He stepped back and looked at this one. Ortalis was right. It didn't look a bit like the city of Avornis. What he really needed to be sure of was that those three towers were properly aligned. He'd done the best he could, going by what this manuscript and a couple of others told him. If they were wrong… If they were wrong, he'd wasted a lot of money and effort and time, that was all.
When he had things the way he wanted them — the way he was convinced they ought to be — he wrote Grus a letter, explaining exactly how the other king should use the sketch. He put both his artwork and the letter into a message tube. "Pass the word on to others who take this south — you may be troubled by bad dreams," he told the courier to whom he gave the tube.
"I'm not afraid of dreams, Your Majesty," the man replied. "I don't think anybody is, at least after he grows up."
"These dreams will frighten a grown-up," Lanius said firmly. "Pass the word along. I'm not imagining this. They won't hurt you, but you won't know what being frightened is until you've had one."
"All right, Your Majesty." The courier sounded more as though he was humoring him than anything else, but that was all right, as long as he remembered what Lanius told him.
But then he was gone, and Lanius couldn't do anything but worry. He went over to the great cathedral to pray to the gods in the heavens. He didn't know how much good that would do, but he didn't see how it could hurt.
Of course, when the King of Avornis visited the great cathedral, he didn't go alone. Guardsmen accompanied him. So did a secretary, to write down whatever he said that might need writing down. And he couldn't simply visit and pray. He had to be announced to the arch-hallow. In his crimson robes of office, Anser looked every inch a holy man. When he came up to talk with Lanius after the king finished praying, the guards and even the secretary withdrew to a discreet distance.
"You don't look very happy, Your Majesty," he said.
"Truth to tell, I'm not." Lanius didn't feel he could go into detail; like Sosia and Hirundo, Anser was one whom the Banished One had not troubled with visits in the night.
"I know what you need to do," the arch-hallow said now.
"Oh? What?" Lanius asked.
Another man in the red robes would have spoken of cleansing his spirit, of setting aside his will and accepting the decrees of the gods. Anser? Anser said, "You ought to go hunting. Nothing like hunting to take your mind off things."
Lanius didn't laugh. He'd always known Anser wasn't the spiritual leader Avornis needed in a time of trouble. He wasn't what the kingdom needed — but he was what it had. And Avornis had done some great things with him as arch-hallow. How much he had to do with all that was liable to be a different question.
"You really should," he persisted. "Yes, even you. I know you don't care about the hunt, but how can you not like the woods?"
"If you liked the woods any better, you'd grow hair all over and start going around on all fours," Lanius said. Anser laughed good-naturedly. The king went on, "Besides, I really can't right now. Too much is going on down in the south. I can't leave the palace."
"Why not?" Anser asked. "Nothing you do up here will change the way things go down there, will it?"
I hope it will, Lanius thought. Aloud, he said, "I want to know."
"Well, all right." The arch-hallow sounded patient and amused, both at the same time. He also sounded very much like his father, which amused Lanius. Anser went on, "If you've got to keep up with everything every hour of the day and night, you can send couriers out from the woods to the palace. That way, you won't hear the news much later than you would if you stayed here. And I don't suppose the riders would spook the game very much." He sounded like a man making a formidable sacrifice, and no doubt thought he was.
Because he worked so hard to meet Lanius halfway, the king didn't see how he could say no without sounding rude. "All right. You've talked me into it," he said, and Anser grinned enormously.
"Good. Let's go. I'll meet you in front of the palace as fast as I can change clothes and call my beaters," he said. Any excuse for getting out of the city was a good one, as far as he was concerned. His ecclesiastical duties worried him not even for a moment.
Laughing, Lanius held up a hand. "Let's make it first thing tomorrow morning," he said. "I don't know about you, but I have some things I need to take care of before I leave."
"Spoilsport." But Anser was laughing, too. "All right, Your Majesty — tomorrow morning it is. You'd better not give me any excuses then, that's all I've got to say, or I'll get up in the pulpit and start screaming about heretics."
If he'd meant that, Avornis would have needed a new arch-hallow. Leading clerics who got up in the pulpit and caused kings trouble had to be replaced. Otherwise, they thought they were the ones running the kingdom. Arch-Hallow Bucco had, back when Lanius was a boy. For a while, he'd been right — he'd led the regency council. He hadn't led it any too well, unfortunately.
But Anser had no ambitions along those lines. If ruling Avornis would have meant all the hunting trips and all the deer he wanted, he might have taken the idea more seriously. As things were, not a chance.
"Have fun," Sosia said when Lanius told her where he was going. "You're not chasing serving girls when you go out with Anser." If he wasn't doing that, she didn't mind whatever he did.
He nodded. "No, that's your brother."
Sosia grimaced. "I didn't mean like that," she said. If Ortalis chased serving girls through the woods, he was as likely to shoot them for the fun of it as he was to do anything else with them.
"Tonight, I'll show you what I do for fun," Lanius said.
"Oh, you will, will you?" Sosia gave him a sidelong look.
He did, too, and enjoyed it as much as he'd hoped. By all the signs, his wife did, too. After a last kiss, they both rolled over and fell asleep. The next thing Lanius knew, he was looking into the Banished One's inhumanly handsome face. "Worm, you think you can trick me!" the exiled god roared.
"How could I do that?" Lanius said, as innocently as he could. "I'm only a man. You must know so much more than I do, anything I try will be plain as day to you."
"Do you mock me? Do you dare mock me? You will pay for that!"
"I'm already paying for so many things," Lanius said. "After all of them, what's one more?"
"My curse shall fall all the more heavily upon you and your miserable joke of a kingdom, all built of mud and straw and sticks." The Banished One sounded ready to explode with fury. How long had it been since anyone had the nerve to twit him? Since he was cast out of the heavens? Lanius wouldn't have been surprised.
Somehow, the exiled god didn't leave the king quite as terrified as usual. Or maybe Lanius realized, even in a dream, that having the Banished One angry at him was liable to be better than having him angry at Grus. All Lanius' mental faculties were intact, as they always were in dreams the Banished One sent. That usually made those dreams worse for him. Here, now, he turned it to his advantage. "I know why they sent you down to earth," the king said.
"Do you?" The Banished One seemed to lean toward him. Even if Lanius was less frightened now than he had been in some other dreams, that alarmed him. In a deadly voice, the Banished One asked, "Why?"
"Because you're a bore," Lanius' dream-self said.
The Banished One's roar of fury was so enormous, Lanius thought for a moment that it was a real sound, not an imaginary one. He burst from sleep as though shot from a stone-thrower, the way he'd gotten used to doing when escaping one of the exiled god's dreams. Sweat ran down his face and trickled along his sides from his armpits. His heart drummed madly.