The Scepter's Return (44 page)

He wished that hadn't happened, but he didn't know what he could have done to stop it. If the Menteshe in Yozgat wanted to parley, he had no choice but to talk to them. There was a chance they would surrender the Scepter in exchange for his withdrawal. He had the feeling Korkut might have done it if he didn't fear the Banished One.

Well, let him,
Grus thought.
I'll show him he'd better fear Avornis, too.

Avornans shot back at the Menteshe on the walls of Yozgat. The Menteshe, with stronger bows and the advantage of height, had the better of that until Grus' artisans got some dart-throwers in position and started skewering them. Korkut's men did not seem to have any of those up on the walls.

Hirundo said, “I think I'd better get the outer ditch and palisade made before the inner ones this time.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Grus answered his own question, saying, “Because every nomad south of the Stura is liable to be heading this way just as fast as he can ride?”

“Not
every
nomad, Your Majesty.” Hirundo pointed to the walls of Yozgat. “A lot of them are already here.”

“So they are. That's a relief, isn't it?” Grus said. They both laughed. If they didn't laugh, they would start worrying. Grus knew he would start worrying very soon anyhow. He looked toward Yozgat. “I wonder how much food they've got in there.”

“Wonder how much we can scrounge off the countryside, too,” Hirundo said. “If we knew this stuff ahead of time, maybe we wouldn't have to fight the battles. Since we don't, we do.”

Grus thought about that. After he worked it through, he nodded. “Right,” he said, and then, “I think.”

“Don't fret, Your Majesty.” Hirundo grinned at him. “Let Korkut fret. Let the Banished One fret. Do you think they're not? You'd better think again if you do. When was the last time they had to figure out what to do with an Avornan army besieging Yozgat?”

“If this isn't a first for Korkut, he's a
lot
older than I think he is,” Grus observed, which made Hirundo laugh. Grus added, “It's been a long, long time for the Banished One, too. We're giving him something to think about, anyway.”

Korkut kept his archers busy on the walls, making things as hard as they could for the Avornans. That impressed Grus less than it might have. If he'd intended to try to storm Yozgat right away, a strong, aggressive defense would have mattered more. As things were, it just meant the Avornans set up their inner perimeter a little farther from the wall than they would have otherwise. Even so, soldiers and engineers went about their business with unflustered competence. This wasn't the first siege for most of them.

The king's pavilion rose between the inner and outer perimeters. Hirundo's tent and Pterocles' went up nearby. So did the one that Otus shared with Fulca. The ex-thrall bowed to Grus. “It makes me happy to see the Menteshe beaten, Your Majesty,” he said. “For so long, I did not know they could be.”

“For a long time, I didn't know they could be, either, not south of the Stura,” Grus said. “You have Pterocles to thank for that.”

“I have Pterocles to thank for
me,”
Otus said. “I have Pterocles to thank for my woman—even if she does tell me what to do.”

“That can happen,” Grus said. “Do you tell her what to do, too?” When Otus nodded, the king clapped him on the back. “Then things are pretty near even, sounds like. That's about how they ought to be.”

He was glad to go to bed that night. He liked staying in one spot more and more as he got older. Not having to break camp and travel in the morning had a strong attraction for him. Even a siege camp could come to resemble a home as he spent time there.

But he was anything but glad when, sometime in the night, the Banished One appeared before him in all his fearful majesty. “You will not enter Yozgat. You shall never set foot in Yozgat. This I tell you, and tell you truly,” the exiled god said.

When that bell-like voice resounded inside Grus' head, not believing it was almost impossible. Grus did his best. “I'll take my chances,” he replied.

“They will bring you sorrow.” Again, the Banished One left no room for doubt or disagreement.

Instead of disagreeing, Grus tried to deflect. “Life is full of sorrow. Facing sorrow is part of what makes a man.”

The Banished One's laughter might have been a lash of ice. “What do you know of sorrow, wretched mortal? I was cast down from the
heavens
to this accursed place. Shall I rejoice in it? When you know exile, you will understand—as much as a flea understands a dog.”

“I don't intend to be exiled, thank you very much.” Grus managed such defiance as he could.

All he won was more scorn from the Banished One. “As though what a man intends matters! It will be as I say it will, not as you intend.”

Grus woke then, with the usual shudders after confronting the Banished One. The exiled god had sounded even more certain than usual. His certainty was part of what made him so terrible—and so terrifying.
He's lying. He wants to confuse me. He wants to trick me.
Telling himself that was easy for Grus. Believing it? Believing it came ever so much harder.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The dispatch rider handed Lanius the letter from his waxed-leather message tube, then bowed and departed. Lanius broke the seal and began to read. As usual, Grus came straight to the point.
Your Majesty,
he wrote,
We have surrounded Yozgat, and we are laying siege to it. All goes as well as possible. With the gods' help, the Scepter of Mercy will soon be in Avornan hands once more.

“We have surrounded Yozgat.” Lanius read the phrases aloud so he could savor them. “We are laying siege to it. Soon to be in Avornan hands.”

He had been waiting to hear those phrases ever since Prince Ulash's sons squared off against each other. That seemed a long time now—until he thought about how long the kingdom had been waiting for them. Four hundred years. A long,
long
wait, but one finally over.

Lanius shook his head. The wait was almost at an end. When a King of Avornis actually took up the Scepter of Mercy, then it would be over. Not until then. He had no trouble imagining all the things that still might go wrong.

He called for pen and ink and parchment. He had no doubt Grus could imagine everything that might go wrong, too. Now, though, now was not the time to dwell on such things.
Congratulations,
he wrote, and then, after a pause,
Your Majesty. All Avornis is proud of what you have achieved, and hopes you may achieve more still. Is it time to begin what we discussed when you were here in the north this past winter?

He sealed the letter and sent it off. He wanted it to get to Grus as fast as it possibly could. There was no room for jealousy, not about this.

Realizing he shouldn't be the only one in the palace who had such excellent news, he hurried toward the bedchamber to tell Sosia. On the way there, he came up to Ortalis and a captain of the guards. The officer's mailshirt clinked as he bowed to Lanius. The king bowed back, more than a little absently. To Ortalis, he said, “Your father is besieging Yozgat down in the south.”

“That's very good to hear, Your Majesty,” the guard captain said.

“Yes, very good.” But Ortalis sounded much less impressed than his soldierly companion. Looking down his nose at Lanius, he said, “Makes training a moncat pretty tame, doesn't it?”

He laughed uproariously. The guardsman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh, too, or to look embarrassed. He tried doing both at once; what came out was a distinctly uneasy chuckle.

As for Lanius, he didn't think he'd been so angry since Grus announced he was appropriating more than his share of the crown. The hand that wasn't holding the letter from Grus now bunched into a fist. Instead of trying to wipe the smirk off Ortalis' handsome face, though, Lanius stormed away. Ortalis laughed again. So did the guard captain, but he still sounded nervous.

“Quelea's mercy!” Sosia exclaimed when Lanius thundered into the bedchamber. “What happened to you? You look like you want to murder someone.” Without a word, he thrust Grus' letter at her. Once she read it, she seemed more bewildered than ever. “But this is
good
news. Or am I missing something?”

“No, it's good news, all right.” Lanius' growl made it seem anything but. He summed up what Ortalis had said, and the way Sosia's brother looked and sounded while he said it.

“Oh,” Sosia said once the bile had poured out of him. She shrugged helplessly. “You know what Ortalis is like. I'm sorry, but he
is
like that, and nobody can do anything about it. If you let him see he's gotten your goat, he's won.”

She was right. Lanius knew as much. He passed off most of Ortalis' gibes with a smile and a nod—if his brother-in-law didn't see him angry, he had less incentive to sting again. “This was just too raw to ignore,” he muttered.

“It shouldn't have been.” Sosia was doing her best to seem quiet and reasonable, the role Lanius usually took for himself. She continued, “It's not even so much that he was wrong, even if he
was
rude. Training that moncat
doesn't
seem like much next to besieging Yozgat.”

“Not you, too!” Lanius shouted. Sosia stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. He was as furious as she'd been when she caught him with each new serving girl. She was usually the one who yelled and threw things. Now he looked around for the closest missile, and she was lucky he didn't find one ready to hand.

“What's the matter?” she asked helplessly. “What did I say?”

“You're as bad as your brother!” Lanius roared. He didn't calculate that to wound, but it did the job. He rushed out of the bedchamber and slammed the door behind him.

Servants scattered like frightened little birds when they saw his face. If they hadn't scattered, he would have walked over them or through them. Once he got to the archives, he stormed in as fiercely as he'd swarmed out of the royal bedchamber. He slammed that door behind him, too. The boom echoed through the vast hall.

Once the echoes faded, he found himself in the midst of silence. Whatever waited outside couldn't touch him here. He knew what he'd done for Avornis. Grus also knew what he'd done for Avornis, even if the other king sometimes needed reminding. If no one in the palace knew …

It's because you haven't told anyone here,
Lanius thought. He knew why he hadn't, too. The less he said, the less other people knew, the better for the kingdom. The better for the kingdom, yes, but the harder for him. He'd just painfully run into that. Until he ran into it, he didn't realize how hard it would be.

Soldiers made great swarms of hurdles from brush and branches. They piled them out of fire-arrow range of the walls of Yozgat. Grus didn't know if he was going to try to storm Korkut's capital. If he did, he would need some way to cross the moat. Hurdles, he thought, gave his men the best chance.

The Menteshe had already tried to run barges piled high with sacks of grain under the walls. The Avornans had captured some and burned others. A few had managed to unload their supplies.

That wouldn't happen anymore—or Grus hoped with all his heart it wouldn't, anyhow. Now, along with the stone- and dart-throwers by the riverbank, he had boats on the river, too. They weren't proper river galleys. They were what his men could capture and what his carpenters could knock together with the timber they found locally. They floated, and he could fill them with archers and spearmen. As far as he knew, the Menteshe didn't have any river galleys in these parts, either. Up until now, why would they have needed them here?

Korkut's men seemed alert. They shot from the top of the wall. Every so often, one of their arrows would hit an Avornan. Grus' artificers set up more and more catapults that bore on the walls. Every so often, one of their darts would pierce a Menteshe or one of their stones would smash a man or two flat. Neither side did the other much harm. Each reminded the other it was still in the fight and still serious about it.

Grus' engineers began digging to see if they could undermine Yozgat's walls the way they had with Trabzun's. They reported to him with long faces. “Won't be easy, Your Majesty,” one of them said. “Soil's pretty soft, and the water from the moat seeps on down. I don't see how we can keep a tunnel dry.”

He listened, he thanked them, and then he summoned Pterocles. After describing the problem, he asked, “What can you do about it?”

The wizard frowned. “I'm not sure I have a spell strong enough to shore up the bottom of a moat. Even if I did, it wouldn't be something I could keep the Menteshe from noticing. There are quiet magics and loud ones, if you know what I mean. That sort of thing couldn't be louder if I yelled at the top of my lungs.”

Grus grunted discontentedly. He'd asked for miracles from Pterocles, and he'd gotten a lot of them.
No
wasn't what he wanted to hear. He asked, “Could you come up with something new?”

“Maybe,” Pterocles said. “Do you want to send me back to the city of Avornis and let me do somewhere between six months and six years of research? By the time I'm done, I may have something worthwhile. I
may,
mind you—I can't promise anything.”

That was
no
again, a polite
no,
but
no
all the same. Grus liked it no better than he had before. “Do you think any of the other wizards with the army will give me a different answer?” he inquired.

“Some of them may,” Pterocles answered. Grus brightened—until the sorcerer went on, “I don't think they'll be telling the truth if they do, though. But some people do like to let you think they can do more than they really can.”

That was depressingly true. Grus had seen it more times than he could count. Just to check, he called in several other wizards and asked what they could do about the moat. Sure enough, one man promised everything but to drink it dry with a hollow reed. Grus asked him several pointed questions and found out he knew less than he pretended.