The Chernagor Pirates (2 page)

“Tell me what you know about the Chernagors,” he said.

Lanius started.
He thought I was going to ask him something else.
Grus clicked his tongue between his teeth. He expected they would get, around to that, too. Lanius said, “You'll know a lot already. Hard to be King of Avornis”—he made a sour face at that—“and not know a good deal about the Chernagors.”

“I'm not interested in all the trading they do out on the Northern Sea,” Grus said. “They'll do that come what may. I'm interested in the rivalries between their city-states.”

“All right.” Lanius thought for a moment. “Some of them, you know, go back a long way, back even before the days when their pirate ancestors took the northern coastline away from us.”

“That's fine,” Grus said agreeably. “If knowing why they hated each other before helps me know how they hate each other now, I'll listen. If it doesn't”—he shrugged—“it can wait for some other time.”

Grus was a relentlessly practical man. One of his complaints about Lanius was that his son-in-law was anything but. Of course, had Lanius been more like him, he would also have been more likely to try to overthrow him—and much more likely to succeed.

“What's this all about?” Lanius asked now, a practical enough question. “The Chernagors haven't troubled us much lately—certainly no sea raids on our coast like the ones in my great-grandfather's day, and not more than the usual nuisance raids across the land frontier. Thervingia's been a lot bigger problem.”

“Not since Prince Berto became King Berto,” Grus said. Avornis' western neighbor was quiet under a king who would rather build cathedrals than fight. Grus approved of a pious sovereign for a neighbor. Berto's father, King Dagipert, had almost made Thervingia the master of Avornis and himself Lanius' father-in-law instead of Grus. He'd also come unpleasantly close to killing Grus on the battlefield. The news that Dagipert had finally died was some of the best Grus had ever gotten.

“You know what I mean.” Lanius let his impatience show. He had scant patience for comments he found foolish.

“All right.” Grus spread his hands, trying to placate the younger king. “I'm concerned because the Banished One may be trying to get a foothold in some of the Chernagor city-states. With Berto on the throne in Thervingia, he won't have any luck there, and he could use a lever against us besides the Menteshe.”

“I wonder if the Banished One and Dagipert connived together,” Lanius said. Grus only shrugged once more. He'd wondered the same thing. Avornans had never proved it. Dagipert had always denied it. Doubt lingered even so.

“Any which way, our spies have seen Menteshe—which is to say, they've surely seen the Banished One's—agents in several Chernagor towns,” Grus said.

“
Milvago
.” Lanius' lips shaped the name without a sound.

“Don't say it.” Grus shook his head in warning. “Don't even come as close as you did. That's nobody's business but ours—and I wouldn't be sorry if we didn't know, either.”

“Yes.” Despite the warm spring weather, Lanius shivered. Grus didn't blame him a bit. Everyone knew King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods had joined together to cast the Banished One out of the heavens and down to earth more than a thousand years before.

Everyone knew that, yes. What no one knew, these days, was that the Banished One—Milvago, as he'd been known when he still dwelt in the heavens—hadn't been any minor deity. Lanius had found that truth in the ecclesiastical archives, far below the great cathedral in the capital.

No, Milvago hadn't been any ordinary god, a god of weather or anger or earthquakes or other such well-defined function. From what the ancient archives said, Milvago had fathered Olor and Quelea and the rest. Until they cast him forth, he'd been Lord of All.

He remained, or seemed to remain, immortal, though he wasn't all-powerful anymore—wasn't, in fact, a god at all anymore. He wanted dominion on earth, not only for its own sake but also, somehow, as a stepping-stone back to the heavens. Avornis had always resisted him. Grus wondered how long his kingdom could go on resisting a power greater than it held.

“Do you know what I think?” Lanius said.

Grus shook his head. “I haven't the faintest idea, Your Majesty.” He stayed polite to Lanius. The other king seldom used his royal title. Lanius resented reigning rather than ruling. Grus didn't worry about that, as long as the resentment stayed no more than resentment. Polite still, Grus added, “Tell me, please.”

“I think the Banished One is stirring up trouble among the Chernagors to keep us too busy even to try to go after the Scepter of Mercy down in the south,” Lanius said.

That hadn't occurred to Grus. He realized it should have. The Banished One saw the world as a whole. He had to try to do the same himself. “You may very well be right,” he said slowly. “But even if you are, what can we do about it?”

“I don't know,” Lanius admitted. “I was hoping you might think of something.”

“Thanks—I think,” Grus said.

“If we get in trouble in the north, what can we do but try to calm it down before it gets worse?” Lanius asked. “Nothing I can see. We can't very well pretend it isn't there, can we?”

“I don't see how. I wish I did.” Grus' laugh was sour as green apples. “Well, Your Majesty, the Scepter of Mercy has been out of our hands for a long time now. I don't suppose a little longer will make that much difference.”

Lanius' answering nod was unhappy. Four hundred years ago, the then-King of Avornis had brought the great talisman down from the capital to the south to help resist the inroads of the Menteshe. But the hard-riding nomads had fallen on the Scepter's escort, galloped off with it to Yozgat, and held it there ever since. After several disastrously unsuccessful efforts to retake it, the Avornans hadn't tried for a couple of centuries. And yet …

Lanius said, “As long as we go without it, the Banished One has the advantage. All we can do is respond to his moves. Playing the game that way, we lose sooner or later. With it, maybe we can call the tune.”

“I know.” Now Grus sounded unhappy, too. Sending Avornan soldiers south of the Stura River was asking either to lose them or to see them made into thralls—half-mindless men bound to the Menteshe and to the Banished One. And Yozgat, these days the chief town of the Menteshe Prince Ulash, lay a long way south of the Stura. “If only our magic could stand up against what the Banished One can aim at us.”

“Wish for the moon while you're at it.” But King Lanius caught himself. “No. Wish for the Scepter of Mercy.”

“If I need to have it already before I can hope to get it—” Grus stopped. Even if he went around that twenty-two times, he'd still get caught.

“We have to try. Sooner or later, we have to try,” Lanius said. But Lanius was no soldier. How much of the bitter consequences of failure did he grasp?

On the other hand,
not
trying to take back the Scepter of Mercy would also be a failure, a failure most bitter. Grus understood that, too. He'd never wished more to disagree than when he made his head go up and down and said, “You're right.”

Lanius dreamed. He knew he dreamed. But dreams in which the Banished One appeared were not of the ordinary sort. That supremely cold, supremely beautiful face seemed more real than most of the things he saw while wide awake. The Banished One said, “And so you know my name. You know who I was, who I am, who I shall be again.”

His voice was as beautiful—and as cold—as his features. Lanius heard in these dreams with the same spectral clarity as he saw.
Milvago.
The name, and the knowledge of what it meant, echoed and reechoed in his mind.

He didn't speak the name—however one spoke in dreams—but the Banished One sensed it. “Yes, I am Milvago, shaper of this miserable world,” he declared. “How dare you presume to stand against me?”

“You want to conquer my kingdom,” Lanius replied. He could answer honestly; the Banished One, he'd seen, might commandeer his dreams, but couldn't harm him in them. “You want to make my people into thralls. If I can keep you from doing that, I will.”

“No mere mortal may hinder me,” the Banished One said.

“Not so.” Lanius shook his head, or it felt as though he shook his head, there in this dream that was all too real. “You were cast down from the heavens long ago. If no man could hinder you, you would have ruled the world long since.”

“Rule it I shall.” The Banished One tossed his head in more than mortal scorn. “What is time? Time means nothing to me, not when I created time. Think you I am trapped in it, to gutter out one day like a lamp running dry? You had best think again, you mayfly, you brief pimple on the buttock of the world.”

Lanius knew he would die. He didn't know the Banished One wouldn't, but Milvago had shown no sign of aging in all the long years since coming down from the heavens. He couldn't assume the Banished One was lying. Still, that didn't matter. The king's tutors had trained him well. However intimidating the Banished One was, Lanius saw he was trying to distract him here. Whether he would die wasn't the essence of the argument. Whether he remained omnipotent—if, indeed, he'd ever been omnipotent—was.

“If you were all you say you are, you would have ruled the world since you came into it,” Lanius said. “That you don't proves you can be beaten. I will do everything I know how to do to stop you.”

“Everything you know how to do.” The Banished One's laughter flayed like whips of ice. “What do you know? What
can
you know, who live but for a season and then go back to the nothingness from which you sprang?”

“I know it is better to live free than as one of your thralls,” Lanius answered. “Did the gods who sprang from you decide the same thing?”

Normally, the Banished One's perfect countenance showed no emotion. Rage rippled over it now, though. “After yours, their turn shall come,” he snarled. “You need not doubt that. Oh, no, do not doubt it.
Their turn shall come.”

He
reached
for Lanius, the nails on his fingers sharpening into talons as his hands drew near. As one will in dreams, Lanius turned to flee. As one will in dreams, he knew he fled too slow. He looked back to see how much danger he was in. The Banished One, apparently, could make his arms as long as he chose. His hand closed on the shoulder of the King of Avornis.

Lanius shrieked himself awake.

“Are you all right?” The hand on his shoulder belonged to his wife. Even in the dim light of the royal bedchamber, Sosia looked alarmed. “I haven't heard you make a noise like that in …” Grus' daughter shook her head. “I don't know if I've ever heard you make a noise like that.”

“Bad dream,” Lanius said.

He would have left it there. He didn't want to worry Sosia. Grus had arranged the marriage—forced it on both of them, in other words. The new king wanted to tie himself to Avornis' ancient dynasty as closely as he could. In their seven years of marriage, though, Lanius and Sosia had come to care for each other as much as a married couple could reasonably be expected to do—which was, perhaps, more than anything else, a triumph of good manners and patience on both sides.

Sosia shook her head. Her dark, wavy hair, down for the night, brushed across his face. “That wasn't any ordinary dream,” she said. “You don't have dreams like that—nightmares, I should say. Did you see … him?”

She didn't even want to call him the Banished One. She didn't know the name Milvago, or what the Banished One had been before his ouster from the heavens. So far as Lanius knew, only he and Grus knew that. Grus had told him not to tell anyone—not his wife, who was Grus' daughter, and not the Arch-Hallow of Avornis, who was Grus' bastard son. Lanius hadn't argued. He too could see that the fewer people who knew about exactly what sort of enemy Avornis faced, the better.

After his scream, he couldn't very well lie to Sosia. “Yes, I saw him,” he said with a reluctant nod.

“Why doesn't he leave you alone?” She sounded indignant, as though, could she have been alone with the Banished One, she would have given him a piece of her mind. She probably would have, too.

“He sends me dreams. He sends your father dreams. He doesn't bother other people—General Hirundo never gets them, for instance,” Lanius said. The Banished One didn't trouble Sosia, either, but Lanius forbore to mention that.

His wife sounded more irate than ever. “He should bother other people, and leave you alone.”

But Lanius shook his head. “In an odd way, I think it's a compliment,” he said. “He knows your father and I are dangerous to him, so we're the ones he visits in dreams. That's what we think, anyhow.”

Maybe we're giving ourselves too much credit,
he thought. Could he and Grus—could any mortals—seriously discommode the Banished One? On days when Lanius felt gloomy, he had his doubts. But why had thralls under the Banished One's will tried to murder the two Kings of Avornis the winter before, if those kings didn't represent some kind of danger?

Sosia said, “What I think is, you ought to go back to sleep, and hope no more bad dreams come. And if they don't, you can worry about all these things in the morning, when you feel better.”

Lanius leaned over and kissed her. “That's good advice,” he said. In fact, he could think of no better advice for the wee small hours of the morning. He took it, and the Banished One left him alone … then.

King Grus and the man he hoped to make his new wizard eyed each other. The wizard, whose name was Pterocles, said, “I'll do everything I can for you, Your Majesty.” He was young and earnest and very bright. Grus was sure he would be diligent. Whether he would be versatile enough, or discreet enough, to make a royal wizard … Grus wished he weren't
quite
so young.