When the Avtokrator returned to the mage's chamber, Bagdasares had already succeeded in expanding the strip of parchment on which the order for Abivard's death was written to a size that would also let it hold the names from the Makuraner marshal's list.

«Not a difficult sorcery, your Majesty,» he said when Maniakes praised him. He'd grown angry when Philetos had said the same thing, but now he was extolling his own skill, which was a different matter altogether. «Instead of changing the substance of the parchment, as I had first planned, I merely fused its edge with another, having taken care to secure a good match in appearance.»

Picking up the extended sheet, Maniakes nodded. Neither his eyes nor his fingernail could detect the join. A sorcerer probably would have been able to do so, but he counted on no sorcerers analyzing the document till it was too late to matter.

«And now,» Bagdasares said, «if you will forgive a homely metaphor, I aim to cut the list of names and ranks from the parchment whereon Abivard wrote it and to paste it into the appropriate Place on the one written by Sharbaraz' scribe. I shall attend to the cutting first, as is but fitting.»

The parchment Abivard had given to Maniakes lay on a silver tray. Bagdasares had set a silver arket with a portrait of Sharbaraz on top of the parchment. Now he began to chant and to make passes above it. Some of the chanting was in the old-fashioned Videssian of the divine liturgy, the rest in the Vaspurakaner tongue. Sweat ran down Bagdasares' face. Pausing for a moment, he turned to Maniakes and said, «I have created the conditions wherein cutting is possible and practical. Now for my instrument.»

Instead of producing an ensorceled knife, as Maniakes had expected, the mage walked over to a cage and pulled out a small, gray mouse. The little animal sat calmly in his hand, and did not try to escape even when he dipped its tail into a bottle of ink.

«You understand, your Majesty, that the animal is acting under my sorcerous compulsion,» Bagdasares said. Maniakes nodded. The wizard went on, «It will—the good god and Vaspur the Firstborn willing, it will—precisely pick out the text to be shifted from one document to the other.»

He removed the arket from Abivard's list, then set the mouse at the head of the parchment. Whiskers twitching, the mouse ran down to the bottom of the list. Maniakes feared its inky tail would smear Abivard's writing. Nothing of the sort happened. Bagdasares' sorcery must have kept anything of the sort from happening. Instead, the unintelligible—at least to Maniakes—characters Abivard had written now turned a glowing white, while the parchment beneath them went black as soot.

Bagdasares let out a sigh of relief. Evidently, that was the effect he had wanted to achieve. Maniakes let out a sigh of relief, too, because he had achieved it. The mage said, «Now to paste.»

He coaxed the mouse back up into the palm of his hand. It stared at him with beady little black eyes. Maniakes wondered what, if anything, it thought of its role in the sorcery. One more thing he'd never know.

Bagdasares carried the silver arket of Sharbaraz' over to the letter the King of Kings had sent to Romezan. «I have learned enough of the Makuraner script to be able to recognize Abivard's name,» he said, «and I am going to set this coin immediately after it, so as to indicate the insertion point for the text to be shifted.»

That done, he put the mouse back in its cage. It began to lick the ink off its tail with a tiny pink tongue. Bagdasares began another incantatory chant. His long-fingered hands moved in swift passes. His tone went from beseeching to serious to demanding. He shifted into throaty Vaspurakaner, a good language for demanding if ever there was one.

Maniakes exclaimed. There, starting where the arket lay, were the names and titles to be shifted to Sharbaraz' letter. The characters in which those names and titles were written remained white, though, and the portion of the parchment on which they appeared, black.

«Here,» Bagdasares said, «we have an exact copy of the list Abivard wrote.»

«Too exact, maybe,» Maniakes observed, examining the document. «For one thing, the margins of the added text are different from those of the letter from Sharbaraz to Romezan.»

«I have not yet completed the sorcery,» Bagdasares said with a touch of annoyance. The Avtokrator waved for him to go on. He did, muttering now in Videssian, now in the Vaspurakaner tongue. When he stabbed out his forefinger at the parchment, the region of white characters on black grew longer and narrower; names and titles seemed to crawl downward to accommodate themselves to the change.

Watching words move made Maniakes vaguely seasick. Once having written, he expected what he wrote to stay put. But the result was no small improvement over what had been there before. It was, however, not yet perfect. Pointing, Maniakes said, «I don't read Makuraner, but even I can tell two different hands did the writing here.»

Bagdasares exhaled through his nose—and a fine nose he had for exhaling, too. With the air of a man clutching for patience as it slipped through his fingers, he said, «I am aware of this, your Majesty. I have a remedy for it.» He walked over to the cage to which he had returned the mouse. After he took it out once more, he let out another exasperated exhalation. «A pestilence! The foolish creature has done too good a job of cleaning itself. I shall have to reink it.»

He dipped the mouse's tail into the jar of ink again, all the while murmuring the cantrips that made the black liquid part of his sorcery rather than a messy nuisance. That done, he set the mouse at the top of the document, allowing its sorcerously inked tail to slide across a couple of lines of text there.

«That should do it,» he said, and picked up the little beast again. «Now we apply the law of similarity to the names pasted onto the Parchment…»

He set the mouse down at the top of the area where the words were still white and the parchment black. His magic made it walk down the black area to the very end, its tail twisting this way and that till it touched all the names and titles in Abivard's pasted list. And as its tail touched them, they—changed. Now they were written in the same style as the words of the document to which they had been appended.

Once the change of scripts was complete, Bagdasares again caged the mouse. He turned to Maniakes. «Is this indeed how you wish the final document to appear, your Majesty?»

«Well, I'd be happier if it were all black on white instead of half the other way around,» the Avtokrator answered.

Bagdasares snorted. «The reversal shows that part of the text still remaining mutable. Has it now been changed to your satisfaction?»

«Yes,» Maniakes said. «I hope turning it back into black on white isn't too complicated for you.»

«I think I can manage that, your Majesty,» Bagdasares said with a smile. Tongue between his teeth, he made a single sharp clicking sound. All at once, white letters turned black, black parchment white. «There you are: one long, bloodthirsty letter, ready to befuddle Romezan.»

Maniakes studied the letter. As far as he could tell, it might have come straight from the chancery of the King of Kings. The only trouble was, he couldn't tell much. «We'll let Abivard have a look at it and see what he thinks,» Maniakes said. Bagdasares nodded. When the Avtokrator stepped out of the wizard's workroom, Kameas stood waiting for his command. Half of him was surprised to find the vestiarios there; the other half would have been surprised had Kameas been anyplace else. «I shall bring him here directly,» the eunuch said, almost before Maniakes could tell him what he wanted.

Bozorg came up the hallway of the imperial residence with Abivard. Maniakes was glad both of them would be reviewing the document before Romezan set eyes on it. Abivard looked at it first. He read it through, read it again, and then read it a third time. Having done that, he delivered his verdict: «Romezan will have kittens.»