«What does this mean?» Maniakes asked. Then he chuckled wryly. «I have a gift for the obvious, I fear.»

«Were the answer as obvious as the question, I should be happier—and so, no doubt, would you,» Alvinos Bagdasares said. «But questions about meaning, while easy to ask, have a way of being troublesome to wrestle with.»

«Everything has a way of being troublesome,» Maniakes said irritably. «Very well. I assume you can't tell me everything I would know. What can you tell me?»

«To meet your gift for the obvious, I would say it is obviously true my magic touched on something larger than I had intended.» Bagdasares replied. «As I said, you will have good weather sailing to Lyssaion. I would also say it is likely you will have bad weather sailing back.»

«I didn't ask you about sailing back.»

«I know that,» Bagdasares said. «It alarms me. Most times, magic does either what you want or less, as I told you a little while ago. When it does more than you charge it with, that is a token your spell has pulled back the curtain from great events, events with a power of their own blending with the power you bring to them.»

«What can I do to keep out of this storm?» Maniakes asked.

Regretfully, Bagdasares spread his hands. «Nothing, your Majesty. It has been seen, and so it will come to pass. Phos grant that the fleet pass through it with losses as small as may be.»

«Yes,» Maniakes said in an abstracted voice. As Avtokrator of the Videssians, ruler of a great empire, he'd grown unused to the idea that some things were beyond his power. Not even the Avtokrator, though, could hope to bend wind and rain and sea to his will. Maniakes changed the subject, at least slightly: «What about those other ships I saw?»

Bagdasares looked no happier. «I do not know, so I cannot tell you. I do not know if they be friends or foes, whether they come to rescue the ships from your fleet that passed through the storm or to attack them. I do not know whether the rescue or the attack succeeds or fails.»

«Can you try to find out more than you do know?» Maniakes said.

«Aye, I can try, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. «I will try. But I make no guarantees of success: indeed, I fear failure. I was not granted the vision, whatever it might have been. This suggests it might well have been meant for you alone, which in turn suggests reproducing, grasping, and interpreting it will be extraordinarily difficult for anyone but yourself.»

«Do what you can,» Maniakes said.

And, for the next several hours, Bagdasares did what he could. Some of his efforts were far more spectacular than the relatively uncomplicated spell Maniakes had first requested of him. Once, the chamber glowed with a pure white light for several minutes. Shadows appeared on the walls with nothing to cast them. Words in a language Maniakes did not understand came out of thin air.

«What does that mean?» he whispered to Bagdasares.

«I don't know,» the wizard whispered back. A little while later, he gave up, saying, «Whatever lies ahead is beyond my ability to unravel now, your Majesty. Only the passing of time can reveal its fullness.»

Maniakes clenched his fists. If he'd been willing to wait for the fullness of time, he wouldn't have asked Bagdasares to work magic. We sighed. «I know the army will get to Lyssaion without any great trouble,» he declared. «For now, I'll cling to that. Once I get there, once I punish the Makuraners for all they've done to Videssos, then I'll worry about what happens next.»

«That is the proper course, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said. His large, dark eyes, though… his eyes were full of worry.

What looked at first glance like chaos filled the harbor of Kontoskalion. Soldiers filed aboard some merchantmen; grooms and cavalrymen led unhappy, suspicious horses up the gangplanks of others. Last-minute supplies went onto still others.

«The lord with the great and good mind bless you, your Majesty, as you go about your holy work,» the ecumenical patriarch Agathios said to Maniakes, sketching Phos' sun-sign above his heart. «I thank you, most holy sir,» the Avtokrator answered, on the whole sincerely. Since granting the dispensation recognizing his marriage to Lysia as licit, Agathios had shown himself willing to be seen with them and to pray with them and for their success in public. A good many other clerics, including some who accepted the dispensation as within the patriarch's power, refused to offer such open recognition of it.

«Smite the Makuraners!» Agathios suddenly shouted in a great voice. One thing Maniakes had noted about him over the years was that, while usually calm, he could work himself up to rage or down to panic with alarming speed. «Smite them!» he cried again. «For they have tried to wipe out and to pervert Phos' holy faith in the lands they have stolen from the Empire of Videssos. Now let our vengeance against them continue.»

A good many soldiers, hearing his words, made the sun-sign themselves. Maniakes had punished the Land of the Thousand Cities for the outrages the Makuraners had visited upon the Videssian westlands, for the temples pulled down or burned, for the Vaspurakaner doctrine forcibly imposed upon Videssians who reckoned it heretical, for the priests tormented when they would not preach the Vaspurakaner heresy.

Maniakes recognized the irony there, even if he did not go out of his way to advertise it. He himself inclined toward what the Videssians called orthodoxy, but his father stubbornly clung to the doctrines so loathed in the westlands.

He'd gone out of his way to wreck shrines dedicated to the God the Makuraners worshiped. Having begun a war of religion, they were now finding out what being on the receiving end of it was like.

Agathios, fortunately for Maniakes' peace of mind, calmed as quick as he inflamed himself. Moments after bellowing about the iniquities of the Makuraners, he said, in an ordinary tone of voice, «If the good god is kind, your Majesty, he will let you find a way to put an end to this long, hard war once and for all.»

«From your lips to Phos' ear,» Maniakes agreed. «Nothing would make me happier than peace—provided they restore to us what they've stolen. And nothing would make them happier than peace– provided they keep what they took when Videssos was weak. You do see the problem, most holy sir?»

«I do indeed.» The ecumenical patriarch let out a long, sad sigh. «Would it were otherwise, your Majesty.» He looked embarrassed. «You do understand, I hope, that I speak as I do in the interest of Videssos as a whole and in the interest of peace rather than that of the temples.»

«Of course,» Maniakes answered. He'd had so much practice at diplomacy—or perhaps hypocrisy was the better word—that Agathios didn't notice his sarcasm. Back when the fight against the Makuraners had looked as black as the gaping emptiness of the imperial treasury, he'd borrowed gold and silver vessels and candelabra, especially from the High Temple but also from the rest, and melted them down to make the gold and silver coins with which he could pay his soldiers—and with which he could also pay tribute to the Kubratoi so he could concentrate what few resources he had on fighting the Makuraners. With peace, the temples would– might—be repaid.

Thinking about the Kubratoi made him glance eastward. He was not up on the walls of Videssos the city now; he could not see the Kubrati scouts who had come down near the imperial city to see what he was doing. But he hadn't forgotten them, either. The nomads had never before sent out spies so openly. He wondered what they had in mind. Etzilios had been very quiet in the nearly three years since he'd been trounced… till now.

While Maniakes was musing thus, Agathios raised his hands toward the sun and spat down onto the planks of the wharf to show his rejection of Skotos. «We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind,» he intoned, «by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.»