"Not quite nothing but," Pterocles answered, "but illusion's no small part of them. A lot of spells make illusions turn real."

"How can you say for sure what's real?" Grus enjoyed throwing Pterocles' words back at him. He enjoyed it even more when the wizard turned red and spluttered and didn't answer.

"I'll tell you what I want to be real," Hirundo said. "I want one more good victory against the Menteshe to be real before we get to Yozgat. If we beat them again – do a proper job of beating them, I mean – they won't be so hot to come breathing down our necks."

"Do you want to provoke them into attacking us, then?" Grus asked. "Can we set an ambush for them?"

"I'd love to try," Hirundo said. "I'll laugh if we can bring it off, too. It's what the cursed nomads always try on us. By the gods, paying them back in their own coin would be sweet."

"Yes, by the gods. By the gods in the heavens," Grus said. They hadn't been invoked much in these parts lately. "Not by…" He let that hang. Hirundo nodded. He understood what Grus wasn't saying. Grus went on, "Let's look for a chance to do that and see how it goes."

"No guarantees," Hirundo said. "A lot will depend on the terrain and the weather and how we bump into the nomads or they bump into us."

"I understand. It's always that way," Grus said, and the general nodded again. Grus wished Hirundo hadn't mentioned the weather. So far this campaigning season, it had been good. Hirundo reminded him it didn't have to stay that way.

He worried about summertime rain. That could turn the roads to porridge and slow the Avornans to a crawl. Summer rain this far south wasn't just unseasonable; it would be the next thing to miraculous. Of course, that didn't necessarily stop the Banished One.

Rain, though, wasn't what the army met a few days later. A hot wind blew out of the south, a hot wind full of clouds of dust and sand. The grit got into Grus' eyes. He tied a scarf over his mouth and nose to keep from swallowing and breathing so much of it. That helped, but less than he wished it would have.

All through the army, men were doing the same thing. Some of them tried to tie cloths over the animals' mouths and nostrils, too. The horses and mules didn't like that. Neither did the oxen drawing the supply wagons.

Grus thought about asking Pterocles whether the sandstorm was natural or came from the Banished One. He shrugged, coughing as he did so. What was the point? Natural or not, the army had to go through it. Pterocles couldn't do anything about the weather.

It went on and on and on. Swirling dust blotted the sun from the sky. From blue, the dome overhead went an ugly grayish yellow. Hirundo finally had to order the army to halt. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty," he shouted above the howl of the wind, "but I don't have any idea which way south is anymore."

"Neither do I," Grus admitted. "I just hope this dust isn't going to bury us."

"You're full of cheerful ideas, aren't you?" Hirundo said.

"Cheerful?" Grus echoed. "Yes, of course." He rubbed at his eyes, not that it did much good.

The storm was still roaring when the sun set. It got darker, but not a lot. The soldiers did what they could for themselves and their animals, settling down to make the best night of it they could. Grus would have liked to get inside his pavilion, but he wasn't sure it would stay up in the gale. He swaddled himself in a blanket and hoped for the best. When he fell asleep, he surprised himself.

He woke up some time in the middle of the night. He needed a moment to figure out why. Something was missing – the wind wasn't ravening like a hungry wild thing. "Gods be praised," he muttered, even if he doubted they'd had anything to do with it. He yawned, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Light the color of blood and molten gold pried his eyelids open. If this wasn't the most spectacular sunrise he'd ever seen, he had no idea which one from years gone by would top it. And the brighter it grew, the stranger grew the landscape it showed. Dust and grit lay over everything, smoothing outlines and dulling colors. The world might have been reduced to yellow-gray.

When he got to his feet, dust spilled off him and made a little cloud around him. Soldiers were stirring, and stirring up the dust. Grus coughed. He spat – and spat brown. He felt as though he were covered with bugs. He might have been, but suspected it was grit and dust instead.

Hirundo uncocooned himself from his blanket and looked around. Even though he'd been entirely wrapped up, his face and beard were the same yellow-gray that filled the rest of the landscape. Seeing that, Grus suspected he was also the color of dirt – almost the color of a corpse.

As Grus had, Hirundo spat. He looked revolted when his spittle too proved brown. "Well," he said in tones of forced – and false – gaiety, " that was fun."

"Wasn't it just?" Grus said. "A little more, and it would have swallowed us up."

"Not the way I plan to go." Hirundo coughed again. Dust spurted from his nostrils when he did.

"And how do you plan to go?" Grus inquired. The inside of his mouth tasted like dirt. He swigged from the canteen of watered wine he wore on his belt, then spat again. Even after that, his mouth still felt gritty.

"Me?" Hirundo grinned. "I intend to be murdered by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three. It will be a great scandal, I promise." He sounded as though he looked forward to it.

"There are worse ways to go," Grus said. "I'll help spread the gossip after it happens, I promise."

"Oh, who'd listen to you?" Hirundo said scornfully. "You'd be nothing but an old man."

They both laughed. Part of the laughter was relief. They'd brushed up against disaster with the sandstorm, and they both knew it. Grus stared south. The haze and dust still floating in the air hid the Argolid Mountains. Was the Banished One pleased with what he'd just accomplished, or was he disappointed he hadn't managed more? He still might manage more, of course (Grus assumed the storm was his, for it seemed too nasty to have been natural). He might send more wind and dust and sand. Or…

"We'll need scouts out," Grus said. "The Menteshe may try to pay us an early morning visit."

"So they may," Hirundo agreed. "Don't worry, Your Majesty. I'll take care of it."

By then, lots of Avornans were coughing and spitting and rubbing their eyes and cursing the storm and putting more dust in the air every time they moved. When scouts trotted off to take their positions all around the army, their horses kicked up more dust still. "How will we see the Menteshe even if they're there?" Grus wondered.

"I don't know." Hirundo didn't sound worried. "We'll see them the same way they see us, I expect."

"The same way..? Oh," Grus said. Any nomads close enough to attack would also have been close enough to get caught in the storm themselves.

Still more dust surrounded the soldiers as they began to move. They went right on grumbling and coughing and wheezing. Grus wondered what the storm had done to the crops growing around here. True, grain came up in the winter in these parts, to take advantage of what rain fell. But vines and olives and almonds grew through the summertime. Could they ripen the way they should if they were covered in dust? Could livestock find enough to eat if sand and dust buried grass? He didn't know. Before long, he would start finding out.

Pterocles had a similar thought. Steering his mule up close to Grus' horse, the wizard said, "I wonder what the thralls make of all this."

"Probably about what their cattle do," Grus answered. "You're talking about the ones that hadn't been freed?"

"Well, yes," Pterocles said. "The others are just… people."

"Just people," Grus repeated. It wasn't that Pterocles was wrong. It was, in fact, that he was right, and that being right was so important. "Who would have thought a couple of years ago that we would have freed thralls by the thousands? You've done something marvelous, you and all the other wizards."