“Did he? Well, good for him,” Hesmucet said. That was more initiative than the commander of unicorn-riders usually showed.
“Yes, sir, he did. I gave him a cantrip I thought would serve.” Alva’s smile slipped. “It didn’t. The northerners had a counterspell that sniffed it out, and beat back his column of riders.”
“Ah. Too bad,” Hesmucet said. “Well, they have good wizards of their own, and keeping us off the Hoocheecoochee is very important to them.”
“Their wizards are strong, but they aren’t all that good,” Alva said. “There’s a difference.” If there was, Hesmucet couldn’t see it. Alva added, “What’s so important about the river, anyway?”
“By the gods!” Hesmucet muttered. His pet mage lived in a world so abstract, things of real value meant nothing to him. Gently, the general commanding explained: “It’s the last big barrier in front of Marthasville, Major. If we can get across, Joseph the Gamecock will have a hells of a time keeping us out of the city.”
“Oh. All right.” The sorcerer nodded. He wasn’t stupid-on the contrary-but was as narrowly focused as a good burning glass. “I suppose that means you’ll want me to try another masking spell, then.”
“I did have that in mind, yes.” Hesmucet nodded, too. “Or anything else that will get us over the Hoocheecoochee-I’m not fussy about how it happens.”
Alva’s face tightened into the mask of concentration Hesmucet had come to know well. Alva sometimes stayed like that, hardly moving, hardly even seeming to breathe, for a couple of hours at a stretch. This time, though, he came out almost at once, to ask, “You will not want this to be a showy spell, am I right?”
“Showy?” Hesmucet frowned. “How do you mean?”
“A showy spell is something the other side notices,” Alva answered. “You’ll want them to notice nothing at all till the knife goes into their back? Not to have the slightest idea they’re being diddled?”
“Isn’t that how every single masking spell under the sun works?” Hesmucet asked.
“Oh, no… sir.” Major Alva sounded shocked. He launched into a technical disquisition in which Hesmucet found himself following perhaps one word in three. He did gather that some masking spells were like lamps shone in the enemy’s eyes, while others hung an opaque curtain between the foe and what he wished to see and still others sought to be transparent. He also gathered that the last sort was the hardest to bring off. It would be, he thought.
“You have it right,” he told Alva when the mage finally ran down. “I don’t want the traitors to have any idea what’s going on till it’s too late for them to do one fornicating thing about it.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with, sir.” Like a groundhog slipping back into hibernation, Alva returned to his trance of study.
There were other ways besides the sorcerous to keep the northerners from finding out what Hesmucet had in mind. He didn’t entrench up close to the traitors’ positions, but placed pickets well in front of his own lines. The enemy wouldn’t be able to see how many soldiers he had in place and how many he was using for his casts up and down the Hoocheecoochee, or how ready his army was to move in a hurry if somehow he managed to find a crossing.
Joseph the Gamecock has to be worried, he thought. He knows the Hoocheecoochee is his last strong line as well as I do. Feints toward the river both north and south kept false King Geoffrey’s unicorn-riders galloping this way and that. They couldn’t afford to assume that any move was a feint, not here they couldn’t. They had to take each one seriously.
Hesmucet won approval from one source whose opinion he valued-Doubting George said, “This is all very fine work, sir. The wider we stretch the traitors, the sooner they’ll break.”
“Glad you agree, Lieutenant General,” Hesmucet told him. “And glad we’re working together as well as we are.”
“So am I, sir,” George replied. “Only one who’d laugh if we pulled opposite ways, though, is Geoffrey.”
“There is that.” Hesmucet’s laugh held little real mirth. “Not that such considerations have stopped a good many other officers from wrangling with one another.”
“True enough, true enough. We’re a band of brothers, is what we are-and brothers fight like cats and dogs.”
“Don’t we just?” Hesmucet eyed his second-in-command. “If you were in Joseph the Gamecock’s boots, what would you do?”
“About what he’s doing,” George said. “I don’t know what else he could do, not with an army barely half the size of ours. He’s managed to make a nuisance of himself, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.” Hesmucet admitted what he could hardly deny. “Gods damn it, though, we need Marthasville. King Avram needs it. The whole kingdom needs it, to show we’re winning the war.”
“We go forward,” Doubting George said. “One lurch at a time, we do go forward. And Marshal Bart has Duke Edward of Arlington and the Army of Southern Parthenia pushed a lot farther north in Parthenia than they really want to be.”
“So he does,” Hesmucet said, “though the latest, I hear, is that Earl Early the Jubilant has managed to get loose and come south for an attack on Georgetown.”
“D’you think he can take the place?” George asked.
“I doubt it,” Hesmucet answered, and his wing commander smiled. Hesmucet went on, “Have you seen the works around Georgetown, Lieutenant General? They make the ones Joseph the Gamecock has thrown up here look like sand castles by comparison. King Avram set his artificers to work as soon as the war against Geoffrey began, and I don’t believe they’ve slowed down from that day to this.”
“No doubt you’re right, sir, but if all the soldiers are up in Parthenia with Marshal Bart…” Doubting George’s voice trailed away. “The best fortress in the world isn’t worth a counterfeit copper without some men inside it.”
“Avram can fill the forts up with clerks from all the Georgetown offices and hold off Earl Early till Marshal Bart has time to bring some real fighting men down from his own lines,” Hesmucet said. “With those works, even clerks with crossbows would do for a little while.”
“Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that,” George said, and then, thoughtfully, “I wonder what sort of works Joseph the Gamecock has waiting for us outside of Marthasville itself.”
“We’ll find out, I hope.” Hesmucet smiled a wolfish smile. “And, once we cross the Hoocheecoochee, all the glideways to the east, to Dothan and the Great River, fall into our hands, even if we can’t break into the city yet.”
“That’s true. I hadn’t thought of it quite so, but that’s true,” George said. “And false King Geoffrey won’t be very happy about it, either.”
Hesmucet clasped both hands to his breast in false and exaggerated sympathy. George laughed out loud. “Too bad. My heart’s just breaking,” Hesmucet said in syrupy tones.
George laughed again, louder and harder. “If we do cross the Hoocheecoochee,” he said, “poor Geoffrey’s going to have kittens.”
“So he will,” Hesmucet agreed. “I told you once: what Geoffrey calls a kingdom is nothing but two armies and a lot of wind and air. Once we get over the river, we’ll show all of Detina how empty the north is.”
“May it be so. I think it will be so,” George said.
“We’ll make it so,” Hesmucet said. “Once we’re over the river, Joseph the Gamecock won’t be able to keep us from making it so.”
“Only trouble is, we’re not over the river yet,” George said.
“I think Alva can let us get men down to it even if we can’t manage any other way,” Hesmucet replied. “And once we reach it, we’ll cross it. Our artificers can throw a bridge over it in a hurry. Then”-he grinned-“we see what happens next.”
“Corporal Rollant!” Lieutenant Griff called.