The treasury minister was a lean, hook-nosed, nearsighted man named Euplectes. Unlike Petrosus, his predecessor, he didn't try to cut the funds that supported Lanius. (Petrosus was in the Maze these days, but not for that – he'd married his daughter to Prince Ortalis. Ambition was a worse crime than keeping a king on short commons; he'd surely had Grus' support in that.)
Peering at Lanius and blinking as though to bring him into better focus, Euplectes said, "I really do believe, Your Majesty, that increasing the hearth tax is necessary. War is an expensive business, and we cannot pull silver from the sky."
"If we increase the tax, how much money will we raise?" Lanius asked. "How many townsmen and peasants will try to evade the increase and cost us silver instead? How many nobles will try to take advantage of unrest and rebel? What will that cost?"
Euplectes did some more blinking – maybe from his bad eyesight, maybe from surprise. "I can give you the first of those with no trouble. Knowing the number of hearths in the kingdom and the size of the increase, the calculation is elementary. The other questions do not have such well-defined answers."
"Suppose you go figure out your best guesses to what those answers would be," Lanius said. "When you have them, bring them back to me, and I'll decide whether the extra money is worth the trouble it costs."
"King Grus will not be pleased if the campaign against the Menteshe encounters difficulties due to lack of funds," Euplectes warned.
Lanius nodded. "I understand that. He won't be pleased about an uprising behind his back, either. How much do you think the chances go up after a tax increase?"
"I will… do what I can to try to calculate that, but only the gods truly know the future," Euplectes said.
"I understand that. Do your best. You may go," Lanius said. Euplectes went, shaking his head. Lanius wondered if he'd done the right thing. Agreeing to the tax hike would have been simplest. He didn't want to hinder the war against the nomads. But Avornis had seen too many civil wars since the crown came to him. Now the Menteshe were suffering through such strife, and he wanted them to be the only ones.
He hoped to get away to the archives after seeing Euplectes, but no such luck. He'd forgotten a man who'd appealed to him for a pardon after being convicted of murder. He had to go over the documents both sides had sent up from the provinces. He hadn't ridden south with Grus, but now a man's fate lay in his hands.
He studied the evidence and the convicted man's desperate appeal. Reluctantly, the king shook his head. He didn't believe the man's claim that a one-eared man had fled the house where the victim lived just before he went in. Nobody from the village had seen anyone but him. He'd been standing over the body when someone else walked in. He'd quarreled with the victim over a sheep not long before, too.
Let the sentence be carried out, Lanius wrote at the bottom of the appeal. He dripped hot wax on the parchment and stamped it with his sealing ring. He often worried about such cases, but felt confident he'd gotten this one right.
A servant took the appeal with his verdict to the royal post. Before long, Avornis would be rid of one murderer. If only getting rid of all the kingdom's troubles were so simple!
Lanius had just started for the archives when he almost bumped into another servant coming around a comer toward him. "Your Majesty!" the man exclaimed. "Where have you been? The queen has been waiting for you to come to lunch for almost an hour now."
"She has?" Lanius said. The servant nodded. Lanius blinked in mild amazement. Was it that time already? Evidently, and past that time, too. He gathered himself. "Well, take me to her."
He never did make it to the archives that day.
King Grus had seen thrall villages from a distance as he looked from Avornis into the lands the Menteshe held. That did nothing, he discovered, to prepare him for the first thrall village he rode into.
He knew it would be bad even before he rode up what passed for the main street. The breeze came from the south, and brought the stink of the place to his nostrils while he was still some distance away. He coughed and wrinkled his nose, which did no good at all. The muscular stench was the sort that clung to whatever it touched. Avornan villages smelled bad. Any place where people lived for a while smelled bad. This.. this was far beyond smelling bad. Filth and vileness had accumulated here for a long, long time, and no one had cared – or perhaps even noticed.
"I've never known a battlefield that stank like this, not even three days after the fighting was done," Hirundo said.
Grus wasn't sure the stench was that bad. But the thralls lived with it every day of their lives. How anyone could do that without going mad was beyond the king. He turned to Pterocles. "Now we start to see how good our magic is."
"Yes, Your Majesty." The wizard, usually cheerful, sounded somber. "Now we do."
Ordinary peasants – peasants who were ordinary human beings – would either have run away the minute they saw the Avornans coming near or else would have run toward them, welcoming them as liberators after a long, hard occupation.
The thralls did neither. They didn't seem to care one way or the other. The ones who were out in the fields kept right on working there. The ones in the village went on about their business. Only a handful of them bothered to stop and give the Avornans dull, uninterested stares.
Presumably at the Banished One's impulse, thralls had crossed into Avornis a few years before. Otus was one of them. Grus knew something of the squalid life they led. Seeing them on their own home ground, where they'd lived like this for generation after brutish generation, struck him as doubly appalling.
A fly buzzed around his face. Another one lit on his earlobe, still another on the back of his hand. All around him, other Avornans were swearing and swatting. This is early springtime, Grus thought. How bad do the bugs get later in the year? A few thralls brushed languidly at themselves. They might have been horses switching their tails in a meadow. More of the luckless wretches in the village didn't even bother. Were their hides dead along with their souls?
Grief etched harsh lines in Otus' face. "I lived like this for years," he said. "The only way you could tell me from my swine was that I walked on two legs, and some of my grunts were words. Now I know better." He held out his hands in appeal to Grus. "We have to free these people, Your Majesty. They could be just like me."
"Avornis could use more people just like you," Grus said. As long as the Banished One isn't looking out through your eyes, he added, but only to himself. He wished the doubt weren't there, but it was, and it wouldn't go away. He did his best to keep it out of his voice. "We'll see what we can do to free some of the ones here. Pterocles!"
"Yes, Your Majesty?" the wizard said.
"You'll do one, and I'll want one of the other wizards to do one as well," Grus said. "We have to make sure you aren't the only sorcerer with the knack. If you have to free thralls one at a time, you'll take a while to do it, eh?"
"Er – so I would, Your Majesty." Pterocles sounded as though he wasn't sure whether Grus was joking. Grus wasn't sure, either. Pterocles asked, "Shall I start right now?"
"Tomorrow morning will do," the king answered. "We'll want to make sure we have a strong cordon around this place. We can't have the Menteshe trying to take it back while you're in the middle of a spell."
"They'd have to be crazy to want it back," Hirundo said. "If I were a nomad, I'd say take it and welcome."