Yes, I'm going out to the country again," Lanius said. Sosia's expression was dubious, to say the least. "You can't tell me you enjoy it there," she said. "You can't, I mean, unless you've got someone there waiting for you."
"I do," he said, and her eyes flashed furiously. He held up a hand to hold back the lightning. "It's not a woman. You saw that the last time you were there. You can come again, whenever you please. Don't tell me ahead of time. I'm not worried about that. But I've got Collurio and Crinitus out there, and Pouncer, too."
"That miserable moncat," his wife said. "The way you talk about it, it might as well be a person."
"One of these days, maybe, all Avornis will be talking about it," Lanius said.
"What makes you think all Avornis isn't talking about it already?" Sosia paused to spoon up some breakfast porridge and sip from her cup of wine. "I know what Avornis is saying, too. 'Why is the king spending so much money and wasting so much time on a dumb beast?' People can understand mistresses. But the moncat?" She shook her head.
"Pouncer is a beast, but he's a long way from dumb. People will see that, too," Lanius said. He started to say even more, but held his tongue at the last moment. The Banished One had never stalked Sosia's dreams. He wouldn't have talked about Pouncer with Anser or Hirundo, either. Grus and Pterocles.. understood.
Sosia didn't. "Well, go on, then. I can't stop you, but I don't like it, either."
"It has nothing to do with you," Lanius said, and he wasn't lying. "It's business of state, that's what it is."
His wife sniffed. "Tell me another one. I wonder what a bricklayer or a candlemaker says when he wants to get away from his wife for a while."
Lanius exhaled in exasperation. "Do you want to come with me? You can, if you care to."
"No." Sosia made a face. "I don't care for the country at all. I like it right where I am. You always liked it here, too. Is it any surprise I wonder what you're up to when you start doing things you don't usually do?"
She might have been a constable keeping track of a sneak thief's habits. Lanius thought that was unfair. He never took anything that wasn't freely given. Whether he took something Sosia didn't want him to have was a different question, one he didn't care to examine so closely.
He did ride out to the country a few days later. While he was interested in what Pouncer had learned, riding out to see the moncat was not his idea of fun. Some people enjoyed horseback riding for its own sake. Lanius found that almost as strange – and almost as perverse – as Limosa's taste for the lash. He'd become a good enough rider to stay in the saddle if his horse didn't get too frisky, and he rode placid geldings to try to make sure that didn't happen. He could do it, but he did it without enjoyment.
There was something he had in common with Grus. The other king wasn't a natural equestrian, either; Hirundo, who was, never tired of teasing him. But Grus did well enough not merely to ride but to fight on horseback. Grus might not – did not, in fact – have a lot of education, but he'd proved competent in any number of ways.
A hawk wheeled overhead in the blue. Somewhere in the fields of ripening grain scurried the rabbits and mice on which it lived. Lanius couldn't see them or smell them, but the hawk could. As often as not, peasants shot at hawks or netted them because they sometimes stole chickens and ducks. Lanius thought they did more good than harm, and by a wide margin, too.
He wondered if a royal edict would keep peasants from killing them. As far as he knew, no king had ever issued a decree like that. In the back of his mind, he heard Grus saying, Don't make a law if you can't enforce it. People won't obey it, and they won't respect the other laws so much, either.
That was probably true, however little he cared for it. And he knew he could not force people to obey a law protecting hawks. He sighed. Good ideas often broke to pieces when they ran up against brute fact.
The road was dusty. The only time roads weren't dusty was when they were muddy, which made them worse. How much would cobblestoning all the kingdom's main roads cost, how long would it take, and how many men would it need? Too much, too long, and too many – the answer formed almost as fast as the question.
Collurio and his son didn't know the king was coming. The animal trainer greeted him with a bow and the words, "By the gods, Your Majesty, you were right."
"Was I?" Lanius always liked hearing that. "Uh, about what?"
"About hawks, Your Majesty," Collurio replied. "The soldiers have shot three of them that tried to swoop down on the moncat."
" Have they?" Lanius said, surprised in spite of his precautions.
Collurio nodded. "They sure have. One eagle – biggest bird I've ever seen, I think – one fish-hawk, and one ordinary hawk. Others were circling around, too, but they didn't do anything more than circle. It was almost like they knew to stay away from the archers' bows."
" Was it?" Lanius said, and Collurio nodded again. The king plucked at his rather unkempt beard. "Isn't that interesting?" He remembered the hawk he'd seen floating in the air earlier in the day. Maybe it hadn't been thinking about mice and rabbits. Maybe it had been thinking of moncats instead. And maybe the Banished One had been doing its thinking for it.
Grus looked down into the well. The stench wafting up from the shaft told him what the Menteshe had done, but he wanted to see for himself. Sure enough, the cut-up carcasses of a couple of sheep, or possibly goats, bobbed in the water.
Hirundo looked down the shaft, too. "Well, we won't get any use out of that one," he said matter-of-factly.
"They've poisoned quite a few of them," Grus said. "It's getting to be a nuisance." It was getting to be more than a nuisance, but he tried to admit as little as he could, even to himself.
"Where there's one well, odds are we can dig another one close by," Hirundo said.
"Yes, that's true, but whenever we have to stop and dig, it takes time," the king answered. "I worry about every day we don't spend pushing on toward Yozgat. You can only stretch a campaigning season so far."
"If we can get supplies down from the north, we'll do all right," Hirundo said. "We could stay through the winter if we had to. No blizzards to worry about here, not like in the Chernagor country or even in Avornis."
"No, I suppose not." Grus looked south just the same. If the Banished One wanted to badly enough, could he bring a snowstorm screaming down on an army besieging Yozgat? Grus didn't know, and hoped he wouldn't have to find out the hard way. He brought his thoughts back to more immediate worries. "Do we have enough water to keep moving?"
"For now, yes," Hirundo answered. "If we don't come across any in the next couple of days, then we have a problem. But I'm not going to fret about that. Something will turn up. It usually does."
"I hope so." Grus envied the general's easy optimism. Hirundo had been saying things like that his whole life long, and he'd been right most of the time. If he happened to be wrong here, that would be more than a problem. It would be a disaster. The king pounded a fist against his thigh. "This country is a lot drier than Avornis."
"We've managed to get this far." Yes, Hirundo had no trouble staying cheerful. "Yozgat's just over the next rise – oh, not really, but close enough. Don't worry, Your Majesty. We'll do all right."
"Maybe we will," said Grus, who certainly wanted to believe it. "This is liable to be hard on the thralls, though. Everything lately has been hard on those poor people – war across their fields, the plague during the winter, and now this."
"Not everything," Hirundo said. "They're free – the ones who are left are free, anyhow. And I'll tell you something else, Your Majesty. I'll bet the freed ones will know of more wells and such than the Menteshe do. If we run into what looks like trouble, asking them is likely to do us more good than anything else."
"Mm, I'd say that's a pretty good bet," Grus agreed after a little thought. "And it's something the Banished One and the Menteshe are liable to miss. Who pays attention to thralls unless he has to?"
"We do," Hirundo answered.
Grus nodded, wondering whether that was a weakness the enemy could exploit or a strength that might help Avornis win this struggle. He had no idea – it would all depend on how things played out. And caring about the thralls also might turn out not to matter one way or the other.
The army did move forward, and found more poisoned wells in its path. Men and animals started getting thirsty. Most streams were either dry or tiny trickles in the summer heat. Grus sent wizards ahead with the scouts, to bring freedom to some thralls and try out Hirundo's notion.
It worked even better than the general might have guessed. The thralls found wells and streams and even a pond the Menteshe had missed. The army got enough water to keep going – not a lot of water, but enough. And the thralls, even with the darkness freshly lifted from their spirits, were not just willing but eager to do all they could for the Avornans. The Menteshe had been hard on them and hard on their ancestors for hundreds of years. How much of that oppression did they really understand? Enough to know which side they were on; that was clear.
"Well, you were right," Grus told his general as they encamped for the night.
Hirundo bowed. "Thank you kindly, Your Majesty. One of the reasons people want to do things for you is that you say things like that. Plenty would just take the credit, whether it belonged to them or not."
"I've known officers like that – who hasn't? Nothing's ever their fault, either," Grus said. Hirundo nodded. The king continued, "If you have a choice, you'd rather lean on the other kind. I do try to remember that myself."
Hirundo bowed again. He didn't say anything. His silence was part of the price Grus paid for being king. If he had spoken, Grus was sure he would have said something like, Most people would forget all about that as soon as they got a crown on their head. It was probably – no, certainly – true, but it wasn't the sort of thing you told a sovereign, even an easygoing one.
The Menteshe didn't need long to realize something had gone wrong. Seeing the Avornans moving forward, seeing their animals healthy and not on their last legs, told the nomads Grus' army had found water one way or another. But the nomads didn't turn any special savagery against the thralls. It was as though they couldn't imagine those near-beasts doing anything for good or ill – doing anything at all, except what beasts did.
Instead, with a fury that seemed to Grus not far from despair, the Menteshe struck at the Avornan army. As always, they hit hard. Volleys of arrows stung Grus' force. Wounded men and wounded horses screamed. The Avornans wavered. If the nomads had kept pelting them with arrows from long range, they might have broken.
What saved the Avornans were the siege engines rattling along in the baggage train. Those could hit the Menteshe where Avornan archery couldn't. And, as always, each of the flying stone balls and stout darts did far more damage than a mere arrow could have. The Menteshe abruptly seemed to lose patience with the long-range duel. Shouting curses in their own language, they charged.
In charging, they threw away the advantage they'd enjoyed. They'd had the better of the missile duel even if they didn't like stones flying their way. At close quarters, the Avornans, who wore heavier armor and rode sturdier horses, had the edge.
The Menteshe didn't need long to realize they'd made a mistake. By the time they did, though, it was too late. They were already entangled with the Avornans. Getting out of trouble proved harder than getting into it, which was usually true. The Avornan lancers and archers and spear-carrying foot soldiers made the Menteshe sorry they hadn't stayed farther away.
And when the nomads did finally break free, they were too battered and too disorganized to go back to the strategy that had worked well for them before. They were also too closely pursued. They rode off toward the south. Grus didn't push the pursuit hard. That would have let his men get shaken out into loose order, where they would be vulnerable to the nomads. He wanted to play to his own countrymen's strengths as long as he could.
Watching the Menteshe retreat, Hirundo said, "That will give them something to think about."
"I hope so," Grus said. "They tried to stop us with filth in the wells, and they couldn't. And they tried to stop us with soldiers again, and they couldn't do that, either. What have they got left?"
"They may have more fight left in them. They're tough," the general answered. "And then, if they keep losing, they stand siege in Yozgat. The place is supposed to be formidable."
"We'll find out how formidable it is," Grus said. Like Hirundo, he was looking south. Hirundo no doubt thought he was thinking of the city where the Scepter of Mercy had lain for so long. And so he was, but he was also looking farther south still, toward the Argolid Mountains. What would the Banished One do if – no, probably when – the Avornan army encircled the city? We'll find out, Grus thought again.
Pouncer knew what to do, every step of the way. King Lanius watched as the moncat proved as much in the city slice he'd had Tinamus design and build. "Look at him go!" Lanius exclaimed.
"He's a remarkable animal, Your Majesty," Collurio agreed. "It's been a… a privilege working with him."
"You started to say something else," Lanius told him. "What was it? A pleasure? But you didn't say that."
"No, I didn't. The moncat pushes back too hard to make it a pleasure," Collurio said.
After a few heartbeats, Lanius shook his head. "I don't think that's quite right. It's just that, well, a moncat is a cat. Pouncer will do what Pouncer wants to do, not what we want him to do. The trick is to get the miserable creature to want to do what we want him to do – and not to knock him over the head with a rock when he doesn't want to do it."
"Yes – and that last," Collurio agreed with a weary smile. "Anyone can tell you've had some experience with animals, Your Majesty."
"And with children," Lanius said.
That made the trainer laugh. "And with children," he agreed. "Oh, yes. Children, though, mostly grow out of it. Beasts never do."
"True enough." But Lanius was thinking about Ortalis, and about how much beastliness he'd never grown out of. Collurio might have heard this or that about Ortalis; palace gossip always leaked out into the streets of the capital. The animal trainer didn't have to live with the prince, no matter what he'd heard. As far as Lanius was concerned, that made Collurio the lucky one.
Pouncer kept on with the routine it had learned. It knew where to go and what to do to earn each new reward. The moncat knew how to reverse its course, too. Lanius kept looking away from Pouncer and up into the sky. No hawks. No eagles. Not even a jay scolding people for being people. Just a few small white clouds drifting on a warm, lazy breeze.
"I'm glad you're here, Your Majesty. We're just coming to the hard part now," Collurio said. "Crinitus and I are going to start widening the distances between rewards. We'll set them out in every other usual place, so the moncat will have to go twice as far between them. Then we'll double the distance again, and so on until we have what you want."
The trainer only knew what the king wanted. He remained unsure why Lanius wanted it. Lanius didn't enlighten him. The less the trainer knew, the safer he was – and the safer Pouncer was. Collurio had already drawn the Banished One's interest. If the exiled god looked his way again…
"Have you had any more dreams?" Lanius asked. "Has Crinitus had any?"
"Dreams?" Collurio looked blank for a moment, but only for a moment. "Oh, those dreams! No, the gods in the heavens be praised, I haven't. That one was plenty to last me a lifetime. I don't think my son has. If he had, I expect he would have said so."
They returned to the business at hand the next morning. As Collurio had said he would, he put out only half as many rewards as usual for Pouncer. When the moncat got to where the first one should have been, it looked around in surprise on discovering the treat wasn't there. After a brief pause, though, it went on to where the next treat should have been – and was.
Collurio breathed a sigh of relief. "You're always afraid they'll just sit down and lick themselves when they run into something different," he said. "I didn't really expect that, but you can't know ahead of time."
Pouncer hesitated whenever a reward was missing, but kept on with the routine to get the ones that were there. When Collurio put the moncat through its paces again later in the day, it went straight from reward to reward, scarcely even slowing at the sites that had held treats but did no more.
"He's figured it out!" Lanius said happily.
"Looks that way," Collurio agreed. "Like I told you, we'll keep going until he's good and used to doing it this way, then stretch the distance between rewards again. We're going in the right direction, Your Majesty."
Lanius nodded. "Yes," he said. "I really think we are."
King Grus fanned himself with a fan made of peacock feathers. It was not only gorgeous but, in this sweltering weather, highly practical. Anything that stirred the air was welcome. Even now, with the sun sinking down in the west, it was hotter than it ever got in the city of Avornis.
"Your Majesty?" A sweating guardsman stuck his head into the pavilion.
"What is it?" Grus asked.
"One of our scouts just rode into camp. I think he's got himself a high-and-mighty Menteshe with him."
"Oh, he does, does he?" With a grunt, the king heaved himself up off the stool where he'd perched. "Well, I suppose I'd better come see what the fellow wants, then, hadn't I?"
He had no idea who the nomad would be or which faction he represented. Whatever the answers to those questions were, Grus could guess what the man would want – would demand, probably. He would tell Grus that the Avornans had to go back over the Stura, and that they must not join with whichever faction he didn't happen to favor. The Menteshe knew only one song, though they tried to disguise that by singing it in different keys.
"Your Majesty." The nomad bowed low before Grus.
And Grus found he recognized him. "Good day, Qizil son of Qilich. What does Prince Sanjar want with me?" he inquired.
The Menteshe bowed again, lower this time. "I am honored that you remember me, Your Majesty."
"Oh, yes. I remember you. And I know Sanjar's men have attacked mine this year. What have we got to say to each other?"
"When we last spoke, Your Majesty, you mentioned something in which you were interested." Qizil didn't name the Scepter of Mercy. Did that mean he was too close to Yozgat? Or was he too close to the Banished One's lair in the Argolid Mountains?
It didn't really matter. Whether Qizil named it or not, Grus knew perfectly well what he was talking about. "Well?" the king asked. "You're right. I am interested. Does Sanjar have it?" If the concubine's son had stolen the Scepter from his unloving half brother, Grus was ready to deal with him. Grus would have made almost any bargain for the Scepter of Mercy.
But, regretfully, the Menteshe emissary shook his head. "No, I must tell you that it still rests in Yozgat. But my principal will join his men to yours in the effort to take the city and the – prize."
Grus bowed. "My thanks. That is generous of Prince Sanjar, but it would be more generous if things were different. The way they are, the Banished One could make them turn against us without warning, the way they did when they fought us not long ago. Then it was Sanjar's men and Korkut's all together, and all against my army."
To his surprise, Qizil looked embarrassed. "That… was not what we expected to happen, Your Majesty. Our own shamans are looking into it."
"Are they?" Grus was surprised all over again. This was the first time he'd ever heard of Menteshe working against the Banished One's wizardry. He didn't know whether to believe it, either.
"They are. We are not puppets on strings. We are not thralls." Pride rang in Qizil's voice. "We serve the Fallen Star because we choose to serve him. If the choice is not ours – well, maybe we will choose differently."
"You tempt me," Grus said. "It's a pity you don't tempt me quite enough. If I could be sure you were your own men and would stay your own men – that might be different. But the way things are, my men can't trust Sanjar's men at their side or behind them. And so I think we'll just have to go on by ourselves."
'This could be the worst mistake you ever make," Qizil warned.
"Maybe," Grus said. "But it could also be one of the smarter things I've done lately, and so I'm going to do it. If you ever persuade me you're really broken free of the Banished One, we may have something to talk about. Until then, I'm afraid we don't."
Qizil winced at the name the Avornans gave the exiled god. That told Grus he might not be happy with his ultimate overlord, but he wasn't ready to break away from him, which meant Sanjar wasn't ready to break with the Banished One, either. It would have been nice if things were different.
"I will take your words back to my sovereign," Sanjar's ambassador said.
"Yes, do," Grus said. Unfortunately, to his way of thinking, Sanjar was only Qizil's superior; the Banished One remained his sovereign – and Sanjar's, too. They could see they were less free than they wanted to be, but they could not yet see how to get away.
After dismissing Sanjar's envoy, Grus summoned Pterocles. He told the wizard what Qizil had said. Pterocles stayed silent for some little while. "That is interesting," he said at last. His voice sounded far away; he was plainly still deep in thought. "I wonder what the Menteshe could do to block the Banished One's spells if they set their minds to it. They know his magic much better than we do."
'Than most of us except you do, anyhow," Grus said.
"Oh, I'm sure he gets into their minds sometimes, only to help them with their spells, not to knock them down," Pterocles said. "They ought to know him from the inside out, too, so to speak."
"What would a warding spell against him be like?" the king asked.
Pterocles started to laugh. "If I knew, Your Majesty, I'd use one," he said. "Since I don't know, since I'm just guessing, I'd say it would be something like the spell that frees thralls. Same principles, anyhow – probably a different way of using them."
"That sounds as though it ought to be true – which doesn't mean it is, of course." Grus plucked at his beard as he considered. "Would you do well to leave that spell written out someplace where the nomads might find it?"
"You do ask fascinating questions," Pterocles breathed. He paused again in thought. When he came out of his study, he said, "The way it looks to me, Your Majesty, that sword has two edges. Letting the Menteshe learn exactly how we free thralls might help them do something against the Banished One. The other edge is, it might help them – or him – figure out how to counter our spell. I'll do it if you order me to, but not unless you do."
Grus grunted. Now he had to do some studying of his own. In the end, he said, "No, I won't order you to do it. You're right – the risk that they might find a way to fight our spell is real, and we can't ignore it. For now, it's too important. But if we win this campaign, it gives us something to think about doing next, so we won't forget about it, either."
"I hadn't even begun to think about what happens next," Pterocles said.
"Neither had I, but we need to," Grus said. "Once we free the serfs, we ought to help the Menteshe build barriers against the Banished One." Maybe the Scepter of Mercy will help, he thought. But even if it doesn't, we should try. Aloud, he went on, "We'll still have trouble with them, no doubt, but it'll be trouble like we have with the Thervings – ordinary human trouble. It won't be the kind of trouble we have now."
"That would be good," Pterocles said seriously.
"It would, wouldn't it?" Grus' smile was wistful. "If I only had to worry about ordinary, human troubles… Yes, that would be wonderful. Well, here's hoping."
"Make way for His Majesty!" Lanius' guardsmen bawled as they rode into the city of Avornis. "Make way! Make way!"
People scrambled to clear the streets. Lanius wished the troopers wouldn't make such a fuss. He'd told them as much, but they refused to listen to him. Anyone who thought a king gave orders that were always instantly obeyed had never been a king.
"Look! It's the king!" People shouted and pointed, as though seeing him could somehow make a difference in their own lives. And then someone yelled, "Hurrah for King Grus! Beat those Chernagors!" In a heartbeat, everyone was cheering and applauding.
Lanius, by contrast, was fuming and steaming. Not only didn't the people know who Avornis' current foe was, they didn't even know who he was. And then, to his own surprise, he started to laugh. Like any king, he'd had wistful thoughts of living a normal life, of going through the streets of his own capital unrecognized. Well, here he was, going through the streets of his own capital, and he certainly seemed unrecognized. This was as close to anonymity as he was ever likely to come.
The palace battlements and, not far away, the heaven-leaping spire of the great cathedral dominated the city skyline. The closer Lanius came, the taller they seemed. He smiled as he got ready to fall back into the routine of palace life. The country holiday had been pleasant, but this was home.
Servants bowed and curtsied when he went up the broad stairway and into the palace. "Your Majesty!" they exclaimed. "Welcome back, Your Majesty!"
"It's good to be back," Lanius answered, over and over again. He beamed at the servants. They knew he wasn't King Grus. He'd never thought that was any special reason for which to admire them, but he did now.
"You'll want a bath, won't you, Your Majesty?" one of the servants said.
That was probably a polite way of telling him he smelled of horse. He couldn't smell it himself; he'd been too close to it for too long. But he nodded. 'Thank you very much. A bath would be wonderful."
And it was wonderful – a big copper tub to soak in, with plenty of hot water to wash away the stinks and the kinks of a journey on horseback. They brought him wine, too, and put the cup where he could reach it without getting out of the tub.
He was thinking regretfully about getting out and getting dressed when the door to the bathing chamber opened yet again. This time, though, it wasn't another servant with a pitcher of hot water. It was Sosia.
"I hope you had a nice stay in the country," she said, politely if not enthusiastically.
"Thank you – I did," Lanius answered.
"I hope it wasn't too nice." Her claws came out, just for a moment.
"Not like that," he said truthfully, though he would have said the same thing even if it hadn't been true. "It's good to see you again," he added, also truthfully. "How are you?"
"I'm going to have a baby."
"Oh," Lanius said, and then, "Oh!" That wasn't the way he'd thought she would answer his question. "I want to give you a hug," he went on, "but I'm afraid I'd soak you if I did."
"You could dry off first," Sosia suggested.
Lanius still didn't much want to come out of the tub, even though he'd been in there for a while. For a baby on the way, though, he put what Sosia wanted first. Out he came. She handed him a towel. He rubbed himself more or less dry, then took her in his arms.
She let out a small squawk. "I thought you'd put some clothes on!"
"Why?" he asked, genuinely curious. He didn't let go of her. In fact, he held her tighter. "What better way to celebrate?" Sosia squawked again. "In here?"
"It's as good a place as anywhere else," he answered, rising to the occasion. "Do you think the tub is big enough for two?"
"I think you're out of your mind," his wife said. "What if the servants walk in on us?"
"Then they'll have something brand-new to gossip about." Lanius kissed her. "The best way to keep them from walking in on us is to hurry."
"The best way to keep them from walking in is not to start in the first place." She tried to sound severe, but her mouth couldn't help turning up at the comers. "You really are out of your mind."
"I know." He kissed her again, and steered her toward the gently steaming tub.
They managed. They did hurry. It was more awkward than Lanius thought it would be, and more water slopped onto the floor than he'd expected. But they had finished and were both dressed by the time a servant did come in.
"Sorry… I was so sloppy," Lanius said. He'd almost said, Sorry we were so sloppy. That would have given the game away.
The servant only shrugged. "You put towels down, anyways," he said. "That's something. Won't be a lot of mopping to do."
"Good," Lanius said. He steered Sosia again, this time toward the door. "A baby!" he repeated.
"It does happen," she said, and then giggled. "If I'd caught this time instead of before, I might have had a mermaid." Lanius laughed, too. Sosia turned serious again. "I hope it's a boy."
"So do I." Lanius said. "If it's a girl, though, we'll just try again, that's all." Ortalis had said the same thing after Limosa had Capella. They had tried again, and now they had Marinus.
Sosia hesitated in the hallway, then asked, "You don't have any bastards I don't know about, do you?"
"No. By the gods, no!" Lanius said. "What brought that on?"
"Mother thinks Father may have another one out in the provinces somewhere," Sosia answered bleakly. "She's not sure, but some things she's heard make her think so."
"I don't know anything about that," Lanius said. Grus had kept it a secret from him as well as Estrilda – if it was true. And if it was, and if Grus could keep secrets like that… Good, Lanius thought. The way things are, good.