Dan Chernenko - The Scepter_s Return

"I was thinking the same thing." Grus spotted Pterocles and waved to him. "Is the mine still masked from the Menteshe? I hope none of them stumbled down the hole when they broke in. And I hope the wizard you set there didn't run away from his post when that happened."

"I'll go find out," Pterocles said, which was exactly what Grus wanted to hear from him. The wizard hurried away.

"We can always start the undermining again somewhere else if things did get buggered up," Hirundo said.

"I know. But we would have wasted a lot of time and a lot of work," the king replied. "And if the Menteshe know we're trying to dig under the wall, they'll countermine to keep us away." He snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me – we have to bring in the hurdles the nomads used to cross the inner ditch."

"I should hope so. If we don't, they're liable to sneak out at night and see if they can slit our throats while we're sleeping," Hirundo said.

"Well, yes, that, too," Grus said. Hirundo gave him a puzzled look. He explained what he had in mind.

Hirundo heard him out and then bowed. "That's very nice, Your Majesty. Very fitting, you might say. I'll give the orders right away." As Pterocles had a few minutes earlier, he bustled off to tend to what needed doing.

The wizard returned at a trot, the smile on Pterocles' face telling Grus what he needed to know even before the wizard said, "All's very well, Your Majesty. No trouble came too close to Calidris, and he kept the spell going all through the fight. The Menteshe in Trabzun don't know what we're up to."

"Ah." Grus smiled, too. His was a more wolfish expression than the one the wizard wore. "Then that work will go on. How much longer till we're under Trabzun's walls? Do you happen to know?"

Pterocles shook his head. "I spoke to the sorcerer, not to the minemaster."

"Too bad," Grus said. "We'll go on till we finish, that's all." He looked south, toward Yozgat. "Yes, we'll go on till we finish."

King Lanius looked up toward the skylight set into the roof above the royal archives. Dusty sunbeams filtered down to where he sat. No one had ever been able to get those skylights clean. Lanius suspected much of the dirt was on the inside of the glass, and thereby inaccessible. The only way to be rid of it would be to take out the panes and replace them with clean ones.

A faint skittering noise came from somewhere in the bowels of the archives. Lanius sighed. He knew mice got in here. The only thing he didn't know was how many precious parchments they'd chewed up before he ever got the chance to see them.

Grus had written that he was besieging Trabzun, formerly Trapezus. Avornis hadn't owned the city for centuries. Even so, the archives held papers and parchments about the city and what it had been like in bygone days – tax records, reports on the state of the walls, appeals to lawsuits that had gone all the way to the city of Avornis. Lanius had run into them from time to time when he was looking for other things, sometimes when he was looking for nothing in particular.

He'd run into them, yes, but he hadn't thought anything about it. Why should he have? The Kingdom of Avornis had lost more than a few cities in the Menteshe invasions. Quite a few of them, these days, were only ruins. The one that really impinged on Avornan consciousness was Yozgat, and that more because it held the Scepter of Mercy than for any other reason.

Lanius shook his head. The road to Yozgat ran through Trabzun, and he had to think about Trabzun now.

Dust rose in choking clouds when the king pulled a crate off a shelf. Coughing, he carried the crate to a table. He thought he remembered finding papers from Trabzun – or rather, from Trapezus – in it. As he pulled out documents and started reading them, he happened to look down at himself. His tunic, though old, had been clean when he put it on. Now dust and dirt streaked and spotted it. He tried to brush off some of the dust with his hands, and raised a small cloud around himself without getting the tunic much cleaner.

The king began to wonder whether he knew what he was talking about. The crate didn't seem to have any of the documents he was looking for. Were they really somewhere else? Was he misremembering? He'd done that when he was looking for papers from Yozgat. Once could happen to anybody. Twice? Didn't twice suggest his memory wasn't as good as he thought it was? For a man who prided himself on his wits – not least because he didn't have a whole lot of other things on which to pride himself – that was a disheartening notion.

"Ha!" he exclaimed as he got near the bottom of the crate. There they were! He'd buried them under other documents that had seemed more interesting the last time he went through them.

Tax registers from Trapezus wouldn't do Grus any good. The people who'd dutifully paid those taxes (or not so dutifully tried to evade them) were hundreds of years dead. Their descendants, if they had any, were probably thralls. But…

"Ha!" Lanius said again, and plucked a parchment from the crate. Here was a map of Trapezus long ago, showing which of those taxpayers – recalcitrant or otherwise – owned which properties in the city. Again, those property owners were ashes for a very long time. Many of the buildings were bound to have fallen down between then and now. Odds were, though, that the streets still ran as they had in those far-off days, which meant Grus might find the map worth having.

Lanius sighed once more. Part of him still resented working for the man who'd stolen half his throne and far more than half his power. But he couldn't deny, however much he wanted to, that Grus had done a good job with that power. If, say, Ortalis had been the usurper… Lanius shook his head. No, he didn't want to think about that.

Below the map lay a report from an officer in Trapezus on the walls, and on repairs that had been made after an earthquake. Lanius decided to send that along, too. Maybe there had been more earthquakes since, but it might prove useful.

He was sure Grus would be interested in some of the things he'd found out about Yozgat. He would tell his father-in-law about those when Grus got back to the city of Avornis. He didn't want to put them in writing. They would have to travel a long way south of the Stura before they got to Grus. Lanius knew Menteshe raiders bedeviled the route by which supplies and letters went down to the Avornan army. If he went into too much detail and the dispatch happened to be captured – that wouldn't be good at all.

And it could end up a lot worse than merely no good at all. A captured dispatch from one King of Avornis to the other might end up in the Banished One's hands. That would do for a catastrophe until a more emphatic word came along. If the Banished One suspected any of what Lanius had in mind, all his carefully laid plans would fall to pieces then and there.

He heard another skittering noise and looked up, hoping it was Pouncer. But no moncat came out hoping for a treat. Just another mouse, he thought. He'd tried setting traps in the archives, traps that would smash any mouse taking the bait. The next dead mouse he saw in any of them would be the first. He had almost smashed his own foot in one; only a hasty backward leap saved him. After that, he took out the traps.

Thinking of that fiasco made him start to laugh. What if he'd forgotten one and left it here? How long would it be before some other king – or perhaps some scholar – prowled through the archives the way he liked to do? A hundred years from now, or two hundred, would the man who went through the archives have any idea the trap that had smashed his foot was set by a King of Avornis? Lanius didn't see how he could.

Sosia gave him a peculiar look when he told her about the thought later that day. "You find the oddest things to worry about," she said.