly and briars; for the most part, the archers' and lancers' horses followed where the knights led, but it could only have been out of bewildered curiosity. Above all, they made a racket that surely could've been heard in the city. Only one man actually fell off and hurt himself, but he was the lesser Nicephorus, an enormous man in full plate, and the crash bounced about among the trees like a small bird trapped in a barn.

Coming out of the forest onto the road and into the light was a terrifying experience. Very reluctantly, but with duty forcing him on like a jailer, Miel led the way and was the first to break cover. He expected yells, movement, a flurry of arrows, but he had the road to himself. He reined in his horse and stood quite still for a moment or so, feeling as though he was the last man on earth. He could hear no birds singing, not even a bee or a horsefly, and it occurred to him that the enemy had already been and gone. But a glance at the road set his mind at rest; no hoofmarks, footprints, wheel-tracks to be seen.

Which reminded him. He turned in the saddle and waved his men on, then rode back to intercept one of the line officers, a man he trusted.

"Have the rearguard remembered to cut some branches?" he asked. He realized while he was saying it that the branch-cutting detail weren't this officer's responsibility; but he nodded and said yes, he'd watched them doing it, and did the Ducas want him to go back and make sure it was all done right?

Miel had absolute confidence in his subordinates, but even so he hung back and watched as the rearguard tied cut branches to the pommels of their saddles and dragged them behind as they rode on, sweeping away the column's hoofprints. The result didn't look right, but it was less obvious than the tracks of a thousand horses.

He remembered the canyon, though it was several years since the last time he'd been there, hunting late-season wolves with Jarnac and the Sphax twins. On that occasion the place had played cruelly on his nerves, because he hadn't yet got the hang of not being at war with the Vadani and therefore constantly at risk from maverick raiding parties, and because anybody with more imagination than a small rock could see it was a perfect place for an ambush. He started worrying; the enemy commander was by definition a professional soldier, trained from childhood to spot dangerous terrain. Surely he'd have recognized the risk from his scouts' reports. Either he wouldn't show up at all, which would be horribly embarrassing, or else he'd figured out an ingenious counter-ambush of his own that'd leave the Eremians trapped in their own snare. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was that that was precisely what was about to happen. At any moment, archers would appear on the skyline, or the sun would disappear behind a curtain of falling scorpion bolts. Maybe he'd be lucky and die in the first volley, thereby spared the humiliating pain of knowing he'd led the flower of Eremian chivalry to a pointless, shameful death...

I'm turning into Orsea, he thought. Maybe it's something that comes with being in charge. As his men filed past, he scanned the top of the ridge on both sides. If there was an ambush waiting up there, they'd missed their chance. He'd got away with it after all.

Once they'd taken up position at the canyon neck, there was a great deal to be done. The lancers dismounted and started felling trees to build the roadblock, while the designated specialists in each unit unloaded and spread the caltrops and snagging wires they'd brought with them from the city. Miel couldn't recall offhand whose suggestion the caltrops had been, though he had a nasty feeling it'd been his. They were crude, put together in a hurry; a wooden ball the size of a large apple, with eight two-inch spikes sticking out in all directions. Wouldn't it be the most delicate irony if the battle turned against him and those spikes ended up buried in the frogs of his own horses' hoofs, as a painful lesson in poetic justice to anybody who presumed to use weapons of indiscriminate effect against the Mezentines?