The Scepter's Return (10 page)

“Let him give me the Scepter of Mercy with his own hands,” Grus said. “Then I will believe he is serious, not just telling lies to help himself.”

Qizil's eyes went very wide. Whatever he'd expected the King of Avornis to ask for, that caught him by surprise. “Your Majesty is joking,” he blurted.

“I have never been more serious in my life.” Grus meant every word of that. If he could win the Scepter of Mercy by allying himself with Sanjar, he would do it. If he could win it by allying with Korkut, he would do that, too. And if winning it meant standing aloof from both of them, he would do that.

“It is impossible,” Qizil said.

Grus folded his arms across his chest. “Then we have no more to say to each other, do we? The scouts will take you out beyond our lines. My compliments to your master, but there will be no alliance.”

“You do not understand,” Qizil said urgently. “The prince cannot give you what he does not have. The Scepter of Mercy is in Yozgat, and Korkut holds it.”

The king had known where the Scepter was, of course. Yozgat still lay far to the south. He hadn't been sure which unloving half brother controlled what had been Ulash's capital. Some of the prisoners he'd taken claimed one did, some the other. But if Sanjar's envoy admitted Korkut held it …

“If you aid my master, we can speak of this again after he has triumphed,” Qizil suggested.

“No,” Grus said. “This is a price he would have to pay in advance. Once he'd won the war, he would surely try to do me out of it.”

Qizil made elaborate promises that Sanjar was the very image of honesty. The more he promised, the less Grus believed him. “I'm sorry,” the king said at last, which seemed more polite than saying he was bored. “I don't think we have anything to talk about. As I told you, you have a safe-conduct till you're outside of our lines. If things change farther south, maybe Prince Sanjar will talk to me again.”

“If things change farther south, the prince will not need to talk to you,” Qizil said venomously. “He will drive you from this country like the dog you are.”

That sounded more like the Menteshe Grus was familiar with. “I love you, too,” he said, and had the small satisfaction of startling Sanjar's emissary again. Qizil sprang up onto his pony's back. He rode away at such a pace, the Avornan scouts had a hard time staying with him. He was so angry, he might have forgotten his weapons.

“Too bad,” Hirundo remarked. “That would have made things a lot easier.”

“Well, so it would,” Grus said. “I had to try. All right—he told me no. Now we go on the way we would have before.”

“So Korkut holds Yozgat,” Hirundo said musingly. “If he sends someone to you to ask for help against Sanjar …”

“Yes, that could be interesting,” Grus agreed. “Both of them have sent envoys up to the city of Avornis, so I suppose it could happen. I'll know the right thing to ask if it does, anyhow.”

“What will you do if Korkut says he'll send you the Scepter?” Hirundo asked.

Faint,
was what crossed Grus' mind. “The first thing I'd do is make sure he sent me the real Scepter of Mercy and not a clever counterfeit,” he said, and Hirundo nodded. The king went on, “If it was the real Scepter … If it was, I do believe I'd take it and go back to Avornis. It means more to me—and to the kingdom—than anything else down here.”

“Even freeing the thralls?” Hirundo asked slyly.

Grus looked around. When he didn't see Otus, he nodded. “Even that. If we have the Scepter of Mercy, we can worry about everything else later.”
I think we can. I hope we can. How do I know for sure, when no King of Avornis has tried to wield it for all these years?
He blinked when he realized he didn't
know.
What he had to go on was Lanius' certainty. No matter how fine a scholar the other king had proved himself, was that really enough? All at once, Grus wondered.

With a laugh, Hirundo said, “The Banished One wouldn't be very happy if Korkut sent you the Scepter to win his civil war.”

He could speak lightly of the Banished One. The exiled god had never appeared in his dreams. He didn't know—literally didn't know—how lucky he was. Grus, who did, said only, “No, he wouldn't.” His doubts left him. The Banished One wouldn't worry about losing the Scepter of Mercy if it weren't a weighty weapon against him.

Hirundo stared south. The dust Qizil and the Avornan scouts had kicked up as they rode away still hung in the air. “For now, I guess you're right—the only thing we can do is go on,” the general said.

“There's nothing else to do,” Grus said.

Lanius had a reputation as a man interested in everything. The reputation held a lot of truth, as he knew better than anyone else. It also came in handy in some unexpected ways. He knew that better than anyone else, too.

Had, say, King Grus poked his nose into one of the little rooms in the palace that held bed linens, any servant who came down the corridor and saw him would have been astonished. Gossip about Grus' odd behavior would have flashed from one end of the palace to the other before an hour went by.

But it wasn't odd for Lanius to go into a room like that. He poked around in the kitchens, and in the archives, and anywhere else that suited his fancy. A servant who saw him opening one of those doors would just shrug and go about his business. It had happened before, plenty of times.

No servants were coming down the corridor now. That did make things simpler. Lanius opened the door to the storeroom, and quietly closed it behind him. He smiled to smell the spicy scent of the cedar shelves on which the linens rested. The cedar was said to help hold moths at bay.

And he smelled another sweet scent—a woman's perfume. “Why, hello, Your Majesty,” Oissa said, as though they'd met there by chance.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Lanius said, and took her in his arms. The serving girl was short and round, with curly, light brown hair, big gray eyes, cheeks always rosy even though she didn't seem to use rouge, and a dark beauty mark by the side of her mouth. She tilted her face up for a kiss. Lanius was glad to oblige.

They met when and where they could. The floor of the storeroom wasn't the best place for such things, but it was better than a few they'd tried. Lanius didn't think Oissa was in love with him. He didn't think he was in love with her, either. He hadn't made that mistake since his first affair with a maidservant. He enjoyed what they did together even so. He tried his best to make sure Oissa did, too; he'd always thought it was better when his partner also took pleasure.

Afterwards, they both dressed quickly. “These to remember the day,” Lanius said, and gave her a pair of gold hoops to wear in her ears.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” she said. “You didn't have to do that, though.”

“I didn't do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to,” Lanius answered. He thought she meant what she'd said. She wasn't greedy or pushy. He didn't care for people who were. Nothing would make him break off a liaison faster than someone pushing him for presents.

He coughed once or twice. No, that wasn't quite true. Sosia finding out about an affair could make him break it off in nothing flat. He was reasonably, or even more than reasonably, discreet, and he tried to pick partners who wouldn't blab. It didn't always work. He didn't like remembering what happened when it didn't.

This dalliance wasn't going anywhere. Even if his wife didn't learn of it, Oissa would find someone she wanted to marry, or else Lanius would tire of her. But it was pleasant. He enjoyed the variety. What point to being a king if he couldn't enjoy himself once in a while?

After a last kiss, he slipped out of the little room. No servants were walking along the corridor. Lanius nodded to himself. No scandal this time—not even a raised eyebrow.

Had things been different, Grus might have gotten furious at him for being unfaithful to his daughter. But Grus had been known to enjoy himself every once in a while even before he became a king; Arch-Hallow Anser was living proof of that. And he hadn't stopped after he wore a crown. He was hardly one to tell Lanius what to do and what not to.

Lanius hoped everything down in the south was still going well. Grus' letters were encouraging, but they took longer to come back to the city of Avornis than Lanius would have liked. He knew the Avornans were over the Stura and disenchanting thralls. That they'd done so much was reason enough to celebrate. But Lanius wanted them to push on to Yozgat. Like Grus, he cared more about the Scepter of Mercy than anything else.

He could have known more, of course, if he'd campaigned with Grus. He shook his head at the mere idea. The one battlefield he'd seen was plenty to persuade him he never wanted to see another. Listening to vultures and ravens and carrion crows quarreling over corpses, watching them peck at dead men's eyes and tongues and other dainties, smelling the outhouse and butcher's-shop reek, hearing dying men groan and wounded men shriek … No, once was enough for a lifetime.

He supposed he ought to be grateful to Grus for going on campaign. The other king had already usurped half—more than half—the throne. He couldn't want anything else. If Lanius had had to send out generals to do his fighting for him, he would always have been as afraid of great victories as of great defeats. A great victory was liable to make a general think he deserved a higher station. Since only one higher station was available, that wouldn't have been good for Lanius. He didn't think many usurpers would have worked out the arrangement Grus had.

While he mused on bad usurpers and worse ones, his feet, almost by themselves, took him to the archives. He went inside eagerly enough. The smile on his face had only so much to do with the hope of finding that missing traveler's tale. As he had with other women before her, he'd brought Oissa here once or twice. It was quiet; it was peaceful; they were unlikely to be disturbed—and they hadn't been, at least not by anyone banging on the door. It was also dusty, here, though, and sneezing at the wrong time had put him off his stride and made Oissa laugh, which put her off hers.

“Business,” Lanius reminded himself. The smile didn't want to go away, though. He let it stay. Why not?

Even smiling, he did want to look for that missing tale. What annoyed him most was that he usually had a good memory for where he'd put things. Not this time, though. Most of his pride revolved around his wits. When they let him down, he felt he'd failed in some fundamental fashion. It rarely happened, and was all the more troubling because of that.

“It has to be here,” he said. Although true, that didn't help much. No one knew better than he how vast—and how disorganized—the archives were.

He pawed through crates and barrels and plucked documents off shelves. He had to look at each parchment or sheet of paper separately, because things got stored all higgledy-piggledy. A paper from his reign could lie next to or on top of a parchment centuries old. Before long, his smile faded. If he wasn't lucky, he'd be here forever, or half an hour longer.

That less than delightful thought had hardly crossed his mind before he let out a shout of triumph that came echoing back from the ceiling. There it was! He swore under his breath. That crate looked familiar—now. Not so long before, he'd moved it to get at some other documents, and forgotten he'd done it.

Lanius started to take the traveler's tale to a secretary who could make a fair copy. He hadn't gotten to the doorway before he stopped and shook his head. The fewer people who knew anything about what he had in mind, the better.
I'll make the fair copy myself,
he decided. Now he found himself nodding. Yes, that would be better, no doubt about it.

Before long, he would put carpenters and masons to work. But they wouldn't know why they were doing what they were doing. And what they didn't know, nobody could find out from them … not even the Banished One.

CHAPTER FIVE

Grus never got tired of watching Avornan wizards free thralls from the dark mists that had held them all their lives. Part of that was pride at the magic Pterocles had created that he and and other wizards were using. And part of it was simply that the spell of liberation was one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen. The rainbows arising from the swinging crystal and then spinning around and into a thrall's head were wonderful enough by themselves. The expression on each thrall's face when the mists dissolved, though—that was even better.

“How does it feel to be a mother?” the king asked Pterocles after another successful sorcery.

The wizard frowned. “A mother, Your Majesty?”

“You're giving birth to people, aren't you?” Grus said. “I didn't think a man could. I should be jealous.”

“Giving birth to people …” Pterocles savored the words. A slow smile spread over his face. “I like that.”

“Good. You ought to. How well this would work was my biggest worry when we crossed the Stura,” Grus said. “It's gone better than I dared hope. It's gone better than anyone dared hope, I think. What do you suppose the Banished One is thinking right now?”

“I don't know. Please don't ask me to try to find out, either.” Pterocles sounded even more earnest than usual. “For me to get inside his mind would be like one of Lanius' moncats trying to understand my sorcery here. The Banished One … is what he is. Don't expect a mere mortal to understand him.”

“All right.” Grus had hoped the wizard might be able to do just that. But he had no trouble seeing Pterocles' point. “Let me ask it in a different way, then—how happy do you think he is?”

“How happy would you have been if the Menteshe had started turning peasants
into
thralls the last time they invaded Avornis?” Pterocles asked in turn.

That had been one of Grus' worst fears. One reason he'd counterattacked so hard and so quickly was to make sure the nomads' wizards didn't get settled enough to do anything of the sort. He muttered to himself. “How will he try to stop us?” he asked.