"Well, there's magic missiles and minor projectile spells, heat metal, warp wood…"

"Hmmmmm… very good for fouling up arrows, wagon wheels and spears."

"Yes. Then there's your lightning bolt and fireball; poison fogs like stinking clouds and cloudkill… illusion spells, I guess…" Miliana crinkled her freckled nose in a scowl. "Anything bigger than that, and it's time to run like squealing weasels!"

Lorenzo, oblivious to the whole conversation, wonderingly lifted the lid from a pot of beans.

"Where do they make these things, anyway?"

"They bake them down on High Street." Luccio answered with a dismissive wave.

Miliana slapped at Lorenzo's hands as the inventor hit the pot a blow with the butt end of his rapier. "Stop that!" she scolded, "You'll get beans on Tekoriikii!"

"But the pot's tough… it doesn't break!"

"It's not clay, its made from ground-up shells. If it was clay, the heat would crack it." Luccio took the bowl away. "Leave it alone and tell us what you want to do."

"Do? Do!" Lorenzo suddenly whipped papers aside and drew sketches directly onto the tabletop. "I know what to do!" Moving faster than a genie, the inventor had already settled on his plans. "Brilliant! Luccio tell your girlfriend I'll need a hundred bags of sponges, and as many stinging jellyfish as her people can find."

"Right!" Luccio stuffed his head underwater and began to talk in a mumbling stream of bubbles. Lorenzo wrenched the man back out into the open air and continued with his interrupted orders.

"After that, I want you to collect cart horses, shells, and all the spyglasses you can find. Miliana, I need the entire potters' guild and the wheelwrights' guild here within the hour."

"Right!" Luccio leapt to his feet, streaming water from his hair. "Anything else?"

"Some more beans?" Lorenzo held up his plate in dismay. "Tekoriikii's eaten all of mine."

"My liege?"

Ugo Svarezi stood overlooking the nighttime campfires of a mighty army. The whole bowl-shaped Valley of Umbricci had been turned into one massive military camp. The cooking fires curved high up the mountainsides where they twinkled in the dark like countless stars.

The stars twinkled because men moved between the onlookers and the flames; the army was on the move, leaving its fires burning as a decoy for any airborne eyes. Svarezi watched as his vanguard spurred off down the road, dark-skinned horse archers hired en masse from the hot lands far to the west. Behind them came artillery and wagonloads of hireling sorcerers; the heavy weapons were kept up at the blade edge of the march, ensuring quick deployment on the battlefield.

Svarezi was well pleased with his efforts through the months of wind and rain. He had snatched up minor kingdoms during winter lulls, picking them up like plums before his enemies realized he had struck. By stripping his conquests to the bone for ready cash, he had acquired a mercenary army virtually overnight.

Labor conscription had stripped the mines of metal; the enormous civilian casualties would breed back their numbers with time. For the moment, all that mattered was the short-term goal.

Now, with the harvest season about to begin, his enemies should be dispersed into their fields. Their armies would take many vital days to gather in from their winter quarters; Svarezi's troops would overrun the city-state of Lomatra in a matter of hours.

And with Lomatra gone, the scattering of still-independent towns would sue for peace. In less than a year, Svarezi would have accomplished what no other man had ever done; he would have welded the Blade Kingdoms into a single entity beneath a single crown.

The Akanal would lie before him like a kid for the slaughter. Decadent old kingdoms to the east-more squabbling city-states and pitiful Chondath lined the Vilhon Reach to the west-barbarian lands stretched on to the south. Within a few years, he could carve a bloody empire across the face of Faerun.

An empire ruled by one lethal, tireless king.

Tethered behind Svarezi, the black hippogriff Shaatra stirred. The creature winced as Svarezi curbed her with a glance before turning back to his waiting officers.

"What of the errant Sumbrian companies?"

"Orlando Toporello and his followers?" A lean Sumbrian officer-one of the new breed arisen over the ashes of the old-laughed aloud in scorn. "Our agents found him; he refused your gold and silver. He says that money defiles a 'true soldier's' hands."

"Then he will make a very poor mercenary." Svarezi slowly settled his black burgonet helmet on his head. Toporello's reticence was almost annoying; two thousand fully armored cavalry would bring a solid backbone to his army's rabble of riffraff from the west. "Forget him. He will need gold to feed his horses soon enough."

Chessentian free-lancers of Helyos's Renegades rode past along the road below, four thousand strong in articulated metal shells. They would be chaff before Blade Kingdom lancers in an all-out charge, but their sheer numbers would serve to simply overawe most mortal enemies. They had a cruel streak Svarezi had come to admire. The prince of the Blade Kingdoms watched his vanguard thunder down the valley road, then clutched a fistful of feathers from Shaatra's mane and swung up into his own saddle.

"Move the main body out immediately-pikes to the fore and crossbows at the rear." Shaatra shivered, arched and flapped her wings as Svarezi raked her sleek black flanks with his spurs. "Burn the Lomatran villages at will. Kill at need; they will offer peace soon enough. We'll have no need for Lomatra-or its fields-as a base for our swords."

Kicking at his hippogriff, Svarezi clawed aloft. The black shape swept low across an army teeming through the dark like countless ants. He framed himself against the dark, then faded out into the night on silent wings.

Scudding low across the chalky hillsides in the light of dawn, a patrol of Colletran hippogriffs whipped just above the trees. The dawn dew hissed beneath their pale brown wings-leaves flicked at hooves and talons as the mighty beasts rippled past the boughs. Marked only by the flap and swerve of feathers in the breeze, the air cavalry made a silent race against the sun.

Their orders were to make a swift, unseen reconnaissance, to check the dispositions of the Lomatran alliance, and to confirm that their troops were still not mustered.

The scout troop's commander had other, more ambitious plans. Who could forget the air commander Otorelli Lambruccini, who had alighted on the gates of Zutria so long ago? In a single swoop he had flung open the city gates and won a bloodless victory! There was not an air cavalryman alive who didn't cherish Lambruccini's triumph in his dreams.

A silent approach, a quick sweep up onto Lomatra's walls, and who knew what the results might be? Looking back at the perfect arrowhead formation of nine hippogriffs to his rear, the commander felt cold shivers of anticipation ripple up his spine.

"Tekorii-kii-kii! Tekorii-kii-kii!"

A hippogriff screamed in fear; two more took frantic evasive action and collided in midair, spilling their riders free. The scout commander halted at his reins in fright, then felt his mount buck in pain as the hairs were plucked clean out of its tail.

A thunderbolt of orange raffia-work rattled gaily past, tossing plundered hairs into the breeze. Rustling its feathers in delirious abandon, the giant orange bird turned a lazy roll and pulled the helmet plumes clean off a rider's head.

Hippogriffs broke left and right; another pair climbed clumsily up toward the sun. Shocked almost to death, the scout commander ripped his composite bow out of its sheath and clumsily fumbled an arrow into place.