He nodded now. “All right. I’ll do that. Snooping is fun. It’s not like General Bell has any wizards who can stop me.” He certainly owned all the arrogance a good mage should have.

“Good enough,” George said. “You’re dismissed, Major.”

“See you later,” Alva said cheerfully, and touched the brim of his gray hat as he might have back in civilian life. Doubting George coughed. Major Alva turned red again. Little by little, George kept on persuading him he was a soldier. In even smaller increments, the lessons took. Mumbling, “Sorry,” Alva gave him another salute. He coughed again. Alva’s stare held nothing but indignation. “Now what?”

“’Sorry, sir,’” George said, as if to a four-year-old.

“’Sorry, sir,’” Alva repeated, obviously not sorry in the least. “What the hells difference does it make?”

“Magic has rituals, eh?” George said.

“I should hope so,” the young wizard answered. “What’s that got to do with anything, though?”

“Think of this as a ritual of the army,” George said. “You don’t need to salute me because you like me or because you think I’m wonderful. You need to salute me because you’re a major and I’m a lieutenant general.”

Alva sniffed. “Pretty feeble excuse for a ritual-that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Maybe. Maybe not, too,” Doubting George said. “But I’ll tell you this-every army in the world has rituals like that. Every single one of ’em. If there ever were armies without those rituals, the ones that do have ’em squashed the others flat. What does that tell you?”

It told Alva more than George had expected it to. The mage’s foxy features shut down in a mask of concentration so intense, he might have forgotten George was there. At last, after a couple of minutes of that ferocious thought, he said, “Well, sir, when you put it that way, you just may be right. It almost puts you in mind of the Inward Hypothesis of Divine Choice, doesn’t it?”