"That's just the way it goes," Mammianos said when Krispos complained. "We can't move out in the morning till the slowest soldiers are ready to go. If we let quicker regiments just rush on ahead, after a few days we'd have men strung out over fifty miles. The whole point of a big army is to be able to use all the troops you've brought along."
"Supplies—" Krispos said, as if it were a complete sentence.
Mammianos clapped him on the shoulder. "Majesty, unless we crawl north on our hands and knees, we'll manage. The quartermasters know how fast—how slow, if you like—we travel. They've had practice keeping armies this size in bread, I promise you."
Krispos let himself be reassured. The Videssian bureaucracy had kept the Empire running throughout Anthimos' antic reign and through worse reigns than his in the past. Avtokrators came, ruled, and were gone; the gray, efficient stewards, secretaries, and logothetes went on forever. The army quartermasters belonged to the same breed.
He wondered what would happen if one day an Emperor died and no one succeeded him. He suspected the bureaucrats would go on ruling competently if unspectaculariy ... at least until some important paper needed signing. Then, for want of a signature, the whole state would come crashing down. He chuckled softly, pleased at his foolish conceit.
The next day the army rode past the field when Harvas' raiders had beaten and killed Mavros. The mass graves Krispos' men had dug afterward still scarred the earth. Now new grass, green and hopeful, was spreading over the squares of raw dirt. Krispos pointed to it. "Like the grass, may our victory spring from their defeat."
"From your lips to the ear of Phos," Trokoundos said, sketching the sun-sign with his right hand. He sent Krispos a sly look. "I hadn't thought your Majesty had so much of a poet in him."
"Poet?" Krispos snorted. "I'm no poet, just a former—well, a man who used to be a farmer. The grass will grow tall over those graves, with the bodies of so many brave men manuring the fields."
The mage nodded soberly. "That's a less pleasing image, but I daresay a truer one."
They camped three or four miles past the battlefield, far enough, Krispos hoped, to keep the troopers from brooding on it. As was his habit each evening, Krispos wrote a brief note to Iakovitzes detailing the day's progress. When he was done, he called for a courier.
A rider came trotting up to the imperial tent hardly a minute later. He saluted Krispos and said, "All right, your Majesty, let's have yours, too, and I'll be off for the city."
He sat his horse with a let's-get-on-with-it, don't-waste-my-time attitude that made Krispos smile. That attitude and the blithe cheek of his words left Krispos certain he was a city man himself. "Mine, too, is it, eh? Well, sir, with whose letter is mine lucky enough to travel?"
"It's all in the family, you might say, your Majesty: yours and your father-in-law's will go together, both in the same pouch."
"Will they?" Krispos raised an eyebrow. He knew his use of the gesture did not have the flair that Chihor-Vshnasp, say, put into it, but it got the job done. "And to whom is the eminent Rhisoulphos writing?"
"Just let me look and I'll tell you." Like any man from Videssos the city, the courier took it for granted that he knew things lesser mortals didn't. He opened his leather dispatch pouch and drew out a roll of parchment sealed with enough wax to keep a poor family in candles for a month. He had to turn it between his fingers to find out where the address was. "Here we go, your Majesty. It's to the most holy patriarch Gnatios, it is. Leastways, I think he's most holy patriarch this week, unless you made him into a monk again while I wasn't looking, or maybe into a prawn salad."
"A prawn salad? He'll end up wishing he was a prawn salad when I get through with him." Maybe Rhisoulphos was writing to Gnatios for enlightenment on an abstruse theological point or for some other innocuous reason. Krispos didn't believe it, not for a minute. The two of them were both intriguers, and he the logical person against whom they would intrigue. He plucked at his beard as he thought, then turned to one of the Halogai who stood guard in front of his tent. "Vagn, fetch me Trokoundos, right away."
"The mage, Majesty? Aye, I bring him."
Trokoundos was picking at his teeth with a fingernail as he followed Vagn to the imperial tent. "What's toward, your Majesty?"
"This fellow—" Krispos pointed to the courier. "—is carrying a letter from the excellent Rhisoulphos to the most holy patriarch Gnatios."
"Is he indeed?" No one had to draw pictures for Trokoundos. "Are you curious about what's in that letter?"
"You might say so, yes." Krispos held out a hand. The courier was not a man to be caught napping. With a flourish, he gave Krispos Rhisoulphos' letter. Krispos passed it to Trokoundos. "As you see, it's sealed tighter than a winter grain pit. Can you get it open and then shut again without breaking the seals?"
"Hmm. An interesting question. Do you know, sometimes these small conjurations are harder than the more grandiose ones? I'm certain I can get the wax off and on again, but the first method that springs to mind would surely ruin the writing it shelters—net what you have in mind, unless I miss my guess. Let me think..."
He proceeded to do just that, quite intensely, for the next couple of minutes. Once he brightened, then shook his head and sank back into his study. At last he nodded.
"You can do it, then?" Krispos said.
"I believe so, your Majesty. Not a major magic, but one that will draw upon the laws of similarity and contagion both, and nearly at the same time. I presume privacy would be a valuable adjunct to this undertaking?"
"What? Oh, yes; of course." Krispos held the tent flap open with his own hands, then followed Trokoundos inside.
The wizard said, "You must have some parchment in here, yes?" Laughing, Krispos pointed to the portable desk where he'd just finished his note to Iakovitzes. Several other sheets still curled over one another. Trokoundos nodded. "Excellent." He took one, rolling it into a cylinder of about the same diameter as the sealed letter from Rhisoulphos to Gnatios. Then he touched the two of them together and squinted at the place where their ends joined. "I'll use the law of similarity in two aspects," he explained. "First in that parchment is similar to parchment, and second in that these are two similar cylinders. Now just a dab of paste to let this one hold its shape—can't use ribbon, don't you know, for it wouldn't be in precisely the right place."
Krispos didn't know, but he'd already seen that Trokoundos liked to lecture as he worked. The mage set his new parchment cylinder upright on the desk. "By the law of contagion, things once in contact continue to influence each other after that contact ends. Thus—" He held the letter upright in one hand and made slow passes over it with the other, chanting all the while.
Sudden as a blink, the sealing wax disappeared. Trokoundos pointed to the parchment cylinder he'd made. "You did it!" Krispos exclaimed—that new cylinder wore a wax coat now. Every daub and spatter that had been on the letter was there.
"So I did," Trokoundos said with a touch of smugness. "I had to make certain my cylinder was no wider than the one Rhisoulphos made of his letter. That was most important, for otherwise the wax would have cracked as it tried to form itself around my piece of parchment."
He went on explaining, but Krispos had stopped listening. He held out his hand for the letter. Trokoundos gave it to him. He slid off the ribbon, unrolled the document, and read: " 'Rhisoulphos to the most holy ecumenical patriarch Gnatios: Greetings. As I said in my last letter, I think it self-evident that Videssos would best be ruled by a man whose blood is of the best, not by a parvenu, no matter how energetic.' " He paused. "What's a parvenu?"