“You soldier here?” the guard said, and Istvan nodded. The guard shrugged. “Soldier no more. Now you to be captive here.”

Kun said, “This harbor wasn’t here when we were fighting on Obuda.”

Istvan nodded. Since the island fell, the Kuusamans had run up an enormous number of piers-and all of them looked to have ships tied up at them. Gyongyos and Kuusamo had fought over Obuda not least because several ley lines converged there, making it important for one navy or the other to hold the place. The Kuusamans weren’t just holding it these days-they’d taken it and made it their own.

“They couldn’t have got this much work out of the Obudans,” Istvan said as the guards marched him and his comrades toward the gangplank. “There weren’t that many of them, and they’re lazy buggers anyhow.” He never had thought much of the islanders.

“They didn’t even bother,” Kun said positively. “Most of this port was hammered together by sorcery.”

“How can you tell?” Istvan asked.

“Because all the piers and all the pilings are just alike,” Kun answered. “That means they used the law of similarity a lot-it can’t mean anything else.” He scowled. “I wish we could afford to throw magecraft around like this. We’d stand a lot better chance in the fight, I’ll tell you.”

Under the sticks of the Kuusaman guards, the captives marched off the pier and onto the beach of Obuda. More Kuusamans waited for them there. One of the little men turned out to speak pretty good Gyongyosian. “I am Colonel Eino,” he said. “I am the commandant of the captives’ camp here. I want you to understand what that means. What that means is that, as far as you are concerned, I am the stars above. If anything good happens to you, it will happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to please me. And if anything bad happens to you, it will also happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to make me angry. Do not make me angry. You will be very sorry if you do.”

“Blasphemous, goat-eating son of a whore,” Istvan muttered. The captives around him-even Kun, that hard-boiled city man-nodded. Colonel Eino might know the Gyongyosian language, but he didn’t know Gyongyosians.

Istvan’s close comrades weren’t the only ones to be appalled. More mutters rose from other soldiers captured on Becsehely-several hundred of them had filed off the transport. Some of them shouted instead of muttering.

Those shouts bothered Eino not at all. “I care nothing for what you think of me,” he said. “I care only that you obey me. When the war is over-when we have won it-you will go back to Gyongyos again. Until then, you belong to Kuusamo. Remember that.” He turned his back, ignoring the new shouts that rose from the captives.

The Kuusaman guards didn’t speak so much Gyongyosian. Of course, they didn’t need to, either. They shouted, “To march!”-and march the captives did.

“Somewhere not far from here, we beat these buggers back from the beaches.” Istvan heaved a sigh. “But they’re like roaches, seems like. Stomp ‘em once and they just come back again.”

He’d expected to have to march all the way to the captives’ camp, wherever on the island it turned out to be. He looked toward the forest that grew almost down to the beach. Parts of it were still battered from the fight his countrymen had put up before the Kuusamans finally seized Obuda. His own memories of that losing campaign were of hunger and fog and fear.

To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.

Kun kept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”

“Silence, there,” Captain Frigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”

“Aye, Captain,” Kun answered, the only thing he could say-out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”

“We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere between Kun ’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so… “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:

Kun just grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.

The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.

When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.

“Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.

Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.

“What to be funny?” a guard demanded.

“This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?

That was a chilly thought with which to enter the captives’ camp.

Some of the Gyongyosian barracks still stood. The guards took Istvan and his comrades to a newer, less weathered building. He turned out to have a better cot and more space as a captive of the Kuusamans than he’d had as a Gyongyosian soldier on Obuda. He didn’t know what that said about the relative strength of the two warring kingdoms. Nothing good, probably, not from a Gyongyosian point of view.

“I wish to speak to Colonel Eino,” Frigyes told a guard. The Kuusaman went off to see if the camp commandant cared to speak with a captive captain.

To Istvan’s surprise, Eino came to the barracks. “What do you want?” he asked. “Whatever it is, it had better be important.”

“It is,” Frigyes said. “I want your word of honor as an officer that you do not abuse us by feeding us the filthy, forbidden flesh of goats. We are in your power. I hope you are not so vile as to make us either starve or become ritually unclean.”

Alarm blazed through Istvan. He glanced at Kun and Szonyi. They looked alarmed, too. The scar on his hand seemed to throb. His gaze swung back to Colonel Eino.

The camp commandant laughed. “Many of your people ask this. I give you my word, it does not happen.” He laughed again, less pleasantly. “You may ask, what is a Kuusaman’s word worth?” Off he went, leaving appalled silence behind him.

Colonel Spinello was bored. He’d been a great many things since the war took him to Unkerlant-wounded, hungry, freezing, terrified-but never bored, never till now. He yawned till his jaw creaked. He felt like ordering another attack on Pewsum, just to give his men-and himself-something to do.