Skander came up to me and bowed. “Excuse me, your Majesty, but Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa are here to see you.”

“Are they?” I said innocently. I don’t know if I’d convinced Max everything was fine. Max is not easy to convince of such things. I do know I’d convinced myself. “Well, I’d be glad to see them.”

There I sat, on the throne, happy and kingly, Max standing a step back and to the left, where he belonged. There they came, two of Essad Pasha’s officers in dust-brown uniforms. Neither of them had missed a meal any time lately. Major Mustafa had a big black mustache. Colonel Kemal had an even bigger gray one. Major Mustafa’s fez and shoulder straps had one jewel. Colonel Kemal’s had three.

They didn’t bow. They didn’t say, “Your Majesty.” They just looked at me, not quite as if they’d found half of me in their apple but as if they’d like to give me to a Shqipetari cook for some intimate acquaintance with hot grease.

I did my best not to notice. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to notice. I said, “Gentlemen, it’s good that you’re here”-which only shows how much I knew. “Tell me your specialties. I’ll want to get the best use out of you when the fighting with Belagora heats up.”

They just kept staring at me. After a little while, I started not to like that very much. At last, Major Mustafa said, “How can you be who you say you are when the Atabeg says you aren’t who you say you are?”

I waited for Max to cough. He didn’t bother. He evidently figured I could see this was trouble all by myself. Max is so trusting. “You must not have heard. I explained that to Essad Pasha just yesterday,” I told the officers, and went through my song and dance again. Really, I should have had an orchestra accompanying me. I finished, “So you see, all this silly fuss should die down in a few days,” and waited for the applause from my adoring audience.

Only it wasn’t adoring. If the major and the colonel were carrying rotten rutabagas, they would have thrown them. Since they didn’t, they contented themselves with shaking their heads. They were out of synch with each other, which struck me as most unmilitary. Major Mustafa said, “We did hear that yesterday.”

“We don’t believe it,” Colonel Kemal said.

“The Hassockian Atabeg would never sully himself by telling a lie,” Mustafa declared.

I almost had a laughing fit, right there on the throne. There hasn’t been a Hassockian Atabeg for the past five hundred years who wasn’t a lying reptile. It’s essential for living long enough to get halfway good at the job. And I couldn’t tell them so. If I did, they would decide I was insulting their sovereign, and I couldn’t possibly be the lying reptile’s nephew.

I was, plainly, going to have to be a lying reptile myself. Well, if working for Dooger and Cark prepared me for anything, it prepared me for that. I rose from the throne, a smile still on my face. “Gentlemen, I have to tell you you are mistaken,” I said. Or at least right for the wrong reasons. “Let’s talk about it, shall we? Captain Yildirim, why don’t you come along with us?”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Max had to be wondering if I wanted him to murder the two Hassocki. I don’t blame him; I was wondering the same thing myself.

We ambled through the palace. I went on explaining how I really was Halim Eddin and always had been, even as a small child, although the lying reptile in Vyzance (whom I couldn’t call a lying reptile) couldn’t admit it. Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa went on not believing me. I started to get angry, though I didn’t let it show. Anyone would have thought from their attitude that I was deliberately lying to them!

In due course, we reached the front entrance. The soldiers standing guard there sprang to stiff attention. Whoever was in charge of them seemed imperfectly trustful of my popularity; he’d posted a couple of squads’ worth of men there to protect me from my beloved people. “At ease,” I told them.

“Yes, your Majesty,” they chorused, and relaxed from their brace.

They thought I was King of Shqiperi. And if they did…“Men,” I said, “arrest these officers! They plot to remove me from the throne!”

It was as easy as that. The soldiers seized Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa. After a moment’s shocked paralysis, the officers raised a horrible fuss. It did them exactly no good. A king outtrumped a major and a colonel put together. “What shall we do with ’em, your Majesty?” a sergeant asked once the loyal dimwits, uh, soldiers had laid hold of Kemal and Mustafa.

“Take them to the dungeons,” I said grandly. Kemal and Mustafa cursed and moaned even louder than they had before. I paid no attention to them. To my vast relief, neither did the palace guards.

“Uh, your Majesty, where are the dungeons?” the sergeant asked: a reasonable question, under the circumstances.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “They’re in there somewhere, I suppose-how can you have a palace if you don’t have dungeons?-but I just got here myself. I haven’t found ’em yet.” I went back to the doorway and shouted down the hall: “Skander!”

“Yes, your Majesty?” I don’t know how he kept appearing out of nowhere like that, but he did. Maybe Zogu had something to do with it.

“We have a couple of gentlemen here who require incarceration,” I said. Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa vehemently denied it. Skander didn’t listen to them, either. “Noisy, aren’t they?” I remarked. “Would you be so kind as to show the soldiers to the dungeons so they can lock these rascals up? I hope the doors are thick-that way, their racket won’t bother anyone else.”

“The doors are very thick indeed, your Majesty,” Skander said. He nodded to the sergeant. “Come this way, if you please.” Mustafa and Kemal did their best not to go that way. Their best wasn’t good enough. I don’t believe the soldiers did anything in persuading them that wouldn’t heal in a few days.

All the palace guards trooped along with the loud, boisterous officers. The more Kemal and Mustafa tried to fight, the more men joined in to make sure they couldn’t. Max and I stood by ourselves at the entrance. “Well,” I said brightly, “that was interesting.”

“There’s one word,” Max said. He used several others, most of which would set the page on fire if I tried to write them down.

“Did I get out of it or not?” I asked him. “Did I get away with it or not?”

He didn’t want to say I had, but he couldn’t very well say I hadn’t. “You’ve got the balls of a burglar,” was what he did say, “and if you don’t watch out, you’ll get ’em chopped off just like Rexhep.”

“Oh, rubbish,” I said, and hoped like anything it was.

When the guardsmen came back, it was without Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa. The sergeant didn’t look happy. “Whoever designed those dungeons didn’t know what he was doing. No dripping water, no bad smells…I didn’t see a single rat. North and south, east and west, there are hardly any cockroaches, even.”

“They’ll have to do for now,” I said. “Later on, maybe, we’ll fix up something properly nasty.”

“I should hope so!” he said. “Back in Vyzance, now, you’ll be used to doing it right. Filth, vermin, water, gloom, easy access for the torturers…They don’t fool around back there.” If I ever did decide to renovate my dungeons, here was a man with ideas.

I had an idea of my own. It turned out not to be a good idea, but I couldn’t know that when I had it. “Come with me,” I said to Max. “The people of Peshkepiia should get to know us. Let’s go to the market square and see them at their earnest endeavors.” Yes, Let’s watch the quaint natives was what it boiled down to. I should have known better, even then. Shqipetari are too confounded ornery to be quaint.

Not that a Shqipetar gave me trouble. Oh, no. But I’m getting to that.

If a Schlepsigian public-health mage got a look at the market square in Peshkepiia, he would close it down on the spot, fall over dead from a fit of apoplexy, or more likely both. Flies buzzed everywhere. They settled on meat and vegetables and stallkeepers and customers. Sewage ran in the gutters and puddled here and there, which helped account for the flies. Consumptive beggars held out bowls and coughed on passersby.