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time he spent in Kanjai, the wall between his cell and the training gym.
    He pictured it clearly, in every detail, just as he would if he were trying to use psi to move it. He gathered psi and tried to make a connection with the wall . . . and there! The connection was made.
    Next he pictured the words of the peace proposal written into the paint on the wall. He told himself this wouldn’t be that hard, that it was just like changing the colors of the holes when he used to play psiball. All he had to do was picture the words on the wall and change the color of the gray paint to . . . blue. That was his old psiball team color. He pictured the letters in neat, tidy handwriting, so it wouldn’t look too much like vandalism. He wasn’t trying to deface property; he just wanted to get the message to the general. He was just going to paint the words on the wall.
    He imagined the gray wall with the blue words on it. Held it in his mind. Every
i
dotted and every
t
crossed. When he had it clearly in his mind, he gave the order.
Be it so!
    And the words were there. He couldn’t say exactly how he knew it had worked, but he was certain it had.
    Now what?
    How soon would General Sarin respond? And how would he send his reply? The Republik used their strange-fangled devices, radios and phones, to send messages. But of course there were no radios and phones in Deliverance. Not even in the days of psi. Those kinds of things had never appealed to psi wielders, who distrusted mechanical devices, especially those designed to transmit information.
    Taemon took a deep breath. They would just have to wait and see how Sarin chose to respond. For now, he should probably report back to Hannova and tell her that the message had been sent. He slipped out the back door of Drigg’s workshop and into the afternoon heat, heading toward Hannova’s place. He took all of three steps before he stopped cold.
    A message. Gouged into the stucco of the back wall of Drigg’s house. Not neat little words printed onto the wall, but deep, slashing letters scored into the plaster:
    We will discuss the proposal. Meet us inside the tunnel in three days
.
    The quickness of the response wasn’t the only thing that disturbed Taemon. Whoever had used dominion to carve those letters had to have seen Drigg’s house, which meant that General Sarin’s spies hadn’t been restricted to the temple.

The transport vehicle jostled and bounced the young archons along the endless road. Gevri watched the billowing dust the tires stirred up, glad it wasn’t his job to drive. On a flat, featureless road like this, surrounded by eternal fields of wheat stubble, driving was the most boring job he could think of. Two soldiers sat in the front seats: one off duty and dozing, the other at the wheel.
    Three days of land travel would get them back to Kanjai, where they would stage the attack on Nathan’s people. In the old times, the army would have used planes to transport soldiers, but the Nau had dominated the airspace for some time now, and the army allowed only fighter planes in the air. All troop movements were safer by ground. In this case, Gevri had mixed feelings.
    The bad part was that Jix refused to travel with them. To her, a vehicle was just another cage, and she would have none of it. She knew how to get back to Kanjai, and she preferred to travel on foot and on her own. Being separated from her for that long made him uneasy, but there was no arguing with a jaguar.
    The upside to three days of driving was the time it gave Gevri to get his team in the right state of mind, which was crucial. He sensed that his archons were reluctant about the attack on Deliverance, and that had to be dealt with. “Great leaders are comfortable with conflict,” his father always said, “not because we enjoy it, but because we are eager to get beyond it.” And that is exactly what Gevri needed to do right now. Face the conflict head-on so he could get beyond it.
    “Listen,” Gevri