In the end, Abivard couldn't see that it mattered much one way or the other. The village burned.

Coughing, his eyes streaming from the smoke, he rode with the rest of the incendiary party back to camp. The black column of smoke that rose from the village's funeral pyre climbed higher than the summit of Nalgis Crag. The wind whipped it and frayed it and eventually dissipated it, but the smell of the burning must surely have reached the stronghold.

Pradtak, though, made no move to surrender Smerdis.

When morning came, Sharbaraz sent Abivard out with another troop of horsemen to burn down the village next nearest to Nalgis Crag-about a farsang off to the north. A shower of arrows greeted them when they arrived. A couple of men and a horse were wounded. "Forward!" Abivard cried. The troopers rode into town full of grim determination. More arrows fell among them, wounding another horse. In this kind of fight, horses were not much use. Armored men were. Once they knocked down a few doors and killed the defenders inside, the fight went out of the rest of the people in the village.

Abivard barely kept his soldiers from slaughtering them just the same. "They had a right to fight," he insisted. "No one warned them there'd be a massacre afterward if they did. Next time, though-"

He drove the villagers out of their homes with only the clothes on their backs and a chunk of pocket bread and a wine jar each. After that, the smoke rose into the air again, a pillar even thicker and darker than the one that had gone up the day before. The troopers went about their business with a single-mindedness they hadn't shown in the other village; they wasted no time on horseplay here.

Sharbaraz nodded when Abivard told him what he had done. "That was just right, brother-in-law of mine. Tomorrow, if we need to go out tomorrow, we'll tell them they may leave with what they can carry if they offer no resistance. Otherwise, we'll treat it as war in all ways." He looked up toward Nalgis Crag stronghold. "With any luck at all, Pradtak will see he'll have no domain left if he keeps the usurper much longer."

But a village to the south went up in smoke the next day. The people there left sullenly but without fighting the King of Kings' lancers, who went out in greater force. The day after that, villagers in a fourth hamlet had to be overcome in battle-and were.

Along with the houses, vines and pistachio trees also burned. Sharbaraz had meant what he said: Pradtak might keep Nalgis Crag stronghold for a long time, but nothing in the domain except for the stronghold would be worth having once the soldiers and their torches were done.

On the fifth day, the village of Gayy, the one Sharbaraz had known of and exploited during his escape from the stronghold, was given over to the flames. Sighing, he said, "Whatever I learned about the town will have to be rewritten."

His incendiaries were about to ride out for their sixth day of devastation when a man bearing a shield of truce came down from Nalgis Crag and prostrated himself before him. After the ritual eating of dirt, the fellow said, "Majesty, may your years be many and your realm increase. If Lord Pradtak surrenders to you the person of your cousin Smerdis, will you forgive him whatever transgressions he may in your mind have committed, leave off destroying his domain, and confirm not only his safety but his tenure as dihqan here?"

"I hate to give him so much," Sharbaraz said. But when he glanced at Abivard, Abivard nodded. Sharbaraz frowned, irresolute, but finally said, "Very well. For the sake of ending this civil war, I will. Let the usurper be brought to me before noon today and all shall be as Pradtak says." The dihqan's envoy rode back toward Nalgis Crag at a gallop. Sharbaraz turned back to Abivard and said, "I may forgive, but drop me into the Void if I forget."

Abivard took that to mean Pradtak would be wise to stay up in Nalgis Crag stronghold the rest of his mortal days unless he wanted those days abruptly curtailed. The thought slid out of his mind almost as soon as it formed, overwhelmed by surging relief that the long struggle which had torn Makuran apart soon would at last be over.

He was also consumed with curiosity to learn-finally-what the man who had taken Sharbaraz's throne looked like. Long before the sun reached its high point in the sky, three men rode down from Nalgis Crag: two warriors leading a graybeard who had been tied onto a mule. Once Smerdis was in Sharbaraz's hands, the soldiers didn't wait around to learn what sort of reception they would get from the King of Kings. Like Pradtak's earlier spokesman, they galloped back toward safety.

Though Smerdis was unkempt and wearing only a dirty caftan, the family link among him, Peroz, and Sharbaraz was easy to see. He did his best to hide the fear he had to feel.

"Well, cousin, what have you to say for yourself?" Sharbaraz asked him.

"Only that I should have taken your head along with your throne," Smerdis answered. His voice was almost as mushy as that of the old woman in the village; he had lost a good many teeth.

"A mistake I will not imitate," Sharbaraz said. "But you have more spirit than I credited to you. I'll just shorten you and have done."

Smerdis nodded. Sharbaraz's officers gathered round to witness the execution. One of his men cut Smerdis' bonds and helped him off the mule. He got down on all fours and stretched out his neck for the sword. It bit. His body convulsed briefly. Had he lived as well as he died, he might have made a worthy King of Kings.

"It's over," Sharbaraz said.

Along with the wagon that carried Roshnani, the surviving horsemen who had come from Vek Rud domain, and Tanshar the fortune-teller, Abivard rode back toward his home with a company of troops from the army that had besieged Nalgis Crag stronghold. "Call them my parting gift," Sharbaraz said as he took his leave. "You may run into plainsmen along the road to your domain."

"That's so." Abivard clasped the hand of the King of Kings. The rest of Sharbaraz's army was breaking camp, too, some of the northwestern contingents to return to their home domains, some to go south to Mashiz with the King of Kings, and Ypsilantes' Videssian engineers to fare back to their native land. Abivard went on, "Majesty, I'll miss you more than I can say. After so long-"

Sharbaraz snorted. "I named these men here a parting gift, brother-in-law of mine, not a farewell gift. You have to make sure your own house is in order; I understand that. But before too long I'll want you at my side again. You know what my plans are."

Abivard glanced over toward the Videssians. None of them was in earshot. Even so, he lowered his voice: "We owe them a debt, Majesty." That was as close as he felt like coming to reproving the King of Kings.

"I know," Sharbaraz answered calmly. "A debt is exactly what it is, as if I'd had to borrow ten thousand arkets from a moneylender. I'll pay it back as I can. And once I have, do you think such a stickler as Likinios will give me no excuse to get back Makuran's own?"

"Put that way, no," Abivard said. Likinios was a very able ruler; he had seen that. But Sharbaraz was right: in trying to calculate everything beforehand, the Videssian Avtokrator left scant room for anything outside his calculations. And no man, however wise, was wise enough to foresee everything. That was for the God alone.

Sharbaraz clapped him on the back. "The God grant that all's well with your domain and your family."

"Thank you, Majesty." Abivard hesitated, then said, "Majesty, if you see your way clear to giving my sister some freedom from the women's quarters, it would mean a great deal to her."

"I know that, too," Sharbaraz said. "You need not worry there. I owe Denak far more than I owe Likinios. I shall attend to it." He laughed. "I may even make it the fashion for men to be seen with their wives. What a scandal that will be for the graybeards!" He sounded as if he relished the prospect.