Max looked from me to the journal and back again. “All right, you look the part,” he admitted. “But how much Hassocki do you speak?”

“Enough to assure thee that thou art the bastard child of a poxed camel-driver and an innocent sheep he deceived and debauched,” I answered in that tongue. One hitch in the Hassocki Army was enough to make me fluently obscene. By the time I finished the second term, I was just plain fluent. Languages have always come easy for me-easier than steady work.

His eyebrows leaped. “That’s pretty good-thou shriveled and flyblown horse turd.” Max knew some Hassocki, too. I thought I’d remembered that. It would help.

“Are you game?” I pushed him. “If you turn yellow on me now, you’ll never forgive yourself, and you know it. If we pull this off, people will still be talking about it a hundred years from now.”

“And if we don’t, the Shqipetari will murder us. Or maybe the Hassockian soldiers still in their country will beat them to the punch.” Max was not an optimist. But then, as I’ve found since, nobody who’s ever had much to do with the Land of the Eagle is an optimist. Taken all in all, the Nekemte Peninsula is a backwater. Well, Shqiperi is a backwater even by the standards of the Nekemte Peninsula. It’s mountainous. It’s isolated. The Hassocki garrison there was long since cut off from any hope of relief or rescue. The national sport, as far as anyone can tell, is the blood feud.

But I could be a king!

I looked down my nose, so much like Prince Halim Eddin’s nose, at Max. Well, actually, I looked up it at him, since he’s about six feet eight. In my toploftiest tones, I said, “I don’t think you’ve got the nerve.”

If he’d had only the hair of the dog, he probably would have laughed and told me I was right. With a good deal more than that aboard, though, his pinched, sallow cheeks turned red. “Who hasn’t?” he growled. “I’ll go anywhere you go, Otto, and you know it cursed well.”

And I did. We’d been some strange places together, Max and I, and who was watching whose back wasn’t always obvious. “All right,” I said, roaring as gently as any sucking dove. “All right. The first place we need to go is a public crystal.”

“Why?” Max asked. “So we can tell the world we’re sticking our head in the dragon’s mouth?” He opened his mouth very wide and bit down. The effect would have been more dramatic if he didn’t have a missing front tooth. It somehow impaired his ferocity.

“No, no, no,” I said. “What are the Shqipetari and Essad Pasha going to need before they think Halim Eddin is on his way?” Essad Pasha was the Hassocki general in command of the garrison there. Before the war, he’d been the Hassocki governor of Shqiperi. He had fingers in so many pies, he probably had about four hands.

Max looked at me. “I was going to say a hunting license, but I don’t suppose they bother with them there.”

“Funny man! You should do vaudeville and music-hall turns instead of this,” I said. “What they’ll need is a crystal message from Vyzance saying he’s on his way.”

“And how do you propose to get them to send one, thou great lion of the perfumиd bedchamber, thou running rabbit on the blood-filled field?” Max dropped into Hassocki again. It’s a good language for being…charming in.

I just grinned. I hadn’t served those two hitches in the Hassocki army for nothing-though with what the Hassocki pay, it often seemed that way at the time. “It so happens that I’m friends with a certain Murad Bey. He was a lieutenant when I was a sergeant. These days, he’s a major in the Hassockian Ministry of War.”

“And he’d send a message like that?” Max shook his head. He does dubious very well. “Wouldn’t he sooner send one ordering us arrested and handed over to the torturers?”

“I know this man, I tell you. It’s possible he’ll say no, if he thinks the Empire’s honor is touched,” I said. “But if he says he’ll send the message I need, he’ll send it. He likes practical jokes. Did I ever tell you about the time when he had three different officers thinking they’d got the colonel’s courtesan pregnant?”

“The joke’ll be on us if the torturers are waiting,” Max pointed out.

“But it’ll be a bigger joke if it’s on Essad Pasha and the Shqipetari,” I said. “Torturing foreigners is easy. It happens all the time. Making one of your own generals look like a fool, though…”

Max didn’t answer right away. Instead, he went to work on the dog’s other hind leg. After he set down the jug, he got to his feet. “This had better work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, I’ll never forgive you.”

If it didn’t, he’d probably be too dead to forgive me. Of course, I’d probably be too dead to need forgiving. I stood up, too. “Let’s get moving,” I said.

Lokrian soldiers swaggered through the streets of Thasos. They were little dark men in green uniforms. They had kepis and neatly trimmed mustaches. There were also soldiers from Plovdiv, off to the northwest, in the streets. They were bigger and fairer, and wore tobacco-brown uniforms. They had floppy hats and big, bushy mustaches.

They didn’t look as if they much cared for Lokrians. The Lokrians didn’t look as if they much cared for them, either. Lokris and Plovdiv had been allies against the Hassocki. Of course, everybody in the Nekemte Peninsula-except the Shqipetari, mind you-had been allies against the Hassocki. Now, here in Thasos, you could watch the thieves fall out.

That round of fighting didn’t start till later, though, so I’m not going to talk about it now. If you talk about all the wars, you’ll never get around to anything else.

Both the soldiers from Lokris and the soldiers from Plovdiv looked as if they didn’t much care for Max and me. I did my best not to notice, or not to be noticed noticing. Blithe ignorance tends to fray, though, when somebody aims a crossbow at your brisket. After a moment, when Max and I just kept walking, the Lokrian lowered the cursed thing and grinned as if he’d been joking. Maybe he had. But not even Dooger and Cark would hire a clown with a sense of humor like that.

“Nice fellow,” I remarked in Schlepsigian. If the Lokrian soldier spoke my language-not likely but not impossible-he couldn’t have proved by my tone that I was being sarcastic.

“Sure is,” Max said, just as heartily. Neither one of us is usually such a good liar so early in the morning.

The Dual Monarchy has a post office in Thasos. Narbonensis has one. So does Albion. So does Schlepsig. And so did the Hassocki. It was their city, after all. Now that’s a Lokrian post office. The Green Dragon flies above it, not the red lightning bolt on gold.

Right next to what’s now the Lokrian post office is the local Consolidated Crystal headquarters. Consolidated Crystal doesn’t belong to any one kingdom. They say their services belong to people from all the kingdoms-people with the money to pay for them, of course. Actually, in a lot of ways they’re above all the kingdoms. Because what they do is so important, any kingdom that tried to interfere with them would end up in trouble with all its neighbors. Nobody talks about that, but everybody knows it.

We went in. Max held the door open for me. “Your Majesty,” he murmured-and then let go of the door so it swung shut and got me in the seat of the pants.

“Some aide-de-camp you turned out to be,” I said. “I should have asked Ilona.”

“There’s a difference between aide-de-camp and camp follower,” Max said loftily. He was lucky Ilona wasn’t there to hear that. She would have followed him, all right-with a knife.

Inside the CC headquarters, you never would have known that Thasos had changed hands not long before, or that fighting still sputtered not far away. Everything was peaceful and orderly. People-Lokrians, Hassocki, an Albionese merchant in baggy tweeds, us-waited in line for the next available crystallographer. Lots of places in Thasos, lines just sit there. They don’t move. Not at CC headquarters. Perish the thought. Those people know what efficiency means.