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in good heart, now. It is only miserable skulking sorts of formations that do not relish showing off for their emperor.”
    We had barely touched on that awful moment when the Second had recoiled. They had broken at the junction of Kerchuri and Kerchuri, the two wings of the Phalanx. They had been forced back on their rear ranks, a seething sea of bronze and crimson and many of the pikes had gone up. A pikeman whose pike stabs air is of little use in the front ranks. But the Third’s Sixth Kerchuri had swung up and held the torrent of voves, and the Second had closed up, reformed, and held.
    That, as I pointed out to Nath, was the achievement.
    After the break, they had taken a fresh grasp on courage, had breathed in, and then smashed back, file by file, and the pikes had come down all in line, and they had driven the clansmen recoiling back.
    “There are many bobs to be distributed, majister.”
    “We shall make of the ceremony something special.” The men had earned their medals, and if they called them bobs in fine free-and-easy fashion, they valued them nonetheless.
    Making my excuses to the company — which had thinned now as the people went about their work — I slipped away without ceremony. The Sword Watch were there. Delia gave me a smile and I said: “I must talk to you this evening, my heart.” Whereat her face grew grave and she understood that I did not talk thus lightly. But I went out and mounted up on a fine fresh zorca, Grumbleknees, a gray, and took myself off to the flour mill.
    The original mill had burned in the Time of Troubles and the new structure incorporated refinements the wise men said would increase production as well as milling a finer flour.
    If I do not dwell on this flour mill it is precisely because this inspection was typical of so many that had to be undertaken. Everyone wanted to shine in the sight of the emperor, and although I could, had I wished, regard that as petty crawling lick-spittling behavior, I did not. We all worked for Vondium and for Vallia and my job was to make sure we all did the best we could.
    The streaming mingled lights of the Suns of Scorpio flooded down as the waterwheel groaned and heaved and turned over as the sluice gates opened and the white water poured through. I looked up. Feeding the people would be by the measure of this mill that much easier. So I looked up, and with a hissing thud a long Lohvian arrow sprouted abruptly from the wood, a hand’s breadth from my head.

Chapter Three
    Of a Meeting with Nath the Knife, Aleygyn of the Stikitches
    “Hold fast!” My bellow ripped into the air. The bows of the Sword Watch, lifted, arrows nocked, drawn back, poised. Those sinewy fingers did not release the pull on the bowstrings by a fraction.
    “There he goes!” shouted Cleitar, furious.
    We could all see the bowman who had loosed at me clambering up the outside staircase of a half-ruined building across the canal. He wore a drab gray half-cape, and his legs were bare. He carried the long Lohvian bow in his left hand, and the quiver over his shoulder was stuffed with shafts. Like the arrow that still quivered in the wood by my head, each one was fletched with feathers of somber purple.
    “A damned stikitche!” raved Cleitar. “Majister — you allow him to escape. Let us—”
    “Lower your bows.”
    The archers in the detachment of the Sword Watch obeyed.
    Targon the Tapster, his face scowling, his brilliance of uniform which lent him, like them all, a barbaric magnificence, aflame under the suns, heeled his zorca across.
    “Assassins, majister. They should be put down—”
    These officers of the Sword Watch had not always been fighting men. I think it true to say their military experience had all been gained in contact with me. We had fought together in clearing Vallia. Cleitar the Standard, a big bulky man with bitterness in his soul, had been Cleitar the Smith until the Iron Riders had sundered him forever from his family and home. Targon the