"Even the way it is, it's better than you'll find on the other side of the river." Otus pointed south. "Farmers who care work this land. They do everything they can with it, even when that is not so much. Over there" – he pointed again – "you might as well have so many cattle tilling the soil. Nobody does anything but what he has to. The people – the thralls, I mean – don't see half of what they ought to do."

If things went wrong on the far side of the Stura, the whole army – or however much of it was left alive after the Menteshe got through with it – would probably be made into thralls. It had happened before. A King of Avornis had lived out his days dead of soul in a little peasant hut somewhere between the Stura and Yozgat. After that, no Avornan army had presumed to cross the last river… until now.

Was the Banished One laughing and rubbing his hands together, looking forward to another easy triumph? Had everything that had happened over the past few years, including the civil strife among the Menteshe, been nothing but a ruse to lure Grus and the Avornan army down over the Stura? Could the Banished One see that far ahead? Could he move the pieces on the board so precisely? Was Pterocles' thrall-freeing sorcery all part of the ruse?

Grus shook his head. If the exiled god could do all that, there was no hope of resisting him. But if he could do all that, he would have crushed Avornis centuries earlier. Whatever he'd been in the heavens, he had limits in the material world. He could be opposed. He could be beaten. Otherwise, the Chernagors would bow down to him as the Fallen Star, the way the Menteshe did. Grus' campaigns in the north had made sure that wouldn't happen.

Sunlight glinted off water in the distance. A smudge of smoke near the Stura marked the city of Anna. The king knew the town well from his days as a river-galley captain. It hadn't fallen to the nomads, even when things seemed blackest for Avornis. Lying on the broad river, it depended less on nearby fields for food than towns farther from the Stura. And archers and catapults on river galleys had taken their toll on the Menteshe who ventured too close to the bank.

Anna was used to soldiers and sailors. It was always heavily garrisoned. Any king with eyes to see knew the border towns stood as bulwarks against trouble from the south. A great flotilla of river galleys patrolled the Stura now. The river had tributaries that flowed in from the south as well as from the north. They hadn't seen Avornan ships on them for many, many years. Soon they would again.

Along with Hirundo, Grus stood on Anna's riverfront wall, peering south into the land where no Avornan soldiers had willingly set foot for so very long. It looked little different from the country on this side of the Stura. Off in the distance stood a peasant village. It was full of thralls, of course. From this distance, it looked the same as an ordinary Avornan village in spite of what Otus said. No matter how it looked, the difference was there – for now. With luck, it wouldn't be there much longer.

CHAPTER THREE

King Lanius liked the archives for all kinds of reasons. Where Arch-Hallow Anser took pleasure from hunting deer and wild boar, Lanius enjoyed running facts to earth, and the archives were the best place to do it. The thrill of the chase was every bit as real for him as it was for Anser. Centuries of clerks had stored documents not immediately useful in the archives. Very few of them had used any system beyond throwing the parchments and papers into crates or buckets or barrels or cases or whatever else seemed handy at the moment. Finding any one parchment in particular was an adventure at best, impossible at worst.

Even when Lanius didn't have anything special in mind, he enjoyed the hunt for its own sake. He never knew what he would come across going through documents at random. Tax records could be stuffed next to accounts of controversies in some provincial town's temples or next to the tales of travelers who'd gone to distant lands and written out descriptions of what they saw and did. Until you looked, you couldn't tell.

And the king enjoyed going to the archives for their own sake. When he closed the heavy doors behind him, he closed away the world. Servants hardly ever came and bothered him while he was there. From when he was very young, he'd made it plain to everyone that that was his place, and he wasn't to be disturbed.

Sunlight sifted in through windows set in the ceiling that somehow never came clean. Dust motes danced in those tired sunbeams. If the archives held one thing besides documents, it was dust. The air smelled of it, and of old parchment, and of old wood, and of other things Lanius always recognized but never could have named. It was just the smell of the archives, an indispensable part of the place.

Quiet was also an indispensable part of the place. Those heavy doors muffled the usual noises that filled the palace – rattling and banging and shouting from the kitchens, servants' shrill squabbles in the hallways, carpenters or masons hammering and chiseling as they repaired this or rebuilt that. Peace was where you found it, and Lanius found it there.

Along with peace went privacy, which a king always had trouble getting and keeping. Every once in a while, Lanius would bring a maidservant into the archives. The women often giggled at his choice of a trysting place, but no one was likely to interrupt him there. No one ever had, not when he was in there with company.

This morning, he was there by himself. He knew the document he wanted – a traveler's tale – was in there somewhere. He'd read it once, years before. How many thousands of tales and receipts and records of all sorts had he looked at since? He was a most precise man, but he had no idea. He also had no sure idea where in that mad maze of documents and crates and tables and cases lay the parchment he wanted.

Had it been by the far wall? Or had he found it in that dark comer? Even if he had, had he put it back where he got it? He'd tried to convince his children to do that, with indifferent success. Had he had any better luck with himself?

He shrugged and started to laugh. If he couldn't remember where he'd found that parchment written in old-fashioned Avornan, he couldn't very well blame himself for putting it back in the wrong place, could he?

When he sniffed again, he frowned. Somewhere mixed in with the odors of dust and old parchment was the small, sour stink of mouse droppings. Mice and damp were the worst enemies documents had. Who could guess how much history, how much knowledge, had vanished beneath the ever-gnawing front teeth of mice? Maybe they'd gotten to the traveler's tale he needed. He shivered, though the archives were warm enough. If that tale was gone forever, he would have to trust his memory. It was very good, but he didn't think it was good enough.

Here? No, these were tax registers from his father's reign. He didn't remember his father well; King Mergus had died when he was a little boy. What he remembered was how things changed after Mergus died. He'd gone from being everyone's darling to a lousy bastard the instant Mergus' younger brother, Scolopax, put on the crown. Lanius still bristled at the word. It wasn't his fault his mother had been his father's seventh wife, no matter what the priests had to say about it. Avornans were allowed only six, no matter what. To get a son, a legitimate son, Mergus broke the rule. But they had wed. If that didn't make him legitimate, what did?

Plenty of people had said nothing did. Over the years, the fuss and feathers about that had died down. Some priests had been forced into exile in the Maze – the swamps and marshes not far from the city of Avornis – on account of it, though, and a few were still there. Others preached in small towns in out-of-the-way parts of the kingdom, and would never be welcome in the capital again.