“I understand that. Do your best. You may go,” Lanius said. Euplectes went, shaking his head. Lanius wondered if he’d done the right thing. Agreeing to the tax hike would have been simplest. He didn’t want to hinder the war against the nomads. But Avornis had seen too many civil wars since the crown came to him. Now the Menteshe were suffering through such strife, and he wanted them to be the only ones.
He hoped to get away to the archives after seeing Euplectes, but no such luck. He’d forgotten a man who’d appealed to him for a pardon after being convicted of murder. He had to go over the documents both sides had sent up from the provinces. He hadn’t ridden south with Grus, but now a man’s fate lay in his hands.
He studied the evidence and the convicted man’s desperate appeal. Reluctantly, the king shook his head. He didn’t believe the man’s claim that a one-eared man had fled the house where the victim lived just before he went in. Nobody from the village had seen anyone but him. He’d been standing over the body when someone else walked in. He’d quarreled with the victim over a sheep not long before, too.
Let the sentence be carried out, Lanius wrote at the bottom of the appeal. He dripped hot wax on the parchment and stamped it with his sealing ring. He often worried about such cases, but felt confident he’d gotten this one right.
A servant took the appeal with his verdict to the royal post. Before long, Avornis would be rid of one murderer. If only getting rid of all the kingdom’s troubles were so simple!
Lanius had just started for the archives when he almost bumped into another servant coming around a corner toward him. “Your Majesty!” the man exclaimed. “Where have you been? The queen has been waiting for you to come to lunch for almost an hour now.”
“She has?” Lanius said. The servant nodded. Lanius blinked in mild amazement. Was it that time already? Evidently, and past that time, too. He gathered himself. “Well, take me to her.”
He never did make it to the archives that day.
King Grus had seen thrall villages from a distance as he looked from Avornis into the lands the Menteshe held. That did nothing, he discovered, to prepare him for the first thrall village he rode into.
He knew it would be bad even before he rode up what passed for the main street. The breeze came from the south, and brought the stink of the place to his nostrils while he was still some distance away. He coughed and wrinkled his nose, which did no good at all. The muscular stench was the sort that clung to whatever it touched. Avornan villages smelled bad. Any place where people lived for a while smelled bad. This … this was far beyond smelling bad. Filth and vileness had accumulated here for a long, long time, and no one had cared—or perhaps even noticed.
“I’ve never known a battlefield that stank like this, not even three days after the fighting was done,” Hirundo said.
Grus wasn’t sure the stench was that bad. But the thralls lived with it every day of their lives. How anyone could do that without going mad was beyond the king. He turned to Pterocles. “Now we start to see how good our magic is.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The wizard, usually cheerful, sounded somber. “Now we do.”
Ordinary peasants—peasants who were ordinary human beings—would either have run away the minute they saw the Avornans coming near or else would have run toward them, welcoming them as liberators after a long, hard occupation. The thralls did neither. They didn’t seem to care one way or the other. The ones who were out in the fields kept right on working there. The ones in the village went on about their business. Only a handful of them bothered to stop and give the Avornans dull, uninterested stares.
Presumably at the Banished One’s impulse, thralls had crossed into Avornis a few years before. Otus was one of them. Grus knew something of the squalid life they led. Seeing them on their own home ground, where they’d lived like this for generation after brutish generation, struck him as doubly appalling.
A fly buzzed around his face. Another one lit on his earlobe, still another on the back of his hand. All around him, other Avornans were swearing and swatting. This is early springtime, Grus thought. How bad do the bugs get later in the year? A few thralls brushed languidly at themselves. They might have been horses switching their tails in a meadow. More of the luckless wretches in the village didn’t even bother. Were their hides dead along with their souls?
Grief etched harsh lines in Otus’ face. “I lived like this for years,” he said. “The only way you could tell me from my swine was that I walked on two legs, and some of my grunts were words. Now I know better.” He held out his hands in appeal to Grus. “We have to free these people, Your Majesty. They could be just like me.”
“Avornis could use more people just like you,” Grus said. As long as the Banished One isn’t looking out through your eyes, he added, but only to himself. He wished the doubt weren’t there, but it was, and it wouldn’t go away. He did his best to keep it out of his voice. “We’ll see what we can do to free some of the ones here. Pterocles!”
“Yes, Your Majesty?” the wizard said.
“You’ll do one, and I’ll want one of the other wizards to do one as well,” Grus said. “We have to make sure you aren’t the only sorcerer with the knack. If you have to free thralls one at a time, you’ll take a while to do it, eh?”
“Er—so I would, Your Majesty.” Pterocles sounded as though he wasn’t sure whether Grus was joking. Grus wasn’t sure, either. Pterocles asked, “Shall I start right now?”
“Tomorrow morning will do,” the king answered. “We’ll want to make sure we have a strong cordon around this place. We can’t have the Menteshe trying to take it back while you’re in the middle of a spell.”
“They’d have to be crazy to want it back,” Hirundo said. “If I were a nomad, I’d say take it and welcome.”
“You might. We can’t be sure they will,” Grus said. So far, less than a day into their push south of the Stura, the Avornans had seen scattered scouts. Grus hoped the Menteshe were still busy murdering one another. He wanted to make his foothold south of the river as firm as he could before the nomads tried to throw him back.
He slept in a pavilion upwind from the thralls’ village. Some of the stink from it reached him even so—or maybe that was the more distant stink of a downwind village. Despite the foul odor, he slept well. The first part of the invasion, and maybe the most dangerous, had gone well. He’d got his army over the river. Now he would see what happened next.
When he woke up, he realized he’d been foolish the night before. Crossing wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t most dangerous, either. Losing a battle, falling into the hands of the Menteshe—that would be dangerous. He might find out what thralldom was like … from the inside.
The first wizard Pterocles had chosen to free a thrall with him was a bald, gray-bearded man named Artamus. Both sorcerers bowed to King Grus. “I’ll do my best, Your Majesty,” Artamus said. “I’d like to see it really done before I try myself, if you don’t mind. I think I know how everything’s supposed to go, but you always like to watch before you go and do something yourself.”
“Seems reasonable,” Grus said. Pterocles nodded.
Royal guards brought two thralls to the king’s pavilion—a man with a scar on his forehead and a woman who might have been pretty if she weren’t so filthy and disheveled, and if her face weren’t an uncaring blank mask. “If I have first choice …” Pterocles smiled and nodded to the woman. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Vasa.” By the way she said it, it hardly mattered.
“Pleased to meet you, Vasa.” Pterocles began swinging a bit of crystal on the end of a chain. Vasa’s hazel eyes followed it as he went back and forth, back and forth. Grus had watched this once before, when the wizard worked the spell on Otus. The king looked around for the ex-thrall. There he was, standing in the shade of an almond tree, watching intently but keeping his distance.
Pterocles waited, watching Vasa’s eyes follow the swinging crystal. When he thought the time was right, he mu
rmured, “You are an empty one, Vasa. Your will is not your own. You have always been empty, your will never your own.”
“I am an empty one,” she echoed, and her voice indeed sounded empty of everything that made ordinary human voices show the character of the speaker. “My will is not my own. I have always been empty, my will never my own.” Even parroting that much was more than a thrall could usually manage.
The crystal kept swinging back and forth. Vasa’s eyes kept following it. She might have forgotten everything but its sparkling self. As softly as he’d spoken before, Pterocles asked, “Do you want to find your own will, Vasa? Do you want to be filled with your own self?”
“I want to find my own will. I want to be filled with my own self.” By the way Vasa sounded, she couldn’t have cared less.
“I can lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light. Do you want me to lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light?”
“I want you to lift the shadow from my spirit and give me light.” No matter what Vasa said, she still seemed dead inside.
“I will do what I can for you, then,” Pterocles said.
“Do what you can for me, then,” Vasa said. Back when Pterocles freed Otus, the wizard hadn’t expected him to respond there. Now Otus leaned forward intently, eyes staring, fists clenched. What was he thinking? Grus would have given a good deal to know, but he didn’t presume to do anything to interrupt Pterocles’ wizardry.
Still in a low voice, Pterocles began to chant. The Avornan dialect he used was very old, even older than the one priests used in temple services. Grus could make out a word here and there, but no more. The wizard went on swinging his crystal in its unending arc. Rainbows flashed from it. Before long, there were more of them than could have sprung from the sun alone. “Ah,” Artamus said softly.
Pterocles made a pass and said, “Let them be assembled,” in Avornan close enough to ordinary for Grus to follow. Those rainbows began to spin around Vasa’s head—faster and faster, closer and closer. Even the thrall’s dull eyes lit at the spectacle. “Let them come together!” Pterocles said, and Grus could follow that, too.
Again, the rainbows obeyed the wizard’s will. Instead of swirling around Vasa’s head, they began swirling through it. Some of them still seemed to shine even inside her head. Grus wondered if that might be his imagination, but it was what he thought he saw. He’d seen—or thought he’d seen—the same with Otus, too.
Vasa said, “Oh!” The simple exclamation of surprise was the first thing Grus had heard from her that had any feeling in it. Her eyes opened so wide, the king could see white all around her irises. The rainbows faded, but Grus fancied he could still see some of their light shining out from her face.
She bowed low to Pterocles. “Oh,” she said again, and, “Thank. Thank. Thank.” She didn’t have many words, but she knew what she wanted to say. When he raised her up, her face had tears on it.
So did Otus’ as he came up from his place under the tree. “She is free,” he whispered. “Like me, she is free. Gods be praised for this.”
Pterocles nodded to him, and to Grus, and to Artamus. To the other wizard, he said, “You see.”
“Yes, I see, or I hope I do,” Artamus answered. “Thank you for letting me watch you. That was a brilliant piece of sorcery.” He also bowed to Pterocles.
“I’ve done it before. I knew I could do it now,” Pterocles said, and gestured toward the other thrall. “Let’s see you match it. Then we’ll know how brilliant it is.”
“I’ll do my best,” Artamus said. He turned to the thrall, who’d stood there all through Pterocles’ spell, as indifferent to the marvel as he was to everything else in his miserable life. Artamus asked, “What is your name, fellow?”
“Lybius,” the scarred thrall replied.
Artamus had his own bit of crystal on a silver chain. He began to swing it back and forth, as Pterocles had before him. Lybius’ eyes followed the sparkling crystal. Artamus waited for a bit, then began, “You are an empty one, Lybius.…”
The spell proceeded as it had for Pterocles. Artamus wasn’t as smooth as Grus’ chief wizard, but he seemed capable enough. He summoned the rainbows into being and brought them into a glowing, spinning circle around Lybius’ head and then into and inside it.
And, as Vasa had—and as Otus had before her—Lybius awoke from thralldom into true humanity. He wept. He squeezed Artamus’ hand and babbled what little praise he knew how to give. And Grus slowly nodded to himself. He did have a weapon someone besides Pterocles could wield.
Lanius was studying a tax register to make sure all the nobles in the coastal provinces had paid everything they were supposed to. Officials here in the capital had a way of forgetting about those distant lands, and the people who lived in them knew it and took advantage of it whenever they could. But they were Avornans, too, and the kingdom needed their silver no less than anyone else’s. Lanius might not have wanted to raise taxes, but he did want to collect everything properly owed.
Prince Ortalis stuck his head into the little room where the king worked. “Do you know where Sosia is?” he asked.
“Not right this minute. I’ve been here for a couple of hours,” Lanius answered.
“What are you working on?” Ortalis asked. When Lanius explained, his brother-in-law made a horrible face. “Why on earth are you wasting your time with that sort of nonsense?”
“I don’t think it’s nonsense,” Lanius said. “We need to see that the laws are carried out, and we need to punish people who break them.”
“That’s work for a secretary, or at most for a minister,” Ortalis said. “A king tells people what to do.”
“If I don’t already know what they’re doing, how can what I tell them make any sense?” Lanius asked reasonably. “And secretaries do do most of this. But if I don’t do some, how can I know whether they’re doing what they’re supposed to? If a king lets officials do whatever they want, pretty soon they’re the ones telling people what to do, and he isn’t.”
“You’re welcome to it.” Ortalis went off down the hall shaking his head.
Grus had tried to get his legitimate son to show some interest in governing Avornis. Lanius knew that. He also knew Grus hadn’t had much luck. Ortalis didn’t, and wouldn’t, care. In a way, that made Lanius happy. Ortalis would have been a more dangerous rival if he’d worried about—or even taken any notice of—the way government actually worked.
Ortalis would also have been a more dangerous rival without the streak of cruelty that ran through so much of what he did. Hunting helped keep it down, which was one reason Lanius would go hunting with him despite caring nothing for the chase. Worse things happened when Ortalis didn’t hunt than when he did.
Or was that true? His wife, Princess Limosa, had stripes on her back, and Ortalis had put them there although he hunted. Lanius shook his head. Limosa was a perfect match for Ortalis in a way Lanius hadn’t thought possible. She liked getting stripes as much as he liked giving them. The mere idea made Lanius queasy.
Had Petrosus known that about his daughter when he dangled her in front of Ortalis? Lanius had no idea, and he wasn’t about to write to the Maze to find out. Which was worse? That Petrosus had known about her, and used her … peculiarity to attract Ortalis? Or that he hadn’t, but was willing to have Ortalis hurt her as long as it gained him advantage in the court?
“Disgusting either way,” Lanius muttered. He knew what Petrosus’ … peculiarity was—power.
But Petrosus hadn’t had the chance to indulge his peculiarity. Grus had made sure of that. As soon as Grus found out who Ortalis’ new wife was, into the Maze that treasury minister went. On the whole, Lanius approved of that. Grus had power and liked wielding it, but he’d never been as heartless in his pursuit of it as Petrosus was. A good thing, too, Lanius thought. I’d be dead if he were.
If only Grus had been as stern with Ortalis as he had with Petrosus. But for a long time he’d had a blind spot about his legitimate son
. By the time he couldn’t ignore what Ortalis was, it was much too late to change him. Lanius wondered whether Ortalis could have changed if Grus had tried harder earlier. The question was easier to ask than to answer.
Lanius went back to the tax register. As far as he could tell, nobody by the coast was trying to cheat the kingdom. That was how things were supposed to work. Ortalis probably would have asked him why he’d gone to all this trouble just to find out everything was normal. If I hadn’t checked, I wouldn’t have known. Lanius imagined himself explaining that to Ortalis. He also imagined Ortalis laughing in his face.
“Too bad,” Lanius said out loud. A servant walking down the corridor gave him a curious look. He’d gotten plenty of those. He looked out at the servant. The man kept walking.
Hurting things is Ortalis’ peculiarity. Knowing things is mine. A white butterfly flitted about in a flower bed outside the window. As soon as Lanius saw it, he recognized it as a cabbage butterfly. Knowing that would never do him any good, but he did know it, and he was glad he did. As for some of the other things he knew … Well, you never could tell.
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About the Author
Harry Turtledove is an American novelist of science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Publishers Weekly has called him the “master of alternate history,” and he is best known for his work in that genre. Some of his most popular titles include The Guns of the South, the novels of the Worldwar series, and the books in the Great War trilogy. In addition to many other honors and nominations, Turtledove has received the Hugo Award, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the Prometheus Award. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a PhD in Byzantine history. Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos, and together they have three daughters. The family lives in Southern California.
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