That sounded like something Lady ought to ponder. It was the sort of question she had dealt with regularly before I stumbled into her life.

I could hear the clockwork kerchunking inside Voroshk craniums. Their thoughts were obvious. Tell Croaker anything. Tell Croaker what he wanted to hear. Get off this cruel and frightful plain. Run away. Find a place where they have not heard of the Voroshk, where they have no major wizards of their own. Set up shop there and slap together a whole new empire.

Just as the Shadowmasters had done before them.

“Tell them I’ll come back after they’ve had a day or two to think it over.”

As she retreated with me Arkana told me, “If they agree to join you they’ll give you more trouble than Gromovol did.”

“Really?” I chose a tone that was supposed to let her know I might not be as dumb as I looked. “How do you suppose we could keep them from doing that?”

She did have some ideas. “Do what you did to us. Make them strip naked. Take their rheitgeistiden and their shefsepoken . Make them stay on the ground where they’re vulnerable. But promise them they’ll get everything back after they show you that you can trust them. Then you stretch it out.”

“I’m going to adopt you. You’d make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?”

Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, “I think she’s right.”

“Excellent! Let’s go ask your wicked future mother’s opinion.”

We found Lady reading what Baladitya was spending his final years recording, which was, more or less, Shivetya’s biography. “Darling, I’ve decided we need to adopt these two marvellous children. They’re turning out every bit as blackhearted as we ever wanted our Booboo to be.”

Lady awarded me a suspicious look, decided I was fooling around but meant what I said. More or less. “Tell me about it.”

I said, “Go to it, girls.”

Expecting the Great General to remain offensive-minded was not enough, Sleepy knew. She had to outguess him. This one time she could not let Mogaba slide around her.

She took a twinned approach to planning, setting up two distinct staffs. The first consisted of Iqbal and Runmust Singh, Riverwalker, Sahra, Willow Swan and others who had been with her since the Kiaulune wars. She even summoned Blade up from Jaicur because Blade actually knew Mogaba personally and, at one time, had been fairly close to him.

The second general staff consisted entirely of officers from Hsien. These men knew Mogaba only as a bugaboo. And they had no knowledge of the surrounding territory beyond what they could learn from maps and scouting on their own.

Sleepy hoped to find something useful in the gap between diverging visions.

She kept her cavalry busy, scouting, chasing Mogaba’s scouts, skirmishing with enemy patrols, trying to locate the bulk of the Great General’s forces.

Mogaba was doing the same. Both sides relied heavily on questioning civilians passing through. Traffic on the Rock Road had slackened but had not stopped entirely.

Each staff proposed several likely enemy campaigns. Sleepy had their opposite numbers play out a counter campaign. And in the end, after two almost sleepless days, she felt no more illuminated than she had at the beginning.

So she chose to go with intuition. That had served her best during previous dances with the Great General, anyway.

The Great General told his commanders, “I’m growing concerned that all this maneuvering helps them more than it does us. It’s obvious that they’re without mystical support. But every hour we maneuver is an hour nearer the time when they get those advantages back.”

Aridatha Singh asked, “Aren’t we still at a disadvantage in a direct confrontation?”

“Soldier for soldier, possibly. But we have three times as many soldiers. And they’re still trying to cover a line running all the way from the Grove of Doom to this stand near their camp. That’s too much to hold with ten thousand men.”

No questions came. No suggestions arose. The Great General seldom solicited advice. When Mogaba gathered his captains he planned to issue instructions. Their job would be to see that those were executed.

“I’m returning to the original plan. I’ll drive straight forward, in the middle, with the Second Territorial. I’ll engage and hold. Singh, you advance along your previous route with your same mission. Once you’re behind them form your division in battle array and advance up the Rock Road. If the rest of us have done our jobs you’ll only have to sweep up fugitives.”

Mogaba rested a hand upon the shoulder of a young officer named Narenda Nath Saraswati, scion of an old aristocratic family, of the third generation of that family to serve under arms since the opening skirmishes of the Shadowmaster wars. Two days earlier Saraswati had been a regimental chief of staff with an aggressive attitude. The Great General having been disappointed by the timid performance of his remaining division, Saraswati’s aggressive nature was about to earn him a chance to shine.

Mogaba said, “Narenda, as soon as I have the enemy engaged, I want you to take your whole force forward on a narrow front, along the edge of this wood.” That division having been shifted to the right since the previous engagement. “Overrun their camp. That shouldn’t be difficult. They appear to be holding it with raw recruits. Once you clear the camp, reform and advance so as to strike the enemy left wing, rear, and reserve. Don’t begin your initial attack until I do have the enemy solidly engaged.”

“One more thing. I want you both to leave your main standards with me. If the enemy sees those maybe they’ll think I’m concentrating everything in one place.”

He paused. There were no questions. All this had been planned out before. The necessity now was renewed vigor.

“I’ll go in at midmorning. Behind scouts and skirmishers. Make sure your men are well-provisioned. I’ll personally strangle any officer who fails to see to the welfare of his soldiers.”

The Great General’s attitude was well-known, if not universally applauded by his officers. Corruption was so deeply ingrained in Taglian culture that even after more than a generation of cultural collision and occasional bloody change there were still those who failed to understand that theft from the men you commanded was not an acceptable way to supplement your income.

Whatever their differences, the Black Company, the Protector, the Great General, all the northerners who gained power, strained to increase the efficiency of their regime by rooting out graft and corruption. More than anything else, that made the outsiders incredibly alien.

“Aridatha. Wait. I’ve had a thought. If things go well it’s likely Saraswati will break the enemy before you can get into position behind them.”

“I was thinking of leaving during the night and going into hiding inside the Grove of Doom.”

“Good idea. What I’m thinking, then, is, you should come out in a long line so you can catch most of the fugitives running southward. I’m especially interested in catching the kind of people who go underground and five years later turn up with a whole damned new army.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Mogaba growled. That was a promise he hated. It sounded like an excuse being put into place beforehand. Though Aridatha was never the sort to excuse his own shortcomings. He was more the sort who found good reasons why others failed.