The Hidden City

here to have a look at him. Don’t give up hope yet, Betuana. Aphrael cured me, and I was closer to being dead than Engessa is.’
    ‘He is fairly strong,’ she said. ‘If the Child Goddess can heal his wound before it carries him off—’ Her voice caught with an odd little note.
    ‘He’ll be all right, your Majesty,’ he said, trying to sound more certain than he really was. ‘Can you get word to your husband? About Klael, I mean? He should know about those soldiers Klael hides under his wings.’
    ‘I’ll send a runner. Should I tell Androl to come to Sama instead of going to Toea? Klael is here now, and Scarpa’s army won’t reach Toea for quite some time—and that’s only if they can evade the Trolls.’
    ‘Let’s wait until I’ve had the chance to talk with the others first. Is King Androl already on the march?’
    ‘He should be. Androl always jumps when I suggest something. He’s a good man—and very, very brave.’ She said it almost as if defending her husband from some unspoken criticism, but Vanion noticed that she absently stroked Engessa’s ashen face even as she spoke.
    ‘He must have been in a hurry,’ Stragen said, still puzzling over Sparhawk’s terse note.
    ‘He’s never been very good at writing letters,’ Talen shrugged, ‘except for that one time when he spent days composing lies about what we were supposedly doing on the Isle of Tega.’
    ‘Maybe that took it all out of him.’ Stragen folded the note and looked closely at it. ‘Parchment,’ he said. ‘Where did he get his hands on parchment?’
    ‘Who knows? Maybe he’ll tell us when he comes back. Let’s go take a walk on the beach. I need some exercise.’
    ‘All right.’ Stragen picked up his cloak, and he and the younger thief went downstairs and out into the street.
    The southern Tamul Sea was calm, and the moon-path across its dark surface was unbroken and very bright. ‘Pretty,’ Talen murmured when the two reached the damp sand at the edge of the water.
    ‘Yes,’ Stragen agreed.
    ‘I think I’ve come up with something,’ Talen said.
    ‘So have I,’ Stragen replied.
    ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘No, let’s hear yours first.’
    ‘All right. The Cynesgans are massing on the border, right?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘A good story could un-mass them.’
    ‘I don’t think there is such a word.’
    ‘Did we come here to discuss vocabulary? What will the Cynesgans do if they hear that the Church Knights are coming? Wouldn’t they almost have to send an army to meet them?’
    ‘I think Sparhawk and Vanion want to keep the fact that the knights are coming more or less a secret.’
    ‘Stragen, how are you going to keep a hundred thousand men a secret? Let’s say that I tell Valash that I’ve picked up a very reliable report that a fleet of ships flying Church banners has rounded the southern tip of Daconia bound for Kaftal. Wouldn’t that cause the other side some concern? Even if they know about the knights coming across Zemoch, they’d still have to send troops to meet that fleet. They couldn’t ignore the possibility that the knights are coming at them from two different directions.’
    Stragen suddenly laughed.
    ‘What’s so funny?’
    ‘You and I have been running together for too long, Talen. We’re starting to think alike. I came up with the idea of telling Valash that the Atans are going to cross the steppes of eastern Astel and strike down into northern Cynesga toward the capital.’
    ‘Nice plan,’ Talen said.
    ‘So’s yours.’ Stragen squinted out across the moon-bathed water. ‘Either story’s strategically credible,’ he mused. ‘They’re exactly the kind of moves a military man would come up with. What we’re really planning is a simultaneous strike from the east and the west. If we can make Cyrgon believe that we’re going to hit him from the north and south instead, we’ll pull him so far out of position that he’ll never be able to get his armies back to meet our real attacks.’
    ‘Not to mention the fact that we’ll cut his army in two.’
    ‘We’ll have to be careful though,’ Stragen cautioned. ‘I don’t think even Valash is gullible enough to swallow these stories if we drop them both on him at the same time. We’ll have to spread them out and dribble them to him bit by bit. What I’d really like to do is let the fairy-tale about the Atans come from someone other than me.’
    ‘Sparhawk could probably get Aphrael to arrange that,’ Talen