“This is just a way to build up our strength while we train. To gather supplies, demoralize and confuse the enemy,” said Olivenko. “Remember that those experienced raiders who take part in the raids that Haddamander thinks are the earliest ones don’t come back to the enclave at that earlier time. They always come back after they left. So our soldiers will experience everything in the right order. So at the end of our ten years of raiding and training and building up supplies and weapons, it will have been only a couple of years in Stashiland. That’s when we suddenly show up with a large, well-trained army, only a few weeks after the raid we did first, which they think was most recent.”

“So there’ll still be a battle,” said Param.

“Probably more than one,” said Olivenko, “though we’ll do our best to win a decisive victory the first time. But when you actually commit to battle, you can’t predict the outcome. We might lose. Again and again.”

“But if we lose,” said Umbo, “couldn’t we go back and fight it again, using what we learned?”

“You tell me,” said Olivenko. “I’m not a timeshaper.”

“This is where King Umbo comes in,” said Loaf. “Instead of taking the whole army back in time—which would hardly work, considering that it doesn’t do any good to take the bodies of the dead back in time—instead of that, Umbo, you simply appear to yourself before the battle and tell yourself—the way you always have—what went wrong, so we can take countermeasures and try it again. That will erase the battle we lost so it never happened.”

Param nodded. “So the raids will all happen and be remembered. But when the battles come, we’ll keep repeating each ­battle until we get it right.”

“Unless Umbo is killed,” said Rigg.

“Well, he can’t be,” said Olivenko. “He has to stay in a protected location.”

“If I’m in a protected location, how will I know how the ­battle went?” said Umbo.

“Not a protected location,” said Param. “He and I will be in the midst of everything, but slicing time so that we’re invisible. If we lose, I slice us forward even faster till it’s all done, and then we go to the place where he can warn himself what’s about to go wrong.”

“And then you continue to live in that future where you lost,” said Ram Odin.