The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Baron Fuscus said.

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Grus pulled out more parchments. “But just because you say it doesn’t make it so. Here is the testimony of three farmers from your barony, men you bought out in the past six months. They say you did do what you say you didn’t. I’ve had wizards check what they say, too. The wizards say they’re telling the truth. Shall I have wizards check you, too?”

  He wondered whether Fuscus would have the gall to play it out to the bitter end. But the baron glared and shook his head. “No, you’ve got me, gods curse you,” he snarled. “Who would have thought anybody could expect a nobleman to take an idiot law like that seriously? It’s not a proper law—more like a bad joke.”

  “Stealing farmers from the kingdom is a bad joke, Your Excellency. They aren’t yours—they’re Avornis’,” Grus said. “And Avornis is going to keep them. You, on the other hand, are going to the Maze, and so is your family. Generous of you to bring everybody along with you when you came to the city.”

  Fuscus invited him to do something he wasn’t physically able to manage. The deposed baron added, “And see if the next nobleman you invite to the capital is dumb enough to come.”

  He had a point there, no doubt about it. But King Grus only shrugged. “With you as an example, maybe the rest of the nobles will think I don’t issue laws for the sake of making bad jokes.” He nodded to his guards. “Take him away.”

  Off Fuscus went, into captivity. Grus nodded to himself. He might be the son of a guardsman, the grandson of a small farmer. But he was King of Avornis now, regardless of whether the nobles with their old bloodlines and fancy pedigrees liked it or not. And if they thought they could pretend his laws didn’t apply to them, he was going to teach them just how wrong they were.

  The city of Avornis went through a hard winter, almost as hard as the winter where the Banished One had tried to bring the capital to its knees. The weather was bad enough to make King Lanius suspicious, bad enough to make him mention his suspicions to his father-in-law.

  Grus looked thoughtful. “I was down in the south then myself,” he said, “so I don’t know the details of that. But maybe we ought to find out about this business, eh? I wonder what a wizard or witch would have to say.”

  “So do I.” Lanius nodded. “I think it would be worth knowing.”

  “Yes, me, too.” Grus also nodded. “And I have someone in mind who might be able to tell us.”

  “Alca the witch?” Lanius asked. When Grus nodded again, he had a startled expression on his face. Smiling to himself, Lanius went on, “She’s the one who shut down the spring that kept Corvus’ castle drinking, isn’t she?”

  “How did you know that?” his father-in-law demanded. “You were already on your way back here to the capital by then.”

  “I know. I found out later,” Lanius answered, more than a little smugly. “I like to find out about as much as I can.”

  “What else did you find out about what Alca and I did there?” King Grus asked.

  He sounded ominous. Lanius wondered why. When he tried to make sense of Grus’ expression this time, he couldn’t. “What else should I have found out?” he inquired.

  “Oh, nothing.” Grus sounded much too casual to be convincing. But, since Lanius couldn’t figure out what he was missing, he saw nothing to do but let it go.

  Alca didn’t look happy when Lanius and Grus summoned her. “You want me to try to learn whether the Banished One is behind this winter weather?” she said. “I wish you’d give me something else to do. I think I’ve said this before”—she eyed Grus in a way Lanius couldn’t quite fathom—“but mortals who measure themselves against the Banished One’s magic often end up wishing they hadn’t.”

  Lanius said, “If he dares to use his magic and we don’t dare use ours, how can we hope to stand against him?”

  The witch let out a long sigh. “Your Majesty, that is the question that has led many mortals to use magic when they felt they had to. It is also the question that has led many of them to be sorry they did.”

  “Will you try, or won’t you?” Grus asked. “I won’t order it of you, but I wish you would—for Avornis’ sake.” Lanius would have ordered her. He wondered why Grus, usually so hard, declined to do so.

  Alca sighed again, a sound more wintry than the freezing wind that moaned around the palace. “For Avornis’ sake,” she repeated in a gray voice. “Yes, that is a key to undo a witch’s locks, isn’t it?” Grus stirred, but didn’t answer. At last, with another sigh, Alca nodded. “I will see what I can do.”

  “Thank you,” Grus said soberly.

  “Yes, thank you,” Lanius said. “You may not know how important this is.”

  The witch looked at him—looked through him. “Your Majesty, you may not know how dangerous this is.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t even sound angry. Lanius’ cheeks and ears heated, even so. He hadn’t been dismissed like that since he was a very little boy. Turning to Grus, Alca asked, “May I be as indirect as I possibly can, Your Majesty? The less of myself I show, the better my chances of living to work some other wizardry one day.”

  “As you think best, of course,” Grus answered. “I don’t want your blood on my hands—you know that.”

  “Do I?” Alca said, still in those gray tones. But then she nodded once more. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. If you wanted it, you’ve had plenty of excuses to take it.”

  Lanius looked from one of them to the other. They knew what they were talking about, and he didn’t. They knew, and spoke obliquely so he wouldn’t. He asked Alca, “How soon will you be able to cast your spell?”

  “A few days,” she said. “I have a lot of studying to do before I try it. And even after I cast it, how much good will knowing do you? If the Banished One is making the weather worse, how do you propose to stop him? I know of no spells to let a mortal wizard change the weather.”

  “Knowing is always better than not knowing,” Lanius said.

  Alca raised an eyebrow. “Always, Your Majesty?”

  “Yes, of course.” Lanius believed it with every fiber of his being. He was, of course, still very young.

  Grus said, “I think King Lanius is right here. We may not be able to stop the Banished One, but taking his measure, finding out how much he hates us at the moment, is worth doing.”

  “Maybe.” The witch didn’t sound convinced. But she dropped them both curtsies—first to Grus, then to Lanius, who resented taking second place to his father-in-law. “You are the kings. I will give you what you think you want.” Lanius didn’t like the sound of that. Before he could make up his mind to say so, Alca walked out of the chamber, her back very stiff. But she paused in the doorway. “Will either of you want to watch the spell as I cast it?”

  “I will.” Lanius’ magpie curiosity made him speak up at once.

  “It may be dangerous. Anything that has to do with the Banished One is dangerous,” she said. He shrugged. He wouldn’t back away while she and Grus listened.

  “I’ll come, too,” Grus said. “Lanius isn’t the only one who wants to know what’s going on.”

  “The more fools both of you,” Alca said, and went her way before either one of them could answer her.

  More than a week went by before she let the two kings know she was ready. That was longer than she’d said the spell would take to prepare. Lanius almost sent her a message, asking her about the delay. In the end, he didn’t. As she’d said, even if they learned the Banished One lay behind the hard winter, what could they do to him? Nothing. That being so, where was the rush?

  When Lanius walked into the cramped little room where she’d try her magic, he was surprised to see a large bowl full of snow sitting on top of a battered, stained, and scarred wooden table. But then he exclaimed, “Oh! The law of contagion!”

  “What’s that?” Grus asked, and sneezed. As he wiped his nose, he said, “I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with this cold I’ve caug
ht.” He sneezed again.

  “No, Your Majesty,” Alca told him, and turned to Lanius, to whom she said, “Yes, Your Majesty, the law of contagion. If our blizzards spring from the Banished One, they were once in contact with him, so to speak. That’s what I intend to try to find out. Of course, what the Banished One intends may be something very different. We’ll see.”

  She held a chunk of rock crystal in a sunbeam that fell on the table but not on the bowl of snow. Lanius exclaimed in amazement, for a rainbow suddenly appeared on the wall nearby. “Pretty,” Grus remarked. If he too was amazed, he hid it very well.

  “How did you do that?” Lanius asked.

  “It is a property of the crystal,” Alca answered, which told him nothing. She twisted the crystal this way and that, till the rainbow fell across the bowl of snow.

  Steam immediately began to rise from the snow, though the room was not nearly warm enough to make any such thing happen. Alca started chanting. The words were in an ancient dialect of Avornan, one even more archaic than that which clerics used in their prayers and hymns. Lanius understood bits and pieces of it, but no more.

  “What’s she saying?” Grus whispered to him; to the older king, the archaic Avornan made no sense at all.

  And as soon as Lanius shifted his attention to try to explain, he found it stopped making any sense at all for him, too. “I don’t know, not exactly,” he whispered back, and let it go at that. “We’ll find out when we see what the spell does.” Grus nodded; that seemed to satisfy him well enough.

  Despite what Lanius had told Grus, he did have some general idea of what Alca’s spell was doing—she was trying to detect any sorcerous link between this snow on the one hand and the Banished One on the other, and trying to do it in such a sneaky, roundabout way that the exile from the heavens wouldn’t notice. Whether that would work—whether, in fact, there was any link to detect … That was what the witch was trying to find out.

  The first chant ended. Alca shrugged. “Nothing obvious,” she reported, sounding not a little relieved that she hadn’t found anything. “There’s one other spell I might try, though, if you like.” She looked from Lanius to Grus.

  Grus looked at Lanius, as though to say, This was your idea in the first place. You figure out what you want her to do. Lanius said, “We’ve come this far. If we can find out, we ought to try all the arrows in our quiver.”

  “As you wish, Your Majesty,” Alca said. “Give me a moment.” She closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, steadying herself, concentrating, before she resumed. Then, as though to be sure, she carried the bowl of snow from the chamber. Looking out the window, Lanius saw her dump what was left in it, move away a few feet, and scoop up a fresh bowlful.

  When she came back, she set down the bowl and picked up the chunk of rock crystal. Again, a rainbow sprang into being on the wall. The witch began to chant once more. This spell was also in old-fashioned Avornan—if anything, more so than the first. It had a stronger, harsher rhythm; Lanius could imagine soldiers marching into battle to a chant like this.

  As she had before, Alca swung the crystal this way and that, till the rainbow it engendered fell across the bowl of new snow. As it had before, the snow began to steam. There all resemblance to the previous conjuration ended. Lanius stared in mingled fascination and horror at this new rainbow. Little by little, it grew redder and redder and redder, as though the color of blood were drinking up all the other hues, the oranges and yellows and greens and blues and violets. And as it got redder, it somehow got brighter, though the sunbeam from which it had to be formed remained unchanged.

  More and more steam rose from the snow. Peering down into the bowl, Lanius saw it too looked as though it were made from blood—blood now boiling, bubbling—rather than frozen water. “Enough!” he said suddenly. “We have all the answer we need!”

  All at once, the question wasn’t whether they would learn what they wanted to know but whether they could escape the chamber. With a whooshing roar, all the snow—the blood?—in the bowl turned to steam. Coughing, choking, his lungs half scalded, Lanius staggered out of the room.

  Grus was only a couple of steps behind him, and dragged Alca along to make sure she got out, too. She had the presence of mind to slam the door behind them. For a moment, Lanius felt, or thought he felt, a power inside the room trying to pull the door open again and come after them. Then that perception faded. He breathed a sigh of relief, at last convinced they had won free.

  Expressionless, Alca said, “Now you see, Your Majesties, why wizards fight shy of measuring themselves against the Banished One.”

  “Er—yes.” That was Grus. Normally the most unflappable of men, he sounded shaken to the core. “Are we really so small when set against him?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Alca answered, “yes.”

  “Then why does he fear us?” Grus asked. “Why does he torment us? Why does he send this dreadful winter weather against us? What can we do to him that makes him even bother noticing us?”

  “We hold back the Menteshe,” Lanius said. “We have our own wills. We don’t care to be his thralls. We fight back against him, and against his puppets. If we had the Scepter of Mercy, we might do even more.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Grus still sounded dazed.

  “I believe the Banished One believes it,” Lanius replied. “If he didn’t, why would he have stolen the Scepter in the first place? Why would he keep it closed away in Yozgat? He doesn’t want us to have it.”

  “You speak the truth there, Your Majesty.” Alca seemed more like herself than she had a little while before.

  Grus frowned. He started to say something. Alca raised a finger to her lips, telling him to stay quiet instead. Grus nodded. Lanius started to ask Grus what he would have said. The witch shook her head at him. He frowned. But then, after a moment’s thought, he also nodded. They’d just drawn the Banished One’s notice to them. If his presence somehow lingered, did they want him hearing them talking about the Scepter of Mercy? Lanius was willing to admit they didn’t.

  Alca asked, “Do we have enough grain to get through this winter?”

  “Of course we do,” Lanius declared. “The harvest was good, and we made a point of stockpiling while we could.” That wasn’t strictly true, but he didn’t care. If the Banished One was listening, Lanius wanted him to hear whatever would disconcert him most.

  Grus came over and set a hand on his shoulder. The older king grinned and nodded. He understood what Lanius was doing—understood and approved. Somehow, and much to Lanius’ surprise, that made him feel very good.

  After a couple of weeks, the grip of winter on the city of Avornis eased. Maybe the Banished One decided that keeping up his magic was more trouble than it was worth. Grus couldn’t have proved that, but he strongly suspected it. When the blizzards stopped coming one after the other, he hoped the Banished One had stopped paying attention to the capital.

  With that hope in mind, he sought out Lanius and asked, “Do you think it’s safe to talk about the Scepter of Mercy now?”

  “Why are you asking me?” Lanius replied. “Your witch would have a better idea of that than I do.”

  “Alca’s not my witch.” Grus hoped he managed to keep the stab of regret from his voice. “And you’re the one who knows about the Scepter.”

  Lanius only shrugged. “Maybe. I wonder if any Avornan these days can know about the Scepter of Mercy. It’s been gone so very long now. Everything we think we know about it is in the old books. But the people who wrote them really did know about the Scepter, because they’d seen it or sometimes even held it. I don’t understand some of the things they say. How can I? I haven’t done the things they did.”

  “Good point,” Grus said. “What did you think when you realized reading something in a book wasn’t the same as actually doing it?”

  His son-in-law gave him an odd look. “I didn’t much like the idea, to tell you the truth.”

  That, Grus believed. La
nius was convinced books made the sun go round the earth. At least he had realized they weren’t a perfect reflection of and substitute for reality. That was something, anyhow. For somebody as naturally bookish as Lanius, it was probably quite a bit.

  “What do you want to know?” the young king asked him.

  “Suppose I was holding the Scepter of Mercy right this minute.” Grus held out his arm, his hand closed as though gripping a shaft. “What could I do with it? What would the Banished One be afraid I could do with it?”

  “Remember how Alca said merely human wizards are all very small and weak when they’re measured against the Banished One?” Lanius asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Grus nodded and shivered at the same time. “I’m not likely to forget—not after that snow turned to blood and boiled.”

  “No. Neither am I. Neither is Alca, I expect,” Lanius said. “Well, if you were holding the Scepter of Mercy, you wouldn’t be small anymore. That much is pretty plain.”

  “So I’d be able to face him on something like even terms, would I?” Grus said, and Lanius nodded. Grus went on, “Suppose I was holding the Scepter, then, like I said. How could I use it to smash the Banished One, to give him what he deserves?”

  “That’s where things get tricky, or maybe just where I don’t understand,” Lanius answered. “The Scepter of Mercy isn’t a weapon, or isn’t exactly a weapon. It is what it says it is—the Scepter of Mercy. The way you’d use it is tied up in that—tied up tight.”

  “Tied up how?” Grus demanded. “This is the important stuff, you know, or would be if we had the Scepter.”

  “Yes. If.” Lanius’ tone made it plain how large an if that was. “It’s also what’s hardest to understand in the old writings. Some of the Kings of Avornis who used the Scepter of Mercy wrote down what they did and felt while they held it, but how can I know what that means when I haven’t held it myself?”