Behind the stradiotes came a banda of mountaineers from the slopes between Alba and the Empire—tall, strong men and women with heavy javelins and heavier bows. They wore no armour at all beyond skull caps of iron. Many carried small round targets, but none had a knife longer than his forearm. The mountaineers had their own officers, bearded men on small ponies, and they marched quickly enough to keep up with the horsemen.

Behind them came a banda of Outwallers from south Huran, around Orawa, the extreme northern outposts of the Empire. They had come south to Middleburg and many had already shadowed the hosts of the sorcerer. Janos Turkos rode at their head, smoking. They kept no sort of order and sometimes left the column altogether.

Last, in the rearguard, came Ser Milus, with the company’s great banner of Saint Catherine, and with him rode Morgan Mortirmir and fully half of the company, and perhaps half again—Ser Milus had been busy recruiting.

All totalled, the Emperor had five thousand seasoned veterans to march to war in the north. If he was worried, his beautiful, bland face gave none of that away.

The army cheered him, and then turned, almost as one man, and moved off to the west.

Morgon Mortirmir had enjoyed a pleasant semester polishing his skills—really just a few weeks—before the Emperor’s messenger and Ser Milus’s had collided on his inn’s stairs summoning him to war. But he’d learned some fascinating things, and he’d used the first ten days out of Liviapolis on the road to work them into practical designs.

One was a simple hermetical device the size of a tinderbox that allowed a scout, when he pressed a stud, to make a string vibrate on another box held by another scout up to a league or more away. It was imperfect still and Morgon was sure it could be “sensed” in the aethereal, but it put in the Emperor’s hand the ability to see over the next ridge as surely as his scouts could travel there. Morgon had concocted a dozen other devices—most of them intended to protect the column against spies, as the captain had warned him.

Some of them even worked.

The only outward show was that insects had a very hard time indeed getting close to the column, in camp or out of it—a side effect that delighted the soldiers and made Morgon outstandingly popular with the company.

Morgon was musing on the possibilities of a code—something simple—perhaps easily changed—for his communication devices. He had only made six of them—each one took more than a day of work and more than a day of his potentia. Ser Milus and Proconsularis Vlad, the acting commander of the Vardariotes, both requested more devices each day.