But the first sentence caught and held his eye. I wonder why I have written this, it said, when no one is ever likely to read it, or to understand it if he does. After that, he couldn’t have stopped reading for anything. The author was a black-robed priest named Xenops. He had been consecrated the year before the Chernagors took Argithea out of the Kingdom of Avornis, and had stayed on at the cathedral under the town’s new masters for the next fifty years and more.
“Olor’s beard!” Lanius whispered. “This shows how Durdevatz passed from one world to the other.” He’d never imagined seeing such a document. In their early years in these parts, the Chernagors hadn’t written in Avornan or their own language or any other. And he had not thought any Avomans left behind in the north had set down what they’d seen and heard and felt. No such chronicles existed in the royal archives—he was sure of that. A moment later, he shook his head. One did now.
Xenops had caught moments in the transition from the old way of life to the new. He’d mocked the crude coins the Chernagors began to mint a generation after the fall of Argithea. Next to those of Avornis, they are ugly and irregular, he’d written. But new coins of Avornis come seldom if at all, while so many old ones are hoarded against hard times. Even these ugly things may be better than none.
Later, he’d noted the demise of Avornan in the market square. Besides me, only a few old grannies use it as a birthspeech nowadays, he said. Some of the younger folk can speak it after a fashion, but they prefer the conquerors’ barbarous jargon. Soon, only those who need Avornan in trade will know it at all.
Once, earlier, some of the Avornans left in the city had plotted to rejoin it to the kingdom from which it had been torn. The Chernagors discovered the plot and bloodily put it down. But none of them so much as looked toward me, Xenops wrote. Had they done so, they might have been surprised. I have been for so long invisible to the new lords of this town, though, that they cannot see me at all. Well, I know their deeds, regardless of whether they know mine.
That was interesting, to say the least. How deep in the conspiracy had Xenops been? Had he quietly started it and managed to survive unnoticed when it fell to pieces? The only evidence Lanius had—the only evidence he would ever have—lay before him now, and the priest did not go into detail. If someone had found and read his chronicle while he still lived in Durdevatz, he had said enough to hang himself, so why not more? Lanius knew he would never find out.
A chilling passage began, He calls himself a spark from the Fallen Star. Xenops went on to record how an emissary from the Banished One had come to Durdevatz even that long ago. He’d made a mistake—he’d gotten angry when the Chernagors didn’t fall down on their knees before him right away. I advised the lords of the Chernagors that such a one was not to be trusted, as he had shown by his own speech and deeds, Xenops wrote. They were persuaded, and sent him away unsuccessful.
How much did Avornis owe to this altogether unknown priest? If the Chernagors had fallen under the sway of the Banished One centuries earlier, how would the other city-states—how would Avornis— have fared? Not well, not when Avornis might have been trapped between the Banished Ones backers to north and south.
“Thank you, Xenops,” Lanius murmured. “You’ll get your due centuries later than you should have, but you’ll have it.” He could think of several passages in How to Be a King he would need to revise.
At the end of the long roll of parchment, Xenops wrote, Now, as I say, I am old. I have heard that the old always remember the time of their youth as the sweet summer of the world. I dare say it is true. But who could blame me for having that feeling myself? Before the barbarians came, Argithea was part of a wider world. Now it is alone, and I rarely hear what passes beyond its walls. The Chernagors do not even keep its name, but use some vile appellation of their own. Their speech drives out Avornan; even I have had to acquire it, however reluctantly I cough out its gutturals. The tongue I learned in my cradle gutters toward extinction. When I am gone — which will not be long — who here will know, much less care, what I have set down in this scroll? No one, I fear me— no one at all. If the gods be kind, let it pass through time until it comes into the hands of someone who will care for it in the reading as I have in the writing. King Olor, Queen Quelea, grant this your servants final prayer.
Tears stung Lanius’ eyes. “The gods heard you,” he whispered, though Xenops, of course, could not hear him. But how many centuries had Olor and Quelea taken to deliver the priest’s manuscript into the hands of someone who could appreciate it as it deserved? If they were going to answer Xenops’ last request, couldn’t they have done it sooner? Evidently not.
Was a prayer answered centuries after it was made truly answered at all? In one sense, Lanius supposed so. But the way the gods had chosen to respond did poor Xenops no good at all.
Lanius looked again at the long-dead priest’s closing words. No, Xenops hadn’t expected anyone in his lifetime could make sense of what he’d written. He’d merely hoped someone would someday. On reflection, the gods had given him what he’d asked for. Even so, Lanius would have been surprised if Xenops had thought his chronicle would have to wait so very long to find an audience.
But then, for all Xenops knew, the scroll might have stayed unread until time had its way with it. The priest must have thought that likely, as a matter of fact, for Avornan was a dying language in the town that had become Durdevatz. And, except among traders who used it for dealing with the Avornans farther south but not among themselves, it had died there. Yes, its getting here was a miracle, even if a slow one.
“A slow miracle.” Lanius spoke the words aloud, liking the way they felt in his mouth. But the Banished One could also work what men called miracles when he intervened in the world’s affairs, and he didn’t wait centuries to do it. There were times when he waited, and wasted, not a moment.
The gods had exiled him to the material world. In a way, that made it his. Could they really do much to counter his grip on things here? If they couldn’t, who could? Ordinary people? He had far more power than they did, as Lanius knew all too well. Yet somehow the Banished One had failed to sweep everything before him. Maybe that was a portent. Maybe it just meant the Banished One hadn’t triumphed. Time was on his side.
But he still feared Lanius and Grus and Pterocles—and Alca as well, the king remembered. Lanius only wished he knew what he could do to deserve even more of the Banished One’s distrust.
For a while, nothing occurred to him. Having the exiled god notice him at all was something of a compliment, even if one that he could often do without. Then Lanius nodded to himself. If he—or rather, if Avornis’ wizards—could begin liberating thralls in large numbers, the Banished One would surely pay heed.
What would he do then? Lanius didn’t know. He couldn’t begin to guess. One thing he did know, though, was that he would dearly love to find out.
Hisardzik sat at the end of a long spit of land jutting out into the Northern Sea. Besieging Nishevatz had been anything but easy. Besieging this Chernagor city-state would have been harder still, for the defenders had to hold only a short length of wall against their foes. King Grus, a longtime naval officer, knew he could have made the Chernagors’ work more difficult with a fleet, but they had a fleet of their own. Their ships were tied up at quays beyond the reach of any catapult.