The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Well, well.” Grus eyed the parchment he’d just unrolled. “King Lanius came through for us.”

Hirundo looked over his shoulder. “He sure did,” the general agreed. “This was in the archives?”

“That’s what the note with it says,” Grus answered.

“If we knew this once upon a time, I wonder why we forgot,” Hirundo said.

“A spell of peace probably lasted longer than any one man’s career,” Grus said. “The people who knew wouldn’t have passed it on to the younger officers who needed to know, and so the chain got broken.”

“That makes sense,” Hirundo said.

“Which doesn’t mean it’s true, of course,” Grus said. “How many things that seem to make perfect sense turn out not to have anything to do with what looks sensible?”

“Oh, a few,” his general replied. “Yes, just a few.”

“We don’t have to worry about tracking down the whys and wherefores here,” Grus said with a certain relief. “If what Lanius says in that note is true, it happened a long time ago.”

“Now that we have what we need, though, let’s see what we can do about giving the Menteshe a surprise,” Hirundo said.

“Oh, yes.” Grus nodded. “That’s the idea.”

The drums started thumping at sunset that day. In the evening twilight, Grus peered down at the list of calls Lanius had sent him. Three beats, pause, two beats… That meant west. Five quick beats was assemble. Having found those meanings, the king started laughing. Knowing what the drums meant helped him less than he’d hoped it would. Yes, Ulash’s men were to assemble somewhere off to the west. But where?

Grus snapped his fingers. He didn’t know; this wasn’t a part of Avornis with which he was intimately familiar. But the army had soldiers from all parts of Avornis in it. He called for runners, gave them quick orders, and sent them on their way through the encampment.

Inside half an hour, they came back with four soldiers, all of them from farms and towns within a few miles of where the army had camped. They bowed low before the king. “Never mind that nonsense,” Grus said impatiently, which made their eyes widen in surprise. “If you were going to gather a large force of horsemen somewhere within a day’s ride west of here, where would you do it?”

They looked surprised again, but put their heads together even so. After a few minutes of talk, they all nodded. One of them pointed southwest. “Your Majesty, there’s a meadow just this side of the Aternus, before it runs into the Cephisus.” The latter was one of the Nine. The soldier went on, “It’s got good grazing—Olor’s beard, sir, it’s got wonderful grazing—the whole year around. It’s about half a day’s ride that way.”

“Can you guide us to it?” Grus asked. The man nodded. So did his comrades. And so did the king. “All right, then. Every one of you will do that come morning. You’ll all have a reward, too. Keep quiet about this until then, though.”

The men loudly promised they would. Grus hoped so, though he wasn’t overoptimistic. His father had always said two men could keep a secret if one of them was dead, and that, if three men tried, one was likely a fool and the other two spies. After leaving a farm not impossibly far from here, his father had come to the city of Avornis and served as a royal guard, so he’d seen enough intrigue to know what he was talking about.

After sending away the soldiers, Grus summoned Hirundo and Pterocles. He explained what he had in mind. “Can we do this?” he asked.

“A little risky,” Hirundo said. “More than a little, maybe. We’ll look like idiots if the Menteshe catch on. We may look like dead idiots if they catch on.”

Grus nodded. He’d already figured that out for himself. He turned to Pterocles. “Can you mask us, or mask some of us?”

“Some of us,” the wizard answered. “It would have to be some of us. All?” He rolled his eyes. “That would be an impossibly large job for any human wizard.”

“Do the best you can,” Grus told him. “I don’t expect you to do more than a human wizard’s capable of.”

“All right, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said.

“You’re going ahead with this scheme, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

“Yes,” Grus said. “If it works, we’ll give Ulash’s men a nasty surprise.” And if it doesn’t, they’ll give us one. He refused to worry—too much—about that. By its nature, war involved risk. The gamble here seemed good to the king. If they won, they would win a lot.

They rode out before sunrise the next morning, the men from close by leading the two divisions into which Grus had split the army. Out of a certain sense of fairness, Grus sent Pterocles off with the division Hirundo led. The king hadn’t ridden far before regretting his generosity. If Pterocles had come with him, he would have had a better chance of staying alive.

No help for it now, though. As Grus had told his guides to do, they led him and his men on a looping track that would take them around to strike the Menteshe from the west—if the Menteshe were there. Whether they struck them at the same time as Hirundo’s men did was going to be largely a matter of luck.

One of the guards pointed. “There, Your Majesty! Look!”

They’d guessed right. Prince Ulash’s nomads were gathering on the meadow. Grus knew exactly the moment when they realized the large force approaching wasn’t theirs but Avornan. So ants boiled after their hill was kicked.

“Forward!” Grus shouted to the trumpeters. As the fierce horn calls clove the air, he set spurs to his gelding. The horse whinnied in pained protest. Grus roweled it again. It bounded ahead. He drew his sword. The sun flashed fire from the blade. “Forward!” he yelled once more.

Some of the Menteshe started shooting. Others fled. King Grus doubted the nomads were under any sort of unified command. Each chieftain—maybe even each horseman—decided for himself what he would do. That made the Menteshe hard for Avornis to control. It also made them hard for their own warlords to control.

The Avornans shot back as soon as they came within range. A few of them had already pitched from the saddle. But Ulash’s warriors began falling, too. Soon the Menteshe still hale started fleeing. They had never seen any shame in running away when the odds seemed against them.

Grus brandished the sword, though he had yet to come within fifty feet of a foe. Where were Hirundo and Pterocles and the other division? Had the wizard masked them so well, they’d disappeared altogether? Had the Banished One swept them off the field, as a man might have removed them from a gaming board? Or had their guides simply gotten lost?

No sooner had Grus begun to worry than the other Avornan force appeared, as suddenly as though a fog in front of them had blown away. His own men burst into cheers. The Menteshe, suddenly caught between hammer and anvil, cried out in dismay. They all tried to flee now, shooting over their shoulders as they desperately galloped off.

A lot of the nomads did escape. Grus never had to use his sword. Somehow, none of that mattered much. Many Menteshe lay dead. Looking around, the king could see that his own force hadn’t suffered badly.

Hirundo saw the same thing. “We hurt ’em this time, your Majesty,” the general said, riding up to Grus.

“That’s what we set out to do,” Grus replied, though he knew the Avornans didn’t always do what they set out to do against the Menteshe. “Where’s Pterocles? He kept you hidden, all right.”

“He sure did,” Hirundo said enthusiastically. “Even I didn’t know where we were until just before we got here.” He looked around, then scratched his head. “I don’t know where he’s gotten to now, though.” His shrug might have been apology.

Grus also eyed the field. His men, swords drawn, were moving over it. They plundered the dead Menteshe and cut the throats of the wounded nomads they found. Had the fight gone against them, the invaders would have done the same, though they would have reserved some Avornans for torment before death’s mercy came. Here a trooper held up a fine sword with a glittering edge, there another displayed a purse nicely heavy with coins, in another place a man threw on a fur-edged cape not badly bloodstained.

Several Avornans picked up recurved Menteshe bows. One fitted an arrow to the string, then tried to draw the shaft back to his ear. At the first pull, he didn’t use enough strength. His friends jeered. Gritting his teeth, he tried again. This time, the bow bent. He turned it away from his fellows and let fly. They all exclaimed in surprise at how far the arrow flew.

“There’s the wizard!” Hirundo pointed as Pterocles emerged from a clump of bushes. “I thought the rascal had gone and disappeared himself this time.”

When Grus waved, Pterocles nodded back and made his way toward the king. Grus clasped his hand and slapped him on the back. Pterocles, none too steady on his feet, almost fell over. Holding him up, Grus said, “Well done!”

“Er—thank you, Your Majesty.” Pterocles did not sound like a man who’d just helped win a good-sized victory. He sounded more like one who’d had too much to drink and was about to sick up much of what he’d poured down. His greenish color suggested the same.

“Are you all right?” Grus asked.

Pterocles shrugged. “If you love me, Your Majesty—or even if you hate me, but not too much—do me the courtesy of never asking me to use that masking spell against the Menteshe again.” He gulped, and then ran back into the bushes from which he’d just emerged. When he came out again, his face was deathly pale, but he looked better. He might have gotten rid of some of what ailed him.

“Your spell here helped us win,” Grus said, surprised and puzzled. “Why not use it again?”

“Why not?” The wizard took a deep breath—almost a sob. “I’ll tell you why not, Your Majesty. I was holding the spell against the Menteshe horsemen. Thus far, well and good. Then I was holding it against Ulash’s wizards, which was not such an easy thing, but I managed well enough. But soon I was also holding it against the Banished One—and gods spare me from ever having to do that again.” He sat down on the ground; his legs didn’t seem to want to hold him up anymore.

“But you did it.” The king squatted beside him.

“Oh, yes. I did it.” Pterocles’ voice was hollow, not proud. “He didn’t take the spell seriously, you might say, until too late. By the time he grew fully aware of it and realized it might hurt his followers, it already had. He doesn’t make mistakes twice. He doesn’t make many mistakes once.”

And what would you expect from a foe who was a god? Grus wondered. But Pterocles already knew about that—not all about it, but enough.

“It will be as you say,” Grus promised, and the wizard’s shoulders sagged with relief.

The forest smelled clean and green. When Bang Lanius was in the city of Avornis, he didn’t notice the mingled stinks of dung and smoke and unwashed people crowded too close together. When he left, which wasn’t often enough, the air seemed perfumed in his nostrils. He relished each inhalation and regretted every breath he had to let out. He also regretted having to go back to the capital when this day ended. He knew he would smell the stench he usually ignored.

And part of him regretted letting Arch-Hallow Anser talk him into coming along on another hunt. After the first one the year before, he’d vowed never to go hunting again. But this excursion had promised to be too interesting for him to refuse. For Prince Ortalis also rode with Anser—and the prince and the arch-hallow had quarreled years before Lanius disappointed Anser by being immune to the thrills of the chase.

King Grus, of course, was down in the southern provinces fighting the Menteshe. And yet, though he’d gone hundreds of miles, his influence still lingered over the city of Avornis—and, indeed, over the hunting party. Here were his legitimate son, his bastard, and his son-in-law. Had he not taken the crown, would any of the three younger men even have met the other two? Lanius doubted it. He would have been just as well pleased never to have made Ortalis’ acquaintance, but it was years too late to worry about that.

Some of their beaters were men Anser regularly used in his sport— lean, silent fellows in leather jerkins and caps who slipped through the trees with the silent skill of practiced poachers. The rest were Lanius’ royal bodyguards. The men who served Anser sneered at their jingling mailshirts. The bodyguards pretended not to hear. They were along to protect King Lanius first. If they happened to flush out a stag or a wildcat, so much the better.

Lanius suspected that Anser’s beaters might end up beaten after the hunting party went back to the city of Avornis. The bodyguards, sensitive to the royal mood, didn’t want to spoil the day. But they weren’t used to being mocked, and they had long memories for slights. The men who put Lanius in mind of poachers seemed strong and tough enough, but the royal guardsmen were the best Avornis had.

A sharp, staccato drumming high up in an oak made Lanius’ head whip around. Laughing, Anser said, “It’s nothing—only a woodpecker.”

“What kind?” the king asked. “One of the big black ones with the red crest, or the small ones that are all black and white stripes, or a flicker with a black mustache?”

Anser blinked. Ortalis laughed. “Trust Lanius to know about woodpeckers,” he said. Lanius listened for the malice that usually informed Ortalis’ words. He didn’t hear it. Maybe not hearing it was wishful thinking on his part. Or maybe being married to Limosa agreed with Grus’ son—at least so far. And Lanius didn’t know as much about woodpeckers, or birds in general, as he would have liked to, but he was learning.

The drumming rang through the woods again. One of the soft-moving men in a jerkin said, “Your Majesty, that’s the noise those small, stripy woodpeckers make. The others, the bigger birds, drum more slowly.”

“Thank you,” Lanius said.

“Yes, thank you,” Anser agreed. “I’ve found something out, too. Who would have wondered about woodpeckers?”

“Let’s push on,” Ortalis said. “We’ve still got a lot of hunting ahead of us, woodpeckers or no woodpeckers.”

Anser’s beater vanished among the trees, to drive game back toward the men with rank enough to kill it. Some of Lanius’ guardsmen went with them. More, though, stayed behind with the king. “They take no chances, do they?” Anser said.

“We don’t get paid to take chances, Your Arch-Reverence.” A guard spoke up before the king could.

A stag bounded past. Ortalis had his bow drawn and an arrow hissing through the air before Lanius even began to raise his bow. I am a hopeless dub at this, Lanius thought. I will always be a hopeless dub at this. Ortalis, meanwhile, whooped. “That’s a hit!” he called, and loped after the deer.

In the palace, Grus’ legitimate son seemed as useless a mortal as any Lanius had ever seen. Here in the field, he proved to know what he was doing. Following in his wake, Lanius saw blood splashed on leaves and bushes. He did not care for the pursuit of wounded animals. Killing beasts cleanly was one thing. Inflicting such suffering as this on them struck him as something else again.

It was something else for Ortalis, too—something he relished, as his excited chatter showed. Lanius would have sneered at his bloodlust— Lanius had sneered at his bloodlust in the past—but he’d also seen Anser get excited in the chase. The arch-hallow was mild as milk when he wasn’t hunting. The king didn’t understand the transformation. Understand it or not, though, he couldn’t deny it was real.

“Nice shot, Your Highness,” one of the beaters told Ortalis. “He went down right quick there.” It hadn’t seemed quick to Lanius, who brushed a twig from his hair as he came up. He didn’t think it had seemed quick to the stag, either.

Ortalis’ eyes glowed. He knelt beside the fallen deer. Its sides still heaved feebly as it fought to suck in air. Bloody froth showed at each nostril; Ortalis’ arrow must have punctured a lung. Drawing a belt knife, Ortalis cut the stag’s throat. More blood yet poured out onto his hands and the ground. “Ah,” he said softly, as he might have after a woman. Lanius’ stomach lurched. He turned away, hoping breakfast would stay down.

It did. When he looked back, Ortalis was plunging the knife into the deer’s belly to butcher it. The animal’s eyes were opaque and lusterless now. That obvious proof of death helped ease the king’s conscience along with his nausea. Ortalis went right on with the butchering. He seemed to enjoy it as much as the killing.

Looking up from the work, he remarked, “It’s a bloody job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Lanius managed to nod. It wasn’t that Ortalis was wrong. But did a butcher have to do his work with such fiendish gusto? Lanius doubted that. He’d doubted it for years.

Getting back on the trail was a relief for him, if not for Ortalis. Anser had the first shot at the next stag they saw, had it and missed. He cursed good-naturedly, but with enough pointed comments to startle anyone who, after hearing him, might suddenly learn he was Arch-Hallow of Avornis.

Nodding to Lanius, Anser said, “Next one we see, Your Majesty, you can let fly first.”

“That’s all right,” Lanius said; the honor was one he would gladly have done without. But both the arch-hallow and Prince Ortalis sent him looks full of horror. Even his own guardsmen clucked disapprovingly. Without even knowing it, he’d broken some hunt custom. He did his best to repair things, adding, “I just don’t want a deer to get away—I’m not much of a shot.” The last part of that was true, the first part one of the bigger lies he’d ever told.

But, because he had a reputation for sticking to the truth no matter what, both Anser and Ortalis accepted his words. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” Anser said. “I missed, and the world won’t end if you do, too, as long as you try your best.”

“Of course,” said the king, who still couldn’t stomach the idea of shooting at an animal for the sport of it.

But, before long, he had to try. A magnificent stag stood at the edge of a clearing twenty or thirty yards away. The wind blew from the stag to the hunters; the beast, which depended so much on its sensitive nose, had not the slightest notion they were there. Reluctantly, Lanius drew his bow and let fly. The arrow flew alarmingly straight. For a bad heartbeat, he feared he’d actually hit what he aimed at. The shaft zipped over the deer’s back and thudded into the pale, parchment-barked trunk of a birch behind it.

The stag bounded away. But Anser and Ortalis’ bowstrings twanged in the same instant. One of those shafts struck home. The stag crashed to the ground in the middle of a leap. The arch-hallow and the prince both cried out in triumph.

And they both turned to Lanius. “Well shot!” Ortalis told him. “You spooked it perfectly. Now Anser and I have to see who got the kill.”

By the time they reached the carcass, the deer, mercifully, was already dead. It had two arrows in it—one in the throat, the other through the ribs. Ortalis had loosed the first, Anser the second. They began arguing over who deserved credit for bringing down the stag. “Perhaps,” Lanius said diffidently, “you should share the—” He broke off. He’d almost said blame. That was what he thought of the whole business, but he knew it wouldn’t do.

Even though he’d stopped, prince and arch-hallow both stared at him as though he’d started spouting the Chernagors’ throaty language. Then they went back to their argument. He wondered if he’d violated some other unwritten rule of the hunt.

Thinking of unwritten rules made him wonder if there were written ones. Poking through the archives trying to find out would be more fun than looking at flies beginning to settle in the blood that had spilled from the stag, and to walk across the eyeballs that could no longer blink them away.

Again, Ortalis got the privilege—if that was what it was—of butchering the deer. He made the gory job as neat as he could. Even so, Lanius saw, or thought he saw, a gleam of satisfaction in his brother-in-law’s eyes. It could be worse, the king thought. If he were hunting women, the way he’d wanted to, he’d butcher them after he made the kill.

He shivered. No, he didn’t think Ortalis had been joking about that, not at all. And he was anything but reassured when Grus’ legitimate son, after wiping his gory hands on the grass, licked the last of the stag’s blood from his fingers. Ortalis smacked his lips, too, as though at fine wine.

Anser and the beaters seemed to find nothing wrong with that. Lanius told himself he was worrying too much. He also told himself he would be glad to eat the venison the hunt was bringing home. He believed that. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself believe the other.

Sestus lay by the Arzus River. When Grus’ army reached the city, the Menteshe had had it under siege for some little while. Their idea of besieging a town was different from Grus’ at Nishevatz. They didn’t aim to storm the walls. They had no catapults or battering rams to knock down its towers. But that didn’t mean they’d had no chance of forcing the place to yield. If the royal army hadn’t come when it did, they probably would have done just that.

They’d ravaged the farms around Sestus. Not a cow, not a sheep, not a pig survived. Not many farmers did, either. The Menteshe had trampled or burned most of the wheatfields within a day’s ride of the town. Vineyards and olive groves and almond orchards also went under the ax or the torch. The Arzus was not a wide stream. Menteshe on the banks had peppered with arrows the ships that tried to bring grain into Sestus. They hadn’t stopped all of them, but they had made skippers most reluctant to run their gauntlet. Little by little, Sestus had started starving.

Prince Ulash’s men didn’t put up much of a fight when the Avornan army thundered down on them. The nomads simply rode away. Why not? They could afflict some other city, and the devastation they’d left behind remained. Sestus would have a hard and hungry time of it now, regardless of whether it had opened its gates to the Menteshe.

Riding through fields black with soot or prematurely yellow and dead, Grus saw that at once. It was, understandably, less obvious to the local governor, a bald baron named Butastur. He rode out from the city to welcome the king. “By the gods, Your Majesty, it’s good to see you here!” he said, beaming. “Another couple of weeks of those demons prowling around out there and we’d‘ve been eating the grass that grows between the ruts in the street and boiling shoeleather for soup.”

“I’m glad it won’t come to that.” Grus wasn’t beaming; he was grim. His wave encompassed the ravaged fields. “Only Queen Quelea can judge how much you’ll be able to salvage from this.”

Butastur nodded. “Oh, yes. We’ll be a while getting over this, no doubt about it. But now you’ll be able to bring supplies in to us from places where the cursed Menteshe haven’t reached.”

He sounded as confident as a little boy who was sure his father could reach out, pluck the moon from the sky, and hand it to him on a string. Grus hated to disillusion him, but felt he had no choice. “We’ll be able to do something for you, Baron,” he said, “but I’m not sure how much. Sestus isn’t the only hungry city, and yours aren’t the only fields the nomads have ruined. This is a big invasion—look how far north you are, and we’re only now reaching you.”

By Butastur’s expression, he cared not a pin for any other part of Avornis unless it could send him food. “Surely you can’t mean you’re going to let us famish here!” he cried. “What have we done to deserve such a fate?”

“You haven’t done anything to deserve it,” Grus answered. “I hope it doesn’t happen. But I don’t know if I can do all I’d like to help you, because this isn’t the only town in the kingdom that’s suffering.”

He might as well have saved his breath, for all the effect his words had on Butastur. “Ruined!” the baron said, and tugged at his bushy beard as though he wanted to get credit for pulling chunks out by the roots. “Ruined by the cursed barbarians, and even my sovereign will do nothing to relieve my city’s suffering!”

“You seem to misunderstand me on purpose,” Grus said.

Butastur, by now, wasn’t even listening to him, let alone understanding. “Ruined!” he cried once again, more piteously than ever. “How shall we ever recover from the ravages of the Menteshe?”

Grus lost his temper. He’d just paid in blood to drive the nomads away from Sestus, and the local governor seemed not to have noticed. “How will you recover?” he growled. “Shutting up and buckling down to repair the damage makes a good start. I told you I’d do what I could for you. I just don’t know how much that’s going to be. Am I plain enough, Your Excellency?”

Butastur flinched away from him as though he were one of Prince Ulash’s torturers. “Yes, yes, Your Majesty,” he said. But he didn’t speak from conviction. He just didn’t dare argue. Grus had seen plenty of palace servants who yielded to authority like that—not because it was right, but because it was authority, and something worse would happen to them if they didn’t.

Crossing the Arzus in pursuit of the Menteshe came as nothing but a relief. When the army camped that evening, the king turned to Hirundo and said, “I can fight the nomads. But what am I supposed to do when someone on my own side makes me want to hang him from the tallest tower in his town?”

“You could go ahead and hang him,” the general answered. “You’d have a lot fewer idiots bothering you afterwards.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Grus said. “But if I start hanging all the fools in Avornis, how many people will be left alive in six months’ time? And who hangs me, for being fool enough to start hanging fools in the first place?”

“A nice question,” Hirundo said. “If you start hanging fools, who would dare rebel against you and confess that he’s one of those fools?” He grinned.

“Stop that!” Grus said. “You’re making my head ache, and I couldn’t even enjoy getting drunk first.”

The next morning, the Avornans rode on. The bands of Menteshe had melted away during the night. But for burned-out fields and farmhouses, no one would have known Ulash’s men had come so far. Ahead, though, more plumes of black smoke rising into the sky said they were still busy at their work of destruction. Grus tasted smoke every time he breathed. He felt it in his lungs, and in his stinging eyes.

He sent scouts out by squadrons, fearing the Menteshe weren’t far away. As the main force of Avornans advanced, he waited for one scout or another to come pelting back, bringing word the nomads had attacked his squadrons. He was ready to strike and strike hard.

But, to his surprise and more than a little to his disappointment, nothing like that happened. His army pushed on through the ravaged countryside, hardly seeing any Menteshe at all. Maybe Ulash’s men were fleeing back toward the Stura. Grus wanted to believe they were. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

It was midafternoon before he realized he hadn’t heard anything at all from one scout squadron since the early morning. He pointed west, where they’d ridden when the army broke camp. “Are things going so very well over that way, do you suppose?” he asked Hirundo.

“They could be,” the general answered. “We’ve had a pretty quiet day.” But he fidgeted when Grus eyed him. “All right, Your Majesty. It doesn’t seem likely.”

“Send out another squadron,” Grus said. “If the first one’s all right, you can call me a fussy old woman. But if it’s not…” If it’s not, it’s liable to be too late to do the men any good. Why didn’t I start worrying sooner?

Off trotted the horsemen. Grus’ unease grew. It reminded him of the feeling he got when someone was staring at him from behind. He wished he hadn’t had that thought. It made him suddenly look back over his shoulder, again and again. Naturally, no one was looking his way—until his antics drew other people’s attention.

After a while, impatient and nervous, the king summoned Pterocles. “Can you tell me anything about those scouts?” he demanded.

“I don’t know, Your Majesty. Let me see what I can divine.” Pterocles set to work, murmuring a charm. Grus recognized the chant; it was the sort of spell wizards used to find lost coins or strayed sheep. He’d thought Pterocles would use something fancier, but if a simple charm would serve…

Pterocles hadn’t finished the spell when he broke off with a gasp of horror. His long, lean face went white as bone, leaving him looking like nothing so much as an appalled skull. Before Grus could even ask him what was wrong, he doubled over and was noisily and violently ill.

Grus wondered if he’d eaten something bad, or perhaps been poisoned. Before he could do more than stare, galloping hoofbeats distracted him. “Your Majesty!” shouted the leader of the party Hirundo had ordered out after the missing scouts. “Oh, Your Majesty! By the gods, Your Majesty!”

“I’m here,” Grus called, now torn. “What is it? Did you find them?”

The captain nodded. He was as pale as Pterocles, and looked not far from sickness himself. “Yes, Your Majesty.” He gulped and went even paler. “We found them.”

“And?” Grus said.

“I will not speak of this,” the captain said. “I will not. If you order me to, I will take you to them. If you do not order me, I will never go near that spot again. Never!” The last word was almost a scream. He shuddered.

“Whatever this is, I had better see it,” Grus said. “Take me there at once, Captain. At once, do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Your Majesty.” The officer shuddered again. “I do not thank you for the order, but I will obey it. Come, then.”

“Guards,” Pterocles croaked. “Take guards.”

That hadn’t crossed Grus’ mind. It was plainly a good idea, though. A squadron of bodyguards surrounded him as he rode with the officer toward… what?

Coming up over the swell of a low rise, he first saw, from perhaps a quarter of a mile, that the first squadron of scouts and their horses were down, with some of the would-be rescuers still by them. He was braced for that much of a disaster. He hadn’t thought he’d lose a whole squadron of scouts, but it seemed to have happened. “The Menteshe caught them?” he asked.

“Yes.” The captain managed a ghastly nod. “The Menteshe caught them, Your Majesty.”

As Grus rode closer, he began to get a better look at how the scouts—and their horses—had died, and how their bodies had been used after they were dead… or while they were dying. “No,” he said, as though someone had told him about it and he didn’t believe the fellow. “No one would do that.” But his eyes, his treacherous, truth-telling eyes, insisted someone had. That they’d been mutilated was bad enough. That the dead men had also been violated…

“You see, Your Majesty,” the Avornan officer said heavily. “I’ve seen, and I wish I hadn’t.”

Grus didn’t answer. He rode through that scene of horror and torture. He felt he needed to see it all. He learned more about cruel ingenuity in those few minutes than he’d ever known, or ever wanted to know. At last, he said, “I didn’t think even the Menteshe did things like this.”

“They usually don’t,” the officer replied. “I’ve served in the south for years. This…” He turned his head away. “There are no words for this.”

“The Banished One,” Grus said in a voice like iron. “This is his doing. He’s trying to put us in fear.”

With a laugh on the ragged edge of hysteria, the Avornan captain said, “He knows how to get what he wants, doesn’t he?”

But Grus shook his head. “No. This—shakes me, but it doesn’t make me afraid. It makes me angry. I want revenge.” He paused. Did that mean paying back the Menteshe in their own coin? Could he stomach ordering his men to do something like this to their foes? If he did that, didn’t he invite the Banished One to take up residence in Avornis? “The best revenge I know is whipping them out of the kingdom.”

“What do we do about… this, Your Majesty?”

“We make pyres. We burn the dead. We’re all equal in the flames.” Grus paused again, then added, “This time, we burn the horses, too. They deserved what the Menteshe did even less than our troopers. They weren’t enemies, just animals.”

As he ordered, so it was done. The smoke of the great pyre mingled with the smoke from burning fields. To his relief, the men who made the pyres and laid the dead on them seemed to feel as he did. The bodies inspired horror and rage, but not fear. “We’ve got to whip the sons of whores who did this,” a soldier said. “We owe it to the dead.”

“We’ll give the Menteshe everything we owe,” Grus promised. “Everything.”