The Chernagor Pirates (45 page)

It was more than a week later that Grus hauled Lanius off to the chamber where the thralls were kept. “Where were you?” Grus asked irritably while they were on the way. “I looked for you for quite a while, and it was only luck we ran into each other in the hall here.”

Lanius had been sporting with Zenaida. He didn't feel like admitting that to Grus. He just shrugged and answered, “Well, you've found me. Pterocles is ready?”

“He says he is,” Grus told him. “We'll find out, won't we?”

“So we will,” Lanius said. “One way or the other …”

Half a dozen armed guards brought a thrall from the room where the not-quite-men were kept to the chamber next door. The guards looked scornful, plainly wondering why Grus had ordered out so many of them to deal with one unarmed fellow who hadn't much more in the way of brains than a goat. The thrall glanced around with the usual dull lack of curiosity of his kind.

No matter how dull the thrall seemed, Lanius eyed him suspiciously. The Banished One could be peering out through those almost unblinking eyes. Pterocles was giving the thrall that same sharp scrutiny. The haggard expression the wizard wore said he knew the risk he was taking. Lanius nodded to him. He wouldn't have wanted Pterocles to try to free the man from thralldom without bearing in mind the danger of failure.

“Are you sure you're ready?” Grus asked.

“I'm sure. We're here to find out whether I'm right, which is not the same thing,” Pterocles answered. “I think I am, Your Majesty. I aim to—” He broke off. “No, I won't say what I aim to do, not while this fellow's ears may pass it on to the Banished One. I'll just go ahead and try the sorcery.”

At first, whatever he was doing didn't seem much like magic at all. He stepped over to a window and took a small crystal on a silver chain from a pouch on his belt. Idly, he began to swing the crystal back and forth. It sparkled in the sunlight streaming in through the window. The glitter and flash drew Lanius' eyes to the crystal. He needed an effort of will to pull them away.

Looking at the thrall helped keep Lanius from looking at the crystal. The thrall didn't look at the king. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth, following the swinging, flashing chunk of clear rock.

“You are an empty one,” Pterocles said quietly. “Your will is not your own. You have always been empty, your will never your own.”

“I am an empty one,” the thrall repeated. His voice sounded empty—eerily inhuman, all emotion and feeling washed from it. “My will is not my own. I have always been empty, my will never my own.”

“Queen Quelea's mercy,” Grus whispered to Lanius. “Just listen to what the wizard's done.”

“What do you mean?” Lanius whispered back.

“I've heard plenty of thralls down in the south,” Grus answered. “They can talk, a little, but they don't talk as well as that, not usually they don't. Pterocles has managed something special to get even that much out of this fellow.”

“I don't know,” Lanius said dubiously. “I think the thrall was just echoing the wizard.”

Pterocles waved impatiently at the two kings. Lanius nodded and fell silent. Grus looked as though he wanted to say something more, but he too subsided when Pterocles waved again. The sorcerer kept on swinging his shining bit of crystal. The thrall's eyes kept following it. It might have been the only thing in all the world with meaning for the filthy, scruffily bearded man.

Softly, Pterocles asked, “Do you want to find your own will? Do you want to be filled with your own self?”

“I want to find my own will,” the thrall droned. “I want to be filled with my own self.” Did he understand what he was saying? Or was he only parroting Pterocles' words? Lanius still thought he was, but the king had to admit to himself that he wasn't so sure anymore.

“I can lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light.” Pterocles sounded confident. How many Avornan wizards over the years, though, had sounded confident trying to cure thralls? Many. How many had had reason to sound confident? Few. No—none. None yet, anyhow. Pterocles went on, “Do you
want
me to lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light?”

“I want you to lift the shadow from my spirit and give me light.” By what was in his voice, the thrall still wanted nothing, regardless of the words he mouthed. Or was that so? Buried under the indifference, was there a terrible longing struggling to burst free? For an instant, Lanius heard it, or thought he did. Though he doubted himself again in the very next heartbeat, a sudden surge of hope warmed him.

“I will do what I can for you, then,” Pterocles said.

“Do what you can for me, then,” the thrall said. Pterocles blinked, then grinned enormously. Lanius realized the wizard hadn't expected the thrall to respond there. If the man did, even if the response was just another near-echo, wasn't that a sign he was trying to escape the shadow on his own? Lanius dared hope it was, anyhow.

Pterocles began to chant, very softly, in a very old dialect of Avornan. Lanius fancied himself a scholar, but even he had trouble following what the wizard said. Beside him, Grus looked altogether bewildered.

Pterocles also kept swinging the crystal in the sunbeam. It cast rainbows on the walls of the chamber—more and more rainbows by the moment. The chant went on and on. It got more insistent, though no louder. Ever more rainbows sprang into being—far more than a single bit of crystal had any business extracting from an ordinary sunbeam.

Suddenly, the wizard said, “Let them be assembled.” Lanius understood that very clearly. Pterocles made a pass, and all the rainbows, still glowing, came off the walls and began to spin around the thrall's head. Lanius exclaimed in wonder—no, in awe. Those same two qualities also filled Grus' voice. They were watching both the beautiful and the impossible. Lanius couldn't have said which side of that coin impressed him more.

Even the thrall, who was supposed to be hardly more than a beast, took notice of what was going on around him. He reached up with his right hand, as though to pluck one of the spinning rainbows out of the air. Was that awe on
his
dull face? Lanius would have had a hard time claiming it wasn't.

The king couldn't see whether the swirling bands of color went around the thrall's hand, whether they slipped between his fingers, or whether they simply passed through his flesh. In the end, what did it matter? His hand did them no harm, which was all that counted.

“Let them come together!” Pterocles called out in that archaic dialect of Avornan. And come together the rainbows did. Instead of swirling around the thrall's head, they began passing
into
it. For a moment, even after they entered his flesh, they kept their brilliance, or so it seemed to Lanius' dazzled eye.

“Ahhh!” the thrall said—a long, involuntary exclamation of wonder. His eyes opened very wide. By then, Lanius had thought himself as full of awe as he could be. He found out he was wrong. Unless his imagination had altogether run away with him, the thrall's eyes held something that had never been in them before. They held reason.

Grus said it in a slightly different way—he whispered, “By Olor's strong right hand, that's a
man
there”—but it meant the same thing. If this wasn't a cured thrall, maybe there never would be one.

Little by little, the rainbows faded. No—the rainbows became invisible from the outside. Lanius was convinced that, in some way he could not fully fathom, they went on swirling and spinning inside the thrall's mind, lighting up all the corners over which darkness had lain for so long.

Chief proof of that was the way the thrall himself reacted. Tears ran down his grimy cheeks. He seized Pterocles' hand and brought it up to his mouth and kissed it again and again. “Good,” he said, and, “Thank you,” over and over. He didn't yet have all the words a man might have, but he had the feelings behind the words. The feelings, up until this moment, might as well have floated a mile beyond the moon.

Pterocles turned to Grus. “Your Majesty, what I have said I would do, I have done.” He bowed, then seemed to remember Lanius was there and bowed to him, too. “Your Majesties, I should say.”

“You
have
done it.” Grus still took it for granted that he was the one to speak for Avornis. “But the next question is, how hard is the spell? Can other wizards learn it and use it in the field?”

“I don't see why not, Your Majesty,” Pterocles answered. “Putting the spell together, seeing what had to go into it—that was hard. Using it?” He shook his head. “Any halfway decent wizard ought to be able to do that. I'd like to experiment with the rest of the thralls here in the palace to be sure, but we've seen what can happen.” He pointed to the man he'd just cured.

“Yes,” Grus said.

“Yes,” Lanius echoed. The two kings looked at each other and nodded. With any luck at all, they had a weapon they could use against the Menteshe if Avornan armies ever went south of the Stura. Avornis had been looking for a weapon like that for a very long time. Lanius asked, “Do you want to cure those other thralls now? How wearing, is the spell?”

“It's not bad at all, Your Majesty,” Pterocles replied. “I could do more now, if you like. But if you don't mind, I'd like to wait a day or two instead, so I can incorporate what I've learned just now into the spell. I think I can make it better and simpler yet.”

“Good. Do that, then.” Lanius spoke with the voice of royal command. Grus didn't contradict him. Even though he knew Grus could have, for a little while he felt every inch the King of Avornis.

“Your Majesty! Your Majesty!” Someone pounded on the door to Grus' bedchamber. He opened his eyes. It was still dark. Beside him, Estrilda stirred and murmured. The pounding went on. “Come quick, Your Majesty!”

“What's going on?” Estrilda asked sleepily.

“I don't know, but I'd better find out.” Grus sat up in bed. “If it won't wait for daylight, it usually isn't good news.” He raised his voice and called, “Quit that racket, by Olor's teeth! I'm coming.” The pounding stopped.

When Grus went to the door, he went sword in hand, in case whoever waited there wasn't an ordinary servant. But, when he opened the door a crack, he recognized the man. The servant said, “Come with me, Your Majesty. It's the thralls!”

That got Grus' attention, as no doubt it was calculated to do. “Take me to them,” he said at once. “What's happened?”

“You'd better see for yourself, Your Majesty,” the servant answered. Grus swore under his breath. He might have known the man would say something like that.

They hurried through silent corridors lit only by guttering torches set in every third sconce. From that, and from the feel of the air, Grus guessed it was a couple of hours before dawn. He yawned as he half trotted after the servant, the sword still in his hand. The mosaic tiles of the floor were cold against his bare feet.

Around the chamber where the thralls were kept, all the sconces held torches, and all the torches blazed brightly. The door to the chamber stood open. Grus stopped in his tracks when he saw that. “Oh, by the gods!” he said. “Have they gotten loose?” That could be a deadly dangerous disaster.

But one of the guards standing in the hallway outside the open door shook his head. “No, Your Majesty. They're in there, all right.”

“Then what's happened?” Grus demanded.

The guard didn't answer. Neither did any of his comrades or the servant who'd fetched the king. Muttering, Grus strode forward. The stink of the thralls' room hit him like a slap in the face. Doing his best to ignore it, he walked in … and found the last two thralls brought north from the Stura lying dead on the floor.

They had strangled each other. Each still had his hands clenched on the other's throat. The chamber was no more disarrayed than usual. By all the signs, the thralls had both decided to die and taken care of the job as quickly and neatly as they could. But, unless Grus was very wrong, the thralls hadn't decided any such thing. The Banished One had.

“By the gods,” the king said softly. He hoped the magic that made men into thralls hadn't so stunted their souls as to keep them from winning free of this world. He hoped so, but had no way of knowing if that was true.

“You see, Your Majesty,” a guard said.

“I see, all right,” Grus agreed grimly. He nodded to the guard, who no longer had anything to do here. “Go fetch me Pterocles.” The man hurried away. Almost as an afterthought, Grus turned to the servant who'd brought him to the thralls' room and added, “Fetch King Lanius here, too.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The servant went off even faster than the guard had.

Even so, Pterocles got to the thralls' chamber before the other king. The wizard was yawning and rubbing his eyes, but he stared at the dead thralls without astonishment; the guard must have told him what had happened. “Well, so much for that,” he said.

“Eh?” Grus scratched his head. “I don't follow you.”

“I was going to do what I could to improve the spell. I used to free the first thrall,” the wizard replied. “I was, but I can't very well do it now, not when I don't have any more thralls to work with—to work on.”

“Oh.” The king thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have seen that for myself.”

“Should have seen what?” King Lanius asked around a yawn of his own. Then he got a good look at the thralls who'd killed each other. He also said, “Oh,” and then turned to Pterocles. “We'll have to get you more thralls, won't we, if you're going to do all the experiments you need to?”

“Afraid so,” Pterocles said.

Grus grunted, obscurely annoyed with himself. The other king and the wizard had both seen at once what he'd missed—why the Banished One had decided to end the lives of the captive thralls. How was he supposed to run Avornis when other people in the kingdom were smarter than he was?