Dan Chernenko - Scepter of Mercy 02 - The Chernagor Pirates

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While young King Lanius dreams of being more than a mere figurehead, his fellow

sovereign, the usurper King Grus, is defending Avornis against the shadowy plots of

the Banished One—the dark god cast from heaven, who seeks now to dominate

the mortal world.

With the barbarous, nomadic Menteshe in the south holding the Scepter of

Mercy—and civil war raging among the Chernagor city-states in the north—Avornis

finds itself threatened on two fronts. King Grus and his army are in the land of the

Chernagors, hoping to quell the trouble— without becoming bogged down in a

protracted war. Grus may be able to form an alliance against the Menteshe....Then

again, it could be an inescapable trap.

But the longer the kings go without acting on their dream of retaking the Scepter of

Mercy, the greater the advantage the Banished One gains. However, sending

soldiers against the Menteshe risks having the army turned into half-mindless thralls.

But sooner or later, King Grus will have to strike—before his people realize just how

formidable an enemy the Banished One truly is....

PRAISE FOR THE BASTARD KING

“A READER’S DELIGHT.”

—Judith Tarr, Author of House of War

“A VIVID, ACTION-PACKED STORY.”

—J. Ardian Lee, Author of Outlaw Sword

The Chernagor Pirates

Book Two of The Scepter of Mercy

DAN CHERNENKO

A ROC BOOK

Copyright notice

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

The Chernagor Pirates

CHAPTER ONE

Not for the first time—not for the hundredth, either—King Lanius wondered

what it would be like to rule Avornis. His ancestors for a dozen generations had

been kings. They’d ruled. He, on the other hand . . .

He, on the other hand, sighed and went on poking through the royal archives.

Avornis was a proud and ancient kingdom. That meant it had been accumulating

scrolls and codices and sheets of parchment and the occasional (often broken)

potsherd for centuries. Lanius, fascinated by history, dug through them as eagerly as

a miner went after a rich vein of gold.

The King—well, one of the Kings—of Avornis looked more like a scholar than a

ruler. He was a tall, thin, weedy man in his midtwenties, with dark brown hair that

needed combing and a beard with a chunk of dust in it down low on his right cheek

where he couldn’t see it and flick it away. Instead of royal robes, he wore an

ordinary—in fact, rather grubby—linen tunic and baggy wool trousers. The servants

had complained that he always came back from the archives covered in dust and

dirt, and that robes so smirched were impossible to clean. Lanius didn’t like to cause

people trouble when he didn’t have to.

Dispirited sunbeams came through the dusty skylights set into the ceiling. Motes

of dust Lanius had kicked up danced in the light. Somewhere off in the distance, far

beyond the heavy doors that shut the archives away from the rest of the palace, a

couple of serving women shrilly squabbled over something or other. Lanius

smiled—he couldn’t make out a word they were saying.

He bent for a closer look at the latest parchment he’d unearthed. It talked about

Yozgat—the great southern city where the barbarous Menteshe held the Scepter of

Mercy for their master, the Banished One—back in the lost and distant days when

Yozgat was not Yozgat but rather Prusa, an Avornan town.

Lanius sighed. “Why do I bother?” he muttered under his breath. Prusa had been

made into Yozgat more than five hundred years before, when the wild Menteshe

horsemen rode out of the hills and took the southern part of the kingdom away

from an Avornis wracked by civil war. It had housed the Scepter of Mercy, once the

great talisman of the Kings of Avornis, for four centuries. All efforts to reclaim the

Scepter had failed, most of them horribly.

Maybe some clue in Prusa-that-was would yield a key to Yozgat. So Lanius

hoped. In that hope, he kept going through the manuscripts in the archives one

after another. If he didn’t look, he would assuredly find nothing.

“And if I do look, I’ll probably find nothing,” he said, and sighed again. Odds

were, all his efforts were futile. The Banished One might have been cast down from

the heavens to earth below, but he remained much, much more than a mere mortal

man. He’d spent the intervening years fortifying Yozgat against assault. Even if an

Avornan army fought its way to the place, what could it do then? Lanius hoped he

would find something, anything, to tell him.

Not on this parchment, which was a tax register and said very little about Prusa’s

geography. The next one . . . The next one talked about a border squabble between

Avornis and the Chernagor city-states at the opposite end of the kingdom. No one

could be sure how, or if, the archives were organized.

One of these days, I’ll have to do something about that. Lanius laughed at himself. He’d

had the same thought ever since he started coming into the archives as a youth. It

hadn’t happened yet. He didn’t intend to hold his breath waiting for it to happen.

He put down the parchment that didn’t interest him, got up from the chair where

he’d been sitting for a long time, and stretched. Something in his back popped.

With a glance over his shoulder, as though to say he’d be back, he left the archives.

Servants bowed. “Your Majesty,” they murmured. Their respect might have

shown that Lanius was the ruler of Avornis. It might have, but it didn’t. All it

showed was that he was the descendant of a long line of kings.

As though to underscore his lack of power, one of the servants said, “Oh, Your

Majesty, King Grus wants to see you.”

Not, King Grus wants to see you at your convenience, or anything of the sort. No one

worried about Lanius’ convenience—Grus certainly didn’t. “Where is Grus?” Lanius

asked. He seldom used the other king’s royal title—as seldom as he could get away

with, in fact.

“He’s at the entranceway to the palace, Your Majesty, enjoying the fine spring

day,” the servant replied.

Lanius couldn’t quarrel with Grus about that. Spring had come late to the city of

Avornis this year. Now that it was finally here, it was worth savoring. “I’ll meet him

there, then,” Lanius said.

If he hadn’t gone, Grus wouldn’t have done anything to him. His fellow

sovereign wasn’t a cruel or vindictive man. Lanius would have had an easier time

disliking him if he were. The rightful King of Avornis—so he thought of

himself—still managed it, but it was sometimes hard work.

Serving women smiled at him as he went past. Sleeping with even a powerless

king might let them escape a life of drudgery. Lanius passed the chambers where he

kept his white-mustached monkeys and his moncats. He didn’t have time for the

menagerie now, either.

Unfiltered by dusty, dirty glass, the sunlight streaming through the open doors of

the palace made Lanius first blink and then smile. Bird-song came in with the

sunshine. Warblers and flycatchers and other birds were finally coming back from

the south. Lanius hadn’t realized how much he’d missed their music until he started

hearing it again.

Storks were coming back from the south, too, building great ramshackle nests in

trees and on rooftops. They didn’t sing—their voices were raucous croaks—but

most people took them for good luck.

Grus stood in the sunshine, not so much basking in it as seeming to cause it. He

had a knack for attaching to himself anything good that happened. His royal robes,

encrusted with jewels and pearls and shot through with golden threads, gleamed and

glittered as though they had come down from the heavens to illuminate the dull,

gross, all-too-material earth. Their splendor made Lanius in his plain, dirty clothes

seem all the shabbier by contrast.

Turning at the sound of Lanius’ footfalls, Grus smiled and said, “Hello, Your

Majesty. Meaning no offense, but you look like a teamster.”

“I was in the archives,” Lanius said shortly.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” In spite of the apology, Grus’ smile got wider. “That means you

want to clout me in the head for dragging you out.”

Lanius didn’t care to think what would happen to him if he tried to clout Grus in

the head. The other king was about twice his age and several inches shorter than he.

But Grus, despite a grizzled beard, was solidly made and trained as a fighting man.

Not much in the way of muscle had ever clung to Lanius’ long bones, while he knew

far less of fighting than of ancient dialects of Avornan. And so, while he might think

wistfully of clouting the usurper, he knew better than to have a go at it.

“It’s all right,” he said now. “I’d come out anyhow. What can I do for you?”

Before Grus could answer, a priest whose yellow robe displayed his high rank

walked in through the entrance. He bowed to Grus, murmuring, “Your Majesty.”

He started to go on by Lanius, whose attire was anything but royal, but then

stopped and stared and at last bowed again. “Your Majesties,” he corrected himself,

and walked on.

A real teamster with a couple of barrels of ale in a handcart came in right after the

priest. Intent on his work, he noticed neither king. “Let’s find some quiet place

where we can talk,” Grus said.

“Lead on,” Lanius said. You will anyhow, he thought glumly.

King Grus sat down on a stool in one of the several small dining rooms in the

palace. Servants ate here; royalty didn’t. Grus watched with some amusement as

Lanius perched on another stool a few feet away. Perched was the right word—with

his long limbs and awkward gait, Lanius put Grus in mind of a crane or a stork or

some other large bird.

“This seems quiet enough,” Lanius remarked. A stout door—oak barred with

iron—muffled the noise from the hallway outside, and would keep people from

eavesdropping on what the two kings said.

“It will do.” Grus watched the younger man fidget. He wondered if Lanius had

any idea he was doing it. Probably not, Grus judged.

“What is it, then?” Lanius sounded hostile and more than a little nervous. Grus

knew his son-in-law didn’t love him. He wouldn’t have loved a man who’d taken the

power rightfully his, either. As for the nerves . . . Grus thought he understood those,

too.

“Tell me what you know about the Chernagors,” he said.

Lanius started. He thought I was going to ask him something else. Grus clicked his

tongue between his teeth. He expected they would get around to that, too. Lanius

said, “You’ll know a lot already. Hard to be King of Avornis”—he made a sour face

at that—“and not know a good deal about the Chernagors.”

“I’m not interested in all the trading they do out on the Northern Sea,” Grus

said. “They’ll do that come what may. I’m interested in the rivalries between their

city-states.”

“All right.” Lanius thought for a moment. “Some of them, you know, go back a

long way, back even before the days when their pirate ancestors took the northern

coastline away from us.”

“That’s fine,” Grus said agreeably. “If knowing why they hated each other before

helps me know how they hate each other now, I’ll listen. If it doesn’t”—he

shrugged—“it can wait for some other time.”

Grus was a relentlessly practical man. One of his complaints about Lanius was

that his son-in-law was anything but. Of course, had Lanius been more like him, he

would also have been more likely to try to overthrow him—and much more likely to

succeed.

“What’s this all about?” Lanius asked now, a practical enough question. “The

Chernagors haven’t troubled us much lately—certainly no sea raids on our coast like

the ones in my great-grandfather’s day, and not more than the usual nuisance raids

across the land frontier. Thervingia’s been a lot bigger problem.”

“Not since Prince Berto became King Berto,” Grus said. Avornis’ western

neighbor was quiet under a king who would rather build cathedrals than fight. Grus

approved of a pious sovereign for a neighbor. Berto’s father, King Dagipert, had

almost made Thervingia the master of Avornis and himself Lanius’ father-in-law

instead of Grus. He’d also come unpleasantly close to killing Grus on the battlefield.

The news that Dagipert had finally died was some of the best Grus had ever gotten.

“You know what I mean.” Lanius let his impatience show. He had scant patience

for comments he found foolish.

“All right.” Grus spread his hands, trying to placate the younger king. “I’m

concerned because the Banished One may be trying to get a foothold in some of

the Chernagor city-states. With Berto on the throne in Thervingia, he won’t have

any luck there, and he could use a lever against us besides the Menteshe.”

“I wonder if the Banished One and Dagipert connived together,”

Lanius said. Grus only shrugged once more. He’d wondered the same thing.

Avornans had never proved it. Dagipert had always denied it. Doubt lingered even

so.

“Any which way, our spies have seen Menteshe—which is to say, they’ve surely

seen the Banished One’s—agents in several Chernagor towns,” Grus said.

“Milvago.” Lanius’ lips shaped the name without a sound.

“Don’t say it.” Grus shook his head in warning. “Don’t even come as close as

you did. That’s nobody’s business but ours—and I wouldn’t be sorry if we didn’t

know, either.”

“Yes.” Despite the warm spring weather, Lanius shivered. Grus didn’t blame him

a bit. Everyone knew King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods had

joined together to cast the Banished One out of the heavens and down to earth

more than a thousand years before.

Everyone knew that, yes. What no one knew, these days, was that the Banished

One—Milvago, as he’d been known when he still dwelt in the heavens—hadn’t

been any minor deity. Lanius had found that truth in the ecclesiastical archives, far

below the great cathedral in the capital.

No, Milvago hadn’t been any ordinary god, a god of weather or anger or

earthquakes or other such well-defined function. From what the ancient archives

said, Milvago had fathered Olor and Quelea and the rest. Until they cast him forth,

he’d been Lord of All.

He remained, or seemed to remain, immortal, though he wasn’t all-powerful

anymore—wasn’t, in fact, a god at all anymore. He wanted dominion on earth, not

only for its own sake but also, somehow, as a stepping-stone back to the heavens.

Avornis had always resisted him. Grus wondered how long his kingdom could go

on resisting a power greater than it held.

“Do you know what I think?” Lanius said.

Grus shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea, Your Majesty.” He stayed polite

to Lanius. The other king seldom used his royal title. Lanius resented reigning rather

than ruling. Grus didn’t worry about that, as long as the resentment stayed no more

than resentment. Polite still, Grus added, “Tell me, please.”

“I think the Banished One is stirring up trouble among the Chernagors to keep

us too busy even to try to go after the Scepter of Mercy down in the south,” Lanius

said.

That hadn’t occurred to Grus. He realized it should have. The Banished One saw

the world as a whole. He had to try to do the same himself. “You may very well be

right,” he said slowly. “But even if you are, what can we do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Lanius admitted. “I was hoping you might think of something.”

“Thanks—I think,” Grus said.

“If we get in trouble in the north, what can we do but try to calm it down before

it gets worse?” Lanius asked. “Nothing I can see. We can’t very well pretend it isn’t

there, can we?”

“I don’t see how. I wish I did.” Grus’ laugh was sour as green apples. “Well, Your

Majesty, the Scepter of Mercy has been out of our hands for a long time now. I

don’t suppose a little longer will make that much difference.”

Lanius’ answering nod was unhappy. Four hundred years ago, the then-King of

Avornis had brought the great talisman down from the capital to the south to help

resist the inroads of the Menteshe. But the hard-riding nomads had fallen on the

Scepter’s escort, galloped off with it to Yozgat, and held it there ever since. After

several disastrously unsuccessful efforts to retake it, the Avornans hadn’t tried for a

couple of centuries. And yet. . .

Lanius said, “As long as we go without it, the Banished One has the advantage.

All we can do is respond to his moves. Playing the game that way, we lose sooner or

later. With it, maybe we can call the tune.”

“I know.” Now Grus sounded unhappy, too. Sending Avornan soldiers south of

the Stura River was asking either to lose them or to see them made into

thralls—half-mindless men bound to the Menteshe and to the Banished One. And

Yozgat, these days the chief town of the Menteshe Prince Ulash, lay a long way

south of the Stura. “If only our magic could stand up against what the Banished

One can aim at us.”

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” But King Lanius caught himself. “No.

Wish for the Scepter of Mercy.”

“If I need to have it already before I can hope to get it—” Grus stopped. Even if

he went around that twenty-two times, he’d still get caught.

“We have to try. Sooner or later, we have to try,” Lanius said. But Lanius was no

soldier. How much of the bitter consequences of failure did he grasp?

On the other hand, not trying to take back the Scepter of Mercy would also be a

failure, a failure most bitter. Grus understood that, too.

He’d never wished more to disagree than when he made his head go up and

down and said, “You’re right.”

Lanius dreamed. He knew he dreamed. But dreams in which the Banished One

appeared were not of the ordinary sort. That supremely cold, supremely beautiful

face seemed more real than most of the things he saw while wide awake. The

Banished One said, “And so you know my name. You know who I was, who I am,

who I shall be again.”

His voice was as beautiful—and as cold—as his features. Lanius heard in these

dreams with the same spectral clarity as he saw. Milvago. The name, and the

knowledge of what it meant, echoed and reechoed in his mind.

He didn’t speak the name—however one spoke in dreams—but the Banished

One sensed it. “Yes, I am Milvago, shaper of this miserable world,” he declared.

“How dare you presume to stand against me?”

“You want to conquer my kingdom,” Lanius replied. He could answer honestly;

the Banished One, he’d seen, might commandeer his dreams, but couldn’t harm

him in them. “You want to make my people into thralls. If I can keep you from

doing that, I will.”

“No mere mortal may hinder me,” the Banished One said.

“Not so.” Lanius shook his head, or it felt as though he shook his head, there in

this dream that was all too real. “You were cast down from the heavens long ago. If

no man could hinder you, you would have ruled the world long since.”

“Rule it I shall.” The Banished One tossed his head in more than mortal scorn.

“What is time? Time means nothing to me, not when I created time. Think you I

am trapped in it, to gutter out one day like a lamp running dry? You had best think

again, you mayfly, you brief pimple on the buttock of the world.”

Lanius knew he would die. He didn’t know the Banished One wouldn’t, but

Milvago had shown no sign of aging in all the long years since coming down from

the heavens. He couldn’t assume the Banished One was lying. Still, that didn’t

matter. The king’s tutors had trained him well. However intimidating the Banished

One was, Lanius saw he was trying to distract him here. Whether he would die

wasn’t the essence of the argument. Whether he remained omnipotent—if, indeed,

he’d ever been omnipotent—was.

“If you were all you say you are, you would have ruled the world since you came

into it,” Lanius said. “That you don’t proves you can be beaten. I will do everything

I know how to do to stop you.”

“Everything you know how to do.” The Banished One’s laughter flayed like

whips of ice. “What do you know? What can you know, who live but for a season

and then go back to the nothingness from which you sprang?”

“I know it is better to live free than as one of your thralls,” Lanius answered.

“Did the gods who sprang from you decide the same thing?”

Normally, the Banished One’s perfect countenance showed no emotion. Rage

rippled over it now, though. “After yours, their turn shall come,” he snarled. “You

need not doubt that. Oh, no, do not doubt it. Their turn shall come.”

He reached for Lanius, the nails on his fingers sharpening into talons as his hands

drew near. As one will in dreams, Lanius turned to flee. As one will in dreams, he

knew he fled too slow. He looked back to see how much danger he was in. The

Banished One, apparently, could make his arms as long as he chose. His hand closed

on the shoulder of the King of Avornis.

Lanius shrieked himself awake.

“Are you all right?” The hand on his shoulder belonged to his wife. Even in the

dim light of the royal bedchamber, Sosia looked alarmed. “I haven’t heard you make

a noise like that in ...” Grus’ daughter shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever

heard you make a noise like that.”

“Bad dream,” Lanius said.

He would have left it there. He didn’t want to worry Sosia. Grus had arranged the

marriage—forced it on both of them, in other words. The new king wanted to tie

himself to Avornis’ ancient dynasty as closely as he could. In their seven years of

marriage, though, Lanius and Sosia had come to care for each other as much as a

married couple could reasonably be expected to do—which was, perhaps, more than

anything else, a triumph of good manners and patience on both sides.

Sosia shook her head. Her dark, wavy hair, down for the night, brushed across

his face. “That wasn’t any ordinary dream,” she said. “You don’t have dreams like

that—nightmares, I should say. Did you see ... him?”

She didn’t even want to call him the Banished One. She didn’t know the name

Milvago, or what the Banished One had been before his ouster from the heavens.

So far as Lanius knew, only he and Grus knew that. Grus had told him not to tell

anyone—not his wife, who was Grus’ daughter, and not the Arch-Hallow of

Avornis, who was Grus’ bastard son. Lanius hadn’t argued. He too could see that

the fewer people who knew about exactly what sort of enemy Avornis faced, the

better.

After his scream, he couldn’t very well lie to Sosia. “Yes, I saw him,” he said with

a reluctant nod.

“Why doesn’t he leave you alone?” She sounded indignant, as though, could she

have been alone with the Banished One, she would have given him a piece of her

mind. She probably would have, too.

“He sends me dreams. He sends your father dreams. He doesn’t bother other

people—General Hirundo never gets them, for instance,” Lanius said. The Banished

One didn’t trouble Sosia, either, but Lanius forbore to mention that.

His wife sounded more irate than ever. “He should bother other people, and

leave you alone.”

But Lanius shook his head. “In an odd way, I think it’s a compliment,” he said.

“He knows your father and I are dangerous to him, so we’re the ones he visits in

dreams. That’s what we think, anyhow.”

Maybe we’re giving ourselves too much credit, he thought. Could he and Grus—could

any mortals—seriously discommode the Banished One? On days when Lanius felt

gloomy, he had his doubts. But why had thralls under the Banished One’s will tried

to murder the two Kings of Avornis the winter before, if those kings didn’t

represent some kind of danger?

Sosia said, “What I think is, you ought to go back to sleep, and hope no more

bad dreams come. And if they don’t, you can worry about all these things in the

morning, when you feel better.”

Lanius leaned over and kissed her. “That’s good advice,” he said. In fact, he

could think of no better advice for the wee small hours of the morning. He took it,

and the Banished One left him alone . . . then.

King Grus and the man he hoped to make his new wizard eyed each other. The

wizard, whose name was Pterocles, said, “I’ll do everything I can for you, Your

Majesty.” He was young and earnest and very bright. Grus was sure he would be

diligent. Whether he would be versatile enough, or discreet enough, to make a royal

wizard . . . Grus wished he weren’t quite so young.

And what was Pterocles thinking about as he sat studying Grus? The king

couldn’t read his face. That was, if anything, a point in the wizard’s favor. After

dealing with so many petitioners and courtiers over the years, Grus knew how

transparent most men were. Not this one.

“One of the things a king’s wizard needs to do,” Grus said, “is keep his mouth

shut. I think you can manage that.”

Dan Chernenko - Scepter of Mercy 02 - The Chernagor Pirates

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