Chapter one

Jaidur is annoyed

“Do you bare the throat?”

“Aye, my love. I bare the throat.”

The brightly painted pieces were swept up and returned to the silver-bound box. I had been comprehensively defeated. The game had been protracted and cunning and fiercely contested, filled with shifts and stratagems on Delia’s part that wrecked my cleverest schemes. I leaned over the board awkwardly from the bed and picked up my right-wing Chuktar. He was the only piece of high value my remorseless antagonist had failed to take.

“You held him back too long,” she said, decisively, her face half-laughing and yet filled with concern for the instinctive wince I failed to quell as that dratted wound stabbed my neck.

“I did.”

He was a marvelously fashioned playing piece, a Chuktar of the Khibil race of diffs, his foxlike face carved with a precision and understanding that revealed the qualities of the Khibils in a way that many a much more famous sculptor might well miss. Delia took the Chuktar from my fingers and placed him carefully in his velvet-lined niche within the box. When you play Jikaida, win or lose, you develop a rapport with the little pieces that, hard to define or even to justify coherently, nevertheless exists.

“You will not play again?” I leaned back on the plumped-up pillows and found that smile that always comes from Delia. “I am mindful to develop a new ploy with the Paktuns—”

“No more games tonight.” The tone of voice was practical. There is no arguing with Delia in this mood. “Your wound is troubling you and you need rest. We have won this battle but until you are fit again I shall not rest easy.”

“Sink me!” I burst out. “There is so much to do!”

“Yes. And it will not get done if you do not rest.”

The invasion of the island of Vallia by the riff-raff of half a world, and the onslaught by the disciplined iron legions of Hamal, Vallia’s mortal enemy, had been checked. But only that. We held Vondium the capital and much of the northeast and midlands; from the rest of the empire our enemies pressed in on us. I’d collapsed after this last battle in which we had successfully held that wild charge of the vove-mounted clansmen — I’m no superman but just a mere mortal man who tries to do the best he can. Now Delia looked on me, the lamps’ gleam limning her hair with those gorgeous chestnut tints, her face wonderfully soft and concerned, leaning over me. I swallowed.

“You rest now. Tomorrow we can strike camp and fly back to Vondium—”

“Rather, fly after the clansmen and try to—”

“The wind is foul for the northeast.”

“Is there no arguing with you?”

“Ra