With so much light behind them, with their eyes not accustomed to gloom, the redcoat sentries up on the walls might also have a harder time spotting the Atlanteans moving up on them. Again, Victor dared hope so.

No one raised the alarm as his men drew near. "Scaling ladders forward!" he hissed urgently. Forward they came. He pointed toward the fortress. "Do you see where to place them?"

"We do that, General," replied a soldier who'd surely been born in Ireland.

"Then advance against the palisade-slowly till you're discovered, and after that quick as you can."

Off went the ladders, one by one. Storming parties-he hoped they weren't forlorn hopes-followed them. If everything went well, the fort would fall to the Atlanteans almost before the enemy inside realized it was under attack. But how often did everything go well? Not often enough, as Victor had seen… too often.

Tonight, though, the scaling ladders were about to thud into place against the palisade before a redcoat up there let out a startled yelp: "Bloody 'ell! It's the bleedin' Atlanteans!"

A moment later, a rifle barked. The sentry yelped again, this time in pain. He had been a dark blotch against the lighter background of the barracks hall. Now that blotch disappeared.

"Atlantis!" Victor's men cried as they swarmed up the ladders, and "The Proclamation of Liberty!" and "Down with King George!"

Down with King George it was, at least in that one spot. So many men in green jackets got up onto the palisade and dropped down into the courtyard behind it, the defenders never had a chance. Only a few shots were fired before the gates swung open. Someone sang out in an Atlantean accent: "All yours, General!"

"Well done," Victor said as he walked into the little fortress. "Very well done indeed, boys!"

The English captain who'd commanded the garrison didn't think so. "A night attack? Not sporting," he said sourly.

"If you show me where Hoyle's rules state I'm not allowed to make one, perhaps I'll march away," Victor said. "Or perhaps I won't."

His men jeered. The captain glared, and then tried a different tack: "Another thing-one of your blighters lifted my pocket watch."

"Can you tell me which one?" Victor asked.

"No, dammit." The English officer shook his head. "He was tall. He was skinny. He had an evil leer and foul breath."

"Well, sir, as a matter of fact, so do you," Victor said, which won him another glare. Taking no notice of it, he continued, "You do realize you're describing more than half of my army?" He wasn't exaggerating; most Atlanteans seemed tall to their shorter English cousins.

"I shouldn't wonder if more than half your army consists of thieves." The captain didn't lack for nerve.

But Victor only laughed. "And you think yours doesn't? By God, sir, I've served with redcoats before. I know better."

"We may be thieves, but we aren't foul rebels," the captain said.

"Not yet, perhaps. You would be surprised, though, at how many in the Atlantean army took the King's shilling first," Victor responded.

He couldn't down the English officer, who said, "And what of Habakkuk Biddiscombe? Will you tell me he is the only Atlantean who at last came to see where his true loyalty should lie?"

"All I'll tell you of Biddiscombe is that sooner or later-likely sooner-he'll quarrel with his English superiors, as he quarreled with me," Victor said tightly. "And I wish them joy of him when he does."

That actually made the captain thoughtful. "Mm… I've met the man, and I must say I shouldn't be astonished if you prove right. But, having antagonized both sides in this struggle, where can he go next?"

"He can go to the Devil, for all of me," Victor said. "I'll tell you where I'm going next, though. I'm going to Hanover."

More often than not, the wind blew down from the Green Ridge Mountains toward the sea. When it did, it carried the spicy, resinous scents of Atlantis' vast evergreen forests with it. Victor took that odor for granted. He noticed it only when it changed.

As his army neared Hanover, it did. The breeze swung around to come off the Atlantic for a while. The ocean's salt tang seemed to quicken Victor's pulse. Was that because all Radcliff's and Radcliffes sprang from fishermen, and so naturally responded to the smell of the sea? Or did Victor's excitement grow because the oceanic odor reminded him how near his goal he was? Some of each, he guessed; a man's reasons were rarely all of one piece.

Blaise pointed to the river beside which the army marched. "It did turn black, General, like you said. Why?"

"Because it flows through peat beds under the meadows," Victor answered. "You know peat?"

"You can burn it," Blaise said. "Like God was trying to make coal but didn't know how yet."

Victor laughed in surprise. He wouldn't have come out with anything so blasphemous, but he probably wouldn't have come out with anything so apt, either.

Before long, the breeze from the east brought more than the odor of the Atlantic to his nostrils. It carried the smell of smoke with it-and also, less attractively, the reek of sewage. That combination always proclaimed a large settlement not far away.

"Cities stink," Blaise complained.

"Well, so they do," Victor said. "Do your African villages smell any sweeter?"

Blaise clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Er-no."

"I didn't think so," Victor said. "When I use the privy, it's not angels that come out. No reason your folk should differ there." The colored sergeant changed the subject, from which Victor concluded that he'd made his point: "How do you propose to take Hanover away from Cornwallis?"

"I can't answer that yet. I shall have to see just where the English have placed their lines and their forts, and how many men they can put into them now that they're dealing with trouble in Terranova, too," Victor said.

"Ah," Blaise said. "You do make fighting more complicated than it needs to be."

More complicated than you were used to in Africa, Victor translated. But anyone-black, white, or, he supposed, copper-skinned-took what he'd grown up with as the touchstone for what was right and proper the rest of his days.

Before long, Victor had a pretty good notion of the lie of the English works outside Hanover, and of how many redcoats Cornwallis had in them. The enemy commander did his best to keep the locals inside his lines. Cornwallis didn't want them bringing Victor such news.

Cornwallis' best wasn't good enough. His lines leaked. The English captain at the fort had been right: there were plenty of loyalists and royalists in land held by the forces following the Atlantean Assembly. Sometimes they did go over to King George's army, as Habakkuk Biddiscombe had done.

But that coin had two sides. Hanover was a fair-sized city by anybody's standards-not London, not Paris, but a fair-sized city. Of course it had its share of people who cheered behind closed doors when the United States of Atlantis were proclaimed. And of course some of those men, seeing liberation as one of Victor Radcliff's outriders, would leave the city to tell him what they knew of its defenses and the soldiers who manned them.

He made a point of separating his informants one from another. He interviewed them one at a time, and made a sketch map of what each described. If one of them told a tale different from the others'… He wouldn't put it past Cornwallis to try to lead him into a trap. He knew he would have done the same thing to the English general had he found the chance.

Adding all the sketch maps together… By the time he called a council of war, he had a pretty good notion of what wanted doing. "We will feint here," he told his assembled officers-and Blaise-pointing with the fancy-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had presented to him. "A good portion of our field artillery will accompany the feint, to make it seem the more persuasive. Having drawn Cornwallis' notice thither, we strike here." He pointed again, farther south this time.