"Good soldiers, you have your victory! Sumbria has left us in possession of the field!" The man gave an authoritarian sweep of his armored hand. "Now go! Disperse! The task of employees is to obey, and not to howl like beasts for blood!"

The answer came as a vicious, angry snarl; one of the crossbow regiments produced a gangly camp lawyer who balanced himself upon a war-horse's flyblown corpse.

"Then we abandon your employ. The contract is dissolved!" The soldier adjusted his grimy breastplate, whipping out a stained old parchment and waving it in the air. "The Articles of Association allow us to recontract once per year! We'll hire ourselves to Svarezi or to none at all!"

"Rabble!" A Blade Captain gazed at the filthy soldier with undisguised hatred. "Do as you're ordered, or I'll have one man in ten dragged off and flogged!"

A stone whipped out from the crowd and rebounded from the Blade Captain's helm. The noble swore and then ripped out his unbloodied sword, lunging his horse forward at a suspected enemy.

The action instantly sparked off a storm. Soldiers dragged at the courtier's stirrups; he flailed at them with his sword, then screamed as a billhook snaked out to hook behind his neck. The sharp metal blade worried furiously back and forth under the gilded gorget, tearing flesh and bone until it jerked the man free from his saddle with a scream of fear. He disappeared beneath a tidal wave of stabbing dagger blades. Led on by Svarezi's carefully prepared provocateurs, the troops stormed forward, up and over the remaining Blade Captains, and simply tore the men apart.

On a ridgeline to one side, Ugo Svarezi watched the bloody death of his erstwhile peers. Black armor sheathed with velvet seemed to absorb every last speck of sunlight; not a ripple nor a highlight sheened the man's silhouette.

The city of Colletro had spilled into his hands. Unmoved by the fruition of his plans, Svarezi turned his back on the distant carnage and consulted his sorcerers.

"Well?"

"Prince Mannicci confers with his Blade Captains at the far side of the pass."

"And his men?"

"They now march beneath the first overhang, my lord." A magician bent above a crystal ball, making gliding motions about the swirling images. "There is insufficient snow for us to do as you command."

"I have no need for your spells here. You will go to Sumbria and follow the instructions written here." Svarezi passed a scrap of parchment to his chief sorcerer without sparing the man a glance. "You depart at once. Take a hippogriff."

"And the enemy, lord?"

"Leave the Sumbrian army to me."

Svarezi gazed coldly toward the open pass, where the dense-packed mass of Prince Mannicci's personal troops had finally disappeared from view. He raised a hand without even once looking behind his back.

"Fire!"

On a hill to the rear, a hissing contraption mounted on a vast armored wagon sputtered into life. Twenty feet high, and so massive it had to be drawn by thirty stallions, the machine leaked a palpable cloud of cherry-scented death. Titanic vats of glass protected by adamantine shields spurted steam as pressure valves were wrenched open by technicians clad in armor plate. The chief gunner sighted through a spyglass, pumped his fist, then slammed a sealed black visor shut across his eyes as his assistants briskly ducked aside.

Air pressure shot the contents of the glass tanks into a sealed combustion chamber; the machine seemed to bulge, and brilliant white light leaked through tiny rivet holes in the armored housing. With a dazzle that left purple streamers drifting through the skies, a bolt of light blasted from the muzzle of the great machine and speared off into the pass.

The light gouged into the mountain crest-instantly turning packed ice into vapor and rock into a liquid stream. The superheated rock face exploded like a bomb. An entire mountaintop came slamming down into the narrow pass-untold tons of rubble, ice, and snow. The avalanche thundered on and on, shuddering the entire valley beneath a violent storm of noise.

Finally the rockslide began to slow; the last secondary avalanche on distant peaks drew to a close. The soldiers of Colletro stood gaping up into the pass, then turned to stare in awe at Ugo Svarezi standing at their side.

A long silence reigned; coming faintly from the rear of Colletro's battered army, there suddenly came a single tiny cheer. The first voice was joined by a second, and then a third. The noise rippled forward, then surged into fantastic life as men began to run toward the Sun Cannon-Svarezi's death machine.

The cheers turned to adulation. Svarezi, mounted on his brooding black hippogriff, reached out to allow the touch of eager soldiers' hands. The troops screamed out Svarezi's name until it became a formless, soaring litany that shuddered the very rooftops of the world.

While the cheers roared on, the technicians went swiftly back to servicing their monstrous machine. At the front of the giant Sun Cannon, the Sun Gem slowly cooled; while in the pass, three thousand Sumbrian troops lay buried under steaming lava.

The council chambers of Sumbria echoed to the roar of outraged voices. What had started as a postmortem of the lost campaign had turned into a maelstrom of invective and blame-passing. Blade Captains accused one another of everything from cowardice and incompetence, to outright treachery. The Sumbrian army-the finest, most expensively equipped forces in the Blade Kingdoms-had been utterly overturned. Scouts should have been sent out; cavalry should have intercepted the Colletran horse. Tactics, magic, science, or sorcery should have somehow obliterated the enemy and won the day. Battle mages and unit commanders fought to make their voices heard as they furiously tried to clear their own good names.

Everyone had another man to blame; some old enemy who had long been a secret traitor; some rival whose true colors at last were flown. The snarling madhouse shook papers, pens, and blades at one another around the table-top, while Prince Mannicci simply sat with his head bowed in his hands.

For the prince, the battle had been more than just a military disaster. The contingents of Mannicci's closest allies had been in the path of the Colletran charge. Worse still, the Mannicci regiments had held the pass as it inexplicably collapsed above them. The Mannicci family's forces now scarcely numbered a hundred men, not enough to qualify the prince for a vote in his own council. He sat there upon the sufferance of the Blade Captains, if he sat there at all.

Above the chaos, a single voice rose into a deep, commanding tone.

"Gentlemen! Colleagues… be still! We have only a few hours to stop a disaster from turning into a catastrophe!"

Heads turned; the motion caused more men to lose track of their arguments. The speaker stepped forward into the lessening din with consummate timing and skill. Sweeping open his arms, Gilberto Ilego stood like a pristine figurehead bursting through a storm.

"We are defeated, but we are not destroyed!" Ilego's voice fought to overcome a reawakened roar. "No, not yet! But division can still be our undoing!"

He spoke as though the great battle had not yet been lost and won; flushed and bickering noblemen snatched at the offered straw and began to listen.

"Colleagues! Sumbria is the most powerful of the Blade Kingdoms. As an individual state, we command the greatest wealth, the greatest intellects, and the finest military equipment. And yet we have found ourselves locked into a futile war for years! Rather than taking our place as rightful leader of the Akanal, we have squandered our energies in an endless war with Colletro-and over what? A valley. A single valley." Ilego's voice rose suddenly into a sharp pitch of scorn. "One valley! When the Blade Kingdoms hold a thousand such penny-plots of land!"