“Do you want a guide, or would you sooner poke through things on your own?” Ixoreus asked.
“By your leave, most holy sir—” Lanius began.
The priest laughed out loud. “You want me to go away and let you do as you would,” he said. “There may be more to you as a searcher than I thought. The run-of-the-mill sort want me to hold their hand. They may find what they’re looking for, but somehow they’re never looking for anything much. The other kind—well, they often come up empty. When they don’t, though…”
Lanius hardly heard him. The king looked now here, now there, wondering where to begin. He also wondered why he’d never come here before. True, the royal archives held enough documents to keep a man busy till the end of time. Even so, he should have started going through these records years before.
When he sat down, the stool creaked under him. He wondered if it dated back to the days before the Scepter of Mercy was lost. Then he wondered if it dated back to the days before the Banished One was cast out of the heavens. Anywhere else, he would have laughed at the idea. Down here in the near darkness, it didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.
He almost called Ixoreus back to ask if the records held any order at all. In the end, he didn’t—he wanted to find out for himself. He soon discovered there wasn’t much. Documents from his father’s reign lay beside others dating back before the loss of the Scepter of Mercy. If he wanted something in particular, he was going to need luck and patience.
Luck came from the gods. Patience… Lanius shifted on that ancient stool. Patience he had. His lips twisted in a bitter smile. After all, it wasn’t as though he would be taking time away from anything vital to Avornis if he came down here and worked his way through the clerical archives one silverfish-nibbled piece of parchment at a time. Grus didn’t let him deal with anything vital anyhow.
If he hadn’t had practice reading old, old scripts in the royal archives, he would have been altogether at sea here. As things were, that troubled him no more than switching from the hand of one secretary to that of another would have. He felt like shouting when he came upon letters from half a dozen yellow-robed clerics bewailing the irruption of the Menteshe into the lands around their towns. No Avornan clerics had gone to those towns for more than four hundred years.
He felt like cursing when, in the same set of pigeonholes as those letters, he found others about sending consecrated wine to the Chernagor city-states that came from the reign of his great-grandfather. Maybe someone would find those interesting one day, but he didn’t.
He shoved them back into their pigeonholes. The next cache of letters also came from the days of his dynasty, which meant they were too recent to be interesting to him. He had to go through them one at a time anyway, because no one except Olor and Quelea could be sure ahead of time what might lie mixed in with them.
As it happened, nothing was mixed in with that batch—nothing Lanius cared about, anyhow. “But if I hadn’t looked through them, the parchment I need would be at the bottom of that crate,” he muttered. His words vanished without the slightest trace of echo, as though the parchments and the boxes and racks that held them swallowed up sound. They were surely hungry. They wouldn’t have had many sounds to swallow down here, not for year upon year upon year.
Lanius went through another crate and another rack. He kept waiting for Ixoreus to come nag him about going back up to the outer world again. But the green-robed priest left him alone.
That made him happy. Ixoreus understood, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Lanius had met only a handful of men who did.
And patience and persistence had their reward. Lanius was going through some minutes from a minor ecclesiastical council two hundred fifty years before when he came upon a parchment that didn’t belong with the rest. He saw as much at once; the parchment was yellow with age, the writing faded to a pale ghost of itself. He whistled softly. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything this old in the royal archives.
He brought three lamps together, to give him the best light he could get down here. Then he bent close to see what he could make out. Not just the script was archaic here; so was the language. He had to puzzle it out a phrase at a time. When he finished, he quietly put the parchment back where he’d found it. He said not a word about it to Ixoreus when they returned to the world of light and air. The priest wouldn’t have believed him. Lanius wondered if he believed himself, or wanted to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A lea eyed the Menteshe prisoner with no great warmth. The Menteshe looked back at her out of narrow dark eyes filled with fear and suspicion. Grus listened to the rain drumming down on the roof of his residence in Cumanus. His men and the changing weather had finally persuaded Prince Evren his attacks were costing him more than they were worth.
“You speak Avornan?” Alca asked the prisoner.
“I speak some, yes,” the nomad answered.
“I chose one for you who did,” Grus said.
Alca nodded. She asked the Menteshe, “What is your name?”
“I am Kai-Qubad,” he said. If he’d trusted her, he would have given her his whole genealogy after that; the Menteshe were proud of their ancestors. Grus wondered why. To him, one lizard-eating savage was no different from another. Someone like Lanius, now, had reason to boast about the family tree. But a Menteshe? Kai-Qubad, though, fell silent after his own name, not wanting to give Alca more of a hold on him than he had to.
She didn’t press him for more. Instead, she said, “You need to know that I will know if you lie. Do you understand this? Do you believe it?”
“I understand. I believe. You are…” Kai-Qubad said something in his own tongue.
Grus didn’t speak the Menteshe language. He hadn’t thought the witch did, either, but she nodded. “All right, then. Tell me why Prince Evren went to war against Avornis.”
Kai-Qubad scratched by the side of his mouth. He had a wispy mustache any Avornan man would have been ashamed of, but few Menteshe could have grown a thicker one. After that brief hesitation, he said, “You are there to war on. You should ask, why did we not war on you for so long?”
“When you hadn’t warred on us for so long, why did Evren pick that time to start?” Grus asked.
“Am I Evren? Do I know why the prince does what he does?” Kai-Qubad returned.
Sharply, Alca said, “I know when you evade, too. You would do better not to evade. You would do much better, in fact.” She waited. Kai-Qubad nodded. So did she. “Answer the king’s question,” she told him.
“You are the enemy. You will always be the enemy. And our flocks need new grazing lands,” the nomad said. “What more reason do we need?”
“I don’t know,” Grus said. “Did the Banished One order Evren to send men over the Stura? Is that why you chose to fight when you did?”
“The Banished One. So you call him,” Kai-Qubad said scornfully. “To us, he is the Fallen Star. He will return to the heavens one day. He will return, and all debts will be paid. Oh, yes—they will be paid.”
That prospect—which, unsurprisingly, matched what the Banished One himself had claimed—frightened Grus more than he could say. Kai-Qubad looked forward to it with a gloating anticipation that frightened the king, too. Then Alca said, “You are evading again. Did he order Evren to go over the Stura?”