The Chernagor Pirates

How long did I take my eye off Pouncer to watch the other beasts? Lanius wondered. Half a minute? A minute? Maybe even a minute and a half? No more than that, surely. How far could an unwatched moncat go in, at most, a minute and a half?

Far enough, evidently.

“Cursed thing,” Lanius said. If he had been paying attention, he would finally have found out Pouncer’s secret. Instead, the moncat had outsmarted him. He could almost hear Bubulcus’ mocking voice. Which is hardly a surprise to anyone who knows them both, the servant would say.

But Bubulcus was dead. Remembering that brought Lanius up as sharply as seeing—or rather, not seeing— Pouncer vanish. The servant had mocked once too often, and paid too high a price.

Where was Pouncer now? Somewhere in the spaces between the walls, heading for—where? The kitchens? The archives? Someplace else, a spot known only to the moncat? How did the beast find its way in what had to be absolute darkness? Smell? Hearing? Touch?

Those were all wonderful questions. Lanius had less trouble coming up with them than he’d had finding questions to answer for How to Be a King. He’d replied to those questions. These? No.

Staying here until Pouncer reappeared might give him at least some of the answers he wanted so badly. Of course, the moncat, left to its own devices, might not come back for days—might not, in fact, come back at all. Put a servant in here to watch? Keep sending in servants in shirts until Pouncer returned? Lanius shook his head. Opening and closing the door so often would only give the rest of the moncats chances to escape. And how much attention would servants pay if they did come in and watch? Not enough, probably.

What to do, then? Lanius let out a few soft curses, just enough to make some of the moncats look his way again. This was one of the rare times when he wished he took the field. He was convinced the curses of fighting soldiers had an unmatched sonorous magnificence.

As things were, once he got done swearing the best thing he could think to do was leave the moncats’ room. Sooner or later, Pouncer would turn up somewhere. Then the beast would go back in here… and then, sooner or later, it would escape again.

And maybe, with a little luck, I’ll get to see it escaping next time, Lanius thought.

The road to Hrvace, the easternmost of the Chernagor city-states that had joined Nishevatz in harrying Avornis, would have been as good as any Grus had seen in the north country. He wouldn’t have had to worry about ambushes or anything else while traveling it. It would have been, if a driving rainstorm from off the Northern Sea hadn’t turned it into a bottomless ribbon of mud. As things were, horses sank to their bellies, wagons to their hubs or deeper. Moving forward at all became a desperate struggle. Moving forward in a hurry—the very idea was laughable.

But Grus knew he had to move forward in a hurry if he wanted to punish Hrvace for what it had done. That same rain was ruining the last of the harvest hereabouts. Living off the land wouldn’t be easy. Living off the land would, in fact, be just as hard as moving forward in a hurry.

“We have to,” Grus said.

“Your Majesty, I don’t work miracles,” Hirundo replied, more than a little testily. “And if my horse goes down into the mud all the way to its nose so it drowns, I won’t go forward one bit, let alone fast.”

“You don’t work miracles,” Grus said. He raised his voice and shouted for Pterocles. The rain drowned his voice as effectively as mud would have drowned Hirundo’s horse. He shouted again, louder.

Eventually, Pterocles heard him. Even more eventually, the wizard fought his way to the king’s side. “What do you need, Your Majesty?” Pterocles asked.

Grus looked up into the weeping heavens, and got a faceful of rain for doing it. “Can you make this stop?” he inquired.

Pterocles shook his head. Water dripped from the end of his nose and from his beard. “Not me, Your Majesty, and any other wizard who says he can is lying through his teeth. Wizards aren’t weatherworkers. Men aren’t strong enough to do anything about rain or wind or sun. The Banished One could, but I don’t suppose you’d want to ask him.”

“No,” Grus said. “I don’t suppose I would. Is he aiming this weather at us, or is it just a storm?”

“I think it’s just a storm,” Pterocles replied. “It doesn’t feel like anything but natural weather.”

“All right,” Grus said, though it wasn’t. He murmured a prayer to the gods in the heavens. They surely had some control over the weather—if they chose to do anything about it. But how interested in the material world were they? Natural or not, this rain helped nobody but the Banished One. Didn’t Olor and Quelea and the rest see as much?

Regardless of what Olor and Quelea and the other gods in the heavens saw, the rain kept falling. It didn’t get lighter. If anything, it got worse. Grus kept the army moving west for as long as he could. But movement was at best a crawl. What should have taken a quarter of an hour took a quarter of a day.

At last, Hirundo said, “Your Majesty, may I tell you something obvious?”

“Go ahead,” Grus said.

“Your Majesty, this is more trouble than it’s worth,” the general said. “Gods only know how long we’re going to need to get to Hrvace. Once we’re there, how are we going to feed ourselves? We won’t be able to live off the country, and supply wagons will have a demon of a time getting through. The Chernagors inside the walls will laugh their heads off when they see us.”

He was right. King Grus knew that all too well. Even though he knew it, he resisted acting on what he knew. Angrily, he asked, “What do you want me to do? Turn around and go back to the city of Avornis?”

Grus hoped that would make Hirundo say something like, No, of course not, Your Majesty. Instead, the general nodded emphatically. “Yes, that’s just what I want you to do,” he said. “If you ask me, it’s the only sensible thing we can do.”

“But—” Grus still fought the idea. “If we do that, then the Banished One still has a toehold in the Chernagor country.”

“Maybe,” Hirundo said. “But maybe not, too. Lazutin and Gleb swore up and down they didn’t have much to do with him—certainly not directly. We don’t really know he had a toehold anywhere but Nishevatz.”

“Tempting to believe that,” Grus said. “I’m almost afraid to, though, just because it’s so tempting.”

“Well, look at it this way,” Hirundo said. “Suppose we go on to Hrvace and sit outside it and get weaker and hungrier by the day. We can’t threaten to ravage the countryside, because the storms already done most of that. Suppose the Chernagors come out when they see how weak we are. Suppose they smash us. Don’t you think

that would do the Banished One some good?”

Grus tried not to think how much good that would do the Banished One. He tried… and he failed. He sighed. “All right. You’ve made your point,” he said, and sighed again. “We’ll go home.”

“King Olor be praised!” Hirundo exclaimed. “You won’t regret this.”

“I already regret it,” Grus answered. “But I’m liable to regret pushing ahead even more. And so… and so we’ll go home.” He spent the next few minutes cursing the weather as comprehensively as he knew how.

Hirundo had heard a good deal. He’d sometimes been known to say a good deal. His eyes grew wide even so. “That’s… impressive, Your Majesty,” he said when Grus finally ran down.

The king chuckled self-consciously. “Only goes to show you can take the old river rat away from the river, but you can’t get the river out of the river rat.”

“You’ll have to teach me some of that one of these days, you old river rat,” Hirundo said. “But meanwhile —”

“Yes. Meanwhile,” Grus said. “Go ahead. Give the orders. Turn us south. You’ve won.”

“It’s not me. Its the stinking weather,” Hirundo said. He did give the necessary orders. He gave them with great assurance and without the slightest pause for thought. He had been planning those orders for a long time, and he’d gotten them right.

The army obeyed them with alacrity, too. A lot of the soldiers must have been thinking about going home.