The Scepter's Return (60 page)

A knock on the bedchamber door in the middle of the night always meant trouble. Grus knew that. Good news would wait until sunup. Bad news? Bad news cried out to be heard right away.

“What do they want?” Estrilda asked sleepily.

“I don't know.” Clad in only his nightshirt, Grus was already getting out of bed. “I'd better find out, though.” He walked over to the door and asked, “Who's there? What's the word?”

“It's Serinus, Your Majesty,” said the man on the other side, and Grus relaxed, recognizing the captain's voice. Serinus went on, “A courier's just come in from the south. Some kind of trouble down there—I don't know exactly what, but it didn't sound good.”

“Oh, by the gods!” Grus exclaimed. And it might have been by the gods, too. Had the Banished One found some way around the concessions Grus had forced from him with the Scepter of Mercy? Were the Menteshe kicking up their heels even without any help from the exiled god? Or had some ambitious and stupid noble decided this was a good time to rebel? “I'm coming,” Grus added, and unbarred the door. “Where is this fellow, anyway?”

“Near the front entrance, Your Majesty,” Serinus answered. “He's hopping around like he's got to run for the jakes any time now.”

“He can do that
after
I've talked to him,” Grus said. “Come on. What are you waiting for?” He hurried up the corridor.

So did Serinus, who hadn't really been waiting for anything. A couple of squads of soldiers, all of them armed and armored, fell in with the guards officer and the king. But for their thumping boots and jingling chainmail, the hallways in the palace were very quiet. Grus wondered what the hour was.

He also suddenly wondered why, at whatever hour this was, so many soldiers should appear as though from nowhere. Suspicion flared in him. “What's going on here?” he demanded.

“This way, Your Majesty,” Serinus said as though he hadn't spoken.

“Wait a minute.” Grus stopped. “For one thing, you didn't answer me. What
is
going on? And, for another, this isn't the way to the front hall.”

“Well, so it isn't.” Serinus smiled. It was not the sort of smile Grus wanted to see—more the sort a wolf would have worn just before it sprang. The young officer bowed to Grus. “But you see, Your Majesty, that's part of what's going on.” He nodded to the soldiers. The ones who carried swords drew them. The ones who carried spears pointed them at Grus. “You can come along with us quietly or”—he shrugged—“the servants will have to clean a mess off the floor. Up to you.”

“You can't do this!” Grus blurted. “You can't expect to get away with it, either.”

“Oh, but we can. And we do. And we will.” Serinus sounded as though he had all the answers. At the moment, he certainly had more of them than Grus did.

“Where do you aim to take me?” Grus asked. In his nightshirt, without even an eating knife on his belt—without even a belt!—he couldn't do much about it no matter where it was. His best hope was that somebody would come by and notice this … this kidnapping. But no one except Serinus and his men seemed to be up and about.

“Why, to the Maze, of course.” Serinus certainly had the answer to that question. “You've sent enough people there yourself. High time you find out what it's like, don't you think?”

Grus thought nothing of the sort. Still more outraged than afraid, he filled his lungs to shout for help. Some of the soldiers saw him doing it. They shook their heads. A couple of them brandished their weapons. He didn't shout.

“Smart fellow.” Serinus nodded approval. “They say blood is so hard to get out from between these little mosaic tiles.” His voice lost its good humor and assumed the snap of command. “Now get moving. If anybody sees us and tries to stop us, you'll be the one who's sorriest. I promise you that.”

Believing him, Grus did get moving. He couldn't help asking, “Who put you up to this? King Lanius?”

Serinus laughed uproariously. So did his henchmen. “By the gods in the heavens, no,” the officer answered, laughing still. “We serve King Ortalis.”

“King—?” Associating his son with sovereignty was so ridiculous, Grus couldn't do it even now. He wanted to laugh himself, at the absurdity of the idea. He wanted to, but he couldn't. Ortalis and these men evidently didn't think it was absurd.
I should have paid more attention to Hirundo,
Grus thought, much too late for it to do him any good.

Serinus and the soldiers hustled him out of the palace. They bundled him onto a horse and tied his legs beneath him. They had horses, too. Out of the city they rode, as slick as boiled asparagus.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Your Majesty, the other king wants to see you in the small dining room as soon as you can get there,” a guard outside Lanius' chamber told him as soon as he opened the door.

“Does he?” Lanius said around a yawn. The soldier nodded. Lanius yawned again, then asked, “Did he tell you what it was about?”

“No, Your Majesty, but I think you'd better hurry. I've got the feeling it's important,” the guard answered.

He knew more than he was letting on. Lanius didn't have to be a genius to figure that out. The king wondered if he ought to press the soldier. In the end, he decided not to. He would find out soon enough from Grus. He wondered what had happened. The other king hadn't summoned him like this in quite a while.

Scratching his head, Lanius went to the room where he usually ate breakfast. Ortalis sat there, sipping on a cup of wine and fidgeting a little. “Oh, hello,” Lanius said. “The guard must have gotten his signals crossed. I thought your father would be here.”

“What did he say?” Ortalis asked. The silver goblet shook in his hand—not very much, but enough for Lanius to notice. “What
exactly
did he say?”

Lanius thought back. He prided himself on being able to get things like that straight. “He said the other king wanted to see me in here as soon as possible.” That wasn't word for word, but it caught the meaning well enough.

Ortalis nodded and smiled—a surprisingly nervous smile for so early in the day. “Good. He did get it right then,” he said. “That's what I told him to tell you, all right.”

“What
you
told him to tell me?” Lanius' wits weren't working as well as he wished they were.

“What I told him to tell you, yes.” Ortalis sounded a little more confident this time. Without rising from his stool, he struck a pose. “I'm the new King of Avornis.”

“You're what?” No, Lanius wasn't at his best. He didn't laugh in Ortalis' face, but held back only by the tiniest of margins. “What's happened to your father?” That worry was the main thing that made him not show everything he was thinking.

He waited for Ortalis to tell him Grus was desperately ill, or even that he'd died in the night. Grus had seemed in good health the last time Lanius saw him, but the other king wasn't a young man. Such things could happen, and happen all too easily.

But, a certain ferocious glee in his voice, Ortalis answered, “I packed him off to the Maze, that's what.”

Now Lanius frankly stared. “You … sent your father to the Maze?” He couldn't believe it. Grus had overcome every foe in sight, from rebellious Avornan nobles to King Dagipert of Thervingia to the Banished One himself. How could he possibly have fallen to his own son, a far less dangerous opponent?

As soon as Lanius asked himself the question that way, the likely answer became clear. As far as Grus was concerned, would Ortalis have been a visible opponent at all? Grus had always made allowances for his legitimate son, and never taken him very seriously. He had to be regretting that now.

“You'd best believe I did,” Ortalis growled. “He had it coming, too. This is
my
kingdom now, by Olor's beard.”

“Yours?” Lanius said. “What about me?”

“What about you? I'll tell you what about you,” his brother-in-law answered. “You can be king, too, if you want. You can go on wearing the crown, if you want. Whenever my old man said, ‘Frog,' you'd hop. As long as you keep on hopping for me, everything will be fine.” He smiled, as though to say he was sure Lanius wouldn't mind an arrangement like that.

Back when Grus first put the crown on his own head, all the power
had
been in his hands. Lanius had been a figurehead, nothing more. Grus would have gotten rid of him if he could have done it without inflaming people by ending Avornis' ancient dynasty. He hadn't even bothered pretending anything different.

Little by little, though, Lanius had gathered bits and pieces of power into his own hands. Grus' going out on campaign so often hadn't hurt things, not one bit. Grus had needed someone who could run things here in the capital while he was away. To whom else would he have given the job? Ortalis? Ortalis hadn't wanted it. And so it came to Lanius, and more and more came with it.

Had Ortalis ever bothered to notice Lanius really was a king in his own right? It seemed unlikely.

Lanius almost asked him,
And what happens if I don't feel like hopping?
He almost did, but he didn't. The look on Ortalis' face gave him all the answer he needed.
If you don't, I'll hurt you. I'll enjoy hurting you, too. Have you got any idea how much I'll enjoy it?

What Lanius did say was, “I'll work with you the way I worked with your father on one condition.”

“Condition?” Ortalis' face had been ugly before. It got uglier now. “What kind of condition? You don't tell me what to do, Lanius. No one tells me what to do now. I've had a bellyful of that from everybody.”

“This isn't much,” Lanius said, which might have been true and might not have.

“What is it, then?” Suspicion still clotted Ortalis' voice.

“If the Scepter of Mercy accepts you, I will, too,” Lanius said. “Your father could use it. So can I. If you can, too, then I know you'll be good for Avornis, and I won't say a word about anything at all.” After a moment, inspired, he added, “And the soldiers will want to see that you can wield it, too. They spent a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of blood bringing it back from the Menteshe country, you know.”

Odds were Ortalis knew nothing of the sort. He hadn't wanted to know anything about the Scepter. But he just laughed now. “Is
that
all you want?” he said. “Sure, I'll do that. Like the Scepter cares who's holding it! Whenever you want, I'll do it, and the soldiers can stare as much as they please. Does that suit you, Your Majesty?” He made a mockery of Lanius' title.

“That suits me fine, Your Majesty.” Lanius also mocked his title, but Ortalis never realized it.

Lanius wondered whether he really would, whether he really could, accept Ortalis as King of Avornis if the Scepter of Mercy did.
If the Scepter does, what choice have I got?
he asked himself. However little he liked it, he didn't see that he had any.

Grus had been through the Maze many times—always on the way to somewhere else. He'd sent people here for good, but he'd never imagined he would come here for good one of these days himself.

The Maze was, when you got right down to it, a dreary place. River turned to swamp turned to mudflat. It was heaven on earth for mosquitoes and gnats and midges. Grus supposed it was also pretty good if you happened to be something like a heron or a turtle or a frog. If you were a man … The Maze was green enough, but most of it was a sickly green, not a vibrant one. Besides being full of biting bugs, the air smelled stagnant.

“You won't get away with this,” Grus told his captors as they rowed him along in a small boat.

“Seems to me we already have,” the officer in charge of them answered calmly. “As soon as we got you out of the city of Avornis without running into trouble, the game was ours. We'll pack you away in a nice, quiet monastery, and the outside world can start forgetting about you. People get forgotten all the time.”

“And suppose I don't feel like becoming a monk?” Grus asked.

The officer—his name was Gygis—only shrugged. “Then we tie something heavy to your hands and feet, we find a place where the water's a little deeper than usual, and we dump you over the side. Our worries are over either way. You figure out what you want.”

“Ortalis
gave the orders for this?” Grus couldn't believe his son had brought off such a smoothly efficient coup.

“Of course. Who else?” Gygis seemed innocence personified. That made Grus wonder whether he and his fellow officers were the tail or the dog in this plot. Could they use Ortalis for a figurehead? Why not? Grus had used Lanius as one for years. Gygis went on, “So what'll it be? The monastic life or a short one? You'd better make up your mind in a hurry.”

No one had told Grus what to do like that since his father died. He noticed Gygis wasn't calling him
Your Majesty.
In spite of himself, Grus laughed. He'd wondered what he had left to do as king after recovering the Scepter of Mercy. Maybe the answer was
nothing
all along.

“Well?” Gygis demanded, obviously suspicious of that laugh. “Which way do we do it?”

“With the choice you gave me, being a monk looks better and better all of a sudden,” Grus answered. And that was, perhaps, truer than either he or Gygis fully realized.

Ortalis' henchman grinned a crooked grin. “You see? You're not a fool after all.”

Oh, yes, I am,
Grus thought. Lanius wrote Ortalis was keeping dangerous company. Hirundo came and warned him about his son. Everyone saw trouble coming except him. And everyone was right, too.
I always was too soft on Ortalis.

“Plenty of people before you have made the same choice. Nothing to be ashamed about,” Gygis said, trying to be soothing. “Why, when you get to the monastery, you'll probably run into people you know.”