The Chernagor Pirates

closed, opened and closed. Grus hadn’t cared to be caught in that grip, and didn’t think Vasilko would, either.

Even from so far away, the din was tremendous, deafening. Men shouted and screamed. Armor clattered. Dart-throwing engines bucked and snapped. Stones crashed down on soldiers storming up—the wizard’s magic wasn’t perfect. Ladders went over or broke, spilling soldiers off them.

And, much closer than the walls of Nishevatz, Pterocles suddenly howled like a wounded wolf. “Noooo!” he cried, his voice getting higher and shriller every instant. All at once, every siege ladder became fully visible again. The ladders started toppling one after another when that happened. Pterocles also toppled, still wailing.

Vsevolod said something in his own language that sounded incandescent. Grus said the foulest things he knew how to say in Avornan. None of their curses did any good. It quickly grew plain the assault on the wall wouldn’t do any good, either.

Grus hauled Pterocles to his feet. The wizard’s face was a mask of pain. Grus shook him. “Do something!” he shouted. “Don’t just sound like a wheel that needs grease. Do something!”

“I can’t.” Pterocles didn’t just sound like an ungreased wheel. He sounded like a man who might be about to die, and who knew it. “I can’t, Your Majesty. He’s too strong. What happened to me before, this is ten times worse—a hundred times. Whoever’s in there, he’s too strong for me.” Tears ran down his cheeks. Grus didn’t think he knew he shed them.

The king shook the wizard again. “You have to try. By the gods, Pterocles, the soldiers are depending on you. The kingdom is depending on you.”

“I can’t,” Pterocles whispered, but from somewhere he found strength. He straightened. Grus let go of him. He still swayed, but he stayed on his feet. “I’ll try,” he said, even more quietly than before. “I don’t know what will happen to me, but I’ll try.”

Before Grus could even praise him, he exploded into motion. He had a long, angular frame, and every separate part of him seemed to be moving in a different direction. Grus had never seen a wizard incant so furiously. It was as though Pterocles were taking pieces of his pain and flinging them back into Nishevatz. His magic didn’t seemed aimed at the Chernagor soldiers on the walls anymore. Whatever he was doing, he was doing against—doing to—the wizard who’d come so close to killing him moments before.

“Take that!” he shouted again and again. “Take that, and see how you like it!”

Vsevolod nudged Grus. “He is mad,” the old Chernagor said, and tapped the side of his head with a forefinger.

“Sometimes, with a wizard, it helps,” Grus said. But he wondered exactly whom Pterocles was fighting. Was it some Chernagor wizard who, like Vasilko, had abandoned the gods and turned to the Banished One, or was it the being the Menteshe called the Fallen Star himself, in his own person? If it was the Banished One himself, could any merely mortal wizard stand against him?

Before Grus got even a hint of an answer, Hirundo distracted him. The general was bleeding from a cut over one eye. His gilded helmet had a dent in it, and was jammed down over one ear, which also bled. He seemed unaware of the small wounds. “Your Majesty, we can’t get over the wall,” he said without preamble. “You’re just throwing more men away if you keep trying.”

“No hope?” Grus asked.

“None. Not a bit. No chance.” Hirundo sounded absolutely certain.

“All right. Pull them back,” Grus said. The general bowed and hurried away. Vsevolod made a wordless noise full of fury and pain. He turned his back on Grus. Grus started to tell him he was sorry, but checked himself. If Vsevolod couldn’t figure that out without being told, too bad.

“Take that!” Pterocles shouted again, and laughed a wild, crazy laugh. “Ha! See how you like it this time!”

He thought he was getting home against whoever or whatever his foe was. And the more confident he grew, the harder and quicker came the spells he cast. Maybe—probably—it was madness, but it was inspired madness.

And then, like a man who’d been hit square in the jaw, Pterocles toppled, right in the middle of an incantation. All his bones might have turned to water. When Grus stooped beside him, he was sure the wizard was dead. But, to his surprise, Pterocles went on breathing and still had a pulse. Grus slapped him in the face, none too gently, to try to bring him around. He stirred and muttered, but would not wake.

“Will he have any mind when he rouses?” Vsevolod asked.

Grus could only shrug. “We’ll have to see, that’s all. I just hope he does wake up. Something bigger than he was hit him there.”

“It is mark of Banished One,” the Prince of Nishevatz declared. Grus found himself nodding. He didn’t see what else it could be, either.

Hirundo, meanwhile, pulled the Avornans back from the walls of the city-state where Vsevolod had ruled for so long. Many of them limped and bled. More than a few helped wounded comrades escape the rain of stones and arrows from the battlements.

“What now?” Vsevolod asked.

The last time Grus had faced that question, he’d decided to try to storm Nishevatz. Now he’d not only tried that, he’d also seen how thoroughly it didn’t work. He gave the man who’d asked for his help the only answer he could—a shrug. “Your Highness, right now I just don’t know what to tell you.”

He waited for Vsevolod to get angry. Instead, the Chernagor nodded in dour approval. “At least you do not give me opium in honey sauce. This is something. You make no fog of pretty, sweet-smelling promises to lull me to sleep and make me not notice you say nothing.”

“No. I come right out and say nothing,” Grus replied.

“Is better.” Prince Vsevolod sounded certain. Grus had his doubts.

King Lanius read the letter aloud to Queen Sosia, Queen Estrilda, Prince Ortalis, and Arch-Hallow Anser— Grus’ daughter, wife, legitimate son, and bastard. “ ‘And so we were repulsed from the walls of Nishevatz,’ Grus writes,” he said. “‘I should never have tried to storm them, but looking back is always easier than looking forward.’ ”

“What will he do now?” The question, which should have come from Ortalis’ lips if he had the least bit of interest in ruling Avornis, instead came from Estrilda’s.

“I’m just getting to that,” Lanius answered. “He writes, ‘I do not know what I’ll do next. I think I will stay in front of the city and see what happens next inside of it. Maybe Vasilko will make himself hated enough to spark an uprising against him. I can hope, anyhow.’ ”

He would have written a much more formal, much more detailed account of the campaign than Grus had. But Grus’ letter had an interest, an appeal, of its own. If it were three hundred years old and I’d found it in the archives, I’d be delighted, Lanius thought. It makes me feel I’m there.

Anser asked, “What happened to the wizard?”

“To Pterocles? That’s farther down. Here, this is what he says. ‘Pterocles started coming back to himself the morning after he lost the magical fight with the wizard in Nishevatz—or with the wizard’s Master. He knows who he is, and where, but he is not yet strong enough to try sorcery. This gives me one more reason to wait and see what happens here.’ ”

“He’s probably doing the smart thing by not charging ahead with the war,” Sosia said.

“Yes, probably,” Lanius agreed. “But if we can’t take Nishevatz with our soldiers or with our magic, what are we doing there?”

His wife had no answer for that. Lanius had none, either. He wondered if Grus did. He also wondered whether to write to the other King of Avornis and ask him. But he didn’t need long to decide not to. Grus would be suspicious because Lanius had ordered soldiers to the south. If he also wrote a letter questioning what Grus was doing up in the Chernagor country, the other king might suspect him of ambitions he didn’t have. Even more dangerous, Grus might suspect him of ambitions he did have.

Sosia said, “You’re right—if we aren’t doing anything worthwhile up there, our men ought to come back to Avornis.”

“If Grus decides he needs to do that, I expect he will,” Lanius answered, and wondered if Grus would have