«And we'll both be looking over our shoulders every minute, even if no trouble comes,» Maniakes said unhappily. «You can't know what's going to happen, I can't know what's going to happen…» He paused. «But Bagdasares might be able to know what's going to happen.»

«Who?»

«Alvinos, you might know him as,» the Avtokrator answered. «He knows I've got Vaspurakaner blood in me, so when we talk he usually goes by the name he was born with, not the one he uses with ordinary Videssians.»

«Oh, one of those,» Ypsilantes said, nodding. «Puts me in mind of that rebel a hundred and fifty years ago, the Vaspurakaner chap who would have ruled as Kalekas if he'd won. What was his real name? Do you know?»

«Andzeratsik,» Maniakes told him, adding with a wry grin, hardly a fitting name for an Avtokrator of the Videssians, is it? My clan has some sort of distant marriage connection to his. Since he didn't win the civil war, it's not anything we talk about much.»

«I can see that,» Ypsilantes agreed gravely. «Good enough, then—check with the wizard. See what he has to say.»

«Bagdasares?» Maniakes rolled his eyes. «He always has a good deal to say. How much of it will have to do with the question I first ask him—that's liable to be another matter.» The crack was unfair if taken literally, but, like most unfair cracks, held a grain of truth.

«What can I do for you, your Majesty?» Bagdasares asked after Maniakes had ridden Antelope over to his tent. The Avtokrator explained. Bagdasares plucked at his beard. «A spell much like the one we used to examine the passage of the fleet from the city to Lyssaion should serve here, I believe.»

«Good enough,» Maniakes said, «but can you guarantee me that it won't show more than we want to know, as that one did?»

«Could I guarantee what magic would reveal and what it would not, your Majesty, I should be Phos, or at the least Vaspur, the good god's sole perfect creation. The principal reason for casting a spell is to see what will happen, and by that I mean not only in the outer world but with the magic itself.»

Having thus been put in his place, the Avtokrator spread his hands, conceding defeat. «Have it your way, then, excellent sir. Whatever your magecraft can show me, I shall be glad to view it.»

Bagdasares proceeded briskly to work. He filled a bowl with dirt he dug up from close by where he was standing—"What better symbol for the local land than the local land?» He made a channel in it, and poured in water from the pitcher that rested by his bedroll—"How else to represent the water of the Tib than by the water of the Tib?»

The landscape created, he used little twigs and chips of wood to symbolize the bridge of boats that would soon stretch across the river. «You want to know whether some flood is impending, not so?» «That's right,» Maniakes said.

«Very well, then,» the wizard answered, more than a little absently: he was already gathering himself for the spell proper. He began to chant and make passes over the bowl. «Reveal!» he cried in Videssian, and then again in the Vaspurakaner tongue Maniakes had trouble following.

The Avtokrator wondered if Makuraner mages were trying to interfere with Bagdasares' conjuration. He would not have been surprised to learn they were; knowing whether he could cross the Tib in safety was obviously important to him, and the magical method for determining the truth not too complex.

But Alvinos Bagdasares gave him a straight answer. The Avtokrator watched the bridge extend itself toward the western bank of the model of the Tib, then saw little ghostly, glowing specks spring into being and cross the symbolic river from east to west.

«Weather shall not hamper us, your Majesty,» Bagdasares murmured.

«I see that,» Maniakes answered, still looking down into the bowl. And, as he had at his friend's earlier attempt to learn what lay ahead, he saw more than he had bargained for. Those ghostly specks suddenly recrossed the Tib, this time from west to east. «What does that mean?» he asked Bagdasares.

This time, the mage had seen for himself what had happened, instead of needing to rely on his sovereign's description. «At a guess—and a guess is all it is—we are not destined to stay long in Mashiz, if indeed we succeed in reaching the seat of the King of Kings.»

«That was my guess, too,» Maniakes said. «I was hoping yours would be more palatable.»

«I'm sorry, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I do not know for a fact that what I say here is true, mind you, but all other interpretations strike me as less probable than the one I offered.»

«They strike me the same way,» Maniakes said. «As I say, I'm just wishing they didn't.» He brightened. «Maybe the magic Means Sharbaraz will be so frightened after we cross the Tib, he'll Make peace on our terms. If he does that, we won't have to stay west of the river long.»

«It could be so,» Bagdasares answered. «Trying by magic to learn what the King of Kings might do is hopeless, or as near as makes no difference, he being warded against such snoopery as you are. But nothing in the spell I have cast contradicts the meaning you offer.»

Nothing in the spell contradicted it, perhaps, but Maniakes had trouble believing it even though it came from his own mouth. The trouble was, however much he wanted to think it likely, it went dead against everything he knew, or thought he knew, of Sharbaraz's character. The next sign of flexibility the Makuraner King of Kings displayed would be the first. The envoy he had sent to negotiate with Maniakes had been sent not to make peace but to delay the Videssians till that army of foot soldiers could fall on them. Which meant…

«Something's going to go wrong,» Maniakes said. «I have no idea what, I have no idea why, but something is going to go wrong.»

He watched Bagdasares. The Vaspurakaner mage had been a courtier for a good many years now, and plainly wanted to tell him nothing could possibly go wrong with the plans of the ever-victorious Videssian army. The only trouble was, Bagdasares couldn't do that. Both he and Maniakes had seen plans go wrong before, had seen that the Videssian army was a long way from ever-victorious. Flattery worked a lot better when both sides were willing to ignore small details like truth. «Perhaps it won't go totally wrong,» Bagdasares said.

«Aye, perhaps it won't,» Maniakes said. In an unsafe, imperfect world, sometimes that was as much as you could reasonably expect. He held up one finger. «No one save the two of us need know of this conjuration.» Bagdasares nodded. Maniakes figured he would tell Lysia, who could be relied upon not to blab. But if the army didn't know, maybe what the magic foretold would somehow fail to come true for them. Maniakes let out a silent sigh. He had trouble believing that, too.

Engineers ran planks and chains from one boat to the next. One piece at a time, the bridge they were building advanced across the Tib. Ypsilantes glanced over at Maniakes and remarked, «It's all going very well.»

«So it is,» the Avtokrator answered. He hadn't told Ypsilantes anything about the conjuration except that it showed the bridge could advance without fear of flooding. Too late, it occurred to him that too much silence might well have made the chief engineer draw his own conclusions, and that the conclusions were liable to be right. Whether Ypsilantes had his own conclusions or not, he carried out the orders Maniakes gave him.

Foot soldiers were drawn up on the west bank of the Tib to harass the engineers and, Maniakes supposed, to resist the Videssians if that harassment failed. Thanks to magic, Maniakes knew it would. The Makuraners, being more ignorant, kept trying to make nuisances of themselves.

They did a fair job of it, too, wounding several Videssian engineers once the end of the bridge moved into archery range. Not too troubled, Ypsilantes sent forward men with big, heavy shields: the same shields, in fact, that had protected the barricade-clearing engineers in the sheds in the recent battle with the Makuraners. Behind those shields, the bridge builders kept working. Surgeons tended the injured men, none of whom was hurt badly enough to need a healer-priest.