The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “I said that before,” Sosia replied—a handful of words with a world of worry in them.

  Lanius had been so proud of himself when he sent Grus his letter along with Sosia’s. He’d uncovered what might be a cure for the plague, and wasn’t that wonderful? Wasn’t he wonderful for being so clever?

  Now he would have to test that cure, if it was a cure, on someone who mattered to him very much—and who mattered even more to his wife, and to the other king, and possibly even to his brother-in-law. He sighed and said, “I’d better send for Aedon.” Aedon was the leading wizard in the city of Avornis after Pterocles—a long way after Pterocles, unfortunately.

  A servant went hotfooting it out of the palace to bring him back. He came within the hour. He was closer to Grus’ age than to Lanius’—a stately man with a neat gray beard and with the pink skin and mild smile of a kindly grandfather. “How may I serve you, Your Majesty?” he asked.

  “The plague is in the city,” Lanius said bluntly. “You will have heard of it?”

  “Yes,” Aedon admitted. “But how do you know this to be the case?”

  “Queen Estrilda has it,” the king replied, more bluntly still.

  Aedon licked his lips. “What … do you wish me to do?” He couldn’t have sounded more wary if he were an actor on a stage. If he tried to save King Grus’ wife and failed, his head might answer for it. He said, “You do understand, I trust, that I have no experience in facing this disease.”

  “I do understand that,” Lanius said. While waiting for Aedon, he’d gone to the archives and gotten the document on which he’d based his letter to Grus. “This seems to be the same plague as the one the Banished One used against us about the time the Scepter of Mercy was lost. Here is what the sorcerers of that time did against it.”

  Like Grus, Aedon held things out at arm’s length to read them. No one had found a magical cure for lengthening sight. By the time the wizard finished reading, his skin was less pink than it had been. He licked his lips again. “You wish me to attempt this untested sorcery on Her Majesty?”

  “It’s not untested. It just hasn’t been used for a while,” Lanius said, proving technical truth could live in the same sentence with enormous understatement.

  “If I understand the spell correctly, we will need one other, ah, participant besides the queen and me,” Aedon said.

  Lanius nodded. “I read it the same way.” He pointed to himself. “I will be the other one.”

  Now the wizard went from wary to horrified. “Oh, no, Your Majesty! Use a servant or someone else who will not be missed if something goes awry.”

  “No,” Lanius said. “This is my responsibility. I found it. I was the one who thought it would work—and I still think so. I have … the courage of my convictions, you might say.” He’d been on a battlefield once, and never wielded a sword in anger. This may be the first really brave thing I’ve ever tried to do in my life, he thought. I’m old to start, but I hope I can do it right.

  He waited, trying to look as kingly as he could. Grus would have had no trouble getting the wizard to obey him—Lanius was resentfully sure of that. Aedon went right on grimacing, but at last he nodded. “Let it be as you say, Your Majesty. But please do me the courtesy of showing in writing that you have given me this order. I do not wish to be blamed if something goes wrong.”

  “I suppose that’s fair,” Lanius said, remembering the sorcerer would be trying a spell he’d never used before. Remembering that sent a chill through him. Am I brave or just foolhardy? Before long, he’d find out. He called to a servant for parchment and pen and ink, and also for sealing wax. He wrote rapidly, then used the royal signet ring. “Here,” he told Aedon. “Does this satisfy you?”

  After reading the pledge to hold him harmless, Aedon nodded. “It does. I thank you, Your Majesty.” He tucked the document into his belt pouch, no doubt ready to pull it out if things failed to go the way he wanted. “And now, if you would be so kind, take me to Her Majesty.”

  Actually, a serving woman led both Lanius and Aedon to Queen Estrilda. Lanius fought back a wince when he saw his mother-in-law. Estrilda had gotten worse since Sosia told him she was sick. Grus’ wife seemed only half aware of who he was, and either didn’t care or didn’t understand who the wizard was. The blisters described in both Grus’ dispatches and the ancient ecclesiastical document were plain on her face and hands.

  When Aedon gently touched her forehead, he flinched. “She is very warm, Your Majesty,” he said. “Very warm indeed.” If she dies, you can’t blame me. He didn’t shout that, but he might as well have.

  “Then you’d better not waste any time, had you?” Lanius said.

  That wasn’t what the wizard had wanted to hear. He said, “I also note that this spell involves a most unusual and uncertain application of the law of similarity.”

  “All right. You’ve noted it. Now get on with it.” When Lanius wanted to get something done, he started sounding brisk and brusque like Grus. One of these days before too long, he would have to think about what that meant. At the moment, he had more urgent things to worry about.

  Even with the pledge, Aedon seemed on the point of balking. After a longing look back toward the door, though, he seemed to realize he would take his reputation with him if he walked out through it.

  He took a deep breath, gathered himself, and managed a dignified bow for Lanius. “Very well, Your Majesty, and may King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens watch over my attempt,” he said.

  “Since the pestilence comes from the Banished One, I hope they will,” the king replied. Aedon looked startled, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. Maybe it hadn’t. A lot of things had happened to the wizard all at once.

  He carried a stool over by the side of the bed and set the text of the spell on it. Lanius, who was a little shortsighted, wouldn’t have wanted to try to read it from there, but Aedon seemed to have no trouble. For once, his lengthening sight worked for him, not against. “Please give me your hand, Your Majesty,” he said, and took Lanius’ right hand in his own left.

  Then he took Queen Estrilda’s left hand in his right. Since the wizard had neither hand free for passes, the spell necessarily depended on the verbal element. Lanius hoped Aedon would be able to handle that. Avornan had changed some in the centuries since it was written down. Words that had rhymed then didn’t anymore, while some that hadn’t did now. If Aedon performed in a play and made a mistake on the stage, that would be embarrassing. It would be much worse than embarrassing if he made a mistake now—for him, for Lanius, and for Estrilda.

  As soon as he started to read, Lanius let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t know Aedon well, or know where the wizard had learned to cope with the old-fashioned language. But learn he had. It fell trippingly from his tongue, and Lanius felt the power build with each word that passed his lips.

  The king was no sorcerer, but he had tried to learn something about conjuration, as he’d tried to learn something about everything. He knew what Aedon meant when he called this magic a strange use of the law of similarity. It treated the sick person and the well one as similar in everything save the sickness, and sought to transfer the well person’s health to the victim. If the wizard got a couple of things backwards, it would work the other way, and send the plague to the well person—and probably to the wizard, too. Other things could also go amiss. Lanius had more than enough imagination to see several.

  On Aedon went. He fought his way through a particularly intricate part of the spell. As soon as he did, his confidence seemed to rise. After that, he read more quickly. He almost stumbled once, but caught himself at a warning squeeze from Lanius. With a grateful glance toward the king, he saved the fluff and hurried toward the end.

  Lanius watched his mother-in-law. He didn’t know what to expect, even if the magic worked. Would she suddenly be better? Or would it be as though a fever broke, so that, while still ill, she was no longer in danger? He hoped for the one while expe
cting the other.

  What Aedon and he got was something more or less in the middle. He could see the blisters shrink back into themselves on Estrilda’s face. They had almost disappeared when the wizard finished the spell. Estrilda let out a long, long sigh as Aedon let go of her hand and Lanius’. “Better,” she whispered. “Much better. I thought I was on fire, and now I’m not.”

  She wasn’t her former self yet, either. She was plainly still weak from the pestilence. How long would that last? Lanius had no way of knowing. All he did know was that she was on the right track again. That counted for more than anything else. He nodded—he almost bowed—to Aedon. “Thank you. That was well done. Your fee will match your skill and your courage.”

  Aedon did bow to him, deeply, from the waist. “Speak to me not of my courage, Your Majesty, which is as nothing when measured against your own. And as for skill … You caught me when I was about to go badly astray. Everyone says you are a learned man, but I did not look for you to correct me in my own field, and to be right.” He bowed once more.

  What exactly did he mean by that? Had he looked for Lanius to try jogging his elbow, and to be wrong when he did? That was how it sounded. Lanius thought about anger, but set it aside. What point to it? Any expert would feel the same about amateurs.

  Then Lanius stopped worrying about such small, such trivial, things. The spell he’d found—the spell Avornan wizards had found all those centuries before—worked. If it worked in the city of Avornis, it would work down by the Stura, too. And it would work on the far side of the river. The folk who had been thralls would suffer no more—no more than they already had, anyhow. And the war against the Menteshe and the Banished One would go on.

  Smoke from a funeral pyre darkened the sky above Cumanus. The stench of burning wood and oil and dead flesh never left the city; it stayed in Grus’ nostrils day and night. And yet things were getting better, here and in the land south of the Stura where the Banished One first unleashed the pestilence.

  Grus didn’t see Pterocles very much lately. The wizard was busy from before dawn until after nightfall every day. He ran himself ragged curing plague victims himself and teaching others how to do it. Grus had no idea when he slept, or if he did. The king knew the wizard ate erratically. Grus had servants send him food wherever he was. If not for that, Pterocles might not have eaten at all.

  When Pterocles fell asleep in the middle of explaining to half a dozen wizards from towns along the Stura how the spell worked, Grus had him carried back to the city governor’s palace and put to bed with guards in front of his door not to keep other people out but to keep him in until he’d had at least one good rest. The wizard complained, loudly and angrily. Then he slept from one midafternoon to the next.

  He woke insisting he hadn’t closed his eyes at all, and at first refused to believe he’d slept the sun around. Then, when he woke a little more and his wits began to work, he realized he wouldn’t be so hungry or have such a desperate need to piss if he hadn’t lost a day. He ate enough for two, almost filled a chamber pot, and declared himself ready to charge back into the routine that had caused his collapse.

  “No,” Grus told him. “Wait. Spend a little time relaxing, if you please.”

  “But I can’t!” Pterocles said. “People are dying. If I don’t cure, if I don’t train other wizards—”

  “Wait,” Grus repeated. “If you kill yourself, you can’t help anybody. And you were right on the edge of doing that. Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong. Make me believe it.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared a challenge at Pterocles.

  The younger man took a deep breath. Then he laughed, let it out again, and spread his hands. “I wish I could, Your Majesty, but I fear I can’t.”

  “All right, then,” Grus said. “You’ve done more than any three men could be expected to. And you’ve got more than three men doing your work now, because of everybody you’ve taught. We’re getting the upper hand on this cursed thing.”

  “We should be doing more.” But that was Pterocles’ last protest, and a fading one at that. The wizard shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, which hadn’t been combed, let alone washed, in some time. “We owe this one to King Lanius.”

  “Well, so we do,” Grus said. “Fine—we owe it to him. I like to think he owes us one or two, too.”

  “It’s a good spell. It’s a very good spell,” Pterocles said. “And it’s a novel approach to the problem. I never would have thought of it myself.”

  “Really?” Grus hoped he kept his tone neutral. He did his best. But he didn’t like to think there were many sorcerous matters that wouldn’t have occurred to his best wizard.

  Pterocles understood what he meant, even if he didn’t say it. With a wry smile, the sorcerer answered, “Afraid so, Your Majesty. Magic is a big field. Nobody can know all the blades of grass—and the flowers, and the weeds—in it.” That smile vanished like snow in springtime. “Nobody who’s a mere man, I should say. About anyone else, I reserve judgment.”

  “No doubt you’re smart to do it, too.” Grus started to look south toward the Argolid Mountains—toward the Banished One’s lair. He started to, but then deliberately checked the motion. “Now if only he would reserve judgment on us.”

  “I’m afraid that’s too much to hope for,” Pterocles said.

  “So am I,” Grus answered. “And if you’d left off everything but the first two words, that would have been just as true, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” the wizard said, and then, as though that didn’t put his meaning across strongly enough, he repeated it with a different emphasis. “Oh, yes. Anyone who isn’t afraid of the Banished One doesn’t know anything about him.”

  “Right.” Grus let it lie there. Had he been the Banished One—a truly terrifying thought—he would have done things differently. The freed thralls could only be an annoyance to him, never a real danger. Danger lay in the Avornan army and in the farmers north of the Stura who kept it fed. Grus would have struck there. But freeing the thralls might have pricked the Banished One’s vanity. And so he had struck at and avenged himself upon that which annoyed him, and concerned himself much less with everything else. The folk who really threatened his longtime dominion over the lands south of the Stura did not suffer in proportion to their menace.

  Pterocles poured some wine into his cup from a silver pitcher. “So here’s to King Lanius. He was our memory this time. Without him, the pestilence probably would have gone through the whole kingdom, and gods only know how many would have died.”

  Grus filled his winecup, too. “To Lanius,” he agreed. Both men raised their cups and drank the toast. Grus had the feeling Pterocles might have put his finger on the Banished One’s plan. The exiled god, with his contempt for mankind, wouldn’t have expected the Avornans to be able to stop the disease. That showed his arrogance, but perhaps less in the way of bad planning than Grus had thought.

  Drinking to Lanius as a real salute, not to the other king’s place as a member of the longtime ruling dynasty, bothered Grus less than it would have a few years earlier. The two kings had come up with a working arrangement that probably didn’t altogether satisfy either one—Grus knew it didn’t altogether satisfy him—but that both men could live with. Lanius wasn’t afraid anymore that Grus would murder him if he got out of line. And Grus didn’t worry that he would find himself outlawed and the gates of the capital closed against him when he came back from a campaign. He still wished he could campaign and stay in the city of Avornis at the same time. Maybe the gods could be in two places at once, but mere men couldn’t.

  And since he couldn’t, having Lanius there in his place worked … pretty well.

  Lanius rode out from the city of Avornis with Collurio and with a troop of royal bodyguards. The soldiers fanned out to give the king and the animal trainer room to talk without being overheard. By now, they’d seen Collurio in the palace often enough and for long enough to be used to him and to be fairly confident he harbore
d no evil designs against Lanius.

  Collurio laughed in some embarrassment. “It’s a funny thing, Your Majesty,” he said. “I train beasts for a living, but I fear I’m not much of a horseman. I never have been.”

  “Well, I’m not, either, so don’t let it worry you,” Lanius said.

  “But it’s different. You’re the king. You have other things to worry about,” Collurio said. “I spend all my time with animals. I should be able to ride better than a farmer bringing a couple of baskets of turnips to town.”

  “Why can’t you, then?” Lanius asked. As usual, his attitude was down-to-earth. Before you could solve a problem, you had to figure out what it was.

  And Collurio had the answer for him. “Because I don’t get on horseback more than a couple of times a year. Why should I, when I live in the capital? All my kin are there. All my work is there, or near enough. I don’t need to leave the city very often, and it’s not such a big place that I need to ride to get where I’m going. I just walk, the way most people do. If you ride a lot inside the city, you’re doing it for swank, not because you need to. Ordinary folks haven’t got the time or the silver to waste on swank.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Lanius hoped he didn’t sound too vague. The only ordinary people with whom he had any acquaintance were the palace guardsmen—who had to know how to ride—and the servants inside the palace. And what the servants did when they weren’t actually working was a closed book to him.

  “It is nice getting away every once in a while, isn’t it?” Collurio said, looking around at the countryside with the fascination of a man who didn’t see it very often. “Everything smells so fresh.” Everyone who got outside the walls said that. Lanius had said it himself, more times than he could count. In a lower voice, Collurio went on, “And I’m not sorry to get out with that cursed disease loose in the city, either.”