The Scepter's return

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

King Grus looked back toward Cumanus from the south bank of the Stura. The town looked smaller and more distant than it should have. The river wasn't that wide. But there was the sense that it separated two different worlds. There was also the sense that Grus didn't belong in the one he'd just entered.

He said as much to Pterocles, who'd crossed the Stura with him. When he finished, he asked, "Am I making that up? Is it coming out of my head because I know too much about what's happened to Avornans down here? Or is it something real?"

"I can't say for sure, Your Majesty," the wizard replied. "All I can tell you for sure is that I feel it, too, for whatever that may be worth. Maybe it's my nerves. Maybe it's nerves for both of us. Or maybe… someone's hand still lies heavy on the land in spite of everything we've done."

"That could be," Grus said, and let it go right there. He noticed that Pterocles shied away from saying the Banished One's name here in the country the exiled god had dominated for so long. Hirundo was the one who didn't worry about such things. Hirundo didn't have as many reasons to worry about the Banished One as Grus and Pterocles — and Lanius — did. Having seen the Banished One in the night, the two kings and the wizard were members of a club whose dominant feature was that all the people who belonged to it wished they didn't.

A royal guardsman brought up Grus' gelding. Another, with a perfectly straight face, led up Pterocles' mule — Grus wasn't forcing him up onto horseback now. The king mounted. So did Pterocles. A troop of guardsmen surrounded them. Grus said not a word about it. Menteshe raiding parties could easily break into lands from which the Avornans had driven them the year before. The nomads might not rule all this country anymore, but they could still cause trouble here. The king was glad to have solid protection around him.

Toward the close of day, the armed party rode into one of the first villages of thralls Grus had ever entered. It was different now from what it had been a year before. Most of the stink and most of the filth were gone. What was left was about what he would have found riding into a peasant village on the north bank of the Stura.

The people were different, too. They were people now, and acted like it. Instead of with bovine stares, they greeted Grus with shouts of, "Your Majesty! The gods bless Your Majesty!" They were, if not spotlessly clean, no dirtier than any other peasants would have been. They wore ordinary clothes, not filthy remnants of rags.

They were different in another way, too. A large number of houses in the village stood empty. The plague had hit hard here. From everything Grus had been able to learn, it had hit hard everywhere south of the Stura. That spoke more clearly than anything else Grus had found concerning how the Banished One felt about losing control of the thralls.

"Congratulations," the king told Pterocles. "If not for your spell, none of this would have happened."

Pterocles nodded soberly. "I'm glad I was able to take some of what I went through up in the Chernagor country and use it against… the one who put me through it." Again, he left the Banished One unnamed.

"Yes," Grus said. "That's something I understand, sure enough. Most of the time, from all I've seen, revenge costs more than it's worth. Every once in a while…"

"That's right, Your Majesty. Every once in a while…" The wizard's expression was, for him, uncommonly fierce. But that didn't last long. He looked farther south. The towering Argolid Mountains were still far away, but he — and Grus — could make out their shadowed purple bulk low on the horizon. All at once, something in Pterocles' face went from hunter to hunted. "Of course, we haven't won anything yet. For all we know, we're nothing but fleas waiting for the dog to notice he's got an itch and start scratching."

"There's a cheerful thought!" Grus exclaimed. "And such a jolly way of putting it, too." Pterocles inclined his head as regally as if he were the king. Grus looked toward the mountains, too — and toward Yozgat, which also lay in that direction. Still naming no names, he went on, "Well, if I'm a flea and he's a dog, I aim to bite him someplace where he'll notice me."

"Good, Your Majesty," Pterocles said. "Bite hard."

Lanius studied his slice of city. He drummed the fingers of his right hand against his thigh as he worried. "Last summer, when the architect asked me why I was having him build this, I told him I was making a fancy run for my moncat," he said.

Collurio scratched his nose. "What did he think of that, Your Majesty?"

"That I was out of my mind, I expect," the king answered. "Or that I was mocking him. Or maybe both at once."

The animal trainer laughed. "And there you were, just telling the truth. What better way to put a spike in somebody's wheel?"

"Yes, I remember thinking the same thing at the time," Lanius said. "But I'm more worried than I was that Pouncer's going to be able to get away."

"I don't see what else you could have done," Collurio said. "The insides of the side walls — that sounds funny, doesn't it? — and the front and back are too high for him to jump to the top, and the tile that lines them is glazed too smooth for his claws to get a grip. What can he do? He can't fly, even if it sometimes seems like he's able to."

"I'm not so worried about him flying," Lanius said. "I'm worried about him thinking, and I'm worried about him getting into trouble." His fingers drummed his thigh again. "He's awfully good at getting into trouble. Moncats are troublesome beasts, and he's a troublesome moncat."

"Uh, Your Majesty.." Collurio hesitated.

"Go ahead," Lanius said. "I'm not Pouncer. I don't bite."

"No, indeed, Your Majesty. You've been very kind to me," Collurio said hastily. "I just wanted to say — even if Pouncer should run off, there are other beasts back at the palace. I don't want you to take that wrong, now. I'm not saying it just so you'd go on giving me money. I'm grateful for your bounty — don't get me wrong — but I made a living before, and I can go right on doing it."

"I understand that," Lanius said. "If we have to, we'll do as you say and try another moncat. But I pray to the gods in the heavens we won't have to. Pouncer has.. advantages."

"We've been working with him and not with the others. If we had to train a different moncat, it would cost us some time," Collurio said. "Other than that, I don't see anything all that special about him."

"He has a habit of stealing from the kitchens," Lanius said. "That could turn out to matter quite a bit."

"I can't imagine why," the trainer said with what would have been a distinct sniff if he weren't talking to a king.

Lanius didn't enlighten him. The king usually liked telling other people what he knew- would he have written a book called How to Be a King for Crex if he hadn't? But Tinamus didn't know why he'd built this slice of city, and Collurio had only guesses about why he'd be running Pouncer through it. As far as Lanius was concerned, the less they knew, the better. What they didn't know, they couldn't talk about. They couldn't write it down, either. And even if the Banished One took them in his terrible hands and squeezed them, they couldn't tell him what he would assuredly want to know.

That probably wouldn't do them any good if the Banished One did lay hold of them. No, it wouldn't do them any good, but it might do the Kingdom of Avornis a great deal.

Collurio asked, "Your Majesty, this has something to do with that, uh, frightening dream I had after I said I'd train your moncat, doesn't it?"

Lanius glared at him in annoyed admiration. Here I keep trying to save you from more danger than you'd know what to do with, and how do you pay me back? You add two and two and get four. Why couldn't you come up with five, or even three?

"I'm going to do you a favor," the king said. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear a word you said."

He wondered whether Collurio would get angry. A lot of men would have. Lanius knew he would have himself; he always wanted to know what was going on. He always had; he was sure he always would. But Collurio only scratched his nose again with a tooth- and claw-scarred hand and nodded thoughtfully. "All right, Your Majesty. That tells me what I need to hear."

"Does it?" Lanius said tonelessly. The less informative he wanted to be, the more informative he seemed to be. Maybe I should have started out telling lies right from the beginning. Too late now, though.

"Don't worry. I told you when I got into this that I don't blab," Collurio said. "I meant it. And if there's a reason Pouncer is the best moncat because he steals from the kitchens — well, then there is, that's all." Now the animal trainer scratched his head, not his nose. "What difference it makes that an animal will steal food when it gets the chance is beyond me, though. Any other moncat in the kitchens would do the same thing."

"You may be right," Lanius said, which, as a polite response, ranked right up there with how interesting. You could say it in reply to almost anything, it sounded accommodating, and it didn't mean a thing.

No matter how shrewd Collurio was, he didn't notice the emptiness of the answer this time. "I'm sure of it, Your Majesty," he said. "When you're talking about things like that, they're all alike."

"I suppose so." Lanius looked up to the sky above the slice of city that had risen out of nothing. "I don't suppose there's any way the moncat could get out or anything could get in at him."

"I don't see how," the trainer said. "You'd need wings. Besides, Pouncer is fast and smart and tough. Anything that did try to catch him might be biting off more than it could chew."

"Wings…" Lanius looked up into the sky again. He saw nothing with wings except a yellow butterfly. Pouncer would have tried to catch that, not the other way around. It put a thought in the king's mind, though. He nodded to Collurio. "Thanks. I'll have to make sure we have some more archers around here."

"Your Majesty?" Collurio gave him the same This is one of the strangest people I've ever tried to deal with look Lanius had seen on Tinamus' face.

"Wings," Lanius said again. Collurio looked unenlightened. Lanius had expected nothing different. "Don't worry about it," he told the animal trainer. "You see that they let me wander around loose and everything. That's because they're pretty much convinced I'm harmless. I haven't had a really bad spell in — oh, days now."

"Days," Collurio echoed. He seemed in something of a daze himself. "Why would anything with wings want to go after Pouncer? He'd be a handful even for something the size of an eagle."

"Well, I don't know that anything would. But I don't know that anything wouldn't, either," Lanius said, which seemed to go a long way toward persuading Collurio that he had no business wandering around loose. The king went on, "The fewer chances I take, the happier everyone's likely to end up. Everyone on our side, I should say."

"Our side?" Collurio's gaze sharpened. "This does have to do with that dreadful dream the Ban — "

"Don't say the name," Lanius broke in. "I don't know that it makes any difference, but I don't know that it doesn't, either. So don't say it, not while you're here. Better safe than sorry, eh?"

"I would do — or not do — whatever I have to so I don't ever have another one of those dreams again," Collurio said earnestly.

"I understand that. I not only understand, I agree with you," Lanius said. "I don't know if this will help, but I know it can't hurt. In the meantime, shall we walk through here? I want to show you just what you'll be teaching Pouncer to do…"

The Menteshe called the river where Grus had stopped his advance the autumn before the Zabat. Hundreds of years earlier, it must have had a proper Avornan name. King Grus had no idea what that was, though. Lanius might have been able to pull it out of the archives, but Grus had no intention of asking him to. If Grus talked about the Zabat, people knew what he meant. That was all that mattered, as far as he was concerned.

It was a much wider river than it had been the last time he looked at it. Hirundo saw him eyeing it and said, "You see, Your Majesty?"

"Well, what if I do?" Grus said gruffly. Hirundo only laughed at him. The king went on, "All right — we didn't have much trouble from Menteshe raiders coming up out of the south. We had a pestilence instead. Between you and me, I'm not sure we got the best of the bargain."

"Since you put it that way, neither am I," Hirundo said. "But it won't be long before we're ready to go see what's on the other side."

At the moment, three or four Menteshe horsemen were on the other side of the Zabat. They weren't doing anything but watching; they wanted to see what the Avornans were up to. Grus had his army do as much as it could out of sight of the nomads on the southern bank of the river. He hoped that would help.

And he knew what lay well on the other side of the Zabat — Yozgat. This year, he thought. This year we get there. He could feel the hunger in his belly. Was that the Scepter of Mercy calling — or was it the Banished One, trying to lure him to destruction? How could he know? All he could do was go on. The other choice was giving up and heading home, and that would be unbearable.

As though thinking along with him, Hirundo said, "One good thing — Korkut and Sanjar are still at war with each other. From what our men down here heard, they fought a big battle over the winter. Korkut's still holding Yozgat, though, and that's what counts as far as we're concerned."

"Yes." Grus let it go at that. If he didn't let it go, he would show how hungry he was. Hirundo already knew, of course, but Grus didn't want to be too open, not here in the south where the Banished One had so many eyes and ears.

A man came toward the king. Grus' guardsmen got between him and this fellow who had to be a freed thrall. "I mean no harm," the man protested.

"Then you'll understand why we take no chances," a guard answered.

The man thought about that, shrugged, and finally nodded "Smash em up!" he called to Grus. "Smash 'em all up, those horse-riding pigs!" He probably hadn't been free very long-otherwise he would have come up with something juicier to call the Menteshe.

Grus appreciated the sentiment even if it could have been expressed more forcefully. "That's what I intend to do," I said. "Tell your friends. Tell everybody you know." He wasn't keeping that a secret. The Menteshe had to know he was coming. When and how and exactly where — those were different questions.

"I'll do it," the man said. "By the… gods in the heaven: I'll do it." Grus caught the brief hesitation. He knew what meant. The local had almost sworn by the Fallen Star, the name the Menteshe gave the Banished One. If a thrall had any reason to think of a supernatural power, he thought of the Banished One, not the gods. But things were changing here.

And if we lose, they'll change back again, too, Grus re minded himself. Things had gone well so far. That didn't mean they would keep on going well. One way to make sure the; didn't was to assume they would.

"We need to talk," the king told his general. "We need to figure out where we're going once we cross the river, and when the Menteshe are likely to try to stop us."

"If we're not going to Yozgat, Your Majesty, somebody's been talking to you while I wasn't looking," Hirundo said. Grus sent him a severe look. Hirundo ignored it with the fortitude of a man who'd known worse — and he had.

"How are we going to get there?" the king said, as patiently as he could. "What will we run into on the way?"

"Menteshe?" Hirundo suggested. When Grus looked severe again, the general spread his hands in affable innocence. "You said so yourself."

"Well, so I did," Grus answered with a sigh. "But where? How many? And what are they likely to try against us?"

"We need to talk about that." Hirundo sounded altogether serious. Grus didn't pick up a rock and hit him over the head with it. That proved only one thing — years on the throne had given him much more tolerance than he'd ever imagined.

Lanius nodded to Collurio. "Put him through his paces."

"That's what I'm going to do, Your Majesty," the animal trainer replied. They stood on the outer wall of the city slice Lanius had built out in the country. It was twenty-five or thirty feet high; Lanius could see for a long way. Above the stand of trees to the south was a smudge on the sky that marked where the city of Avornis lay.

Collurio waved to his son, who'd come out to help him. The younger man was on the ground out beyond a dry ditch. The youth picked up a pole about as thick as his thumb. He swung it up and over the ditch until the end of it came to rest on top of the wall not far from Lanius and Collurio.

Then Collurio's son — his name was Crinitus — opened a door to a wooden cage by the base of the pole. Out came Pouncer. The moncat saw the pole and swarmed up it, holding on with all four clawed hands. No ordinary cat with ordinary feet could have done it. For the moncat, it was as easy and normal as walking along a palace corridor would have been for Lanius.

Once at the top, Pouncer looked expectantly at the king and the trainer. Collurio gave the moncat a piece of meat. Lanius said, 'This isn't so good. Nobody will be around — nobody who would give Pouncer anything, anyway."

"We'll take care of it, Your Majesty," Collurio answered easily.

He did, too. The next time Pouncer did the trick, the trainer and Lanius stood well away from that stretch of the wall. They'd left a reward behind, though. The moncat ate it and then looked around as though considering what to do next.

Collurio smiled when he saw that. "He knows he'll get something he wants if he does what we want him to do. He knows. You were right, Your Majesty. These are very clever animals."

"Is he clever enough, though?" Lanius said.

"Clever enough for what?" Collurio asked.

"For what you need to teach him," the king answered.

Collurio let out an exasperated breath. "I wish you would tell me more, Your Majesty."

For his part, Lanius wished he'd never told the trainer which city this was a slice of. "Do you? Do you really?" the king said. "Do you want more visits in the night from…?" He did not name the name.

"This truly does have to do with that?" Collurio asked once more.

"It truly does," Lanius agreed with a sigh. "Do you think… he would have visited you if it didn't? He is like the law in one way — he does not concern himself with trifles."

Shuddering, Collurio said, "In that case, I wish he wouldn't concern himself with me. I was happy to be a small man, bothering no one and bothered by no one."

"We all wish he wouldn't concern himself with us. We were all happier when he didn't," Lanius said gravely. "But wishes here have as much to do with what is as they usually do."

"Yes, Your Majesty." Collurio sounded no more delighted with the world. "I still sometimes wish I never stuck my big nose into this business." He gave the organ in question a mournful tweak.

He and Crinitus and the king worked with Pouncer until the moncat got tired or bored or full. Then they put Pouncer in the cage and took it back to the enclosure where the moncat stayed when it wasn't working. Pouncer climbed up the poles they had in there, found a perch to its liking, and fell asleep.

A few minutes later, a royal guardsman came up to Lanius and said, "Excuse me, Your Majesty, but Her Majesty the Queen has just arrived."

"Has she?" One of Lanius' eyebrows rose. He'd invited Sosia to come out and look this place over. He hadn't expected her to take him up on it, but here she was. He hadn't started fooling around with any maidservants; no frightened washerwoman hid under the bed not overburdened with clothing. Sosia could prod and poke as much as she pleased. She wouldn't find anything to complain about here.

She barely greeted Lanius. She prowled through all the tents around the slice of city, then pointed to it. "Let me have a look in there, if you please."

"All right," Lanius said. He had nothing female lurking inside.

He walked her through it. Her expression got odder and odder the farther she went. "This really is what you said it was, isn't it?" she said as the tour neared an end.

"Nothing else," Lanius answered.

"But — what good is it?" the queen asked. "You've built something enormous for Pouncer to run around in. Couldn't you have found something else to do with all that silver?"

"You sound like your father," Lanius said, and Sosia made a face at him. He went on, "Actually, your father knows what I'm doing here. He knows and he doesn't mind."

"If he knows, then he knows more than I do," Sosia said. "What are you doing here that's important enough to impress my father?"

"Staying out of his way and not causing trouble for anyone." Lanius did his best to sound annoyed as he said that. Grus would have been happy to keep him on a shelf doing nothing, or nothing worthwhile. Only the urgencies of what the other king had set himself to do had let Lanius gain a little — and just a little — freedom of action of his own.

The answer almost satisfied Sosia. When she said, "There has to be more to it than that," she didn't sound as though she believed it herself. "What a funny place this is," she added, as much to herself as to him.

"It's — not the city," Lanius said. "By the gods, I'm a city man, but even I like to get away once in a while. There isn't smoke in the air all the time here. I think that's part of the reason Anser likes to hunt. I'm — not all that fond of hunting, but I like it here myself."

His wife's nod was slow and hesitant, as though she found herself yielding a point she hadn't expected to. "I can see why," she said.

"I brought a good cook along, too," Lanius said. "And the food couldn't be any fresher. It doesn't have to travel into the capital. It's right here."

Supper proved that. The lamb they ate came from a farm only a few hundred yards away. The meat was so tender, it almost fell off the bone. The wine was a local vintage, too. Lanius had to admit he'd drunk better. But the finest wines came from special regions scattered across the kingdom, and this didn't happen to be one of them. The stuff wasn't dreadful. It just wasn't of the best.

If you drank enough of it, you stopped noticing it wasn't of the best. Sosia looked around the inside of the pavilion. "You kept your promise," she said.

"I told you I would," Lanius answered.

She waved that aside, as though of no account. "You've told me all kinds of things," she said. "Some of them are true. Some of them — " She stopped and shook her head. "I didn't come here to quarrel with you — as long as I didn't find you in bed with a milkmaid, anyhow."

"No milkmaids," Lanius said solemnly.

"I don't see any, anyhow," his wife said, which was not quite a ringing endorsement. But she shook her head again, this time apparently at herself. "You deserve a reward for keeping your word."

"A reward?" Lanius blinked. "What sort of reward?"

She looked at him sidelong. "What would you like?"

The cot in which he slept was crowded for two, but proved not too crowded. The reward left them both sweaty. "If we could give something like this to all the people in Avornis who do something good, we'd see a lot more done," Lanius said.

Sosia poked him in the ribs. He jerked; she'd hit a ticklish spot. Trying to keep her voice severe, she said, "This isn't something the kingdom supplies. And besides, what would you give to women?"

"Men?" he suggested. She poked him again. But she didn't ask him anything more about why he'd brought Pouncer out here. As far as he was concerned, that was part of her reward for him, too.

"Over the river!" Grus said triumphantly.

"Did you have any doubts?" Hirundo asked him. "If you did, maybe we shouldn't have started this campaign at all."

"Well, it's nice to know we can still fool the Menteshe, anyhow," Grus said. He'd used a familiar ploy to cross the Zabat — feinting a crossing at one place to draw the nomads there, then crossing somewhere else and hitting them from behind. A jug of wine sat on the folding table in his pavilion. He poured his cup full and added, "Now we get to find out how they can fool us."

"They didn't have much luck last year." Hirundo never lacked for confidence.

Grus had drunk enough wine to make him melancholy. "They made us lay siege to Trabzun. They didn't let us get all the way to Yozgat, the way I hoped they would." Looking back on things, that had probably been wild-eyed optimism on his part before he set out from the city of Avornis, but still…

"We'll get there," Hirundo said — confidently.

Menteshe horsemen shadowed the Avornan army when it started moving south the next day. Grus wondered whether they belonged to Korkut's faction or Sanjar's. He also wondered how much difference it made. If he penetrated deep enough into the Menteshe country, wouldn't the nomads abandon their feuds and band together to attack his men? They didn't last year, he thought, trying his best to be as hopeful as Hirundo.

The air was warm and moist — sultry was the word that came to Grus' mind. He nodded to himself. That seemed right, even if it wasn't a word he got to use very often. He hadn't gone far south of the Zabat before he saw trees that put him in mind of outsized feather dusters. Their trunks were long, bare columns, some straight, others gracefully curved. Leaves spread out fanlike only from the top.

Hirundo and Pterocles stared at the curious growths along with the king. "Aren't those the most peculiar things you ever set eyes on?" Pterocles said.

"Not when we're riding with you," Hirundo told him, and the wizard sent the general a wounded look.

"I know what they are," Grus said suddenly, and Pterocles and Hirundo both turned toward him. "They're palm trees!" he declared. "They have to be."

"They don't have to be anything," Pterocles said, which was bound to be true. He eyed the strange trees. "They don't have to be anything, no, but I'd say they're more likely to be palm trees than anything else."

"What good are they?" Hirundo asked.

Grus wished Lanius were riding with them. The other king would have known what palm trees were good for if anybody did. Maybe they were nothing but overgrown ornaments. But then Pterocles said, "You get dates from them, don't you?"

"Personally?" Hirundo said. "No."

"I think he's right," Grus said. "I've heard of date palms, though I don't know if that's what these are."

"When we start freeing thralls, they'll be able to tell us," Pterocles said. "They'll probably think we're a pack of fools for needing to ask, but they'll tell us. Do you feel like being laughed at by men three steps above idiot?"

Before Hirundo could say anything, Grus coughed warningly. Hirundo kept his mouth shut. Grus felt as though the gods had doled out a miracle, if only a small one.

And then a scout came back shouting frantically for his attention. "Your Majesty! Your Majesty!"

"I'm here," Grus called. "What do you need?"

"Your Majesty, there's an ambassador from the Banished One behind me."

"From… the Banished One, you say?" Grus got the words out through lips suddenly numb with alarm.

"That's right, Your Majesty." The scout nodded. He didn't sound particularly afraid. Why should he? Any envoy from the Banished One wasn't his worry — not unless the whole army went down to ruin, anyway. "Will you see him, or shall we send him off with his tail between his legs?"

"I'll see him," Grus answered after no more than a heartbeat's hesitation. Avornis was at war with the Banished One and those who worshiped him, yes. But that didn't mean the forms were forgotten. It didn't mean insulting the exiled god in any small way wasn't dangerous, either.

The Banished One's envoy rode up to Grus a few minutes later. He gave his name as Tutush son of Budak. "I speak for the Fallen Star, and he speaks through me," he declared, and sounded proud that that was so.

Grus could imagine no greater horror. He asked, "How do I know that you speak the truth?"

Tutush looked at him — looked through him, really. "You will have dreamt of my master," he said.

Beside Grus, Pterocles inhaled sharply. The king had better self-control, but only barely. He no longer doubted Tutush. "Say on," he told the Menteshe. The words were harsh in his mouth.

"Hear the Fallen Star, then. Hear him and obey." Tutush looked almost as arrogant as he sounded. He had a hawk's proud face, with a scimitar of a nose and a slash of a mouth almost hidden by mustache and graying black beard. "The Fallen Star orders you from his lands. Go now, go in peace, and he will suffer you to leave unharmed." The envoy spoke fluent, slightly old-fashioned Avornan. "Should you flout his will, though, you shall have only yourself to blame for your destruction."

"I'll take the chance," Grus replied. "The way it looks to me, the Banished One wants to scare me into leaving when he and his puppets haven't been strong enough to make me leave. He knows where I'm going, and he knows why. I'm bound for Yozgat, and for the Scepter of Mercy. If Prince Korkut gives it to me, I will go home — or if Prince Sanjar does, for that matter." Maybe he could make the Banished One suspect Ulash's warring sons.

Or maybe not. Tutush threw back his head and laughed uproariously, as if Grus had just made some rich joke. "Fool! Do you think holding the Scepter of Mercy will make you happy? Even if you should touch it — which you never will — you would remain nothing but a puny mortal man, soon doomed to die and be forgotten."

Grus only shrugged. "I'll take the chance," he said again. "I'm not doing this for me — I'm doing it for Avornis, and for those who come after me."

Tutush laughed again, even more woundingly this time. "He who comes after you will never wield it — never, do you hear me? So says the Fallen Star, and he speaks the truth. So he says; so he swears. He would swear by the accursed so-called gods in the heavens that he speaks truth here."

"He can swear whatever he pleases, and take whatever oaths he pleases. That does not mean I would believe him, not when he is the fount from which all lies spring." Grus tried to hide how startled he was. Had the Banished One ever sworn an oath like that? The king doubted it.

"This being so, you see that it makes no sense for you to do anything but give up your vain and foolish adventure," Tutush said, as though the king had not spoken. "If you go on, you will only bring ruin to your kingdom, your army, and yourself. Go back, then, and enjoy what the Fallen Star permits you to retain as your own."

The exiled god's implacable arrogance came through in every one of his envoy's words. It chilled Grus, but also angered him. "I'll take my chances," he said one more time. "And whoever comes after me will have to take his chances with the Scepter of Mercy. I don't intend to worry about that. I want him to have the chance to take his chances."

"Do you presume to reject my master's mercy?" Tutush sounded as though he couldn't believe his ears.

"I don't think your master knows the meaning of the word," Grus replied. "He can't use the Scepter, after all. The only thing he can do is keep it away from people who can use it — and that does include the Kings of Avornis."

"You will live to regret this," Tutush said angrily. "But you may not live long."

"So tell me," Grus said, "who is the Banished One's favorite in the civil war?"

Tutush knew. Grus could see as much. And the ambassador started to answer. He started to, but he didn't finish. Grus had hoped to catch him by surprise and learn something important, something he could have used against both Menteshe princes. But all Tutush said was, "You'll find out — if you live so long. Good day." He rode off. Grus thought the day was better because he was gone.