The Chernagor Pirates (41 page)

Limosa turned her back on him. She stalked away without a word. Lanius sighed. As soon as he heard what she had in mind, he'd been sure he was going to lose no matter what happened. He'd been sure, and he'd been right, and being right had done him no good at all.

“Well, well,” King Grus said when a courier handed him three sealed letters from the city of Avornis. “What have we here?”

“Letters, Your Majesty,” the courier said unhelpfully. “One from His Majesty, one from Prince Ortalis, and one from Princess Limosa.” He was just a soldier, with a provincial accent. Odds were he neither knew nor cared how Limosa had become Ortalis' wife. Grus wished he could say the same.

He opened Lanius' letter first. The other king wrote,
King Lanius to Grus
—
greetings. Your son and his wife will be petitioning you to let Petrosus out of the Maze. They expect me to write you yet another letter to the same effect, which is why I am sending this to you. In point of fact, I am profoundly indifferent to whatever you choose to do with or to Petrosus. But now I have written, and they will suppose I am once more urging you to release him. You will, I am sure, also have written letters intended to keep the peace. I hope all goes well in the south, for that is truly important business.
He'd scrawled his name below the carefully written words.

Grus couldn't help smiling as he read the letter. He could almost hear Lanius' voice in the words—intelligent, candid, detached, more than a little ironic. When he got letters from son, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law all at once, he'd had a pretty good idea of what they were about. Now that he knew he was right, he broke the seal on Ortalis' letter, and then on Limosa's. From what they (especially Limosa—Ortalis' letter was brief, and less enthusiastic than his wife's) said about Petrosus, Grus might have installed him as Arch-Hallow of Avornis after recalling him from the Maze. He was good, he was pure, he was honest, he was reliable, he was saintly … and he was nothing like the Petrosus Grus had known for so long before sending him away from the capital.

If he didn't let Petrosus come out of the Maze, he would anger Ortalis and Limosa. They made that plain. But if he did let Petrosus come out, he would endanger himself. He could see that, even if Ortalis and Limosa couldn't. Petrosus would want revenge. Even if he didn't get his position back (Lanius' suggestion in his earlier letter)—and he wouldn't—he still had connections. An angry man with connections …
I'd need eyes in the back of my head for the rest of my life,
the king thought.

He called for parchment and ink. Grus wrote,
I am sorry
—a polite lie—
but, as I have written before, it is necessary for Petrosus to remain in the monastery to which he has retired. No further petitions on this subject will be entertained.
He signed his name.

Limosa would pout. Lanius would shrug. Ortalis … Grus gritted his teeth. Who could guess what Ortalis would do? Grus sometimes wondered if his son knew from one minute to the next. Maybe he would shrug, too. But maybe he would throw a tantrum instead. That could prove … unpleasant.

The king had just finished sealing his letter when a guard stuck his head into the tent and said, “Your Majesty, Pterocles would like to speak to you if you have a moment to spare.”

“Of course,” Grus answered. The guard disappeared. A moment later, the wizard came in. Grus nodded to him. “Good evening. What can I do for you? How is your leg?”

Pterocles looked down at the wounded member. “It's healed well. I still feel it now and again—well, a little more than now and again—but I can get around on it. I came to tell you I've been doing some thinking.”

“I doubt you'll take any lasting harm from it,” Grus said. Pterocles started to reply, then closed his mouth and sent Grus a sharp look. The king looked back blandly. He asked, “And what have you been thinking about?”

“Thralls.”

No one word could have been better calculated to seize and hold Grus' interest. “Have you, now?” he murmured. Pterocles nodded. Grus asked, “What have you been thinking about them?”

“That I wish I were back in the city of Avornis to try some spells on the ones you brought back from the south,” Pterocles answered. “I think …” He paused and took a deep breath. “I think, Your Majesty, that I know how to cure them.”

“Do
you?” Grus said. The wizard nodded again. “By Olor's beard, you have my attention,” Grus told him. “Why do you think you know this now, when you didn't before we left the city?” He sent Pterocles a wry smile. “When you were where the thralls are, you didn't know. Now that you're hundreds of miles from them, you say you do. Will you forget again when we get back to the capital?”

“I hope not, Your Majesty.” The wizard gave back a wry smile of his own. “Part of this has to do with my own thinking, thinking that's been stewing for a long time. Part of it has to do with the masking spell the Menteshe threw at us the night before we went into Pelagonia. And part of it has to do with some of the things your witch said when we were in Pelagonia.”

Grus remembered some of the things Alca had said to
him
while the army was in Pelagonia. He wished he could forget a lot of them, but those weren't things she'd said in connection with the thralls. “Go on,” he told Pterocles. “Believe me, I'm listening.”

“For a few days there, I couldn't do much but lie around and listen to her,” Pterocles said. “She made herself a lot clearer, a lot plainer, than she ever had before. And I told her some things she hadn't known before, things I know because of … because of what happened to me outside of Nishevatz.”

Because I almost got killed outside of Nishevatz,
he meant. “Go on,” Grus said. “What does the masking spell have to do with all this?”

“Well, Your Majesty, part of what makes a thrall is emptying out his soul,” Pterocles answered. Grus nodded; that much he knew. The wizard went on, “It finally occurred to me, though, that that's not all that's going on. The Menteshe sorcerers have to leave something behind. They can't empty out the
whole
soul, or a thrall would be nothing but a corpse or a beast. And we all know there's a little more to them than that.”

“Yes, a little. Sometimes more than a little,” Grus said, remembering the thralls who'd tried to kill Lanius and, in lieu of himself, Estrilda.

“Sometimes more than a little,” Pterocles agreed. “But now it seems to me—and to Alca—that the emptying spell isn't the only one the Menteshe wizards use. It seems to us that they also use a masking spell. Some of the true soul that makes a man remains in a thrall, but it's hidden away even from him.”

Grus considered. Slowly, he nodded again. “Yes, that makes sense,” he said. “Which doesn't mean it's true, of course. A lot of the time, we've found that the things that seem to make the most sense about thralls turn out not to be true at all. But you're right. It may be worth looking into. You and Alca figured all of this out, you say?”

He could name the witch without flinching now. He could also name her without longing for her, which he wouldn't have believed possible. People said absence made the heart grow fonder. And if the person you cared about suddenly
wasn't
absent, and the two of you found you
didn't
care for each other anymore? There was a gloomy picture of human nature, but one Grus couldn't deny. It had happened to him.

Pterocles said, “We started working on it in Pelagonia, yes. I've added some new touches since. That's why I'm so eager to get back to the city of Avornis and try them out on the thralls there.”

“I understand,” Grus said. “But the other thing I understand is, I need you here as long as we're campaigning. We'll head back in the fall, I expect. They won't go anywhere in the meantime.” Reluctantly, Pterocles spread his hands, admitting that was so.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For a long time, thralls had fascinated King Lanius. They were men robbed of much of their humanity, forced down to the dusky, shadow-filled borderland between mankind and the animal world. The existence of thralls made whole men think about what being human really meant.

Then a thrall tried to kill Lanius.

It wasn't just a fit of bestial passion, of course. It was the Banished One reaching out through the thrall, controlling him as a merely human puppeteer controlled a marionette. From that moment on, thralls hadn't seemed the same to Lanius. They didn't strike him as just being half man and half animal. Instead, he also saw them as the Banished One's tools, as so many hammers and saws and knives (oh yes, knives!) to be picked up whenever the exiled god needed them.

And tools weren't so fascinating.

Since the thralls tried to murder Lanius and Estrilda, the king had paid much less attention to them, except for making sure the ones still in the palace couldn't get out and try anything like that again. He didn't know what sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.

He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.

By all appearances, they didn't care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.

The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn't think he'd made any noise uncovering it, but that didn't always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn't the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.

That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall's gaze. This thrall's face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite-man) was as empty, as
emptied,
as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.

Did something glint in the thrall's eyes? His face didn't change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn't feel like a beast's stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.

Nonsense,
Lanius told himself.
That's only a thrall, with no working wits in his head.
He tried to make himself believe it. He couldn't.

The thrall kept staring and staring. Sometimes, during one of these episodes, a thrall would mouth something up at him, or even say something—a sure sign something more than the poor, damaged thrall was looking out through those eyes. Not this time. After a couple of minutes, the thrall turned away.

Lanius turned away, too, with nothing but relief. He covered the peephole. His knees clicked as he got to his feet. He rubbed his nose, as though that could get rid of the stink from the thralls' room. Still, he kept coming back to look at them. He was no wizard. He couldn't learn anything about them that would help anyone find out how to cure them—if, indeed, anyone
could
cure them. But he stayed intrigued. He couldn't help wondering what went on in the thralls' minds. Logic and observation said nothing much went on there, but he wasn't sure how far to trust them. Where sorcery was involved, were logic and observation the right tools to use?

If they weren't, what was? What could be? More good questions. Lanius could come up with any number of good questions. Finding good answers for them was harder. Maybe the hope of good answers was what kept him coming back to the peephole.

Not long after that thought crossed his mind, he walked past Limosa in the hallway. She nodded politely as she went by—she thought he'd tried harder than he really had to get her father out of the Maze. He nodded back, though it took an effort. He had plenty of good questions about her and Ortalis, too, but no good answers, however much he would have liked to have them.

What you need is a peephole into their bedchamber,
he thought.
That would tell you what you want to know.

He violently shook his head. What he wanted to know was none of his business. Knowing it was none of his business didn't keep him from wanting to find out. Sosia would be angry at him if she learned he wanted to peep into other people's bedrooms—except she was even more curious about this than he was.

No,
he told himself firmly.
Some curiosity doesn't need to be satisfied.
That went dead against everything he'd ever believed. He tried to convince himself of it anyway.

Here was the Stura. Grus had spent a lot of years traveling up and down the river in a war galley. Now he approached it on horseback. The sour smell of old smoke filled his nostrils. This was the valley the Menteshe had overrun most thoroughly. That meant it was the valley where Prince Ulash's men had done the most damage.

Seeing that damage both infuriated and depressed the king. “How am I supposed to set this to rights?” he demanded of Hirundo.

“Driving the Menteshe back over the river would be a good start,” the general answered.

Hirundo smiled. He joked. But that was kidding on the square. Unless the Avornans could drive the Menteshe south of the Stura once more, Grus had exactly no chance of setting any of this to rights. And here, where their countrymen could slip north over the river in small boats by night, where the Menteshe could also bring river galleys—some of them rowed by brainless thralls—into the fight, driving them out of Avornis was liable to prove doubly hard.