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return to the
     city. Istar brooked no failure, no weakness, and what was defeat but failure and weakness?
     Rubbing his arm, bruised in dispatching a rather large and thickly armored Solamnic, a
     concerned Stormlight watched his commander. Fordus stared beyond the sullen Solamnic,
     beyond the assembled, defeated Istarians ... to a point on the horizon no man could see.
     Stormlight shivered. Fordus had gone again to that place where none of themnot even the
     bard Larken with her voice and drumcould reach him. When the sea-blue eyes fixed pale in
     the distance, sometimes all life would seem to flee from them. They glittered, then, like
     ice, like cut glass, like the salt crystals rising from the desert flats, and there was no
     warmth in their light, no heart behind the eyes' brilliance. What Fordus wanted, what he
     looked toward, Stormlight did not know. “I accept the surrender of General Josef
     Monocu-lus,” Fordus intoned by habit, the eyes of all resting rapt upon his windburnt,
     impassive face. “And I accept the surrender of his legions.” He waved his hand
     dramatically over the attendant rebels.
    “And let those who lost dear friends,” he pronounced, “console themselves that the losses
     were few and in my just and glorious cause.” For a moment his voice faded away, caught on
     a high northerly wind and carried into the mountains to lose itself in thin air and
     desolation.
    Stormlight looked at his commander sharply. Console themselves with few losses? His just
     and glorious cause? Now Fordus rose to his full height above the wounded Josef Monoculus
     and his trembling Istar-ian supporters. “And at this hour tomorrow,” Fordus continued, “I
     shall grant these men unconditional freedom.” The sea-blue eyes descended to the general,
     regarded him softly, warmly. There! Stormlight thought with a strange and sudden relief.
     Fordus is back among us. “Your arms will be ... confiscated, sir,” Fordus explained,
     quietly and kindly. “You will be allowed to keep your armor and your provisions. Steer by
     Chislev and the sunrise.” “I know how to find my way across this damned wasteland!” the
     Solamnic growled. “Then find it with my blessing,” Fordus replied. He smiled absently, and
     Larken's drum began a slow, somber march. The Istarian troopers guided their commander
     back into the circle of his men, and mournfully, the defeated legion stacked its arms
     before the inconsolable general. It would be the Games for him back in Istar. The doomed
     gladiatorial struggle against barbarian, dwarf, and Irda. The fortunes of Josef Monoculus
     had risen, had fallen. There was some moral here, some fable for the devout, the
     scholarly. But being neither bard nor cleric, Stormlight climbed to the top of the rise
     and merely watched the sun set, his thoughts lulled by the warm light on his face and by
     the steady report of Larken's drum. Fordus sat in the shadows as the sun descended. A
     barbarian youth, schooled for a year as the com-mander's orderly, untied his boots, and
     Fordus reclined broodingly, his big hands interlaced behind his head. A song to cheer you?
     Larken signed. There was a verse she had saved for this day, this victory, and she wanted
     the last of the sun for its singing. “No cheerful songs this evening, Larken,” Fordus
     murmured. The melancholy had come upon him after the armored rider had fallen. He had
     watched the dead boy for a moment, the blood-matted blond hair waving forlornly in the
     whistling, hot wind, the horse wandering lazily off down the dry creek bed. As Lunitari
     rose over the grasslands, purpling the waving grain with a slanted, bizarre light, Fordus
     brought himself back to the present. “I am tired of too easy,” he said aloud, and the bard
     cocked her head alertly, reaching for the drum. “No songs about Fordus Firesoul tonight,”
     he said. Larken nodded. “Sing of Huma,” Fordus