The Scepter's Return (28 page)

And then the sun came out. It got warm enough to melt a lot of the snow—not quite springlike, but close enough. Here and there, a few prematurely hopeful shoots of grass sprouted between cobblestones.

Lanius laughed at himself. Plucking one of those little green shoots outside the palace, he held it under Grus' nose. “This probably
won't
be a winter like that dreadful one,” he said.

He must have held the shoot too close to Grus' nose, for the other king's eyes crossed as he looked at it. “I'd say you're right,” Grus answered. “Of course, there's still some winter left. Other thing is, just because he's not sending snow and ice at us doesn't mean he won't do
something.”

“And here I wanted to be happy and cheerful,” Lanius said. “How am I supposed to manage that when you keep spouting common sense at me?”

“I'm sorry, Your Majesty.” Grus bowed almost double; he might have been a clumsy servant who'd dropped a pitcher of wine and splashed Lanius' robe. “I'll try not to let it happen again.”

“A likely story,” Lanius said, laughing. “You can't help being sensible any more than I can, and you know it.”

“Well, maybe not,” Grus said. “Between us, we make a pretty fair pair—now that each of us knows he can trust the other one with his back turned.”

That had taken a while for Lanius. After Grus took more than his share of the crown, Lanius had feared the other king would dispose of him and rule on his own. Odds were Grus was strong enough and well enough liked to have gotten away with it. But it hadn't happened. For his part, Grus had taken even longer to learn to trust Lanius. Grus had kept him nothing but a figurehead for years. Little by little, though, when Grus went on campaign, Lanius began handling things in—and from—the capital.

“Here we are, getting along … well enough.” Try as Lanius would, he couldn't make his agreement any warmer than that. Wanting to lighten things with a joke, he added, “And all we have to worry about is the Banished One.”

Grus laughed—not the sort of laugh that says something is really funny, but more the kind that comes out when the choice is between laughter and a sob. The other king said, “I'm not worried about that. After all, you've got things all figured out, don't you? As soon as we get to Yozgat, the Scepter of Mercy falls into our hands.” He laughed again.

“I wish things would be that simple,” Lanius replied. “Still, though, there's no denying that some of the things we've both done have made the Banished One sit up and take notice.”

He waited to see if Grus would try to deny that, or would try to deny him any credit for it. The other king didn't. He just said, “To tell you the truth, Your Majesty, I could do without the honor.”

“So could I,” Lanius said. “I've come awake in my bed too many times with the memory of … him staring at me.” Grus nodded. As anyone who'd known them could testify, dreams from the Banished One seemed more vivid, more real, and certainly more memorable, than most things in the waking world. Lanius went on, “If he didn't worry about us, about what we're doing, he wouldn't trouble us so. That is an honor of a kind.”

“Of a kind,” Grus agreed. “Or we tell ourselves it is, anyhow. We don't know much about the Banished One for certain. Maybe he doesn't send dreams to some other people because he can't, not because he doesn't think they're important.”

“Maybe.” Lanius was usually polite. But he didn't believe it. If someone worried the Banished One in any real way, the exiled god threatened that person. Who the victim was—king or witch or animal trainer—didn't seem to matter.

Before they could take the argument any further—if that was what Grus had in mind—someone in the palace started calling, “Your Majesty! Your Majesty!”

Lanius and Grus looked at each other. They both smiled. Lanius said, “I don't know which one of us he wants, but I think he's going to get both of us.”

They went toward the noise until a servant coming out from it ran into them and led them back to a weather-beaten courier who smelled powerfully of horse. Bowing, the man said, “Sorry it took me so long to come up from the south, Your Majesty—I mean, Your Majesties—but the weather's been beastly until a couple of days ago.” He took a waxed-leather message tube off his belt and thrust it at the two kings—at both of them, but not quite at either one of them.

They both started to reach for it. At the last instant, Lanius deferred to Grus—things coming out of the south were the older man's province, and he'd earned the right to know of them first. With a nod and a murmur of thanks, Grus took the waterproofed tube and worked off the lid. He pulled out the letter inside, unrolled it, and began to read. His face got longer and longer.

“What is it?” Lanius asked. “Something's gone wrong—I can tell. Where? How bad is it?”

“Down south of the Stura,” Grus told him. “And it's not good. Thralls and freed thralls … they're dying like flies.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Like almost every wizard Grus had ever known, Pterocles normally rode a donkey or a mule. He was on horseback now, on horseback and apprehensive at how high off the ground he perched and how fast he was going. The king showed him no mercy. “By Olor's beard, we need to get there as fast as we can,” Grus growled.

Pterocles sent him a piteous stare. “What good will I be to you if I fall off and break my neck long before we get near the Stura?”

“Oh, nonsense,” Grus said, or perhaps something stronger than that. He waved at the snowdrifts to either side of the road. “If you fall off, you'll go into the snow here, see? It's nice and soft—just like your head.”

“Thank you so much, Your Majesty,” the wizard said stiffly.

“Any time.” Grus couldn't have been less sympathetic. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Look at me, why don't you? I didn't know what to do on a horse for years—I was a river-galley captain, remember? But I managed. I'm still not what you'd call pretty on horseback, but even Hirundo hardly bothers teasing me anymore, because I got the job done.” He did some more glowering. “I get the job done—
and so will you.”

“You're a cruel, hard man.” Pterocles sounded like a convict who'd been denied clemency.

Grus bowed in the saddle. “At your service.” He paused, then shook his head. “I may be a hard man, but I hope I'm not cruel.” He pointed south. “There's the cruel one, killing off people because he thinks he can get some good out of it.”

Pterocles chewed on that for a little while. Grus waited to see whether he would keep arguing. The king wouldn't have minded much if he did; it gave them both something to do as they rode along. A troop of guards rode in front of them and another in back of them to make sure no Menteshe raiders sneaked north over the border and struck at them, but the soldiers were all business. And so, for the moment, was Pterocles. Grus decided he'd won his point.

The snow would get thicker as they rode through the low, rolling hills separating one of the valleys of the Nine Rivers from the next. Then, when they came down out of herding country and into better farmland once more, the weather would warm up a little. Bare dirt would show through here and there, more and more of it with each valley farther south. Even in most years with bad blizzards up in the city of Avornis, the valley of the Stura saw more rain than snow. What things would be like south of the Stura … Grus shrugged. For hundreds of years, no Avornan had personally known what things were like south of the Stura. Now his countrymen were getting the chance to find out.

This proved a year like most years. Grus cursed when snow gave way to rain. Up until then, he and the unhappy Pterocles and their escorts—about whose opinions no one had asked—made fine time. The road was frozen hard, and there wasn't even the usual summer annoyance of dust rising in choking clouds. But the horses had to slow down slogging their way through mud.

Every so often, Pterocles—and Grus—had to dismount to get their beasts through the worst stretches. Mud was no respecter of rank or of person. A king riding through it got as filthy as a farmer or a wandering tinker.

Afterwards, though, a king could do more about it than a farmer or a tinker. When Grus and Pterocles got to Cumanus, the city governor whisked them to his residence. He had a big copper tub, which his servants filled with hot water. First Grus and then Pterocles soaked away the dirt and the chill of the road. A blazing fire in the room with the tub kept Grus comfortable as he sat wrapped in a thick robe of soft wool. He sipped warm wine as he sat with Pterocles, who seemed ready to stay in the tub until he either grew fins or came out wrinkled as a prune.

“How much do you think you'll be able to do against this plague or curse or whatever it is?” he asked, not for the first time.

Not for the first time, Pterocles shrugged. This time, though, the motion threatened to send waves slopping over the edge of the tub and out onto the slate floor. The wizard had warm wine, too, the cup resting on a stool within easy reach. He took a sip before answering, “Your Majesty, I'll do the best I can. Until I know more, how can I say more?”

That was reasonable. Grus was usually a reasonable man, one who craved reasonable answers. Even Lanius had said so, and he was reasonable to a fault. Tonight, though, despite not being soaked and shivering anymore, Grus craved reassurance more than reason. He said, “You have to find a cure, you know. Everything will unravel if you don't. It's already started hitting soldiers along with the thralls.” That unwelcome bit of news had come to him only a couple of days before; he'd intercepted it on its way north to the capital.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Now Pterocles sounded patient.

Grus was in no mood for patience, either. “What happens if—no, what happens
when
—it spreads to this side of the river?”

“We do the best we can, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said again, patient still. “Maybe you shouldn't have come south yourself.”

The same thing had occurred to Grus. He'd been fighting the Banished One for years, so he'd naturally assumed that fighting the pestilence required him to be here in person. Would the Banished One mind killing him by disease instead of more directly? Not a bit—the king was sure of that. He was also sure of some other things. “If the plague crosses the Stura, it will get all the way to the city of Avornis,” he said. “Or am I wrong?”

“I wish you were,” Pterocles said.

“In that case, it doesn't make any difference,” Grus said. “If it can get me down here, it can get me up there, too. And if it gets me a little sooner down here than it would up there—well, so what?”

He might have fought an ordinary outbreak of disease by ordering that no one south of the Stura should cross to the north side of the river. That might have slowed things down. For a plague in which he suspected the Banished One played a part … well, what was the point? The exiled god could make sure a diseased thrall came over the river, or might waft the illness across it some other way.

And, even if Grus had given the order, it would have come too late. Less than an hour after Pterocles finally came out of the tub, a messenger ran up to the city governor's residence shouting that two soldiers and a merchant by the waterfront had come down sick.

People who heard the news gasped in horror. Some of them seemed ready to disappear as fast as they could. When people heard a pestilence was loose, they often did that—and they often brought it with them and spread it places where it wouldn't have gone if they hadn't. That was one more reason Grus couldn't have hoped to hold the disease on the southern side of the Stura.

He and Pterocles looked at each other. “Well, now we get the chance to find out what we're up against,” Grus said, hoping he sounded more cheerful than he felt.

“So we do.” Pterocles frowned. “You don't have to do this, you know, Your Majesty. No one will call you a coward if you don't.”

“A coward?” Grus stared and then started to laugh. “I wasn't worried about that. No, my thinking went in the other direction—if the Banished One wants me to come down with this disease, he'll find a way to make me catch it. I don't expect I can escape it just by staying away from the first few people we find who've come down with it.”

“Oh.” Pterocles kept frowning, but the expression took on a slightly different shape. “Well, when you put it like that, you're probably right. I wish I could tell you that you were wrong, but you're probably right.”

“Come on, then,” the king told him. “We're only wasting time here.”

The waterfront at Cumanus was a busy place, full of barges and boats that went up and down the river, and lately even more full of those that crossed the river and brought the Avornans on the far side whatever they chanced to need. It smelled of horses and wool and olive oil and spilled wine and puke and the cheap floral scents the barmaids and doxies splashed on themselves to draw customers and fight the other odors. Dogs scratched through rubbish. So did derelicts. Someone sang a syrupy love song and accompanied himself on the mandolin; the music floated out through the shutters of a second-story window.

Normally, the dockside was where you could also hear the most inspired cursing in the kingdom. Riverboat men, longshoremen, the taverners and the wenches who served them, and the merchants who tried to diddle them were all folk of passion and vivid imagination. Back when Grus was a river-galley captain, he'd had to try to hold his own in such company, and it hadn't been easy.

Now, though, the wharves and the warehouses and whorehouses and inns and shops close by were, apart from that love song, quieter than they had any business being, quieter than the king had ever heard them. The few voices that did come to his ear were high and shrill and frightened. He was frightened, too, though he tried not to show it.