“As you were earlier,” Lanius replied. “Shall we both settle down to business now, and speak of what Prince Ulash wants of me, and of Avornis?”
Before answering, Farrukh-Zad gave him a long, measuring stare. “Things are not quite as I was led to believe.” He sounded accusing.
“Life is full of surprises,” Lanius said. “I ask once more, shall we go on?”
“Maybe we had better.” Farrukh-Zad turned and spoke in a low voice with one of the other Menteshe—the one who had started when Lanius warned him. They expected me to be less than I am, Lanius thought. That must be why the embassy came when Grus was away. I’ve surprised them. That was a compliment—of sorts. The ambassador gave his attention back to the king. “In the name of my sovereign, Prince Ulash, I ask you what Avornis intends to do with the thralls who have left his lands and come to those you rule.”
“Do you also ask that in the name of Prince Ulash’s sovereign?” Lanius inquired, partly to jab Farrukh-Zad again, partly because he did want to know. Thralls—the descendants of the Avornan farmers who’d worked the southern lands before the Menteshe conquered them— were less than full men, only a little more than barnyard animals, thanks to spells from the Banished One. Every so often, thralls escaped those dark spells and fled. Every so often, too, the Banished One and the Menteshe used thralls who feigned escaping those spells as spies and assassins.
Again Farrukh-Zad conferred with his henchman before answering. “I am Ulash’s ambassador,” he said, but his hesitation gave the words the lie. “These thralls are Ulash’s people.”
“When they wake up, they have a different opinion,” Lanius said dryly. He wished Avornan wizards had had better luck with spells that could liberate a thrall from his bondage. The Banished One’s sorceries, though, were stronger than those of any mere mortals. If all of Avornis fell to the Menteshe, would everyone in the kingdom fall into thrall-dom? The thought made Lanius shudder.
Farrukh-Zad said, “You have in your hands—you have in this very palace—many who fled without awakening. What do you say of them?”
“Yes, we do,” Lanius agreed. “One of them tried to kill me this past winter, while another tried to kill King Grus. We hold your sovereign’s sovereign to blame for that.”
“You are unjust,” the Menteshe envoy said.
“I doubt it,” Lanius said. “Thralls who stay thralls usually stay on the land. Why would these men have crossed the Stura River into Avornis, if not through the will of the Banished One?” There, he thought. Let Farrukh-Zad know I’m not— much— afraid to speak his master’s name.
Now the ambassador’s companion leaned forward to speak to him.
Nodding, Farrukh-Zad said, “If you admit that these men belong to the Fallen Star, then you must also admit you should return them to him.”
Lanius would sooner have been pawing through the archives than playing verbal cut-and-thrust with a tool of a tool of the Banished One. No help for it, though. He said, “I did not admit that. I said the Banished One had compelled them to cross the river. Compulsion is not the same as ownership, and certainly not the same as right.”
“You refuse to give them back, then?” Farrukh-Zad’s voice was silky with danger.
Avornan wizards still studied the thralls, learning what they could from them. Maybe the Banished One wanted them back because he was afraid the wizards would find out something important. Maybe. Lanius didn’t know what the odds were, but he could only hope. “I do,” he said. “As long as they have done no wrong in Avornis, they may stay here.”
“I shall take your words back to Prince Ulash,” the envoy said. “Do not believe you have heard the last of this. You have not.” His last bow held enough polite irony to satisfy even the most exacting Avornan courtier. Having given it, he didn’t wait for any response, or even dismissal, from King Lanius, but simply turned and strode out of the throne room, the other Menteshe in his wake.
Lanius stared after him. He’d always thought about the power that went with being king in fact as well as in name. As he began to use it, he saw that worry went with the job, too.
Riding as usual at the head of his army, Grus got his first good look at Nishevatz. Seeing the town did not delight him. If anything, it horrified him. “Olor’s beard, Hirundo, how are we supposed to take that place?” he yelped.
“Good question, Your Majesty,” his general replied. “Maybe the defenders inside will laugh themselves to death when they see we’re crazy enough to try to winkle them out.”
It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but it wasn’t good. Nishevatz had originally been a small island a quarter of a mile or so off the coast of the mainland. Before the Chernagors took the northern coast away from Avornis, the townsfolk had built a causeway from the shore to the island. The slow wheel of centuries since had seen silt widen the causeway from a road to a real neck of land. Even so, the approach remained formidable.
King Grus tried to make the best of things, saying, “Well, if it were easy, Vsevolod wouldn’t have needed to ask us for help.”
“Huzzah,” Hirundo said sourly. “He was still in charge of things when he did ask us here, remember. He’s not anymore.”
“I know. We’ll have to see what we can do about that.” He called to Vsevolod, who rode in the middle of a small party of Chernagor noblemen not far away. “Your Highness!”
“What you want, Your Majesty?” Vsevolod spoke Avornan with a thick, guttural accent. He was about sixty, with thinning white hair, bushy eyebrows, and an enormous hooked nose.
“Do you know any secret ways into your city?” Grus asked. “We could use one about now, you know.”
“I know some, yes. I use one to get away,” Vsevolod replied. “Vasilko know most of these, too, though. I show him, so he get away if he ever have trouble when he ruling prince. I not show him this one, in case I have trouble.” He jabbed a large, callused thumb—more the thumb of a fisherman or metalworker than that of a ruling prince—at his own broad chest.
“Can an army use it, or just one man?” Grus asked.
The ousted ruler ran a hand through his long, curly beard. A couple of white hairs clung to his fingers. He brushed his hand against his kilt to dislodge them. “Would not be easy for army,” he said at last. “Passage is narrow. Few men could hold it against host.”
“Does Vasilko know how you got out? Or does he just know that you did?”
“He did not know of this way ahead of time. I am sure of that,” Vsevolod replied. “He would have blocked. If he knows now… This I cannot say. I am sorry.”
Hirundo said, “Maybe our wizard could tell us.”
“Maybe.” Grus frowned. “Maybe he’d give it away trying to find out, too.” He frowned again, hating indecision yet trapped into it. “We’d better see what he thinks, eh?”
Pterocles seemed determined to think as little as possible, or at least to admit to as little thought as possible. “I really could not say, Your Majesty. I know little of the blocking magics the Chernagors use these days, and how they match against ours. We haven’t warred with them in their own lands for a long time, so we haven’t had much need to learn such things. Maybe I can sneak past whatever wizardly wards he has without his being the wiser, or maybe I would put his wind up at once.”
“Helpful,” Grus said, meaning anything but. “Duke Radim is bound to have a wizard or two with him, eh? Talk to them, why don’t you? You can see what sorts of things the Chernagors do. Maybe that will tell you what you need to know.”
“Maybe.” Pterocles seemed glum, not convinced. Grus longed for Alca. He longed for her a couple of ways, in fact, even if he had made up with Estrilda.
He would have pushed Pterocles when the army camped that night, but a courier galloped into the encampment with a long letter from Lanius. Reading about the visit from Farrukh-Zad, Grus wished he were back in the city of Avornis. By what was in the letter, Lanius had done as well as anyone could have hoped to do. Grus wondered how closely the letter refle
cted truth; Lanius was, after all, telling his own story. Even if Lanius had gotten everything straight, was that all good news? Would he decide he liked this taste of real kingship and crave more?
Grus summarized the letter in a few sentences for the courier, then asked, “Is that how it happened?”
“Yes, Your Majesty, as far as I know,” the man replied. “I wasn’t in the throne room, you understand, but that pretty much matches what I’ve heard.”
Ah, gossip, Grus thought with a smile. “What all have you heard?” he asked, hoping to pick up some more news about the embassy, or at least to get more of a feel for what had gone on.
That wasn’t what he got. The courier hesitated, then shrugged and said, “Well, you’ll have heard about that other business by now, won’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Grus answered. “What other business?”
“About your son.”
“No, I hadn’t heard about that. What about him?” Grus tried to keep his tone as light and casual as he could. If he’d asked the question the way he wanted to, he would have frightened the courier out of saying another word.
He evidently succeeded, for the fellow just asked, “You haven’t heard about him and the girl?”
“No,” Grus said, again in as mild a voice as he could muster. “What happened? Is some serving girl going to have his bastard?” Next to a lot of the things Ortalis might have done, that would be good news. The only real trouble with royal bastards was finding a fitting place for them once they grew up.
But the courier said, “Uh, no, Your Majesty, no bastards. Not that I know about, anyhow.”
That Uh, no worried Grus. Carefully, he asked, “Well, what do you know about?” Staying casual wasn’t easy, not anymore.
“About how he—” The courier stopped. He suddenly seemed to remember he wasn’t passing time with somebody in a tavern. “It wasn’t so good,” he finished.
“Tell me everything you know,” Grus said. “About how he what? What wasn’t so good?” The courier stood mute. Grus snapped his fingers. “Come on. You know more than you’re letting on. Out with it.”
“Your Majesty, I don’t really know anything.” The man seemed very unhappy. “I’ve just heard things people are talking about.”
“Tell me those, then,” Grus said. “I swear by the gods I’ll remember they don’t come from you. I don’t even know your name.”
“No, but you know my face,” the courier muttered. King Grus folded his arms and waited. Trapped, the man gave him what was bound to be as cleaned-up a version of the gossip he’d heard as he could manage on the spur of the moment. It boiled down to the same sort of story as Grus had already heard about Ortalis too many times. At last, the man stumbled to a stop, saying, “And that’s everything I heard.”
Grus doubted it was. Such tales were usually much more lurid. But he thought he would need a torturer to pull anything else from the fellow. “All right, you can go,” he said, and the courier fled. “I’ll deal with this… whenever I get a chance.” Only he heard that.
He looked ahead to Nishevatz. The Chernagor city-state would take up all of his time for who could guess how long. He sighed. Whatever Ortalis had done was done. With a little luck, he wouldn’t do anything worse until Grus got back to the capital. Grus looked up at the heavens, wondering if that could be too much to ask of the gods.
Every once in a while, Lanius liked getting out of the royal palace. He especially liked going over to the great cathedral not far away, partly because some of the ecclesiastical archives went back even further than those in the palace and partly because he liked Arch-Hallow Anser.
He didn’t know anyone who didn’t like Grus’ bastard son. Even Queen Estrilda liked Anser, and she’d borne Grus’ two legitimate children. Prince Ortalis liked Anser, too, even though they had quarreled now and again, and Ortalis rarely liked anybody.
That didn’t mean Lanius thought Anser made a perfect arch-hallow. He’d been a layman when Grus first named him to the post, and had worn the black, green, and yellow robes of the ascending grades of the priesthood on successive days before donning the arch-hallow’s scarlet garb. He still knew—and cared—little about the gods or the structure of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His chief passion, almost his only passion, was hunting.
But he was loyal to Grus. To the man who held the real power in Avornis, that counted for much more than anything else. Lanius might prove a problem for Grus. Ortalis might, too. Anser? No. Anser never would.
He bowed to the king when Lanius stepped into his chamber in a back part of the cathedral where ordinary worshipers never went. “Good to see you, Your Majesty!” he exclaimed with a smile, and he sounded as though he meant it.
“Good to see you, too, most holy sir.” Lanius also meant it. You couldn’t help being glad to see Anser. He wasn’t far from Lanius’ own age, and looked a lot like Grus—more like him than either Ortalis or Sosia. They favored their mother, which probably made them better-looking.
“What can I do for you today?” Anser asked. “Did you come to visit me, or shall I just send for Ixoreus and wave while you wander down to the archives?” He grinned at Lanius.
Ixoreus, one of his secretaries, knew more about the ecclesiastical archives than any man living. But Lanius smiled back and, not without a certain regret, shook his head. “No, thanks, though it is tempting,” he said. “I wanted to ask you a question.”
“Well, here I am. Go right ahead,” Anser replied. “If I know, I’ll tell you.”
And he would, too. Lanius had no doubt of it. He thought back to‘ the days of Arch-Hallow Bucco, Anser’s predecessor. Bucco had been a formidable scholar, administrator, and diplomat. He’d been regent during part of Lanius’ childhood; he’d even sent Lanius’ mother into exile. He wouldn’t have told anyone his own name unless he saw some profit or advantage in it. All things considered, Lanius preferred Anser.
He said, “What I want to know is, did you write to King Grus about… any troubles Ortalis has had lately with women?”
“Not me,” the arch-hallow said at once. “I’ve heard a few things, but I wouldn’t send gossip to… the other king.” The hesitation was so small, Lanius barely noticed it. Anser really did work hard at being polite to everybody.
“It’s not just gossip. I wish it were,” Lanius said. “But I’ve heard about it from Ortalis himself. He didn’t want Grus to find out. Now Grus has. By the letter I have from him, he’s not very happy about it, either.”
“I can see how he wouldn’t be. Ortalis… I like my half brother, most ways,” Anser said. He saw the good in people—maybe that was why everybody liked him. He proved as much now, for he went on, “He’s a clever fellow, and I enjoyed hunting with him, at least until he.…” His voice trailed away again.
“Yes. Until he.” Lanius didn’t finish the sentence, either. Ortalis would sooner have hunted men, or rather women, than beasts. And what he would have done when he caught them… was one more thing Lanius didn’t care to contemplate. “Somebody told Grus about this latest news.”
“It wasn’t me,” Anser said again. He looked up at the ceiling, as though hoping to find answers there. “I wish we hadn’t had that… trouble with the hunting. It did seem to help, for a while.”
“Yes, for a while,” Lanius agreed. For several years, Ortalis had held his demons at bay by killing beasts instead of doing anything with or to people. But that hadn’t satisfied him, not for good. And so… And so I’m hashing this out with Anser, Lanius thought unhappily.
“I wish I knew what to tell you, Your Majesty. I wish I knew what to tell Ortalis, too,” the arch-hallow said.
“No one has ever been able to tell Ortalis anything. That’s a big part of the problem,” Lanius said.
Anser nodded. “So it is.” Suddenly, he grinned again. “Now don’t you wish you’d gone down under the cathedral with Ixoreus?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Lanius said. They both laughed. Then Lanius had another tho
ught. He asked, “You grew up down in the south, didn’t you?”
“Yes, that’s right—in Drepanum, right along the Stura River,” Anser said, and Lanius remembered that Grus had captained a river galley that patrolled the Stura. Anser went on, “Why do you want to know?”
“I just wondered if you knew anything special about Sanjar and Korkut—you know, things you might hear because you’re right across the border but would never come all the way up to the city of Avornis.”
“About Ulash’s sons?” The arch-hallow frowned and shook his head. “The only thing I ever heard is that they don’t like each other very well—but you can say that about half the brothers in the world, especially when they’re princes.”
“I suppose so.” Lanius had no brothers. When King Mergus, his father, at last had a son by his concubine Certhia, he’d married her although that made her his seventh wife. All the ecclesiastics in Avornis had screamed at the top of their lungs, since even King Olor up in the heavens had only six. A lot of them had reckoned—some still did reckon—Lanius a bastard because of Mergus’ irregularities. Thanks to his own past, he had a certain amount of sympathy for Anser. He wondered if that sympathy ran the other way, too. Anser had never said a word along those lines—but then, Lanius was known to be touchy about his ancestry.
Anser didn’t say anything about ancestors now, either. He said, “Sorry I can’t tell you more about them.”
“Who knows when it might matter?” Lanius replied with a shrug. “Who knows if it will matter at all?”
Slowly—too slowly to suit King Grus—twilight deepened toward darkness. The tall, frowning walls of Nishevatz seemed to melt into the northern sky. Only the torches Chernagor sentries carried as they paced along their stretches of walkway told where the top of the wall was.
Grus turned to Calcarius and Malk, the Avornan and Chernagor officers who would lead a mixed assault party back through the secret tunnel Prince Vsevolod had used to flee the city. “You know what you’re going to do?” he said, and felt foolish a moment later—if they didn’t know by now, why were they trying it?
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