Four hundred years ago the kingdom of Avornis lost the Scepter of Mercy, long the property of its kings - and the key to its destiny. All attempts to retrieve it have failed horribly. But without it, how long can Avornis keep resisting powers greater than its own?

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 holding the Scepter of Mercy - and civil war raging among the Chernagor city-states in the north - Avornis finds itself threatened on two fronts and prevented from regaining the Scepter. But the longer the kings go without acting on their dream of retaking the Scepter of Mercy, the greater the chance the Banished One will triumph... **

From Publishers Weekly

Intelligence and wry humor refresh stale material in the middle volume of Chernenko's sword and sorcery trilogy that began with 2003's The Bastard King. Scholarly young King Lanius is the rightful ruler of the city-state Avornis, but he's largely a figurehead for grizzled warrior Grus, who also calls himself king. They don't have time to indulge in magical plotting to seize absolute power, though, because Avornis is not just surrounded by hostile neighbors but is a special target of the Banished One, a deity whom the other gods cast out and who now wants to dominate the human world before he launches an attack to reconquer the heavens. The kings of Avornis must cope with a host of worries, especially their obligation to return a heroic elderly king to the throne of one of the Chernagor city-states. Fortunately, the author knows how shopworn these plot elements have become, and he takes time to work out the details. As they are forced to work together, Lanius and Grus discover that their abilities complement each other and that they even can respect each other. The deposed Chernagor king may look like a stalwart, sword-swinging hero, but he's also a boorish monomaniac. If the emphasis on step-by-step preparations sometimes feels tedious because readers don't see how it ultimately will pay off, the sense of complicated people struggling through difficult times is unusually convincing.
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From Booklist

The sequel to The Bastard King [BKL Mr 1 03] focuses on usurping King Grus, who is trying to impose some sort of order on the city-states of Chernagor without getting bogged down in a war of unpredictable costs and length (sounds familiar). At the same time, he is trying to wrest the Sceptre of Mercy from the hands of the nomadic Menteshe in the south, who could use it as a potent weapon against his army. The Sceptre is also the vital weapon to use against the fallen god, the Banished One, whose ambitions for rule on Earth threaten ruin for everybody. Both Grus and the figurehead king he opposes, Lanius, want at least to prevent that. The two kings are in an ethical as well as a political-military conflict, which, along with exceptional world building, do very nicely for keeping readers of The Bastard King absorbed in its sequel. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In the second volume in The Scepter of Mercy trilogy, the troubled dual reign of Lanius and Grus is threatened by the onslaught of civil war in the north, and the thralldom of the Menteshe in the south, as the two kings race against time to reclaim the Scepter before the Banished One can unleash his vengeance on the kingdom. Original. 12,000 first printing.

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