Harry Turtledove - The Scepter's return

If the Menteshe caught the Avornans by surprise, they would probably have Hirundo's head, and Grus', too. Grus didn't point that out. Instead, he gestured with the Scepter. By the way everyone's eyes, even his own, followed it, he couldn't have found anything more effective to do. He said, "Let's get ready to go home."

The soldiers wouldn't be sorry to break off the siege. Most of them liked having campaigned much more than they liked campaigning. Since Grus felt the same way, he couldn't get angry at them for that. And they would likely stay healthier on the move than settled down here. Fluxes of the bowels and other sicknesses cut short more sieges than enemy soldiers did.

"When we first met — when you were a river-galley skipper and I ran a troop of horsemen — did you ever dream it would come to… this?" Hirundo asked.

"No," Grus answered. If he tried to say yes, Hirundo wouldn't need the Scepter of Mercy to know he was lying. He pointed at the general. "How about you?"

"Me? Back then, all I worried about was driving the Menteshe out of the kingdom. It seemed like plenty, too — plenty and then some."

"It did, didn't it?" Grus agreed. Hirundo sketched a salute and went off to start readying the withdrawal from Yozgat.

"Your Majesty?" Otus asked, and then paused. Only when Grus nodded did the former thrall go on, "Did you really mean that, Your Majesty? Thralldom is gone? All the thralls are themselves again?"

"I… think so," Grus answered cautiously. "When we go back, we'll send out riders to villages where our wizards have never gone. We'll find out for sure then. But that was the promise I got from the Banished One. I don't believe he can break a promise he makes through the Scepter."

"This is good. This is gooder — better — than anything I can think of." Otus looked at the Scepter, then toward the south. When his eyes swung back to the king, they had a twinkle in them. "I would kiss you, too, but I know you like it better from Fulca."

Grus laughed. "Well — yes," he said, and Otus laughed with him. The world seemed fresh and new and wonderful. When was the last time he'd had that feeling? After his first girl, maybe. He shook his head. As far as he could see, this was even better than that, and he'd never imagined anything could be.

What's left for me to do? he wondered. In the short run, several things needed taking care of. He knew what they were. He intended to deal with them. But after that? Once he'd recovered the Scepter, wasn't everything else an anticlimax? I'll worry about it when I get back to the capital, he told himself. I've had plenty of worse things to worry about, by the gods.

One of the things that needed taking care of now was a talk with Korkut. He approached the moat under flag of truce, but with enough shieldsmen and other guards to make sure the Menteshe couldn't hope to break the truce and kill him. When he called for Korkut, one of the defenders who understood Avornan shouted back, asking him to wait. He waved to show that he would.

The Menteshe prince came up onto the wall half an hour later. "What do you want?" he called in his fluent Avornan. "You know I have the Scepter," Grus said.

"I know it, ah, disappeared," Korkut answered bleakly. "If you say you have it, I will not call you a liar, though you could show it to me."

"No," said Grus, who'd left it in his pavilion under guard. Bringing it anywhere near the wall would have been all too likely to tempt the Menteshe to attack to get it back. "I have it. Believe me or not, as you like. The Scepter is what I came for. I told you that before. Since I have it, I'm going home. As far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to Yozgat. Your loving half brother may have a different idea about that, but the two of you are welcome to each other, too."

"You are — going home?" Korkut sounded as though he couldn't believe his ears.

"I said so from the beginning," Grus answered. "If you'd handed me the Scepter then, we never would have had a siege to begin with. But you need to know I'm leaving because I want to, not because I have to. We've won every stand-up fight against the Menteshe. We can win one more — or three or four more — if we have to."

"Can you fight the Fallen Star, thief?" Korkut asked.

"Yes," Grus said bluntly. "I can, and I have, and if I need to I will again." That made the Menteshe who understood Avornan stir on the wall, as he'd hoped it would. The rest would stir, too, once they'd translated it. Having said what he'd come to say, he went back inside the Avornan palisade. When he looked toward Yozgat again, Korkut was still up on the wall, staring out after him. Well, well. Grus smiled. Now he has something brand new to think about. Good.

More waiting. Lanius had always thought he was a patient man. He'd had to be patient. He'd been shoved into the background several times in several different ways. Even if Pouncer had succeeded down in Yozgat, he would stay in the background. Grus would get the credit, and Grus would deserve… a good deal of it, for he would be the one who wielded the Scepter of Mercy.

But he never would have had the chance to wield it if Lanius hadn't had the idea to train Pouncer to steal it.

Things had happened down in the far south. The dream the Banished One had sent made him sure of that. But he still wanted a human source for the news, a source he could pass on to others. Not having one yet made him itch worse than sitting in a bathtub full of fleas would have.

He buried himself in the archives so he wouldn't snap at whoever was unlucky enough to run into him. He expected that Grus and Collurio and Pterocles and Hirundo and Otus — maybe especially Otus — were rejoicing down there outside of Yozgat. He wanted to have a palpable excuse to rejoice himself. He wanted to run through the palace corridors whooping and waving his arms and kissing everybody he met — old men with brooms, serving girls (if Sosia didn't like it, too bad — but he would kiss her, too), fat cooks, Chernagor ambassadors (not that any Chernagor ambassadors were around right now, but the longer he waited for a letter, the more chance they had to show up), his children. Ortalis? He had to think about that, but in the end he nodded. He'd even kiss Ortalis.

But he couldn't, not just on the strength of a dream. He needed something written down in a man's hand. He ached for that — and he didn't have it.

As long as he didn't, he buried himself in tax registers that would have stupefied him in ordinary times — and he didn't stupefy easily. While he was concentrating on them, though, he wasn't thinking about anything else.

He learned that his great-great-great-grandfather was a thief and a cheapskate and a man any reasonable person would hate on sight. There were several uprisings in those days. Lanius' ancestor put them down with ferocious brutality and then taxed the rebels even more to make them pay for the cost of suppressing them. The king thought that, if he'd been alive in his multiple-great-grandfather's day, he would have wanted to revolt, too.

And yet his own father — a stem, hard man himself — would have probably put down the uprisings about the same way. And Mergus was a pretty good king, as far as Lanius could judge. The more you looked at things, the less simple they got.

One afternoon, someone knocked on the heavy doors that closed the archives off from the rest of the palace. Lanius jumped and swore. He'd trained the servants not to bother him in here unless it was the end of the world. Maybe it was.

With that in mind, Lanius didn't shout at the apprehensive servant waiting outside. "Yes? What is it?" he asked in his usual tone of voice.

Relief blossomed on the man's face. "Your Majesty, there's a courier up from the south waiting to see you."

"Up from the south? From south of the Stura?" Lanius asked, and the servant nodded. "Well, you'd better take me to him, then," the king said.