The Chernagor Pirates (27 page)

At the top of the pass, he looked back toward his own kingdom once more. He hadn't thought he'd climbed all that high, but he could see a long way. The bright green of newly planted fields of wheat and barley and rye and oats contrasted with the darker tones of orchards and forests. Here and there, smoke plumes rose from towns and obscured the farmland beyond. Only very gradually did natural mist and haze blur the rest of the landscape.

When he looked ahead, the story was different. Fog rolling off the Northern Sea left the land of the Chernagors shrouded in mystery. But Grus didn't need to see the Chernagor country to know what lay ahead—trouble. If the Chernagors weren't going to cause trouble, he wouldn't have had to come here and look out across their land.

He also looked around. There was Prince Vsevolod, hard-faced and grim, riding along at the head of a handful of retainers. Did he believe Grus could restore him as Prince of Nishevatz after two years in exile? Grus hoped he did; he might yet prove valuable to the Avornan cause.

And there rode Pterocles. In one sense, he wasn't far from Prince Vsevolod. In another, he might have belonged to a different world. The wizard didn't even seem to see Vsevolod and his kilted retainers. All his attention focused on the view ahead. He looked like a man riding into a battle he expected to lose—brave enough, but far from hopeful. Remembering what had happened to Pterocles in the Chernagor country a couple of years before, Grus didn't suppose he could blame him.

Pterocles also stood out because of his bad riding. Next to the seasoned cavalry troopers, Grus wasn't much of a rider. Next to Pterocles, he might have been a centaur. The wizard rode as though he'd never heard of riding before climbing aboard his mule. He was all knees and elbows and apprehension. Every slightest jounce took him by surprise, and threatened to pitch him out of the saddle and under the horse's hoofs. Watching him made Grus nervous and sympathetic at the same time.

“You're doing fine,” the king called to the wizard. “Relax a little, and everything will be all right.”

Pterocles eyed him as though he'd taken leave of his senses. “Relax a little, and I'll be dead … Your Majesty,” he answered.

Grus wondered whether he was talking about the mule or about the sorcerous challenges ahead. After some thought, he decided he didn't want to ask.

To Grus' surprise, the Chernagors didn't try to defend the fortress of Varazdin. They evacuated it instead, fleeing ahead of the advancing Avornans. Grus left a small garrison in it—enough men to make sure the Chernagors didn't seize it again as soon as he'd gone on toward Nishevatz.

“This is a funny business,” Hirundo said as they headed for the coastal lowlands. “When the fellow commanding that fort was loyal to Prince Vsevolod, he fought us teeth and toenails. Now the man in charge of it gets his orders from Vasilko, and he runs off. Go figure.”

“Everything about the war with the Chernagors has been backward,” Grus said. “Why should this be any different?”

He hadn't come very far into the Chernagor country before realizing he'd left Avornis behind. The look of the sky and the quality of the sunlight weren't the same as they had been down in his own kingdom. A perpetual haze hung over the lowlands here. It turned the sunlight watery and the sky a color halfway between blue and gray. Drifting clouds had no sharp edges; they blurred into the sky behind them in a way they never would have in a land of bright sun and a sky of a respectable, genuine blue.

The landscape had a strange look, too. Roofs of thatch replaced those of red tiles. In this damp, dripping country, fire wasn't the worry it would have been farther south. Even the haystacks were different here; they wore canvas covers on top to keep off the rain. Gliding gulls mewed and squawked overhead.

And the Northern Sea was nothing like the Azanian Sea. Gray and chilly-looking, it struck Grus as far from inviting. He knew the Chernagors thought otherwise. To them, it was the high road to trading—and raiding—riches. As far as he was concerned, they were welcome to it.

He and his army reached the sea sooner than he'd expected. Instead of offering battle away from Nishevatz, Prince Vasilko seemed intent on defending the city with everything he had. A few archers harassed the advancing Avornans, but only a few. They would shoot from ambush, then either rely on concealment or try to get away on fast horses. They would not stand and fight.

That mortified Prince Vsevolod. “Not enough my son should give self to Banished One,” he rumbled in disgust. “No, not enough. Also he show self coward. Better he should die.”

“Better he should surrender, so you can have your throne back and we can go home to Avornis.” Grus didn't believe that would happen. Vasilko had something in mind. The king hoped discovering what it was wouldn't prove too painful.

In any case, Vsevolod wasn't listening to him. “Disgrace,” he muttered. “My son is disgrace.”

There
was a feeling Grus knew all too well. He set a hand on Vsevolod's shoulder. “Try not to blame yourself, Your Highness. I'm sure you did everything you could.”
I did with Ortalis.

Vsevolod shrugged off the hand and shook his massive head. Grus didn't like to think about his own quarrels with his son, either. And what would come of Ortalis' marriage to Limosa? What besides trouble, anyhow?

A grandson who might be an heir,
Grus thought. Of course, Crex was already a grandson who might be an heir. If having two grandsons who might be heirs wasn't trouble, Grus had no idea what would fit the definition. How
would
things play out once he wasn't there to make sure they went the way he wanted?

“Your Majesty!” A cavalry captain rode up to Grus. “Ask you a question, Your Majesty?”

“Go ahead,” Grus told him. Whatever questions a cavalry captain could come up with were bound to be less worrisome than thoughts of two grandsons going to war with each other over which one got to wear the crown.

“Well, Your Majesty, these fields are full—full to bursting, you might say—of cows and sheep, and I'd banquet off my boots if the sties aren't full of pigs, too,” the officer said. “Now, I know we're here to help His Highness the prince, but it would make things a lot easier if we could do some foraging, too.”

Grus didn't have to think about that. He didn't have to ask Prince Vsevolod, either. He said, “As far as we're concerned, Captain, this is enemy country. Go ahead and forage to your heart's content, and I hope you stuff yourself full of beefsteaks and mutton chops and roast pork. Right now, we worry about hurting Vasilko. Once we've cast him down, then we start worrying about helping Vsevolod. Or do you think I'm wrong?”

“Oh, no, sir!” the officer said quickly. Grus laughed at the naked hunger on his face. He went on, “We'll forage, all right. We'll take the war right to the Chernagors. Let 'em go hungry.” They wouldn't go hungry enough, not when the other Chernagor city-states helped supply them by sea. Grus knew as much. But his own side would eat well. That counted, too.

CHAPTER TWELVE

King Lanius looked at the moncat, and the moncat looked at Lanius. “How did you get out?” the king demanded. Bubulcus wasn't the only servant who denied having anything to do with Pouncer's latest escape. Had it found some way out of the chamber all by itself? If it had, none of the other animals in here had proved smart enough to use it.

What did that mean? Did it mean anything? Could one moncat be so much smarter and sneakier than the rest that it kept an escape route a secret? Lanius didn't know. He would have liked to ask Pouncer with some hope of getting back an answer he could understand. That failing, he would have liked to catch the beast in the act of escaping.

Neither seemed likely. Moncats were sneaky enough—and enough like ordinary cats—not to do something while a lowly human being was watching. And, to a moncat, even a King of Avornis counted as a lowly human being.

“Mrowr,” Pouncer said, staring at Grus out of large amber eyes. Then it scampered up the scaffolding of branches and poles that did duty for a forest canopy. Its retractile claws, always sharp, bit into the wood. Moncats climbed even better than monkeys.

He still wondered which were smarter, moncats or monkeys. Moncats were more self-centered and perverse; of that he had no doubt. Monkeys thought more along the lines of human intelligence. That made them
seem
smarter, at least at first glance. But Lanius remained unconvinced they really were.

Try as he would, he couldn't think of any way to test the animals that would prove anything. If the moncats didn't feel like playing along, they simply wouldn't. What did that prove? Were they stupid, or just willful? Or would he be the stupid one for trying to get them to do things they weren't inclined to do?

As things stood now, he certainly felt like the stupid one. He eyed the moncat he'd twice encountered in the archives. Maybe the servants were lying, and someone had opened a door that second time, as Bubulcus had the first time. If they weren't, though, Pouncer did have a secret it wasn't telling.

“If you come to the archives again, I'll …” Lanius' voice trailed away. What
would
he do to Pouncer if it escaped again? Punish it? Congratulate it? Both at once? If the moncat didn't already think so, that would convince it human beings were crazy.

Reluctantly, he left the moncats' chamber. He wasn't going to find out what he wanted to know there. He wondered if a wizard could figure out what Pouncer was doing. But plenty of more important things needed wizards. What a moncat was up to didn't. Odds were it wouldn't—couldn't—do it again anyway.

So Lanius told himself. All the same, the first few times he went back to the archives, he kept looking around at every small noise he imagined he heard. He waited for the moncat to meow and to emerge from concealment brandishing something it had stolen from the kitchens.

He waited, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. He decided those small noises really were figments of his imagination. When he stopped worrying about them, he got more work done than he had for weeks. He turned up several parchments touching on how Avornis had ruled the provinces south of the Stura River before the Menteshe—and the Banished One—took them from the kingdom.

Would those ever really matter again? Every time Avornis tried to reclaim the lost provinces, disaster had followed. No King of Avornis for the past two centuries and more had dared do any serious campaigning south of the Stura. And yet Grus talked about going after the Scepter of Mercy in a way that suggested he
was
serious and
would
do it if he got the chance. Lanius would have been more likely to take that as bluster if the Banished One hadn't stirred up so much trouble for Avornis far from the Stura. Didn't that suggest he was worried about what might happen if the Avornans did try once more to reclaim the Scepter and their lost lands?

Didn't it? Or did it? How could a mere mortal know? Maybe the outcast god was stirring up trouble elsewhere for its own sake. Or maybe he was laying an uncommonly deep trap, building up belief in their chances so he could do a better job of cutting them down.

That troubled Lanius enough to drive him out of the royal archives—and over to the great cathedral and the ecclesiastical archives. He'd seen they held more about the Banished One than the royal archives did. The expelled deity had been a theological problem even before he became a political problem.

Lanius paid his respects to Arch-Hallow Anser. Then he called on Ixoreus. The green-robed priest held no high rank. But what he didn't know of the archives under the cathedral, no man living did.

After a moment's thought, the king wondered about that. As he and the white-bearded archivist went downstairs, Lanius asked, as casually as he could, “Have you ever run across the name Milvago in all these parchments?”

Ixoreus stopped. His eyes widened slightly—no, more than slightly. “Oh, yes, Your Majesty,” he said in a low voice. “I have run across that name. I didn't know you had.”

“I often wish I hadn't,” Lanius said. “Do you know what that name means?”

“Oh, yes,” the archivist repeated. “But I have never told a living soul of it. Have you?”

“One,” Lanius answered. “I told Grus. He had to know.”

Ixoreus considered. At last, with some reluctance, he nodded. “Yes, I suppose he did. But can he keep his mouth shut?” He spoke of the other king with a casual lack of respect. Lanius was suddenly sure the old man spoke about him the same way when he was out of earshot.

“Yes,” he said. “Grus and I don't always get along, but he can hold a secret.”

“I suppose so,” Ixoreus said. “He hasn't told the arch-hallow. I'm sure of that—and Anser is his own flesh and blood.
I
never told anybody—not Arch-Hallow Bucco, not King Mergus, not King Scolopax—gods, no!—not anybody. And I wouldn't have told you, either, if you hadn't found out for yourself.”

Considering what this secret was … “Good,” Lanius told the priest.

The gray stone walls of Nishevatz frowned down on the Avornan army encamped in front of them. Grus studied the formidable stonework. “Here we are again,” he said to Hirundo. “How do we do better this time than we did two years ago?”

“Yes, here we are again,” the general agreed lightly. “How do we do better? Taking the city would be good, don't you think?”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” King Grus matched him dry for dry. “And how do we go about that, if you'd be so kind?”

They stood not far from the outer opening of the tunnel Prince Vsevolod had used to escape from Nishevatz, the tunnel Avornan and Chernagor soldiers had entered to sneak into the town … and from which, by all appearances, they'd never emerged. Hirundo's eyes flicked in the direction of that opening. “One thing we'd better
not
do,” he said, “and that's try going underground again.”