«I'm so sorry for you!» Rhegorios exclaimed. «Here, sit down and stay quiet, you poor fellow. I'll send for Philetos from the Sorcerers' Collegium and for Agathios the patriarch, too. Between the two of them, they ought to be able to exorcise whatever evil spirit's got its claws in you.»

Maniakes laughed again, but persisted: «By the good god, I mean it. Tzikas must have learned a lot, serving under Likinios. He couldn't have helped it, sly as he was—still is, worse luck. I don't know whether he decided to be just like Likinios the way sons decide to be like their fathers, but I'd bet it was something like that. And he is just like Likinios—or rather, he's just what Likinios would have been without integrity.»

«Your Majesty, I believe you are correct,» Kameas said. «I admit, however, that my experience with Tzikas is limited.»

«I wish mine were.» But Maniakes refused to let himself get downhearted. «He's not my worry now, Phos be praised. He's Abivard's worry, there on the far side of the Cattle Crossing. Abivard's welcome to him, as far as I'm concerned.»

The mention of Abivard brought silence in its wake, as it often did. «Why is he still sitting in Across?» Rhegorios said at last. «What will he do now that he knows he can't get over the strait and attack us?»

He and Maniakes and their kin had been asking one another the same question since they'd crushed the Kubratoi on the sea. «We still don't know, curse it,» Maniakes said. «I've been trying to figure it out, these past few days. Maybe he thinks Etzilios will be able to bring the Kubratoi south again and start up the siege once more.»

«He cannot be so foolish, can he, your Majesty?» Kameas said, at the same times as Rhegorios was vehemently shaking his head. Maniakes spread his hands. «All right. I didn't really believe that myself. Etzilios is going to be lucky if someone doesn't take his head for leading the nomads into disaster.» He spoke with the somber satisfaction any man can feel on contemplating his enemy's discomfiture. «But if that's not the answer, what is?»

Rhegorios said, «As long as he's over there—» He nodded west, toward the suburb of Videssos the city. «—he blocks our easiest way into the westlands.»

«That's true,» Maniakes said. «Still, with us having a fleet and him not, we can bring our men in wherever we want, whenever we want—if the weather lets us, of course. But even in the dark days, before we had any kind of army worth mentioning, we were using ships to put raiders into the westlands and get them out again.»

«Not that we've stopped since,» Rhegorios said.

«Hardly,» Maniakes agreed. «We've had rather bigger things going on beside that, though.» Rhegorios and Kameas both nodded. Maniakes went on, «Cousin of mine, you hold a piece of the truth, but I don't think you have all of it. As I say, I've been thinking about this ever since we saw that Abivard wasn't going anywhere.»

«We all have,» Rhegorios said. He grinned. «But do enlighten us, then, O sage of the age.»

«I'll try, cousin of mine, though after that buildup whatever I say won't sound like much,» Maniakes answered. He and Rhegorios both laughed. The corners of Kameas' mouth slid upward, loo, slowly, as if the vestiarios didn't want that to happen but discovered he couldn't help himself. Maniakes continued, «The frightening thing about this siege is how close it came to working. The other frightening thing is that we didn't see it coming till it was here. Sharbaraz King of Kings—may the ice take him—prepared his ground ever so well.»

«All true,» Rhegorios said. «The lord with the great and good mind knows it's all true. If that messenger hadn't made it through the Land of the Thousand Cities—» He shivered. «It was a good plan.»

«Aye,» Maniakes said. «And Abivard did everything he could to make it work, too. He got engineers over the Cattle Crossing. He got Tzikas over the Cattle Crossing. By the good god, he crossed over himself. The only thing he couldn't do was get a good-sized chunk of his army across, and that wasn't his fault. He had to depend on the Kubrati fleet, and we smashed it»

«All true,» Rhegorios said. «And so?»

«The planning was splendid. We all agree about that,» Maniakes said. The Sevastos and the vestiarios both nodded. «Abivard did everything possible to get it to work.» More nods. «But it didn't.» Still more nods. Maniakes smiled, once more enjoying a foe's predicament. «When Sharbaraz King of Kings, being who he is, being what he is, finds out it didn't work, what will he do?»

«Phos,» Rhegorios whispered.

«Not exactly,» Maniakes said. «But he is the fellow who had a shrine for the God made over in his own image, remember. Anyone who'd do that isn't the sort of fellow who's likely to stay calm when things go wrong, is he? And who knows Sharbaraz King of Kings better than Abivard?»

«Phos,» Rhegorios said again, this time most reverently. «He doesn't dare go home, does he?»

«I don't know whether I'd go that far,» Maniakes answered. «But he has to be thinking about it. We would be, if that were us over there. The Makuraners may play the game a little more politely than we do, but it's the same game. Sharbaraz will be looking for someone to blame.»

«He could blame Etzilios, your Majesty,» Kameas said. «The fault, as you pointed out, lay in the Kubrati fleet.»

«Yes, he could do that,» Maniakes agreed. «He probably even does do that, or will when the news reaches him, if it hasn't got there yet. But how much good will that do him? Even if he blames Etzilios, he can't punish him. He was lucky to get an embassy to Kubrat. He'd never get an army there.»

Rhegorios said, «Half the fun of blaming someone is punishing him for whatever he did wrong.»

Maniakes hadn't thought of it as fun. He'd worried about what was practical and what wasn't. But his freewheeling cousin had a point. When you were King of Kings of Makuran—or, for that matter, Avtokrator of the Videssians—you could, if you wanted, do exactly as you wanted. Punishing those who failed you was one of the perquisites—sometimes one of the enjoyable perquisites—of the position.

Musingly, Kameas said, «I wonder how we could best exploit whatever disaffection may exist between Sharbaraz and Abivard, or create such disaffection if none exists at present.»

Maniakes clapped the vestiarios on the back. «The Makuraners are always complaining about how devious and underhanded we Videssians are. Esteemed sir, if they heard that, it would prove their point. And do you know what else? You're exactly right. That's what we have to do.»

«Send a messenger—secret but not too secret—to Abivard,» Rhegorios said. «One of two things will happen. He may go along with us, which is what we have in mind. Or he may say no, in which case Sharbaraz will still get word he's been treating with Videssians. I don't think Sharbaraz would like that.»

«I don't, either,» Maniakes said. «I'll do it.»

The messenger sailed out of Videssos the city the next day. He went behind a shield of truce. Abivard was better about honoring such shields than most officers on either side. Maniakes had reason to expect the messenger, a certain Isokasios, would return intact, if not necessarily successful.

Return Isokasios did, by noon that day. He was tall and lean, with a close-trimmed gray beard fringing a face thin to gauntness. After prostrating himself, he said, «Your Majesty, I failed. Abivard would not see me, would not hear my words, would have nothing to do with me whatever. He did send one message to you: that, since the westlands are, in his words, rightfully Makuraner territory, any Videssian warriors caught there will be treated as spies henceforth. Fair warning, he called it.»

«Killed out of hand instead of slowly, you mean,» Maniakes said. «They work their war captives to death, a digit at a time.» He wondered if that had happened to his brother Tatoules, who had vanished in the Makuraner invasion of the westlands and not been seen since.