The Scepter's Return (20 page)

Grus laughed. “With you, nothing would surprise me.”

“Me? What about you?” Hirundo pointed at him. “Am I the fellow who made Dagipert of Thervingia leave us alone? Am I the fellow who taught the Chernagors respect? Am I the fellow who took an Avornan army south of the Stura for the first time in gods only know how many years?” He paused. “Well, I suppose King Lanius would know how many years, too.”

“Yes, I suppose he would.” Grus was sure the other king would know not just the year but to the hour. That was Lanius' way. And if he talked about Lanius, he didn't have to talk about himself.

But his general wouldn't let him get away with modesty. “What do you aim to do when you grab the Scepter of Mercy?” Hirundo asked.

Bash you over the head with it,
was the first thing that came to Grus' mind. Hirundo was a cheerful soul who didn't worry about things as much as he should. “Don't talk about that, please,” Grus said. “I may not be the only one listening.”

“What? There's nobody else around. Oh.” Another pause from the general. “You mean the Banished One? This for the Banished One.” Hirundo snapped his fingers.

He'd never had the exiled god come to him in dreams. He'd never started up in bed after one of those dreams, heart pounding, eyes staring, cold sweat and gooseflesh all over his body. He didn't know how lucky he was. “For my sake if not your own, please—please!—don't mention him again,” Grus said carefully.

“Sure, Your Majesty.” Hirundo was nothing if not agreeable. “How come, though?”

“Because he really might be listening,” Grus answered, and let it go at that. Most of the time, a man learned only by experience. Hirundo had no experience. Grus wished
he
didn't, either.

A mug flew past Lanius' head and shattered against the wall behind him. “You—You slimy
thing,
you!” Sosia shouted, and looked for something else to throw.

“Oh, dear,” Lanius said unhappily. He knew what sparked fury like that in his wife. Knowing, he tried to pretend he didn't. “What's wrong, dear?”

“You are, that's what. You're wrong if you think you can bed any cute little chit of a serving girl and have me sit still for it. Not even Queen Quelea would put up with the trouble you give me.” Sosia scaled the tray the mug had sat on at him. He sidestepped more nimbly than he'd thought he could. The tray slammed into the wall with a noise like a thunderclap.

No servants came running to see what the trouble was. When the servants heard shouts and bangs like that, they already had a good idea what the trouble was. They were likely to interfere only if they saw blood dribbling out under the doorway to the royal bedchamber.

Sosia went on, “Well, you won't be bedding Oissa again, by the gods! I sent her packing—you can bet on that.”

“Oh, dear,” Lanius said again. He'd have to find out where Sosia had sent Oissa. Was she still in the city of Avornis, or had Sosia exiled her to the provinces? The provinces, probably; the queen didn't do those things by halves. Wherever she was, Lanius knew he would have to find a quiet way to make sure she stayed comfortable. That was only fair. He was, in his own way, scrupulous about such things.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Sosia snarled. “‘Oh, dear' doesn't do the job, believe you me it doesn't.”

She wouldn't believe him if he called Oissa a liar. The next best thing was to plead for mercy. He tried that, spreading his hands placatingly and saying, “I'm sorry.”

She laughed in his face. “How many times have you told me that? How many times have I believed it? How many times have I been a fool? The only thing you're sorry about is that I found out again.”

“I
am
sorry,” Lanius insisted. “I don't want to make you unhappy.” That was true. He also noticed Sosia was careful not to say she'd never let him into her bed again. If she said that, what was to keep him from going out and looking for another serving woman? If the King of Avornis looked, he wouldn't have to look very far, either. They both knew that.

“If you don't want to make me unhappy, why do you do things like this?” Sosia demanded. “You don't fall in love with them, not anymore.”

“I only did that once,” Lanius said. Sosia rolled her eyes. Lanius' cheeks heated. No matter how embarrassing, what he'd said was true. Only his first affair had turned into what he thought was love.

“Why?” Sosia asked once more.

That had but one possible answer, the obvious one:
Because it's fun.
The trouble with that answer was equally obvious—Sosia wouldn't want to hear it. That being so, Lanius looked around for something else. “I don't know,” he said at last. “I just do.”

“You certainly do,” his wife agreed bitterly. “You can't resist a pretty face, can you?”
Face
wasn't exactly the word she meant.

Lanius felt himself flush again. “I am sorry,” he repeated.

She went right on glaring at him. “That doesn't mean you don't want to keep on doing it. It only means you don't want me to find out about it. Pretty soon, there'll be banished serving girls in every country town in the kingdom.”

“How can I make it up to you?” Lanius said.

“You could start by not dropping your drawers whenever you walk into a linen closet,” Sosia snapped. That was more precise information than he'd thought she would have. Somebody had been spying on him.

“I'll … do my best,” Lanius said—a promise that was not a promise.

Sosia knew perfectly well that it wasn't a promise, too. She looked no happier. “If you were somebody ordinary, I could walk away from you and try my luck somewhere else. But I can't even do that, can I?”

“No,” Lanius said, thinking,
And neither can I.
He compensated for it by sporting with the maidservants. If Sosia tried turning the tables on him that way, the scandal would be enormous. It probably wasn't fair, which didn't mean it wasn't true. He sighed once more. “We are what we are, and one of the things we are is, uh, left with each other.” He'd almost said
stuck with each other,
which was true but less polite.

His wife sent him yet another furious glance. This one said she had no trouble reading between the lines. She looked around. He thought it was for something else to throw. He got ready to duck. Instead, she burst into tears and stormed out of the bedchamber. She slammed the door behind her—one more punctuation mark on the quarrel.

“Is … Is everything all right, Your Majesty?” a servant asked him when he too left the bedchamber.

“These things happen,” Lanius answered vaguely. That he and Sosia had fought would be all over the palace by now. Before long, all the intimate details of the fight would be blown so out of proportion that the two people who actually knew the truth would never recognize them. Such things were all too familiar to the king. They'd happened before; they would happen again.
What a depressing idea,
he thought.

King Grus stood by the entrance to the mine the Avornan soldiers had dug under the walls of Trabzun. A last couple of men came out of the shaft. They'd filled the end of it with wood and brush—the hurdles the Menteshe had used to bridge the ditch in front of the palisade were now playing a new role—and then drenched all that with oil. An oil-soaked rope led from the entrance to the mass of waiting fuel.

A captain handed Grus a lighted torch. “Would you care to do the honors, Your Majesty?” the man asked.

“I'd be delighted,” Grus replied, matching courtesy with courtesy. He stooped and touched the flame to the rope. It caught at once. Fire snaked down it and out of sight. Grus asked, “How long will we have to wait?”

“Shouldn't be long,” the captain said. “If smoke doesn't start pouring out of the hole pretty soon, something's gone wrong in there.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “In that case, somebody has to go down in there and start things up again.”

“Who?” Grus asked. That struck him as an unenviable job, especially if the break was very close to the brush and wood that would become a conflagration as soon as flames reached them.

“Who?” the captain echoed. “Me.” No wonder he looked unhappy.

Pterocles stood close by. He and the other wizards had been maintaining the masking spell ever since the digging started. Now he asked, “Your Majesty, may I lift the spell when the smoke bursts forth?”

“That depends. Can the Menteshe work any kind of magic to foil the mine in the time between when they see the smoke and things start falling down?”
If things do start falling down,
the king thought; mining was an imperfect art.

“I can't imagine how,” Pterocles answered.

“Then go ahead,” Grus said.

He waited. So did the captain, apprehensively. So did Pterocles, who looked pleased he was about to be relieved of a burden. Just when Grus began to wonder whether something
had
gone wrong, thick black smoke began billowing from the hole. Coughing, Grus stepped upwind of it. So did the captain, his face now wreathed in smiles. Pterocles had had sense enough to stay upwind from the beginning.

Grus wondered how long the fire would take to consume the supports that had kept the mine from collapsing under the weight of earth and stone above it. He started to ask the officer, then held his tongue. He would find out as soon as anyone did.

Avornan soldiers waited near the shaft. When the moment came—if it came—wooden gangplanks would take them over the ditch and let them charge to the attack. On the wall, Menteshe pointed out toward the rapidly swelling column of smoke. The motions were tiny in the distance, but Grus saw them distinctly. What did the defenders think? Were they hoping something had gone wrong within the Avornan lines? Or did they realize the very stones on which they stood were liable to come tumbling down at any moment?

The question had hardly occurred to Grus before the stones under the feet of the Menteshe must have begun to tremble and shake. The defenders began to run this way and that. Thin and attenuated, their shouts of alarm came to the king's ears. And then those shouts were lost in a great rumbling roar as a long stretch of Trabzun's wall crumbled into ruin. The ground beneath Grus' feet also shook, as though from an earthquake.

But the gods sent earthquakes. This collapse was man-made. Grus and Pterocles and the captain who hadn't had to go down into the mine all whooped and clapped their hands. They pounded one another on the back and embraced like a band of brothers.

A great cloud of dust rose from the shattered wall. Smoke rose, too, as rents in the ground exposed the fire down below. How many men lay crushed and maimed among the tumbled blocks of stone?

They are the enemy,
Grus reminded himself.
They stand between us and the Scepter of Mercy, between us and a crushing defeat for the Banished One.
A Menteshe who caught him would have cut his throat right away—or else cut his throat after torturing him first. He knew that full well. The men who reverenced the Banished One had chosen evil. Grus knew that, too. But they were still men, and he flinched a little, imagining their suffering.

Horns bellowed within the Avornan lines. Like long tongues, the gangplanks stuck out over the ditch. Soldiers ran across them. Cheering, the men rushed toward the downfallen length of wall. They scrambled over and through the rubble and into Trabzun.

Not all the city's defenders had perished, of course. Most of the wall and most of the garrison remained intact. But then, most of a man remained intact after a spear pierced his chest. He was likely to die even so. And Trabzun, with its defenses breached, was likely to fall.

Menteshe from the undamaged stretches of the wall rushed to try to push back the Avornans. Seeing that, more Avornans went forward all around the city. Now scaling ladders could thud into place against the walls. Now soldiers could rush up them to gain the battlements. Some of the ladders went over. With the defenders so distracted, though, more of them stayed in place. Avornans atop the wall waved banners so the besiegers could see they'd won their lodgements.

Everywhere in Trabzun, Avornans who could speak a little of the Menteshe language shouted, “Surrender! We take prisoners!” Scrawny defenders, their hands in the air and dismay naked on their faces, began stumbling out of the city, herded along by Avornans.

When Trabzun's main gate swung open, Grus whooped again. He thumped Pterocles almost hard enough to knock him flat. “It's ours!” he shouted. “Trabzun is ours!”

“Uh, yes, Your Majesty. So it is.” The wizard straightened up. “A good thing, too. If they'd thrown us back, you probably would have murdered me.”

“Don't tempt me.” Grus sounded as though he was joking, which he was. Pterocles flinched even so. Grus felt ashamed of himself. If a king felt like murdering someone, he could. Who would punish him? Avornis had known its share of bloody-handed tyrants. He didn't care to be remembered as another one. Setting a hand—gently—on Pterocles' shoulder, he said, “I'm sorry.”

A king might murder with impunity. Apologizing looked to be something else again. Pterocles stared at him as though he'd said something in some exotic tongue. “I didn't mean anything by it, Your Majesty,” the wizard said.
He
might have been the one at fault.

“I don't think either of us did.” Grus laughed at himself; he'd just reduced their conversation to meaninglessness.

His guards weren't laughing when he decided to go into Trabzun late that afternoon. Only spatters of fighting were left in the city by then, but they didn't like it anyhow. “Too many places for enemy soldiers to hide,” one of them said. “We won't have the place cleaned out for days. If one of those buggers lets fly with a bow …”

“That's what you people are for, isn't it?” Grus asked mildly.