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orders without question. So far there had been no hint of any reprisal for the mischief Jommy had inflicted on Servan during the last operation, when Jommy had been appointed senior, but Jommy just knew it was coming.
    The two young officers had been detailed to a position low in the foothills of the region known as the Peaks of the Quor, a rugged, mountainous peninsula jutting northward from the eastern side of the Empire of Great Kesh. About a hundred men, including these two young officers, had been deposited on this beach a week earlier, and all Jommy knew was that a landing was expected here, though the exact identity of the invaders had not been shared with the young officers. All Jommy knew was they wouldn’t be friendly.
    Jommy also had aged, but as a farm youth and caravan worker, already used to a harsher life than his companion, he revealed less dramatic evidence of his recent experiences. Rather, his already cocksure brashness had evolved into more of a quiet confidence, and his time spent with the other young officers from the university at Roldem had taught him a fair dose of humility; all were better at something than he was. Still, one part of his nature remained unchanged: his almost unique ability tosee humor in most situations. This one, however, had tested his limits. The downpour had been unrelenting for four days now. Their only source of warmth was a fire built in a large cave a mile up a miserable hillside, and the enemy they were told to expect had shown no evidence of arriving on schedule.
    “No,” said Jommy, “I don’t mean why are we here. I mean why are we here ?”
    “Did you sleep through the Captain’s orders?” came a voice from behind them.
    Jommy turned to see the shadowy figure who had approached undetected. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he complained.
    The man sat down next to Jommy, ignoring the fact that half his body was still outside the scant protection offered by the makeshift shelter. “I wouldn’t be much of a thief if I couldn’t sneak up on you two in a driving storm, would I?” he replied.
    Both young officers looked at the newcomer. He was only a few years older than them, yet his face showed premature aging, including an unexpected sprinkling of grey hair in his dark mustache and beard, a neatly trimmed affair that revealed a streak of vanity in an otherwise chronically unkempt and slovenly person. He was nearly as tall as Jommy, but not quite as burly, yet his movement and carriage betrayed a lean hardness, a whipcord toughness that had Jommy convinced he’d be a difficult man to contend with in a stand-up fight.
    Servan nodded. “Jim,” he acknowledged. The young thief had somehow managed to get caught up in the same net of intrigue that had brought Servan and Jommy to this lonely hillside in a remote part of Kesh. He had put in an appearance the week before, arriving on a ship with supplies for what Jommy had come to think of as the “Cursed Expedition.”
    Servan and Jommy were both currently serving in the Army of Roldem, though Jommy came from a land on the other side of the world. Servan was nobility, royalty even, somewhere in line to be king should perhaps ten or eleven relatives expire unexpectedly. Yet they were now assigned to what could only be generously called an unusual company, soldiers from Roldem, the Kingdom of the Isles, Kesh, and even a contingent of miners and sappers from the dwarven city of Dorgin, all under the command of Kaspar of Olasko, former Duke of what was now a province of the Kingdom of Roldem. Once a hunted outlaw with a price on his head, sometime over the last few years he had managed to rehabilitate his reputation and now had special status with both Roldem and the Empire of Great Kesh. His adjutant was a Roldem captain named Stefan, who happened to be Servan’s cousin, which also made him another distant cousin to the King of Roldem.
    The arrival of the newcomer had revealed another puzzling aspect of this