Dan Chernenko - The Scepter_s Return

"You weren't before," Sosia reminded him. "Not very long before, either."

"I am now, though. I have been." Lanius did his best to seem virtuous and innocent. He must have succeeded; his wife stopped nagging him.

Flies buzzed through the Avornan encirclement of Trabzun. Grus ignored them when he could and slapped at them when he couldn't. With all the garbage and sewage accumulating as his army besieged the town, he couldn't be surprised the bugs were bad. If anything, they could have been worse.

Grus made a point of appearing now here, now there, all around the encirclement. He wanted the Menteshe to notice him and to wonder what sort of scheme he was plotting. The only thing he didn't want them to do was come up with the right answer.

Shielded – Grus hoped – by Pterocles' masking spell, sappers dug down toward the walls of Trabzun. The king showed himself to the Menteshe there as often as he did anywhere else. "Shouldn't you stay away from this part of the line, Your Majesty?" Hirundo asked him after one of those appearances.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. If I show myself around four fifths of the circle but not right here, the garrison will start wondering why. If I show myself all the way around, they won't care more about one stretch of the line than any other."

Hirundo thought that over. He overacted thinking it over, in fact; he grunted and stroked his chin and stared up into the sky. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. "You've got a complicated way of looking at the world, haven't you?" he said.

"It's a complicated place," Grus answered. "Making things as simple as you can is good. Making them too simple isn't."

"How do you tell the difference?" The general sounded genuinely curious.

"Well, if you start making a lot of mistakes, you probably think things are simpler than they really are," Grus said.

Hirundo started to say something else. Before he could, a soldier ran toward Grus and him shouting, "Your Majesty! General! Your Majesty!"

"I don't know that I like the sound of that," Hirundo said.

"I do know that I don't like it a bit. Something's gone wrong somewhere." Grus raised his voice and waved to the soldier. "We're here. What is it?"

"Your Majesty, there's a good-sized Menteshe army coming up from the south," the man replied.

"Well, we knew that was liable to happen," Hirundo said.

"So we did," Grus agreed. "We've done what we could to get ready for it, too. Now we get to see how good a job that was."

"I'd better go out to the outer works and have a look for myself," Hirundo said.

"I'll come, too," the king told him. "If I start joggling your elbow, don't be shy about letting me know."

"Everyone knows how shy and retiring I am, Your Majesty," Hirundo replied. "People have been talking about it for years." He didn't even try to pretend that Grus should take him seriously. He knew better. Grus didn't say anything. He just rolled his eyes and went along with the general.

He made sure trumpeters came with them, too. He didn't know what orders Hirundo would give, but he had a pretty good notion. Trumpeters would spread the word far faster than runners could.

The outer works, by now, were head-high, with a rammed-earth step for archers, pikemen, and observers. Grus got up on the step and peered south. Hirundo had gotten up there ahead of him. The approaching army was close enough to let the king see individual riders under the cloud of dust the mass of them kicked up.

"I wonder how serious they are," he said. "Well, I doubt they came here for a holiday," Hirundo observed.

"Oh, so do I. But whether they make an attack and go away with their honor satisfied or really press it home… That makes a lot of difference," Grus said. "What sort of sally the garrison inside Trabzun makes will be interesting, too."

"There's one word for it." Hirundo looked back over his shoulder toward the walls of the besieged city. "I think I'd better order the men into back-to-back. The other interesting question – that word again! – is whether we really do have enough men to hold the outer ring and the inner at the same time. Well, we'll find out, won't we?" He sounded lighthearted. If he'd sounded as worried as he felt… he probably would have sounded as worried as Grus felt, too.

The king made himself nod. He made himself seem calm while he did it, too. He said, "Yes, that seems to be what needs doing, all right." Hirundo spoke to the trumpeters. They blared out the command. Other musicians all around the Avornans' ring took it up.

Swearing soldiers sprinted to their stations. Grus looked back toward Trabzun, as Hirundo had before him. He didn't see any sudden burst of activity from the defenders atop it. Of course, if the Menteshe commander inside the town had any brains, he wouldn't. The warriors in there would open a gate and storm out fighting without giving anything away beforehand. Grus knew that perfectly well. He eyed the town anyway. Not all commanders had brains. That, unfortunately, was just as true for Avornans as it was for Menteshe.

Something else occurred to him. He did some swearing of his own, then hurried off to find Pterocles. The wizard, as he'd expected, stood near the hole in the ground where the miners worked. "We may need your magic against the nomads outside," Grus said. "Will your masking spell hold up for a while if you aren't there to keep an eye on it every minute?"

"Nomads outside?" Pterocles peered around in surprise. Up until that moment, the horn calls and the soldiers running back and forth had escaped his notice. He sent Grus an accusing stare. "Something is going on, isn't it?"

"Oh, you might say so," the king answered. Since Pterocles plainly had no idea what, Grus filled him in with a few sentences, finishing, "Can you leave this by itself, or at least to a junior wizard?"

"Someone will need to keep it going." Pterocles shouted, and kept shouting until another wizard came up. That took longer than Grus thought it should have; Pterocles didn't seem to be the only absentminded sorcerer who'd come south of the Stura. But Pterocles bowed when the other wizard was in place. "I am at your service, Your Majesty."

"Come on, then." Grus picked up a shield some foot soldier had forgotten. He tossed it to Pterocles, who caught it awkwardly. "Here, I expect you'll want this."

By the expression on Pterocles' face, he'd never grabbed anything he wanted less. But, under Grus' stem eye, he didn't let go. Grus commandeered a shield for himself a moment later. Well before they got back to the outer palisade, arrows started coming down not far away from them. "Oh," Pterocles said in what sounded like real surprise. "Now I understand."

"I'm so glad," Grus said. The look the sorcerer sent him was distinctly wounded. But he yelped like a puppy with a stepped-on tail when an arrow thudded into his shield. It might have gone by harmlessly had he not carried the round, bronze-faced wooden disk. On the other hand, it might not have. Grus gave back a sardonic nod. "You see?"

"Well, now that you mention it, yes," Pterocles replied in an unusually small voice.

Hirundo pointed out toward the Menteshe. "So far, they're just riding around shooting at us. They won't do us much harm that way. We've hit a few of them, too, though their bows shoot farther than ours. But we'll start using the dart-throwers and stone-throwers on 'em any minute. By Olor's mighty fist, they can't outrange those, and I don't think they'll like 'em very much."

He proved a good prophet. The engines began to buck and snap, sending their missiles farther and faster than any arrow could fly. A dart could pin a nomad's leg to his horse, or go right through him and pierce the man behind him. A twenty-pound stone ball would mash a man's head, or a horse's, to red rags. In moving out of range of such weapons, the Menteshe also moved out beyond their own ability to strike at the Avornans.