He had to nerve himself before asking Alva. Partly, that was not wanting to distract the sorcerer. Partly, it was… Hesmucet would have hesitated to call it fear, but he would have hesitated to call it anything else, either.

When at last he did put the question to the mage, Alva smiled an unpleasant smile. “If you have trouble telling, sir, think how much more trouble the traitors must have. Often enough, an illusion you can’t tell from the real thing is as good as the real thing.”

Hesmucet nodded. He’d heard the like from other sorcerers, too. But he said, “I want a straight answer, if you don’t mind.”

“And if I do?” But Alva seemed to think twice about the wisdom of twitting a fierce-faced lieutenant general. “Well, sir, to tell you the truth, most of it’s illusion. Most, but not quite all. Some of the traitors up there on the hillside are really roasting, and that makes them all thoughtful.”

“I can see how it would,” Hesmucet said. “It’d make me thoughtful, that’s for gods-damned sure. Now-what can they do about it?”

“Cook,” Alva said happily. Hesmucet laughed.

But Thraxton the Braggart wasn’t the only mage the northerners had. Before long, the flames faded. Hesmucet wondered how many men they’d seared. Not enough for his purposes: he saw that quite soon. Shouting King Avram’s name, his own men charged the enemy’s trenches on Funnel Hill. They charged-and, not for the first time that day, they were driven off with heavy loss.

Now Alva sounded indignant: “Why can’t the traitors just panic and flee?”

“Because they’re Detinans, same as we are,” Hesmucet answered, “and because they’re a pack of stubborn bastards, too, maybe even more than we are. Would you like to try to stand up to the might of most of the kingdom when all you had to help you was the north?”

“I never thought about it like that, sir,” Alva said. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re traitors, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, they’re traitors, all right,” Hesmucet said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not brave men. I don’t think I’ve ever seen braver.”

“Or fighting for a worse cause,” Alva remarked.

“Splitting the kingdom, you mean? Of course,” Hesmucet said. Alva stirred beside him. Before the mage could speak, Hesmucet went on, “If you aim to talk about the blonds, I’m going to tell you something first. What I’m going to tell you is, I don’t much care about them one way or the other. If you want to think they’ll make good Detinans, go ahead. I have my doubts. But I obey my king, and my king is King Avram. I haven’t got any doubts at all about that.”

Alva eyed him as if he’d never seen him before. “You are a very… peculiar man, aren’t you, sir?”

“Thank you,” Hesmucet said, which only seemed to confuse the mage further. He added, “What I am right now, thank you very much, is an angry man. We aren’t going to take that stinking hill. You’ve done everything you could-you’ve been splendid, Alva, and that’ll go into my report-but we aren’t. And we needed to. This whole army will have to work harder because we didn’t.”

“Don’t you worry about it, sir,” Alva said. “We’ll lick them.”

“How can you be so sure?” Hesmucet asked. “You’re the one who said the gods don’t worry about us so much as we think.”

“Even so,” Alva said.

“Well, then?” Hesmucet growled. He knew he sounded impatient. As far as he could see, he could hardly sound any other way. The fight on Funnel Hill wasn’t going the way he wished it were.

“There’s more of us, and we’ve got more engines,” Alva said. “If we lose in spite of that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

“General Bart says the same thing,” Hesmucet replied. “He’s right about the war. I’m pretty sure about that. But I don’t know whether he’s right about this fight here-and right this minute, this fight here is all that counts.”

Lieutenant General George was not happy with the role General Bart had assigned to his army. The soldiers General Guildenstern had formerly commanded were making what amounted to a noisy demonstration against Proselytizers’ Rise. Even if Bart hadn’t spelled it out in so many words, their assignment was to keep Thraxton the Braggart’s men busy in the center while Fighting Joseph and Hesmucet won glory on the wings.

Bart’s orders did read, If possible, your force shall scale the heights of Proselytizers’ Rise and expel the enemy therefrom. “I like that,” George said to Colonel Andy. “I truly like that. If the gods themselves attacked Proselytizers’ Rise from below, could they carry that position?”

“Sir, I…” His aide-de-camp spoke with all due deliberation, and with malice aforethought: “Sir, I doubt it.”

“So do I,” Doubting George said morosely. “By the Thunderer, so do I.”

“General Bart doesn’t think this part of the army can really fight,” Andy said. “He doesn’t think we’re worth anything.”

“I’m very much afraid you’re right,” George said. “And, as long as he gives us impossible positions to try to take, all he has to do is see that we haven’t taken them to get all his assumptions proved for him.”

“It isn’t fair,” Andy said. “It isn’t even close to fair.”

“Well, there I would have to agree with you.” George raised a forefinger. “Now don’t get me wrong. I want this whole great force to whip Count Thraxton. That comes first, and I’ve said so many times. But I don’t want my men, so many of whom fought like heroes by the River of Death even though we lost, I don’t want them slighted.”

“I should say not, sir,” Andy replied. “It’s a reflection on them, and it’s also a reflection on you.”

Privately, Doubting George agree with that. Publicly… He said what he’d been saying: “No one man’s part is all that important. But I think we could serve the kingdom better with different orders.”

“Do you want to complain to Bart?” Andy asked. “It might do some good.”

“Unfortunately, I doubt that,” George said. “It wouldn’t make the commanding general change his mind, and it would get me a reputation as a whiner, which is not the reputation I want to have.”

Pulling the brim of his hat down lower over his eyes, he watched his men doing their best to go forward in the face of formidable odds. The eastern slope of Proselytizers’ Rise was very high and very steep. No one could reasonably be expected to get close to it, let alone scale it with an enemy waiting at the top.

But, as long as George’s men kept trying, Thraxton couldn’t move any of his own soldiers away from Proselytizers’ Rise to Sentry Peak or Funnel Hill. We’d be a proper fighting army if Bart would let us, George thought. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. As long as the battle is won, how doesn’t much matter. And there will be credit to go around.

And if the battle isn’t won, where will the blame land? He imagined coming before the panel of Avram’s ministers empowered to review the conduct of the war. He imagined some crusty, white-haired pen-pusher rasping, “You were requested and required to drive the traitors from this place called Proselytizers’ Rise. Would you care to explain to us how you failed to carry out your duty?”

He wouldn’t be able to. He knew he wouldn’t be able to. If the king’s ministers saw the ground, they might possibly begin to understand. Without seeing the ground? Not a chance, he thought. Not a single, solitary chance, not in any one of the hells. All they would see was that he’d got an order and failed to carry it out. And that panel was full of vindictive souls. They would remember he was a Parthenian. They would forget he was called the Rock in the River of Death. And they would, without the tiniest fragment of doubt, kill his soldierly career.

By all the gods, we’d better win.

Seeing where he was, seeing what lay ahead of him, seeing what his orders were, he had to rely on Fighting Joseph to his right and Lieutenant General Hesmucet to his left. He wasn’t going to win the battle by himself. He hated that. Relying on others came no easier to him than it did to most Detinans. If he had to do something, he wanted to be in charge of it. But this battle was too big to make that possible. Come on, Fighting Joseph. Make them run.