Mingled with the cries of the horses were those of the sentries guarding them. Some of those cries were cut off abruptly as Turan's followers cut down the Videssians. But some sentries survived and fought and helped raise the alarm for their fellows in the tents off to the side of the horse lines.

The watch fires burning around those tents showed men bursting forth from them, helms jammed hastily onto heads, sword blades glittering. «Now!» Abivard shouted. The warriors who had stayed behind with him started shooting arrows into the midst of the Videssians. At night and at long range they could hardly aim, but with enough arrows and enough targets, some were bound to strike home. Screams said that some did.

Abivard plucked arrow after arrow from his bow case, shooting as fast as he could. This was a different sort of warfare from the one to which he was accustomed. Normally he hunted with the bow but in battle charged with the lance. Using archery against men felt strange.

Strange or not, he saw Videssians topple and fall. Hurting one's foe was what war was all about, so he stopped worrying about how he was doing it. He also saw more Videssians, urged on by cursing officers, trot out toward him and his men.

He gauged their numbers—many more than he had. «Back, back, back!» he yelled. Most of the soldiers he had with him were men from the city garrisons, not Turan's troopers. They saw nothing shameful about retreat. Very much the reverse; he heard a couple of them grumbling that he'd waited too long to order it.

They ran back toward the rest. Most of them wore only tunics, so Abivard in their midst felt himself surrounded by ghosts. When they'd gotten across the biggest canal between Maniakes' camp and their own, some of them attacked its eastern bank with a mattock. Water poured out onto the fields.

The Makuraners raised a cheer when Abivard and his little band returned after losing only a couple of men. «That was better than a flea bite,» he declared. «We've nipped their finger like an ill-mannered lapdog, perhaps. The God willing, we'll do worse when next we meet.» His men cheered again more loudly.

«The God willing,» Roshnani said when he'd returned to the wagon giddy with triumph and date wine, «you won't feel compelled to lead another raid like that any time soon.» Abivard did not argue with her.

Abivard hoped Maniakes would be angry enough at the lapdog nip he'd given him to lunge straight ahead without worrying about the consequences. A couple of years before Maniakes would have been likely to do just that; he'd had a way of leaping before he looked. And if he was heading straight for Mashiz, as Sharbaraz had thought—as Sharbaraz had feared—Abivard's army lay directly across his path. That hadn't been easy to arrange, since it involved maneuvering infantry against cavalry.

But to Abivard's dismay, Maniakes did not try to bull his way straight to Mashiz. Instead, he moved north toward the Mylasa Sea, up into the very heart of the land of the Thousand Cities.

«We have to follow him,» Abivard said when a scout brought the unwelcome news that the Avtokrator had broken camp. «If he gets around us, our army might as well fall into the Void for all the help it will be to the realm.»

As soon as he put his army on the road, he made another unpleasant discovery. Up till that time his forces had been impeding Maniakes' movements by destroying canals. Now, suddenly, the boot was on the other foot. The floods that spilled out over the fields and gardens of the lands between the rivers meant that he had to move slowly in pursuit of the Videssians.

While his men were struggling with water and mud, a great pillar of smoke rose into the sky ahead of him. «That's not a camp,» Abivard said grimly. «That's not the ordinary smoke from city, either. It's the pyre of a town that's been sacked and burned.»

So indeed it proved to be. Just as the sack was beginning, Maniakes had gathered up a couple of servants of the God and sent them back to Abivard with a message. «He said this to us with his own lips and in our tongue so we could not misunderstand,» one of the men said. «We were to tell you this is repayment for what Videssos has suffered at the hands of Makuran. We were also to tell you this was only the first coin of the stack.»

«Were you?» Abivard said.

The servants of the God nodded together. Abivard's pedagogue had given him a nodding acquaintance with logic and rhetoric and other strange Videssian notions. Years of living inside the Empire and dealing with its people had taught him more. Not so the servants of the God, who didn't know what to do with a rhetorical question.

Sighing, Abivard said, «If that's how Maniakes intends to fight this war, it will be very ugly indeed.»

«He said you would say that very thing, lord,» one of the servants of the God said, scratching himself through his dirty yellow robe. «He said to tell you, if you did, that to Videssos it was already ugly and that we of Makuran needed to be reminded wars aren't always fought on the other man's soil.»

Abivard sighed again. «Did he tell you anything else?»

«He did, lord,» the other holy man answered. «He said he would leave the Thousand Cities if the armies of the King of Kings, may his days be long and his realm increase, leave Videssos and Vaspurakan.»

«Did he?» Abivard said, and then said no more. He had no idea whether Maniakes meant that as a serious proposal or merely as a ploy to irk him. Irked he was. He had no intention of sending Sharbaraz the Avtokrator's offer. The King of Kings was inflamed enough without it. The servants of the God waited to hear what he would say. He realized he would have to respond. «If we can destroy Maniakes here, he'll be in no position to propose anything.»

Destroying Maniakes, though, was beginning to look as hard to Abivard as stopping the Makuraners formerly had to have looked to the Videssian Emperor.

Up on its mound the city of Khurrembar still smoked. Videssian siege engines had knocked a breach in its mud-brick wall, allowing Maniakes' troopers in to sack it. One of these days the survivors would rebuild. When they did, so much new rubble would lie underfoot that the hill of Khurrembar would rise higher yet above the floodplain.

Surveying the devastation of what had been a prosperous city, Abivard said, «We must have more cavalry or Maniakes won't leave one town between the Tutub and the Tib intact.»

«You speak nothing but the truth, lord,» Turan answered, «but where will we come by horsemen? The garrisons hereabouts are all infantry. Easy enough to gather together a great lump of them, but once you have it, what do you do with it? By the time you move it here, the Videssians have already ridden there.»

«I'd even take Tzikas' regiment now,» Abivard said, a telling measure of his distress.

«Can we pry those men out of Vaspurakan?» Turan asked. «As you say, they'd come in handy now, whoever leads them.»

«Can we pry them loose?» Abivard plucked at his beard. He hadn't meant it seriously, but now Turan was forcing him to think of it that way. «The King of Kings was willing—even eager—to give them to me at the start of the campaign. I still despise Tzikas, but I could use his men. Perhaps I'll write to Sharbaraz—and to Mikhran marzban, too. The worst they can tell me is no, and how can hearing that make me worse off?»

«Well said, lord,» Turan said. «If you don't mind my telling you so, those letters shouldn't wait.»

«I'll write them today,» Abivard promised. «The next interesting question is, Will Tzikas want to come to the Thousand Cities when I call him? Finding out should be interesting. So should finding out how reliable he proves if he gets here. One more thing to worry about.» Turan corrected him: «Two more.» Abivard laughed and bowed. «You are a model of precision before which I can only yield.» His amusement vanished as quickly as it had appeared. «Now, to keep from having to yield to Maniakes' men—»