The Chernagor Pirates (53 page)

On leaving the chamber, he made sure he barred the door from the outside. No matter how clever the moncats were, that had defeated them. It defeated human prisoners all over Avornis, and no doubt in Thervingia and the Chernagor country and the lands the Menteshe ruled, too. He just had to make sure he did it every single time.

The king was pleased with himself. Teaching any cat a trick felt like a triumph. As tricks went, this one was pretty simple. Anyone who trained dogs wouldn't have thought much of it. Still, it made Lanius wonder what else Pouncer could learn. A moncat that could manage more complicated tricks might be entertaining.

Nodding to himself, Lanius walked on down the corridor. After he got the idea, he shoved it down to the back of his mind. He didn't forget about it, but it wasn't anything he had to worry about right away. Pouncer wouldn't learn a new trick tomorrow.

That night, the Banished One visited him in a dream. The exiled god's perfectly handsome, perfectly chilly visage stared at—stared through—Lanius with what seemed to be even more contempt than usual. “So,” the Banished One said, “you seek to trifle with me again.”

Lanius kept quiet. If the Banished One had only just now learned Otus was truly cured, the king did not intend to tell him anything more.

Silence helped less than it would against a human opponent, for the Banished One's words cut like whips even in a dream. “You will fail,” he said. “You will fail, and you will die.”

“All men die,” Lanius said with such courage as he could muster.

“All men die, yes, and all beasts, too,” the Banished One snarled. “Some, though, sooner than others.”

At that, Lanius woke up, his heart pounding. He didn't forget the dream; he never forgot a dream where the Banished One came calling. He did not forget, but he did not understand, either.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Somewhere in the world, there was probably something that seemed more progress-free than a long siege. Grus supposed snail races might fill the bill. Other than a field of mollusks languidly gliding along eyestalk to eyestalk, nothing even came close. So the king felt outside of Nishevatz, anyhow.

Day followed day. Vasilko's men on the walls hurled insults at the Avornans who surrounded the city. When the Avornans came too close to the wall, the Chernagors would shoot at them. Every once in a while, somebody got hurt. Despite the occasional casualties, though, it hardly seemed like war.

When Grus grumbled about that, Hirundo laughed at him. “It could be a lot worse,” the general said. “They could be sallying every day, trying to break out. They could have ships trying to bring in more supplies. We could have a pestilence start. They could have hit us from east and west at the same time, and the army that did hit us from the east could have shown more in the way of staying power. Are those the sorts of things you'd rather see, Your Majesty?”

Laughing, Grus shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no. All at once, I'm happy enough to be bored.”

“Good for you,” Hirundo said. “They're not bored inside Nishevatz—I promise you that. They've got plenty to think about. How to break our ring around the place tops their list, if I'm any judge.”

Whatever Vasilko and his henchmen were thinking, they gave no sign of it. Spring waned. Summer came on. Here in the north, summer days were noticeably longer than at the city of Avornis—a good deal longer than they were down by the Stura, where Grus had spent so much time before becoming king. The weather grew mild, sometimes even fairly warm. For the Chernagor country, it doubtless counted as a savage heat wave.

Couriers from the capital brought news of the civil war among the Meriteshe. Grus avidly read those. The more the nomads squabbled, the happier he was. King Lanius wrote that he'd taught a moncat to do tricks. That amused Grus, anyhow, and livened up what would have been a dull day. Besides, if Lanius stayed busy with his moncats, he probably wasn't planning anything too nefarious.

One day, a letter came up to Nishevatz that hadn't started or gone through the city of Avornis. That in itself was interesting enough to make Grus open it right away. When he'd read it, he smiled to himself and then put it aside.

One of the advantages of being King of Avornis was that nobody presumed to ask him what he was smiling about. He didn't go around bragging, either, even if part of him felt like it. But if he advertised having a new bastard boy, word would get to Estrilda sooner than if he kept quiet. He wanted to put off that evil day as long as possible—forever, if he could.

Alauda had named the baby Nivalis. It wasn't a name Grus would have chosen, but he'd been up here in the north, and hadn't had any say in it. “Nivalis.” He tasted the sound of it. It wasn't so bad, not after he thought about it. From what the letter said, both the baby and Alauda were doing well. That mattered more than the name. New mothers and infants died too easily.

Pterocles answered the king's smiles with smiles of his own. Did the wizard use his sorcerous powers to divine why Grus was so pleased with himself? Or did he just remember that Alauda had been pregnant and would be having her baby about now? Grus didn't ask him. How much difference did it make, one way or the other?

Hirundo kept his usually smiling face serious. He had to remember Alauda, too. But he, unlike Pterocles, had affairs of his own wherever he found willing women. He understood discretion. Whatever questions or congratulations he might have had, he kept them to himself.

Grateful for that, Grus asked, “How hungry do you think they're getting in there?”

“They're not at the end of their tether,” Hirundo replied at once. “If they were, they'd be slipping down over the wall just to get fed. But they can't be in the best of shape, either.”

That marched well with what Grus thought himself. He'd hoped Hirundo would tell him something more optimistic. But Hirundo, however discreet, would not say something was so when he thought otherwise. That would get men who might otherwise live killed, and he was too good a soldier to do any such thing.

“Fair enough,” Grus said, eyeing the battlements of Nishevatz. Chernagors on the walls looked out at the army hemming them in. The king pointed their way. “They aren't going anywhere. We've made sure of that.”

The pyre that rose on the burning grounds was relatively modest. The white-bearded priest lying atop it wore only a green robe; he had never advanced to the yellow of the upper clergy. And yet, not only had the Arch-Hallow of Avornis come to say farewell to him, so had King Lanius.

After the usual prayers, the priest in charge of the service touched a torch to the oil-soaked wood. It caught at once and burned strongly, swallowing Ixoreus' mortal remains. “May his spirit rise with the smoke to the heavens,” the priest intoned.

“May it be so,” the mourners murmured. The small crowd began to break up. Most of the people there were priests who'd served with Ixoreus in the great cathedral. By all appearances, he'd had few real friends.

That saddened Lanius, but did not surprise him, Arch-Hallow Anser came up to him and clasped his hand, saying, “It was good of you to come.”

“A lot of knowledge died with him.” Lanius wondered if Anser had any idea how much. The king doubted it. Anser knew more—and cared more—about the hunt than about matters ecclesiastical. To his credit, he'd never pretended otherwise. Lanius went on, “You will never find another archivist who comes close to matching him.”

To his surprise, Anser smiled, shook his head, and replied, “Oh, I don't know about that, Your Majesty.”

Lanius had some notion of the abilities of Ixoreus' assistants, and a low opinion of them. “Who?” he demanded.

“Why, you, of course,” the arch-hallow said.

“Me?” The king blinked. “You do me too much credit, I think. I know the royal archives tolerably well, but Ixoreus was always my guide to the ones under the cathedral.”
And now one person fewer knows the name Milvago. That may be just as well.

“You could do the job,” Anser said. “If you had no other, I mean.”

Not so long before, Lanius had wondered how he might have earned his bread if he weren't king. Now he bowed. “If I had no other, maybe I could.” Anser meant well. Anser never meant less than well. But the job Lanius had, that of King of Avornis, was less, much less, than it might have been, which was the fault of one man and one man only—Anser's father, King Grus. Lanius brooded on that less than he had in years gone by, but he knew it was true. Still, he made himself smile and said, “As I told you before, you flatter me.”

“I don't think so,” Anser said. “It's in your blood, the way it was in Ixoreus', and you can't tell me any different. These other fellows, they'll do it, but they'll do it because someone tells them to. If it fell to you, you'd do it
right.”

Given a choice, Lanius might well have preferred being an archivist to wearing the crown. His blood did not give him that choice. He nodded to the arch-hallow. “You may be right. But you at least had one good archivist. At the palace, I've spent years sifting through chaos.”

“Before long, you may have to do that with our records, too,” Anser said.

“I hope not,” Lanius said. And yet, if the ancient document that named Milvago and told what he was were to be lost for a few more generations, would he be unhappy? He knew perfectly well he would be anything but.

His guardsmen fell in around him as he made his way back to the royal palace. The priests who'd come to Ixoreus' cremation stared at him as he left. They had to be wondering why he'd chosen to pay his personal respects to an old man good for nothing but shuffling through parchments. He always found what he was looking for? So what?

Lanius sighed and shook his head. Who but another archivist could possibly appreciate what an archivist did? Not even Anser really understood it. He'd come because he liked Ixoreus. But then, he liked everybody, just as much as everybody liked him, so how much did that prove?

On the way back to the palace, one of the guardsmen asked, “Your Majesty, what's the point of even keeping old parchments, let alone going through them?”

By the way he said it, he plainly expected the king to have no good answer for him. Several of the other guards craned their necks toward Lanius to hear what he would say. The last thing he wanted was to seem a fool in front of them. He thought for several paces before asking a question of his own. “Do you read and write, Carbo?”

“Me, Your Majesty?” Carbo laughed. “Not likely!”

“All right. Have you ever gotten into an argument with the paymaster about what he gives you every fortnight?” Lanius asked. To his relief, Carbo nodded at that. Lanius said, “You know how he settled things, then. He went through the parchments that said how much pay you get and when you got it last. That's what the archives are—they're like the pay records for the whole kingdom, as far back as anybody can remember. No matter what kind of question you ask about how things were a long time ago, the answer's in there—if the mice haven't chewed up the parchment where it was hiding.”

“But why would you care about what happened before anybody who's alive now was born?” Carbo asked.

“So in case the kingdom gets into a kind of trouble it's seen before, I'll know how it fixed things a long time ago,” Lanius answered. Carbo could see that that made sense. But no matter how much sense it made, it was only part of the truth. The main reasons Lanius liked to go exploring in the archives were that he was interested in the past for its own sake and that people hardly ever bothered him while he was poking through old parchments.

And Carbo didn't bother him the rest of the way back to the palace.
Another triumph for the archives,
he thought.

Three Chernagors stood nervously before King Grus. They'd escaped from Nishevatz with a rope they'd let down from the wall. All three were hollow-cheeked and scrawny. Through Beloyuz, Grus asked them, “How bad off for food is Nishevatz?”

They all tried to talk at once. Beloyuz pointed to the man in the middle, the tallest of the three. He spewed forth a mouthful of gutturals. “He says the city is hungry,” Beloyuz told Grus. “He says to look at him, to look at these fellows with him. He says they were strapping men when this siege started. They might as well be ghosts now, he says.”

They were, to Grus' eye, rather substantial ghosts even now. The king asked, “How hard will the Chernagors fight if we attack them?”

Again, all three talked at once. This time, they began to argue. Beloyuz said, “One of them says Vasilko's men will strike a blow or two for appearance's sake and then give up. The others say they will fight hard.”

“I heard Prince Vsevolod's name in there,” Grus said. “What did they say about him?”

Vsevolod's name in Grus' mouth was plenty to start the Chernagors talking. Whatever they said, it sounded impassioned. Beloyuz let them go on for a while before observing, “They do not think well of His Highness, Your Majesty.”

“I would have guessed that,” Grus said—an understatement, if anything. “But what do they think of fighting on the same side as the Banished One?”

When Beloyuz translated that into the Chernagor tongue, the three escapees began arguing again. Without a word of the language, Grus had no trouble figuring that out. One of them said something that touched a nerve, too, for Beloyuz shouted angrily at him. He shouted back. Before long, all four Chernagors were yelling at the top of their lungs.

“What do they say?” Grus asked. Beloyuz paid him no attention. “What do they say?” he asked again. Still no response.
“What do they say?”
he roared in a voice that might have carried across a battlefield.

For a heartbeat, he didn't think even that would remind Beloyuz he was there. Then, reluctantly, the noble broke away from the other Chernagors. “They say vile things, insulting things, Your Majesty,” he said, his voice full of indignation. “One of them, the vile dog, says better the Banished One than Vsevolod. You ought to burn a man who says things like that.”