Dan Chernenko - The Scepter_s Return

"Maybe." Gus did his best to stay polite; it wasn't Pterocles' fault that Trabzun was so well supplied with water. He nodded to the wizard. "You never can tell."

When a cook burst out of the kitchens crying, "Your Majesty! Oh, your Majesty!" it was a good bet Pouncer had done something particularly brazen in there. If the cook wasn't upset about the moncat, then a couple of the meat carvers had probably gone after each other with knives. Given a choice like that, Lanius hoped Pouncer was the one to blame.

The cook rounded a comer and bore down on him like a Chernagor pirate ship with a strong following wind. "Here I am," Lanius said mildly.

"Your Majesty! Your Majesty!" The cook went right on yelling, now in Lanius' face.

"Here I am," the king repeated, not quite as mildly this time. "What do you want?"

"That… that… that horrible creature of yours!" The cook hadn't gotten any quieter.

"What about that horrible creature of mine?" Lanius knew a certain amount of relief that the trouble did involve Pouncer. At least he wouldn't walk into the kitchens and find somebody dead on the floor. He wasn't relieved by the way the cook kept going on at the top of his lungs. "Tell me what the moncat's done. Try to tell me without making the top of my head fly off."

"Well, Your Majesty, the nasty beast went and stole – " The cook stayed much too loud.

"I said, try to tell me without making the top of my head fly off!" Suddenly, Lanius shouted just as loud. The cook's eyes bugged out of his head in amazement. Lanius dropped his voice to more normal tones and went on, "I said it, and I cursed well' meant it, too." He folded his arms across his chest and waited to see whether the man was paying any attention at all.

"I'll try, Your Majesty." Now Lanius could hardly hear the cook at all. That didn't bother him; he didn't mind leaning forward. "It stole a fine silver spoon and a marrow bone, and then it disappeared again. You should have drowned the miserable thing when it was a kitten."

"A marrow bone, too, eh? It must have thought you were rewarding it for being clever enough to steal the spoon," Lanius said.

"Well, then, it's pretty stinking stupid, isn't it?" The cook's voice rose again.

"Easy, there. Easy, I say." Lanius might have been gentling a spooked horse. "Just don't go jumping out of your breeches. You'll probably get the spoon back sooner or later. Pouncer usually takes them someplace where people go. It's not as though some pawnbroker will give the beast a few coins for the silver in it."

"Why does the gods-despised animal steal spoons in the first place?" the cook demanded. He didn't seem much gentled.

"Pouncer is a great many things – willful, obnoxious, annoying, pestilential, mangy. Take your pick," Lanius said. "But one thing that moncat is not is gods-despised. I would stake a great deal on the truth of that."

"Oh, you would, would you?" The cook didn't believe a word of it. "And why wouldn't the gods despise the rotten creature?"

"Because Pouncer just may be the salvation of the kingdom," Lanius replied, and the cook's eyes bugged out of his head all over again. The king continued, "I am sorry about the marrow bone. Some soup or stew or gravy won't be all that it might have been. But I suppose you can probably find another."

"This is no joking matter, Your Majesty," the cook protested.

"Good, because I'm not joking," the king said. 'The spoon likely will come back. You can come up with a new bone. Do you have any other reasons to shriek in my ear, or was that everything?"

The cook glowered. He scowled. He swelled up like a puffer fish. Lanius stood there waiting. As he'd expected, the cook deflated. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty," he said in a much smaller voice.

"There. That's much better. You see? You can talk like a normal human being when you want to. Well done," Lanius said. "And now, what do you expect me to do about my willful, obnoxious, annoying, pestilential – but not, mind you, gods-despised – moncat?" Lanius was proud of himself for remembering all the nasty names he'd called Pouncer.

By the way the cook gaped, the king's memory impressed him, too. He said, "If you can make sure the beast never comes back to the kitchens, that would be nice. If you can get the spoon back, that would be, too." He went out of his way to sound mild.

"I don't think I can stop Pouncer from getting in," Lanius said. "I've tried, and I haven't had much luck. I won't lie to you about anything like that. But I already told you there's a pretty good chance the spoon will turn up."

"All right, Your Majesty. Thank you, Your Majesty." The cook turned around and headed back toward the kitchen, a meeker and more subdued man than the bellowing hysteric who'd come roaring up to Lanius.

The king laughed a little as he made for the archives. Turning excitable people into calm ones wasn't a skill most people thought of when they imagined things a sovereign ought to be able to do. That didn't mean it wasn't valuable, though. Oh, no – far from it.

Lanius hoped he would find Pouncer in the archives with his prize. That would let him bring the spoon back to the kitchens in something approaching triumph. It would also let him feel virtuous for resisting the temptation to wallop the cook over the head with it – unless he yielded to the temptation instead, which offered pleasures of its own.

But there was no sign of the moncat when Lanius got to the archives. He called Pouncer and even lay down on the dusty floor and thumped his chest, the way he did to summon Pouncer for a treat. Pouncer either was too far away to hear or didn't feel like coming. Lanius only shrugged. So much for neat endings, he thought, and went back to sorting through documents.

King Grus suspected some generals tried to storm cities for no better reason than that sitting around besieging them was boring. Sitting down outside of Trabzun was boring. He wasn't inclined to complain even so. As long as dysentery didn't break out in his army, he thought he could take the city far more cheaply by siege than by storm.

Grus glanced toward the walls of Trabzun. Torches flared every few paces along them. By the flickering torchlight, the king could make out Menteshe archers and a few pikemen. The garrison wanted him to know – or at least to think – it was ready for anything. He let out a wry chuckle.

"How long do you think the siege will last?" Pterocles asked.

"I can't tell you, not within months," Grus said. "Depends on how much food the Menteshe have, on how much they want to starve ordinary people to feed the soldiers, on… oh, all sorts of things. It would have been over a lot sooner if you'd been able to shut off their water supply – I'll tell you that."

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty. I am sorry," Pterocles said. "I can't help the way the springs and wells are laid out, though. You have to blame the gods for that."

"I wasn't blaming you," Grus assured him. "I can see how you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. But I can wish it were different, though, too." He looked over toward Trabzun again. "I can wish a lot of things were different."

"Your Majesty?" Pterocles made an inquiring noise.

"Oh, nothing.. nothing," Grus repeated, a little annoyed that he'd shown so much of himself. Pterocles plainly didn't believe him – which seemed only fair, since he wasn't telling the truth. But he didn't want to tell the wizard just how much he wished his one legitimate son had turned out to be a decent, hardworking man instead of.. what he was. The older Grus got, the more he thought about what would happen after he wasn't here to rule Avornis.

When he first seized the throne, he'd expected Ortalis to succeed him. Lanius could go right on wearing the crown; he was, after all, the last twig of the old, familiar dynasty. If he had a son by Sosia, that boy could be called king, too. But real power would flow through Ortalis and his descendants.