The Scepter's return

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lanius had a large map of the Kingdom of Avornis brought to his bedchamber. He pinned it to the wall despite Sosia's squawks. In most years, the map inhabited the treasury minister's office, and was used to show which cities and provinces had paid their taxes and which had revenues still outstanding.

This year's revenues had all come in. Lanius used the map for a different and grimmer purpose — to chart the plague's advance through Avornis. It spread along the routes he would have expected. It came up from the Stura toward the city of Avornis along the roads couriers and merchants most often used. When it took sidetracks, it traveled more slowly. Large stretches of the kingdom well away from the main routes stayed happily unaffected. They probably didn't even know a new pestilence was on the loose. Anyone who brought the word might bring the sickness, too.

The disease was going to get to the capital. Lanius could see that. He said nothing to Sosia about it. Odds were she could figure it out for herself. If she couldn't, he didn't want to worry her.

One day, she said, "Ortalis and Limosa have taken their children out to the countryside. Do you think we should do the same?"

She could see, then. And so could her brother — or, perhaps more likely, his wife. Lanius only shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think anyone can know right now. Maybe this will follow them. Maybe it will get there ahead of them. We have no way of knowing."

Sosia sent him a sour look. "You aren't much help."

"I'm sorry," he said, though he was more annoyed than sorry. "I have no good answers for you, or even for myself."

"You're talking about the heir to the throne," Sosia said. "If anything happens to Crex, it passes through Ortalis to Marinus."

That appealed to Lanius no more than it did to Sosia. He wanted to point out that they were trying to have another child, but realized she wouldn't heed that. They might not succeed. If they did, it might be a girl. If it was a boy, it might not live long. So many things could go wrong.

What he did say was, "If you send the children away and they get sick, you'll blame whoever told you to send them. The same if they stay. My own view is that it won't matter much one way or the other, so do whichever you please. I swear by Olor's raised right hand that I won't blame you no matter what happens." He raised his own hand, as though taking an oath.

"You're no help at all!" Sosia said angrily. "These are your children we're talking about, you know."

"I do know that. I'm not likely to forget it," Lanius said with a touch of anger of his own. "I also know I can't foretell the future. If you want to know which would be better, or whether either one will make any difference, you'd do better asking a wizard than me."

To his surprise, Sosia smiled and nodded and kissed him. "That's a good idea," she said. But then her face fell. "I wish Pterocles weren't down in the south. I wouldn't like to trust a spell like that to anyone else. It would be like putting Crex and Pitta in some stranger's hands."

She exaggerated, but not by too much. Lanius said, "Write to him, then. Tell him what you want. He'll find a way to work the magic and let you know what it tells him — if it tells him anything."

"I don't like to wait…" Sosia said.

Lanius laughed. That made her angry in a new way. Quickly, he said, "Now you're being silly. How can waiting matter when there's no disease here? Write your letter. Send it."

He mollified her again. He wished he could have calmed his own worries as easily. Yes, Sosia could write to Pterocles. And Pterocles would cast his spell and write back. And who was chiefly responsible for spreading the pestilence? Couriers coming up from the south. Maybe the one who carried the wizard's answer would also carry the plague. Could the sorcery take that into account?

"What is it now?" Sosia asked. She pointed a finger at him. "And don't tell me it's nothing, either. I know better. I saw something on your face."

He shrugged and tried to minimize it. "The disease is down in the south. I hope Pterocles and your father are well." That wasn't exactly what he'd worried about, but it came close enough to be plausible.

"Queen Quelea watch over both of them!" Sosia exclaimed. She didn't ask him any more questions, for which he was duly grateful.

These days, couriers came south to Cumanus only reluctantly. King Grus had trouble blaming them. He offered extra pay to the men who did ride into danger. Some remained reluctant. Grus forced no one to this duty, and punished no one who refused it. The couriers who would not undertake it could still serve Avornis in other ways, ways less dangerous to them.

One of the riders who did brave the journey brought Grus a letter from Lanius. The older king wondered what the younger had to say. Only one way to find out — he broke the seal on the letter. Sometimes chatty court gossip filled Lanius' letters. Sometimes it was the doings of the animal trainer the other king had hired. And sometimes Lanius would go on about things he'd fished out of the archives. Those letters could be interesting or anything but.

This was one of those letters. Grus saw as much at a glance. He went through it, thankful that Lanius wrote in a large, round hand. The other king was considerate enough to remember that he needed to read things from farther away than he had when he was younger.

By the time Grus got through the first half of the parchment, his face bore a thoughtful frown. He sent a servant to bring Pterocles to his room in the city governor's palace. When the wizard got there, his face wore a frown, too — an unhappy one. "You interrupted a spell, Your Majesty," he said irritably.

"I'm sorry," Grus said, "but I'm not very sorry, if you know what I mean. Here. Tell me what you make of this." He held out the letter he'd just gotten from Lanius.

Pterocles took it with poor grace. He was about Lanius' age himself — maybe even younger — and had no trouble reading it at the normal distance. He hadn't gone far before the frown disappeared from his face. A little later, one of his eyebrows rose. He raced through the rest of the letter. "I suppose, up in the heavens, Olor's beard collects all kinds of crumbs and scraps," he said.

Grus gave him a quizzical look. "I'm sure you're going somewhere with that, but I can't for the life of me imagine where."

"I am, Your Majesty," Pterocles assured him. "The god can't even comb out what gets stuck in there, because things that touch him turn holy themselves. And so nothing ever gets thrown away or discarded. If it's in his beard, it's in there for good."

"Queen Quelea has even more mercy than I thought," Grus said.

Pterocles ignored that sally. "Our archives are just like Olor's beard," he said. "If something gets in there, it's in there for good. And every once in a while we can fish something out, dust it off, and maybe — just maybe — use it again."

"This does sound like the same illness to you, then?" Grus said. "It did to me. Maybe the Banished One got lazy."

Pterocles stared, blinked, and started to laugh. "I can just imagine him going through his keep down there in the mountains. 'Mm,' he'd say. T had pretty good luck with this plague a few hundred years ago. They won't remember it, those miserable mayfly mortals. Why don't I haul it out again and see how they like it?' "

Grus laughed, too, in tones somewhere between admiration and horror. Pterocles had caught the Banished One's way of thinking almost blasphemously well. The exiled god often mocked men for their short lives when he came to them in dreams. He might well believe a disease not seen for centuries was forgotten. And so it would have been, but for Lanius.

"I didn't read the whole letter," the king said. "What did they do about the pestilence, all those years ago? What could they do about it? Anything? Or do we know what's biting us without being able to bite back?"

"He's passed on the spell the wizards were using then," Pterocles answered. "Whoever thought of it had nerve. It uses the law of similarity in a way I wouldn't try unless I was desperate." His laugh was grim. "Of course, if I watched people dying all around me, I expect I'd get desperate pretty fast."

"Can you use it? Can other wizards use it? Will it work again?" Grus asked.

"I can use it. So can others. It's not hard to cast — I can see that at a glance," Pterocles said. "It's not hard to cast like that, anyway. You don't have to be a senior sorcerer to be able to get the incantation right. But it's going to be wearing on the wizards who use it. And you don't want to make a mistake about which direction the spell runs in. You'd be very unhappy if you did, and so would your patients." He explained what he meant, and showed Grus the end of the letter to give him more detail.

The king read that part. He had no sorcerous talent to speak of, and no sorcerous knowledge, either, except the bits and pieces he'd picked up from talking with Pterocles and other wizards and witches over the years. He wasn't sure he would understand, but he had no trouble at all. The problem was nothing if not obvious.

"Well," he said, "you don't want to do that, do you?"

"Now that you mention it," Pterocles said, "no."

If the plague came to the city of Avornis, Lanius realized he was one of the people likeliest to catch it. Couriers seemed intimately involved in spreading it, and couriers from infected parts of the kingdom kept bringing word of its progress up to the capital. And to whom were they bringing that word? Why, to him. He was the king, the man who most needed to know what was going on elsewhere in Avornis.

That meant other people in the palace were also among the likeliest to come down sick. And it meant — or might mean — he'd been wrong about what he told Sosia. Maybe getting Crex and Pitta away from the city for a while was a good idea after all. He waited for Pterocles' letter. When it came back from the south, it said, Getting them away from the capital will not hurt, and may do some good. Lanius wished the wizard would have said something stronger than that, but it was plenty to persuade him — and Sosia, too.

He wondered if he'd made a mistake waiting for Pterocles' response. If the children had gotten out of the city sooner.. Three days after Crex and Pitta left the palace, Sosia came up to him with a worried look on her face. "Mother's not feeling well," she said.

"What's wrong?" Lanius hoped dread didn't clog his throat too much. People had any number of ways of falling sick. Queen Estrilda wasn't a young woman. If she didn't feel well, that didn't necessarily mean anything. So he told himself, grasping at straws like a harness maker or a farmer. In some ways, all men were very much alike.

"She has a fever," Sosia answered. "She says the light hurts her eyes, and she has some… some bumps on her face."

"Bumps," Lanius echoed tonelessly. His wife nodded. He knew — and Sosia obviously did, too — the pestilence showed itself with fever and with blisters. Not quite apropos of nothing, he said, "I wish Pterocles weren't down in the south."

"I said that before," Sosia replied — a handful of words with a world of worry in them.

Lanius had been so proud of himself when he sent Grus his letter along with Sosia's. He'd uncovered what might be a cure for the plague, and wasn't that wonderful? Wasn't he wonderful for being so clever?

Now he would have to test that cure, if it was a cure, on someone who mattered to him very much — and who mattered even more to his wife, and to the other king, and possibly even to his brother-in-law. He sighed and said, "I'd better send for Aedon." Aedon was the leading wizard in the city of Avornis after Pterocles — a long way after Pterocles, unfortunately.

A servant went hotfooting it out of the palace to bring him back. He came within the hour. He was closer to Grus' age than to Lanius' — a stately man with a neat gray beard and with the pink skin and mild smile of a kindly grandfather. "How may I serve you, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"The plague is in the city," Lanius said bluntly. "You will have heard of it?"

"Yes," Aedon admitted. "But how do you know this to be the case?"

"Queen Estrilda has it," the king replied, more bluntly still.

Aedon licked his lips. "What… do you wish me to do?" He couldn't have sounded more wary if he were an actor on a stage. If he tried to save King Grus' wife and failed, his head might answer for it. He said, "You do understand, I trust, that I have no experience in facing this disease."

"I do understand that," Lanius said. While waiting for Aedon, he'd gone to the archives and gotten the document on which he'd based his letter to Grus. "This seems to be the same plague as the one the Banished One used against us about the time the Scepter of Mercy was lost. Here is what the sorcerers of that time did against it."

Like Grus, Aedon held things out at arm's length to read them. No one had found a magical cure for lengthening sight. By the time the wizard finished reading, his skin was less pink than it had been. He licked his lips again. "You wish me to attempt this untested sorcery on Her Majesty?"

"It's not untested. It just hasn't been used for a while," Lanius said, proving technical truth could live in the same sentence with enormous understatement.

"If I understand the spell correctly, we will need one other, ah, participant besides the queen and me," Aedon said.

Lanius nodded. "I read it the same way." He pointed to himself. "I will be the other one."

Now the wizard went from wary to horrified. "Oh, no, Your Majesty! Use a servant or someone else who will not be missed if something goes awry."

"No," Lanius said. "This is my responsibility. I found it. I was the one who thought it would work — and I still think so. I have… the courage of my convictions, you might say." He'd been on a battlefield once, and never wielded a sword in anger.

This may be the first really brave thing I've ever tried to do in my life, he thought. I'm old to start, but I hope I can do it right.

He waited, trying to look as kingly as he could. Grus would have had no trouble getting the wizard to obey him — Lanius was resentfully sure of that. Aedon went right on grimacing, but at last he nodded. "Let it be as you say, Your Majesty. But please do me the courtesy of showing in writing that you have given me this order. I do not wish to be blamed if something goes wrong."

"I suppose that's fair," Lanius said, remembering the sorcerer would be trying a spell he'd never used before. Remembering that sent a chill through him. Am I brave or just foolhardy? Before long, he'd find out. He called to a servant for parchment and pen and ink, and also for sealing wax. He wrote rapidly, then used the royal signet ring. "Here," he told Aedon. "Does this satisfy you?"

After reading the pledge to hold him harmless, Aedon nodded. "It does. I thank you, Your Majesty." He tucked the document into his belt pouch, no doubt ready to pull it out if things failed to go the way he wanted. "And now, if you would be so kind, take me to Her Majesty."

Actually, a serving woman led both Lanius and Aedon to Queen Estrilda. Lanius fought back a wince when he saw his mother-in-law. Estrilda had gotten worse since Sosia told him she was sick. Grus' wife seemed only half aware of who he was, and either didn't care or didn't understand who the wizard was. The blisters described in both Grus' dispatches and the ancient ecclesiastical document were plain on her face and hands.

When Aedon gently touched her forehead, he flinched. "She is very warm, Your Majesty," he said. "Very warm indeed." If she dies, you can't blame me. He didn't shout that, but he might as well have.

"Then you'd better not waste any time, had you?" Lanius said.

That wasn't what the wizard had wanted to hear. He said, "I also note that this spell involves a most unusual and uncertain application of the law of similarity."

"All right. You've noted it. Now get on with it." When Lanius wanted to get something done, he started sounding brisk and brusque like Grus. One of these days before too long, he would have to think about what that meant. At the moment, he had more urgent things to worry about.

Even with the pledge, Aedon seemed on the point of balking. After a longing look back toward the door, though, he seemed to realize he would take his reputation with him if he walked out through it.

He took a deep breath, gathered himself, and managed a dignified bow for Lanius. "Very well, Your Majesty, and may King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens watch over my attempt," he said.

"Since the pestilence comes from the Banished One, I hope they will," the king replied. Aedon looked startled, as if that hadn't occurred to him. Maybe it hadn't. A lot of things had happened to the wizard all at once.

He carried a stool over by the side of the bed and set the text of the spell on it. Lanius, who was a little shortsighted, wouldn't have wanted to try to read it from there, but Aedon seemed to have no trouble. For once, his lengthening sight worked for him, not against. "Please give me your hand, Your Majesty," he said, and took Lanius' right hand in his own left.

Then he took Queen Estrilda's left hand in his right. Since the wizard had neither hand free for passes, the spell necessarily depended on the verbal element. Lanius hoped Aedon would be able to handle that. Avornan had changed some in the centuries since it was written down. Words that had rhymed then didn't anymore, while some that hadn't did now. If Aedon performed in a play and made a mistake on the stage, that would be embarrassing. It would be much worse than embarrassing if he made a mistake now — for him, for Lanius, and for Estrilda.

As soon as he started to read, Lanius let out a silent sigh of relief. He didn't know Aedon well, or know where the wizard had learned to cope with the old-fashioned language. But learn he had. It fell trippingly from his tongue, and Lanius felt the power build with each word that passed his lips.

The king was no sorcerer, but he had tried to learn something about conjuration, as he'd tried to learn something about everything. He knew what Aedon meant when he called this magic a strange use of the law of similarity. It treated the sick person and the well one as similar in everything save the sickness, and sought to transfer the well person's health to the victim. If the wizard got a couple of things backwards, it would work the other way, and send the plague to the well person — and probably to the wizard, too. Other things could also go amiss. Lanius had more than enough imagination to see several.

On Aedon went. He fought his way through a particularly intricate part of the spell. As soon as he did, his confidence seemed to rise. After that, he read more quickly. He almost stumbled once, but caught himself at a warning squeeze from Lanius. With a grateful glance toward the king, he saved the fluff and hurried toward the end.

Lanius watched his mother-in-law. He didn't know what to expect, even if the magic worked. Would she suddenly be better? Or would it be as though a fever broke, so that, while still ill, she was no longer in danger? He hoped for the one while expecting the other.

What Aedon and he got was something more or less in the middle. He could see the blisters shrink back into themselves on Estrilda's face. They had almost disappeared when the wizard finished the spell. Estrilda let out a long, long sigh as Aedon let go of her hand and Lanius'. "Better," she whispered. "Much better. I thought I was on fire, and now I'm not."

She wasn't her former self yet, either. She was plainly still weak from the pestilence. How long would that last? Lanius had no way of knowing. All he did know was that she was on the right track again. That counted for more than anything else. He nodded — he almost bowed — to Aedon. "Thank you. That was well done. Your fee will match your skill and your courage."

Aedon did bow to him, deeply, from the waist. "Speak to me not of my courage, Your Majesty, which is as nothing when measured against your own. And as for skill… You caught me when I was about to go badly astray. Everyone says you are a learned man, but I did not look for you to correct me in my own field, and to be right." He bowed once more.

What exactly did he mean by that? Had he looked for Lanius to try jogging his elbow, and to be wrong when he did? That was how it sounded. Lanius thought about anger, but set it aside. What point to it? Any expert would feel the same about amateurs.

Then Lanius stopped worrying about such small, such trivial, things. The spell he'd found — the spell Avornan wizards had found all those centuries before — worked. If it worked in the city of Avornis, it would work down by the Stura, too. And it would work on the far side of the river. The folk who had been thralls would suffer no more — no more than they already had, anyhow. And the war against the Menteshe and the Banished One would go on.

Smoke from a funeral pyre darkened the sky above Cumanus. The stench of burning wood and oil and dead flesh never left the city; it stayed in Grus' nostrils day and night. And yet things were getting better, here and in the land south of the Stura where the Banished One first unleashed the pestilence.

Grus didn't see Pterocles very much lately. The wizard was busy from before dawn until after nightfall every day. He ran himself ragged curing plague victims himself and teaching others how to do it. Grus had no idea when he slept, or if he did. The king knew the wizard ate erratically. Grus had servants send him food wherever he was. If not for that, Pterocles might not have eaten at all.

When Pterocles fell asleep in the middle of explaining to half a dozen wizards from towns along the Stura how the spell worked, Grus had him carried back to the city governor's palace and put to bed with guards in front of his door not to keep other people out but to keep him in until he'd had at least one good rest. The wizard complained, loudly and angrily. Then he slept from one midafternoon to the next.

He woke insisting he hadn't closed his eyes at all, and at first refused to believe he'd slept the sun around. Then, when he woke a little more and his wits began to work, he realized he wouldn't be so hungry or have such a desperate need to piss if he hadn't lost a day. He ate enough for two, almost filled a chamber pot, and declared himself ready to charge back into the routine that had caused his collapse.

"No," Grus told him. "Wait. Spend a little time relaxing, if you please."

"But I can't!" Pterocles said. "People are dying. If I don't cure, if I don't train other wizards — "

"Wait," Grus repeated. "If you kill yourself, you can't help anybody. And you were right on the edge of doing that. Go ahead and tell me I'm wrong. Make me believe it." He folded his arms across his chest and stared a challenge at Pterocles.

The younger man took a deep breath. Then he laughed, let it out again, and spread his hands. "I wish I could, Your Majesty, but I fear I can't."

"All right, then," Grus said. "You've done more than any three men could be expected to. And you've got more than three men doing your work now, because of everybody you've taught. We're getting the upper hand on this cursed thing."

"We should be doing more." But that was Pterocles' last protest, and a fading one at that. The wizard shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, which hadn't been combed, let alone washed, in some time. "We owe this one to King Lanius."

"Well, so we do," Grus said. "Fine — we owe it to him. I like to think he owes us one or two, too."

"It's a good spell. It's a very good spell," Pterocles said. "And it's a novel approach to the problem. I never would have thought of it myself."

"Really?" Grus hoped he kept his tone neutral. He did his best. But he didn't like to think there were many sorcerous matters that wouldn't have occurred to his best wizard.

Pterocles understood what he meant, even if he didn't say it. With a wry smile, the sorcerer answered, "Afraid so, Your Majesty. Magic is a big field. Nobody can know all the blades of grass — and the flowers, and the weeds — in it." That smile vanished like snow in springtime. "Nobody who's a mere man, I should say. About anyone else, I reserve judgment."

"No doubt you're smart to do it, too." Grus started to look south toward the Argolid Mountains — toward the Banished One's lair. He started to, but then deliberately checked the motion. "Now if only he would reserve judgment on us."

"I'm afraid that's too much to hope for," Pterocles said.

"So am I," Grus answered. "And if you'd left off everything but the first two words, that would have been just as true, wouldn't it?"

"Oh, yes," the wizard said, and then, as though that didn't put his meaning across strongly enough, he repeated it with a different emphasis. "Oh, yes. Anyone who isn't afraid of the Banished One doesn't know anything about him."

"Right." Grus let it lie there. Had he been the Banished One — a truly terrifying thought — he would have done things differently. The freed thralls could only be an annoyance to him, never a real danger. Danger lay in the Avornan army and in the farmers north of the Stura who kept it fed. Grus would have struck there. But freeing the thralls might have pricked the Banished One's vanity. And so he had struck at and avenged himself upon that which annoyed him, and concerned himself much less with everything else. The folk who really threatened his longtime dominion over the lands south of the Stura did not suffer in proportion to their menace.

Pterocles poured some wine into his cup from a silver pitcher. "So here's to King Lanius. He was our memory this time. Without him, the pestilence probably would have gone through the whole kingdom, and gods only know how many would have died."

Grus filled his winecup, too. "To Lanius," he agreed. Both men raised their cups and drank the toast. Grus had the feeling Pterocles might have put his finger on the Banished One's plan. The exiled god, with his contempt for mankind, wouldn't have expected the Avornans to be able to stop the disease. That showed his arrogance, but perhaps less in the way of bad planning than Grus had thought.

Drinking to Lanius as a real salute, not to the other king's place as a member of the longtime ruling dynasty, bothered Grus less than it would have a few years earlier. The two kings had come up with a working arrangement that probably didn't altogether satisfy either one — Grus knew it didn't altogether satisfy him — but that both men could live with. Lanius wasn't afraid anymore that Grus would murder him if he got out of line. And Grus didn't worry that he would find himself outlawed and the gates of the capital closed against him when he came back from a campaign. He still wished he could campaign and stay in the city of Avornis at the same time. Maybe the gods could be in two places at once, but mere men couldn't.

And since he couldn't, having Lanius there in his place worked… pretty well.

Lanius rode out from the city of Avornis with Collurio and with a troop of royal bodyguards. The soldiers fanned out to give the king and the animal trainer room to talk without being overheard. By now, they'd seen Collurio in the palace often enough and for long enough to be used to him and to be fairly confident he harbored no evil designs against Lanius.

Collurio laughed in some embarrassment. "It's a funny thing, Your Majesty," he said. "I train beasts for a living, but I fear I'm not much of a horseman. I never have been."

"Well, I'm not, either, so don't let it worry you," Lanius said.

"But it's different. You're the king. You have other things to worry about," Collurio said. "I spend all my time with animals. I should be able to ride better than a farmer bringing a couple of baskets of turnips to town."

"Why can't you, then?" Lanius asked. As usual, his attitude was down-to-earth. Before you could solve a problem, you had to figure out what it was.

And Collurio had the answer for him. "Because I don't get on horseback more than a couple of times a year. Why should I, when I live in the capital? All my kin are there. All my work is there, or near enough. I don't need to leave the city very often, and it's not such a big place that I need to ride to get where I'm going. I just walk, the way most people do. If you ride a lot inside the city, you're doing it for swank, not because you need to. Ordinary folks haven't got the time or the silver to waste on swank."

"No, I suppose not." Lanius hoped he didn't sound too vague. The only ordinary people with whom he had any acquaintance were the palace guardsmen — who had to know how to ride — and the servants inside the palace. And what the servants did when they weren't actually working was a closed book to him.

"It is nice getting away every once in a while, isn't it?" Collurio said, looking around at the countryside with the fascination of a man who didn't see it very often. "Everything smells so fresh." Everyone who got outside the walls said that. Lanius had said it himself, more times than he could count. In a lower voice, Collurio went on, "And I'm not sorry to get out with that cursed disease loose in the city, either."

"No." Lanius let it go at that. The animal trainer didn't know, or need to know, the disease was nothing ordinary, but came from the Banished One. Sicknesses of the more usual sort were only too common in the city of Avornis. With so many people packed so close together, sickness spread all too easily.

Collurio didn't notice how Lanius had said as little as he could. "Looks like the wizards and the healers have figured out what to do about it, anyhow."

"It does, doesn't it? I hope they have." Again, Lanius didn't say much. He didn't want people exclaiming that he was the one who'd found the spell that let the wizards stop the pestilence in its tracks. For one thing, word of that might get back to the Banished One, which wouldn't — couldn't — be good. For another, he never had much cared to have people exclaiming about him for any reason. He did what he did, and he did it as well as he could, and what point to getting excited about it?

They rode up a low swell of ground — nothing grand enough to be called a hill. When they got to the top, Collurio pointed ahead. "What's that? It's one of the funniest-looking things I've ever seen."

"Glad you like it," Lanius said. Collurio looked at him as though pretty sure he was joking — pretty sure, yes, but not completely. The king added, 'That's where we're going."

"Why are we going there?" the animal trainer asked. "How long has that place been here? Why didn't I ever hear about it?" He was full of questions, and comments, too. "I'd think I would have. I'd think anybody would have. It's peculiar enough, by the gods. It looks like somebody cut a slice out of a city and set it down right there."

"Somebody did." Lanius tapped his own chest with the first two fingers of his left hand. "I'm the somebody, as a matter of fact."

"All right, Your Majesty." Collurio might have been humoring a lunatic who didn't seem violent… at the moment. T hope you'll tell me why you built a slice of city out in the middle of the country."

Lanius smiled. "Not quite yet, if you don't mind too much. I'd like you to look it over first."

"Whatever you please, Your Majesty," Collurio said. Again, Lanius had no trouble recognizing his tone — he sounded like a man who had taken another man's pay and realized he had to take the other man's eccentricities along with the silver. Since that was exactly how things were, Lanius didn't contradict him.

They rode up to the structure Tinamus and his workmen had built the summer before. A few workmen were still there, to make sure things didn't come to grief. Most of them, though, had gone back to the city of Avornis.

The two men got down off their horses. Accompanied by royal guardsmen, they went into the slice of the city — Lanius thought Collurio's description apt — through a door in one of the walls forming the sides of the slice. Collurio craned his neck, eyeing everything closely. Lanius had told him to look things over, and he was taking the king at his word.

After they'd walked along for a while, Collurio said, "It isn't a slice of the city of Avornis. I thought it would be. But I know the capital pretty well, even if I don't know much else. There's no place in it that would look like this." He spoke with complete confidence.

And Lanius nodded. "You're right — it isn't the city of Avornis. It's not even close to the city of Avornis."

"I figured that out." Collurio sounded proud of himself now — and he'd earned the right. Then he asked the question Lanius had been waiting for. "If it's not the capital, where is it? It's somewhere. It's bound to be. You wouldn't make up something this detailed."

"Oh, you never can tell." Before answering, really answering, Lanius waved the royal guardsmen back out of earshot. They went, their chainmail jingling. One of them tapped a finger against the side of his head, thinking Lanius wasn't watching him. The king said one word to the animal trainer.

Collurio's eyes widened. "That means — "

"It does, doesn't it?" Lanius said with a smile.