Shadow's Son by Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling and Karen Wehrstein ...

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camp , he thought,all for a shennen bad lead. With Eforas making me personally responsible, and I
can hardly pin it on him, can I, when it was my fikken theory. Maybe I am losing my touch. Shit
shit shit .
He paced his tent, kicked his lap-desk, and for a time wallowed in totally self-indulgent self-pity.
That's enough wallowing, he forcefully told himself after a while.Discipline. On to the next step, of
rational thought, planning and action . Only one rational thought came:Now the fuck what ?
Time passed. He read his notes ten times over again. He paced some more. He ran over his old
principles of spy-craft, hoping to squeeze clues out of general inspiration. He ran over the principles he'd
added to the list himself, from his experience in foreign lands: Brahvnikian intrigue and dealing techniques,
Zak protocols of deception, Yeoli strategic philosophy with its elegantly naive, sweeping rules—perhaps
not so naive, he reflected, as practiced bythese Yeolis.The path unconceived , he thought—a Yeoli
concept, that when faced with an impossible conundrum the general must find an answer outside of what
appeared possible and was therefore conceivable.Yes, thats what I need now .
He catnapped on it. He slept properly on it. He drank a flask of wine on it. He turned it over and over in
his head.Some faceless Brahvnikian, Mikhail's hireling, money-bag runner. How in Hayel am I
going to find him, in this obscene sprawl of a barbarian camp ? He fought off despair.Celestialis,
none of it matters .
He woke in the night, tossed and turned, wanted a boy, an herb-pipe, another wine-flask, to grab and
cling to. Outside wind flopped the canvas, near and far, on a thousand tents. Someone passing outside
murmured in a barbarian tongue, Yeoli or Lakan or who knew what— a barbarian tongue on Arko's
own sacred land, paid for with its blood, in the inviolate Empire.Shefenkas, son of a whore and a dog,
is probably having no trouble sleeping right now , he thought.
He woke again, before dawn; not even a paling showed through the tiny holes in the tent's seams. More
rested now, his thoughts were not so tinged with jitters; his body felt warmer, and all did not seem lost.
And then it came shining into his head.
Matthas crawled up and lit a lamp, chortling; following the original conception like the river after the first
burst in the dam, the details filled themselves in. He drew a pigeon-paper out of the compartment in his
lap-desk and uncapped his finest pen.
Patappas is in the City, down on his luck since he lost the arm, and Frenandias, compromised in
that Srian matter so he'll never get trade work again, living off that fancy lover; there's Moras,
too. They'd wrestle demons in Hayel for a tenth of the gold we'd get for this… And what I'm
asking is nothing, easy. He chortled some more, and began to write.That'll knock the heart out of
this misbegotten barbarian host; they'll fall apart, into easy cuttings, in an eight-day. So much for
the great threat; and Arko, despite itself, will be saved. The path unconceived… Han! I found it .
What would Kurkas give to its savior? The man who arranged what I'm going to? He paused to
chortle louder, imagining the elevation ceremony, the mantle with the coat of arms he would be permitted
to design, the deed to the estate, the speech ringing with words in his praise. No one had ever been
elevated two rungs at once before,fessas toAitzas; but for what he would do, it was not impossible, nor
unreasonable to expect.