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tricks.
    What looked like a great black boot sole blotted out the sky. Its heel descended swiftly. For an instant Shih-ka’i pictured himself as a bug about to be crushed.
    He loosed a spell.
    The air whined with the sound of a thousand giant whetstones scraping steel, then the cracking of a million tiny whips. He looked up. The boot had vanished.
    “Get down there and carve those people up before they come alive again!” he thundered.
    He did not wait to see if his orders were carried out. He closed his eyes and reentered the realm of spell. He seized one, pictured himself hurling a spear. He painted a big bull’s-eye on the map from the fortress wall.
    Thunder rolled across the cloudless wasteland. A flash extinguished the sun. Shih-ka’i opened his eyes. A thousand dust devils danced across the barrens like frenzied, drugged dancers, often colliding and collapsing. A few minutes later he heard a remote rumble. He smiled into his mask. “That’ll make you keep your head down.”
    He waited for several minutes, his Tervola-senses extended. Nothing came. His enemy seemed cowed.
    For the moment, he thought. Only for the moment.
    He joined his men. “We’d do better to burn the bodies,” he told Hsu Shen. “But there seems to be a shortage of wood.”
    The Tervola nodded, untouched by Shih-ka’i’s dry humor. He was a man nearly Shih-ka’i’s age, one of the old guard banished by Lord Kuo. He too remembered the Demon Prince’s experiments. The dead could keep rising and rising, and could recruit their foes to their own cause. They could not be permitted to win battles. They would become stronger with each victory.
    “Send those three back to the fortress,” Shih-ka’i said, indicating the dead legionnaires. “We’ll have that necromancer of Lun-yu’s call up their shades.”
    His neck hairs prickled. He opened up, feeling for some new threat. There was none. He nodded to himself. Something was watching.
    He went up the hill and looked to the east. Somewhere out there. In all that nothing. He studied the dust raised by retreating foemen, projecting their lines of march.
    There? That heat haze hidden hump on the horizon? He oriented himself by the map. Yes. The hump would be smack in the middle of the suspect area.
    “You should have kept your head down, friend,” he murmured. “Now we see you. Now we’re coming for a closer look.”
    A wind rose. It was hard and hot and dry. The dust it carried gnawed like sandpaper. Lord Ssu-ma Shih-ka’i ignored it. He stood on that hill like a sturdy little statue, immobile and unmovable. Behind his mask his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

3
    Year 1016 afe
    Gathering of the Mighty
    T HE WOMAN FOLLOWED her husband through a corridor in Castle Krief, the Royal Palace in Vorgreberg, the capital of Kavelin, one of the Lesser Kingdoms. Her steps were plodding, rolling. An unkind person would have called her walk a waddle. She was very pregnant. And very distracted. She caught herself falling behind, hurried to catch up. Her husband paused, a slight frown crinkling his brow. “Nepanthe, what’s the matter?”
    “What? Oh, nothing.”
    “Nothing? I don’t believe it. You’ve been brooding since we got here. You’ve been dragging around puckered up like a mouth full of crabapple.” He raised her chin, peered into downcast brown eyes. “Come on.”
    Nepanthe was in her forties. A lot of hard years lay behind her, yet her long raven hair showed only traces of grey. Her figure wasn’t the wisp it had been at nineteen, but neither had lumpiness conquered all. Her face did not record all the tragedies that had dogged her life. Only her eyes betrayed the melancholy caged within.
    Those eyes were old, sad windows, aged by sorrow and pain the way glass is purpled by the endless assault of the sun. They said they would never sparkle again. They would believe in no good fortune, for luck and happiness were but pitfalls and taunts cast in one’s face by a malign fate. She had