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An eternity later- an eternity probably measurable as a couple of minutes- the eggs stopped landing on and around the palace and started falling farther north in Bishah. Hajjaj had to fight his way out from under the desk; some of the rubble all but caged him there.
"Qutuz!" he called. "Are you all right?"
"Aye, your Excellency." The secretary came ru
"I'm well enough," Hajjaj said, "but you're bleeding." He pointed to a gash on Qutuz's left calf.
His secretary looked down at it. When he looked up again, astonishment filled his face. "I didn't even know it was there," he said.
"Well, it needs bandaging- that's plain." Hajjaj used a letter-opener to cut up cushions to get cloth to wrap around Qutuz's leg. He would have had a simpler time of it had either of them worn clothes.
"I thank you, your Excellency," Qutuz said. "There are bound to be plenty of people hurt a lot worse than I am. We'd better see what we can do for them."
"You're right." Hajjaj went over to the little closet that opened onto his office. His ceremonial wardrobe lay in chaos on the floor. He didn't care. He tossed his secretary a couple of tunics and kilts and grabbed some for himself. Seeing Qutuz's bewilderment, he spoke aloud his thought of a moment before: "Bandages."
"Ah." Qutuz's face cleared. "That's clever. That's very clever."
"It's cleverness I wish we didn't need," Hajjaj said grimly. "Come on. Let's make for the audience chamber and the throne room." That was as close as he would come to admitting he was worried about King Shazli. His secretary's eyes widened, but Qutuz didn't worry out loud, either.
And they both had plenty to do before they got anywhere near the throne room. People were down and groaning in the hallways. Some of them, the ones with broken bones, needed more than bandaging. Some were beyond all help. Hajjaj and Qutuz found not only bodies but buried bodies and pieces of bodies. Before long, their sandals left bloody footprints at every stride.
Someone around the corner of a corridor barked peremptory orders: "Get that rubble off him! Grab that roof beam and lift! Maybe we can still save his leg!"
Hajjaj's heart leaped within him. He knew that voice. "Your Majesty!" he called. Behind him, Qutuz whooped.
"Is that you, Hajjaj?" the king asked. "Powers above be praised you're whole and hale. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters for doing this to us." He went back to the rescue he was leading: "Heave there, all of you." A shriek- not King Shazli's- followed. "Easy there, my friend," Shazli said. "It'll be better now."
Dust and dirt and blood covered Shazli when Hajjaj finally reached his side. But the king needed no fancy trappings to gain obedience. When he gave a command, everyone who heard hurried to carry it out. People respected him for the man he was as well as for the rank he held.
"Very good indeed to see you in one piece, your Excellency," he told Hajjaj when the foreign minister reached his side. "Swemmel's whoresons have struck us a heavy blow here."
"Aye, your Majesty." Hajjaj knew more than a little gratitude that the king didn't blame him for the Unkerlanter attack- or, if he did, didn't say so in public.
"We are going to have to strengthen our defenses against dragons around the city," Shazli said. "If the Unkerlanters did this once, they'll come back to do it again."
"That's… true, your Majesty." Hajjaj bowed with no small respect. "I hadn't thought so far ahead." That such a thing could happen once to Bishah was appalling enough. That it might happen again and again… He shivered.
"Do you know whether General Ikhshid lives?" King Shazli asked.
"I'm sorry, but no," Hajjaj answered. "I have no idea. The eggs stopped falling, and the first thing I wanted to do was make sure you were safe."
"Here I stand." Shazli had lived the softest of soft lives. He was inclined to be pudgy, and had never looked particularly impressive. But there was iron in him. "King Swemmel will think he can put fear in us, so that we will do whatever he wants. He will find he is wrong. He will find he ca
Several of the people in the damaged hallway clapped their hands. Hajjaj almost clapped himself. He did bow again. "This is the spirit that led your father to reclaim our freedom after the Unkerlanters ruled us for so long."
King Shazli nodded. "And we shall stay free, come what may. Are we not still the men of the desert our forefathers were in days gone by?"
"Even so, your Majesty," Hajjaj replied, though he and the king both knew the Zuwayzin were no such thing. This generation was more urban, and more like townsfolk in the rest of Derlavai, than any before it. But Shazli had to know saying such things was the best way to rally his people.
Neither of them mentioned that the king's father had needed to free Zuwayza because the Unkerlanters had been strong enough to hold it down for generations, and neither of them mentioned that enough blows like the one the Unkerlanters had just delivered might break any people's will- to say nothing of ability- to keep on fighting. Hajjaj understood both those things painfully well. This did not seem the best time to ask Shazli whether he did, too.
"I shall find out what we need to learn about Ikhshid," the king said. He pointed at Hajjaj. "I want you to find a crystallomancer and speak to Marquis Balastro. Assure him we are still in the fight, and see what help we can hope to get from Algarve."
"As you say." Hajjaj's cough had nothing to do with the dust and smoke in the air. It was pure diplomacy. "Seeing how things are going for them in their own fight against Unkerlant, I don't know what they'll be able to spare us."
Shazli, fortunately, recognized a diplomatic cough when he heard one. "You may tell the marquis that we need tools to stay in the fight. They have more dragons than we do. They also have more highly trained mages than we do; they're bound to be better off when it comes to things like heavy sticks that can knock a dragon out of the sky."
"Every word you say there is true," Hajjaj agreed. "I'll do what I can." He nodded to Qutuz. "To the crystallomancers." His secretary nodded and followed.
One of the thick mud-brick walls of the crystallomancers' office had a new, yard-wide hole in it. Some of their tables were overturned; some of their crystals were bright, jagged shards on the floor; some of them were bleeding. But one of the men who hadn't been hurt quickly established an etheric co
"And you," Hajjaj answered. "King Shazli expects the Unkerlanters to pay us more such calls."
"I shouldn't be surprised," Balastro said. "They missed me this time, so they'll have to come back and try again."
Hajjaj smiled at his self-importance, which was partly an act and partly typical of a lot of Algarvians. The Zuwayzi foreign minister said, "Any help you can give us, we'll be grateful for and put to good use. We have the men to serve heavy sticks and the men to fly dragons, if only we could get them. Then the Unkerlanters wouldn't have such an easy time of it."
"I'll pass that along," Balastro said. "When we haven't got enough of anything ourselves, I don't know what they'll say about it back in Trapani. But I'll pass it on with my recommendation that they give you all they can." His eyes narrowed. He was shrewd, was Balastro. "After all, we have to keep you fighting Swemmel, too."
"You and King Shazli see things much alike here," Hajjaj said. "I am glad of it." And I hope it does some good. But will it? Will anything?