I can’t come up empty, Lanius told himself. I just can’t. If he failed here, Grus would never ask him for anything again. As though that weren’t bad enough, the other king would despise the archives. Lanius took that as personally as though Grus were to despise his children.
And then, half an hour later, the king let out a whoop that echoed through the big archives chamber. He held a report by a soldier who’d served along the Stura in the reign of his own great-great-great-grandfather. The man had carefully described each drum signal the Menteshe used and what it meant.
After making a copy of the report, Lanius left the chamber. He scribbled a note to go with the copy, sealed them both, and gave them to a courier for the long journey south.
“You look pleased with yourself,” Sosia answered when he went back to the royal chambers in triumph.
“I am,” Lanius answered, and then looked down at the dusty finery he wore. “But the servants won’t be pleased with me. I forgot to change before I went into the archives.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Well, well.” Grus eyed the parchment he’d just unrolled. “King Lanius came through for us.”
Hirundo looked over his shoulder. “He sure did,” the general agreed. “This was in the archives?”
“That’s what the note with it says,” Grus answered.
“If we knew this once upon a time, I wonder why we forgot,” Hirundo said.
“A spell of peace probably lasted longer than any one man’s career,” Grus said. “The people who knew wouldn’t have passed it on to the younger officers who needed to know, and so the chain got broken.”
“That makes sense,” Hirundo said.
“Which doesn’t mean it’s true, of course,” Grus said. “How many things that seem to make perfect sense turn out not to have anything to do with what looks sensible?”
“Oh, a few,” his general replied. “Yes, just a few.”
“We don’t have to worry about tracking down the whys and wherefores here,” Grus said with a certain relief. “If what Lanius says in that note is true, it happened a long time ago.”
“Now that we have what we need, though, let’s see what we can do about giving the Menteshe a surprise,” Hirundo said.
“Oh, yes.” Grus nodded. “That’s the idea.”
The drums started thumping at sunset that day. In the evening twilight, Grus peered down at the list of calls Lanius had sent him. Three beats, pause, two beats… That meant west. Five quick beats was assemble. Having found those meanings, the king started laughing. Knowing what the drums meant helped him less than he’d hoped it would. Yes, Ulash’s men were to assemble somewhere off to the west. But where?
Grus snapped his fingers. He didn’t know; this wasn’t a part of Avornis with which he was intimately familiar. But the army had soldiers from all parts of Avornis in it. He called for runners, gave them quick orders, and sent them on their way through the encampment.
Inside half an hour, they came back with four soldiers, all of them from farms and towns within a few miles of where the army had camped. They bowed low before the king. “Never mind that nonsense,” Grus said impatiently, which made their eyes widen in surprise. “If you were going to gather a large force of horsemen somewhere within a day’s ride west of here, where would you do it?”
They looked surprised again, but put their heads together even so. After a few minutes of talk, they all nodded. One of them pointed southwest. “Your Majesty, there’s a meadow just this side of the Aternus, before it runs into the Cephisus.” The latter was one of the Nine. The soldier went on, “It’s got good grazing—Olor’s beard, sir, it’s got wonderful grazing—the whole year around. It’s about half a day’s ride that way.”
“Can you guide us to it?” Grus asked. The man nodded. So did his comrades. And so did the king. “All right, then. Every one of you will do that come morning. You’ll all have a reward, too. Keep quiet about this until then, though.”
The men loudly promised they would. Grus hoped so, though he wasn’t overoptimistic. His father had always said two men could keep a secret if one of them was dead, and that, if three men tried, one was likely a fool and the other two spies. After leaving a farm not impossibly far from here, his father had come to the city of Avornis and served as a royal guard, so he’d seen enough intrigue to know what he was talking about.
After sending away the soldiers, Grus summoned Hirundo and Pterocles. He explained what he had in mind. “Can we do this?” he asked.
“A little risky,” Hirundo said. “More than a little, maybe. We’ll look like idiots if the Menteshe catch on. We may look like dead idiots if they catch on.”
Grus nodded. He’d already figured that out for himself. He turned to Pterocles. “Can you mask us, or mask some of us?”
“Some of us,” the wizard answered. “It would have to be some of us. All?” He rolled his eyes. “That would be an impossibly large job for any human wizard.”
“Do the best you can,” Grus told him. “I don’t expect you to do more than a human wizard’s capable of.”
“All right, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said.
“You’re going ahead with this scheme, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.
“Yes,” Grus said. “If it works, we’ll give Ulash’s men a nasty surprise.” And if it doesn’t, they’ll give us one. He refused to worry—too much—about that. By its nature, war involved risk. The gamble here seemed good to the king. If they won, they would win a lot.
They rode out before sunrise the next morning, the men from close by leading the two divisions into which Grus had split the army. Out of a certain sense of fairness, Grus sent Pterocles off with the division Hirundo led. The king hadn’t ridden far before regretting his generosity. If Pterocles had come with him, he would have had a better chance of staying alive.
No help for it now, though. As Grus had told his guides to do, they led him and his men on a looping track that would take them around to strike the Menteshe from the west—if the Menteshe were there. Whether they struck them at the same time as Hirundo’s men did was going to be largely a matter of luck.
One of the guards pointed. “There, Your Majesty! Look!”
They’d guessed right. Prince Ulash’s nomads were gathering on the meadow. Grus knew exactly the moment when they realized the large force approaching wasn’t theirs but Avornan. So ants boiled after their hill was kicked.
“Forward!” Grus shouted to the trumpeters. As the fierce horn calls clove the air, he set spurs to his gelding. The horse whinnied in pained protest. Grus roweled it again. It bounded ahead. He drew his sword. The sun flashed fire from the blade. “Forward!” he yelled once more.
Some of the Menteshe started shooting. Others fled. King Grus doubted the nomads were under any sort of unified command. Each chieftain—maybe even each horseman—decided for himself what he would do. That made the Menteshe hard for Avornis to control. It also made them hard for their own warlords to control.
The Avornans shot back as soon as they came within range. A few of them had already pitched from the saddle. But Ulash’s warriors began falling, too. Soon the Menteshe still hale started fleeing. They had never seen any shame in running away when the odds seemed against them.
Grus brandished the sword, though he had yet to come within fifty feet of a foe. Where were Hirundo and Pterocles and the other division? Had the wizard masked them so well, they’d disappeared altogether? Had the Banished One swept them off the field, as a man might have removed them from a gaming board? Or had their guides simply gotten lost?