The Chernagor Pirates

“Oh, no. Not this time.” Now Bubulcus looked like virtue abused. “Which you have before, though, many a time and oft as the saying goes, and all when I had nothing to do with anything.”

“Not all,” said Lanius, precise as usual. “You’ve let moncats get loose at least twice, which is at least twice too often,”

Bubulcus’ long, mobile face—his whole scrawny frame, in fact— became the image of affronted dignity. He seemed insulted that the king should presume to bring up what were, after all, only facts. “Which wasn’t my fault at all, hardly,” he declared.

“No doubt,” Lanius said. “Someone held a knife at your throat and made you do it.”

“Hmp.” Bubulcus looked more affronted still. Lanius hadn’t thought he could. “Since you seem to have nothing better to do than insult me, Your Majesty, I had better be on my way, hadn’t I?” And on his way he went, beaky nose in the air.

“You don’t need to look for me in the moncats’ chambers—I’m nor there,” Lanius said. Bubulcus stalked down the corridor like an offended cat. The king had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. He’d won a round from his servant. Then the impulse to laugh faded. He wondered what sort of atrocity Bubulcus would commit to get even.

When Lanius walked into the kitchens, spoon in hand, the cooks and cleaners all exclaimed. “I saw it, Your Majesty!” a chubby woman named Quiscula exclaimed. She had a white smear of flour on the end of her nose, and another on one cheek. “That funny beast of yours came out right there. He grabbed the spoon from a counter, and then he disappeared again.” She pointed.

Right there was what seemed like nothing more than a crack between wall and ceiling. Lanius tried to get up there for a closer look, but none of the stools or chairs in the kitchens raised him high enough. He sent a cleaner out to have a ladder fetched. He might not command everything in Avornis, but he could do that.

He could also wait close to half an hour for the ladder to get there. When it finally did, it proved old and rickety, anything but fit for a king. He went up it anyway, though not before saying, “Hang on tight down there. If this miserable thing slips, I’ll land on my head.”

He’d gone up several rungs before he thought to wonder whether his subjects wanted him to land on his head. That made him pause, but only for a moment. He couldn’t very well ask them. That was liable to give them ideas they might not have had before. If he acted as though an accident weren’t possible, that might at least make it less likely.

The ladder creaked, but the cooks and cleaners held it steady. And it was tall enough to let Lanius get a good look at the crack. It was wider than it had appeared from the ground—certainly wide enough for a moncat’s head to go through it. And where the head would go, the rest of the moncat could follow.

Lanius stuck his hand into the crack and felt around. His palms and fingers scraped against rough stone and brickwork. The opening got wider farther back. A person couldn’t have hoped to go through the passageway, but it wouldn’t be any trouble for a moncat.

“This is how you get to the kitchens, all right,” Lanius muttered. “Now—where do you sneak into the archives?” He’d never seen Pouncer come out there. The moncat usually appeared in about the same part of that large chamber, but cabinets and crates and barrels all packed with parchments made searching for an opening much harder than it was here.

He tried to reach in a little farther—and something tapped him on the back of the hand.

He jerked his hand away, and almost fell off the ladder. If he landed on his head and it wasn’t the cooks’ fault… He’d still end up with a smashed skull, or maybe a broken neck. A hasty grab made sure he wouldn’t fall. But his heart still pounded wildly. What the demon had touched him in there?

Staring into the crack, he saw only blackness. “Let me have a lamp,” he called to the people below. A skinny cook’s helper who couldn’t have been more than twelve came up the ladder to give him one. The rungs creaked again, but held.

Lanius held the clay lamp up to the crack. The little flame from the burning oil didn’t reach very far. He poked his face toward the crack, trying to see farther into it. That only got in the way of the lamplight. He pulled back a little.

Suddenly, he saw light inside the crack—two lights, in fact. They appeared, vanished for a moment, and reappeared once more. That blink of a disappearance… As soon as he thought of it as a blink, he realized what he was seeing—the eyes of an animal, throwing back some of the lamplight that fell on them. And what sort of animal was most likely to lurk in this particular crack?

Again, Lanius realized the answer the moment he asked the right question. “Pouncer!” he exclaimed. “You come out of there this instant!”

“Mrowr,” Pouncer said. The moncat, of course, did what it wanted to do, not what Lanius wanted it to do.

The king reached in after it. It batted at his hand once more. As far as it was concerned, it was playing a game. It kept its claws in their sheaths, and didn’t try to hurt Lanius, He was enjoying himself a good deal less than the moncat. Pouncer was too far back in there for him to grab the beast and haul it out. If he tried, the game would quickly stop being one. The moncat had very sharp claws, and even sharper teeth. As long as it stayed in there, it could hurt him, and he couldn’t get it out.

“Miserable, stupid creature,” he grumbled.

That told the cooks and cleaners what was going on. “Is it the moncat again, Your Majesty?” a woman asked. Lanius nodded.

“What do you want to do?” asked a cook with a gray beard.

“I want to make the beast come out,” the king replied. “If I try to haul it out by the scruff of the neck, it’ll tear my hand to pieces.”

“Give it some scraps,” the cook suggested. Lanius hoped he would have thought of that himself in a few heartbeats. The cook called, “Bring a scrap of meat for His Majesty!”

Before long, the scrawny assistant who’d come up with the lamp did. Lanius held the bit of meat at the edge of the crack. Pouncer grabbed it and ate it without coming out. “Another scrap!” Lanius said. He could hear the moncat purring. It was having a fine time. He wished he could say the same.

He got the next scrap. He let Pouncer see this one, but held it far enough away to make the moncat come out after it.

Since he was still holding the lamp in his right hand, grabbing Pouncer was an awkward, clumsy business. He managed, though, and also managed to get down the ladder with lamp, moncat, and himself intact. The kitchen crew cheered. Pouncer finished the second scrap of meat and looked around for more.

The cook who’d thought of feeding scraps to the moncat saw that, too. “Now that thing won’t want to steal spoons anymore,” he said. “It’ll want to steal meat instead.”

That seemed depressingly probable to Lanius. “I’m going to take it back to its room for now,” he said. “Maybe it will stay there for a while, anyhow.” He looked down at Pouncer. The moncat stared back. Was that animal innocence or animal mischief in its eyes? Lanius couldn’t tell. He suspected he’d find out.

One day followed another in the siege of Nishevatz. King Grus did his best to make sure the Avornan army had enough food, and to try to heal the soldiers who fell sick. Disease could devastate a force more thoroughly than battle. Healers and wizards did what they could against fluxes of the bowels and other ailments. None of the sicknesses raced through the camp like wildfire, as they so often did.

Grus wondered how things were on the other side of the wall. Every so often, one or two of Vasilkos warriors would slip down a rope and come out to the Avornan line. Like the first few men who’d given up the fight, they were hungry and weary, but they weren’t starving. Vasilkos followers still fought back when Grus poked at them. They showed no signs of being ready to give up.

And then, one morning that had seemed no different from any other, a messenger came back from the siege line to the king’s pavilion. “Your Majesty, Prince Vasilko is on the wall!” the young soldier said excitedly. “He says he wants to talk to you.”

“Does he?” Grus said, and the young soldier nodded. Grus got off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Well, then, I’d better find out what he has to say for himself, hadn’t I?”

In spite of his words, he didn’t approach Nishevatz by himself. He brought a company of soldiers, enough