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shop there and slap together a whole new empire.
Just as the Shadowmasters had done before them.
"Tell them I'll come back after they've had a day or two to think it over."
As she retreated with me Arkana told me, "If they agree to join you they'll
give you more trouble than Gromovol did."
"Really?" I chose a tone that was supposed to let her know I might not be as
dumb as I looked. "How do you suppose we could keep them from doing that?"
She did have some ideas. "Do what you did to us. Make them strip naked. Take
their rheitgeistiden and their shefsepoken. Make them stay on the ground where
they're vulnerable. But promise them they'll get everything back after they
show you that you can trust them. Then you stretch it out."
"I'm going to adopt you. You'd make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded
future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?"
Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, "I think she's right."
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"Excellent! Let's go ask your wicked future mother's opinion."
We found Lady reading what Baladitya was spending his final years recording,
which was, more or less, Shivetya's biography. "Darling, I've decided we need
to adopt these two marvellous children. They're turning out every bit as
blackhearted as we ever wanted our Booboo to be."
Lady awarded me a suspicious look, decided I was fooling around but meant what
I said. More or less. "Tell me about it."
I said, "Go to it, girls."
Chapter 89
Beside the Cemetery: More Confusion
Expecting the Great General to remain offensive-minded was not enough, Sleepy
knew. She had to outguess him. This one time she could not let Mogaba slide
around her.
She took a twinned approach to planning, setting up two distinct staffs. The
first consisted of Iqbal and Runmust Singh, Riverwalker, Sahra, Willow Swan
and others who had been with her since the Kiaulune wars. She even summoned
Blade up from Jaicur because Blade actually knew Mogaba personally and, at one
time, had been fairly close to him.
The second general staff consisted entirely of officers from Hsien. These men
knew Mogaba only as a bugaboo. And they had no knowledge of the surrounding
territory beyond what they could learn from maps and scouting on their own.
Sleepy hoped to find something useful in the gap between diverging visions.
She kept her cavalry busy, scouting, chasing Mogaba's scouts, skirmishing with
enemy patrols, trying to locate the bulk of the Great General's forces.
Mogaba was doing the same. Both sides relied heavily on questioning civilians
passing through. Traffic on the Rock Road had slackened but had not stopped
entirely.
Each staff proposed several likely enemy campaigns. Sleepy had their opposite
numbers play out a counter campaign. And in the end, after two almost
sleepless days, she felt no more illuminated than she had at the beginning.
So she chose to go with intuition. That had served her best during previous
dances with the Great General, anyway.
Chapter 90
By the Cemetery: Still More Confusion
The Great General told his commanders, "I'm growing concerned that all this
maneuvering helps them more than it does us. It's obvious that they're without
mystical support. But every hour we maneuver is an hour nearer the time when
they get those advantages back."
Aridatha Singh asked, "Aren't we still at a disadvantage in a direct
confrontation?"
"Soldier for soldier, possibly. But we have three times as many soldiers. And
they're still trying to cover a line running all the way from the Grove of
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Doom to this stand near their camp. That's too much to hold with ten thousand
men."
No questions came. No suggestions arose. The Great General seldom solicited
advice. When Mogaba gathered his captains he planned to issue instructions.
Their job would be to see that those were executed.
"I'm returning to the original plan. I'll drive straight forward, in the
middle, with the Second Territorial. I'll engage and hold. Singh, you advance
along your previous route with your same mission. Once you're behind them form
your division in battle array and advance up the Rock Road. If the rest of us
have done our jobs you'll only have to sweep up fugitives."
Mogaba rested a hand upon the shoulder of a young officer named Narenda Nath
Saraswati, scion of an old aristocratic family, of the third generation of
that family to serve under arms since the opening skirmishes of the
Shadowmaster wars. Two days earlier Saraswati had been a regimental chief of
staff with an aggressive attitude. The Great General having been disappointed
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