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A moment later, Qutuz's image faded from the crystal. But light didn't flare from it, as it would have were the etheric connection broken. After a pause of a few heartbeats, a new image formed in the crystal: that of a man whose long white beard began to grow just below his eyes, and whose hairline was hardly separable from his eyebrows. Most savants reckoned the Ortahoin cousins to the Ice People of the austral continent.

Hajjaj gave Hadadezer a seated bow. "Good day, your Excellency," he said in Algarvian, a language the Ortaho minister also used. "As always, it is a privilege to speak to you. I should be delighted to enjoy the privilege more often."

"You are too kind," Hadadezer replied. "You will, I hope, remember our conversation this past winter."

"Aye, I do indeed," Hajjaj said. Sulingen had been on the point of falling then. "It was a worrisome time."

"Worrisome." The minister from Ortah nodded. "The very word. It surely was. You may perhaps also remember the concerns of my sovereign, King Ahinadab."

"I do recall them," Hajjaj agreed soberly. "You are perhaps wise not to speak of them too openly. It is probably that no one but ourselves is picking up these emanations, but it is not certain." Ahinadab had worried that, for the first time in generations, war might bear down on his kingdom in the aftermath of the Algarvian defeat. To Hajjaj, that proved the King of Ortah was no fool.

Now, speaking like a man in mortal torment, Hadadezer said, "What King Ahinadab feared has now come to pass. Algarvian soldiers have begun retreating into Ortah to escape the Unkerlanters, and King Swemmel's men are hard on their heels."

"Oh, my dear fellow!" Hajjaj said, as he had the winter before when Hadadezer spoke of his sovereign's concern. "Do I understand, then, that Ortah lacks the strength to keep them out?"

Ever so mournfully, the Ortaho minister nodded. "King Ahinadab has sent protests in the strongest terms to both Trapani and Cottbus." His eyebrows- they were separate from his hair after all- bristled in humiliated fury. "Ortah is a kingdom, not a road." More bristling. "But neither Mezentio nor Swemmel pays the least attention. Each, in fact, demanded that we declare war on the other."

"Oh, my dear fellow!" Hajjaj said again. Zuwayza lacked Ortah's natural defenses, and had had to suffer some generations of Unkerlanter overlordship. But King Shazli didn't have to worry about getting attacked by both sides at once. With real curiosity, Hajjaj asked, "What will your sovereign do?"

"I do not know," Hadadezer answered. "King Ahinadab does not yet know, either. If we say aye to either kingdom, we put ourselves in that king's hands and make an enemy of the other."

"And if you say no to both kings, you make enemies of them both," Hajjaj said.

"My sovereign is only too painfully aware of that as well," Hadadezer said. "As I told you last winter, I am no skilled diplomat. Ortah has no skilled diplomats. We have never needed skilled diplomats: the land is our shield. But with so many behemoths and dragons about, with so much more strong magecraft loosed in this war, we cannot be sure the land will ward us anymore."