Odds were Ortalis knew nothing of the sort. He hadn't wanted to know anything about the Scepter. But he just laughed now. "Is that all you want?" he said. "Sure, I'll do that. Like the Scepter cares who's holding it! Whenever you want, I'll do it, and the soldiers can stare as much as they please. Does that suit you, Your Majesty?" He made a mockery of Lanius' title.
"That suits me fine, Your Majesty." Lanius also mocked his title, but Ortalis never realized it.
Lanius wondered whether he really would, whether he really could, accept Ortalis as King of Avornis if the Scepter of Mercy did. If the Scepter does, what choice have I got? He asked himself. However little he liked it, he didn't see that he had any.
Grus had been through the Maze many times – always on the way to somewhere else. He'd sent people here for good, but he'd never imagined he would come here for good one of these days himself.
The Maze was, when you got right down to it, a dreary place. River turned to swamp turned to mudflat. It was heaven on earth for mosquitoes and gnats and midges. Grus supposed it was also pretty good if you happened to be something like a heron or a turtle or a frog. If you were a man… The Maze was green enough, but most of it was a sickly green, not a vibrant one. Besides being full of biting bugs, the air smelled stagnant.
"You won't get away with this," Grus told his captors as they rowed him along in a small boat.
"Seems to me we already have," the officer in charge of them answered calmly. "As soon as we got you out of the city of Avornis without running into trouble, the game was ours. We'll pack you away in a nice, quiet monastery, and the outside world can start forgetting about you. People get forgotten all the time."
"And suppose I don't feel like becoming a monk?" Grus asked.
The officer – his name was Gygis – only shrugged. "Then we tie something heavy to your hands and feet, we find a place where the water's a little deeper than usual, and we dump you over the side. Our worries are over either way. You figure out what you want."
" Ortalis gave the orders for this?" Grus couldn't believe his son had brought off such a smoothly efficient coup.
"Of course. Who else?" Gygis seemed innocence personified. That made Grus wonder whether he and his fellow officers were the tail or the dog in this plot. Could they use Ortalis for a figurehead? Why not? Grus had used Lanius as one for years. Gygis went on, "So what'll it be? The monastic life or a short one? You'd better make up your mind in a hurry."
No one had told Grus what to do like that since his father died. He noticed Gygis wasn't calling him Your Majesty. In spite of himself, Grus laughed. He'd wondered what he had left to do as king after recovering the Scepter of Mercy. Maybe the answer was nothing all along.
"Well?" Gygis demanded, obviously suspicious of that laugh. "Which way do we do it?"
"With the choice you gave me, being a monk looks better and better all of a sudden," Grus answered. And that was, perhaps, truer than either he or Gygis fully realized.
Ortalis' henchman grinned a crooked grin. "You see? You're not a fool after all."
Oh, yes, I am, Grus thought. Lanius wrote Ortalis was keeping dangerous company. Hirundo came and warned him about his son. Everyone saw trouble coming except him. And everyone was right, too. I always was too soft on Ortalis.
"Plenty of people before you have made the same choice. Nothing to be ashamed about," Gygis said, trying to be soothing. "Why, when you get to the monastery, you'll probably run into people you know."
People you sent away, he meant. "Oh, joy," Grus said in distinctly hollow tones.
Not many people lived in the Maze of their own accord. There were some fishermen, some trappers, a few men who gathered herbs and sold them to healers and wizards, and a few more who did a variety of things they tried to keep dark from Avornis' tax collectors. Every so often, as Grus' boat made its way through those tricky channels, someone would watch for a while from a boat of his own or from a hummock of ground slightly higher and drier than most.
A couple of the larger hummocks boasted real villages.
Grus' boat gave those a wide berth. Monasteries sprouted like toadstools on smaller patches of more or less dry ground. Some of them were for people who wanted to get away from the world and contemplate the gods at their leisure. Others – more – were for people put away from the world and invited to contemplate the gods instead of being executed and finding out about them with no need for contemplation.
Grus' captors took him toward a monastery of the latter sort. The structure seemed more like a fortress than anything else. Its outer walls looked at least as formidable as the ones Grus had faced at Yozgat. But these works were designed to hold people in, not out.
Gygis cupped his hands in front of his mouth and hallooed when the boat approached those frowning walls. One of the men atop them shouted back. "We've got a new friend for you!" Gygis yelled.
"Who's Grus angry at now?" came the reply.
Gygis laughed. Sitting there beside him, Grus didn't think it was so funny. "You'll see when we bring him in," Gygis said.
A rickety little jetty stuck out into the stream. One of Gygis' men tied up the boat. He looked at Grus and jerked a thumb toward the monastery. "Out you go."
Out Grus went. After sitting in the cramped boat for a couple of days, his legs had a low opinion of walking, but he managed. Gygis and his men made sure Grus went nowhere but toward the monastery.
He and they had to wait outside while a stout portcullis groaned up. Were those monks turning the windlass that raised the chains attached to the portcullis? Who else would they be?
A plump man in a shapeless brown wool robe met the newcomers just inside the portcullis. "Well, well," he said. "Who have we here?"
"Abbot Pipilo, let me present your newest holy man," Gygis said with a broad, insincere smile. "His name is Grus."
"Grus?" Pipilo stared first at Gygis, then at the suddenly overthrown king. "Olor's beard, it is Grus! How did Lanius manage that?"
In spite of himself, Grus started to laugh. Even in the gloom of the fortified gateway, he could see Gygis turn red. The officer said, "King Ortalis now holds the throne with King Lanius. You would be well advised to remember it. He is my master, and I serve him gladly."
"Until something happens to him, or until you see a better deal for yourself," Grus said. "That's how you served me."
"King… Ortalis?" Pipilo said. "Well, well! Isn't that interesting?" He gathered himself, then nodded to Grus. "Come in, come in. You're safe here, anyhow."
"Huzzah," Grus said.
Pipilo laughed. "It may not be everything you hoped for, but you'll agree, I think, it's better than a lot of the things that could have happened to you with your son taking the throne." Since Grus couldn't argue with that, he kept quiet. Pipilo went on, "Forgive me for saying this, but I think I ought to remind you that here you'll just be another monk. If this little domain has a sovereign, I am he."
He didn't sound as though he was rubbing Grus' nose in that – only reminding him, as he'd said. And Grus did need reminding. His word had literally been law for years. Having someone else tell him what to do would be.. different.
"I hear what you're saying," he answered carefully.
That made the abbot laugh again. "By which you mean you don't want to believe it. Well, nobody can blame you for that. You just got here, and you didn't want to come. But you are here, and I have to tell you you're unlikely to leave, and so you should try to make the best of it."
How could anyone make the best of this? Grus wondered. He kept that to himself for fear of insulting Pipilo. The abbot beckoned him forward. Grus followed Pipilo into the monastery. Gygis and his henchmen must have gone back to their boat, for the portcullis creaked down again. With it in place, Grus was trapped here, but he felt no more imprisoned than he had with the iron gate still up.