"It's not really all that substantial, Sorgan," Padan admitted, "but Aracia wouldn't even recognize a real fort. I don't know that you want to wait too much longer. I'm sure that her priests are trying everything they can think of to discredit you. Let's not give them too much more time before she sees the skirmish between your men and the imitation bugs Veltan's going to conjure up. That's going to verify our scam and scare Aracia's stockings off. After that, we'll be home free."

"You're probably right, Padan. I'll have a quick talk with Veltan, and he can go on out and start Torl and Rabbit this way while you and I go to the throne room and tell Aracia that we want to show her what we've accomplished so far."

"What are you going to do if she refuses to come out here?"

Sorgan shrugged. "I'll tell her that all work stops until she comes out here and approves of what we've done so far. No matter what her priests have been telling her, she's still terrified by the Vlagh, so she won't take any chances. She knows that her priests would be useless in a war, so she'll do just about anything to stay on the good side of me."

Bersla was orating again, but for once Aracia didn't even seem to be listening.

"Where have you been?" she demanded of Sorgan when he entered the opulent throne room.

"Off on the west side of your temple, lady," Sorgan replied. "My men have been building a fort to hold off the bug-people. It looks fairly good to me so far, but maybe you should come there and take a look. My men and I have always specialized in tearing forts down, not building them. If you have any suggestions, now's the time to make them. There's a fairly significant difference between a temple and a fort that you might want to think about. A temple says 'come in,' but a fort says 'stay out.' I think you'll see what I mean when we get there."

"Holy Aracia is otherwise occupied right now, outlander," the priestess Alcevan declared arrogantly.

"Listening to Bersla, you mean?" Sorgan asked. "Has he said anything new and different today? I'm sure that Lady Aracia has heard every speech that he's cobbled together a hundred times or more. You could listen, if you'd like, and then when Lady Aracia returns you can sum them up for her."

"Do you really need to have me look at this fort of yours, Sorgan?" Aracia asked.

"This is your temple, Lady Aracia," Sorgan replied. "If the bugs destroy it, your priests will have to build you a new one, and that might take them a while—quite a long while, I'd say, since fat people wear out in just a short time when they're doing real work. I suppose you could set up your throne in an open field somewhere, but I don't think very many of your priests would like to make speeches when it's raining on them. Let me put it to you in the simplest of terms, lady. Come and look, or all work stops. We can't go any farther without your approval."

Aracia's eyes went wide and she stood up. "Let's go look, Captain Hook-Beak," she said.

"Now, that's more like it," Sorgan said approvingly.

"It's called a catapult, lady," Sorgan explained. "The Trogs invented it. Up north in your brother's Domain, it worked out quite well. It was originally invented to throw rocks at the enemy, but we used it to throw burning pitch at the bug-people. If you want to get somebody's—or something's—immediate attention, set him on fire."

"I see that you're still putting sharp stakes in the ground," Aracia noted.

Sorgan nodded. "We've got gallons and gallons of the venom we leeched out of dead bugs down in Zelana's Domain. We dip the stakes in that venom before we plant them in the ground. When a bug-man steps on one of those, he dies almost immediately. It's a quick way to get rid of a lot of enemies."

"Is that as high as you're going to make your fort, Sorgan?" Aracia asked.

"No, ma'am, that's just the base. There'll be another ten feet on top of that part of the fort."

"Ho, Cap'n," one of the Maags shouted. "I think the scouts are coming back, but it looks to me like they're being chased by bug-people."

Sorgan swore. "I told those idiots to be careful!" he exclaimed. Then he took Aracia by the arm. "Let's get up on top of the fort. It'll be safer there."

Aracia's face had gone pale, and her eyes seemed filled with terror.

"Over that way, Cap'n," Padan said in a fair imitation of the Maag dialect. "There's a ladder a short way down along the wall. Once we get up on top, I'll kick the ladder away."

"That's not a bad idea, Black-Beard," Sorgan agreed.

"Black-Beard?" Padan muttered.

"Sorry," Sorgan said softly. "You've got to have a Maag kind of name, and that was about the best I could come up with."

They reached the ladder and scrambled on up. "Leave the ladder where it is for now, Black-Beard," Sorgan said. "If one of our scouts gets clear of the bug-people, we want him up here. I need to know just exactly what happened out there."

"Aye, Cap'n," Padan replied.

"Shouldn't I return to the main temple?" Aracia asked.

Sorgan shook his head. "It's not safe now, Lady Aracia," he said. "My men and I can protect you up here on this wall, but those narrow corridors wouldn't be safe." Then he looked out toward the west. "There!" he said, pointing at a berm no more than a hundred feet away. "My men are doing something right for a change. They took some high ground and it looks to me like they're holding it. There are probably a lot of dead bugs on the far side."

"Isn't that Rabbit with the others?" Padan asked.

"That's Rabbit, all right," Sorgan agreed. "He's got that bow he made down in Veltan country."

"I didn't know that he had a bow," Padan said.

"He spent too much time with Longbow," Sorgan declared.

"Now that's the one I'd like to see out there," Padan said.

"If there's only one Longbow and a thousand bug-men, put your money on Longbow. He'll kill every one of them."

"Our men are holding that berm," Sorgan said. "The bug-people aren't going to get past them."

"Those bug-things aren't very big, are they?" Aracia said then.

"You don't really see very many big ones, Your Majesty," Padan said. "Now and then the Vlagh will make a big one, but most of them are what Rabbit calls 'teenie-weenies.'"

"The little rascal just came down off that berm," Sorgan said, "and he's running this way."

"He probably wants to report, Cap'n," Padan suggested. "You made a big issue of that when you sent them out to scout around. You told them all to stay alive so that they could tell you things that you needed to know."