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hard, peppery sausage done on all sides. His sergeant, a veteran named Magnulf, nodded approval, saying, “Very efficient, Leudast.”
    “Thank you, Sergeant.” Leudast beamed. That was high praise. He’d never heard the word efficiency before the impressers pulled him off his farm and put him in a rock-gray uniform tunic, but King Swemmel was wild for it, which meant everyone beneath Swemmel was wild for it, too. Along with learning how to slaughter the foes of Unkerlant, Leudast had learned to mouth the phrases: “Time and motion—least and fewest.”
    “Least and fewest,” Magnulf agreed around a mouthful of his own sausage. Leudast had a little trouble understanding him, but waiting to swallow would have been inefficient. Magnulf scratched his formidable nose—though it was less formidable than those of Leudast and half the other troopers in his squad—and went on, “The stinking Gongs are liable to try something tonight. That’s what we hear from prisoners, anyhow.”
    Leudast wondered how they’d squeezed out the news. Efficiently, without a doubt. His stomach did a slow flipflop as he thought about how efficient interrogators could be.
    One of his squadmates, a fellow named Wisgard who was slim by Unkerlanter standards, spoke up: “Back home, it would be midnight or so, and here the sun’s barely down.”
    “We are a great kingdom.” Magnulf thumped his broad chest with a big, thick-fingered fist. “And we are going to be a greater kingdom still, once we drive the Gongs off the mainland and over to the islands they’ve taken to infesting.”
    “That’d be easier if they hadn’t stolen this stretch of land from us during the Twinkings War,” a trooper named Berthar said.
    “Proves how important efficiency is,” Magnulf said. “A kingdom gets on fine with one king—that’s efficient. Try to put two in the space meant for one, and everything goes to pieces.”
    That wasn’t efficiency, not the way Leudast saw things. It was just common sense. If either Swemmel or Kyot had admitted he was the younger twin, Unkerlant would have been spared a lot of grief. Armies had marched and countermarched across Leudast’s farm—it had been his father’s then, for he’d been born just as the civil war was finally petering out—stealing what they could and burning a lot of what they couldn’t. The countryside had been years recovering.
    And now, when it finally had recovered, here was another war on the far frontier of the kingdom. For the life of him, Leudast couldn’t see the efficiency of that. Again, though, he could see the inefficiency of saying so.
    Captain Urgan came up to the fire and said, “Be alert, men. The Gyongyosians are planning something nasty.”
    “I’ve already warned them, sir,” Magnulf said.
    “Efficient,” Urgan said crisply. “I have more news, too: over in the far east, all of Algarve’s neighbors have jumped on her back.”
    “His Majesty was as efficient as all get-out to stand aside from that war,” Magnulf said. “Let all those tall bastards kill each other.”
    “Forthwegians aren’t tall bastards,” Berthar said with fussy precision.
    Magnulf gave him a glare undoubtedly practiced in front of a mirror. “They may not be tall bastards, but they’re bastards just the same,” the sergeant growled. “If they weren’t bastards, they wouldn’t have thrown off Unkerlanter suzerainty during the Twinkings War, now would they?”
    His tone strongly suggested that giving any kind of answer would be inefficient. Berthar didn’t need to be a first-rank mage to figure that out. He kept his mouth shut. Captain Urgan added, “And Forthweg has its own share of Kaunians. They’re tall bastards, every bit as much as the lousy Algarvians.”
    Berthar did his best to look as if he’d never been so rash as to open his mouth. Leudast wouldn’t have been so rash himself. He did ask, “Sir, any word on what the Gongs have in mind?”
    “I’m afraid not,” Urgan said.