“If my subordinates were more subordinate and less insubordinate, we should not have these problems,” Thraxton said. Roast-Beef William coughed gently, from him as strong as a string of oaths from another man. Thraxton turned his scowl on the other officer, but the man called Old Reliable looked back out of steady and innocent eyes, and Thraxton was the first to look away. He gave a slow, reluctant nod. “As you say, William. The point is well taken.”

“Thank you, sir,” Roast-Beef William said. “And I know one other thing we should do.”

“And that is?” Thraxton’s voice got some of its usual rasp back. If Roast-Beef William presumed to try to give him orders…

But the wing commander said, “Sir, we should pray to the Thunderer to keep the weather good, so we can go on watching Rising Rock,” and Count Thraxton found he had to nod.

Earl James of Broadpath and his men marched south and west out of Rising Rock in the midst of a driving rain. The autumn had been mild up till then. “Just my luck,” he muttered under his breath, as rain beat down on his broad-brimmed traveler’s hat. “Just my fornicating luck.”

“Sir?” said an aide riding nearby.

“Never mind,” James replied. “Just talking to myself. In the temper I’m in, I’m the only one I’m fit to talk to.”

His heavy-boned unicorn squelched along. When the rain first started falling, he hadn’t been sorry; it would lay the dust on the road. But, of course, more than a little rain was worse than none at all when it came to movement, for it quickly turned roads to bogs. This one was well on the way. And James of Broadpath rode at the head of the army. Once some thousands of footsoldiers had churned up the mud, how would the asses and unicorns hauling supplies and siege engines fare? None too well, and James knew it.

“Glideway,” he said, again more to himself than to anyone else. “We have to get to the glideway port at Grover. Once we do, we’ll be all right.” Grover was thirty miles away: less than two days’ march in good weather, considerably more than two days’ march through muck.

How much more, James soon discovered. His weary, filthy men got into the little town in northwestern Franklin on the fourth day out from Proselytizers’ Rise. He rode to the glideway port there. At the port, he discovered that none of the glideway carpets he’d been promised were anywhere about.

At that point, he lost his temper and began bellowing like a bull just before a sacrifice. His roars routed out a buck-toothed clerk who looked like nothing so much as a skinny, frightened rabbit. The poor clerk’s terror meant nothing to James. “Where in the seven hells are my carpets, you son of a bitch?” he roared.

“Sir, I don’t know anything about them,” the clerk quavered.

“Well, the Lion God rip your throat out, why don’t you?” James said. “If the fornicating glideway clerk doesn’t know where the devils my stinking carpets are, who the devils does?”

“All glideway carpets in the military district of the Army of Franklin are under the personal control of Count Thraxton, sir,” the clerk said.

James of Broadpath clapped a hand to his forehead. “He was supposed to send them here, or enough to let my ragtag and bobtail deliver some sort of attack on Whiskery Ambrose up in Wesleyton. How in the hells am I suppose to deliver any sort of attack on him if half my men drown in the mud before we get to Wesleyton?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir,” the glideway clerk said primly. “No, sir, I wouldn’t know about that at all. If you want to find out about that, sir, you’d have to take it up with Count Thraxton his own self.”

“I thought I bloody well had, before I started for this miserable, stinking hole in the ground of a village,” James snarled. The clerk looked furious-in a rabbity sort of way-but James was too irate himself to care a copper for his feelings.

At that moment, a scryer came up to James and said, “Excuse me, your Excellency, but I’ve just received a message from Count Thraxton’s scryers, inquiring as to where we are and asking why we haven’t made better progress toward Wesleyton.”

James of Broadpath stared at the sorcerer. His expression must have been something to behold, for the fellow drew back in alarm. “He complains that we haven’t got closer to fornicating Wesleyton?” he whispered.

“Yes, sir,” the scryer answered.

“Oh, he does, does he?” From a whisper, Earl James’ voice rose to a deep-throated rumbling roar, rather like the precursor to an earthquake, that sent both the scryer and the glideway clerk backing away from him in alarm not far from terror. “He does, does he? Why, that…” James proceeded to express his detailed opinion of Thraxton’s ancestry, likely destination, and intimate personal habits-matters on which he had nothing save opinions, but those strongly held ones.

“Shall I… respond that we’re doing the best we can, sir?” the scryer asked when his fulminations finally faded.

“No, by the gods,” James said, his outrage kindling anew. “Get your fornicating crystal ball. I’ll tell Thraxton what I think of him and his nagging myself, to the hells with me if I don’t.”

“Sir-”

“Get it!” James shouted, and the scryer fled. When he returned, he had the crystal ball with him. “Good,” James said grimly. “Now get me that two-faced son of a bitch, so I can talk with him face to face to face.” He laughed at his own wit.

Looking distinctly green, the scryer murmured the spells he needed to activate his crystal ball. An image appeared in it. It wasn’t Thraxton’s, but that of his chief scryer. James’ scryer spoke briefly to him, then said, “Count Thraxton is not available, your Excellency. He’s plotting strategy with Roast-Beef William and with Duke Cabell. The scryer says it’s urgent.”

Elbowing aside his own scryer, James stared at the fellow who served Count Thraxton. “Plotting, indeed,” he ground out. “He is plotting against me, and you’re welcome to tell him I said so.”

“Your Excellency, I am certain you are mistaken,” the scryer back by Proselytizers’ Rise said smoothly. “Count Thraxton wishes you every success.”

“Count Thraxton wishes I would jump off a cliff,” James of Broadpath retorted. “Why did he send me out without any proper help on the glideways here?”

“I’m sure that’s an oversight on the part of someone else,” Thraxton’s scryer said.

“Are you? I’m not,” James answered. “Who controls routing for the glideways in this part of the kingdom? His Grace does, his Grace and no one else.”

“Why would he want you to fail, your Excellency?” the scryer asked. “There’s no sense to it, as you’ll see if you think about things for just a moment.”

“No, eh?” James sounded thoroughly grim. “Why would he send me forth without arranging the glideways unless he wanted me to fail? He has to know I need them; whatever else he is, he’s no fool. And why would he order me to hurry without giving me any possible chance to do so? To put himself on the record as hustling me along, that’s why. Of course, nothing about the glideways is on the record, is it?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir,” the scryer answered. “I am not privy to Count Thraxton’s thoughts.”

A lot of those thoughts surely went through him to the officers Thraxton commanded. Even so, James had trouble getting angry at the fellow. He would not have wanted a scryer who blabbed his ideas to the world at large. Still… He took a long, deep, angry breath. “You tell Count Thraxton for me that I want to see enough glideway carpets to move my army get here to Grover pretty gods-damned quick. And you tell him that, without those carpets, I can’t move against Whiskery Ambrose in Wesleyton. I can’t, and I won’t. Have you got that?”

“I certainly do, your Excellency,” Thraxton’s scryer said. “The count will hear of this.”