Free The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman

Vespas. But I know I’ve seen something like it, something very like it, and I’m trying to remember where. . . .”
    Something about him—his voice, perhaps, or his arrogance, or his suggestion that St Cloud’s discovery was not as astonishing as he’d thought—put Basil’s back up. “Indeed?” he said. “When you remember where, you must certainly let me know. Independent corroboration is always important.”
    “In case someone thinks you made it all up,” the young man agreed.
    St Cloud considered ignoring this, but could not. “Will you hear some advice, Master . . . ?”
    “Campion.” The young man swept a courtly bow. “Theron Campion.”
    “Master Campion. A scholar’s facts are a scholar’s honor. I was not made a Doctor of this University for inventing colorful details.”
    “Of course not, Doctor St Cloud.” Campion’s glance flicked up mischievously. “But . . . how charming of you if you had!”
    His eyes were greenish. Basil found that he was looking into them. Theron Campion smiled engagingly, and Basil felt his heart begin to hammer with what, under the circumstances, could only be outrage. “Truth is hardly a jesting matter,” he said coldly.
    A moment later, the young man and his disturbing eyes were pushed aside by a group of students wanting to carry Doctor St Cloud off to the Blackbird’s Nest for a drink and more stories. They were disappointed, but not entirely surprised, when he laughingly informed them that being a magister did not absolve him from the exercise of scholarship.
    “If I’m to be as immortal as Trevor and Fleming are, as Doctor Tortua will be, I need to write a text as great as theirs. Such texts are not written in taverns, my friends, not even taverns as stimulating as the Blackbird’s Nest.”
    ALL THE GREAT HISTORIANS HAD MADE THEIR REPUTATIONS on a single defining work. Tortua, for instance, had written a study of the Inner Council and endless monographs on various pre-Fall laws and treaties, but Hubris and the Fall of the Kings was the thing he would be remembered for, just as Trevor was remembered for Of Decadence and Deceit and Fleming for The Tragedy of Kingship .
    Basil St Cloud doubted that he would be remembered for The Origins of Peace. He considered it a journeyman work, competent but not inspired. The book focused entirely on the nobles’ activities around the Union. It was little more than a paean to the Council of Nobles for forging an alliance that would bring peace and prosperity to both kingdoms and put an end to the interminable border wars that harvested too many lives and not enough food. What finally brought them together was an invasion that threatened both kingdoms; what had kept them together was the marriage of the monarchs. He’d used only established sources, and had come to the unexceptionable conclusion that the barbaric North had gained more from the Union than the civilized South.
    Basil had written Origins to suit the Doctors and Governors, before he’d discovered the heady joys of true scholarship. And before he’d realized the truth about the ancient kings.
    For too many years, that truth had been buried; buried not only by courtiers and scholars eager to please their noble masters, but by the genuinely despicable behavior of the kings immediately preceding Gerard, who had quite rightly been deposed by the Council of Lords. It had been nearly two hundred years since the last king was slain; now, Basil thought, might be time to uncover the truths about the first ones, who ruled the land for hundreds of years: strong and beautiful warriors who had united the two kingdoms against foreign invaders despite the bickering of Northern and Southern partisans; men of daring and imagination who had left their mark on treaties and laws still in place, on stable borders and prosperous farms.
    It was a truth that would be hard for anyone now living to accept. The assumption was that all the kings had been more or less as mad as Hilary,