The Scepter's Return (5 page)

Here, though, the soldiers didn't have to forage off the countryside to keep themselves fed. At Grus' order, supply dumps awaited the army all the way down to the valley of the Stura. Wheat and barley would give them bread; cattle and sheep, meat; and there was ale and wine to drink. The soldiers had plenty. But the peasants didn't know that, and weren't inclined to take chances.

Low ranges of hills running roughly east and west separated the valleys of the Nine Rivers from one another. The roads that ran straight across the valleys wound and twisted as they went through the hills. They followed the passes that had been there since the gods made the world. Grus' mouth twisted when that thought crossed his mind. The god said to have made the world was Milvago, whose children had cast him out of the heavens and who was now the Banished One.

Had he turned to evil before Olor and Quelea and the rest expelled him? Or had being ousted and sent down to this lesser sphere infuriated and corrupted him, so that he became evil only after coming to earth? Grus had no idea. Only the Banished One and the gods in the heavens knew, and Grus would have bet they told different stories. In the end, how much difference did it make? The Banished One dwelt on earth now and was evil now, and that was all a mere mortal needed to know.

Riding at the head of the column, Grus escaped all the dust the horsemen and soldiers kicked up moving along a dirt road. When he looked back over his shoulder, the cloud the army kicked up obscured most of it.

Then Grus looked ahead, down into the valley of the Stura. The scars from the fire and sword the Menteshe had inflicted on it were still plain to see. Those scars would have been worse yet if the nomads hadn't started fighting among themselves instead of going on with their war against Avornis.

They were bad enough as things were. And they told King Grus everything worth knowing about the Banished One's disposition.

“I have warned you against your plots and schemes.” The voice that resounded inside King Lanius' head reminded him of the tolling of a great bronze bell. The face he saw was supremely handsome, even beautiful, yet somehow all the more frightful because of that. The Banished One stared at him out of eyes as fathomless as the depths between the stars. “I have warned you, and you have chosen not to heed. You will pay for your foolishness.”

It was a dream. Lanius knew that. He'd had them before. But the dreams the Banished One sent weren't
only
dreams, as people said after they woke up from bad ones. The terror they brought felt no less real than it would have in the waking world, and the memory of it lingered—indeed, grew worse—as the waking world returned. Ordinary bad dreams were nothing like that, for which the king praised the gods in the heavens.

“I would pay worse,” Lanius answered, “if I did not do all I could for what I know to be right.”

As always, the Banished One's laughter flayed like knives. “You think so, do you? You are wrong, worm of a man-thing. And when the heavens are mine once more,
everyone
will pay! Everyone!” He laughed again, and seemed to reach for the king.

Lanius woke up then, with a horrible start that left him sitting up in bed, his heart pounding like a drum. He breathed a long, slow sigh of relief. The one resemblance the dreams the Banished One sent held to the usual kind was that nothing harmful could really happen in them—or nothing had yet. When the exiled god's hand stretched out toward the king, though …

Sosia stirred sleepily. “Are you all right?” she asked, yawning.

“Yes. I'm all right now.” Saying it made it feel more true to Lanius. “A bad dream, that's all.” He eased himself down flat again.

“Go back to sleep. I'm going to,” Sosia said. Within a few minutes, she was breathing softly and heavily once more. Lanius took much longer to drop off. He didn't find sleep so welcoming, not with the Banished One lurking there. He'd never talked with his wife about the dreams the Banished One sent. The only people to whom he'd mentioned them were Grus and Pterocles. They were the only ones he thought likely to understand, for the Banished One sent them dreams, too.

Lanius did finally fall back to sleep. A sunbeam sneaking between the window curtains woke him. When he opened his eyes—normally, sleepily, not with the terrified stare he always had after confronting the Banished One—he found Sosia was already up and about. He got out of bed, used the chamber pot, and pulled off his nightshirt and replaced it with the royal robes. Servants would have swarmed in to dress him if he'd wanted them to. He'd never been able to see much point in that; he was the one who could best tell how his clothes hung on his bony frame.

Halfway through his breakfast porridge, he snapped his fingers in excitement. Collurio was coming to the palace this morning. Lanius wondered what the animal trainer would make of Pouncer—and what the moncat would make of Collurio. The king ate faster. He wanted to finish before Collurio got there.

He did, by a few minutes, which was perfect. But when Collurio came into the palace, he startled Lanius. The animal trainer was far from the confident showman he'd been while presenting his beasts to Lanius and his family the night before. He was pale and subdued, and gulped at the wine a servant brought him. Concerned, Lanius said, “Is something wrong?”

The trainer started. “I'm sorry, Your Majesty. I didn't know it showed. It's nothing, really.” His tone and his whole attitude belied the words. “Just … a bad dream I had after I got home last night.”

“Did
you?” Lanius said. Collurio nodded. The king urged him aside, out of earshot of the servants. To be safer still, he lowered his voice to something not far from a whisper before asking, “Did you dream of the Banished One?”

Collurio's bloodshot eyes widened. “By the gods—by the gods, indeed—how could you know that, Your Majesty?”

Instead of answering, the king looked around. No one seemed to be paying any special attention to him and Collurio. All the same, he was obscurely glad, or maybe not so obscurely, that Otus was nowhere near the palace. Still in that near-whisper, Lanius said, “How do I know? Because he came to me in the night, too, that's how.”

“What—what did he want of you?” The animal trainer's voice shook.

“To warn me. To threaten me, really,” Lanius answered. “When you see him, that's what he does. He's come to Grus, too, and to … some others.” Lanius didn't like calling Grus the king, or even a king. Sometimes, like it or not, he had to, but not here. He didn't know how far he could trust Collurio, either. The trainer didn't need to know the kingdom's chief wizard had seen the Banished One face-to-face in dreams.

Collurio shuddered. “I thought he would do worse than threaten. I thought those hands of his would tear out my liver.”

Lanius patted the other man on the back. “I know what you mean. Believe me, I do. But the one thing I can tell you is that he can't hurt you in these dreams. He never has, not in all the years since I saw him for the first time. If Grus were here, he would say the same.”

“He can frighten you half to death,” Collurio said feelingly.

“Yes, but only halfway there.” Lanius hesitated, then went on, “As a matter of fact, I can tell you one other thing, or I think I can. Seeing the Banished One in a dream is a compliment of sorts.” By the way the animal trainer shuddered again, it was a compliment he could have done without. Lanius persisted even so. “It is. It means he takes you seriously. It means you worry him. It means he wants to frighten you out of doing whatever you're doing.”

“Training a moncat?” Collurio's laugh was raucous. “He must be plumb daft if that worries him.”

“Maybe. But then again, maybe not, too,” Lanius said. The look Collurio gave him said
he
might have been plumb daft. All the same, Lanius continued, “You never can tell. Come on. You can see the beast for yourself.”

By the trainer's expression, he regretted having anything to do with moncats. Lanius wondered if he'd have to look for somebody else. But Collurio gathered himself. “All right, Your Majesty. I'm coming. By Olor's beard, I've earned the right—earned it and paid for it.”

“Let's go, then. Shall we stop in the kitchens first for some meat scraps?” Lanius said.

The question made Collurio smile for the first time since he'd set foot in the palace. “You know that much, do you? Yes, let's stop there. The way to get any beast to do what you want is to give it a treat when it does. One step at a time, that's how you work in this business.”

He carried the meat scraps in a little earthenware bowl. Lanius led him through the palace's winding corridors to the moncats' chamber. The king hoped Pouncer wouldn't have decided to disappear into the passages between the walls. That would have been annoying, to say the least.

To his relief, the moncat he wanted was there with the others. Collurio stared at all of them with fascination, even after Lanius pointed out the one he'd be working with. “Here, let me have a scrap,” Lanius said. “I've taught him one little trick myself.” He lay down on the floor and thumped his chest. Sure enough, Pouncer came running over and scrambled up onto him to claim the treat.

Collurio made as though to bow. “Not bad, Your Majesty. Not bad at all.”

Lanius scratched Pouncer behind the ears. The moncat deigned to purr. The king said, “He's also taught himself a trick or two. When he goes into the kitchen, he likes to steal serving spoons. He likes silver best—he has expensive tastes—but he'll take wooden ones, too. Sometimes he'll steal forks, but it's usually spoons.”

Now Collurio studied Pouncer like a sculptor eyeing a block of marble and wondering what sort of statue lay hidden within. Here was his raw material. How would he shape it? “Well, Your Majesty,” he said, “we'll see what we can do.…”

Riding through the valley of the Stura toward the river that marked the border between Avornis and the lands of the Menteshe, Grus was doubly glad the nomads had fallen into civil war. Too much of the damage they'd done here still remained. Too many peasant villages were only crumbling ruins with no one living in them. Here in the south, people planted when the fall rains came and harvested in the springtime, the opposite of the way things worked up by the capital. But too many fields that should have been fat with wheat and barley had gone back to weeds. Too many meadows were untended scrub, and too few cattle and sheep and horses and donkeys grazed on the ones that remained.

When the king remarked on that to Hirundo, the general said, “Now they're doing it to themselves, and it serves 'em right.”

“But they're doing it to the thralls, too,” Grus said. “If things go the way we hope they will, we're going to have to start thinking of the thralls as Avornans. We can turn them back to Avornans again.”
We'd better be able to, anyhow. If we can't, we're in trouble.

Hirundo raised an eyebrow. His laugh sounded startled. “To me, they're just thralls. They've always been just thralls. But that's what this is all about, isn't it?”

“That's … one of the things this is all about.” Grus always had the Scepter of Mercy in his mind, and ever more so as he came farther south and so drew closer to it. But, as he drew closer to it, he also got the feeling talking about it, showing that he was thinking about it, grew more dangerous. He didn't know if that feeling sprang from his imagination alone. Whether it did or not, he didn't care to take the chance.

“By King Olor's strong right hand, it'll be good to hit back at the Menteshe on their own soil,” Hirundo said. “We've fought here, inside Avornis, for a cursed long time. All they had to do to get away was make it over the Stura. We never dared go after them. But we owe them a bit, don't we?”

“Just a bit,” the king said, his voice dry. Hirundo laughed again, this time sarcastically. How many times had the Menteshe raided southern Avornis in the four centuries and more since the Scepter of Mercy was lost? How much plundering, how much destruction for the sport of it, how many murders, how many rapes were they to blame for? Not even Lanius, clever as he was, could begin to give an accounting of all their atrocities.

The farther the army advanced into the broad valley of the last of the Nine Rivers, the worse the devastation got. Not only villages had fallen to the Menteshe. So had more than one walled city. The nomads didn't have elaborate siege trains, the way the Avornan army did. But if they burned the fields around a city, slaughtered the livestock, and killed the peasants who raised the crops, the townsfolk inside the walls got hungry. Then they had two choices—they could starve or open their gates to the Menteshe and hope for the best.

Sometimes starving turned out to be the better idea.

Otus rode close to King Grus. The former thrall stared at the countryside with wide eyes, as he had ever since leaving the capital. “This land is so rich,” he said.

“Here? By the gods, no!” Grus shook his head. “What we saw farther north, that was fine country. This used to be. It will be again, once people finish getting over the latest invasion. But it's nothing special now.”

“Even the way it is, it's better than you'll find on the other side of the river.” Otus pointed south. “Farmers who care work this land. They do everything they can with it, even when that is not so much. Over there”—he pointed again—“you might as well have so many cattle tilling the soil. Nobody does anything but what he has to. The people—the thralls, I mean—don't see half of what they ought to do.”

If things went wrong on the far side of the Stura, the whole army—or however much of it was left alive after the Menteshe got through with it—would probably be made into thralls. It had happened before. A King of Avornis had lived out his days dead of soul in a little peasant hut somewhere between the Stura and Yozgat. After that, no Avornan army had presumed to cross the last river … until now.