“Yes, Your Majesty.” The servant went off even faster than the guard had.
Even so, Pterocles got to the thralls’ chamber before the other king. The wizard was yawning and rubbing his eyes, but he stared at the dead thralls without astonishment; the guard must have told him what had happened. “Well, so much for that,” he said.
“Eh?” Grus scratched his head. “I don’t follow you.”
“I was going to do what I could to improve the spell I used to free the first thrall,” the wizard replied. “I was, but I can’t very well do it now, not when I don’t have any more thralls to work with—to work on.”
“Oh.” The king thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have seen that for myself.”
“Should have seen what?” King Lanius asked around a yawn of his own. Then he got a good look at the thralls who’d killed each other. He also said, “Oh,” and then turned to Pterocles. “We’ll have to get you more thralls, won’t we, if you’re going to do all the experiments you need to?”
“Afraid so,” Pterocles said.
Grus grunted, obscurely annoyed with himself. The other king and the wizard had both seen at once what he’d missed—why the Banished One had decided to end the lives of the captive thralls. How was he supposed to run Avornis when other people in the kingdom were smarter than he was?
Then Lanius asked him, “What do we do now?” Pterocles leaned forward expectantly, also waiting for his answer.
They think I can lead them, Grus realized. Well, they’d better be right, hadn’t they? He said, “The only way we can get more thralls is to go over the river and take them out of the lands the Menteshe rule. I don’t know that we want to do that until we see how things go with Sanjar and Korkut. If they want to quarrel with each other instead of us, why give them an excuse to change their minds?”
Pterocles looked disappointed. Pterocles, in fact, looked mutinous. He wanted more thralls, and wanted them badly. But Lanius nodded and said, “That makes good sense.”
To Pterocles, Grus said, “I know you want to make your spell better. But isn’t it good enough now?” Reluctantly—ever so reluctantly— the wizard nodded. “All right, then,” Grus told him. “For now, good enough will have to do.”
“How do you decide so quickly?” Lanius sounded more than abstractly curious. He sounded as though he wanted to learn the trick so he could do it himself.
“Being on the battlefield helps,” Grus said after a momentary pause. “Sometimes it’s better to try something—to try anything—of your own than to let the enemy decide what you’re going to do next. If it turns out that what you tried isn’t working, you try something else instead. The trick is to impose your will on whatever’s going on, and not to let the other fellow impose his on you.”
“But there is no other fellow here,” Lanius said.
“No?” Slowly and deliberately, Grus turned toward the south, toward the lands the Banished One ruled. He waited. Lanius bit his lip. A guard asked, “Your Majesty, shall we get rid of the bodies here?”
“Yes, do that,” Grus answered. “Put them on a proper pyre. Don’t just throw them into a hole in the ground or chuck them in the river. In a strange sort of way, they’re soldiers in the war against the Menteshe.”
The guard shook his head, plainly not believing that. But he didn’t argue with Grus. Neither did his comrades. They got the dead thralls apart—not so easy, for the corpses had begun to stiffen—and carried them away. Not having people argue was one of the advantages of being king.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going because I want us to get there, Grus thought. Now… I’d better not be wrong.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Outside the royal palace, the wind screamed. Snow blew by almost horizontally. Braziers and hearth fires blazed everywhere inside, battling the blizzard. Despite them, the palace was still cold. From the lowliest sweeper on up, people wore robes of wool or furs over their everyday trousers and tunics. The noise of chattering teeth was never far away, even so.
Lanius’ teeth chattered more than most. The king sat in the archives. He had a brazier by him, but it did less than he would have wished to hold the chill at bay. No hearth fire here. Even the one brazier made him nervous. With so many parchments lying around, a single spark escaping could mean catastrophe.
But he wanted—he needed—to do research, and the archives were simply too cold to tolerate without some fire by him. Now that Pterocles had—or thought he had—brought one thrall out from under the shadow the Banished One’s spell had cast over him, Lanius was wild to learn more about all the earlier efforts Avornan wizards had made to lead thralls out of darkness.
He found even more than he’d expected. The archives held dozens, maybe hundreds, of spells intended to cure thralls. They held just as many descriptions of what had happened once the spells were tried. The spells themselves were a monument to ingenuity. The descriptions were a monument of a different sort, a monument to discouragement. Lanius read of failure after failure after failure. He marveled that Avornan wizards had kept on trying after failing so often.
Before long, he realized why they’d kept on trying. Kings of Avornis could see perfectly well that they had no hope of defeating the Menteshe in any permanent way if they couldn’t cure thralls. They kept the wizards at it.
What the present king found gave him pause. Every so often, a wizard would claim to have beaten the spells that made thralls what they were. Reports would come into the capital of thralls being completely cured and made into ordinary men. Every once in a while, the cured thralls themselves would come into the capital.
That was all very well. But none of the wizards had won enduring fame, for most of the thralls proved not to be cured after all. Some gradually drifted back into their previous idiocy. Others—and these were the heartbreakers—turned out to be the eyes and ears of the Banished One.
The more Lanius thought about that, the more he worried. After a while, he couldn’t stand the worry anymore, and summoned Pterocles not to the archives but to a small audience chamber heated by a couple of braziers. He asked, “Are you sure this thrall is cured, or could the Banished One still control him?”
“Ah,” the wizard said. “You wonder about the same thing as I do, Your Majesty.”
“I have reason to.” Lanius spoke of all the reports he’d found of thralls thought to be cured who proved anything but.
Pterocles nodded. “I know of some of those cases, too. I think you’ve found more than I knew of, but that doesn’t matter so much.” Lanius had to fight not to pout; he thought his thoroughness mattered. The wizard went on, “What matters is, by every sorcerous test I know how to make, the thrall is a thrall no more. He’s a man.”
“By every sorcerous test you know how to make,” King Lanius repeated. The wizard nodded again. Lanius said, “You’re not the first to make that claim, either, you know.”
“Yes, I do,” Pterocles replied. “But I am the first to make that claim who knows from the inside what being emptied by the Banished One is like. I know the shape and size of the hole inside a man. I know how to fill it. By the gods, Your Majesty, I have filled it, at least this once.”
He sounded very sure of himself. Lanius would have been more sure of him if he hadn’t read reports by wizards years, sometimes centuries, dead who’d been just as sure of themselves and ended up disappointed. Still, Pterocles had a point—what he’d gone through in front of Nishevatz gave him a unique perspective on how the Banished One’s wizardry worked.