The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  “Bad dream. Just a bad dream,” Lanius answered, his voice shaking. A bad dream it was. Just a bad dream? Oh, no. He knew better than that.

  In the nick of time—in the very nick of time—the king fought himself awake. Grus sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding. “Are you all right?” Estrilda asked sleepily.

  “Bad dream. Just a bad dream,” Grus answered, his voice shaking. A bad dream it was. Just a bad dream? Oh, no. He knew better than that. The Banished One had been on the very point of seizing him when he escaped back into the world of mundane reality. And if the Banished One’s hands had touched him, as they’d been on the point of doing …

  He didn’t know what would have happened then. He didn’t know, and he never, ever wanted to find out.

  Little by little, his thudding heart and gasping breath slowed toward normal. The Banished One had come too close to scaring him to death without touching him. But Grus had also learned more from that horrid nighttime visitation than the Banished One might have intended.

  Fortified by the thought the exiled god had never come to him more than once of a night, he lay down and tried to go back to sleep. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t sleep anymore. He let out a small sigh of frustration. The dream the exiled god had sent remained burned on his memory, as those dreams always did. He wished he could forget them, the way he forgot dreams of the ordinary sort. But no. Whatever else the Banished One was, he was nothing of the ordinary sort.

  Estrilda muttered to herself and went back to sleep. Grus wished again that he could do the same. Whatever he wished, more sleep eluded him. He waited until he was sure his wife was well under, then poked his feet into slippers, pulled a cloak on over his nightshirt, and left the royal bedchamber. The guardsmen in the corridor came to stiff attention. “As you were,” Grus told them, and they relaxed.

  Torches in sconces on the wall guttered and crackled. Quite a few had burned out. Why not? At this hour of the night, hardly anyone was stirring. No need for much light. Grus walked down the hall. He was and was not surprised when another guarded door opened. Out came Lanius, wearing the same sort of irregular outfit as Grus had on.

  After telling his own guards to stand at ease, Lanius looked up and down the corridor. He seemed … surprised and not surprised to discover Grus also up and about. “Hello, Your Majesty,” Grus said. “You, too?”

  “Yes, me, too … Your Majesty,” Lanius answered. Grus nodded to himself. Whenever Lanius deigned to use his title, the other king took things very seriously indeed. As though to prove the point, Lanius gestured courteously. “Shall we walk?”

  “I think maybe we’d better,” Grus said.

  Behind them, guardsmen muttered among themselves. The soldiers no doubt wondered how both kings had happened to wake up at the same time. Grus wished he wondered, too. But he had no doubts whatsoever.

  Neither did Lanius. The younger king said, “The Banished One knows we have something in mind.”

  “He certainly does,” Grus agreed.

  “Good,” Lanius said. “Next spring—”

  Grus held up a hand. “Maybe next spring. Maybe the spring after that, or the spring after that. As long as the Menteshe want to keep doing part of our job for us, I won’t complain a bit.”

  “Well, no. Neither will I,” Lanius said. “We ought to use however much time we have wisely. I wish we could lay our hands on some more ordinary thralls.”

  “So do I,” Grus said. “But we’d have to cross the Stura to do it, and I don’t want to do that while the Menteshe are still in the middle of their civil war.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Lanius sounded regretful but not mutinous. “Pterocles should start teaching other wizards the spell he’s worked out. When we do go south of the Stura, we’ll need it.”

  “We’d better need it,” Grus said, and Lanius nodded. Grus went on, “I have had work for Pterocles up in the Chernagor country, you know.”

  “Oh, yes.” Lanius did not seem in a quarrelsome mood. After facing up to the Banished One, mere mortals seldom felt like fighting among themselves. The younger king continued, “But he’s not up in the Chernagor country now. And he can teach more wizards here in the capital than anywhere else in Avornis.”

  “More of everything here in the capital than anywhere else in Avornis,” Grus said.

  Lanius nodded again. This time, he followed the nod with a yawn. “I think I can sleep again,” he said.

  “Do you?” Grus looked inside himself. After a moment, he gave Lanius a sad little shrug. “Well, Your Majesty, I’m jealous, because I don’t. I’m afraid I’m up for the rest of the night.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Lanius yawned again. He turned around. “If you’ll excuse me—”

  “Good night,” Grus told him. “Don’t snore so loud, you wake up my daughter.” Laughing, Lanius headed back to his bedchamber.

  Grus wandered down the hallway. The soft leather soles of his slippers scuffed over the floor’s mosaic tiles. How many times had he walked along here, not noticing the hunting scenes over which so many craftsmen had worked so hard and so long? Tonight, he noticed. Tonight, he had nothing to distract him.

  Another man’s footsteps came from around a corner. Grus realized he had not even an eating knife on his belt. Had the Banished One come to Otus as he’d come to the two kings? Was the thrall on the prowl? Would his guards let him go because they thought him cured? Did he have murder on his mind? Did he have a mind, or was he but a reflection of the Banished One’s will?

  The other man came into sight. For a moment, in the dim torch light, Grus thought it was Otus. Then he saw with his eyes, not his late-night fears. “Hello, Pterocles,” he called. “What are you doing up at this ghastly hour?”

  “Your Majesty?” Pterocles sounded as surprised and alarmed as Grus had felt. “I could ask you the same question, you know.”

  “Well, so you could,” Grus said. “I couldn’t sleep. I … had a bad dream.”

  He knew Pterocles had dreamed of the Banished One. That the Banished One took Pterocles seriously enough to send him a dream was one reason he was chief wizard in Avornis these days. As far as the king knew, though, the Banished One had visited Pterocles only once in the night.

  Until tonight. The wizard jerked as though Grus had poked him with a pin. “Why, so did I, Your Majesty.” Pterocles nodded jerkily. “So did I.”

  “One of—those dreams?” Grus asked.

  Pterocles nodded again. “Oh, yes, Your Majesty. One of—those dreams.” He mimicked Grus’ tone very well. “I haven’t had one of—those dreams for years now. I wouldn’t have been sorry not to have this one, either.”

  “I believe you,” Grus said. “Nobody wants a visit from the Banished One.” There. He’d said it. The ceiling didn’t fall in on him. The name didn’t even raise any particular echoes—except in his own mind. Gathering himself, he went on, “It’s an honor of sorts, though, if you look at it the right way.”

  “An honor?” Pterocles frowned. “I’m not sure I see … Oh. Wait. Maybe I do.”

  Now King Grus was the one who nodded. “That’s what I meant, all right. Most people never have to worry about seeing the Banished One looking out of their dreams. He never needs to notice them. If he notices you, it’s a sign you’ve done something, or you’re going to do something, to worry him.”

  “He visited both of us tonight, then?” the wizard asked.

  “That’s right.” Grus gave him another nod. “And he visited King Lanius, too.”

  “Did he?” Pterocles said. “Do you know why he visited the, uh, other king?”

  Grus smiled a slightly sour smile. Even after he and Lanius had shared the throne for a good many years, people still found the arrangement awkward every now and again. He chuckled. He still found it awkward every now and again himself. But that was neither here nor there. He told Pterocles why he thought the Banished One had paid the nighttime call.

  “Really?” Pterocles said when he was done. �
��You surprise me, Your Majesty. When was the last time the Banished One sent three people dreams at the same time?” Pterocles wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Grus said. “I don’t know if he’s ever done anything like that before. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “It could be.” Pterocles cocked his head to one side as he considered. “Yes, it could be.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Grus said. “And so I don’t mind wandering the hallways here in the wee small hours of the night quite as much as I would if I’d gotten out of bed with a headache or a sour stomach.”

  Pterocles grunted. Then he yawned. “It; could be so, Your Majesty. But whether it’s so or not, I’m still sleepy. If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to try to go back to bed.”

  “King Lanius did the same thing. I envied him, and I envy you, too,” Grus said. “Maybe I’ll nap in the afternoon, but I can’t sleep more tonight. I’m sure of that.”

  “I’m off, then.” Pterocles sketched a salute to Grus, turned around, and went back the way he had come.

  Grus wandered the hallways aimlessly—or maybe not so aimlessly, for he ended up at the entrance to the palace. The guards there needed a heartbeat or two to recognize him. When they did, they sprang to attention all the more rigid for being embarrassed. His wave told them they could relax. He walked out into the night.

  It was cold on the palace steps, but not cold enough to drive him back inside. When he looked to the east, he saw a faint grayness that said sunrise was coming. He stood and waited, watching the gray spread up the dome of the sky, watching the stars fade and then disappear, watching pink and gold follow the gray. All around him, the bricks and stone and slate roof tiles of the city of Avornis took on solid shape and then, a little at a time, color as well.

  Lanius had had an idea that worried the Banished One. The more Grus thought about that, the better he liked it.

  A new day dawned.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Scepter of Mercy Trilogy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Down in the southern part of the Kingdom of Avornis, spring had come some little while before. It was just now reaching the capital. The city of Avornis had had a long, hard winter. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been—the Banished One hadn’t tried to bury the city in snow and ice, as he had a few years earlier—but no one who’d been through it would have called it mild.

  Today, King Lanius was glad to be able to leave the royal palace without a hooded fur cloak that reached down to the ground and sturdy felt boots with wool socks inside them to keep his toes from freezing. His breath still smoked when he did go out, but the icicles had melted from under the eaves of steep-pitched slate roofs and all the snow was gone from the streets, leaving those that weren’t cobblestoned (which was most of them) calf-deep in stinking mud.

  A few of the oaks and maples around the palace showed the buds that foretold new leaves. Some of the season’s earliest birds perched in the mostly bare branches. The songs they sang sounded relieved and perhaps a little surprised, as though they too had trouble believing winter might be over.

  Prince Crex and Princess Pitta, Lanius’ son and daughter, stood beside him. They were happier to get out of the palace than he was. Snowball fights and snowmen were all very well, but they’d had to spend most of the winter indoors, and that had chafed at them. If the smell from those nearby muddy streets bothered them, they didn’t show it.

  Pitta pointed to one of the birds in the closest oak. “What kind is that, Father?” she asked, confident Lanius would know. People were always confident Lanius knew any number of small, mostly useless things. They were usually right, too.

  “The one on that second branch there?” he asked, squinting toward it—he was a bit shortsighted. His daughter nodded. He said, “That’s a goldfinch.”

  “How come it isn’t gold, then?” Crex asked.

  And Lanius knew that, too. “They’re only gold in the later spring and the summer and the first part of fall,” he answered. “The rest of the time, they’re this sort of greenish yellow color. But you can tell what they are by the song they sing.” He whistled a few notes of it, not very well.

  He wondered if Crex would ask why the birds were gold only half the time. He would have, when he was a boy. But he’d always been wildly inquisitive about everything. He still was. Crex—and Pitta, too—had only ordinary children’s curiosity.

  He smiled down at them with a strange blend of affection and exasperation. Most ways, they took after their mother’s side of the family, not his. Queen Sosia was King Grus’ daughter, and Grus was as practical and hardheaded a man as had ever been born. Lanius did not like his father-in-law very much. How could he, when Grus had grafted his family onto Avornis’ ancient royal dynasty and held in his own hands most of the royal power? That Grus’ hands were extremely capable made matters no better. If anything, it made them worse.

  Crex and Pitta even took after that side of the family in their looks. They were solidly made, where Lanius was tall and on the scrawny side. His beard had always been scraggly. Crex didn’t have one yet, of course, but Lanius was ready to bet it would come in thick and luxuriant, like Grus’.

  The children looked more like their mother than they did like him, too. Lanius laughed at himself. That wasn’t so bad. He was ordinary at best, while Sosia was a nice-looking woman. Her brother, Prince Ortalis, was darkly handsome. Ortalis’ problems lay elsewhere. In looks, he and Sosia both resembled Grus’ wife, Queen Estrilda. The one who looked like Grus, all nose and chin, was his bastard boy, the Arch-Hallow Anser. Yet Anser was as good-natured as Grus was tough. You never could tell.

  “I’ll bet the moncats would like climbing the trees,” Crex said.

  Lanius laughed again, this time out loud. “I’ll bet they would, too,” he said. “And I’ll bet they’d get away if we ever gave them the chance. That’s why they stay inside the palace, and mostly inside their rooms.”

  Mostly. They were supposed to stay in their rooms all the time. The Chernagors had brought him his first pair of moncats from an island somewhere in the Northern Sea. The beasts were much like house cats, except that they had clawed, gripping hands and feet like a monkey’s—hence the name they’d gotten here. They also added a monkey’s sharp cleverness to a cat’s unreliability. Lanius sometimes thought it was a good thing they’d never figured out the bow and arrow, or they might be the ones keeping people caged up.

  Pitta echoed that thought, asking, “How does Pouncer keep getting away all the time, Father?”

  “If I knew, sweetheart, he wouldn’t do it anymore.” Lanius was a thoughtful as well as an honest man. After a moment, he shook his head. “I take it back. He wouldn’t do it that way anymore. He’d probably figure out some other way pretty soon, though.”

  Even by moncat standards, Pouncer was a pest. Somewhere in the room where he was kept, he’d found a secret way out. There were ways through the palace, too, ways too small for a man to use but perfect for a moncat. Pouncer would hunt mice in the royal archives and sometimes give them to Lanius as prizes. He would show up in the kitchens, too. Sometimes he stole food. More often, though, he ran off with silverware. Lanius had never figured out why—probably because the moncat was inherently a nuisance. He was particularly fond of big, heavy silver serving spoons. Maybe he planned to pawn them to pay for his getaway. That made as much sense as anything else Lanius had come up with.

  “I can climb a tree like a moncat,” Crex said, and started for the nearest one. It was an old oak; its branches didn’t begin until well above the level of Lanius’ head. Crex might have been able to get up into them anyway. He was much more agile than his father had been at the same age. Whether he could come down after going up was a different question.

  Lanius didn’t try to tell him that. It would have made no sense to him. What the king did say was, “Oh, no, you don’t, not in your robes. Your mother and the washerwomen will scream at you if you tear them up and get them all filthy.”
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  “Oh, Father!” Crex sounded as disgusted as only a small boy could.

  “No,” Lanius said. Crex didn’t care if Sosia and the washerwomen yelled at him. But they wouldn’t yell just at him. They’d yell at Lanius, too, for letting Crex get his clothes filthy. That was the last thing Lanius wanted. There were times when a king was a lot less powerful than his subjects imagined him to be.

  King Grus knew he would never make a wizard. That didn’t keep him from watching as Pterocles shaped a spell. Nor did it keep Pterocles from explaining as he worked. The wizard, a man who wore his breeches and tunic as though he’d fallen into them, liked to hear himself talk.

  “Spells of foretelling have their risks,” Pterocles said.

  “The biggest one is, they’re liable to be wrong,” Grus put in.

  Pterocles laughed. “Yes, there is that,” he agreed. “But that mostly depends on how the magic is interpreted. The principle underlying the spell is sound. It is based on the law of similarity. The future is commonly similar to the present, for the present is what it springs from.”

  “Fair enough,” Grus said. “If you can, then, tell me whether the Menteshe will go on with their civil war this summer.”

  “I’ll do my best,” the wizard answered. When he laughed again, much of the mirth had leaked from his voice. “The Banished One is probably trying to see the same thing.”

  Grus grunted. That was too true for comfort. Civilized folk, led by the King of Avornis, worshiped King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens. Centuries before, the gods had cast the Banished One out of the heavens and down to the material world below. He still burned to resume his place and take his revenge, and the Menteshe nomads in the south gave him reverence instead of Olor and Quelea and the other gods. Here in the material world, the Banished One was something less than a god. But he was much, much more than a man.

  “If you find your magic vying with his, break yours off and get away,” Grus said.