«Aye, lord,» Bozorg said.
«It shall be as you say, eminent sir,» Panteles added in Videssian. Abivard wished he hadn't done that. The soldiers of the vanguard, from the lowliest trooper up through Romezan, looked from him to Tzikas and back again, tarring both of them with the same brush. Abivard didn't want Panteles getting any ideas, from any source, about disloyalty.
The two wizards worked together smoothly enough, more smoothly than they had when they had been trying to cross the canal, when Bozorg had reckoned the Voimios strap only a figment of Panteles' imagination and a twisted figment at that. Now, sometimes chanting antiphonally, sometimes pointing and gesturing down the road in the direction from which Tzikas had come, sometimes roiling the dust with their spells, they probed what lay ahead.
At last Bozorg reported, «Some sort of sorcerous barrier does lie ahead, lord. What may hide behind it I cannot say: it serves only to mask the sorceries on the farther side. But it is there.»
«That's so,» Panteles agreed. «No possible argument. There's a sorcerous fog bank, so to speak, dead ahead of us.»
Abivard glanced over at Tzikas. The renegade affected not to notice that he was being watched. I've told the truth, his posture said. I've always told the truth. Abivard wondered if he really grasped the difference between the posture of truth and truth itself.
For the time being that was beside the point. He asked Bozorg, «Can you penetrate the fog bank to see what lies behind it?»
«Can we? Perhaps, lord,» Bozorg said. «In fact, it is likely, as penetrating it tends toward a restoration of a natural state. The question of whether we should, however, remains.»
«Drop me into the Void if I can see why,» Abivard said. «It's there, and we need to find out what's on the other side of it before we send the army into what's liable to be danger. That's plain enough, isn't it?»
«Oh, it's plain enough,» Bozorg agreed, «but is it wise? For all we know, trying to penetrate the sorcerous fog, or succeeding in Penetrating it, may be the signal for the truly fearsome charm it conceals to spring to life.»
«I hadn't thought of that.» Abivard was certain his face looked as if he'd been sucking on a lemon. His stomach was as sour as if he'd been sucking on a lemon, too. «What are we supposed to do, then? Sit around here quivering and wait for the sorcerous fog bank to roll away? We're all liable to die of old age before that happens. If I were Maniakes, I'd make sure my wizards gave it a good long life, anyhow.»
Neither Bozorg or Panteles argued with him. Neither of them sprang into action to break down the sorcerous fog, either. When Abivard glared at them, Panteles said, «Eminent sir, we have here risks in going ahead and also risks in doing nothing. Weighing these risks is not easy.»
Abivard glanced over, not at Tzikas this time but at Romezan. The noble of the Seven Clans would have had only one answer when in doubt, go ahead, and worry afterward about what happens afterward. Romezan reckoned Abivard a man of excessive caution. This time the two of them were likely to be thinking along the same lines.
«If you can pierce that fog, pierce it,» Abivard told the two wizards. «The longer we stay stuck here, the farther ahead of us Maniakes gets. If he gets too far ahead, he escapes. We don't want that.»
Panteles bowed, a gesture of respect the Videssians gave to any superior. Bozorg didn't. It wasn't that he minded acknowledging Abivard as being far superior to him in rank; he'd done that before. But to do it now would have been to acknowledge that he thought Abivard was right, and he clearly didn't.
Whether he thought him right or not, though, he obeyed. As at the twisted canal, Panteles took the lead in the answering magic; being a Videssian, he was likely to be more familiar with the sort of sorcery Maniakes' mages employed than Bozorg was.
«We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind, by thy grace our protector,» Panteles intoned, «watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.»
Along with the other Makuraners who understood the Videssian god's creed, Abivard bristled at hearing it. Panteles said, «We have a fog ahead. We need Phos' holy light to pierce it.»
Since Bozorg kept quiet, Abivard made himself stay calm, too. Panteles incanted steadily and then, with a word of command that might not have been Videssian at all-that hardly sounded like any human language-stabbed out his finger at what lay ahead. Abivard expected something splendid and showy, perhaps a ray of scarlet light shooting from his fingertip. Nothing of the sort happened, so it seemed the sort of gesture a father might have used to send an unruly son to his room after the boy had misbehaved.
Then Bozorg grunted and staggered as if someone had struck him a heavy blow, though no one stood near him. «No, by the God!» he exclaimed, and gestured with his left hand. «Fraortish eldest of all, lady Shivini, Gimillu, Narseh-come to my aid!»
He straightened and steadied. Panteles repeated Phos' creed. The two wizards shouted together, both crying out the same word that was not Videssian-it might not have been a word at all, not in the grammarians' sense of the term.
Abivard was watching Tzikas. The renegade started to sketch Phos' sun-circle but checked himself with the motion barely begun. Instead, his left hand twisted in the gesture Bozorg had used. Almost forgot whose camp you were in, didn't you? Abivard thought.
But Tzikas' return to the Makuraner fold did not seem to have been a trap or a snare. He'd warned of magic ahead, and magic ahead there had been. He'd done Abivard a service the general could hardly ignore. The last time they'd seen each other, Tzikas had done his best to kill him. That had been a more honest expression, no doubt, of how the renegade felt-not that Abivard had any great and abiding love for him, either.
The wizards, meanwhile, continued their magic. At length Abivard felt a sharp snap somewhere right in the middle of his head. By the way the soldiers around him exclaimed, he wasn't the only one. Afterward the world seemed a little clearer, a little brighter.
«We have pierced the sorcerous fog, revealing it for the phantasm it is,» Panteles declared.
«And what lies behind it?» Abivard demanded. «What other magic was it concealing?»
Panteles and Bozorg looked surprised. In defeating the first magic, they'd forgotten for a moment what came next. More hasty incanting followed. In a voice that suggested he had trouble believing what he was saying, Bozorg answered, «It does not seem to be concealing any other magic.»
«Bluff!» Romezan boomed. «All bluff.»
«A bluff that worked, too,» Abivard said unhappily. «We've wasted a lot of time trying to break through that screen of theirs. We were almost on their heels, but we're not, not anymore.»
«Let's go after them, then,» Romezan said. «The longer we stand around jabbering here, the farther away they get.»
«That's so,» Abivard said. «You don't suppose-» He glanced over at Tzikas, then shook his head. The renegade would not have come to the Makuraner army Abivard commanded for the sole purpose of delaying it. Maniakes could not have forced that from Tzikas, not when he knew Abivard was as eager as the Avtokrator to dispose of him… could he?
Romezan's gaze swung to Tzikas, too. «What do we do about him now?»
«Drop me into the Void if I know. He said there was magic being worked, and there was. He's no wizard or he would have tried to murder Maniakes himself instead of hiring someone to do it for him.» That made Tzikas bite his lip. Abivard ignored him, continuing: «He had no way to know the magic wasn't worse than what it turned out to be, and so he warned us. That counts for something.»