The Scepter's Return (32 page)

Aedon did bow to him, deeply, from the waist. “Speak to me not of my courage, Your Majesty, which is as nothing when measured against your own. And as for skill … You caught me when I was about to go badly astray. Everyone says you are a learned man, but I did not look for you to correct me in my own field, and to be right.” He bowed once more.

What exactly did he mean by that? Had he looked for Lanius to try jogging his elbow, and to be wrong when he did? That was how it sounded. Lanius thought about anger, but set it aside. What point to it? Any expert would feel the same about amateurs.

Then Lanius stopped worrying about such small, such trivial, things. The spell he'd found—the spell Avornan wizards had found all those centuries before—worked. If it worked in the city of Avornis, it would work down by the Stura, too. And it would work on the far side of the river. The folk who had been thralls would suffer no more—no more than they already had, anyhow. And the war against the Menteshe and the Banished One would go on.

Smoke from a funeral pyre darkened the sky above Cumanus. The stench of burning wood and oil and dead flesh never left the city; it stayed in Grus' nostrils day and night. And yet things were getting better, here and in the land south of the Stura where the Banished One first unleashed the pestilence.

Grus didn't see Pterocles very much lately. The wizard was busy from before dawn until after nightfall every day. He ran himself ragged curing plague victims himself and teaching others how to do it. Grus had no idea when he slept, or if he did. The king knew the wizard ate erratically. Grus had servants send him food wherever he was. If not for that, Pterocles might not have eaten at all.

When Pterocles fell asleep in the middle of explaining to half a dozen wizards from towns along the Stura how the spell worked, Grus had him carried back to the city governor's palace and put to bed with guards in front of his door not to keep other people out but to keep him in until he'd had at least one good rest. The wizard complained, loudly and angrily. Then he slept from one midafternoon to the next.

He woke insisting he hadn't closed his eyes at all, and at first refused to believe he'd slept the sun around. Then, when he woke a little more and his wits began to work, he realized he wouldn't be so hungry or have such a desperate need to piss if he hadn't lost a day. He ate enough for two, almost filled a chamber pot, and declared himself ready to charge back into the routine that had caused his collapse.

“No,” Grus told him. “Wait. Spend a little time relaxing, if you please.”

“But I can't!” Pterocles said. “People are dying. If I don't cure, if I don't train other wizards—”

“Wait,” Grus repeated. “If you kill yourself, you can't help anybody. And you were right on the edge of doing that. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. Make me believe it.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared a challenge at Pterocles.

The younger man took a deep breath. Then he laughed, let it out again, and spread his hands. “I wish I could, Your Majesty, but I fear I can't.”

“All right, then,” Grus said. “You've done more than any three men could be expected to. And you've got more than three men doing your work now, because of everybody you've taught. We're getting the upper hand on this cursed thing.”

“We should be doing more.” But that was Pterocles' last protest, and a fading one at that. The wizard shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, which hadn't been combed, let alone washed, in some time. “We owe this one to King Lanius.”

“Well, so we do,” Grus said. “Fine—we owe it to him. I like to think he owes us one or two, too.”

“It's a good spell. It's a very good spell,” Pterocles said. “And it's a novel approach to the problem. I never would have thought of it myself.”

“Really?” Grus hoped he kept his tone neutral. He did his best. But he didn't like to think there were many sorcerous matters that wouldn't have occurred to his best wizard.

Pterocles understood what he meant, even if he didn't say it. With a wry smile, the sorcerer answered, “Afraid so, Your Majesty. Magic is a big field. Nobody can know all the blades of grass—and the flowers, and the weeds—in it.” That smile vanished like snow in springtime. “Nobody who's a mere man, I should say. About anyone else, I reserve judgment.”

“No doubt you're smart to do it, too.” Grus started to look south toward the Argolid Mountains—toward the Banished One's lair. He started to, but then deliberately checked the motion. “Now if only he would reserve judgment on us.”

“I'm afraid that's too much to hope for,” Pterocles said.

“So am I,” Grus answered. “And if you'd left off everything but the first two words, that would have been just as true, wouldn't it?”

“Oh, yes,” the wizard said, and then, as though that didn't put his meaning across strongly enough, he repeated it with a different emphasis.
“Oh,
yes. Anyone who isn't afraid of the Banished One doesn't know anything about him.”

“Right.” Grus let it lie there. Had he been the Banished One—a truly terrifying thought—he would have done things differently. The freed thralls could only be an annoyance to him, never a real danger. Danger lay in the Avornan army and in the farmers north of the Stura who kept it fed. Grus would have struck there. But freeing the thralls might have pricked the Banished One's vanity. And so he had struck at and avenged himself upon that which annoyed him, and concerned himself much less with everything else. The folk who really threatened his longtime dominion over the lands south of the Stura did not suffer in proportion to their menace.

Pterocles poured some wine into his cup from a silver pitcher. “So here's to King Lanius. He was our memory this time. Without him, the pestilence probably would have gone through the whole kingdom, and gods only know how many would have died.”

Grus filled his winecup, too. “To Lanius,” he agreed. Both men raised their cups and drank the toast. Grus had the feeling Pterocles might have put his finger on the Banished One's plan. The exiled god, with his contempt for mankind, wouldn't have expected the Avornans to be able to stop the disease. That showed his arrogance, but perhaps less in the way of bad planning than Grus had thought.

Drinking to Lanius as a real salute, not to the other king's place as a member of the longtime ruling dynasty, bothered Grus less than it would have a few years earlier. The two kings had come up with a working arrangement that probably didn't altogether satisfy either one—Grus knew it didn't altogether satisfy him—but that both men could live with. Lanius wasn't afraid anymore that Grus would murder him if he got out of line. And Grus didn't worry that he would find himself outlawed and the gates of the capital closed against him when he came back from a campaign. He still wished he could campaign and stay in the city of Avornis at the same time. Maybe the gods could be in two places at once, but mere men couldn't.

And since he couldn't, having Lanius there in his place worked … pretty well.

Lanius rode out from the city of Avornis with Collurio and with a troop of royal bodyguards. The soldiers fanned out to give the king and the animal trainer room to talk without being overheard. By now, they'd seen Collurio in the palace often enough and for long enough to be used to him and to be fairly confident he harbored no evil designs against Lanius.

Collurio laughed in some embarrassment. “It's a funny thing, Your Majesty,” he said. “I train beasts for a living, but I fear I'm not much of a horseman. I never have been.”

“Well, I'm not, either, so don't let it worry you,” Lanius said.

“But it's different. You're the king. You have other things to worry about,” Collurio said. “I spend all my time with animals. I should be able to ride better than a farmer bringing a couple of baskets of turnips to town.”

“Why can't you, then?” Lanius asked. As usual, his attitude was down-to-earth. Before you could solve a problem, you had to figure out what it was.

And Collurio had the answer for him. “Because I don't get on horseback more than a couple of times a year. Why should I, when I live in the capital? All my kin are there. All my work is there, or near enough. I don't need to leave the city very often, and it's not such a big place that I need to ride to get where I'm going. I just walk, the way most people do. If you ride a lot inside the city, you're doing it for swank, not because you need to. Ordinary folks haven't got the time or the silver to waste on swank.”

“No, I suppose not.” Lanius hoped he didn't sound too vague. The only ordinary people with whom he had any acquaintance were the palace guardsmen—who had to know how to ride—and the servants inside the palace. And what the servants did when they weren't actually working was a closed book to him.

“It is nice getting away every once in a while, isn't it?” Collurio said, looking around at the countryside with the fascination of a man who didn't see it very often. “Everything smells so fresh.” Everyone who got outside the walls said that. Lanius had said it himself, more times than he could count. In a lower voice, Collurio went on, “And I'm not sorry to get out with that cursed disease loose in the city, either.”

“No.” Lanius let it go at that. The animal trainer didn't know, or need to know, the disease was nothing ordinary, but came from the Banished One. Sicknesses of the more usual sort were only too common in the city of Avornis. With so many people packed so close together, sickness spread all too easily.

Collurio didn't notice how Lanius had said as little as he could. “Looks like the wizards and the healers have figured out what to do about it, anyhow.”

“It does, doesn't it? I hope they have.” Again, Lanius didn't say much. He didn't want people exclaiming that he was the one who'd found the spell that let the wizards stop the pestilence in its tracks. For one thing, word of that might get back to the Banished One, which wouldn't—couldn't—be good. For another, he never had much cared to have people exclaiming about him for any reason. He did what he did, and he did it as well as he could, and what point to getting excited about it?

They rode up a low swell of ground—nothing grand enough to be called a hill. When they got to the top, Collurio pointed ahead. “What's that? It's one of the funniest-looking things I've ever seen.”

“Glad you like it,” Lanius said. Collurio looked at him as though pretty sure he was joking—pretty sure, yes, but not completely. The king added, “That's where we're going.”

“Why are we going there?” the animal trainer asked. “How long has that place been here? Why didn't I ever hear about it?” He was full of questions, and comments, too. “I'd think I would have. I'd think anybody would have. It's peculiar enough, by the gods. It looks like somebody cut a slice out of a city and set it down right there.”

“Somebody did.” Lanius tapped his own chest with the first two fingers of his left hand. “I'm the somebody, as a matter of fact.”

“All right, Your Majesty.” Collurio might have been humoring a lunatic who didn't seem violent … at the moment. “I hope you'll tell me
why
you built a slice of city out in the middle of the country.”

Lanius smiled. “Not quite yet, if you don't mind too much. I'd like you to look it over first.”

“Whatever you please, Your Majesty,” Collurio said. Again, Lanius had no trouble recognizing his tone—he sounded like a man who had taken another man's pay and realized he had to take the other man's eccentricities along with the silver. Since that was exactly how things were, Lanius didn't contradict him.

They rode up to the structure Tinamus and his workmen had built the summer before. A few workmen were still there, to make sure things didn't come to grief. Most of them, though, had gone back to the city of Avornis.

The two men got down off their horses. Accompanied by royal guardsmen, they went into the slice of the city—Lanius thought Collurio's description apt—through a door in one of the walls forming the sides of the slice. Collurio craned his neck, eyeing everything closely. Lanius had told him to look things over, and he was taking the king at his word.

After they'd walked along for a while, Collurio said, “It isn't a slice of the city of Avornis. I thought it would be. But I know the capital pretty well, even if I don't know much else. There's no place in it that would look like this.” He spoke with complete confidence.

And Lanius nodded. “You're right—it isn't the city of Avornis. It's not even close to the city of Avornis.”

“I figured that out.” Collurio sounded proud of himself now—and he'd earned the right. Then he asked the question Lanius had been waiting for. “If it's not the capital, where is it? It's
somewhere.
It's bound to be. You wouldn't make up something this detailed.”

“Oh, you never can tell.” Before answering, really answering, Lanius waved the royal guardsmen back out of earshot. They went, their chainmail jingling. One of them tapped a finger against the side of his head, thinking Lanius wasn't watching him. The king said one word to the animal trainer.

Collurio's eyes widened. “That means—”

“It does, doesn't it?” Lanius said with a smile.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

King Grus looked back toward Cumanus from the south bank of the Stura. The town looked smaller and more distant than it should have. The river wasn't
that
wide. But there was the sense that it separated two different worlds. There was also the sense that Grus didn't belong in the one he'd just entered.

He said as much to Pterocles, who'd crossed the Stura with him. When he finished, he asked, “Am I making that up? Is it coming out of my head because I know too much about what's happened to Avornans down here? Or is it something real?”