«That is so,» Bagdasares admitted. «And Abivard would like nothing better than to make us think he is in one place when in fact he is somewhere else.»

«Somewhere else probably being a place from which he can breathe right down our necks,» Maniakes said.

«No point in using such a magic unless you gain some advantage from it, now is there?» Bagdasares plucked at his beard as he thought. «Opposites, eh? Well, we shall see what we shall see.»

He pulled the stick out of the water, removed Maniakes' fingernail clipping from it, and tossed the clipping into a brazier. He smeared the end of the stick with pitch, getting his fingers stuck together in the process. Then he took a silver Makuraner arket from his beltpouch and used an iron blade to scrape several slivers of bright metal from the coin. He affixed the slivers to the pitch-smeared stick and put it back into the water.

«We shall use the bits of silver from the arket to represent Makuran's marshal in a somewhat different version of the spell,» he told Maniakes.

«You know your business best,» the Avtokrator answered. «I don't much care how you do what you do, as long as you get the answers I need.»

«Your Majesty's forbearance is beyond price,» Bagdasares said. The Vaspurakaner wizard once more began to chant and make Passes over the bowl in which the stick floated. The incantations this time, especially the ones in the Vaspurakaner tongue, were different from those he'd used before, though Maniakes would have been hard-pressed to say how.

As it had during the previous incantation, the stick began to quiver in the water. And, as it had during the previous incantation, the end with the magical focus affixed swung toward the east. I Bagdasares looked from it to Maniakes and back again. «Unless I am utterly deceived, Abivard is indeed east of here.»

«But that's mad,» Maniakes exclaimed. «It's utterly useless. Why on earth would Abivard—and the Makuraner field army with him, no doubt—go into the Videssian westlands? Makuran holds the westlands, except for a port here and there and some holdouts in the hills of the southeast. What can he possibly do there that he didn't do years ago? He's not about to take Videssos the city—not without ships he's not, and I don't care how many soldiers he has. And for anything less important than that, he'd have been wiser to stay here and fight me instead.»

«Your Majesty, my magic can tell you what is so—or what I believe to be so, at any rate,» Bagdasares said. «Finding out why it is so—looking into the heart of a man that way—is beyond the scope of my art, or of any wizard's art. Often a man does not fully understand himself why he acts as he does—or have you not seen that?»

«I have,» Maniakes said. «But this still perplexes me. Abivard is a great many things, but no one has ever called him stupid. He must have known we were coming back to the Land of the Thousand Cities this year. He didn't try to stop us by seizing Lyssaion. He couldn't stop us from landing up in Erzerum and heading south. If he knew we were coming, why isn't he here to meet us? That's what I want to know.»

«It is a proper question, an important question, your Majesty,» Bagdasares agreed gravely. «It is also a question to which my magic can give you no good answer. May I ask a question of my own in return?»

«Ask,» Maniakes told him. «Anything you can do to let Phos' light into what looks like Skotos' darkness would be welcome.» He drew the good god's sun-circle above his heart.

Bagdasares also sketched the sun-circle, saying, «I have no great and wise thoughts to offer, merely this: if, for whatever reason, Abivard chose to absent himself from the land between the Tutub and the Tib, should we not punish him for his error by doing all the harm we can in these parts?»

«That's what we've been doing,» Maniakes said. «That's what I aim to go on doing. If Abivard wants to go haring off on some business of his own, let him. Makuran will suffer on account of it.»

«Well said, your Majesty.»

Maniakes did not bother answering that. Everything he'd said made perfect sense—and not just to him, if Bagdasares had seized on it so readily. He'd told himself as much a good many times before he'd come seeking Bagdasares' sorcerous counsel. But if Abivard wasn't stupid, why had he left the almost certain scene of this year's action? What reason had he found good enough for him to do such a thing?

«No way to tell,» Maniakes murmured. Alvinos Bagdasares' eyebrows rose; no doubt he hoped to learn what was in Maniakes' mind. Not likely, not when Maniakes was far from sure himself. But whatever Abivard was up to, Maniakes had the feeling he'd find out, and that he wouldn't be overjoyed when he did.

As the Videssians did with temples to Phos, the Makuraners built shrines to the God not only in cities for the benefit of merchants and artisans but also out by the roadside in the country so peasants could pray and worship and then go back to work. Maniakes had been destroying those roadside shrines ever since he first entered the Land of the Thousand Cities. If nothing else, that inconvenienced the farmers, which in a small way would help the Videssian cause.

The God was usually housed in quarters less elaborate than Phos' temples. Some of the shrines were in the open air, with the four sides of the square altar facing in the cardinal directions, each one symbolizing one of the Makuraners' Four Prophets. As the Videssians came closer to Mashiz, the shrines grew more elaborate, as Maniakes had known to be the case from previous incursions into the land between the Tutub and the Tib.

And then, as the Videssian army approached the Tib, the soldiers came upon a shrine so extraordinary, they summoned the Avtokrator to see it. «We don't know what to do with it, your Majesty,» said Komentiolos, the captain of the company that had overrun the shrine. «You have to tell us, and before you can do you have to see it.»

«All right, I'll have a look,» Maniakes said agreeably, and dug his heels into Antelope's sides.

The shrine had walls and a roof. The walls were baked brick rather than plain mud brick, but that did not greatly surprise Maniakes: the Makuraners gave the God and the Four Prophets the best they had, as the Videssians did with Phos. The entranceway stood open. Maniakes looked a question to Komentiolos. The captain nodded. Maniakes went inside, Komentiolos following.

Maniakes' eyes needed a bit to adjust to the gloom within. There at the center of the shrine stood the usual foursquare Makuraner altar. Komentiolos ignored that, having seen its like many times before. He waved to the far wall, the one toward which the side of the altar honoring Fraortish, the eldest prophet, pointed.

Standing against that smoothly plastered wall was a statue of the God, the first such Maniakes had ever seen. The God was portrayed in the regalia of a Makuraner King of Kings. The sun and the moon were painted on the wall beside him in gold and silver. He held a thunderbolt in one hand and was posed as if about to hurl it against some miscreant. His plump face, mouth twisted into a rather nasty smile, said he would enjoy hurling it.

As far as Maniakes was concerned, Videssian craftsmen depicted Phos in a far more artistic and awe-inspiring way. Phos, now, Phos was portrayed as a god worth worshiping, very much unlike this petulant—

Abruptly, Maniakes realized the face the Makuraner sculptor had given the statue was not intended to be an idealized portrait of the God, as images of the lord with the great and good mind were rightly idealized. This portrait was intended to show the features of a man, and of a man the Avtokrator knew, even if he had not seen him for ten years and more.

Maniakes turned his head away from the statue. He did not want to look at it; even thinking of it gave him the feeling of having just taken a big bite of rotten meat.