The Scepter_s Return см-3 Read online

  They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn't matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn't succeed – and they paid for it.

  At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus' archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle – and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they'd had enough. The men who'd lingered rode away after their comrades.

  Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city – those who could, at any rate.

  Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn't won, had fought well – well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.

  What Grus did do as the fighting eased was let out a long sigh of relief and stab his sword into the soil to clean the blood off the blade. He sent runners out to find Hirundo and bring him back. The general nodded as he came up. "Well, Your Majesty, we got through that one," he said.

  "I was thinking the same thing." Grus spotted Pterocles and waved to him. "Is the mine still masked from the Menteshe? I hope none of them stumbled down the hole when they broke in. And I hope the wizard you set there didn't run away from his post when that happened."

  "I'll go find out," Pterocles said, which was exactly what Grus wanted to hear from him. The wizard hurried away.

  "We can always start the undermining again somewhere else if things did get buggered up," Hirundo said.

  "I know. But we would have wasted a lot of time and a lot of work," the king replied. "And if the Menteshe know we're trying to dig under the wall, they'll countermine to keep us away." He snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me – we have to bring in the hurdles the nomads used to cross the inner ditch."

  "I should hope so. If we don't, they're liable to sneak out at night and see if they can slit our throats while we're sleeping," Hirundo said.

  "Well, yes, that, too," Grus said. Hirundo gave him a puzzled look. He explained what he had in mind.

  Hirundo heard him out and then bowed. "That's very nice, Your Majesty. Very fitting, you might say. I'll give the orders right away." As Pterocles had a few minutes earlier, he bustled off to tend to what needed doing.

  The wizard returned at a trot, the smile on Pterocles' face telling Grus what he needed to know even before the wizard said, "All's very well, Your Majesty. No trouble came too close to Calidris, and he kept the spell going all through the fight. The Menteshe in Trabzun don't know what we're up to."

  "Ah." Grus smiled, too. His was a more wolfish expression than the one the wizard wore. "Then that work will go on. How much longer till we're under Trabzun's walls? Do you happen to know?"

  Pterocles shook his head. "I spoke to the sorcerer, not to the minemaster."

  "Too bad," Grus said. "We'll go on till we finish, that's all." He looked south, toward Yozgat. "Yes, we'll go on till we finish."

  King Lanius looked up toward the skylight set into the roof above the royal archives. Dusty sunbeams filtered down to where he sat. No one had ever been able to get those skylights clean. Lanius suspected much of the dirt was on the inside of the glass, and thereby inaccessible. The only way to be rid of it would be to take out the panes and replace them with clean ones.

  A faint skittering noise came from somewhere in the bowels of the archives. Lanius sighed. He knew mice got in here. The only thing he didn't know was how many precious parchments they'd chewed up before he ever got the chance to see them.

  Grus had written that he was besieging Trabzun, formerly Trapezus. Avornis hadn't owned the city for centuries. Even so, the archives held papers and parchments about the city and what it had been like in bygone days – tax records, reports on the state of the walls, appeals to lawsuits that had gone all the way to the city of Avornis. Lanius had run into them from time to time when he was looking for other things, sometimes when he was looking for nothing in particular.

  He'd run into them, yes, but he hadn't thought anything about it. Why should he have? The Kingdom of Avornis had lost more than a few cities in the Menteshe invasions. Quite a few of them, these days, were only ruins. The one that really impinged on Avornan consciousness was Yozgat, and that more because it held the Scepter of Mercy than for any other reason.

  Lanius shook his head. The road to Yozgat ran through Trabzun, and he had to think about Trabzun now.

  Dust rose in choking clouds when the king pulled a crate off a shelf. Coughing, he carried the crate to a table. He thought he remembered finding papers from Trabzun – or rather, from Trapezus – in it. As he pulled out documents and started reading them, he happened to look down at himself. His tunic, though old, had been clean when he put it on. Now dust and dirt streaked and spotted it. He tried to brush off some of the dust with his hands, and raised a small cloud around himself without getting the tunic much cleaner.

  The king began to wonder whether he knew what he was talking about. The crate didn't seem to have any of the documents he was looking for. Were they really somewhere else? Was he misremembering? He'd done that when he was looking for papers from Yozgat. Once could happen to anybody. Twice? Didn't twice suggest his memory wasn't as good as he thought it was? For a man who prided himself on his wits – not least because he didn't have a whole lot of other things on which to pride himself – that was a disheartening notion.

  "Ha!" he exclaimed as he got near the bottom of the crate. There they were! He'd buried them under other documents that had seemed more interesting the last time he went through them.

  Tax registers from Trapezus wouldn't do Grus any good. The people who'd dutifully paid those taxes (or not so dutifully tried to evade them) were hundreds of years dead. Their descendants, if they had any, were probably thralls. But…

  "Ha!" Lanius said again, and plucked a parchment from the crate. Here was a map of Trapezus long ago, showing which of those taxpayers – recalcitrant or otherwise – owned which properties in the city. Again, those property owners were ashes for a very long time. Many of the buildings were bound to have fallen down between then and now. Odds were, though, that the streets still ran as they had in those far-off days, which meant Grus might find the map worth having.

  Lanius sighed once more. Part of him still resented working for the man who'd stolen half his throne and far more than half his power. But he couldn't deny, however much he wanted to, that Grus had done a good job with that power. If, say, Ortalis had been the usurper… Lanius shook his head. No, he didn't want to think about that.

  Below the map lay a report from an officer in Trapezus on the walls, and on repairs that had been made after an earthquake. Lanius decided to send that along, too. Maybe there had been more earthquakes since, but it might prove useful.

  He was sure Grus would be interested in some of the things he'd found out about Yozgat. He would tell his father-in-law about those when Grus got back to the city of Avornis. He didn't want to put them in writing. They would have to travel a long way south of the Stura before they got to Grus. Lanius knew Menteshe raiders bedeviled the route by which supplies and letters went down to the Avornan army. If he went into too much detail and the dispatch happened to be captured – that wouldn't be good at all.

  And it could end up a lot worse than merely no good at all. A captured dispatch from one King of A
vornis to the other might end up in the Banished One's hands. That would do for a catastrophe until a more emphatic word came along. If the Banished One suspected any of what Lanius had in mind, all his carefully laid plans would fall to pieces then and there.

  He heard another skittering noise and looked up, hoping it was Pouncer. But no moncat came out hoping for a treat. Just another mouse, he thought. He'd tried setting traps in the archives, traps that would smash any mouse taking the bait. The next dead mouse he saw in any of them would be the first. He had almost smashed his own foot in one; only a hasty backward leap saved him. After that, he took out the traps.

  Thinking of that fiasco made him start to laugh. What if he'd forgotten one and left it here? How long would it be before some other king – or perhaps some scholar – prowled through the archives the way he liked to do? A hundred years from now, or two hundred, would the man who went through the archives have any idea the trap that had smashed his foot was set by a King of Avornis? Lanius didn't see how he could.

  Sosia gave him a peculiar look when he told her about the thought later that day. "You find the oddest things to worry about," she said.

  "I wasn't worried. I just thought it was… interesting," Lanius said.

  "Interesting!" His wife snorted. "Who in the world could care about what happens a hundred years from now?"

  The Banished One could, Lanius thought. But he didn't want to be compared to the exiled god, and the Banished One wasn't in the world willingly. There was another answer he could give her, though. "I do. The dynasty reaches back further than that. I'd like to see it reach forward further than that, too." He pointed a finger at her. "Wouldn't you? You're part of the dynasty yourself, you know."

  Sosia looked surprised. Then she nodded. "You're right. I am," she said, wonder in her voice.

  Lanius knew why she looked surprised and sounded wondering. She thought of herself as part of Grus' family. Grus had wed her to Lanius not least so she could keep an eye on him. She would back him against Ortalis – he was sure of that. Nobody liked Ortalis, though (except Limosa, Lanius thought uneasily). But would Sosia back him against Grus?

  That was the wrong question. The right question was, would it matter if she did? Lanius feared it wouldn't. A good thing, then, that he and Grus both aimed at Yozgat and not at each other.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Much of the dirt dug out of the tunnel approaching Trabzun went to strengthen the inner and outer fieldworks surrounding the town. That was Hirundo's idea, and King Grus liked it very much. It gave the Avornans somewhere inconspicuous to conceal the spoil from the mine. As the amount of dirt dug out grew greater and greater, that became ever more important.

  After being beaten back once, the Menteshe outside Trabzun did not return for another attack on the besiegers. That relieved Grus, and also rather surprised him. One evening, he remarked, "I hope they've gone back to fighting their civil war again."

  "That would be nice," Hirundo agreed. He fanned himself with the palm of his hand. "I'll tell you something else that would be nice – it would be nice if it got cooler around here."

  "So it would," Grus said. The air was still and breathless. Things farther than a few hundred yards away shimmered in a heat haze. A drop of sweat tickled as it trickled through his beard. A bird called. Even the noise seemed flat and dispirited – or maybe that was Grus' imagination, as overheated as everything else that had to do with Trabzun. He went on, "Don't expect anything different, though, not till summer finally decides to let up."

  "Oh, I don't. I've seen what the weather's like around here." Hirundo swatted at a bug that landed on his bare arm. He killed it, and wiped his hand on his tunic. "Knowing it doesn't mean I have to like it."

  "No, I suppose not. I don't much like it myself." Grus snapped his fingers. "Did I tell you? No, of course I didn't, because it just happened today. I got a plan of the streets inside Trabzun."

  "Did you, by the gods?" The general beamed. "That's good news. Where did you get it from? Did Pterocles pull a new spell out of his belt pouch?"

  Grus shook his head. "No. He was just as surprised as you are. I got it from Lanius. He found it in the archives back at the palace."

  Hirundo laughed so loud, several soldiers stared at him. "He's all the way back there, and we're here, and he knows more about this stinking place than we do? That's funny, is what that is." He paused. "That plan will be older than dirt, if he pulled it out of the archives. D'you think it's still good?"

  "Funny you should ask. He warned me about that. He said he didn't know what the buildings were like in there, but the way the streets ran shouldn't have changed much."

  "That does make sense," Hirundo allowed. "His Majesty thought of everything, didn't he?"

  "So it seems. He has a way of doing that." Grus heard the edge in his own voice. He'd been happy to have Lanius excavate the archives. If the other king played with things from long-ago and far-off days, he wouldn't worry about other things – like power for himself, for instance. But Lanius, not for the first time, had found a way to make the past matter here and now. And if he could do that, then he wasn't so disconnected from the real world after all, was he? As though I need more things to worry about, Grus thought.

  "He certainly does. He's a clever fellow, King Lanius is." Hirundo, by contrast, sounded enthusiastic. And why not? He would keep on being a general no matter who gave him his orders. Not only that, he'd never shown the least interest in the throne himself. That alone would have been plenty to keep him a general regardless of who wore the crown. Capable soldiers without undue ambition were worth their weight in gold.

  "I'll have my secretaries copy out the street plan so our officers can use it when they break into Trabzun," Grus said. "No matter how old it is, it'll come in handy."

  "Fair enough," Hirundo said. "The timing was good. The way these things usually work, we would have gotten it two days after we fired the mine."

  "I know, I know." Grus nodded, and then asked, "How much longer before the diggers get under the wall?"

  "Another few days," the general answered. "The engineers have some way of figuring out when they're in the right place, or maybe it's the wizards who know. I don't worry my head about that kind of thing too much. I suppose it's a little more complicated than unrolling a ball of string till you've gone far enough."

  "Probably. Most of the time, things do turn out more complicated than you wish they would. If they were easy all the time, just about everybody could do just about anything. I suppose that's why people in songs and stories can do whatever they want so easily – if you're listening to that kind of thing, you think you can do anything."

  Hirundo gave him a wide-eyed, innocent stare. "You mean I can't, Your Majesty?" He looked as though he were about to break into tears.

  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.