"Indeed," said Tunigorn. "You'll be astonished, Valentine. I pledge you that."

"Astonish me, then," Valentine said.

Deliamber said, "Tunigorn has told you, I think, that we discovered the agricultural expert Y-Uulisaan to be a Shapeshifter spy?".

"So he has told me, yes. But how was this discovered?"

"The day you set out for the Steiche, my lord, we came upon Y-Uulisaan deep in the communion of minds with some far-off person. I felt his mind reaching forth; I felt the force of the communion. And immediately I asked Zalzan Kavol and Lisamon to apprehend him."

Valentine blinked. "How could Y-Uulisaan possibly have had such a power?"

"Because he was a Shapeshifter, my lord," said Tisana, "and the Shapeshifters have a way of linking mind to mind using the great sea-dragon kings as their joining-place."

Like a man who has been attacked from two sides at once, Valentine glanced from Tisana to Deliamber, and back at the old dream-speaker again. He struggled to absorb the meaning of the things they had said, but there was so much in them that was strange, that was entirely bewildering, that he could at first grasp very little. "It baffles me," he said, "to hear of Metamorphs speaking to one another through sea dragons. Who could have supposed the dragons had any such power of mind?"

"Water-kings, my lord, is what they call them," Tisana said. "And it appears that the water-kings have very powerful minds indeed. Which enabled the spy to file his reports with great ease."

"Reports on what?" said Valentine uneasily. "And to whom?"

"When we found Y-Uulisaan in this communion," said Deliamber, "Lisamon and Zalzan Kavol seized him, and he at once began to change his shape. We would have brought him to you for interrogation, but you had gone ahead to the river, and then the storm began and we could not follow. So we interrogated him ourselves. He admitted that he was a spy, my lord, who would help you to formulate the government's response to the plagues and blights, and then immediately send word of what that response would be.

Which was of great aid to the Metamorphs as they went about the business of causing and spreading those plagues."

Valentine gasped. "The Metamorphs—causing the plagues—spreading the plagues—?"

"Yes, my lord. Y-Uulisaan told us all. We were—ah—not gentle with him. In secret laboratories here in Piurifayne the Metamorphs have for years developed cultures of every enemy of our crops that has ever afflicted them. And when they were ready, they went forth in a thousand disguises—some of them, my lord, actually went to farmers masquerading as provincial agricultural agents, pretending to offer new ways of increasing farm yield, and secretly scattered their poisons over the fields while inspecting them. And also certain creatures were let loose by air, carried by birds that the Metamorphs released. Or things were sprayed, and became drifting clouds—"

Stunned, Valentine looked toward Sleet and said, "Then we have been at war, and did not know it!"