«He to say he to give him what he have to come to him,» Eshkinni answered. Abivard frowned, struggling through the freshet of pronouns and infinitives, and then nodded. Had he had Tzikas in front of him, he would have said very much the same thing, though he probably would have elaborated on it a good deal. For that matter, Maniakes might well have elaborated on it; Abivard realized that Eshkinni wasn't giving him a literal translation.

He asked, «Did Maniakes say what he thought Tzikas had coming to him?» He itched to know, an itch partly gleeful, partly guilty

But Eshkinni shook her head. Her earrings clinked again. Her lip curled; she was plainly bored with this whole proceeding. She tugged at her shift not to get rid of the places where it clung to her but to emphasize them. «You to want?» she asked, twitching her hip to leave no possible doubt about what she was offering.

«No, thank you,» Abivard said politely, though he felt like exclaiming, By the God, no! Polite still, he offered an explanation: «My wife is traveling with me.»

«So?» Eshkinni stared at him as if that had nothing to do with anything. In her eyes and in her experience, it probably didn't. She went on. «Why for big fancy man to have only one wife?» She sniffed as an answer occurred to her. «To be same reason you no to want me, I to bet. You no to have beard, I to wonder if you a—» She couldn't come up with the Videssian word for eunuch but made crotch-level cutting motions to show what she meant.

«No,» Abivard said, sharply now. But she had done him a service, so he reached into a pouch he wore on his belt and drew from it twenty silver arkets, which he gave her. Her mood improved on the instant; it was far more than she would have hoped to realize by opening her legs for him.

«You to need to know any more things,» she declared, «you to ask me. I to find out for you, you to best believe I to do.» When she saw Abivard had nothing more to ask her then, she walked off, rolling her haunches. Abivard remained unstirred by the charms thus advertised, but several of his troopers appreciatively followed Eshkinni with their eyes. He suspected she might enlarge upon her earnings.

Later that day he asked Turan, «What would you do if you had Tzikas in your clutches?»

His lieutenant gave a pragmatic answer: «Cast him in irons so he couldn't escape, then get drunk to celebrate.»

Abivard snorted. «Aside from that, I mean.»

«If I found a pretty girl, I might want to get laid, too,» Turan said, and then, grudgingly, seeing the warning on Abivard's face, «I suppose you mean after that. If I were Maniakes, the next thing I'd do would be to squeeze him dry about whatever he'd done while he was here. After that I'd get rid of him, fast if he'd done a good job of singing, slow if he hadn't—or maybe slow on general principles.»

«Yes, that sounds reasonable,» Abivard agreed. «I suspect I'd do much the same myself. Tzikas has it coming, by the God.» He thought for a minute or so. «Now we have to tell Sharbaraz what happened without letting him know we made it happen. Life is never dull.»

He learned how true that was a few days later, when one of his cavalry patrols came across a westbound rider dressed in the light tunic of a man from the land of the Thousand Cities. «He didn't sit his horse quite the way most of the other folk here do, so we thought we'd look him over,» the soldier in charge of the patrol said. «And we found—this.» He held out a leather message tube.

«Did you?» Abivard turned to the captured courier, asking in Videssian, «And what is—this?»

«I don't know,» the courier answered in the same language; he was one of Maniakes' men, sure enough. «All I know is that I was supposed to get through your lines and carry it to Mashiz, then bring back Sharbaraz' answer if he had one.»

«Were you?» Abivard opened the tube. Save for being stamped with the sunburst of Videssos rather than Makuran's lion, it seemed ordinary enough. The rolled-up parchment inside was sealed with scarlet wax, an imperial prerogative. Abivard broke the seal with his thumbnail.

He read Videssian, but haltingly; he moved his lips, sounding out every word. «Maniakes Avtokrator to Sharbaraz King of Kings: Greetings,» the letter began. A string of florid salutations and boasts followed, showing that the Videssians could match the men of Makuran in such excess as well as in war.

After that, though, Maniakes got down to cases faster than most Makuraners would have. In his own hand—which Abivard recognized—he wrote, «I have the honor to inform you that I am holding as a captive and condemned criminal a certain Tzikas, a renegade formerly in your service, whom I had previously condemned. For the capture of this wretch I am indebted to your general Abivard son of Godarz, who, being as vexed by Tzikas' treacheries as I have been myself, arranged to have me capture him and dispose of him. He shall not be missed when he goes, I assure you. He—»

Maniakes went on at some length to explain Tzikas' iniquities.

Abivard didn't read all of them; he knew them too well. He crumpled up the parchment and threw it on the ground, then stared at it in genuine, if grudging, admiration. Maniakes had more gall than even he'd expected. The Avtokrator had used him to help get rid of Tzikas and now was using Sharbaraz to help get rid of him because of Tzikas! If that wasn't effrontery, Abivard didn't know what was.

And only luck had kept the plan from working or at least had delayed it. If the Videssian courier had ridden more like a local—

Abivard picked up the sheet of parchment, unfolded it as well as he could, and summoned Turan. He translated the Videssian for his lieutenant, who did not read the language. When he was through, Turan scowled and said, «May he fall into the Void! What a sneaky thing to do! He—»

«Is Avtokrator of the Videssians,» Abivard interrupted. «If he weren't sneaky, he wouldn't have the job. My father could go on for hours at a time about how devious and underhanded the Videssians were, and he—» He stopped and began to laugh. «Do you know, I can't say whether he ever had anything more to do with them than skirmishing against them. But however he knew or heard, he was right. You can't trust the Videssians when your eye's not on them, nor sometimes when it is.»

«You're too right there.» Now Turan laughed, though hardly in a way that showed much mirth. «I wish Maniakes were out of the land of the Thousand Cities. Then my eye wouldn't be on him.»

Later that evening Roshnani found a new question to ask: «Did Maniakes' letter to the King of Kings actually come out and say he was going to put Tzikas to death?»

«It said he wouldn't be missed when he went,» Abivard answered after a little thought. «If that doesn't mean the Avtokrator is going to kill him, I don't know what it does mean.»

«You're right about that,» Roshnani admitted, sounding for all the world like Turan. «The only trouble is, I keep remembering the Videssian board game.»

«What has that got to do with—?» Abivard stopped. While he'd liked that game well enough during the time he had lived in Across, he'd hardly thought of it since leaving Videssian soil. One salient feature—a feature that made the game far more complex and difficult than it would have been otherwise—was that captured pieces could return to the board, fighting under the banner of the player who had taken them.

Abivard had used Tzikas exactly as if he were a board-game piece. For as long as the Videssian renegade had been useful to Makuran after failing to assassinate Maniakes, Abivard had hurled him against the Empire he'd once served. Once Tzikas was no longer useful, Abivard had not only acquiesced in but arranged his capture. But that didn't necessarily mean he was gone for good, only that Videssos had recaptured him.

«You don't suppose,» Abivard said uneasily, «Maniakes would give him a chance to redeem himself, do you? He'd have to be crazy, not just foolish, to take a chance like that.»