The Chernagor Pirates tsom-2

by Dan Chernenko

“Then they must be hopeless,” Hirundo declared.

  “Maybe they are,” Grus said. “Now if only they were horsemen like me, too.”

  That the Menteshe weren’t. They shot up a squadron of Avornan cavalry who pursued them too enthusiastically, then delivered a charge with the scimitar that sent Grus’ men, or those who survived, reeling off in headlong retreat. It was a bold exploit, especially since the Menteshe had spent so long falling back before the Avornans. Grus would have admired it more if the nomads hadn’t hacked up the corpses of the men they’d slain.

  “We think, when we die, we die dead,” a captured Menteshe told him. “Only when the Fallen Star regains his place do we live on after death. But you foolish Avornans, you think you last forever. We treat bodies so to show you what is true—for now, you are nothing but flesh, the same as us.”

  He spoke excellent Avornan, with conviction chilling enough to make Grus shiver. If this life was all a man had, why not do whatever pleased at the moment? What would stop you, except brute force here on earth? How could a man sure he was trapped in one brief life show any signs of conscience? By all the evidence from the Menteshe, he couldn’t. And no wonder the nomads clung so strongly to the Banished One. If they thought his triumph was their only hope for life after death…

  If they thought that, Grus was convinced they were wrong. “The gods in the heavens are stronger,” he told the nomad. “They cast the Banished One out, and he will never return.”

  “Yes, he will,” the Menteshe answered. “Once he rules the world, he will take back the heavens, too. The ones you call gods were jealous of the Fallen Star. They tricked him, and so they cast him down.”

  Grus wondered how much truth that held. Only the gods in the heavens and the Banished One, the one who had been Milvago, knew for sure. Grus feared the Banished One would send him a dream where the exiled god set forth his side of the story, as he must have for the Menteshe. But no dream came. At first, that relieved the king. Then he wondered what else the Banished One was doing, what left him too busy to strike fear into the heart of a foe. Imagining some of the possibilities, he felt plenty of fear even without a dream.

  Limosa bowed low before King Lanius. “Your Majesty, may I ask a favor of you?” she said.

  “You may always ask, Your Highness,” Lanius said. “But until I hear what the favor is, I make no promises.”

  Ortalis’ wife nodded. “I understand. No doubt you are wise. The favor I ask is simple enough, though. Could you please bring my father out of the Maze?”

  “You asked that before. I told you no then. Why do you think anything is different now? King Grus sent Petrosus to the Maze. He is the one who would have to bring him out.”

  “Why do I think things are different? Because you have more power than I thought you did,” Princess Limosa answered. “Because King Grus is far away. You can do this, if you care to.”

  She might well have been right. Grus would fume, but would he do anything more than fume? Lanius wondered, especially when Ortalis and Limosa did seem happy together. And yet… Lanius knew one of the reasons he was allowed power was that he used it alongside the power Grus wielded. Up until now, he’d never tried going dead against Grus’ wishes.

  What would happen if he did? Grus was distracted by the war against the Menteshe, yes. Even so, he would surely hear from someone in the capital that Petrosus had come back. If he didn’t like the idea, Lanius would have thrown away years of patient effort—and all on account of a man he didn’t like.

  Caution prevailed. “Here’s what I’ll do,” the king said. “I’ll write a letter to Grus, urging that he think again in the light of everything that’s happened since you married Prince Ortalis. I’m sorry, but that’s about as far as I can go.”

  “As far as you dare go, you mean,” Limosa said.

  No doubt she meant it for an insult. But it was simple truth. “You’re right—that is as far as I dare to go,” Lanius answered. “If Ortalis writes at the same time as I do, it might help change Grus’ mind.”

  Limosa went off with her nose in the air. The day was hot and sticky, one of those late summer days made bearable only by thinking fall would come soon. Even so, she wore a high-necked, long-sleeved tunic. What do she and Ortalis do together? Lanius wondered. Do I really want to know? He shook his head. No, he didn’t think so.

  He did write the letter. He had trouble sounding enthusiastic, but felt he could honestly say, I do not believe Petrosus will prove a danger to you, especially if you leave him without a position on his return to the city of Avornis.

  He also wrote to Grus of an order he’d given the day before, an order sending four of Avornis’ new tall-masted ships from the west coast north to Durdevatz. He hadn’t stripped the coast of all the new ships, but he had done what he thought he could for Kolovrat and Prince Ratibor.

  When he gave the letter to a southbound courier, he asked the man if Ortalis had also given him one to send to Grus. The fellow shook his head. “No, Your Majesty.”

  “Thank you,” Lanius said. Did Ortalis want nothing to do with his father, even for his father-in-law’s sake? Was Ortalis one of those people who never got around to writing, no matter what? Or did he dislike Petrosus, no matter what he felt about Limosa?

  Here, for once, was a topic that failed to rouse Lanius’ curiosity. None of my business, the king thought, and a good thing, too. He’d gone as far as he intended to go for Petrosus.

  He didn’t have long to wait for Grus’ reply. It came back to the capital amazingly fast, especially considering how far south the other king had traveled. It was also very much to the point. Petrosus will stay a monk, Grus wrote. Petrosus will also stay in the Maze. Then he added two more sentences. As for the other, I approve. In those circumstances, what else could you do?

  Relieved Grus was not angry at him for his move with the ships, Lanius read the other part of the note to Limosa. “I’m sorry, Your Highness,” he lied. “I don’t think I’d better go against King Grus’ will when he makes it so clear.” That last was true.

  Petrosus’ daughter scowled. “You haven’t got the nerve.”

  That was also true. Lanius shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Maybe you and Ortalis can persuade him with letters. For your sake, I hope you do.”

  “For my sake,” Limosa said bitterly. “As far as you’re concerned, my father can stay in the Maze until he rots.”

  And that was true, no matter how little Lanius felt like coming out and saying so. He shrugged again. “If Grus wants to let your father out, he will. I won’t say a word about it. But he has to be the one to do it.”

  Limosa turned her back on him. She stalked away without a word. Lanius sighed. As soon as he heard what she had in mind, he’d been sure he was going to lose no matter what happened. He’d been sure, and he’d been right, and being right had done him no good at all.

  “Well, well,” King Grus said when a courier handed him three sealed letters from the city of Avornis. “What have we here?”

  “Letters, Your Majesty,” the courier said unhelpfully. “One from His Majesty, one from Prince Ortalis, and one from Princess Limosa.” He was just a soldier, with a provincial accent. Odds were he neither knew nor cared how Limosa had become Ortalis’ wife. Grus wished he could say the same.

  He opened Lanius’ letter first. The other king wrote, King Lanius to Grus— greetings. Your son and his wife will be petitioning you to let Petrosus out of the Maze. They expect me to write you yet another letter to the same effect, which is why I am sending this to you. In point of fact, I am profoundly indifferent to whatever you choose to do with or to Petrosus. But now I have written, and they will suppose I am once more urging you to release him. You will, I am sure, also have written letters intended to keep the peace. I hope all goes well in the south, for that is truly important business. He’d scrawled his name below the carefully written words.

  Grus couldn’t help smiling as he read the letter. He could almost hear Lanius’ vo
ice in the words—intelligent, candid, detached, more than a little ironic. When he got letters from son, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law all at once, he’d had a pretty good idea of what they were about. Now that he knew he was right, he broke the seal on Ortalis’ letter, and then on Limosa’s. From what they (especially Limosa—Ortalis’ letter was brief, and less enthusiastic than his wife’s) said about Petrosus, Grus might have installed him as Arch-Hallow of Avornis after recalling him from the Maze. He was good, he was pure, he was honest, he was reliable, he was saintly… and he was nothing like the Petrosus Grus had known for so long before sending him away from the capital.

  If he didn’t let Petrosus come out of the Maze, he would anger Ortalis and Limosa. They made that plain. But if he did let Petrosus come out, he would endanger himself. He could see that, even if Ortalis and Limosa couldn’t. Petrosus would want revenge. Even if he didn’t get his position back (Lanius’ suggestion in his earlier letter)—and he wouldn’t— he still had connections. An angry man with connections… I’d need eyes in the back of my head for the rest of my life, the king thought.

  He called for parchment and ink. Grus wrote, I am sorry—a polite lie— but, as I have written before, it is necessary for Petrosus to remain in the monastery to which he has retired. No further petitions on this subject will be entertained. He signed his name.

  Limosa would pout. Lanius would shrug. Ortalis… Grus gritted his teeth. Who could guess what Ortalis would do? Grus sometimes wondered if his son knew from one minute to the next. Maybe he would shrug, too. But maybe he would throw a tantrum instead. That could prove… unpleasant.

  The king had just finished sealing his letter when a guard stuck his head into the tent and said, “Your Majesty, Pterocles would like to speak to you if you have a moment to spare.”

  “Of course,” Grus answered. The guard disappeared. A moment later, the wizard came in. Grus nodded to him. “Good evening. What can I do for you? How is your leg?”

  Pterocles looked down at the wounded member. “It’s healed well. I still feel it now and again—well, a little more than now and again—but I can get around on it. I came to tell you I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “I doubt you’ll take any lasting harm from it,” Grus said. Pterocles started to reply, then closed his mouth and sent Grus a sharp look. The king looked back blandly. He asked, “And what have you been thinking about?”

  “Thralls.”

  No one word could have been better calculated to seize and hold Grus’ interest. “Have you, now?” he murmured. Pterocles nodded. Grus asked, “What have you been thinking about them?”

  “That I wish I were back in the city of Avornis to try some spells on the ones you brought back from the south,” Pterocles answered. “I think…” He paused and took a deep breath. “I think, Your Majesty, that I know how to cure them.”

  “Do you?” Grus said. The wizard nodded again. “By Olor’s beard, you have my attention,” Grus told him. “Why do you think you know this now, when you didn’t before we left the city?” He sent Pterocles a wry smile. “When you were where the thralls are, you didn’t know. Now that you’re hundreds of miles from them, you say you do. Will you forget again when we get back to the capital?”

  “I hope not, Your Majesty.” The wizard gave back a wry smile of his own. “Part of this has to do with my own thinking, thinking that’s been stewing for a long time. Part of it has to do with the masking spell the Menteshe threw at us the night before we went into Pelagonia. And part of it has to do with some of the things your witch said when we were in Pelagonia.”

  Grus remembered some of the things Alca had said to him while the army was in Pelagonia. He wished he could forget a lot of them, but those weren’t things she’d said in connection with the thralls. “Go on,” he told Pterocles. “Believe me, I’m listening.”

  “For a few days there, I couldn’t do much but lie around and listen to her,” Pterocles said. “She made herself a lot clearer, a lot plainer, than she ever had before. And I told her some things she hadn’t known before, things I know because of… because of what happened to me outside of Nishevatz.”

  Because I almost got killed outside of Nishevatz, he meant. “Go on,” Grus said. “What does the masking spell have to do with all this?”

  “Well, Your Majesty, part of what makes a thrall is emptying out his soul,” Pterocles answered. Grus nodded; that much he knew. The wizard went on, “It finally occurred to me, though, that that’s not all that’s going on. The Menteshe sorcerers have to leave something behind. They can’t empty out the whole soul, or a thrall would be nothing but a corpse or a beast. And we all know there’s a little more to them than that.”

  “Yes, a little. Sometimes more than a little,” Grus said, remembering the thralls who’d tried to kill Lanius and, in lieu of himself, Estrilda.

  “Sometimes more than a little,” Pterocles agreed. “But now it seems to me—and to Alca—that the emptying spell isn’t the only one the Menteshe wizards use. It seems to us that they also use a masking spell. Some of the true soul that makes a man remains in a thrall, but it’s hidden away even from him.”

  Grus considered. Slowly, he nodded again. “Yes, that makes sense,” he said. “Which doesn’t mean it’s true, of course. A lot of the time, we’ve found that the things that seem to make the most sense about thralls turn out not to be true at all. But you’re right. It may be worth looking into. You and Alca figured all of this out, you say?”

  He could name the witch without flinching now. He could also name her without longing for her, which he wouldn’t have believed possible. People said absence made the heart grow fonder. And if the person you cared about suddenly wasn’t absent, and the two of you found you didn’t care for each other anymore? There was a gloomy picture of human nature, but one Grus couldn’t deny. It had happened to him.

  Pterocles said, “We started working on it in Pelagonia, yes. I’ve added some new touches since. That’s why I’m so eager to get back to the city of Avornis and try them out on the thralls there.”

  “I understand,” Grus said. “But the other thing I understand is, I need you here as long as we’re campaigning. We’ll head back in the fall, I expect. They won’t go anywhere in the meantime.” Reluctantly, Pterocles spread his hands, admitting that was so.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  For a long time, thralls had fascinated King Lanius. They were men robbed of much of their humanity, forced down to the dusky, shadow-filled borderland between mankind and the animal world. The existence of thralls made whole men think about what being human really meant.

  Then a thrall tried to kill Lanius.

  It wasn’t just a fit of bestial passion, of course. It was the Banished One reaching out through the thrall, controlling him as a merely human puppeteer controlled a marionette. From that moment on, thralls hadn’t seemed the same to Lanius. They didn’t strike him as just being half man and half animal. Instead, he also saw them as the Banished One’s tools, as so many hammers and saws and knives (oh yes, knives!) to be picked up whenever the exiled god needed them.

  And tools weren’t so fascinating.

  Since the thralls tried to murder Lanius and Estrilda, the king had paid much less attention to them, except for making sure the ones still in the palace couldn’t get out and try anything like that again. He didn’t know what sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.

  He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.

  By all appearances, they didn’t care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then
he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.

  The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn’t think he’d made any noise uncovering it, but that didn’t always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn’t the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.

  That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall’s gaze. This thrall’s face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite-man) was as empty, as emptied, as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.

  Did something glint in the thrall’s eyes? His face didn’t change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn’t feel like a beast’s stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.

  Nonsense, Lanius told himself. That’s only a thrall, with no working wits in his head. He tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t.

  The thrall kept staring and staring. Sometimes, during one of these episodes, a thrall would mouth something up at him, or even say something—a sure sign something more than the poor, damaged thrall was looking out through those eyes. Not this time. After a couple of minutes, the thrall turned away.

  Lanius turned away, too, with nothing but relief. He covered the peephole. His knees clicked as he got to his feet. He rubbed his nose, as though that could get rid of the stink from the thralls’ room. Still, he kept coming back to look at them. He was no wizard. He couldn’t learn anything about them that would help anyone find out how to cure them—if, indeed, anyone could curs them. But he stayed intrigued. He couldn’t help wondering what went on in the thralls’ minds. Logic and observation said nothing much went on there, but he wasn’t sure how far to trust them. Where sorcery was involved, were logic and observation the right tools to use?