«Abivard will probably want to get more of his people over to this side of the Cattle Crossing before any serious attack on the walls,» Symvatios said. «He won't fancy the Kubratoi taking all the spoils if we fall.»

«And they won't want him taking any—Etzilios sucked in treachery at his mother's breast.» Maniakes grew thoughtful. «I wonder if we can make the allies distrust each other more than they hate us.»

«That is an interesting notion,» the elder Maniakes said. He, too, stared out toward the Kubrati camp. «I have to say I'd guess the odds are against it. We might as well try, though. The worst they can tell us is no.»

«The world doesn't end if you get your face slapped,» Rhegorios remarked. «You just ask another girl the same question. Or sometimes you ask the same girl the same question a little later on, and you get a different answer.»

«Hear the voice of experience,» Maniakes said dryly. His cousin coughed and spluttered. His father and uncle both laughed. The world looked a little brighter, giving him three, maybe even four, heartbeats' worth of relief—till he thought about the Kubratoi again.

A postern gate swung open. Despite all the grease the soldiers had poured onto the hinges, they still squeaked. Maniakes wondered when anyone had last oiled them. Had it been a year ago, or five, or ten? Till this year, no one had expected Videssos the city to be besieged, and a siege was the only time when a postern gate was useful.

«Curse it, we don't want to let all the Kubratoi and Makuraners know we're doing this,» the Avtokrator hissed. «The idea is to keep it secret—otherwise we wouldn't have chosen midnight.»

«Sorry, your Majesty,» the officer in charge of the gate answered, also in a low voice. «That's as quiet as we could manage.» He peered out into the darkness. «Here comes the fellow, so he is on time. I wouldn't have thought it, not with a barbarian.»

No shouts from the wall above warned of any other Kubratoi moving forward with the single emissary Maniakes had suggested to Etzilios. The khagan was keeping his end of the bargain, most likely because he didn't think he could wring any great advantage from betraying it now. At Maniakes' command, the soldiers at the postern gate ran a long plank out over the far side of the ditch.

«Mind you don't fall off,» one of the men called softly to the newcomer. «It's a goodish way down.»

«I shall beens very carefuls, thank youse,» the Kubrati answered in Videssian fractured but fluent. His footfalls thudded confidently on the gangway. When he came into Videssos the city, the guardsmen pulled back the plank and shut the postern gate once more.

«Moundioukh, isn't it?» Maniakes said. No torches burned nearby—that would have given away the parley. But the Avtokrator had heard only one man capable of mangling Videssian as this fellow did.

And, sure enough, the Kubrati nodded in the darkness and said, «Whose else would the magnifolent Etzilios sends to treat against youse?» Maniakes wondered whether that against was more slipshod grammar or a slip of the tongue. He'd find out.

With the gate closed, a couple of torchbearers came hurrying up. Yes, that was Moundioukh, in the flesh as well as in the voice. His scraggly beard had more gray in it than Maniakes remembered. «Your master is a treacherous man,» the Avtokrator said severely.

To his surprise, Moundioukh burst out laughing. «Of courses him are,» the Kubrati answered. «Otherwisely him never talkings at youse.»

«I daresay,» Maniakes said. «All right—what does he want from me for him to give over his alliance with the Makuraners? I presume there must be something I can give him, or he wouldn't have sent you to me.»

Moundioukh's large, square teeth flashed in the torchlight as he laughed again. «The magnifolent Etzilios tell me, 'Go to this Maniakes. See him crawl. See him slithither'—is word, yes, slithithering? 'Then youse tells he what me tells youse.' «

«And what did the magnifolent Etzilios tell you?» Maniakes knew a certain amount of pride at bringing the epithet out with a straight face.

«Not seen enough of slithitherings yettish times,» the Kubratoi replied pointedly.

Maniakes exhaled through his nose in exasperation. «To the ice with him, and to the ice with you, too. I don't know what else I can do but tell you I'll do whatever you and the khagan want.» He couldn't say magnifolent again, no matter how hard he tried.

«You prostitute yourselves for I, like youse always having I prostitute myselves to youse?» Moundioukh said.

The guards growled. «He means 'prostrate,' « Maniakes said quickly. He wondered if that made the demand any more bearable. He was vicegerent of Phos on earth; who was this nasty barbarian envoy to demand that he go down on his belly before him? The man with the whip hand—the answer was painfully plain. «I said anything, and I was not lying.» Maniakes did the deed. He'd seen it performed before him countless times, but hadn't done it himself since Likinios Avtokrator sat on the Videssian throne. His body, he discovered, still remembered how.

«Youse really doing this things.» Moundioukh sounded amazed.

«Yes, I really did it. Have I slithithered enough for you now?» After performing a proskynesis, desecrating the Videssian language came easy.

«Is enoughly, yeses,» Moundioukh admitted. «Now we tells youse what the magnifolent khagan tell we. He tell, nothing in all these world youse does—» He made it sound like yooz dooz."—am enoughs to make he go buggering Makuraners. Us, theys see chance to slaughterize you, and usses takes it.»

«You and the Makuraners would quarrel afterward, even if you won,» Maniakes said. «We have a saying—'thieves fall out.' «

«We quarrels?» Moundioukh shrugged. «Then we quarrels. Not having mores of quarrels with Videssians, not nevers again. Magnifolent Etzilios sezzing, that worths any sizes of quarrelings with Makuran.»

The khagan was probably right, too, when you looked at things from the Kubrati point of view. If Videssos the city fell, it would be a frontier province to the Makuraners, far from their center. But Videssos the city was the very heart of the Empire of Videssos. Cut it out and the Empire had no heart left. Free rein hereabouts, near enough—that was the stake for which Etzilios was playing. «And beside,» Moundioukh added, «you beat Etzilios. He pay youse back how youse am deservings.»

For a barbarian, the khagan was a rational man. But a hunger for revenge, coupled with sound reasons of policy, could make him unreasonable—and apparently had made him so. «If I hadn't beaten him, he would have been down here by the city years before,» Maniakes pointed out.

«Should has beed,» Moundioukh said. «Should has killed you in trick making treaty. Save Kubrat shitpot full troubles, that beed happening.»

«I'm so sorry,» Maniakes said dryly. «I should have killed Etzilios, that last fight where I landed troops behind your raiders. That would have saved me a lot of trouble.»

«Now youse gots troubles, Etzilios gots troubles, all gots troubles,» Moundioukh said, apparently in agreement. «Am time of troubles.»

«No agreement from the khagan, then?» Maniakes said unhappily.

«Nones,» Moundioukh said. «He says I says no. Youse pushing, I says no and futter yourself, youse pushings hard and I tells youse something really with lots of juices in it. You wants I should?» He sounded delighted to oblige.

«Never mind,» Maniakes told him. He didn't bother waving the torchbearers away from the postern gate now—if any Makuraners saw Moundioukh coming back, maybe they'd think the Kubratoi were betraying them even when they weren't. «Let him out,» he said to the men in charge of the gate. «We're not going to be able to come to terms.»

Having opened once, the gate proved more willing to do so quietly the second time—when Maniakes would have preferred it noisy. The Videssian soldiers slid the gangway out across the ditch. Moundioukh walked across it. This time, no one urged him to be careful. If he fell down and broke his neck in the ditch now, what difference would it make? None Maniakes could see.