The Scepter's Return (33 page)

“I can't say for sure, Your Majesty,” the wizard replied. “All I can tell you for sure is that I feel it, too, for whatever that may be worth. Maybe it's my nerves. Maybe it's nerves for both of us. Or maybe … someone's hand still lies heavy on the land in spite of everything we've done.”

“That could be,” Grus said, and let it go right there. He noticed that Pterocles shied away from saying the Banished One's name here in the country the exiled god had dominated for so long. Hirundo was the one who didn't worry about such things. Hirundo didn't have as many reasons to worry about the Banished One as Grus and Pterocles—and Lanius—did. Having seen the Banished One in the night, the two kings and the wizard were members of a club whose dominant feature was that all the people who belonged to it wished they didn't.

A royal guardsman brought up Grus' gelding. Another, with a perfectly straight face, led up Pterocles' mule—Grus wasn't forcing him up onto horseback now. The king mounted. So did Pterocles. A troop of guardsmen surrounded them. Grus said not a word about it. Menteshe raiding parties could easily break into lands from which the Avornans had driven them the year before. The nomads might not rule all this country anymore, but they could still cause trouble here. The king was glad to have solid protection around him.

Toward the close of day, the armed party rode into one of the first villages of thralls Grus had ever entered. It was different now from what it had been a year before. Most of the stink and most of the filth were gone. What was left was about what he would have found riding into a peasant village on the north bank of the Stura.

The people were different, too. They
were
people now, and acted like it. Instead of with bovine stares, they greeted Grus with shouts of, “Your Majesty! The gods bless Your Majesty!” They were, if not spotlessly clean, no dirtier than any other peasants would have been. They wore ordinary clothes, not filthy remnants of rags.

They were different in another way, too. A large number of houses in the village stood empty. The plague had hit hard here. From everything Grus had been able to learn, it had hit hard everywhere south of the Stura. That spoke more clearly than anything else Grus had found concerning how the Banished One felt about losing control of the thralls.

“Congratulations,” the king told Pterocles. “If not for your spell, none of this would have happened.”

Pterocles nodded soberly. “I'm glad I was able to take some of what I went through up in the Chernagor country and use it against … the one who put me through it.” Again, he left the Banished One unnamed.

“Yes,” Grus said. “That's something I understand, sure enough. Most of the time, from all I've seen, revenge costs more than it's worth. Every once in a while …”

“That's right, Your Majesty. Every once in a while …” The wizard's expression was, for him, uncommonly fierce. But that didn't last long. He looked farther south. The towering Argolid Mountains were still far away, but he—and Grus—could make out their shadowed purple bulk low on the horizon. All at once, something in Pterocles' face went from hunter to hunted. “Of course, we haven't won anything yet. For all we know, we're nothing but fleas waiting for the dog to notice he's got an itch and start scratching.”

“There's a cheerful thought!” Grus exclaimed. “And such a jolly way of putting it, too.” Pterocles inclined his head as regally as if he were the king. Grus looked toward the mountains, too—and toward Yozgat, which also lay in that direction. Still naming no names, he went on, “Well, if I'm a flea and he's a dog, I aim to bite him someplace where he'll notice me.”

“Good, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said. “Bite hard.”

Lanius studied his slice of city. He drummed the fingers of his right hand against his thigh as he worried. “Last summer, when the architect asked me why I was having him build this, I told him I was making a fancy run for my moncat,” he said.

Collurio scratched his nose. “What did he think of that, Your Majesty?”

“That I was out of my mind, I expect,” the king answered. “Or that I was mocking him. Or maybe both at once.”

The animal trainer laughed. “And there you were, just telling the truth. What better way to put a spike in somebody's wheel?”

“Yes, I remember thinking the same thing at the time,” Lanius said. “But I'm more worried than I was that Pouncer's going to be able to get away.”

“I don't see what else you could have done,” Collurio said. “The insides of the side walls—that sounds funny, doesn't it?—and the front and back are too high for him to jump to the top, and the tile that lines them is glazed too smooth for his claws to get a grip. What can he do? He can't fly, even if it sometimes seems like he's able to.”

“I'm not so worried about him flying,” Lanius said. “I'm worried about him thinking, and I'm worried about him getting into trouble.” His fingers drummed his thigh again. “He's awfully good at getting into trouble. Moncats are troublesome beasts, and he's a troublesome moncat.”

“Uh, Your Majesty …” Collurio hesitated.

“Go ahead,” Lanius said. “I'm not Pouncer. I don't bite.”

“No, indeed, Your Majesty. You've been very kind to me,” Collurio said hastily. “I just wanted to say—even if Pouncer should run off, there are other beasts back at the palace. I don't want you to take that wrong, now. I'm not saying it just so you'd go on giving me money. I'm grateful for your bounty—don't get me wrong—but I made a living before, and I can go right on doing it.”

“I understand that,” Lanius said. “If we have to, we'll do as you say and try another moncat. But I pray to the gods in the heavens we won't have to. Pouncer has … advantages.”

“We've been working with him and not with the others. If we had to train a different moncat, it would cost us some time,” Collurio said. “Other than that, I don't see anything all
that
special about him.”

“He has a habit of stealing from the kitchens,” Lanius said. “That could turn out to matter quite a bit.”

“I can't imagine why,” the trainer said with what would have been a distinct sniff if he weren't talking to a king.

Lanius didn't enlighten him. The king usually liked telling other people what he knew—would he have written a book called
How to Be a King
for Crex if he hadn't? But Tinamus didn't know why he'd built this slice of city, and Collurio had only guesses about why he'd be running Pouncer through it. As far as Lanius was concerned, the less they knew, the better. What they didn't know, they couldn't talk about. They couldn't write it down, either. And even if the Banished One took them in his terrible hands and
squeezed
them, they couldn't tell him what he would assuredly want to know.

That probably wouldn't do them any good if the Banished One
did
lay hold of them. No, it wouldn't do them any good, but it might do the Kingdom of Avornis a great deal.

Collurio asked, “Your Majesty, this has something to do with that, uh, frightening dream I had after I said I'd train your moncat, doesn't it?”

Lanius glared at him in annoyed admiration.
Here I keep trying to save you from more danger than you'd know what to do with, and how do you pay me back? You add two and two and get four. Why couldn't you come up with five, or even three?

“I'm going to do you a favor,” the king said. “I'm going to pretend I didn't hear a word you said.”

He wondered whether Collurio would get angry. A lot of men would have. Lanius knew he would have himself; he always wanted to know what was going on. He always had; he was sure he always would. But Collurio only scratched his nose again with a tooth- and claw-scarred hand and nodded thoughtfully. “All right, Your Majesty. That tells me what I need to hear.”

“Does it?” Lanius said tonelessly. The less informative he wanted to be, the more informative he seemed to be.
Maybe I should have started out telling lies right from the beginning. Too late now, though.

“Don't worry. I told you when I got into this that I don't blab,” Collurio said. “I meant it. And if there's a reason Pouncer is the best moncat because he steals from the kitchens—well, then there is, that's all.” Now the animal trainer scratched his head, not his nose. “What difference it makes that an animal will steal food when it gets the chance is beyond me, though. Any other moncat in the kitchens would do the same thing.”

“You may be right,” Lanius said, which, as a polite response, ranked right up there with
how interesting.
You could say it in reply to almost anything, it sounded accommodating, and it didn't mean a thing.

No matter how shrewd Collurio was, he didn't notice the emptiness of the answer this time. “I'm sure of it, Your Majesty,” he said. “When you're talking about things like that, they're all alike.”

“I suppose so.” Lanius looked up to the sky above the slice of city that had risen out of nothing. “I don't suppose there's any way the moncat could get out or anything could get in at him.”

“I don't see how,” the trainer said. “You'd need wings. Besides, Pouncer is fast and smart and tough. Anything that did try to catch him might be biting off more than it could chew.”

“Wings …” Lanius looked up into the sky again. He saw nothing with wings except a yellow butterfly. Pouncer would have tried to catch that, not the other way around. It put a thought in the king's mind, though. He nodded to Collurio. “Thanks. I'll have to make sure we have some more archers around here.”

“Your Majesty?” Collurio gave him the same
This is one of the strangest people I've ever tried to deal with
look Lanius had seen on Tinamus' face.

“Wings,” Lanius said again. Collurio looked unenlightened. Lanius had expected nothing different. “Don't worry about it,” he told the animal trainer. “You see that they let me wander around loose and everything. That's because they're pretty much convinced I'm harmless. I haven't had a really bad spell in—oh, days now.”

“Days,” Collurio echoed. He seemed in something of a daze himself. “Why would anything with wings want to go after Pouncer? He'd be a handful even for something the size of an eagle.”

“Well, I don't know that anything would. But I don't know that anything wouldn't, either,” Lanius said, which seemed to go a long way toward persuading Collurio that he had no business wandering around loose. The king went on, “The fewer chances I take, the happier everyone's likely to end up. Everyone on our side, I should say.”

“Our side?” Collurio's gaze sharpened. “This
does
have to do with that dreadful dream the Ban—”

“Don't say the name,” Lanius broke in. “I don't know that it makes any difference, but I don't know that it doesn't, either. So don't say it, not while you're here. Better safe than sorry, eh?”

“I would do—or not do—whatever I have to so I don't
ever
have another one of those dreams again,” Collurio said earnestly.

“I understand that. I not only understand, I agree with you,” Lanius said. “I don't know if this will help, but I know it can't hurt. In the meantime, shall we walk through here? I want to show you just what you'll be teaching Pouncer to do.…”

The Menteshe called the river where Grus had stopped his advance the autumn before the Zabat. Hundreds of years earlier, it must have had a proper Avornan name. King Grus had no idea what that was, though. Lanius might have been able to pull it out of the archives, but Grus had no intention of asking him to. If Grus talked about the Zabat, people knew what he meant. That was all that mattered, as far as he was concerned.

It was a much wider river than it had been the last time he looked at it. Hirundo saw him eyeing it and said, “You see, Your Majesty?”

“Well, what if I do?” Grus said gruffly. Hirundo only laughed at him. The king went on, “All right—we didn't have much trouble from Menteshe raiders coming up out of the south. We had a pestilence instead. Between you and me, I'm not sure we got the best of the bargain.”

“Since you put it that way, neither am I,” Hirundo said. “But it won't be long before we're ready to go see what's on the other side.”

At the moment, three or four Menteshe horsemen were on the other side of the Zabat. They weren't doing anything but watching; they wanted to see what the Avornans were up to. Grus had his army do as much as it could out of sight of the nomads on the southern bank of the river. He hoped that would help.

And he knew what lay well on the other side of the Zabat—Yozgat.
This year,
he thought.
This year we get there.
He could feel the hunger in his belly. Was that the Scepter of Mercy calling—or was it the Banished One, trying to lure him to destruction? How could he know? All he could do was go on. The other choice was giving up and heading home, and that would be unbearable.

As though thinking along with him, Hirundo said, “One good thing—Korkut and Sanjar are still at war with each other. From what our men down here heard, they fought a big battle over the winter. Korkut's still holding Yozgat, though, and that's what counts as far as we're concerned.”

“Yes.” Grus let it go at that. If he didn't let it go, he would show how hungry he was. Hirundo already knew, of course, but Grus didn't want to be too open, not here in the south where the Banished One had so many eyes and ears.

A man came toward the king. Grus' guardsmen got between him and this fellow who had to be a freed thrall. “I mean no harm,” the man protested.

“Then you'll understand why we take no chances,” a guard answered.

The man thought about that, shrugged, and finally nodded. “Smash 'em up!” he called to Grus. “Smash 'em all up, those horse-riding pigs!” He probably hadn't been free very long—otherwise he would have come up with something juicier to call the Menteshe.