“The gods help those who help themselves,” Fighting Joseph agreed. Hesmucet wished he wouldn’t have done so with a cliche, and then wished for all the gold in the Golden Province far to the east while he was at it.
“Maybe,” James the Bird’s Eye said, “we could give ourselves a better chance of reaching the river with magic.” For a southron to rely on wizardry was out of the ordinary in this war, but Major Alva was no ordinary southron mage.
“Not a bad notion,” Hesmucet agreed. “I will take that up with our sorcerers.” By that, he meant he would take it up with Major Alva, and all the wing commanders understood as much. The rest of the mages in the army, from Colonel Phineas on down, came close to matching the youngster only if all their efforts were added together. Looking from one officer to another, Hesmucet asked, “Anything else? Anyone think we have a real chance of going through Joseph the Gamecock’s position instead of around it?”
Nobody said anything, not even Fighting Joseph, who was much given to overcoming obstacles by charging straight at them and smashing them flat with his hard head. Hesmucet didn’t know whether to be relieved at the show of good sense or sorry he didn’t get the chance to squelch his annoying subordinate.
With a small shrug, he said, “Dismissed.” As the generals trooped away, he called for a runner and told him, “Fetch me Major Alva. Don’t just tell him I want him and then leave. Bring him back here yourself.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier grinned; he’d been one of Hesmucet’s runners for some little while now. “If I don’t bring him, he’s liable to forget to come at all, isn’t he? He’ll just stand there thinking fancy thoughts.”
“He doesn’t know a whole lot about subordination,” Hesmucet agreed wryly. Alva knows even less about subordination than Fighting Joseph does, he thought. Fighting Joseph understands what he’s supposed to do; he just doesn’t do it. To Alva, the whole idea is bizarre. That thought led to another: if he’s not the ultimate free Detinan, who in the seven hells is?
Off went the runner. He returned in due course, Alva in tow. The mage did remember to salute when he came up to Hesmucet, and seemed proud of himself for remembering. “You wanted me, uh, sir?” he said.
“That’s right,” the commanding general answered. He gave Alva more leeway than he did to any other soldier in the army. Alva had earned more than any other soldier had. Hesmucet went on, “Can you work out some sort of masking spell that will let Marble Bill’s unicorn-riders get down to the Hoocheecoochee without the traitors’ finding out about it till too late?”
Major Alva gave him a bright smile. “Funny you should ask me that, sir. Marble Bill asked the very same thing a couple of days ago.”
“Did he? Well, good for him,” Hesmucet said. That was more initiative than the commander of unicorn-riders usually showed.
“Yes, sir, he did. I gave him a cantrip I thought would serve.” Alva’s smile slipped. “It didn’t. The northerners had a counterspell that sniffed it out, and beat back his column of riders.”
“Ah. Too bad,” Hesmucet said. “Well, they have good wizards of their own, and keeping us off the Hoocheecoochee is very important to them.”
“Their wizards are strong, but they aren’t all that good,” Alva said. “There’s a difference.” If there was, Hesmucet couldn’t see it. Alva added, “What’s so important about the river, anyway?”
“By the gods!” Hesmucet muttered. His pet mage lived in a world so abstract, things of real value meant nothing to him. Gently, the general commanding explained: “It’s the last big barrier in front of Marthasville, Major. If we can get across, Joseph the Gamecock will have a hells of a time keeping us out of the city.”
“Oh. All right.” The sorcerer nodded. He wasn’t stupid-on the contrary-but was as narrowly focused as a good burning glass. “I suppose that means you’ll want me to try another masking spell, then.”
“I did have that in mind, yes.” Hesmucet nodded, too. “Or anything else that will get us over the Hoocheecoochee-I’m not fussy about how it happens.”
Alva’s face tightened into the mask of concentration Hesmucet had come to know well. Alva sometimes stayed like that, hardly moving, hardly even seeming to breathe, for a couple of hours at a stretch. This time, though, he came out almost at once, to ask, “You will not want this to be a showy spell, am I right?”
“Showy?” Hesmucet frowned. “How do you mean?”
“A showy spell is something the other side notices,” Alva answered. “You’ll want them to notice nothing at all till the knife goes into their back? Not to have the slightest idea they’re being diddled?”
“Isn’t that how every single masking spell under the sun works?” Hesmucet asked.
“Oh, no… sir.” Major Alva sounded shocked. He launched into a technical disquisition in which Hesmucet found himself following perhaps one word in three. He did gather that some masking spells were like lamps shone in the enemy’s eyes, while others hung an opaque curtain between the foe and what he wished to see and still others sought to be transparent. He also gathered that the last sort was the hardest to bring off. It would be, he thought.
“You have it right,” he told Alva when the mage finally ran down. “I don’t want the traitors to have any idea what’s going on till it’s too late for them to do one fornicating thing about it.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with, sir.” Like a groundhog slipping back into hibernation, Alva returned to his trance of study.
There were other ways besides the sorcerous to keep the northerners from finding out what Hesmucet had in mind. He didn’t entrench up close to the traitors’ positions, but placed pickets well in front of his own lines. The enemy wouldn’t be able to see how many soldiers he had in place and how many he was using for his casts up and down the Hoocheecoochee, or how ready his army was to move in a hurry if somehow he managed to find a crossing.
Joseph the Gamecock has to be worried, he thought. He knows the Hoocheecoochee is his last strong line as well as I do. Feints toward the river both north and south kept false King Geoffrey’s unicorn-riders galloping this way and that. They couldn’t afford to assume that any move was a feint, not here they couldn’t. They had to take each one seriously.
Hesmucet won approval from one source whose opinion he valued-Doubting George said, “This is all very fine work, sir. The wider we stretch the traitors, the sooner they’ll break.”
“Glad you agree, Lieutenant General,” Hesmucet told him. “And glad we’re working together as well as we are.”
“So am I, sir,” George replied. “Only one who’d laugh if we pulled opposite ways, though, is Geoffrey.”
“There is that.” Hesmucet’s laugh held little real mirth. “Not that such considerations have stopped a good many other officers from wrangling with one another.”
“True enough, true enough. We’re a band of brothers, is what we are-and brothers fight like cats and dogs.”
“Don’t we just?” Hesmucet eyed his second-in-command. “If you were in Joseph the Gamecock’s boots, what would you do?”
“About what he’s doing,” George said. “I don’t know what else he could do, not with an army barely half the size of ours. He’s managed to make a nuisance of himself, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.” Hesmucet admitted what he could hardly deny. “Gods damn it, though, we need Marthasville. King Avram needs it. The whole kingdom needs it, to show we’re winning the war.”
“We go forward,” Doubting George said. “One lurch at a time, we do go forward. And Marshal Bart has Duke Edward of Arlington and the Army of Southern Parthenia pushed a lot farther north in Parthenia than they really want to be.”