None of them considered the time wasted. As long as they were going to reach are agreement at all, they had to do a good job. As the count put it, «We're forging a weapon to use against the Wizard. No sensible man will ever trust a weapon that's not well made.»

At last the job was done. The count was escorted home by a squad of Blade's guards and Serana led Blade to their bed. He went, but afterward asked, «Do you think we should go on sharing this room? If you are to be married to Zemun Bossir after the war-«

«Zemun Bossir will have a good and loyal wife, after I have married him,» Serana replied. «Until our wedding day, I am by law, custom, and my own choice my own mistress. If Zemun Bossir worries about what I do now, he will only waste strength he will certainly need against the Wolves.»

Then her lips began their urgent journey back and forth across Blade's body. As he lay back under their caresses, Blade thought of her last remark, and how true it was. Sooner or later, this unnatural condition that was neither war nor peace would come to a bloody end, and the Wolves would come to Morina.

Blade went up on the city's walls every morning before dawn, to watch for the smoke on the horizon and the glint of sunlight on armor that would tell him the Wolves had come. Sometimes Zemun Bossir accompanied Blade, sometimes Count Drago. Young Zemun was so happy over being heir-apparent to Morina that he was quite prepared to forgive Blade for almost anything.

«After all, Blade.» he said, «I owe you far too much to feel the jealous rage of a child. I know what sort of captivity Serana endured in the Wizard's castle. I shall make her forget it all when I am duke. I shall do anything to make her forget it, anything.»

«You show a good heart, Zemun. I wish you luck, and both of you much happiness.»

Privately Blade sometimes thought Zemun Bossir was so enthusiastic about becoming Duke of Morina that he sometimes forgot about the coming war. Still, he seemed a good choice to rule the new Morina. He was brave, intelligent, thoroughly honest, and with a real gift for winning popularity. His company of guards would follow him through fire and water. He was also impulsive, enthusiastic, and talkative, but he'd get over that in a few more years-if he or anyone else in Morina lived that long.

The Wolves would come. It was impossible that the Wizard would let his power simply dissolve without putting up a fight to save it. So where were the Wolves?

Count Drago offered part of the answer. «I've read the history of every fight the Wolves have been in since I was born,» he said. «I've never read of their being out for more than five or six days at a time. I've never heard of their laying siege to a city, or even using war engines in the field. Did you see any stone-throwers, wagons, tents, things like that, when you were in the castle?»

«No.»

«Then the Wizard probably doesn't have any. He's like all soldiers. When they've fought one kind of war for three generations, they forget there's any other kind.

«The Wolves have been raiders, not campaigners, for three generations. They'll have to build everything they need for a long campaign, then learn how to use it, then march on Morina. The sky-bridges won't put them down right outside our gates this time. They'll have to ride, probably for several days, and our scouts will be watching them every foot of the way.»

The count rambled on about the coming campaign against the Wolves for quite a while. Blade began to realize that one problem when the Wolves did come would be keeping Count Drago out of the fighting. His eighty years had slowed his limbs, but they hadn't dimmed his eye or his fierce hatred of the Wolves.

Blade hoped the count was right about the Wolves having to learn to become campaigners instead of raiders. If he was, Morina might have more time than Blade had dared hope. Every extra day would make it a tougher nut for the Wolves to crack.

No one in Morina was wasting any time. The weaponsmakers worked as if the Wolves were already at the gates.

The forges smoked and the toots clattered morning, noon, and night. Already there were weapons for two thousand men. In another two weeks there would be enough to arm five thousand, which was nearly every man in Morina fit for war.

The men already armed were training hard, under Blade's leadership and the guidance of reliable men from Zemun Bossir's company of guards. The city's guards had been policemen and firemen as much as soldiers, but they made fairly good drillmasters. Compared to Blade, the Wizard had an easy job. He merely had to make raiders into campaigners. Blade had to make an army of men who hadn't fought or expected to fight for three generations.

Other things were being done, to make sure Morina would not be taken by surprise or have to fight alone. Mounted patrols scoured all the roads, stopping and searching travellers to make sure the Wizard's agents could not place new skybridge crystals close to the city. Working parties prepared ambush sites and roadblocks Blade was taking a leaf from the Wizard's own book, setting up a defense in depth to hammer at the Wolves long before they reached the city's walls.

The most important riders were those who pounded along the roads with Blade's messages to the other cities and towns of Rentoro. Rise, he told them. Rise and be free! The Wizard has never had real magic, and now he has no secrets either. I know how we may defeat him, and free Rentoro from his grasp.

Some of the cities and towns rose against the Wizard even more enthusiastically than Morina. The Wizard's spies fled or died horribly, blacksmiths sweated forging spearpoints and helmets, and search parties scoured the countryside for skybridge crystals.

There were many ways to destroy the crystals, or at least make them useless. They could be thrown into a fire hot enough to melt them, crushed to powder under heavy stones, or simply picked up and carried off. Blade heard of one particularly ingenious trick used by an outlaw leader in the far north. The leader's name was Arno, and he wore a black mask to conceal a face twisted by a birth injury.

He picked up the crystals of a sky-bridge, took them to a nearby lake, and carefully dropped them into the deepest part of it. Blade wondered what would happen when the Wizard tried to activate that particular sky-bridge. Would the crystals simply not work? Would they explode, or perhaps flood the Great Hall? Even better, might the Wolves get through, to find themselves drowning thirty feet down? Blade applauded Arno's ingenuity and hoped he would be able to meet the man before he had to leave Rentoro.

Some of the scouting parties found only patrols of Wolves. Although the Wizard was not yet attacking Morina, he was not abandoning the countryside to his enemies. Small raiding parties of Wolves charged in and out of those skybridges that were still open. They intercepted messengers, ambushed scouts, attacked undefended farms and villages in the old style. For the moment the Wizard was using random terror against his enemies, since he had nothing else.

The Wolves did not have everything their own way. Now they faced Rentorans who'd lost most of their terror of the Wizard's magic, and knew that the Wolves were only men like themselves, no matter whom they served. The Rentorans did not fight very skillfully, and many of them died. But they fought bravely, desperately, and viciously, and a good many Wolves also died.

Meanwhile, the cities and towns were raising armies. The ones in rebellion against the Wizard were preparing to defend themselves against the Wolves. If they didn't have walls or moats, they were also digging ditches and building log palisades as fast as they could.

Other cities and towns were declaring themselves allies of the Wizard, and preparing armies to march with the Wolves against their neighbors. Serana cursed fluently when she heard this news, but admitted she wasn't greatly surprised.