"Yes," Grus said, and said no more. Blisters branded all three sufferers' faces and hands, and no doubt the parts of them that clothing concealed as well. Some of those blisters were still closed; others had broken open and were weeping a thick, yellowish fluid. Grus had to nerve himself to ask, "Have you ever seen the like? Have you ever heard of the like?"

"No, Your Majesty, I'm afraid I haven't," Pterocles answered. "I'm not a physician, mind you. Maybe one of the healers here will be able to give this… illness a name."

"How much good will that do, even if someone can?" Grus asked.

"I don't know," Pterocles said. "Healers and wizards go after disease in different ways. We see if magic can do anything against it. They try to treat it without sorcery. Sometimes we do better, sometimes they do, and sometimes nobody has much luck."

That struck Grus as honest, if less encouraging than he would have liked. One of the sick men let out a soft sigh and stopped breathing. A moment later, a latrine stench filled the tavern's back room. His bowels had opened, as they usually did when men died.

Grus said, "The other thing is, no physician in his right mind is going to want to come anywhere near this place."

"I think you're wrong about that, Your Majesty," Pterocles said. "Healers deal with sickness all the time – more than wizards do, as a matter of fact. They won't let it faze them here."

"No, eh? It fazes me," Grus said. "Can you tell anything about what this is and what to do about it?"

"About what it is? It's bad. It kills people," Pterocles said. "I don't need to be a wizard to know that, do I? About what to do about it? Not yet. I'll have to do more tests, cast more spells…"

"How long will it take?" Grus asked. "I don't think we've got very long."

There were times when Pterocles got so caught up in sorcerous theory that he lost sight of the real world, the world in which that theory had to operate. That would have irked Grus even more than it did if he hadn't been such a good wizard. Now, though, he understood exactly what his sovereign was telling him. Looking up at Grus, he said, "I don't, either."

Left behind again, Lanius thought, not that he'd ever been eager to travel very far from the city of Avornis. He saw the progress of the plague through a series of dispatches. He'd watched the campaign south of the Stura the same way, and the campaign against the Chernagors before that.

There was a difference this time, though. When couriers came with news of the war south of the Stura, Lanius hadn't worried that they'd brought the war with them. Whenever a letter came up now, he wondered if the man carrying it would get sick two days later. He also wondered if he himself – and the other people in the palace – would get sick two days later.

He did what he could to help. He was neither wizard nor physician, though he knew a little about both crafts. If he was anything besides a king, he was a scholar. He knew how to find out about things he didn't already know. Maybe plagues like this one had gone through Avornis in years gone by. If the archives held records of a similar illness, they might also hold records of what the healers and wizards of days gone by had done about it.

On the other hand, they might hold records that showed the healers and wizards of days gone by hadn't been able to do anything about the illness. But if that were true, wouldn't the pestilence have killed off everyone in the kingdom?

Trying to find out gave him a new excuse to poke around in the archives. As he usually did before going there, he put on an old tunic and a pair of breeches that had seen better days. He forgot every once in a while, and had to put up with sarcastic remarks from the washerwomen. He supposed he didn't have to put up with them. If something dreadful happened to the first servant who complained, the second one would think twice, or maybe more than twice. His father might have done something like that; by all accounts, King Mergus hadn't put up with nonsense from anybody. But Lanius conspicuously lacked a taste for other people's blood. He shrugged and went on to the archives in his shabby old clothes.

He opened the door to the archives, then closed it behind him. As soon as he breathed in, the odor of dust and old paper and parchment and wood shelves and – very faintly – mouse droppings made him smile. It told him this was his place, the place where he belonged. The dusty, watery sunbeams sifting down from the skylights said the same thing.

In an open space near the center of the big room, where the light was as good as it ever got, he had a table nobody else in the palace wanted, a stool, a bottle of ink, some pens, and paper for scribbling notes. He'd done a lot of writing when he was putting together that book on how to be a king for his son. The next interest Crex showed in it would be the first. The boy was still young. So Lanius told himself. He would have been interested in a book like that at Crex's age, but even he knew he'd made an unusual boy. Crex was much more nearly normal. Most of the time, Lanius thought that was a good thing. Every once in a while, he wondered.

Where to look for evidence of plague? Lanius guessed he would find it around the time when the Menteshe swarmed out of the south, took away that part of the Kingdom of Avornis, and carried off the Scepter of Mercy. A pestilence in Avornis would have helped those who served the Banished One. The exiled god would surely have been clever enough to realize as much, too.

Lanius nodded to himself. That was one question answered. The next one, at least as important, was, where in the archives would those documents be hiding? Would they be here at all, for that matter? Those had been chaotic times. Not everything got written down. What did get written down didn't always get stored.

He had to try. He knew where a lot of papers and parchments from those times were. He didn't recall seeing any records of an unusual pestilence in those documents, but he'd never gone looking for records like that, either. So many things had gone wrong for Avornis in those days, he might not have noticed a plague. In more peaceable, more stable times it would have seemed something noteworthy. Here? Here it would have been just one of those things.

Reports of battles lost. Reports of towns taken by the enemy, towns abandoned by the Avornans. Reports of peasants butchered, of herds run off, of crops burned. The report of the loss of the Scepter of Mercy – that was one long cry of anguish all by itself. The archaic language only made it sound more pathetic.

Plague? He didn't see any report of plague, or nothing out of the ordinary. Disease would break out every now and then. Sometimes it got into the records, sometimes it didn't.

For a moment, he thought he was on to something. Avornans in the south reported a horrible new malady, one that… As he read more, he shook his head. This wasn't what he was after. He realized what they were seeing – they were seeing thralls for the first time. They didn't quite understand what the Menteshe wizards had done to peasants down there. Even if they had understood, how much difference would it have made? No one had been able to do anything about thralldom until Pterocles came along.

Lanius went on searching. Every once in a while, his instincts – and the archives – let him down badly. Grus, of course, didn't know what he was doing here. He wouldn't have to be too embarrassed if he didn't come up with anything. But the other king had come to know him and know the way he thought alarmingly well over the years. Grus understood that whenever something unusual came up, Lanius' first reaction was to go into the archives and see what other kings had done when something like it happened in distant days.

That was only sensible, at least to Lanius. Sometimes he found things interesting enough to make Grus agree with him, or at least keep quiet about disagreeing. Whenever he came up empty, he heard Grus laughing at him – or, at least, he imagined he did.