Howling with pain, he scrambled up again and ran toward the nearest burst. The egg had come to earth on the Avenue of Duchess Matalista in front of an eatery where a supper for two cost about a week of Bembo's pay. It had blown a hole in the cobblestones and had blown in the front of the restaurant; he didn't know how the roof was staying up.

The egg had also blown in the front of the milliner's shop across the street, but Bembo didn't worry about that: the milliner's was closed and empty. Screaming, bleeding people came staggering out of the restaurant.

A woman got down on her hands and knees and vomited an expensive meal into the gutter.

Fire was beginning to lick at the exposed roof timbers. Careless of that,

Bembo dashed into the restaurant to help whoever hadn't managed to escape. Shards of glass crunched under his boots. That glass had been almost as deadly as the raw energy of the egg itself. The first person the flickering flames showed him had had his head almost sliced from his body by a great chunk that still glittered beside the corpse.

Someone farther in groaned. Bembo yanked up the table that pinned an old woman, stooped, got her arm around his shoulder, and half dragged, half carried her out to the street. "You!" he snapped to the woman who'd thrown up. "Bandage this cut on her leg.."

"With what?" she asked.

"Your kerchief, if you've got one. Your scarf there. Or cut cloth off her tunic or yours - you'll have a paring knife in your bag there, won't you?" Bembo turned to a couple of men who didn't look too badly hurt.

"You and you - in there with me. She's not the only one left inside."

"What if the roof caves in?" one man asked.

"What if an egg falls on us?" the other added. More eggs were falling.

Sticks bigger and heavier than a man could carry had been set up along some of Tricarico's ley lines. They blazed spears of light up into the sky at the Jelgavan dragons, but there weren't enough of them, not nearly enough.

That didn't matter, not to Bembo. "We'll be very unhappy," he answered. "Now come on, or I curse you for cowards."

"If you weren't a constable and immune, I'd call you out for that," growled the fellow who'd fretted about eggs.

"If you'd come without arguing, I wouldn't have had to say it," Bembo returned, and plunged back into the eatery without waiting to see whether the two men would follow. They did; he heard them kicking through the broken glass that covered the floor.

They worked manfully, once they got down to it. They and Bembo dragged out customers and servitors and, from the kitchens, a couple of cooks. As the flames began to take hold and the smoke got thicker, Bembo had to make his last trip out crawling and dragging a man after him. He couldn't breathe if he stood upright. He could hardly breathe while he crawled; his lungs felt scorched and filled with soot. The glass sliced the palms of his hands.

A horse-drawn pumper clattered up and began pouring water on the flames. Hacking and spitting up lumps of thick black phlegm, Bembo wished the crew could turn the hoses on the inside of his chest.

They were fighting a losing battle here; the eatery was going to bum.

Before long, the crew realized as much. They began playing water on the buildings to either side, neither of which had yet caught fire. Maybe they wouldn't, now. Even if they didn't, though, the water would damage whatever they held.

"I thank you, sir," the old woman Bembo had first rescued said from the sidewalk.

He reached for his hat, only to discover he wasn't wearing it. It had to be back in the eatery, which meant it was gone for good. Bembo instead, he said, "Milady, it was my duty and" - another coughing spasm cut off his words - "my duty and my honor."

"That's well said." The old woman - a noble, by her manners - inclined her head to Bembo.

He bowed again. "Milady, just hope we're giving the Jelgavans worse than we're getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we know? The Jelgavans' news sheets are bound to be telling them they're beating the stuffing out of us."

"How long have you been a constable, young fellow?" the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

Bembo wondered what was funny. "Almost ten years, milady."

The old woman nodded. "That appears to be enough to have left you a profoundly cynical man."

"Thank you," he said. She laughed out loud. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why.

With the dawn, Talsu peered down from the Bradano Mountains into Algarve. Smoke rose from the burning town of Tricarico. He smiled. His officers had assured him that Jelgava was doing far more damage to Algarve than the cowardly Algarvian air pirates were inflicting on his own kingdom.

His officers had also assured him that soon, very soon, Jelgava's ever victorious forces would sweep out of the mountains and across the plains of Algarve. The Jelgavan army had visited fire and devastation on those plains in the last months of the Six Years' War. He saw no reason why Jelgava should not do the same thing again.

He saw no reason why Jelgava should not already have done it again, in fact. All of Algarve's neighbors hated her. All of them that mattered were at war against her. They were many. She was one, and beset from east and west and south. Why, then, were his countrymen not yet out of the mountains and racing to Join hands with the Forthwegians? He scratched at his almost invisibly pale mustache, which he wore close trimmed, not in any wild Algarvian style. It was a puzzlement.

A delicious smell distracted him. Turning his head, he saw Colonel Dzirnavu's servant carrying a covered silver tray toward the regimental commander's tent. "Ha, Vartu, what have you got there?" he asked.

"His lordship's breakfast - what else?" the servant answered.

Talsu made an exasperated noise. "I didn't think it was the chamber pot," he said. "What I meant was, what will the illustrious count enjoy for his breakfast?"

"Not much, if I'm any judge," Vartu said, rolling his eyes. "But if you mean, Mat is he having for breakfast? - I've got fresh-baked blueberry tarts here, and poached eggs and bacon on toasted bread with butter sauce poured over them, and some nice ripe cheese, and a muskmelon from by the seashore. And in the pot - not a chamber pot, mind you - is tea flavored with bergamot leaves."

"Stop!" Talsu held up a hand. "You're breaking my heart." His belly rumbled. "You're breaking my stomach, too," he added.

"See what you rruiss because the blood in your veins isn't blue enough?" Vartu said. "Red blood's good enough to spill for our dear Jelgava, so it is, but it won't get you a breakfast like this at the front, no indeed. And now I've got to get moving. If the hot stuff gets cold or the cold stuff warms up, the other thing his lordship will bite off is my head."

Neither soldier had spoken loudly; the colonel's tent lay only fifteen or twenty feet away. Vartu ducked inside. "Curse you, what took you so long?" Dzirnavu shouted. "Are you trying to starve me to death?"

"I humbly crave pardon, your lordship," Vartu answered, abject as a servant had to be in the face of a noble's wrath. Talsu jammed his own face against the brownish green sleeve of his uniform tunic so no one would hear him giggle. Dzirnavu was as round as a kickball. He looked as if he'd take years without food to starve to death.

With the regimental commander's breakfast attended to, the cooks could get around to feeding the rest of the soldiers. Talsu lined up with the other men in tunics and trousers of the same horse-dung color as his. When he finally got up to the kettles, he held out a tin plate and a wooden cup.

One bored-looking cook plopped a ladleful of barley mush and a length of grayish sausage on the plate. Another poured sour beer into the cup.