The Scepter's Return (13 page)

“There are children,” Hirundo pointed out.

“Well, yes. So there are.” Grus let it lie there. He was disappointed in his son, and feared he always would be disappointed in Ortalis. His hopes along those lines ran through Sosia and his grandson. He didn't like having more faith in his daughter and her line than in the one he'd always wanted to be his heir.

He also didn't know what Crex would turn out to be like. The boy was still too young to make that plain. The one thing Grus could say was that he didn't seem to be vicious. He wished more than anything that he could say the same about Ortalis. He'd tried to believe Ortalis would outgrow whatever gave him the need to hurt things, tried long after it should have been obvious that his legitimate son's ways were set. He didn't believe it anymore.
I may have been foolish to expect he'll ever have it in him to give. I
was
foolish. But there's a difference between foolish and blind.

Did King Olor, looking down from the heavens, have the same sort of thoughts about mankind as a whole? Grus shrugged. He couldn't do anything about that. He didn't look up past the sky. He looked south, toward the mountains where the Banished One lived. The Banished One doubtless had his own thoughts about mankind, too. Grus aimed to prove him wrong.

CHAPTER SIX

Tinamus the architect looked up in surprise from the sheaf of notes King Lanius had just given him. “These are … very detailed, Your Majesty.”

“I wanted to have them as exact as I could,” Lanius said. “Would you have liked it more if they were vaguer?”

Tinamus didn't answer. All the same, Lanius realized that he would have. The architect wasn't a courtier, and didn't have the courtier's knack for hiding what he thought. His long, thin, rather pale face showed each thought flitting across it. Lanius found that more refreshing than otherwise.

“I'm not just doing this for my amusement, you know,” the king said.

“So I gather.” Tinamus flipped through the notes. His hands were long and thin and pale, too—clever hands. “Why
are
you doing it, if you don't mind my asking?”

Lanius hesitated. He didn't want to lie to the architect, but he didn't want to tell him the truth, either. At last, he said, “It might be better if you didn't know. It might be safer—not for me, but for you.”

“Safer, Your Majesty?” Tinamus' eyebrows jumped in surprise. “Who except maybe another builder could care whether I do this for you? The other builders here in the city of Avornis may be jealous of the commission you pay me, but I don't think any of them would try to knock out my brains with a plumb bob or anything like that.”

“Good. I'm glad to hear it. I wouldn't want to believe our architects were wild and unruly men.” Lanius smiled at Tinamus, who seemed one of the least unruly men he'd ever met. “Can you do it? Will you do it? Or should I ask one of your ferocious colleagues?”

“It doesn't seem difficult. One of them could probably do it as well as I can.” No, Tinamus was no courtier. Anyone used to the ways of the court would have loudly proclaimed he was the only person in the whole world who could possibly handle this job. He wagged a finger at Lanius. “But I tell you this, Your Majesty—any of them will be as curious as I am, and will want to know why you say that what looks like a straightforward piece of work may not be safe.”

“Mmp.” Lanius wished he could have made a happier noise than that. However much he didn't want to admit it even to himself, Tinamus had a point. If the work was going to endanger him, he had a right to know why. Sighing, Lanius said, “The less you know about why you're doing what you're doing, the less likely you are to have trouble from the Banished One.”

Tinamus' eyebrows leaped again. His eyes, gray as granite, opened very wide. “The … Banished One, Your Majesty?” He stuck a finger in his right ear, as though to show he didn't believe he'd heard straight.

Lanius only nodded. “That's what I said.”

The architect's left hand twisted in the gesture that was supposed to keep the exiled god's glance far away. Lanius used it, too, though he was far from sure it did any good. Tinamus asked, “Why on earth would … he care about what I build for you?”

“I won't answer that,” Lanius said. “As I told you, the less you know, the better off you'll probably be. Whatever the reason, though, what you're doing may interest him.”

“That's the craziest thing I ever heard.” Tinamus laughed out loud. “When I tell me wife—” He broke off before Lanius could even open his mouth, and said, “Oh. If this has to do with the Banished One, and if I shouldn't know very much, she should know even less, shouldn't she?”

He was quick. Lanius liked that. He said, “Not telling her much—or anything—might be a good idea, yes. The fewer people who know and the less they know, the better off they're likely to be.”

“What about the stonemasons and bricklayers and carpenters and pick-and-shovel men who work on this? What shall I tell them?” Tinamus asked.

“Tell them whatever you please. Tell them you think the king's gone round the bend,” Lanius answered. By the look in the architect's eye, he wasn't far from thinking that. Lanius grinned. “Go ahead. Enjoy yourself. By the gods, I swear I'll never punish you for lèse-majesté.”

Tinamus grinned back. “Now that I've got your oath, I ought to go screaming rude things from the housetops.”

“Go ahead. I'm sure you'll get people to believe them.” Lanius laughed to show he was joking. And so he was—mostly. But some people were still more inclined to believe bad things about him than they would have been for some other king. He'd never quite lived down his father's scandalous seventh marriage and the days when, as a boy, he'd been reckoned a bastard on account of it. The scars he bore because of those days had faded, but they'd never disappeared.

The captain of King Grus' scouts was a tough little man named Strix. Most of the scouts were tough little men. Tough big men did other things in the army. Little men put less weight on their horses than did their larger counterparts. That gave the horses a bit more speed, a bit more endurance, and let them come closer to matching what the Menteshe mounts could do.

Right now, Strix was a tough little man with a worried look on his weathered, sharp-nosed face. He said, “Your Majesty, we've got three scouts missing.”

“Missing?” Grus said sharply. “You mean the Menteshe have them?” That would be bad. Grus had trouble imagining anything worse. When the nomads took prisoners, they often made sport of them, and showed a fiendish ingenuity in their amusement. The Banished One would have been proud of them. The Banished One probably
was
proud of them.

But Strix shook his head. “No, or it doesn't seem that way, anyhow. We've followed their trails as best we could, and those trails just—stop. All three of 'em just—stop. No sign of the men. No sign of the horses, either.”

No wonder he looked worried. “Sounds like magic,” Grus said, and heard the worry in his own voice, too.

“That's what I thought. I sent for a wizard.” A sour look on his face, Strix muttered something about a donkey-riding blunderer. Grus couldn't catch all of it, which was probably just as well. After a moment of fuming, the scout captain went on, “He couldn't tell that anything was wrong, not for sure.” His expression got more sour still.

“You don't believe that,” Grus said.

“Bet your balls I don't,” Strix agreed. “People don't disappear for no reason at all. Horses especially don't disappear for no reason at all. Hard to take a horse and stuff it up your—” He broke off, not wanting to offend Grus' delicate ears.

That he thought Grus' ears might be delicate only proved he'd never served on a war galley. “You're right,” the king said. “Which wizard was this?”

“A scrawny beggar named Anthreptes,” Strix answered with a scornful wave of the hand.

“Oh. Him.” Grus said no more than that. He'd brought south the best sorcerers he could. He knew, though, that Anthreptes wasn't one of the best of the best. The man had been able to learn Pterocles' spell for taking the pall from thralls' minds. How much else he'd been able to learn in his career was much less obvious.

“I thought about kicking some sense into his empty head. I thought about it, Your Majesty, but I didn't do it.” Strix sounded mournfully proud of his own virtue. He did kick up a puff of dust; no rain had fallen here in the south for quite a while, and no more was likely to until autumn.

“Would you like to find out what a real wizard thinks of this business?” Grus asked.

“That might be nice,” Strix said. “It's one of the reasons I came back here, as a matter of fact.”

“I'll see to it.” Grus shouted for a runner. When one of the young men came up to him, he said, “Fetch Pterocles for me, if you please.” The runner bowed and hurried off. He came back with the wizard a few minutes later. Pterocles gave Grus a curious look. The king told Strix, “Tell him what you just told me.”

Strix did, though he didn't name the sorcerer with whom he was dissatisfied. After hearing him out, Pterocles said, “I don't much like the sound of that.”

“Neither do I. Neither do my men,” Strix said. “Don't much fancy the chance of vanishing off the face of the earth.”

“Can you work out what's really going on?” Grus asked.

Pterocles shrugged. “I don't know. I can try.” That only made Strix look unhappy again. Grus knew Pterocles better than the scout captain did. Unlike a lot of wizards, Pterocles didn't promise before he saw what he was promising. He had fewer broken promises to regret than a lot of wizards had.

Night fell before Pterocles came back. Strix rode in with him. Challenges from sentries warned Grus they were approaching. The king got to his feet. Firelight didn't reach very far or tell very much. He saw the looming shapes of horse and mule, and of the men aboard them, but shadows swallowed their expressions.

“What news?” Grus called.

“Anthreptes is a gods-cursed imbecile. Maybe somebody ought to run the thrall-curing spell on
him,”
Strix said. That wasn't exactly praise for Pterocles, but it came close enough.

With a weary grunt, Pterocles slid down from his mule—it definitely came closer to that than to dismounting in the ordinary sense of the word. The wizard stretched, twisted, and rubbed his backside before saying, “That turned out to be more interesting than I wish it would have.”

“Did you figure it out?” Grus asked.

“Finally, yes. Olor's beard, though, I could use something wet,” Pterocles said. Grus waved to one of the servants who'd accompanied the royal pavilion south of the Stura. The man brought Pterocles a mug of wine. Pterocles bowed to him as deeply as though he were the king, exclaiming, “Oh, gods be praised!” He drained the mug at one long, blissful pull, then looked around expectantly.

“I
think
our wizard could use another dose of the same medicine,” Grus told the servant. Had Pterocles nodded any more eagerly, his head might have fallen off. Grus waited while he gulped the second mug of wine, then said, “All right—you figured it out. What was it?”

“It was a cloaking spell masquerading as a transposition spell.”

“Was it?” Grus said. Pterocles nodded again, this time in solemn agreement. Grus went on, “Uh—what exactly does that mean?”

“It means the Menteshe sorcerers wanted us to think they snatched the scouts off to gods know where. They didn't. They didn't.” Pterocles blinked, realizing he'd repeated himself. “Oh, I said that already. Oh, I—” He broke off. “What they did do, or the nomads with them, was ambush our men and then hide their bodies—and the dead horses, too—with magic. They counted on that to make us worry.”

“They got what they wanted,” Strix put in.

“Didn't they?” Grus remembered his own alarm. “I was wondering whether the Menteshe or … someone else could snatch people out of our army whenever they wanted to. That wouldn't have been very good.”

“Not hardly,” Strix agreed.

“That musht—
must
—be what they wanted,” Pterocles said. “If we were all running around trying to protect ourselves from an imaginary danger, we wouldn't have worried about the real dangers in this country. And there are, oh, just a few of those.”

“Are there? I hadn't noticed,” Grus said. Strix laughed raucously. Pterocles giggled. The king eyed him. “I hadn't thought being drunk and disorderly was one of them.”

Pterocles bowed and almost fell over. Straightening, he said, “Your Majesty, I am
not
disorderly.”

Strix laughed again. So did Grus. He said, “Well, no more than usual, anyway. Why don't you go to bed? In the morning, you can be sober and disorderly.” After another imperfectly graceful bow, the wizard lurched out of the firelight and off toward his tent. Grus turned to Strix. “Happier now?”

“A bit.” The guard captain followed Pterocles' irregular path with his eyes. “You were right, Your Majesty. He does know what he's doing. Makes that other fellow look even more like an idiot than he did already.”

Grus shrugged. “Some men are smarter than others. Some men are braver than others. Some men are better wizards than others. You can use men who aren't the smartest or the bravest. Wizards who aren't the very best have their uses, too.”

Strix chewed on that, then reluctantly nodded. “I suppose so,” he said, and then, “I know what
I'd
use him for, by the gods.”

Grus had a pretty good idea of that himself. He said, “Well, but once you did, I wouldn't be able to use him for anything anymore.” Strix chuckled. He hadn't been joking, though, and neither had the king.

Ortalis seemed to imagine that Lanius had offended him. That offended Lanius. As far as he could see, he'd done nothing but tell his brother-in-law the truth. Whom could the truth offend? Only a fool. So it looked to the younger king, anyhow.