“Oh, just a bit,” Grus answered. “Yes, just a bit.”
Plegadis laughed out loud. Grus stared at the Avornan copy of a Chernagor pirate ship. Sure enough, it towered over everything else tied up at the quays of Dodona. To someone used to the low, sleek lines of river galleys, it looked blocky, even ugly, but Grus had seen what ships like this were worth.
“Is she as sturdy as she looks?” the king asked.
“I should hope so.” The shipwright sounded offended. “I didn’t just copy her shape, Your Majesty. I matched lines and timber and canvas, too, as best I could. She’s ready to take to the open sea, and to do as well as a Chernagor ship would.”
Grus nodded. “That’s what I wanted. How soon can I have more just like her—a proper fleet?”
“Give me the timber and the carpenters and it won’t be too long— middle of summer, maybe,” Plegadis answered. “Getting sailors who know what they’re doing in a ship like this… That’ll take a little while, too.”
“I understand.” Grus eyed the tall, tall masts. “Handling all that canvas will take a lot of practice by itself.”
“We do have some Chernagor prisoners to teach us the ropes,” Plegadis said. When a shipwright used that phrase, he wasn’t joking or spitting out a cliché. He meant exactly what the words implied.
He wasn’t joking, but was he being careful enough? “Have you had a wizard check these Chernagors?” Grus asked. “We may have some of the same worries with them that we do with the Menteshe, and even with the thralls. I’m not saying we will, but we may.”
Plegadis’ grimace showed a broken front tooth. “I didn’t even think of that, Your Majesty, but I’ll see to it, I promise you. What I was going to tell you is, some of the fishermen here make better crew for this Chernagor ship than a lot of river-galley men. They know what to do with a good-sized sail, where on a galley it’s row, row, row all the time.”
“Yes, I can see how that might be so.” Grus looked east, out to the Azanian Sea. It seemed to go on and on forever. He’d felt that even more strongly when he went out on it in a river galley. He’d also felt badly out of his element. He’d gotten away with fighting on the sea, but he wasn’t eager to try it again in ships not made for it. Would I be more ready to try it in a monster like that? he wondered. Once I had a good crew, I think I might be. Out loud, he went on, “I don’t care where the men come from, as long as you get them.”
“Good. That’s the right attitude.” Plegadis nodded. “We have to lick those Chernagor bastards. I’m not fussy about how. They did us a lot of harm, and they’d better find out they can’t get away with nonsense like that. I’ll tell you something else, too. Along this coast, plenty of fishermen’ll think an ordinary sailor’s wages look pretty good, poor miserable devils.”
“I believe it,” Grus answered. The eastern coast was Avornis’ forgotten land. If a king wanted to make a man disappear, he sent him to the Maze. If a man wanted to disappear on his own, he came to the coast. Even tax collectors often overlooked this part of the kingdom. Grus knew he had until the Chernagors descended on it. He added, “If all this makes us tie the coast to the rest of Avornis, some good will have come from it.”
To his surprise, Plegadis hesitated before nodding again. “Well, I think so, too, Your Majesty, or I suppose I do. But you’ll find people up and down the coast who won’t. They like being… on their own, you might say.”
“How did they like it when the pirates burned their towns and stole their silver and raped their women?” Grus asked. “They were glad enough to see us after that.”
“Oh, yes.” The shipwright’s smile was as crooked as that tooth of his. “But they got over it pretty quick.” Grus started to smile. He started to, but he didn’t. Once again, Plegadis hadn’t been joking.
When all else failed, King Lanius took refuge in the archives. No one bothered him there, and when he concentrated on old documents he didn’t have to dwell on whatever else was bothering him. Over the years, going there had served him well. But it didn’t come close to easing the pain of losing Cristata.
And it wasn’t just the pain of losing her. He recognized that. Part of it was also the humiliation of being unable to do anything for someone he loved. If Grus had ravished her in front of his eyes, it could hardly have been worse. Grus hadn’t, of course. He’d been humane, especially compared to what he might have done. He’d even made Lanius see his point of view, but so what? Cristata was still gone, she still wouldn’t be back, and Lanius still bitterly missed her.
Next to that ache in his heart, even finding another letter as interesting and important as King Cathartes’ probably wouldn’t have meant much to him. As things turned out, most of what Lanius did find was dull. There were days when he could plow through tax receipts and stay interested, but those were days when he was in a better mood than he was now. He found himself alternately yawning and scowling.
He fought his way through a few sets of receipts, as much from duty as anything else. But then he shook his head, gave up, and buried his face in his hands. If he gave in to self-pity here, at least he could do it without anyone else seeing.
When he raised his head again, sharp curiosity—and the beginnings of alarm—replaced the self-pity. Any noise he heard in the archives was out of the ordinary. And any noise he heard here could be a warning of something dangerous. If one of the thralls had escaped…
He turned his head this way and that, trying to pinpoint the noise. It wasn’t very loud, and it didn’t seem to come from very high off the ground. “Mouse,” Lanius muttered, and tried to make himself believe it.
He’d nearly succeeded when a sharp clatter drove such thoughts from his mind. Mice didn’t carry metal objects—knives?—or knock them against wood. Today, Lanius had a knife at his own belt. But he was neither warrior nor assassin, as he knew all too well.
“Who’s there?” he called, slipping the knife from its sheath and sliding forward as quietly as he could. Only silence answered him. He peered ahead. Almost anything smaller than an elephant could have hidden in the archives. He’d never fully understood what higgledy-piggledy meant until he started coming in here. He often wondered whether anyone ever read half the parchments various officials wrote. Sometimes it seemed as though the parchments just ended up here, on shelves and in boxes and barrels and leather sacks and sometimes even wide-mouthed pottery jugs all stacked one atop another with scant regard for sanity or safety.
Elephants Lanius didn’t much worry about. An elephant would have had to go through a winepress before it could squeeze between the stacks of documents and receptacles. Assassins, unfortunately, weren’t likely to be so handicapped.
“Who’s there?” the king called again, his voice breaking nervously.
Again, no answer, not with words. But he did hear another metallic clatter, down close to the ground.
That made him wonder. There were assassins, and then there were… He made the noise he used when he was about to feed the moncats. Sure enough, out came one of the beasts, this time carrying not a wooden spoon but a long-handled silver dipper for lifting soup from a pot or wine from a barrel.
“You idiot animal!” Lanius exclaimed. Unless he was wildly mistaken, this was the same moncat that had frightened him in here before. He pointed an accusing finger at it. “How did you get out this time, Pouncer? And how did you get into the kitchens and then out of them again?”
“Rowr,” Pouncer said, which didn’t explain enough.