“Ah. So we paint…”

“Just splash on a little mud if that’s all we can find—something dark. Throw a little dirt onto it at the bottom. Then they will not see the trap until we’ve feathered half of the dog-eating bastards…”

The foreman’s cheerful recitation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Count Perivos’ factor, who had been overseeing the evacuation of the palace, but now came running across the yard as if pursued by sawtooth cats. “Kurs!” he shouted. “The lord protector has given the foreign king to the Xixians!”

It took Perivos Akuanis a moment to make sense of that. “King Olin, do you mean? Are you saying that Ludis has given Olin of Southmarch to the autarch? How can that be?”

His factor had to pause for a moment, hands on knees, to catch his breath. “As to how, my lord, I couldn’t say, but Drakava’s Rams came for him before I could finish moving him and the other prisoners, Kurs. I’m sorry. I’ve failed you.”

“No, the fault is not yours.” Akuanis shook his head. “But why are you sure they meant to take Olin to the autarch and not just to Ludis?”

“Because the chief of the Rams had a warrant, with the lord protector’s seal on it. It said precisely what they were to do with him—take him from his cell and take him to the Nektarian harbor seagate where he would be given to the Xixians in return for ‘such considerations as have been agreed upon,’ or something like.”

Count Perivos smelled something distinctly unsavory. Why would Ludis trade such a valuable pawn as Olin, unless it were to end the siege? But Sulepis would surely never give up the siege for the single lowly prize of a foreign king, especially the master of a small kingdom like Olin’s, which hadn’t even managed to ransom him from Ludis after nearly a year. None of it made sense.

Still, there was no good to be gained wasting time trying to understand it. Count Perivos handed his sheaf of plans to the factor, then turned to the foreman. “Irinnis, keep the men working hard—that outwall won’t last the night. And don’t forget that the wall near the Fountain Gate needs shoring up, too—half of it came down.”

The count hurried away across the wreckage of what had once been Empress Thallo’s Garden, a haven for quiet thought and sweet birdsong for hundreds of years. Now with every other step he had to dodge around outcrops of shattered stone knocked loose from the gate or smoking gorges clawed into the earth by cannonballs: the place looked like something that the death-god Kernios had ground beneath his heel.

With twenty full pentecounts of the city’s fiercest fighters surrounding his temporary headquarters in the pillared marble Treasury Hall, it would have been reasonable to suspect that Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol, feared an uprising from his own people more than he feared the massive army of the autarch outside his city walls.