“To Essad Pasha, in Peshkepiia, in Shqiperi,” I answered.

His eyebrows were a raven’s wings. They fluttered in surprise. “Essad Pasha serves a kingdom at war with this one,” he said. He couldn’t have been listening to the crystallographer in Thasos. I know that. We danced around the same barn even so. He warned that Lokrian wizards would examine the message. I promised it held no hostile intent. This time, unlike in Thasos, I knew the steps to the dance; I wasn’t making them up as I went along. When the mage was satisfied, he poised a pen over a pad and asked, “And the message is?”

“You speak Hassocki?” I asked in that tongue.

“Certainly, sir,” he replied, also in Hassocki. I’m good with languages, but he was better. You have to be sharp to work for Consolidated Crystal, even in a place like Vravron. Still in Hassocki, he went on, “Please go ahead.”

“Here is the message, then,” I said. “‘Arriving soon at Fushe-Kuqe. Looking forward. Halim Eddin.’”

Those raven’s wings fluttered again. “Well, well,” he murmured. I hoped he wouldn’t gossip. CC discourages that, and not many people have the nerve to do anything CC discourages. I dared hope, anyhow. I also dared hope that by keeping my message simple I wouldn’t make any errors to draw suspicion my way.

He had to use a spell to find the eight-digit number that uniquely identified Essad Pasha’s crystal-being a prominent official, the Hassocki commandant in Shqiperi had a personal crystallographer attached to him. The man in Vravron murmured the charm and the number to connect his crystal to that one.

Light flared inside the crystal on the CC man’s desk. I got a glimpse of Essad Pasha’s crystallographer in the depths of the sphere: a plump Hassocki in a fez. With only one client, he didn’t need to dress to impress.

“It is accomplished,” my crystallographer said.

“I thank you very much,” I told him. “You don’t know what you’ve done for Shqiperi.”

“To Shqiperi,” Max said. I glared at him, but the crystallographer seemed to like his version better than mine.

Ah, Fushe-Kuqe! Fushe-Kuqe! Some ancient Aenean poet sang of its beauty all those years ago. I presume he had the advantage of not approaching the place in a smuggler.

Actually, it is pretty. It sits in a little sapphire-blue bay punched out of the rim of Shqiperi: the only decent harbor the country has. All around the edge of the bay and running a few miles to either side are beautiful beaches of white and golden sand. The rest of Shqiperi’s coast consists of an unappetizing mix of rocks, boulders, crags, cliffs, and out-and-out mountains, leaping straight up from the Tiberian Sea as if their shoelaces were on fire. Some of this terrain is thickly wooded. Most of it is too steep for trees; they would have to grow sideways if they grew at all.

The land rises steeply back of the bay, too, but half a mile to a mile back of it. Fushe-Kuqe runs up from the sea to the ridge line. The ancient Dalmatians-the ancestors of the Shqipetari-first fortified the place, but they did a spotty job of it, so Lokrian freebooters were able to capture it. In due course, the Dalmatians took it back, with the usual massacre to celebrate the change of ownership. The Aeneans took it away from them, and celebrated with a bigger massacre. Each new owner added new fortifications, figuring he would be there forever. Forever usually worked out to about a lifetime: over the past thousand years, Fushe-Kuqe has changed hands thirteen times.

When Tasos told that to Max, he said, “How lucky.” That left Tasos scratching his head-or maybe he did have dandruff with legs after all. But the Lokrians don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia, even if the name comes from pieces of classical Lokrian.

By then, Max was wearing the enormous Hassocki captain’s uniform he’d got from Manolis in Thasos. I had on the colonel’s outfit I’d bought there. Some of Tasos’ smugglers looked askance at us. I’d never seen a skance before, but lots of skances were flying around as we came into the harbor. If we hadn’t fought the pirates alongside them, if Max hadn’t curbed the sea serpent’s tongue, we might have gone into the harbor, all right, with rocks tied around our feet. But we had, and so, while the skances flew, they didn’t light on us.

Stagiros got us up alongside a wharf with his usual elegance. He was the best thing aboard the Gamemeno. If not for him, we likely wouldn’t have got to Fushe-Kuqe at all. He looked from Max to me and back again. “Good luck-your Majesty,” he said in flawless Hassocki.

“North and south, east and west, may good come to you from every direction,” I replied. I had to remember all the time from now on that I was a Hassocki, a follower of the Quadrate God.

What a role!

And what a risk! That started to sink in now, when it was too late to do anything about it. If even once I absentmindedly swore by Eliphalet’s whiskers or made the sign of the Two with index and middle fingers, I was a dead man, and so was Max. Stagiros gave me a small bow and an even smaller smile. I’d passed the first tiny test.

Down went the gangplank with a thud. My head would make a thud like that if something went wrong. I glanced over at Max. He was smiling, which is not something you see every day. I wondered if our spirits had got up in the wrong bodies this morning. Me worrying? Max cheerful? The cosmic order of things was definitely out of order.

We stepped onto the pier. My worries fell away like fireballs from a dragon. Maybe, as Stagiros said, it was madness. Or maybe I realized it was too late to turn back, and I had to go on. Or maybe those two were one and the same. However it was, I knew I was in the ring again. I had my audience out there. And I had to perform.

“Here comes trouble,” Max murmured-in Hassocki. He sounded like his old self, too, but his old self in character.

I saw the trouble as soon as he did. Two Hassocki soldiers-a young lieutenant with a neat hairline mustache and an older sergeant with an enormous soup-strainer-walked toward the base of the pier. The lieutenant wore only a ceremonial sword. The sergeant carried a pike, had a much more businesslike sword and a knife on his belt, and no doubt kept some other lethal implements secreted here and there about his person.

“Let’s go,” I said to Max, and started down the pier toward them. He followed a pace behind me and a pace to my left: just where a prince’s aide-de-camp should walk. Yes, he’d thought I was crazy for a lot longer than Stagiros had. But he wasn’t about to give me away. Of course, it was his neck, too. If they decided to kill me, they weren’t what you’d call likely to leave him alone.

The lieutenant looked down at something in the palm of his left hand, up toward me, then down at his hand again. I couldn’t see what he had there, but I could make a pretty good guess. If that wasn’t another sorcerous reproduction of the portrait that had run in the Thasos Chronicle and started me off on this adventure, then I wasn’t Prince Halim Eddin.

Which I bloody well wasn’t. Except I had to be.

That lieutenant looked up at me one more time. I stopped. So did Max. He stopped breathing, too. “Your Highness?” the lieutenant said, and Max exhaled again. Now that you mention it, I did, too.

If I was going to do this, I was going to do it to the hilt. I looked down my nose at him and said, “I expected to be met by Essad Pasha himself,” in tones that should have frozen the sun.

The lieutenant was swarthy, but I could see him turn red anyhow. The look on the sergeant’s face said, I told you so. It also said, I wonder how much trouble we’re in. One thing it didn’t say was, He speaks funny Hassocki. The way I sounded seemed to satisfy the lieutenant, too. He bowed to me and said, “Please excuse us, your Highness. We were ordered to escort you to him.”