He could name the witch without flinching now. He could also name her without longing for her, which he wouldn’t have believed possible. People said absence made the heart grow fonder. And if the person you cared about suddenly wasn’t absent, and the two of you found you didn’t care for each other anymore? There was a gloomy picture of human nature, but one Grus couldn’t deny. It had happened to him.
Pterocles said, “We started working on it in Pelagonia, yes. I’ve added some new touches since. That’s why I’m so eager to get back to the city of Avornis and try them out on the thralls there.”
“I understand,” Grus said. “But the other thing I understand is, I need you here as long as we’re campaigning. We’ll head back in the fall, I expect. They won’t go anywhere in the meantime.” Reluctantly, Pterocles spread his hands, admitting that was so.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For a long time, thralls had fascinated King Lanius. They were men robbed of much of their humanity, forced down to the dusky, shadow-filled borderland between mankind and the animal world. The existence of thralls made whole men think about what being human really meant.
Then a thrall tried to kill Lanius.
It wasn’t just a fit of bestial passion, of course. It was the Banished One reaching out through the thrall, controlling him as a merely human puppeteer controlled a marionette. From that moment on, thralls hadn’t seemed the same to Lanius. They didn’t strike him as just being half man and half animal. Instead, he also saw them as the Banished One’s tools, as so many hammers and saws and knives (oh yes, knives!) to be picked up whenever the exiled god needed them.
And tools weren’t so fascinating.
Since the thralls tried to murder Lanius and Estrilda, the king had paid much less attention to them, except for making sure the ones still in the palace couldn’t get out and try anything like that again. He didn’t know what sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.
He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.
By all appearances, they didn’t care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.
The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn’t think he’d made any noise uncovering it, but that didn’t always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn’t the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.
That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall’s gaze. This thrall’s face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite-man) was as empty, as emptied, as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.
Did something glint in the thrall’s eyes? His face didn’t change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn’t feel like a beast’s stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.
Nonsense, Lanius told himself. That’s only a thrall, with no working wits in his head. He tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t.
The thrall kept staring and staring. Sometimes, during one of these episodes, a thrall would mouth something up at him, or even say something—a sure sign something more than the poor, damaged thrall was looking out through those eyes. Not this time. After a couple of minutes, the thrall turned away.
Lanius turned away, too, with nothing but relief. He covered the peephole. His knees clicked as he got to his feet. He rubbed his nose, as though that could get rid of the stink from the thralls’ room. Still, he kept coming back to look at them. He was no wizard. He couldn’t learn anything about them that would help anyone find out how to cure them—if, indeed, anyone could curs them. But he stayed intrigued. He couldn’t help wondering what went on in the thralls’ minds. Logic and observation said nothing much went on there, but he wasn’t sure how far to trust them. Where sorcery was involved, were logic and observation the right tools to use?
If they weren’t, what was? What could be? More good questions. Lanius could come up with any number of good questions. Finding good answers for them was harder. Maybe the hope of good answers was what kept him coming back to the peephole.
Not long after that thought crossed his mind, he walked past Limosa in the hallway. She nodded politely as she went by—she thought he’d tried harder than he really had to get her father out of the Maze. He nodded back, though it took an effort. He had plenty of good questions about her and Ortalis, too, but no good answers, however much he would have liked to have them.
What you need is a peephole into their bedchamber, he thought. That would tell you what you want to know.
He violently shook his head. What he wanted to know was none of his business. Knowing it was none of his business didn’t keep him from wanting to find out. Sosia would be angry at him if she learned he wanted to peep into other people’s bedrooms—except she was even more curious about this than he was.
No, he told himself firmly. Some curiosity doesn’t need to be satisfied. That went dead against everything he’d ever believed. He tried to convince himself of it anyway.
Here was the Stura. Grus had spent a lot of years traveling up and down the river in a war galley. Now he approached it on horseback. The sour smell of old smoke filled his nostrils. This was the valley the Menteshe had overrun most thoroughly. That meant it was the valley where Prince Ulash’s men had done the most damage.
Seeing that damage both infuriated and depressed the king. “How am I supposed to set this to rights?” he demanded of Hirundo.
“Driving the Menteshe back over the river would be a good start,” the general answered.
Hirundo smiled. He joked. But that was kidding on the square. Unless the Avornans could drive the Menteshe south of the Stura once more, Grus had exactly no chance of setting any of this to rights. And here, where their countrymen could slip north over the river in small boats by night, where the Menteshe could also bring river galleys— some of them rowed by brainless thralls—into the fight, driving them out of Avornis was liable to prove doubly hard.
“We can do it,” Hirundo said. “They don’t want to fight a stand-up battle. Whenever they try that, they lose, and they know it.”
“They don’t need to make a stand-up fight,” Grus said darkly. “All they need to do is keep riding around and burning things. What kind of harvest will anyone here in this valley have? None to speak of, and we both know it. The Menteshe know it, too. Wrecking things works as well for them as winning battles.” He waved toward what had been a vineyard. “No one will grow grapes here for years. No grapes, no wine, no raisins. It’s the same with olive groves. Cut the trees down and burn them and it’s years before you have olives and olive oil again. What do people do in the meantime?”