Grus woke then, with the usual shudders after confronting the Banished One. The exiled god had sounded even more certain than usual. His certainty was part of what made him so terrible – and so terrifying. He's lying. He wants to confuse me. He wants to trick me. Telling himself that was easy for Grus. Believing it? Believing it came ever so much harder.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The dispatch rider handed Lanius the letter from his waxed-leather message tube, then bowed and departed. Lanius broke the seal and began to read. As usual, Grus came straight to the point. Your Majesty, he wrote, We have surrounded Yozgat, and we are laying siege to it. All goes as well as possible. With the gods' help, the Scepter of Mercy will soon be in Avornan hands once more.
"We have surrounded Yozgat." Lanius read the phrases aloud so he could savor them. "We are laying siege to it. Soon to be in Avornan hands."
He had been waiting to hear those phrases ever since Prince Ulash's sons squared off against each other. That seemed a long time now – until he thought about how long the kingdom had been waiting for them. Four hundred years. A long, long wait, but one finally over.
Lanius shook his head. The wait was almost at an end. When a King of Avornis actually took up the Scepter of Mercy, then it would be over. Not until then. He had no trouble imagining all the things that still might go wrong.
He called for pen and ink and parchment. He had no doubt Grus could imagine everything that might go wrong, too. Now, though, now was not the time to dwell on such things. Congratulations, he wrote, and then, after a pause, Your Majesty. All Avornis is proud of what you have achieved, and hopes you may achieve more still. Is it time to begin what we discussed when you were here in the north this past winter?
He sealed the letter and sent it off. He wanted it to get to Grus as fast as it possibly could. There was no room for jealousy, not about this.
Realizing he shouldn't be the only one in the palace who had such excellent news, he hurried toward the bedchamber to tell Sosia. On the way there, he came up to Ortalis and a captain of the guards. The officer's mailshirt clinked as he bowed to Lanius. The king bowed back, more than a little absently. To Ortalis, he said, "Your father is besieging Yozgat down in the south."
"That's very good to hear, Your Majesty," the guard captain said.
"Yes, very good." But Ortalis sounded much less impressed than his soldierly companion. Looking down his nose at Lanius, he said, "Makes training a moncat pretty tame, doesn't it?"
He laughed uproariously. The guardsman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh, too, or to look embarrassed. He tried doing both at once; what came out was a distinctly uneasy chuckle.
As for Lanius, he didn't think he'd been so angry since Grus announced he was appropriating more than his share of the crown. The hand that wasn't holding the letter from Grus now bunched into a fist. Instead of trying to wipe the smirk off Ortalis' handsome face, though, Lanius stormed away. Ortalis laughed again. So did the guard captain, but he still sounded nervous.
"Quelea's mercy!" Sosia exclaimed when Lanius thundered into the bedchamber. "What happened to you? You look like you want to murder someone." Without a word, he thrust Grus's letter at her. Once she read it, she seemed more bewildered than ever. "But this is good news. Or am I missing something?"
"No, it's good news, all right." Lanius' growl made it seem anything but. He summed up what Ortalis had said, and the way Sosia's brother looked and sounded while he said it.
"Oh," Sosia said once the bile had poured out of him. She shrugged helplessly. "You know what Ortalis is like. I'm sorry, but he is like that, and nobody can do anything about it. If you let him see he's gotten your goat, he's won."
She was right. Lanius knew as much. He passed off most of Ortalis' gibes with a smile and a nod – if his brother-in-law didn't see him angry, he had less incentive to sting again. "This was just too raw to ignore," he muttered.
"It shouldn't have been." Sosia was doing her best to seem quiet and reasonable, the role Lanius usually took for himself. She continued, "It's not even so much that he was wrong, even if he was rude. Training that moncat doesn't seem like much next to besieging Yozgat."
"Not you, too!" Lanius shouted. Sosia stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. He was as furious as she'd been when she caught him with each new serving girl. She was usually the one who yelled and threw things. Now he looked around for the closest missile, and she was lucky he didn't find one ready to hand.
"What's the matter?" she asked helplessly. "What did I say?"
"You're as bad as your brother!" Lanius roared. He didn't calculate that to wound, but it did the job. He rushed out of the bedchamber and slammed the door behind him.
Servants scattered like frightened little birds when they saw his face. If they hadn't scattered, he would have walked over them or through them. Once he got to the archives, he stormed in as fiercely as he'd swarmed out of the royal bedchamber. He slammed that door behind him, too. The boom echoed through the vast hall.
Once the echoes faded, he found himself in the midst of silence. Whatever waited outside couldn't touch him here. He knew what he'd done for Avornis. Grus also knew what he'd done for Avornis, even if the other king sometimes needed reminding. If no one in the palace knew…
It's because you haven't told anyone here, Lanius thought. He knew why he hadn't, too. The less he said, the less other people knew, the better for the kingdom. The better for the kingdom, yes, but the harder for him. He'd just painfully run into that. Until he ran into it, he didn't realize how hard it would be.
Soldiers made great swarms of hurdles from brash and branches. They piled them out of fire-arrow range of the walls of Yozgat.
Grus didn't know if he was going to try to storm Korkut's capital. If he did, he would need some way to cross the moat. Hurdles, he thought, gave his men the best chance.
The Menteshe had already tried to run barges piled high with sacks of grain under the walls. The Avornans had captured some and burned others. A few had managed to unload their supplies.
That wouldn't happen anymore – or Grus hoped with all his heart it wouldn't, anyhow. Now, along with the stone- and dart-throwers by the riverbank, he had boats on the river, too. They weren't proper river galleys. They were what his men could capture and what his carpenters could knock together with the timber they found locally. They floated, and he could fill them with archers and spearmen. As far as he knew, the Menteshe didn't have any river galleys in these parts, either. Up until now, why would they have needed them here?
Korkut's men seemed alert. They shot from the top of the wall. Every so often, one of their arrows would hit an Avornan. Grus' artificers set up more and more catapults that bore on the walls. Every so often, one of their darts would pierce a Menteshe or one of their stones would smash a man or two flat. Neither side did the other much harm. Each reminded the other it was still in the fight and still serious about it.
Grus' engineers began digging to see if they could undermine Yozgat's walls the way they had with Trabzun's. They reported to him with long faces. "Won't be easy, Your Majesty," one of them said. "Soil's pretty soft, and the water from the moat seeps on down. I don't see how we can keep a tunnel dry."
He listened, he thanked them, and then he summoned Pterocles. After describing the problem, he asked, "What can you do about it?"
The wizard frowned. "I'm not sure I have a spell strong enough to shore up the bottom of a moat. Even if I did, it wouldn't be something I could keep the Menteshe from noticing. There are quiet magics and loud ones, if you know what I mean. That sort of thing couldn't be louder if I yelled at the top of my lungs."