Authors: Dan Chernenko
Having gone down the stairs, Lanius gaped in wonder. "I never imagined this was here!" he exclaimed.
"You don't understand yet," Ixoreus said, smiling. "This is only the first level."
"How many are there altogether?" Lanius asked.
"Five," the priest answered. "The cathedral's a good deal bigger under the ground than it is on top." He made his halting way toward the stairway down to the next level. As he began to descend, he said, "One of these days I'll fall, and these stairs will be .the death of me." Lanius started to shake his head and disagree, but Ixoreus smiled again. "There are plenty of worse ways to go. By now, I've seen most of them."
The archives filled the two lowest levels. Lanius' nostrils twitched at the half musty, half animal smell of old parchment. "No other odor like that in all the world," he said.
His words seemed to reach Ixoreus in a way nothing else had. "Well, none except ink, anyhow," he said. He and Lanius eyed each other in perfect mutual understanding.
Down on the bottommost level, only a few lamps burned. In that dim, flickering light, Lanius felt not only the weight of the centuries but also the weight of everything built and excavated above him. After a moment's fear, he shrugged. If an earthquake made it all collapse, in less than the blink of an eye he would be a red smear thinner than any sheet of parchment. What point to worrying, then?
"Do you want a guide, or would you sooner poke through things on your own?" Ixoreus asked.
"By your leave, most holy sir - " Lanius began.
The priest laughed out loud. "You want me to go away and let you do as you would," he said. "There may be more to you as a searcher than I thought. The run-of-the-mill sort want me to hold their hand. They may find what they're looking for, but somehow they're never looking for anything much. The other kind - well, they often come up empty. When they don't, though..."
Lanius hardly heard him. The king looked now here, now there, wondering where to begin. He also wondered why he'd never come here before. True, the royal archives held enough documents to keep a man busy till the end of time. Even so, he should have started going through these records years before.
When he sat down, the stool creaked under him. He wondered if it dated back to the days before the Scepter of Mercy was lost. Then he wondered if it dated back to the days before the Banished One was cast out of the heavens. Anywhere else, he would have laughed at the idea. Down here in the near darkness, it didn't seem so ridiculous anymore.
He almost called Ixoreus back to ask if the records held any order at all. In the end, he didn't - he wanted to find out for himself. He soon discovered there wasn't much. Documents from his father's reign lay beside others dating back before the loss of the Scepter of Mercy. If he wanted something in particular, he was going to need luck and patience.
Luck came from the gods. Patience ... Lanius shifted on that ancient stool. Patience he had. His lips twisted in a bitter smile. After all, it wasn't as though he would be taking time away from anything vital to Avornis if he came down here and worked his way through the clerical archives one silverfish-nibbled piece of parchment at a time. Grus didn't let him deal with anything vital anyhow.
If he hadn't had practice reading old, old scripts in the royal archives, he would have been altogether at sea here. As things were, that troubled him no more than switching from the hand of one secretary to that of another would have. He felt like shouting when he came upon letters from half a dozen yellow-robed clerics bewailing the irruption of the Menteshe into the lands around their towns. No Avornan clerics had gone to those towns for more than four hundred years.
He felt like cursing when, in the same set of pigeonholes as those letters, he found others about sending consecrated wine to the Chernagor city-states that came from the reign of his great-grandfather. Maybe someone would find those interesting one day, but he didn't.
He shoved them back into their pigeonholes. The next cache of letters also came from the days of his dynasty, which meant they were too recent to be interesting to him. He had to go through them one at a time anyway, because no one except Olor and Quelea could be sure ahead of time what might lie mixed in with them.
As it happened, nothing was mixed in with that batch - nothing Lanius cared about, anyhow. "But if I hadn't looked through them, the parchment I need would be at the bottom of that crate," he muttered. His words vanished without the slightest trace of echo, as though the parchments and the boxes and racks that held them swallowed up sound. They were surely hungry. They wouldn't have had many sounds to swallow down here, not for year upon year upon year.
Lanius went through another crate and another rack. He kept waiting for Ixoreus to come nag him about going back up to the outer world again. But the green-robed priest left him alone.
That made him happy. Ixoreus understood, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Lanius had met only a handful of men who did.
And patience and persistence had their reward. Lanius was going through some minutes from a minor ecclesiastical council two hundred fifty years before when he came upon a parchment that didn't belong with the rest. He saw as much at once; the parchment was yellow with age, the writing faded to a pale ghost of itself. He whistled softly. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen anything this old in the royal archives.
He brought three lamps together, to give him the best light he could get down here. Then he bent close to see what he could make out. Not just the script was archaic here; so was the language. He had to puzzle it out a phrase at a time. When he finished, he quietly put the parchment back where he'd found it. He said not a word about it to Ixoreus when they returned to the world of light and air. The priest wouldn't have believed him. Lanius wondered if he believed himself, or wanted to.
A lea eyed the Menteshe prisoner with no great warmth. The Menteshe looked back at her out of narrow dark eyes filled with fear and suspicion. Grus listened to the rain drumming down on the roof of his residence in Cumanus. His men and the changing weather had finally persuaded Prince Evren his attacks were costing him more than they were worth.
"You speak Avornan?" Alca asked the prisoner.
"I speak some, yes," the nomad answered.
"I chose one for you who did," Grus said.
Alca nodded. She asked the Menteshe, "What is your name?"
"I am Kai-Qubad," he said. If he'd trusted her, he would have given her his whole genealogy after that; the Menteshe were proud of their ancestors. Grus wondered why. To him, one lizard-eating savage was no different from another. Someone like Lanius, now, had reason to boast about the family tree. But a Menteshe? Kai-Qubad, though, fell silent after his own name, not wanting to give Alca more of a hold on him than he had to.
She didn't press him for more. Instead, she said, "You need to know that I will know if you lie. Do you understand this? Do you believe it?"
"I understand. I believe. You are ..." Kai-Qubad said something in his own tongue.
Grus didn't speak the Menteshe language. He hadn't thought the witch did, either, but she nodded. "All right, then. Tell me why Prince Evren went to war against Avornis."
Kai-Qubad scratched by the side of his mouth. He had a wispy mustache any Avornan man would have been ashamed of, but few Menteshe could have grown a thicker one. After that brief hesitation, he said, "You are there to war on. You should ask, why did we not war on you for so long?"
"When you hadn't warred on us for so long, why did Evren pick that time to start?" Grus asked.
"Am I Evren? Do I know why the prince does what he does?" Kai-Qubad returned.
Sharply, Alca said, "I know when you evade, too. You would do better not to evade. You would do much better, in fact." She waited. Kai-Qubad nodded. So did she. "Answer the king's question," she told him.
"You are the enemy. You will always be the enemy. And our flocks need new grazing lands," the nomad said. "What more reason do we need?"
"I don't know," Grus said. "Did the Banished One order Evren to send men over the Stura? Is that why you chose to fight when you did?"
"The Banished One. So you call him," Kai-Qubad said scornfully. "To us, he is the Fallen Star. He will return to the heavens one day. He will return, and all debts will be paid. Oh, yes - they will be paid."
That prospect - which, unsurprisingly, matched what the Banished One himself had claimed - frightened Grus more than he could say. Kai-Qubad looked forward to it with a gloating anticipation that frightened the king, too. Then Alca said, "You are evading again. Did he order Evren to go over the Stura?"
Kai-Qubad shrugged. He wasn't a very big man, but his movements held a liquid grace. "Do I know the minds of princes?" he asked. A moment later, he let out a sharp yelp of pain.
"I told you not to evade," Alca said. "Now answer."
"No one told me anything," he said, and then yelped again.
"These games get you nowhere," the witch warned. "The more you play them, the sorrier you will be. Tell me what you know. Tell me everything you know, and stop wasting time."
"I don't know what to tell you." Kai-Qubad set his jaw, plainly expecting more pain. He hissed like a snake when it came. This time, it didn't seem to go away at once, but hung on and on.
"That is your own lie tormenting you," Alca said. "If you tell the truth, all will be well once more."
"Ha!" the Menteshe said. But he stood there, huddled in his own misery, for no more than a few minutes before groaning, "Make it stop! I will speak."
"If you speak the truth, it
will
stop," the witch told him.
"Yes, then. Yes! Our lord and master started Evren against you." Kai-Qubad sighed with relief. Evidently Alca had meant what she said.
"How do you know this?" Grus asked the nomad.
"How?" The fellow hesitated. By now, even that pause was plenty to cause him pain. He said, "Make it stop! I'll tell." He hurried on. "I know because my captain's sister is wed to one of Prince Evren's guards. That fellow said the prince had an envoy from the Fallen Star come to court not long before we went over the river against you. When an envoy from him you call the Banished One comes, what can a prince do but obey?"
"We don't," Grus said. "We never have. We never will."
Kai-Qubad looked at him with an emotion he'd never dreamt he would see on any Menteshe's face - pity. "One day, you will bow before the Fallen Star, as we have done. One day, you will know peace, as we do." He meant it. He meant every word of it. That alarmed Grus more than anything.
It didn't alarm Alca. It angered her. "How do you dare talk of peace when you were taken in war?"
"We have peace," the Menteshe insisted. "We have perfect peace. We have yielded to the Fallen Star. He is our master. We accept this. We accept him. We need nothing else. We want nothing else. You are the ones who still struggle. When you accept him, you will have perfect peace, too. We bring him to you."
"You bring plunder and rape and murder," Grus said.
"And you fight among yourselves," Alca added. "What do you have to say about that, if you have perfect peace?"
Kai-Qubad shrugged. "Fighting is our sport." There, for once, Grus believed him completely. He went on, "And some of our enmities go back to ancient days, and do not die at once." Grus believed that, too.
"Our old ways go back even further than yours," Grus said. "Why shouldn't we keep them, if they suit us?"
"Oh, that is very simple," Kai-Qubad answered. "Your ways are wrong, but ours are right." He spoke with complete conviction. He showed no sign of sudden pain, either. As far as he was concerned, he was telling the truth. The spell that would have punished him for lying stayed quiet.
"Do you want to hear anything more from him, Your Majesty?" Alca asked. Grus shook his head. The witch gestured to the guards. They took the Menteshe away. Alca sighed wearily. "What can we do with such people?" she said.
"Beat them," Grus said. "That's the only thing I can see. If we don't beat them, one of these days they'll beat us. And that would be very bad."
He laughed at the understatement. He'd spent these past months either fighting the Menteshe or trying to understand the thralls who'd swarmed over the Stura into Avornis. He imagined the riders carrying destruction and murder all through the kingdom. He also imagined the wizards - or would they be priests, of a particular dark sort? - following in the nomads' wake. He imagined farmers and townsfolk made into thralls. And he imagined the Banished One thriving on their adoration and looking out through their eyes and seeing a world full of slaves to him and thinking it was good. He imagined all that, and the laughter curdled in his throat.
"What are we going to do?" he whispered. "Oh, by the gods, what are we going to do?" He looked at Alca, hoping the witch would have an answer. But she spread her hands, as though to say she didn't know, either. He felt worse than if he hadn't looked her way at all.
Sosia eyed Lanius. "Something is wrong," she said.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he answered, knowing what a liar he was.
His wife knew what a liar he was, too. "I don't believe you, not even for a minute," she said. "Something
is
wrong. When I first realized it, I thought you were having an affair."
"I'm not," Lanius said, which was the truth. There were plenty of pretty serving women in the palace. He enjoyed looking at them. He'd kept his hands to himself, though, ever since he'd married Sosia. He'd thought about taking this one or that one to bed, and he knew some of them had thought about the advantages of bedding him, but nothing of that sort had happened.
"I know you're not," Sosia said now. "I almost wish you were. Almost. Then I'd know
what
was wrong. This way ..." She shook her head. "This way, I'm guessing, and that's even worse."
"I'm sorry," Lanius said. "You couldn't do anything about it anyway." And
that,
he knew, was also nothing but the truth.