This time, though, the Chernagor ship didn’t sink. The skipper ran her aground in the shallows before she filled too much and became altogether unmanageable. Pirates leaped off her and splashed ashore. Grus knew he would have to land men, too. The galleys had outpaced other forces following on the river and by land. If all the pirates had taken to their heels through the fields, they would have been very troublesome. The survivors from one ship? Probably not.
Hirundo seemed to think along the same lines. “Not too bad, Your Majesty,” he said.
“No, not too,” Grus agreed. “Not yet. But we’ve only just started cleaning them out. This is the first bunch we’ve run into, and maybe the smallest.”
Hirundo made a horrible face. Then, very reluctantly, he nodded.
King Lanius sat in the royal archives, delightfully encased in quiet. More dust motes than usual danced in the sunbeams that pushed through the dirty skylights overhead. Lanius had been shoving boxes around again, looking for interesting things he hadn’t seen before. He often did that. He didn’t often get rewarded as handsomely as he had this time.
He had to stop and think how long ago King Cathartes had reigned. Seven hundred years ago? Eight hundred? Something like that. Cathartes hadn’t spent an especially long time on the Diamond Throne, nor had his reign been distinguished. But, like all Kings of Avornis until the Menteshe stole it, he’d wielded the Scepter of Mercy. Unlike most of them, he’d worked hard to describe what that was like.
Without both patience and luck, Lanius never would have come across the time-yellowed scrap of parchment. Patience encompassed the labor of digging out new boxes of documents and the different but even more wearing labor of going through them one by one to see what each was. Luck came in when King Cathartes’ letter got stuck by fragments of wax from its seal to a much less interesting report on sheep farming in the Granicus valley that was only a quarter as old. If Lanius hadn’t been paying attention, he would have put the report on wool and mutton aside without noticing it had another document riding on its back.
King Cathartes’ script looked strange, but Lanius could puzzle it out. The language was old-fashioned, but not impossibly so. And Cathartes was talking about something that fascinated Lanius, so the present king worked especially hard. Oft have men of me inquired, What feel you? What think you? on laying hold of the most excellent Scepter. Hath it the massiness of some great burthen in your hand, as seemingly it needs must, being of size not inconsiderable? Let all know, as others have said aforetimes, a man seizing the Scepter of Mercy in the cause of righteousness is in sooth likewise seized by the same.
Lanius wondered what the cause of righteousness was, and how any man, let alone a King of Avornis holding the Scepter of Mercy, could know he was following it. Did Cathartes mean the Scepter gave some sign of what was right and what wasn’t? Perhaps he did, for he went on, Know that, when rightly wielded, the Scepter weigheth in the hand, not naught — for that were, methinks, a thing impossible e’en mongst the gods — but very little, such that a puling babe, purposing to lift it for the said righteous cause, would find neither hindrance nor impediment.
But if a man depart from that which is good, if he purpose the use of the aforesaid Scepter of Mercy in a cause unjust, then will he find he may not lift it at all, but is prevented from all his ends, Cathartes wrote.
“Well, well,” Lanius murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?” It wasn’t just interesting. It was new, and he’d almost despaired of finding anything new about the Scepter of Mercy. Most Kings of Avornis who’d written about it at all had been maddeningly vague, insisting the wielding of the Scepter was a matter of touch without ever explaining how. Cathartes had been far more forthcoming.
It also explained far more than Cathartes could have dreamed. For four hundred years, the Scepter of Mercy had lain in Yozgat. In all that time, so far as Lanius knew, the Banished One had never picked it up and used its powers against his foes. Like all Avornan kings over those four centuries, Lanius was glad the Banished One hadn’t, but he’d never understood why not. Now, perhaps, he did. After the Menteshe brought it back to him, had he tried to lift it, tried and failed? No proof, of course. But it seemed more reasonable to Lanius than any other idea he’d ever had along those lines.
Maybe it meant even more than that. Maybe it meant the gods had been justified in casting Milvago down from the heavens, making him into the Banished One. Didn’t it argue that his goal of forcing his way back into the heavens was anything but righteous? Or did it just say their magic rejected him even as they had themselves?
Lanius laughed. How am I, one mortal man sitting by himself in these dusty archives, supposed to figure out all the workings of the gods? If that wasn’t unmitigated gall, he couldn’t imagine what would be.
He wished he could talk with Grus about it. That failing, he wished Avornis had an arch-hallow whose passion was learning about and seeking to understand the gods, not tracking down a deer after he’d put an arrow in its side. Lanius might have trusted such an arch-hallow with the terrifying secret of Milvago. Anser? No. However much Lanius liked Grus’ bastard, he knew he was a lightweight.
He even understood why Grus had chosen to invest Anser with the red robe. Anser was unshakably loyal to his father. And how many people are unshakably loyal to me? Lanius wondered. Is anyone?) That had enormous advantages for the other king. But sometimes an arch-hallow who did more than fill space would have been useful. Lanius almost wished Bucco still led services in the cathedral, and Bucco would have married him off to King Dagipert of Thervingia’s daughter if he’d had his way.
Now, Lanius asked himself, what to do with Cathartes’ letter? At first, he wanted to put it in some prominent place. Instead, he ended up using its bits of sealing wax to reattach it to the report on sheep in the Granicus valley to which it had clung for so long. Sometimes obscurity was best.
Only after Lanius had left the archives did he wonder whether that applied to him as well as to what King Cathartes had written all those years ago. Little by little, he’d realized he didn’t much want to challenge Grus for the sole rule of Avornis, so maybe it did. And if he didn’t, he might get along with—and work with—his father-in-law better than he ever had before.
Down the Granicus toward the Azanian Sea sailed the fleet of river galleys Grus commanded. Other flotillas and contingents of soldiers were, he hoped, clearing more of the Nine Rivers and their valleys of the Chernagor pirates.
He’d had to fight again, at Calydon. The Chernagors there weren’t plundering the town. They were holding it, and hadn’t intended to give it back to any mere Avornans. Grus used the same ploy he’d succeeded with against Baron Lev at the fortress of Varazdin. He made an ostentatious attack against the waterfront from the river. When he judged most of the pirates had rushed to that part of Calydon, he sent soldiers against the land wall. They got inside the city before the Chernagors realized they were in trouble. After that, Calydon fell in short order. His biggest trouble then was keeping the inhabitants from massacring the Chernagors he’d taken prisoner.
When he heard some of the stories about what the Chernagors did while holding Calydon, he was more than halfway sorry he hadn’t let the people do what they wanted. By then, he’d sent the captured pirates back into the countryside under guard. He didn’t know just what he would do with them—put them to work in the mines, maybe, or exchange them for Avornans their countrymen had taken. And if I don’t do either of those, he thought, I can always give them back to the people of Calydon.