Clang! Iron gates slammed shut, pushed to by more priests, these in blue robes. Thud! A bar slammed into place to make sure they stayed shut. From behind them, Bucco called, “You may not enter. The cathedral is closed to you. Begone, in the name of the gods!”
“Begone!” the other priests chorused, which made Lanius laugh.
His mother was not laughing. “They dare,” she said.
“Fools dare all sorts of things,” his father said grimly. He wasn’t red anymore. He was white—with fury, or with pain? “It’s what makes them fools.”
Chain mail clanking, one of his guardsmen strode up to the king. “Your Majesty, we’d need about two companies’ worth of men to storm the gates,” he said. “Half an hour’s work, no more.”
King Mergus shook his head. “No. We’ll go back to the palace. Let Arch-Hallow Bucco think he’s won—for now. This time, though, he will pay.”
Lanius started to cry when his father steered him back toward the carriage. “I want to go in there!” He pointed to the cathedral. “It’s pretty in there!”
“They won’t let us go in there,” his mother told him. That made him cry harder than ever. He was used to getting what he wanted.
“Be quiet, Son,” his father said, and his tone was such that Lanius was quiet. The king went on, “Bucco has had his day. He’s truly a fool if he thinks I won’t have mine.” Lanius didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand anything except that they had to go back to the palace. It didn’t seem fair at all.
Three days later, a palace servant bowed low to King Mergus. “Someone here to see you, Your Majesty.”
“Ah?” Mergus’ shaggy eyebrows rose. “Someone I’m expecting?” The servant nodded. Mergus’ grin showed teeth yellow but still sharp. “Well, send him in, send him in.”
In came Arch-Hallow Bucco, escorted—none too politely— by several palace guards. He did not wear his red silk robes now, only an ordinary shirt and pair of breeches. He looked more like a retired schoolmaster, say, than a man who dared thunder at kings. He also looked frightened, which was nothing less than Mergus had expected.
“Will you speak to me of bastards now, Bucco?” the king demanded.
One of the guards prodded the arch-hallow. Before speaking at all, Bucco bowed very low. “What—what is the meaning of this, Your Majesty?” he quavered.
“I am going to explain something to you, something that has to do with which of us is stronger in the kingdom,” Mergus answered. “When you shut the gates in my face, you thought you were. I am here to tell you, you are wrong.”
Arch-Hallow Bucco gathered himself, looking sternly at Mergus. “I did what I did because I had to do it, Your Majesty, not from hatred of you. I have told you that before, when you tried to flaunt your sin. If I did otherwise, I would not be worthy of the rank I hold.”
“I take a different view,” King Mergus said. “I say that, because you did what you did, you are not worthy of the rank you hold. And, as I am king, what I say in these matters carries weight. As of now, this instant, Bucco, you are no longer Arch-Hallow of Avornis.”
“What will you do with me?” Bucco knew fear again, but did his best not to show it.
“For your insolence, I ought to take your head,” Mergus said, and the newly deposed arch-hallow quailed. “I ought to,” the king repeated, “but I won’t. Instead, I’ll send you to the Maze, where you can pray for wisdom. You’ll have plenty of leisure to do it in, that’s certain, and company, too, for a good—no, a bad—dozen of your followers will go with you.”
Bucco looked hardly more happy than if King Mergus had ordered his immediate beheading. Not far to the west of the city of Avornis, several of the Nine Rivers came together and split apart in a bewildering group of marshes and islands—the Maze. No one knew all the secrets of navigating there, and those secrets changed from year to year, from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. Kings of Avornis had stashed inconvenient people on insignificant islands there for hundreds of years. Few thus disposed of ever came back.
“And who do you think will make a better arch-hallow than I do?” Bucco asked.
“Almost anyone,” Mergus said brutally. “The man I am naming to the post, if that’s what you mean, is Grand Hallow Megadyptes.”
Now Bucco stared. “He would accept it? From you? He is a very holy man.”
“Yes, he is.” King Mergus smiled a nasty smile. “He actually believes in peace among us, which is more than you can say. For the sake of peace, he will become arch-hallow.”
“You may send away those who condemn your sin, Your Majesty, but you cannot send away the sin itself,” Bucco said. “It remains here in the palace. It will not be forgotten. Neither will what you do to me today.”
King Mergus yawned in his face. “That’s what you think. I told you, I take a different view. And when the king takes a different view, the king is right.” He nodded to the guardsmen who’d brought Bucco into his presence. “Be off with him. Let him lie in the bed he’s made.”
Without giving Bucco a chance for the last word, the guards hauled him away.
Captain Grus had a pleasant home in one of the better—although not one of the best—parts of the city of Avornis. His home would have been even more pleasant, in his view, if he saw it more often. His river-galley cruises sometimes kept him away for months at a time.
He happened to be at home, however, when Mergus cast down Bucco and raised Megadyptes in his place. His father brought the news back to the house from the tavern where he spent his afternoons soaking up wine, rolling dice, and telling lies with other retired soldiers. Crex was a big man, stooped and white-bearded, with enormous hands—far and away the largest Grus had ever seen on any man. Grus never knew why his father was called Crex the Unbearable; everyone but Crex who knew was dead, and his father was not the sort to encourage such questions.
“Aye, he sacked him,” Crex said in the peasant accents of the central plains from which he’d come. “Threw him out on his ear, like he was a servant who dropped a soup bowl once too often.”
“There will be trouble,” Grus predicted.
“There’s always trouble,” Estrilda said. His wife was a couple of years younger than he. She had light brown hair and green eyes. At the moment, she looked tired. Their son, Ortalis, was four, and playing with a toy cart in the garden, while their two-year-old daughter, Sosia, slept on Estrilda’s lap. With them to look after, she’d earned the right to be tired. She went on, “There’s been trouble ever since the king married Queen Certhia. That’s hard to stomach.”
“He wants a proper heir,” Crex said. “He wants a better heir than Scolopax, and how can you blame him?”
“Shhh, Father,” Grus said. Crex would speak his mind, and he wouldn’t keep quiet while he did it. Estrilda said the servants were trustworthy, but that wasn’t something you wanted to find out you were wrong about the hard way.
“I can blame him for a seventh wife,” Estrilda said now. “It’s not natural. And plenty of people will say he got rid of Bucco to keep the arch-hallow from telling him the truth about that.”
“Megadyptes is a holy man,” Crex said. “He’s a holier man than Bucco ever dreamt of being, matter of fact.”
“Well, so he is,” Estrilda admitted. She suddenly raised her voice: “Ortalis! Don’t throw rocks at the cat!”
“I didn’t, Mama,” Ortalis said, revising history more than a little.
“You’d better not,” his mother told him, rolling her eyes. She looked back to Crex. “You’re right. Megadyptes is holy. I don’t understand how he can stomach any of this.”
“It’s simple,” Crex said. “He knows Avornis needs a proper king once Mergus is gone, that’s how.”
With some amusement, Grus listened to his wife and his father going back and forth. Because he was away from the city of Avornis so much, he didn’t bother keeping track of which priests here were holy men and which weren’t. But Estrilda and Crex hashed them over endlessly.
“Ortalis!” Crex yelled. “Your mother told you not to do that. D’you want your backside heated up?”
“No, Grandpa.” When Ortalis said that, he was, no doubt, telling the truth.
“Hasn’t Bucco been dickering with the Thervings?” Grus said. “What’s King Dagipert going to do when he has to talk to somebody else?”
“If he doesn’t like it, Mergus can give him a good kick in the ribs, too,” Crex said.
“It’s not that simple,” Grus said. When it came to the Thervings, he knew what he was talking about. “The way things are nowadays, Dagipert’s about as likely to give us a kick in the ribs as the other way round. And he wants to give us one, too.”
“He spent some time here in the city of Avornis when he was a youth, didn’t he?” Estrilda asked.
Crex nodded. “That’s right. Mergus’ father thought it would make him admire us too much to want to bother us. We were stronger in those days, too, and Thervingia weaker. Ortalis!”
“He admires us, all right—just enough to want what we’ve got,” Grus said. “And you never can quite tell. Is that his greed… or is the Banished One looking out through his eyes, too?” They all made a sign against the coming of evil, but Grus wondered how much good it would do.
Something was wrong in the palace. Lanius was only five, but he knew that. People bustled back and forth, all of them with worried looks on their faces. No one had any time for him. He noticed that, most of all. He had been everyone’s darling. He’d gotten used to being everyone’s darling, too, and he’d liked it. Now nobody paid any attention to him. He might as well not have been there.
“Mama—” he said one day.
But not even his mother had any time for him. “Not now,” Certhia said, impatience and anger in her voice.
He tried again. “But, Mama—”
“Not now!” his mother said again, and swatted him on the bottom. He burst into tears. She didn’t pat him and comfort him, the way she usually did. She just went off and left him to cry till he stopped.
And he couldn’t see his father. They wouldn’t let him. All sorts of strange people got to see his father—priests and wizards and men wearing green gowns, like the fellow who took his pulse and looked at his teeth and gave him nasty potions when he didn’t feel good. But Lanius couldn’t.
“It’s not fair!” he wailed. That didn’t get him what he wanted, either. Nothing did. Nothing could.
Once, his father’s chamber lit up as bright as noon in the middle of the night. Loud voices spoke from the ceiling, or so it seemed to Lanius, whose own room was nearby. The light and the voices woke him up. They didn’t frighten him—they sounded like nice voices—but they did annoy him, because he wanted to sleep. Before long, though, the chamber went dark and the voices fell silent.
Lanius’ mother and a man walked down the corridor in front of his room. “Nothing more to do, if that failed,” the man said. Lanius’ mother began to weep, quietly and without hope. “I’m sorry, Your Highness,” the man told her, “but it’s only a matter of time now.”
Two days later, everybody in the royal palace began to weep and wail. Nobody would tell Lanius why, which made him start crying, too. No one even bothered to wipe his nose for him. Wet, slimy snot dribbled down his chin.
And then Uncle Scolopax strode into his room. Lanius didn’t like Scolopax. He never had. Scolopax didn’t like him, either, and hardly bothered hiding it. He didn’t hide it now. “Shut up, you little bastard,” he snarled. “Your old man’s dead, so I’m the king now. You’re too young, no one will support you. And if I’m the king, you’d best believe you are a bastard.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Wine!” King Scolopax shouted. Servants rushed to obey. When the wine cup was in his hands, Scolopax threw back his head and roared laughter. It echoed from the ceiling of the throne room. He gulped down the wine, then thrust the cup at the closest servant. A moment later, it was full again. Scolopax drank it dry once more.
He’d never imagined life could be so sweet. It wasn’t that he hadn’t drunk before. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been drunk before. As the younger brother of the king—as the despised, distrusted younger brother of the king—what else did he have to do? But now what he did wasn’t what a despised, distrusted younger brother did. Now what he did was what the king did. And that made all the difference in the world.
“Avornis is mine!” he chortled. “Mine, I tell you!”
If he’d ever said anything like that before, the servants would have made sure Mergus knew about it. Scolopax was in many ways a fool, but he knew what his brother would have done to him. That had been especially true after Lanius was born. If the brat hadn’t been on the sickly side, Mergus might have done it anyway. Scolopax had therefore never even let himself think such thoughts, for fear they would come out when he was drunk. Now he didn’t have to run away from them. He didn’t have to hide them. He could come right out and say them. And they were true.
All the servants in the throne room bowed very low. “Yes, Your Majesty,” they chorused. Scolopax laughed again. Only a couple of weeks before, they’d hardly bothered hiding their scorn for him. These days, they had to be hoping he’d been too sodden to remember. Oh, life was sweet!
He sat on the Diamond Throne, drinking, looking out across the chamber at the heart of the palace. It seemed bigger, grander, even brighter from here than it had before. He hated Mergus all the more for holding him away from this delight for so long.
Presently, one of Mergus’ ministers—Scolopax, in his cheerful drunkenness, couldn’t be bothered recalling the man’s name—approached the throne and bowed even lower than the servants had. “Your Majesty, how shall we deal with the Thervings?” he asked.
“Give ’em a good swift kick in the ass and send ’em to bed without supper,” Scolopax answered—the first words that popped into his head. He laughed again, loudly and raucously. So did the nearby servants.
Mergus’ minister— my minister now, Scolopax thought—did not laugh. He said, “King Dagipert will be looking to see what kind of example you set, Your Majesty. So will all the princes of the Menteshe, down in the south.” He lowered his voice. “And so will the Banished One, behind them.”
Scolopax didn’t want to think about the Banished One. He didn’t want to think about anything except being King Scolopax. “So will the Chernagors, on their islands in the Northern Sea, and the barbarians beyond the mountains,” he said.
Mergus’ minister looked pleased. “That’s true, Your Majesty. They will. Everyone will. What sort of example do you intend to set?”
“Wine!” King Scolopax shouted. “Some for me, some for him.” He pointed to the minister.
“No, thank you, Your Majesty,” the fellow said. “The healers forbid it. My liver…”
“You won’t drink with me?” Scolopax said ominously. “I ask no man twice. I need ask no man twice. You are dismissed. Get out of my sight. Get out of the palace. Get out of the city of Avornis.”
With immense dignity, Mergus’ minister bowed before departing. Scolopax wondered for a moment with whom he should replace him. Then he shrugged and laughed. The fellow was plainly useless. Why bother replacing him at all?
“And speaking of useless…” The new king snapped his fingers. The palace servants all looked attentive and eager. Scolopax laughed again. So this was the world Mergus had known for so long, was it? No wonder he’d kept it all to himself. It was too fine to share. The king pointed to the closest servant. “You! Fetch me Certhia, miscalled the queen. Hop to it, now.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the man said, and off he went. King Scolopax marveled. No insolence, no back talk, no delay. Ah, to be the king!
In due course, Certhia entered the throne room. Still in mourning for dead Mergus, she wore black, but her gown was of glistening silk, and worth a not so small fortune. Sour-faced bitch, Scolopax thought as she curtsied. And when she murmured “Your Majesty,” she might have been saying, You swine.
“Hallow Perdix wed us,” Certhia answered. “Arch-Hallow Megadyptes has declared the marriage fitting and proper.”
“This for Arch-Hallow Megadyptes.” Scolopax snapped his fingers. “And this for that pimp of a Perdix.” He made a much cruder gesture.
Certhia’s eyes widened. “May I be excused, Your Majesty?”
“You are not excused. You are dismissed, just like what’s-his-name was,” King Scolopax declared. “Get out of the palace. At once. If you show your nose around here again, I’ll make you sorry for it.”
“But—my son,” Certhia said.
“I shall tend to my nephew, that little bastard.” Scolopax turned to the wonderfully pliant servants. “Throw her out. Don’t let her come back. Do it right this minute.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” they chorused, and they did it. Watching them obey was almost more fun than drinking wine. Almost.
Scolopax pointed to yet another servant—he seemed to have an unending supply of them. “You! Go tell the so-called Arch-Hallow Megadyptes he is to come before me at once. And you!”—this to another man—“Draft a letter for delivery to the Maze, summoning that wise, holy, and pious fellow, Arch-Hallow Bucco, back here to the capital as fast as he can get here. Go!” They both bowed. They both went.
Megadyptes was gaunt and frail, a man with more strength of character than strength of body. When he came before Scolopax, the palpable aura of holiness that shone from him gave the king pause. Bowing, he said, “How may I serve Your Majesty?”—and not even Scolopax could find the faintest hint of reproach in his voice.
But that didn’t matter. Scolopax knew what he knew. “You made my brother’s marriage legitimate. You made his brat legitimate.”
“Why, so I did, Your Majesty,” Megadyptes agreed, showing the king nothing but calm. “King Mergus had, till then, no heir but you. The gods gave him no son till the autumn of his years. They have given you no son at all, I am sorry to say.”
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