The Scepter_s Return см-3 Read online

  "Oh, this is nothing special. Pouncer gets in here every once in a while, and into other places where I need meat to lure him out." Lanius sounded elaborately casual. "So I usually carry a few scraps with me. I have to remember to get fresh ones pretty often. Otherwise, he doesn't want them."

  "I see," Grus said. "I meant to ask you about some of the things you've been spending money on. I've heard about an animal trainer, an architect, and quite a few workmen. What haven't I heard about?"

  "Why I'm doing it," Lanius answered, stroking Pouncer behind the ears. The moncat purred loudly.

  "All right. Why?"

  Lanius went on petting and scratching the moncat as he talked. The longer Grus listened, the more astonished he got. At last, the other king finished by asking, "What do you think?"

  "What do I think?" Grus echoed. Lanius had told him a little of this the winter before, but only a little. Now that he'd heard it all, he thought he'd really heard it all. He said, "I think it's crazy, that's what. What could anybody who heard something like this think?"

  "Now I'll tell you something you don't know," Lanius said. "Not long after we started this, the Banished One sent Collurio a dream."

  Grus had to take that seriously. The Banished One sent dreams only to those who worried him. Some of the enemies who'd struck him heavy blows never saw him in their sleep. Hirundo was one of those, and had no idea how lucky he was. Grus whistled softly, trying to take this in. "He sent dreams… to an animal trainer?"

  "By Olor's beard, Your Majesty, he did." Lanius might have been taking an oath. His use of the royal title impressed Grus much more than his calling on the current king of the gods.

  Grus said, "He didn't send one to the builder, though?"

  "Not yet, at any rate," the other king said. "The builder knows less of what's going on than the trainer does. He would also be easier to replace than the trainer. That all makes him less essential and less dangerous."

  "You've thought this through, haven't you?" Grus laughed at himself. Of course Lanius had thought it through; that was what Lanius did best. Grus aimed a forefinger at the other king as though it were an arrow. "You can't tell me the builder is less expensive than the trainer, by the gods. Oh, you can, but I won't believe you."

  "I won't even try. You'd know I was lying. Here, wait – I'll stop lying." He got up off the floor, still holding Pouncer. Grus made a horrible face. Lanius continued, "Even if he is more expensive, we need him. Will you tell me I'm wrong about that?"

  "I'll tell you that you could be wrong," Grus said. Lanius considered that in his usual grave fashion, then slowly nodded. But Grus felt he had to add, "You could be right, too. We'll find out. I hope we'll find out. In the meantime… In the meantime, you'd better go on."

  The harvest was good. Rain didn't fall at the wrong time. Wheat and barley poured into the city of Avornis by riverboat and, from nearby farms, by wagon. The granaries filled – if not to overflowing, then very full indeed. Watching the golden flood mount, Lanius grew confident the capital could ride out even the worst of winters. Reports that came in from the rest of Avornis said no one was likely to starve this year.

  As more and more grain arrived, Lanius began to doubt the Banished One would use weather as a weapon against Avornis. The king didn't doubt the exiled god would use something. What Grus had said made altogether too much sense for Lanius to doubt it. At some point, the Banished One would have to strike back against Avornis. Not striking back would be confessing weakness. Whatever else he was, he was not weak. His chosen weapons, the Menteshe, were for the moment of less use to him than he would have wanted. But he surely had others – had them or could devise them.

  Lanius knew what he would do if he were in those southern mountains, all alone and furious. He summoned Pterocles. The wizard bowed low before him. "How may I serve you, Your Majesty?"

  "I fear you may be serving all of Avornis before long, not just me," the king answered. "What do you know of plagues begun and spread by sorcery?"

  The comers of Pterocles' mouth turned down. The lines that ran up from the comers of his mouth to beside his nose got deeper. Sorrow and worry filled his eyes. "I was afraid you would ask me that."

  "How can you be so sure of -?" Lanius broke off and pointed an accusing forefinger at the wizard. "You've been studying."

  "Ever since I got back to the capital," Pterocles agreed. "I only wish there were more to study. This sort of thing is a lot like weatherworking – it's too big for a mortal wizard to bring off, which means not many people have had much to say about it."

  "What do they say? The ones who speak at all, I mean," Lanius said.

  "That only a wizard without a heart would even think of trying one of those spells," Pterocles said. "The trouble is, that fits the Banished One too well. They also say that the sicknesses behave like natural ones once they're loose. If a wizard or a doctor can come up with a way to cure them or to keep them from killing, that will work as well as it would against an ordinary illness."

  "If," Lanius said heavily. Pterocles nodded. The two of them shared an unhappy look. The trouble with the optimistic-sounding news the wizard had given was simple – plenty of natural illnesses had no known cure. Many people went to physicians only as a last resort, when they were desperately ill and nothing the doctor did to them was likely to make things worse.

  "Maybe he'll do something else," Pterocles said. "Maybe it will be the weather. Maybe he can find some way to make the Menteshe stop fighting among themselves. Maybe… maybe almost anything, Your Majesty."

  He sounded like a man whistling past a still-smoking pyre. Lanius understood sounding that way, for it was also the way he felt. "And maybe he'll send a plague, too," the king said. "It would be about the best thing he could do, wouldn't it?"

  "Not as far as we're concerned, by the gods!" Pterocles exclaimed. Then he got what Lanius was driving at. "Yes, I think from his way of looking at things a plague might be the best he could do. I see one thing that might help us, though."

  "Oh? What?" Lanius asked. "It's one more than I see, I'll tell you that."

  "Winter is coming," Pterocles said. "People don't travel as much in the wintertime. Even if a plague starts, it won't spread as fast as it would if it got going during the summer."

  "That will give us something to look forward to when the weather warms up, won't it?" Lanius said.

  The wizard winced. "I wish you hadn't put it quite like that."

  Thinking about it, Lanius also wished he hadn't said it like that. "Do the best you can, that's all. And if I come across anything in the archives that has to do with plagues, I'll pass it on to you."

  Anser and Ortalis would have laughed at him. Sosia would have rolled her eyes at the time he wasted in the archives (she would have done more than that if she'd known how he occasionally spent time there). Grus would have rolled his eyes, too, though he knew Lanius often found things worth knowing as he poked around. Pterocles nodded eagerly. "Thank you, Your Majesty. I appreciate that, believe me. You never can tell what might turn up."

  "No, you never can." Some of the things Lanius had learned in the archives – both royal and ecclesiastical – he wished he never would have found. The name Milvago went through his mind again. This time, he didn't say it aloud. Somehow, it seemed all too potent just the same.

  Pterocles bowed to him once more. "I'm glad you and King Grus are alert to the possibilities," he said. "That's bound to help when… whatever happens, happens."

  Lanius wasn't so sure. Suppose the plague killed both kings in the space of a few days. Then Crex would take the crown, assuming he lived – and assuming Ortalis didn't try to steal it. Ortalis would be regent if he wasn't king.

  Lanius had been a little boy when his father died and King Mergus' younger brother, Scolopax, succeeded him. Scolopax had ruled briefly and badly. Lanius didn't see Ortalis doing any better. The king shivered. With luck – and, he hoped, with the aid of the gods still in the heavens – it wouldn't come to anythin
g like that.

  He hoped Olor and Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens were paying attention to what was going on in the material world. They often seemed to give it as little notice as they could get away with. Would they have cast the Banished One down here if they'd taken seriously the material world and what happened in it? Lanius didn't think so.

  The king wished Avornis boasted an arch-hallow who held his seat because of his holiness, not because he happened to be the other king's bastard. Like everybody else, Lanius liked Anser. Even Ortalis, in whom the milk of human kindness had long since curdled, liked Anser. Even Estrilda, who should have despised him as the living symbol of her husband's betrayal, liked Anser. However likable he was, though, he found deer more dear than Queen Quelea, and King Olor more boring than boar.

  But then again, maybe it wouldn't matter one bit. If the gods in the heavens were so nearly indifferent to what went on in the material world, how much would they care whether the arch-hallow was a refined and subtle theologian or a crackerjack archer? Maybe less than Lanius hoped they did.

  And in that case…

  "In that case," the King of Avornis muttered, "it's up to Grus and me and Pterocles and Collurio and Tinamus and Otus and Hirundo and – " He broke off. He could have gone on naming names for quite a while. On the other hand, he could have stopped after the ones to whom the Banished Ones had sent dreams. They might have been enough by themselves.

  Or maybe no one and nothing would be enough. How could anyone do more than hope when confronting an exiled god? Sometimes even holding on to hope seemed hard as holding up the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  When he stood up, he was a little surprised, or maybe more than a little, to find he labored under no literally crushing burden. He walked slowly down the corridor that would take him to the kitchens if he followed it all the way. He didn't really intend to; he wasn't really going anywhere at all. He was just ambling along, thinking about what might happen, what he could do, what would be possible if things went the way he wanted, and what he would have to do if they didn't.

  Servants bowed and curtsied. Lanius noticed them just enough to bow in return. But when Limosa started to drop him a curtsy, he came back to the real world with a snap. "Don't bother," he said quickly. "You might not be able to get up again if you do."

  Her belly seemed to bulge more every day now. The baby was still a couple of months away, which meant that belly would be even bigger by the time it was born. She carried a chunk of raisin loaf in one hand.

  "I'll be all right," she said. "I'm just getting to where all I want is for this to be over. Pretty soon, it will be."

  "I remember Sosia saying the same thing," Lanius said.

  "I feel like I'm carrying around a great big melon, except melons don't kick," Ortalis' wife said, setting the hand without the raisin loaf just above her navel.

  She was another likable one. Lanius cordially loathed her father, and wasn't a bit sorry when Grus sent Petrosus to the Maze. She was wed to a man who'd alarmed the king for as long as he'd known him. She carried a baby that could throw the succession into turmoil. All the same, Lanius didn't dislike her. He worried about her, but that wasn't the same thing.

  "Everything will be fine," Lanius said.

  Limosa nodded. "Oh, I think so, too. It's not a lot of fun when it finally happens, but it does usually turn out all right. If it didn't, there wouldn't be any more people after a while. And when it is over" – her face softened – "you've got a baby. Babies are fun."

  Babies were a lot more fun if someone else did the cleaning up after them. Limosa took that for granted. Since Lanius did, too, he didn't call her on it. He only smiled and nodded and said, "I remember."

  "Crex and Pitta are getting big now," Limosa said. "You and Sosia ought to have another baby yourselves."

  Since Lanius wasn't currently welcome in Sosia's bed, prospects for a new royal prince or princess lay nowhere in the immediate future. If Limosa didn't already know that, Lanius didn't feel like explaining it to her. He just said, "Maybe one of these days."

  "It would be nice," Limosa said. If she worried about the succession, or about a son of hers threatening Crex's place, she didn't show it. Maybe that was good acting on her part. Petrosus had surely grafted her onto Lanius' family in the hope that a grandson of his would wear the crown. But even Lanius had trouble believing she attached enormous importance to it.

  "So it would," he said. She wasn't wrong – he'd enjoyed Crex and Pitta very much when they were small.

  "May I ask you something, Your Majesty?" she said.

  "You can always ask. Whether I answer depends on what the question is," Lanius replied.

  Limosa nodded. "Of course. All I want to know, though, is what you're doing out in the country. Why do you want to build what sounds like a slice of a city?"

  She wasn't the only one wondering about that. Even Tinamus, the architect responsible for it, wondered. Wondering was harmless. Knowing? Knowing was all too likely to be anything but. With what Lanius hoped was a harmless smile, he said, "It's a hobby, that's all. Why does Ortalis like to go hunting?"

  For some tiny fraction of a heartbeat, alarm spread over Limosa's face. She knew the answer to that question, then. It was something on the order of, He hunts animals so he doesn't hunt people. Lanius started to apologize; he hadn't meant to embarrass her. But maybe what he'd said wasn't so bad after all. She didn't press him about what he was building anymore.

  Instead, she murmured, "Hobbies," made as though to curtsy again without actually doing it, and went on up the corridor.

  Lanius shook his head. If things didn't work out the way he hoped, plenty of people would be unhappy with him for wasting so much time and money. For now, though, he didn't have to worry about that. Even Grus agreed what he was doing was worth a try. As soon as the building was finished, he and Collurio could get down to some serious work there. In the meantime…

  In the meantime, shrieks empted from the kitchens. Maybe that meant one of the cooks had stuck a knife in another. Such things happened every once in a while. More like, though…

  "Your Majesty! Your Majesty!" A cook came running toward Lanius, waving her arms in the air. "Oh, there you are, Your Majesty! Come quick! It's that horrible creature of yours, Your Majesty! It's stolen a big silver spoon!"

  "Sooner or later, we'll get it back," the king said. "Pouncer hardly ever loses them."

  "Miserable thieving animal." None of the cooks had a good word to say for moncats. "Nothing but vermin. We ought to set traps."

  "You will do no such thing." Most of the time, Lanius was among the mildest of men. When he wanted to, though, he could sound every inch a monarch. The cook blinked, hardly believing her ears. He went on, "You will not. Do you understand me?"

  The cook turned pale as milk. "We won't do it, Your Majesty. Queen Quelea's sweet mercy on me, I was only joking."

  "All right, then." Lanius knew he'd hit too hard. But she'd alarmed him. He asked, "Is the moncat still in the kitchens, or did it run off?"

  "It went up the wall like it was a big, furry fly, and then in through some crack or other. It's gone." The cook regained a little spirit. "And so is that stinking spoon." She sounded as indignant as though she'd bought it herself.

  "Maybe I can lure it back. Let's go see, shall we?" Lanius said. "A few scraps might do the trick."

  Warmth from the fires and ovens surrounded him when he walked into the kitchens. So did the savory smells of roasting meat and baking bread. A pastry cook was drizzling honey over some fruit tarts. The cooks, men and women, sassed one another in a lively slang enriched by more obscenity and profanity than any this side of the royal army.

  The old crack near the ceiling had been sealed up. The cook pointed to another likely one. The king clambered up on a ladder, a lamp in one hand, some scraps of beef cut from a joint in the other. That left no hands free in case he slipped. He resolved not to slip. This is very undignified, he thought, but only after it
was far too late to do anything about it.

  He held the lamp up to the crack, hoping to see Pouncer's eyes glowing yellow somewhere not far away. No such luck. All he could make out was a spiderweb with the pale spider that had made it squatting near the edge. The spider ran away when his breath shook the web. He climbed down the ladder and shook his head. "He's gone."

  "Well, it's not like that's a big surprise," the cook said, but then, recalling to whom she was talking, she added, "Thank you for trying, Your Majesty."

  "It's all right," Lanius said. "Sooner or later, the spoon will show up. Pouncer doesn't keep them."

  She nodded. The cooks did know that. The moncat had lost a couple, but only a couple. Things could have been worse. As it was, Pouncer's thieving gave the kitchens something to complain about. Everyone needed something to complain about. It was as much fun as.. stealing spoons.

  The past few years, Grus had spent every summer in the field. Coming back to the city of Avornis – coming back to the rest of the royal family – always took adjusting. This fall, it seemed to take more than usual. Estrilda greeted him with, "Any new mistresses I should know about?"

  "No," he answered at once. He would have said the same thing had the answer been yes. He fought battles in the summertime; he didn't want to fight more of them after he got back to the palace.

  His wife greeted his declaration with something less than a ringing endorsement, inquiring, "Any mistresses I shouldn't know about?"

  "None of those, either," he told her. She sniffed. Here, though, he was at least technically truthful. The last mistress he'd had that Estrilda shouldn't have known about – and didn't – was Alauda, a widow he'd met during the Menteshe invasion of Avornis' southern provinces. Estrilda also shouldn't have known – and didn't know – about Grus' bastard boy named Nivalis. Grus made sure his son and the boy's mother lacked for nothing money could buy. He'd never seen Nivalis. He wanted to, one of these days.

  Estrilda looked at him. "Why not?" she asked him, something approaching true curiosity in her voice. "Are you really getting old?"