The Scepter's Return (47 page)

“No,” Grus said. “That it isn't. I can tell you the truth there, and I'll take oath on it if you like.”

Hirundo only shrugged. “Never mind, Your Majesty. If King Lanius isn't getting strange, then I expect
you
are. I'm not so sure I want to know about that.” Still shaking his head, he walked off.

Grus laughed. If Hirundo had really worried about the state of his wits, the general wouldn't have been shy about saying so. Hirundo was rarely shy about saying anything. For now, he seemed willing to believe Grus knew what he was doing. Grus wished he were so sure of that himself.

After he went to bed that night, the Banished One appeared to him in a dream. Seeing those coldly perfect features before him, Grus had another wish—that there was a better word to described these manifestations.
Dream
didn't begin to do them justice.

“You plot against me,” the exiled god declared without preamble.

“Well, of course I do.” Grus saw no point in denying it.

“You think you can outsmart me.” The Banished One fleered laughter. “As well think a cat can outsmart you. You are nearer to a cat—you are nearer to a worm—than you are to me.”

He was probably right about that. Grus had never partaken of divinity. All the same, plenty of cats had outsmarted him at one time or another. He didn't say that to the Banished One. Having the exiled god thinking along those lines was the last thing he wanted. All he did say was, “I'll take my chances.”

“You raise up serpents behind you, and you know it not,” the Banished One said.

“I'll take my chances,” Grus repeated stolidly. The less he gave, the better.

“Whatever you seek to bring against me, I will seize it before it reaches you.”

“Maybe.” Grus knew he was still asleep. He felt himself shrugging all the same, as though he and the Banished One really were face-to-face and not separated by miles and by the barrier of consciousness. “If you could do everything you say you can, though, you would have conquered Avornis a long time ago.”

“You will see what I can do. You will see what your own flesh and blood, your own kith and kin, can do. And may you have joy of it.” More laughter burst from the exiled god. Grus woke up with sweat running down his face. His heart thudded as though it would burst from his chest.

Slowly, ordinary awareness returned. A lamp burned inside the pavilion, casting a dim, flickering light and filling the air with the smell of hot olive oil. Grus got to his feet. A mosquito whined.

He cocked his head to one side and listened. Here and there, men talked quietly. A little farther off, a horse—or possibly a mule—snorted. It was the middle of the night. Everyone and everything with any sense was asleep.

The sentries outside Grus' pavilion had to stay awake and alert. One of them spoke in a low voice to the others. After a moment, Grus made out what he was saying. The king laughed softly. He'd first heard that joke when his beard was no more than fuzz on his cheeks. Some things grew new again for each generation.

He pulled his nightshirt off over his head and put on tunic and baggy breeches again. The nightshirt was more comfortable, but he would scandalize the guards if he stayed in it. When he stepped out of the pavilion into the darkness beyond, he scandalized them anyhow. “What are you doing up, Your Majesty?” one of them demanded, as though he were a toddler caught running around in the night by its mother.

“Bad dream.” Grus' answer sounded like the one a toddler might give, too.

“You should go back to sleep.” But the sentry couldn't pick him up and put him into bed, the way a mother could with a wandering little boy. When the king walked out into the night, his guardsmen could only accompany him at a discreet distance.

Grus looked toward the walls of Yozgat. Torches flickered along them. In the light those torches cast, he could see men moving here and there. He'd thought about a night attack against the Menteshe in the city. That didn't look like a good idea. The defenders seemed much too alert.
What a shame,
he thought.

He hadn't planned to go over to Pterocles' tent, but his feet had a mind of their own. He wasn't astonished when the tent flap opened and the wizard came out, either. Pterocles was in
his
nightshirt—he didn't care what people thought. Nor did he seem surprised to see Grus. “Hello, Your Majesty,” he said; they might have been meeting at breakfast.

“Hello.” Grus also sounded matter-of-fact. “Bad dream?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” the sorcerer said. “You, too, I gather?”

“That's right.” Grus nodded. “He's … annoyed at us.” He managed a wry shrug. “Breaks my heart.”

“Mine, too.” Pterocles also tried to seem casual. He didn't have such good luck. “Uh—do you know
why
he's annoyed at us?”

“I have some idea, yes,” Grus admitted.

Pterocles sent him an annoyed look. “Would you care to tell me why?”

“Because we're trying to get the Scepter of Mercy back.”

Now annoyance turned to exasperation. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I already suspected that. Why is he particularly annoyed now?”

“Because we're going to try something new and different,” Grus replied.

“Aha! Now we come down to it,” the wizard said.
“What
are we going to try that's new and different?”

“Certainly is warm tonight, isn't it?” Grus said.

He waited for Pterocles to splutter and fume. That was one of the more engaging spectacles of camp life. But Pterocles disappointed him. All he said was, “Since I'm alleged to be a sorcerer, and even a fairly decent one, don't you think I have the right to know?”

Grus smiled. “Why, when this has nothing to do with sorcery?”

“I see.” Pterocles' bow was a masterpiece of sarcasm. “You're just going to walk in, pick up the Scepter of Mercy, say, ‘Thank you very much, Your Highness,' to Prince Korkut, and saunter on out again.”

“As a matter of fact,” Grus answered, “yes.”

Lanius was putting the finishing touches on a sketch when Ortalis came into the little north-facing audience chamber he was using as a studio and looked over his shoulder. “What's
that?”
Grus' legitimate son asked.

“What does it look like?” Lanius said.

“A mess.” Ortalis rarely bothered with tact. After further study, he added, “It's not the city of Avornis. What's the point of drawing anywhere else?”

“I thought it was interesting. I wanted to draw a place that wasn't anything like this one here,” Lanius said.

His brother-in-law grunted. “Well, you did that, all right. It doesn't look anything like anywhere. So you made it up out of your head, did you?”

“You might say so.” Lanius hadn't said so. He'd just agreed that Ortalis might. He waited to see whether Ortalis would notice.

To his relief, Ortalis didn't. He said, “You come up with the weirdest ideas sometimes,” and walked away.

That suited Lanius fine. He went back to the sketch, pausing every now and then to check with the ancient manuscript he'd taken from the archives. He laughed softly. When he started drawing, back in the days when Grus didn't trust him at all, he'd done it to sell sketches and make a little extra silver. He'd done moncats then, not cityscapes.

He stepped back and looked at this one. Ortalis was right. It didn't look a bit like the city of Avornis. What he really needed to be sure of was that those three towers were properly aligned. He'd done the best he could, going by what this manuscript and a couple of others told him. If they were wrong … If they were wrong, he'd wasted a lot of money and effort and time, that was all.

When he had things the way he wanted them—the way he was convinced they ought to be—he wrote Grus a letter, explaining exactly how the other king should use the sketch. He put both his artwork and the letter into a message tube. “Pass the word on to others who take this south—you may be troubled by bad dreams,” he told the courier to whom he gave the tube.

“I'm not afraid of dreams, Your Majesty,” the man replied. “I don't think anybody is, at least after he grows up.”

“These dreams will frighten a grown-up,” Lanius said firmly. “Pass the word along. I'm not imagining this. They won't hurt you, but you won't know what being frightened is until you've had one.”

“All right, Your Majesty.” The courier sounded more as though he was humoring him than anything else, but that was all right, as long as he remembered what Lanius told him.

But then he was gone, and Lanius couldn't do anything but worry. He went over to the great cathedral to pray to the gods in the heavens. He didn't know how much good that would do, but he didn't see how it could hurt.

Of course, when the King of Avornis visited the great cathedral, he didn't go alone. Guardsmen accompanied him. So did a secretary, to write down whatever he said that might need writing down. And he couldn't simply visit and pray. He had to be announced to the arch-hallow. In his crimson robes of office, Anser looked every inch a holy man. When he came up to talk with Lanius after the king finished praying, the guards and even the secretary withdrew to a discreet distance.

“You don't look very happy, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Truth to tell, I'm not.” Lanius didn't feel he could go into detail; like Sosia and Hirundo, Anser was one whom the Banished One had not troubled with visits in the night.

“I know what you need to do,” the arch-hallow said now.

“Oh? What?” Lanius asked.

Another man in the red robes would have spoken of cleansing his spirit, of setting aside his will and accepting the decrees of the gods. Anser? Anser said, “You ought to go hunting. Nothing like hunting to take your mind off things.”

Lanius didn't laugh. He'd always known Anser wasn't the spiritual leader Avornis needed in a time of trouble. He wasn't what the kingdom needed—but he was what it had. And Avornis had done some great things with him as arch-hallow. How much he had to do with all that was liable to be a different question.

“You really should,” he persisted. “Yes, even you. I know you don't care about the hunt, but how can you not like the woods?”

“If
you
liked the woods any better, you'd grow hair all over and start going around on all fours,” Lanius said. Anser laughed good-naturedly. The king went on, “Besides, I really can't right now. Too much is going on down in the south. I can't leave the palace.”

“Why not?” Anser asked. “Nothing you do up here will change the way things go down there, will it?”

I hope it will,
Lanius thought. Aloud, he said, “I want to
know.”

“Well, all right.” The arch-hallow sounded patient and amused, both at the same time. He also sounded very much like his father, which amused Lanius. Anser went on, “If you've got to keep up with everything every hour of the day and night, you can send couriers out from the woods to the palace. That way, you won't hear the news
much
later than you would if you stayed here. And I don't suppose the riders would spook the game very much.” He sounded like a man making a formidable sacrifice, and no doubt thought he was.

Because he worked so hard to meet Lanius halfway, the king didn't see how he could say no without sounding rude. “All right. You've talked me into it,” he said, and Anser grinned enormously.

“Good. Let's go. I'll meet you in front of the palace as fast as I can change clothes and call my beaters,” he said. Any excuse for getting out of the city was a good one, as far as he was concerned. His ecclesiastical duties worried him not even for a moment.

Laughing, Lanius held up a hand. “Let's make it first thing tomorrow morning,” he said. “I don't know about you, but I have some things I need to take care of before I leave.”

“Spoilsport.” But Anser was laughing, too. “All right, Your Majesty—tomorrow morning it is. You'd better not give me any excuses then, that's all I've got to say, or I'll get up in the pulpit and start screaming about heretics.”

If he'd meant that, Avornis would have needed a new arch-hallow. Leading clerics who got up in the pulpit and caused kings trouble had to be replaced. Otherwise, they thought they were the ones running the kingdom. Arch-Hallow Bucco had, back when Lanius was a boy. For a while, he'd been right—he'd led the regency council. He hadn't led it any too well, unfortunately.

But Anser had no ambitions along those lines. If ruling Avornis would have meant all the hunting trips and all the deer he wanted, he might have taken the idea more seriously. As things were, not a chance.

“Have fun,” Sosia said when Lanius told her where he was going. “You're not chasing serving girls when you go out with Anser.” If he wasn't doing that, she didn't mind whatever he did.

He nodded. “No, that's your brother.”

Sosia grimaced. “I didn't mean like
that,”
she said. If Ortalis chased serving girls through the woods, he was as likely to shoot them for the fun of it as he was to do anything else with them.

“Tonight, I'll show you what
I
do for fun,” Lanius said.

“Oh, you will, will you?” Sosia gave him a sidelong look.

He did, too, and enjoyed it as much as he'd hoped. By all the signs, his wife did, too. After a last kiss, they both rolled over and fell asleep. The next thing Lanius knew, he was looking into the Banished One's inhumanly handsome face. “Worm, you think you can trick me!” the exiled god roared.

“How could I do that?” Lanius said, as innocently as he could. “I'm only a man. You must know so much more than I do, anything I try will be plain as day to you.”

“Do you mock me? Do you
dare
mock me? You will pay for that!”

“I'm already paying for so many things,” Lanius said. “After all of them, what's one more?”