"A useful lesson," Else said. "Pinkus, see to the dead and wounded. I need to have a few words with whoever was in charge of the scouts."

“That would be Stefango Benedocto."

Drocker tagged along behind Else. Stefango Benedocto turned out to be the son of a cousin of Honario Benedocto. He believed the tie would avert his commander's wrath. It did. There were practical limits that Else had to accept.

Grade Drocker killed me man. Without a word. In front of a hundred witnesses, some of them Benedocto. By sorcery, using a spell that made Benedocto's brain leak out through his eyes and ears. Drocker then announced, "The Special Office doesn't care who your uncle is."

"Another valuable lesson, Pipe," Pinkus Ghort said when he heard about the incident. "That should do wonders for morale." This once he was not being sarcastic.

Soon afterward Else learned that Drocker was no longer with the regiment.

Ghort said, "He just hung around until somebody gave him an excuse to make his point."

"That would be my guess."

"It worked. Even the most useless of these assholes are beginning to realize that this business is as serious as a hot poker up the shit chute."

"It won't last."

"Now you got to be the pollyanna and always look on the bright side?"

"You're not going to be happy with me no matter what, are you?”

"Ain't that my job?"

There were more skirmishes. The Calzirans were not caught unprepared again. Else knew what to expect. He prepared accordingly.

ELSE'S NIGHTS WERE NOT HAPPY. HE FELL ASLEEP WRESTLING his conscience. Logic suggested that he ought to get the crusader forces bogged down. But the city regiment was just a fraction of the invasion, and isolated. The Emperor's forces faced the hardest fighting. That was where the overseas troops had landed. The Patriarchy's closest allies were advancing down the west coast of Firaldia, but most had not yet reached Alameddine, let alone Calzir. The city regiment advanced on an inland route, with Brotherhood troops and contingents from minor principalities close behind. Confusion of command was the order.

God was the answer. God was always the answer, whatever the question might be. Else needed only to trust in the Will of God. All would turn out according to His Plan.

Else feared he was not a good Praman. He could not surrender to the will of the night. Each evening, once the regiment went into camp, Else studied maps and intelligence reports, looking for a way to fail Sublime without discrediting himself.

Had he been sent to Firaldia, expected to fail, so that failure would devour him? Which meant that Gordimer wanted…

That math did not work out.

Else thought he knew Gordimer. Gordimer was subtie enough to put a potential rival out where death might overtake him. But would he do that to Else Tage? Else could not imagine Gordimer seeing him as that serious a threat

Else chose to temporize. He would serve Brothe. How better to serve Dreanger than to soar in the councils of Dreanger's foes?

Pinkus Ghort turned up. "The Deves want to see you, Pipe."

"They say why?"

"Nope. I'm not one of their pals." Ghort glanced around, making sure no nearby shadow harbored anything unfriendly. Constant, unconscious examination of the local scene was second nature in the west.

"Not even a hint?"

"No. I assume it's news from al-Khazen. The vedettes found some Deves beside the road, bickering about whether or not to light a fire."

Ghort did a quick pantomime wherein the freezing-our-asses-off party battled the smoke-will-get-us-killed party.

The weather was miserable and getting worse. Today, there were several kinds, all cold. Bitter winds reminded Else that he had spent last winter cozily tucked into prison. Sleet became snow, falling thickly. There seemed to be a thousand ghosts behind the curtains of white, loping parallel to the road south.

The Instrumentalities of the Night became ever more active as the regiment approached al-Khazen.

The regiment had not yet moved five miles that day. But Else was in no hurry. He was out here alone with a mob of unblooded and poorly trained soldiers likely to panic at their first glimpse of the elephant. It was imperative that they avoid heavy pressure unless the Brotherhood of War joined in.

Else ordered camp to be made at a site less than an hour ahead.

He wanted to visit with the new Deves.

31. Andorayans Far from Home

Svavar hated life. Svavar hated Firaldia. Svavar hated the bandit mercenaries of Ochska Rashaki's company. Most of all, Svavar hated the Instrumentalities of the Night. He was ready to lie down and find peace.

Shagot slept twenty hours at a stretch, now. Or more. Although his spans of awareness and activity now sometimes stretched out, too. He could be furiously active for twenty hours before he collapsed into a sleep deeper than any coma.

The lone spark in the darkness of Svavar's existence was his confidence that Arlensul stalked these cruel foreign hills beside him. Each day she let him glimpse her from the corner of his eye, or slipping into shadow ahead if the band was making one of its rare moves.

The rogue Chooser wanted him to know she was there. Was she guardian or death sentence? Or just a tool? The Arlensul of myth was obsessed with vengeance.

Svavar felt no empathy for Arlensul. She wanted him filled with nothing but an abiding resentment of his horrid immortality so powerful he would be her ally when her hour came.

Asgrimmur Grimmsson was not a brilliant man. Given time, though, he worked things out. In these mountains, taking the Emperor's shilling while giving little in return, he had time to brood and hatch ideas.

Svavar, the Imperial mercenary, was in no way the Asgrimmur Grimmsson sturlanger who had tagged along after his big brother a few hundred years ago. This Svavar bestrode the boundaries of the Realm of Night, slowly becoming the thing he hated, tiny fry on the verges of the shoals of the Instrumentalities of the Night. As had been the case a million times before, never noticed by those involved, he was drifting toward becoming something more than a man.

And the exiled daughter of the All-Father was easing his path.

Not one man in a million ever learned that mere mortals might become something more. Godhood itself was there for the man who enjoyed the will and the luck.

The one in a million seldom recognized the role of chance. A great sorcerer might devote his life to grasping ascendance and kill himself in the effort. An ignorant barbarian like Svavar might succeed just by not knowing any better. Shagot's enchanted head once graced a shaman determined to become one of the Instrumentalities of the Night. The Instrumentalities already out there used him, manipulating him through his ambition, in an age when a warmer world was sloughing the rule of ice and both gods and men were simpler.

Svavar developed a sense for Arlensul's whereabouts. It worked better than his sense for Shagot. He felt the cold and the empty, the hatred and the despair, that were the essence of Arlensul the Exile. Not normally interested in the feelings of others, Svavar nevertheless wondered what it might be like to swap war stories with the daughter of the Gray Walker.

SHAGOT DEVELOPED A DISCONCERTING HABIT OF MOVING FROM the coma state to full awareness in a blink. Svavar was roasting a slow, stupid hare betrayed to him by Arlensul. Shagot popped up and roared, "What the hell is going on?" as though he had not been in another world completely for the last twenty-six hours. "There's something wrong." He ignored the two feet of snow that had not been there before.

"It's that asshole Ockska," Svavar said. "He don't want to do what he's supposed to. Rabbit will be ready in a bit." Svavar knew Shagot was not thinking about Rashaki.