How to engage Dardas. Not Weisel. No, Weisel was no imitator after all.

Incredible ... this war of magic. How historically significant it all was.

Torran Flats was the site of one of Dardas's greatest victories some two hundred and fifty years ago. An army had stood against his forces. The leader was a rival Northland warlord who had some knowledge of battle tactics. He had arrayed his troops to draw Dardas's warriors into a trap. It was a fairly cunning ambush, relying on flanking units that remained out of sight until the crucial moment.

Dardas of course didn't take the bait. He outflanked the flankers and cut a butchering swath through

the enemy army, the remains of which he absorbed into his own forces.

Praulth's counsel to Cultat was to reconstruct this very same battle scenario. Cultat should array his forces (whatever forces he could or had managed to raise) to duplicate the placement of that ancient warlord's troops. Weisel— Dardas—would recognize the "trap" and enact the same outflanking maneuver.

It was an artifice, of course. The Felk, when they moved to outflank, would be spread out, separated. There was unavoidable vulnerability there. A decisive forward thrust at the right time and place could not be successfully defended against. The Felk could be slashed in two.

Praulth knew this. She had previously studied the Battle of Torran Flats. She had debated it exhaustively with other war studies students. She had reenacted it, on paper. Dardas was a dazzling war commander, likely the best that history had to offer. But he wasn't infallible—particularly when his enemy was armed with such intimate knowledge of his strategies and techniques.

She found the door to their chamber unlocked, Xink still awake inside.

"I told you," she said, hearing how inert her voice sounded, "I like that door locked, always."

"Sorry."

She removed her robe. Leaving the faculty compound, she had seen first light in the sky. The coming day would be overcast.

"How is Master Honnis?" Xink asked.

She dropped herself onto the bed. "He died. Come to bed with me."

He stood hesitantly from the chair where he was sitting. This time it was Praulth who didn't meet his eyes. She merely waited to feel the comfort of his body. She needed that solace now. Her role in the Felk war was done.

RADSTAC (4)

THE BANDITS HAD fast horses that had the memories of secret trails through the scrub and woods. Here and there they crossed a road, empty, the merchant caravans that were the bandits' prey long gone. The summer, Radstac had learned, had been a poor one for this professional band The short, heavily muscled bandit chief Anzal opined that this buggering Felk war had ruined business for her and her kind, perhaps permanently.

It was possible, Radstac mused. This was no simple Isthmus tussle between feuding city-states. If the Felk remade this entire land in their image, they would have no more enemies. All would be Felk. And so the Isthmus would no longer be a reliable source of petty wars in which she could fight.

A mercenary needed wars. And she needed her mansid

She peeled one away from its wax paper and bit off half She was, inevitably, building up a tolerance to the painstakingly cultivated narcotic. Fortunately the batch that Deo had procured for her was particularly potent. The fearsome ache that sang through her teeth now was evidence enough of that.

She had not dismounted her horse to take her dose. It was done in the saddle, her black mount and those of the twelve bandits keeping up a pounding pace through the wilderness.

Deo rode at her side. He made no complaints about the punishing speed at which they were moving. Barely a meal break in the day, scarcely two watches of sleep in the night. Northward. To the Felk. As fast as possible.

For Radstac this was decidedly different from being loosed on a battlefield to hack at some arbitrary enemy. A new role. Bodyguard. Escort. Protector. It was truly a shame, then, that her charge was

doomed.

She neatly ducked the gnarled elbow of a branch as the trail suddenly narrowed. The bandits rode both ahead and behind.

"How far from Trael are we, do you suppose?" the Petgrad noble grunted, obviously feeling the soreness and cramped muscles of their prolonged riding.

"Are we going there after all?" Radstac asked drolly.

"No."

Simple, toneless. Yet she heard the regret there, the finality. The mansid was rapidly sharpening her perceptions. Deo was still waiting for an answer.

She said, "I believe we are passing or past the city already." The bandits, by her calculations, had been taking their group just east of Trael.

"Another day or two, in that case, until we reach the Felk."

Then what? But Radstac left the retort unsaid. She hadn't been hired to dissuade this man from his goal. His scheme to infiltrate the vast mass of the Felk army and murder its commander, however, was probably just a vague fantasy in his mind.

Of course, he might change his plans at the last moment. When he saw the naked reality of what he was facing. When his death was there waiting for his next forward step.

Radstac, despite years of seeing men and women lose their lives in battle, hoped Deo would recant. This was senseless. A waste.

She eyed Deo sidelong, his handsome rugged profile. A face of heavy bones. Fatigue in those blue eyes. Being born into the vast privileges of the nobility hadn't ruined his honor, his sense of responsibility. She wondered—the thought sharp and mans «/-inspired—if he would have in fact made a better premier of Petgrad than Cultat.

Now he had recast himself as an assassin, a ready-made folk hero who would be remembered for a failed, but valiant, deed.

And she—would she be remembered by these Isthmusers? If so, it could only be as the one who had allowed the hero to meet his fate.

She didn't want it. She wanted Deo alive. Ahead, a hand flew into the air among the trees and bramble. Anzal, on the lead horse. She was a very able leader, Radstac judged. Her band was loyal. Yet the full dozen had been purchased with Deo's promissory note.

Radstac lunged for Deo's reins, even as she nimbly drew her own mount to a halt. But Deo had seen the signal, too. The whole band was stopping, hooves clambering, dust roiling through the trees.

Her hand fell to her sword. If there was to be a fight, it wouldn't be the first one she had fought while under the influence of mansid. It wouldn't be the tenth. Her eyes darted all around, ears tuned sharply. Nothing came out of the dust.

The bandits were silent, weapons at the ready. At the front of the pack, Anzal was standing in her stirrups, peering at something through the trees that Radstac—maddeningly—couldn't see. Not even the leaf half she'd chewed helped. But this territory belonged to these bandits; they knew it intimately, and they knew when something wasn't right. Or so it seemed.

Deo sat calmly in the saddle.

Finally Anzal came down from hers. Murmuring softly to the others in the band, she walked back down the line. On foot she barely came up to Radstac's kidskin boot.

"Someone's encamped," the bandit chief said quietly. Her eyes indicated the direction through the woods.

"An army?" Radstac asked. Had they reached the Felk faster than expected? She didn't like the thought.

"Smaller. A lot smaller." Anzal went to tell the rest.

Scouts, thought Radstac, though the camp might be anything, including a band of rival bandits. But instinct, when it was honed by so many hard-bitten years, was to be trusted.

They all dismounted.

"Why don't we go around?" Deo asked, but he spoke . the question mildly. Anzal had returned.