The Scepter's Return by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

the moncats’ chamber. The king hoped Pouncer wouldn’t have decided to disappear into the passages between the walls. That would have been annoying, to say the least.
    To his relief, the moncat he wanted was there with the others. Collurio stared at all of them with fascination, even after Lanius pointed out the one he’d be working with. “Here, let me have a scrap,” Lanius said. “I’ve taught him one little trick myself.” He lay down on the floor and thumped his chest. Sure enough, Pouncer came running over and scrambled up onto him to claim the treat.
    Collurio made as though to bow. “Not bad, Your Majesty. Not bad at all.”
    Lanius scratched Pouncer behind the ears. The moncat deigned to purr. The king said, “He’s also taught himself a trick or two. When he goes into the kitchen, he likes to steal serving spoons. He likes silver best—he has expensive tastes—but he’ll take wooden ones, too. Sometimes he’ll steal forks, but it’s usually spoons.”
    Now Collurio studied Pouncer like a sculptor eyeing a block of marble and wondering what sort of statue lay hidden within. Here was his raw material. How would he shape it? “Well, Your Majesty,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do.…”
    Riding through the valley of the Stura toward the river that marked the border between Avornis and the lands of the Menteshe, Grus was doubly glad the nomads had fallen into civil war. Too much of the damage they’d done here still remained. Too many peasant villages were only crumbling ruins with no one living in them. Here in the south, people planted when the fall rains came and harvested in the springtime, the opposite of the way things worked up by the capital. But too many fields that should have been fat with wheat and barley had gone back to weeds. Too many meadows were untended scrub, and too few cattle and sheep and horses and donkeys grazed on the ones that remained.
    When the king remarked on that to Hirundo, the general said, “Now they’re doing it to themselves, and it serves ’em right.”
    â€œBut they’re doing it to the thralls, too,” Grus said. “If things go the way we hope they will, we’re going to have to start thinking of the thralls as Avornans. We can turn them back to Avornans again.” We’d better be able to, anyhow. If we can’t, we’re in trouble.
    Hirundo raised an eyebrow. His laugh sounded startled. “To me, they’re just thralls. They’ve always been just thralls. But that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
    â€œThat’s … one of the things this is all about.” Grus always had the Scepter of Mercy in his mind, and ever more so as he came farther south and so drew closer to it. But, as he drew closer to it, he also got the feeling talking about it, showing that he was thinking about it, grew more dangerous. He didn’t know if that feeling sprang from his imagination alone. Whether it did or not, he didn’t care to take the chance.
    â€œBy King Olor’s strong right hand, it’ll be good to hit back at the Menteshe on their own soil,” Hirundo said. “We’ve fought here, inside Avornis, for a cursed long time. All they had to do to get away was make it over the Stura. We never dared go after them. But we owe them a bit, don’t we?”
    â€œJust a bit,” the king said, his voice dry. Hirundo laughed again, this time sarcastically. How many times had the Menteshe raided southern Avornis in the four centuries and more since the Scepter of Mercy was lost? How much plundering, how much destruction for the sport of it, how many murders, how many rapes were they to blame for? Not even Lanius, clever as he was, could begin to give an accounting of all their atrocities.
    The farther the army advanced into the broad valley of the last of the Nine Rivers, the worse the devastation