The sentries outside Grus' pavilion had to stay awake and alert. One of them spoke in a low voice to the others. After a moment, Grus made out what he was saying. The king laughed softly. He'd first heard that joke when his beard was no more than fuzz on his cheeks. Some things grew new again for each generation.
He pulled his nightshirt off over his head and put on tunic and baggy breeches again. The nightshirt was more comfortable, but he would scandalize the guards if he stayed in it. When he stepped out of the pavilion into the darkness beyond, he scandalized them anyhow. "What are you doing up, Your Majesty?" one of them demanded, as though he were a toddler caught running around in the night by its mother.
"Bad dream." Grus' answer sounded like the one a toddler might give, too.
"You should go back to sleep." But the sentry couldn't pick him up and put him into bed, the way a mother could with a wandering little boy. When the king walked out into the night, his guardsmen could only accompany him at a discreet distance.
Grus looked toward the walls of Yozgat. Torches flickered along them. In the light those torches cast, he could see men moving here and there. He'd thought about a night attack against the Menteshe in the city. That didn't look like a good idea. The defenders seemed much too alert. What a shame, he thought.
He hadn't planned to go over to Pterocles' tent, but his feet had a mind of their own. He wasn't astonished when the tent flap opened and the wizard came out, either. Pterocles was in his nightshirt – he didn't care what people thought. Nor did he seem surprised to see Grus. "Hello, Your Majesty," he said; they might have been meeting at breakfast.
"Hello." Grus also sounded matter-of-fact. "Bad dream?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact," the sorcerer said. "You, too, I gather?"
"That's right." Grus nodded. "He's… annoyed at us." He managed a wry shrug. "Breaks my heart."
"Mine, too." Pterocles also tried to seem casual. He didn't have such good luck. "Uh – do you know why he's annoyed at us?"
"I have some idea, yes," Grus admitted. Pterocles sent him an annoyed look. "Would you care to tell me why?"
"Because we're trying to get the Scepter of Mercy back."
Now annoyance turned to exasperation. "Thank you, Your Majesty. I already suspected that. Why is he particularly annoyed now?"
"Because we're going to try something new and different," Grus replied.
"Aha! Now we come down to it," the wizard said. "What are we going to try that's new and different?"
"Certainly is warm tonight, isn't it?" Grus said.
He waited for Pterocles to splutter and fume. That was one of the more engaging spectacles of camp life. But Pterocles disappointed him. All he said was, "Since I'm alleged to be a sorcerer, and even a fairly decent one, don't you think I have the right to know?"
Grus smiled. "Why, when this has nothing to do with sorcery?"
"I see." Pterocles' bow was a masterpiece of sarcasm. "You're just going to walk in, pick up the Scepter of Mercy, say, 'Thank you very much, Your Highness,' to Prince Korkut, and saunter on out again."
"As a matter of fact," Grus answered, "yes."
Lanius was putting the finishing touches on a sketch when Ortalis came into the little north-facing audience chamber he was using as a studio and looked over his shoulder. "What's that?" Grus' legitimate son asked.
"What does it look like?" Lanius said.
"A mess." Ortalis rarely bothered with tact. After further study, he added, "It's not the city of Avornis. What's the point of drawing anywhere else?"
"I thought it was interesting. I wanted to draw a place that wasn't anything like this one here," Lanius said.
His brother-in-law grunted. "Well, you did that, all right. It doesn't look anything like anywhere. So you made it up out of your head, did you?"
"You might say so." Lanius hadn't said so. He'd just agreed that Ortalis might. He waited to see whether Ortalis would notice.
To his relief, Ortalis didn't. He said, "You come up with the weirdest ideas sometimes," and walked away.
That suited Lanius fine. He went back to the sketch, pausing every now and then to check with the ancient manuscript he'd taken from the archives. He laughed softly. When he started drawing, back in the days when Grus didn't trust him at all, he'd done it to sell sketches and make a little extra silver. He'd done moncats then, not cityscapes.
He stepped back and looked at this one. Ortalis was right. It didn't look a bit like the city of Avornis. What he really needed to be sure of was that those three towers were properly aligned. He'd done the best he could, going by what this manuscript and a couple of others told him. If they were wrong… If they were wrong, he'd wasted a lot of money and effort and time, that was all.
When he had things the way he wanted them – the way he was convinced they ought to be – he wrote Grus a letter, explaining exactly how the other king should use the sketch. He put both his artwork and the letter into a message tube. "Pass the word on to others who take this south – you may be troubled by bad dreams," he told the courier to whom he gave the tube.
"I'm not afraid of dreams, Your Majesty," the man replied. "I don't think anybody is, at least after he grows up."
"These dreams will frighten a grown-up," Lanius said firmly. "Pass the word along. I'm not imagining this. They won't hurt you, but you won't know what being frightened is until you've had one."
"All right, Your Majesty." The courier sounded more as though he was humoring him than anything else, but that was all right, as long as he remembered what Lanius told him.
But then he was gone, and Lanius couldn't do anything but worry. He went over to the great cathedral to pray to the gods in the heavens. He didn't know how much good that would do, but he didn't see how it could hurt.
Of course, when the King of Avornis visited the great cathedral, he didn't go alone. Guardsmen accompanied him. So did a secretary, to write down whatever he said that might need writing down. And he couldn't simply visit and pray. He had to be announced to the arch-hallow. In his crimson robes of office, Anser looked every inch a holy man. When he came up to talk with Lanius after the king finished praying, the guards and even the secretary withdrew to a discreet distance.
"You don't look very happy, Your Majesty," he said.
"Truth to tell, I'm not." Lanius didn't feel he could go into detail; like Sosia and Hirundo, Anser was one whom the Banished One had not troubled with visits in the night.
"I know what you need to do," the arch-hallow said now.
"Oh? What?" Lanius asked.
Another man in the red robes would have spoken of cleansing his spirit, of setting aside his will and accepting the decrees of the gods. Anser? Anser said, "You ought to go hunting. Nothing like hunting to take your mind off things."
Lanius didn't laugh. He'd always known Anser wasn't the spiritual leader Avornis needed in a time of trouble. He wasn't what the kingdom needed – but he was what it had. And Avornis had done some great things with him as arch-hallow. How much he had to do with all that was liable to be a different question.
"You really should," he persisted. "Yes, even you. I know you don't care about the hunt, but how can you not like the woods?"
"If you liked the woods any better, you'd grow hair all over and start going around on all fours," Lanius said. Anser laughed good-naturedly. The king went on, "Besides, I really can't right now. Too much is going on down in the south. I can't leave the palace."
"Why not?" Anser asked. "Nothing you do up here will change the way things go down there, will it?"