The Chernagor Pirates

want— and, for that matter, if I don’t. He signed the letter, sealed it with candle wax and his signet ring, and gave it to the courier. “Take this to Grus in the south. I want him to know I will give it my full attention.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Thank you, Your Majesty.” The courier bowed and hurried away.

Lanius, bemused, headed straight for the archives. Grus had never asked him for information before. He wondered if he could come up with it. He hoped he could. No Avornan could think of the southern provinces being ravaged without cringing. Lanius might still wish Grus didn’t wear the crown. That had nothing to do with whether he wanted Grus to drive the Menteshe out of the kingdom.

“Drum signals,” Lanius muttered. He knew where a lot of old parchments that had to do with the Menteshe in one way or another were stored. Maybe he could find what Grus wanted in among them.

He spent the rest of the day trying, but had no luck. He did discover there were even more documents in those crates than he’d thought. He vanished back into the archives after breakfast, and didn’t come out again until suppertime.

When he disappeared early the following morning, too, Sosia called after him, “I hope I’ll see you again before too long.”

“That’s right,” answered Lanius, who’d only half heard her. Sosia laughed and shook her head; she’d seen such fits take her husband before.

He found the best light he could in the archives. No one ever did a proper job of cleaning the skylights far above, which left the dusty daylight in there all the more wan and shirting. Lanius had complained about that before. He wondered whether complaining again would do any good. He had his doubts.

Then he started going through the parchments once more, and forgot about skylights and everything else but the work at hand. He had no trouble finding parchments mentioning the Menteshe drums. The Avornans hadn’t needed long to realize the nomads didn’t pound them for amusement alone. But what they meant? That was a different question.

The more Lanius read, the more annoyed he got. Why hadn’t his countrymen paid more attention to the drums? More than a few of them, traders and soldiers, had learned the spoken and written language of the Menteshe. Why hadn’t anyone bothered to learn their drum signals? Or, if someone had, why hadn’t he bothered to write them down?

Lanius kept plugging away. He learned all sorts of interesting things about the Menteshe, things he’d never known or things he’d seen once before and then forgotten. He learned the commands a Menteshe used with a draft horse. Those fascinated him, but they had nothing to do with what Grus wanted.

I can’t come up empty, Lanius told himself. I just can’t. If he failed here, Grus would never ask him for anything again. As though that weren’t bad enough, the other king would despise the archives. Lanius took that as personally as though Grus were to despise his children.

And then, half an hour later, the king let out a whoop that echoed through the big archives chamber. He held a report by a soldier who’d served along the Stura in the reign of his own great-great-great-grandfather. The man had carefully described each drum signal the Menteshe used and what it meant.

After making a copy of the report, Lanius left the chamber. He scribbled a note to go with the copy, sealed them both, and gave them to a courier for the long journey south.

“You look pleased with yourself,” Sosia answered when he went back to the royal chambers in triumph.

“I am,” Lanius answered, and then looked down at the dusty finery he wore. “But the servants won’t be pleased with me. I forgot to change before I went into the archives.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Well, well.” Grus eyed the parchment he’d just unrolled. “King Lanius came through for us.”

Hirundo looked over his shoulder. “He sure did,” the general agreed. “This was in the archives?”

“That’s what the note with it says,” Grus answered.

“If we knew this once upon a time, I wonder why we forgot,” Hirundo said.

“A spell of peace probably lasted longer than any one man’s career,” Grus said. “The people who knew wouldn’t have passed it on to the younger officers who needed to know, and so the chain got broken.”

“That makes sense,” Hirundo said.

“Which doesn’t mean it’s true, of course,” Grus said. “How many things that seem to make perfect sense turn out not to have anything to do with what looks sensible?”

“Oh, a few,” his general replied. “Yes, just a few.”

“We don’t have to worry about tracking down the whys and wherefores here,” Grus said with a certain relief. “If what Lanius says in that note is true, it happened a long time ago.”

“Now that we have what we need, though, let’s see what we can do about giving the Menteshe a surprise,” Hirundo said.

“Oh, yes.” Grus nodded. “That’s the idea.”

The drums started thumping at sunset that day. In the evening twilight, Grus peered down at the list of calls Lanius had sent him. Three beats, pause, two beats… That meant west. Five quick beats was assemble. Having found those meanings, the king started laughing. Knowing what the drums meant helped him less than he’d hoped it would. Yes, Ulash’s men were to assemble somewhere off to the west. But where?

Grus snapped his fingers. He didn’t know; this wasn’t a part of Avornis with which he was intimately familiar. But the army had soldiers from all parts of Avornis in it. He called for runners, gave them quick orders, and sent them on their way through the encampment.

Inside half an hour, they came back with four soldiers, all of them from farms and towns within a few miles of where the army had camped. They bowed low before the king. “Never mind that nonsense,” Grus said impatiently, which made their eyes widen in surprise. “If you were going to gather a large force of horsemen somewhere within a day’s ride west of here, where would you do it?”

They looked surprised again, but put their heads together even so. After a few minutes of talk, they all nodded. One of them pointed southwest. “Your Majesty, there’s a meadow just this side of the Aternus, before it runs into the Cephisus.” The latter was one of the Nine. The soldier went on, “It’s got good grazing—Olor’s beard, sir, it’s got wonderful grazing—the whole year around. It’s about half a day’s ride that way.”

“Can you guide us to it?” Grus asked. The man nodded. So did his comrades. And so did the king. “All right, then. Every one of you will do that come morning. You’ll all have a reward, too. Keep quiet about this until then, though.”

The men loudly promised they would. Grus hoped so, though he wasn’t overoptimistic. His father had always said two men could keep a secret if one of them was dead, and that, if three men tried, one was likely a fool and the other two spies. After leaving a farm not impossibly far from here, his father had come to the city of Avornis and served as a royal guard, so he’d seen enough intrigue to know what he was talking about.

After sending away the soldiers, Grus summoned Hirundo and Pterocles. He explained what he had in mind. “Can we do this?” he asked.

“A little risky,” Hirundo said. “More than a little, maybe. We’ll look like idiots if the Menteshe catch on. We may look like dead idiots if they catch on.”

Grus nodded. He’d already figured that out for himself. He turned to Pterocles. “Can you mask us, or mask some of us?”

“Some of us,” the wizard answered. “It would have to be some of us. All?” He rolled his eyes. “That would be an impossibly large job for any human wizard.”

“Do the best you can,” Grus told him. “I don’t expect you to do more than a human wizard’s capable of.”

“All right, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said.

“You’re going ahead with this scheme, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

“Yes,” Grus said. “If it works, we’ll give Ulash’s men a nasty surprise.” And if it doesn’t, they’ll