"Why can't you, then?" Lanius asked. As usual, his attitude was down-to-earth. Before you could solve a problem, you had to figure out what it was.

And Collurio had the answer for him. "Because I don't get on horseback more than a couple of times a year. Why should I, when I live in the capital? All my kin are there. All my work is there, or near enough. I don't need to leave the city very often, and it's not such a big place that I need to ride to get where I'm going. I just walk, the way most people do. If you ride a lot inside the city, you're doing it for swank, not because you need to. Ordinary folks haven't got the time or the silver to waste on swank."

"No, I suppose not." Lanius hoped he didn't sound too vague. The only ordinary people with whom he had any acquaintance were the palace guardsmen – who had to know how to ride – and the servants inside the palace. And what the servants did when they weren't actually working was a closed book to him.

"It is nice getting away every once in a while, isn't it?" Collurio said, looking around at the countryside with the fascination of a man who didn't see it very often. "Everything smells so fresh." Everyone who got outside the walls said that. Lanius had said it himself, more times than he could count. In a lower voice, Collurio went on, "And I'm not sorry to get out with that cursed disease loose in the city, either."

"No." Lanius let it go at that. The animal trainer didn't know, or need to know, the disease was nothing ordinary, but came from the Banished One. Sicknesses of the more usual sort were only too common in the city of Avornis. With so many people packed so close together, sickness spread all too easily.

Collurio didn't notice how Lanius had said as little as he could. "Looks like the wizards and the healers have figured out what to do about it, anyhow."

"It does, doesn't it? I hope they have." Again, Lanius didn't say much. He didn't want people exclaiming that he was the one who'd found the spell that let the wizards stop the pestilence in its tracks. For one thing, word of that might get back to the Banished One, which wouldn't – couldn't – be good. For another, he never had much cared to have people exclaiming about him for any reason. He did what he did, and he did it as well as he could, and what point to getting excited about it?

They rode up a low swell of ground – nothing grand enough to be called a hill. When they got to the top, Collurio pointed ahead. "What's that? It's one of the funniest-looking things I've ever seen."

"Glad you like it," Lanius said. Collurio looked at him as though pretty sure he was joking – pretty sure, yes, but not completely. The king added, 'That's where we're going."

"Why are we going there?" the animal trainer asked. "How long has that place been here? Why didn't I ever hear about it?" He was full of questions, and comments, too. "I'd think I would have. I'd think anybody would have. It's peculiar enough, by the gods. It looks like somebody cut a slice out of a city and set it down right there."

"Somebody did." Lanius tapped his own chest with the first two fingers of his left hand. "I'm the somebody, as a matter of fact."

"All right, Your Majesty." Collurio might have been humoring a lunatic who didn't seem violent… at the moment. T hope you'll tell me why you built a slice of city out in the middle of the country."

Lanius smiled. "Not quite yet, if you don't mind too much. I'd like you to look it over first."

"Whatever you please, Your Majesty," Collurio said. Again, Lanius had no trouble recognizing his tone – he sounded like a man who had taken another man's pay and realized he had to take the other man's eccentricities along with the silver. Since that was exactly how things were, Lanius didn't contradict him.

They rode up to the structure Tinamus and his workmen had built the summer before. A few workmen were still there, to make sure things didn't come to grief. Most of them, though, had gone back to the city of Avornis.

The two men got down off their horses. Accompanied by royal guardsmen, they went into the slice of the city – Lanius thought Collurio's description apt – through a door in one of the walls forming the sides of the slice. Collurio craned his neck, eyeing everything closely. Lanius had told him to look things over, and he was taking the king at his word.

After they'd walked along for a while, Collurio said, "It isn't a slice of the city of Avornis. I thought it would be. But I know the capital pretty well, even if I don't know much else. There's no place in it that would look like this." He spoke with complete confidence.

And Lanius nodded. "You're right – it isn't the city of Avornis. It's not even close to the city of Avornis."

"I figured that out." Collurio sounded proud of himself now – and he'd earned the right. Then he asked the question Lanius had been waiting for. "If it's not the capital, where is it? It's somewhere. It's bound to be. You wouldn't make up something this detailed."

"Oh, you never can tell." Before answering, really answering, Lanius waved the royal guardsmen back out of earshot. They went, their chainmail jingling. One of them tapped a finger against the side of his head, thinking Lanius wasn't watching him. The king said one word to the animal trainer.

Collurio's eyes widened. "That means – "

"It does, doesn't it?" Lanius said with a smile.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

King Grus looked back toward Cumanus from the south bank of the Stura. The town looked smaller and more distant than it should have. The river wasn't that wide. But there was the sense that it separated two different worlds. There was also the sense that Grus didn't belong in the one he'd just entered.

He said as much to Pterocles, who'd crossed the Stura with him. When he finished, he asked, "Am I making that up? Is it coming out of my head because I know too much about what's happened to Avornans down here? Or is it something real?"

"I can't say for sure, Your Majesty," the wizard replied. "All I can tell you for sure is that I feel it, too, for whatever that may be worth. Maybe it's my nerves. Maybe it's nerves for both of us. Or maybe… someone's hand still lies heavy on the land in spite of everything we've done."

"That could be," Grus said, and let it go right there. He noticed that Pterocles shied away from saying the Banished One's name here in the country the exiled god had dominated for so long. Hirundo was the one who didn't worry about such things. Hirundo didn't have as many reasons to worry about the Banished One as Grus and Pterocles – and Lanius – did. Having seen the Banished One in the night, the two kings and the wizard were members of a club whose dominant feature was that all the people who belonged to it wished they didn't.

A royal guardsman brought up Grus' gelding. Another, with a perfectly straight face, led up Pterocles' mule – Grus wasn't forcing him up onto horseback now. The king mounted. So did Pterocles. A troop of guardsmen surrounded them. Grus said not a word about it. Menteshe raiding parties could easily break into lands from which the Avornans had driven them the year before. The nomads might not rule all this country anymore, but they could still cause trouble here. The king was glad to have solid protection around him.

Toward the close of day, the armed party rode into one of the first villages of thralls Grus had ever entered. It was different now from what it had been a year before. Most of the stink and most of the filth were gone. What was left was about what he would have found riding into a peasant village on the north bank of the Stura.

The people were different, too. They were people now, and acted like it. Instead of with bovine stares, they greeted Grus with shouts of, "Your Majesty! The gods bless Your Majesty!" They were, if not spotlessly clean, no dirtier than any other peasants would have been. They wore ordinary clothes, not filthy remnants of rags.