"How sharp do you want it?" the smith asked.

"Sharp enough that if I set a dry leaf on the edge," the soldier said, "the leaf will fall to the ground in two pieces."

The smith nodded and held out his hand. "I'll do it, but an edge like that breaks easily. If you're parried, or hit armor instead of flesh."

"I always hit flesh," answered the soldier, and drew his sword and put it in the smith's waiting hand.

Magic. The weight of it -- too light by far for the short but very thick blade, a piece of metal the length of a short man's arm, straight for three-fourths of its length before coming to a hard triangular point -- the precise balance given by the ball pommel, most of all the color. Not the golden yellow of the fine bronze in which the smith did almost all his own work, nor the red of the copper of which exceptionally old weapons were sometimes made: it was the distinct silver-gray of the weapons of the City.

That word, magic, swept out from the stall in all directions like a flight of messenger birds. There were a hundred hundred stalls and tents and pavilions and bare blankets here in the City's shadow; artisans and small-farmers traveled days to come here and sell the products of their work. The smith didn't need to speak, barely needed to look at the weapon before heads turned, mutters started --

-- and died away. Because a man who carried a sword like that probably knew how to use it, and a quick look at his bearing confirmed that assumption. He would come to the other places here to spend the money he must have in abundance, or he would not, and in any case those who had ideas of getting money from him by more direct means decided it would be a bad idea.

He was not a particularly large man, Yevn niho Nostri niha Saukla (which meant, simply, "Man-Walking-Slowly, son of Who-Breeds-Cats, of the Town-of-Southern-Ocean-People," though the marvelously subtle and descriptive language in which these terms were spoken had died over a thousand years ago, and no one among Yevn's people or any other remained to translate it) but he was very lithe and obviously strong and though he was not young he had no obvious scars, which for a soldier of that age meant he must be very good at his job. He was of slightly less than average height for the City -- which had made him somewhat tall in his homeland -- and very dark by comparison to most of those who surrounded him, rather lighter than a few. His hair was extremely straight and worn pulled back in a ponytail from a fine-boned face and slightly slanted eyes.

The smith, who knew a little about the peoples of the world, guessed correctly that the soldier had walked east across the mountains for most of the summer to reach the City.

"Yes, I can believe that," the smith answered at last, and shook off the traces of superstitious fear to get to his job. Magic sword-metal was much sturdier than bronze, but a sharpening wheel would cut either one.

He took the sword to the wheel, carefully holding it point-down to disavow any hint of aggression -- the soldier might have surrendered his main weapon, but there were sure to be others -- and seated himself. Once there, his feet found the pedals of the wheel with the ease of long practice. This was magic as well, but an old and familiar one: the wheel had been his mother's and her father's, and the whirring and grinding sounds it made had been familiar background noise for his entire childhood.

Rrrrrr-SKKKK. Bits of glowing metal flew from the point of contact between the sword and the wheel. Only a little at a time, rrrrrr-SKKKKK, the metal would soften and then become brittle if he held it to the wheel too long, rrrrr-SKKKKK, impatience had no place in a smithy. Rrrrrr-SKKKKKK. Soldiers could afford to be impatient, but those who made the tools their lives depended on couldn't. Rrrrrr-SKKKKK. And he was done with this part. He quenched the sword in a bucket of water sitting next to the wheel, much more briefly than he would with a newly forged blade -- the water magic was old and simple but subtle and powerful, and it was never a good idea to abuse its power.

Next he went to the stone. This was no magic but something a child could understand; most likely the soldier had a similar, smaller stone in his pockets. Rather than scraping, the blade sang as he moved it over the stone with long, even strokes. That was the sound of a good sharpening. With the rough work done by the wheel it didn't take long at all; after no more than fifty strokes he blew on the fresh edge, inspected it carefully, and handed it back to the waiting soldier.

"Thank you," the soldier said, as he took the weapon. "How much do I owe you?"

"You don't want to test it?"

"I saw what you did. You take care with your work; that's enough for me. I," he paused, "I know what it looks like when people are doing good work."

I'll bet you do, the smith thought. And I'm glad I haven't seen much of the type of work you have. The smith knew he did a good job primarily because most of his customers came back; he'd never had any desire to see his blades tested in person. "Well, then. Thank you. Mmm, do you have any City money?"

The soldier reached into an inner pocket of his shirt. Cotton, the smith thought, but very thick and beautifully stitched: not the sort of clothes he was used to seeing on travelers from outside the City. Which means he probably got it at the same time he got that sword.

"Here. Two gates and a tower, is that enough?"

The smith blinked. "That's a hell of a lot more than enough, friend." He bit the inside of his lip; if he hadn't been honest, the money would have doubled his earnings for the month. "How long since you've been to the City?"

"Twenty years or so."

"Right. Take some advice? I'll change all of those for you, keep a quarter-gate, give the rest back to you in quarters and tenths. You'll find things much less expensive than last time you were here."

Yevn gave him the money and took the change without comment, looking at it only briefly to make sure he was receiving a fair exchange. Saukla and the other towns in the Fishers' League had kept their currency fairly even in value; people always needed to eat, and the daily catch provided a good flow of precious metals to guarantee the purity of their coins. But the inland leagues and kingdoms and principalities and all the other confusing mess of governments suffered constant shortages, and usually ended up debasing their money every few years to compensate. Which was the main reason why the Fishers' League always had work for soldiers as well as fishermen.

The City -- which to most of the people on the other side of the mountains was as much a myth as an actual place -- had always been different, of course.

He nodded a friendly parting to the smith and went back the road. He walked at a steady marching pace up the narrow ravine, a dry river bed which half his life ago had still contained a trickle of water, toward the massive City gates. They were a formality now, with the walls long gone: a remnant of the centuries-gone age when magic had not yet secured the City's place against the barbarians from the east and west and the expansionist Viyang Empire to the north. There were, to Yevn's knowledge, no other cities without walls in the entire world.

To his left was the solid wall of the mountains; to his right, prosperous fields in what should have been a desert stretched away as far as he could see and a good bit beyond. He spotted a farmer harvesting in one of them, driving two massive bison hitched to a grain shrine. He stopped and watched for a while -- the grain shrine looked different from the ones he'd seen before, smaller but somehow more powerful. Then he shrugged and walked on. Magic changed, like everything else in the world, and he could spend lifetimes here and never begin to understand why or how.

At length he came to the gates. He paused for a moment more, to take in the sight. They had lost none of their power to stun him. Stone pillars five times the height of a man, carved with faces which implied without actually representing falcons, lions, rattlesnakes, bears, and other predators native to the region; doors assembled from the whole trunks of young pines, stripped and lashed together and coated with pitch. The doors hung open -- permanently open these days, as they had been for several generations -- on rows of bronze hinges, each almost the size of the soldier's entire body.

Yevn niho Nostri niha Saukla took a deep breath, straightened his spine as a soldier should, and entered the City.

The intelligence reports told her nothing she didn't already know.

Three years of dedicated work on the part of a spy corps which had grown from several score to several hundred, largely at her request; generations of carefully compiled and analyzed reports from the front, by her own orders and those of her predecessors. And all of them told her only one thing: if they fought this war as they had the one before, and the one before that, the City would lose.

Najaluhe Jezeden Broken Wood, General Twenty-Three of the City, could name each of her twenty-two predecessors and expound at length on their great battles. She could analyze in detail their faults and strengths, those of the forces they commanded, and those of their enemies. She could speak learnedly of the rise of magic in the City, and how magic had been all the difference between the struggles of General One -- Monederu Joviman Demega, nicknamed "Hard Luck" by his troops -- and the triumphs of Zeva Vagelon Trader's Town, General Twenty-Two, who when Najaluhe was a captain had turned back a combined force of seven thousand Viyangen and five thousand eastern barbarians with three and a half thousand soldiers of the City. For that the city had erected a statue of Vagelon larger than most buildings, right next to his house in the middle of Traders' Town, and surrounded by man-height steles in which the name of every soldier of that three and a half thousand was engraved in pure gold.

But while Najaluhe was proud to have her name on that monument, it created in her no confidence at all that she could do the same thing now.

She looked down for a moment at the scarred wood of her desk, a relic dating back to General Four and probably well beyond, then back up at the officers assembled in front of her. "My friends," she said, "tell me what we can do to avoid losing this war."

"Not fight it," muttered Rinado Virade Jevega, Brigadier, a thin ascetic with the typical Westerner's sense of biting humor. There was a general laugh at his comment but no real response; everyone there knew that was no longer a meaningful option. Not fighting the war would mean that in a month or two Viyangen and barbarians would be squabbling over who took home the gold stored in the Capitol treasury.

Najaluhe stood. She was a tall woman, strongly built and scarred and weathered by years in the field. Her skin, naturally a deep brown, was so blackened by the sun it was almost blue. Large and very clear eyes stared out from this face. "I won't go down in the histories -- if there are any histories written after this -- as the General who lost the City to the Empire. If that's self-centered of me, I'm sorry, but those are the only terms I can think in right now. Does anyone have any ideas?"

At that no one said anything at all.

"Well," General Twenty-Three said, sitting back down, "at least I'm not alone." Another, louder laugh greeted this.

"The Kapahele," said Migeru Zevo Trader's Town, Colonel. Because the tiny spy was a cousin of Vagelon, people had to listen to her -- but they would have listened if her family had been farmers or Southgate artisans; she had not only Vagelon's name but a remarkable amount of his skill. "General, I know no one wants to hear this, but it's true. The Kapahele are ready to coordinate with us, and they can give us what we need to hold off the barbarians while the regular force deals with the Viyangen."

Another colonel, a big cavalryman with a broad, seamed face, shook his head violently. "No. They're nearly barbarians themselves. Let them plan their own defense."

Half the room started speaking at once, but Zevo's high, clear voice cut through the noise. "They plan their own defense already, and we have to plan around them. Colonel, I'm not just trying to help them, I'm trying to help all of us. Will you please listen for a moment?"

Silence, as fast as if Najaluhe herself had called for it. And this was not because of the spy's military skill, but simply because no one with that name could be ignored.

"The Kapahele," Zevo said in parade-ground cadence, "are not by any stretch of the imagination barbarians. They are Citizens and while they may set themselves apart, they've never given anyone any cause to think they're not loyal. Kapahele itself is simply a district of the City, like Broken Wood or Chefeka or Trader's Town, no more or less."

Nice choice there, Migeru, Najaluhe thought cynically. I notice you didn't mention, say, Temeka or Southgate.

"As things stand now," the spy continued, "we have to evacuate all the eastern fields north and south around Kapahele to get the farmers out of the way of the barbarians. You know what happens to Tekesenero and the Thoren; they're clogged with refugees. At the same time we're trying to get the army out there ... It's a bloody mess. We can't maneuver directly east because, of course, Kapahele's in the way. It's a load of shit!

"If the Kapahele let themselves be folded in -- and I think they will, hell, I know they will -- we can skip all that. The evacuation goes through the entire east side of the City, five or seven checkpoints instead of two; the army gets out the same way. The navy doesn't have to sit around waiting for clearance. Powder's sake, we could have the barbarians on the run before the Viyangen ever get within sight of Palata! Then we swing north over the plains and hit them on the flank. Don't worry about the mountains; we can hold whatever comes down from there with a blocking force, two regiments or a brigade at most --"

The cavalry colonel cut her off. "Of course you're absolutely sure of that, spook." Najaluhe placed him now: Dono Lavodi Degesenero, which explained his antipathy toward the Kapahele. It was a feeling which was probably shared to some degree by most of the officers in the room, but Tekesenero had a particularly bad history with its northern neighbor.

"Yes, I am, sharp." Zevo was smiling in a way that had nothing to do with humor; neither "spook" nor "sharp" was a term of endearment. "Being absolutely sure is my job. I could show you several years of reports documenting weakness on the parts of the Falcons and the Gold Rivers due to their feud with the Cascades, or perhaps you'd rather see some bills of lading from the First Peak trading post? If, that is, you could read them."

Lavodi went very red, and his big hands clenched into fists. Duels were rare in the upper ranks, but not unheard-of. Najaluhe wondered what weapon Zevo would choose if she were challenged. Wands would be the obvious choice, given the size disparity between the two officers, but the general thought the spy's taste might run more to knives. Poisoned, of course.

That couldn't be allowed to happen right now. "Colonels," Najaluhe said, "if you want to kill each other after the war is over, you have my permission. Until then, please concentrate on your jobs."

"Information is my job," Zevo said.

"Zevo, Colonel!"

"Sorry." There was no contrition at all in the spy's face or voice. General Fifteen had gone down in military history as "Jeve the Red" after he ordered a massacre of his intelligence corps; Najaluhe understood precisely his reasons for doing what he had.

Except it only set him back, oh, three or four moves in his game. It would take me back so far I'd never get ahead.

"Does anyone else," she asked very slowly, "have any suggestions?"

Virade said, "Zevo, Colonel is right, the way I see it. Due respect to you and yours -- Lavodi, Colonel; Maga, Brigadier," a nod toward the ranking cavalry officer, "you on horseback don't have to deal with the same kind of mobility problems we do. Which maybe means you don't quite understand them either. It's the straightlegs who end up holding the ground when the refugees come through, and we can't gallop around them, either. Give us a straight shot through Kapahele and some fill-in from their own infantry and we'd have a lot easier time."

There was some muttering from the priests. Najaluhe had to work at keeping her face blank; it was they, more than any other group, who would have the final say. Migeru might persuade even the cavalry and then the General herself, Najaluhe might take the proposal to One Councilor Seventeen and argue passionately for approval, His Honor might even want to go along -- but if the priests didn't want it to happen, it wasn't going to.

Galiri Webera Southgate, Brigadier Holy, said at last, "The Kapahele are Citizens and faithful. Do it."

For just a moment Najaluhe wanted to say no, just to spite him. She didn't like anyone but the Council even appearing to give her orders, and while Webera was a priest he was also a soldier. But that like Zevo and Lavodi's impending duel was something to be put off until another time.

"It is decided," she said with irony in her voice, "that tomorrow, I will take One Councilor a plan for coordination of forces between the Citizens' Army and the Kapahele militia. Brigadiers of Infantry, Cavalry, Logistics; Brigadier Holy; and Colonels of Intelligence, Personnel, and Justice, I'd like you stay for a while so we can draw this up. All others, dismissed."

She started laying out the intelligence reports as her officers filed away.

The elbow to the face had been a feint; the real attack was a knee to the stomach that pushed Tanip back and knocked his breath out, and then with that same leg a kick to the face. He pulled back to avoid that, but barely -- Lochin's heel brushed his jaw, and his teeth clicked together with the impact. He tasted blood.

He let the impact carry him back a couple of steps farther than Lochin had expected, so he was out of her range for the moment. He lashed out with a crescent kick to make her keep her distance while he figured out what to do.

At long range he could keep her away from him all day with his long, strong legs; very close up he could probably wrestle her down. But at the middle range where most real fighting took place she was very skilled and impossibly fast and mean. Across the floor, he studied her. About average height, which was short to him; muscular and graceful; dark hair and olive skin and eyes of a deep green-brown shade he'd never seen before. He indulged himself in a brief fantasy of what she'd be like in bed. Tall and pale would go well with short and dark.

She knew what he was thinking. There was a sideways grin on her face as she scuttled in for another one of her close-range combinations, probably a snap kick to his knee and a hammer-fist to temple or neck -- he stopped it by sidestepping and launching a round kick toward her face. She blocked casually and backed off, still watching for an opportunity.

Hell with it, Tanip thought. He brought his knee up as though for a front kick and then reversed, a tricky spin that put him much farther to the right than she was ready for and let him score a solid back kick to her shoulder. She made a soft grunt and tried to shield that side, as he'd expected. A snap kick to the back of her knee put her off balance and a forearm in the neck finished the job; she fell back and he dropped down to put his knee on her stomach --

-- and felt a hammer-blow in his stomach as she lashed out against him with both feet, somersaulted, rose unsteadily but very fast. She was still gagging from the throat strike but it hadn't stopped her from thinking. Tanip forced himself to take three long, deep breaths as he held a close guard position, not allowing himself to think about how much he wanted to vomit.

Yes, and if you want to ask her what she's doing afterward, you should be in some kind of condition for it, right?

A little lower and that two-foot kick would have put him out action in all senses of the word for most of the night. Lochin wasn't just good; she was extremely good, probably quite a bit better than he was. Only his size had kept it an even fight for this long, and that wouldn't last forever.

"Stop," said the hall-teacher, and Tanip straightened from his crouch with some effort but real relief. Lochin didn't look like she was sorry either that it was over.

"End." The combatants stepped close to each other for the ritual kiss on both cheeks, to show that the friendship which had ended when the fight began was now restored. Tanip was acutely aware of Lochin's smell, excitement and her own personal scent and some perfumed oil and female sweat. He had to make himself step back.

He was also still very tired, and his stomach hurt.

The hall-teacher puffed on his weed, which was smoked down almost to a cinder. That smell too reminded Tanip of something he very much wanted: a weed and a couple of drinks would take away the pain from assorted bruises and pulled muscles and that damned kick to the stomach. He'd have to wait until his pulse and breathing returned to normal, though, or he'd cough his lungs out.

"Tanip Marik's Son, what did you do wrong?"

"I was too cautious early in the fight, Hall-teacher," he replied quickly. "Sparring tired me out more than her, so that when I had the chance to end it I wasn't cautious enough, just went down to the floor." He rubbed his stomach. "She's enough younger than me that's a problem; play-sparring and wild attack are both kids' games."

The hall-teacher laughed. "You're both kids to me." He stubbed out his weed. "Twenty-five more years of this shit, you'll know what old feels like. But, not bad, you're right. And I'd say you need to stretch out better before the fight, get the most use out of those legs of yours." The hall-teacher was shorter than either of them, but as broad across the shoulders as he was tall. His hands looked like they could crush a head without much effort. "You can use up a lot of power on a kick overcoming the resistance of the muscles; stretching frees that power up for the target."

He turned to Lochin. "Lochin Silet's Daughter, what did you do wrong?"

"Nothing, Hall-teacher."

The older man jumped up as fast as a startled cat. "'Nothing?' You little shit, how did you get so fucking good with an attitude like that? If I step onto the floor and tear your head off, will you do nothing wrong then?"

"Yes, Hall-teacher." The sideways grin was back. "Nothing except getting my head torn off, I mean. Tanip Marik's Son is stronger than me, but not as good, so I held him off. You're better and stronger, so ..."

She considered him, like a hunter watching a dangerous animal. "Unless I could lead you on a chase for a while, of course. You have thirty more years of weed in your lungs than I do, after all."

"Shit." The hall-teacher shook his head. "Damn, you're right. Except for one thing: you let the pain in your shoulder distract you from what he was doing to take you off balance. I'd've kicked you in the ribs once you fell rather than going for the pin -- you'd've coughed blood for a week, if you lived. If you're too hurt to fight, get the hell out of range instead of trying to stay in. But other than that, you fucking arrogant brat, you did nothing wrong."

"Thank you, Hall-teacher." She put no irony in her words; Tanip thought, watching her face go blank as she took in the information and reviewed the fight in her mind, that seeing how she got that good wasn't hard at all.

After that it was time for work on the wooden dummies. The putative reason for the dummies was to teach precision, and to toughen up the striking surfaces of the hands and feet. Tanip thought the real reason it came after sparring was to work off the barely contained fury that exercise had generated: he wanted to hit and smash and hurt in a way not even the most realistic mock fighting could allow. As he launched hard strikes and tricky combinations against the short figure with its strange placement of protruding arms, he watched Lochin from the corner of his eye. She was doing something very different, as much a dance as a simulation of a fight.

A victory dance, he thought. Brief rage made him attack the dummy harder, faster; after a few moments of bruises and angry sweat, he decided this was a pretty damned silly way to spend his anger. He stepped out of the ring, pulled a weed off the shelf, and stood watching Lochin and the others who were still practicing. The smoke, one of his own blends, made him feel better. It always did.