"I need you!"
"What's the matter?"
"The Asturians have betrayed us. They've formed an alliance with the Mimbrates, and they're marching on Vo Wacune. Hurry, father. There isn't much time."
I rolled out of bed, dressed, and picked up my traveling cloak. I did stop for a few moments to look at a certain passage in the Mrin Codex before I left, however. I hadn't been entirely sure what it meant before, but Polgara's urgent summons had suddenly made everything clear.
Fabled Vo Wacune was doomed. The only thing I could do now was try to get Pol out of there before the inevitable happened.
I hurried westward to the edge of the Vale through the tag end of that windy night and went wolf. There wasn't much point in trying to sprout feathers. I wouldn't have made much headway trying to fly into the teeth of that howling gale.
It was two days later and I was about halfway across Ulgoland before the wind finally abated. Then I took wing and was able to make better time.
I reached Vo Wacune about mid-afternoon of the following day, but I didn't go immediately into the marble city. I circled over the surrounding forest instead, and it didn't take me very long to locate the Asturians.
They were no more than a few leagues from the gates of Vo Wacune.
They'd be in place by morning, and there was absolutely nothing anybody could do to stop them. I swore and flew on back to the city.
Normally, I'll change back to my own form before I enter any populated place, but this was an emergency. I flew on and settled into a tree in Pol's garden.
As it turned out, she was in the garden, and she wasn't alone. Ontrose was with her. He was wearing chain mail, and he had a sword belted around his waist.
"It must needs be, dear lady," he was saying to her.
"Thou must go from Vo Wacune to a place of safety. The Asturians are almost at the city gates."
I slid back into my real form and climbed down out of the tree.
"He's right, Pol," I said. Ontrose looked a little startled, but Pol was used to that sort of thing.
"Where have you been?" she demanded.
"I ran into some wind. Get your things together. We've got to get you out of here right now."
"I'm not going anywhere. Now that you're here, we can drive off the Asturians."
"No, as a matter of fact, we can't. It's prohibited. I'm sorry, Pol, but this has to happen, and we're not allowed to interfere."
"Is it certain, Ancient One?" Ontrose asked me.
"I'm afraid so, Ontrose. Has Polgara told you about the prophecies?"
He nodded gravely.
"The passage in the Mrin Codex is very obscure, but there's not much question now about what it means. You might want to talk with the duke.
If you hurry, you may be able to get the women and children to safety, but the city's not going to be here in a few days. I saw the Asturians as I was coming in. They're throwing everything they've got at you."
"They will have much less when they return to Vo Astur," he said bleakly.
"I'm not leaving," Polgara said stubbornly.
"Thou art in error, dear Lady," he told her quite firmly.
"Thou wilt accompany thy father and go from this place."
"No! I won't leave you!"
"His Grace, the duke, hath placed me in command of the defense of the city. Lady Polgara. It is my responsibility to deploy our forces. There is no place in that deployment for thee. I therefore instruct thee to depart. Go."
"No!"
"Thou art the duchess of Erat, Lady Polgara, and therefore of the Wacite nobility. Thine oath of fealty to his Grace, our duke, demands thine obedience. Do not dishonor thy station by this stubborn refusal.
Make ready. Thou shalt depart within the hour."
Her chin came up sharply.
"That was unkindly said, my Lord," she accused.
"The truth often is unkindly, my Lady. We both have responsibilities.
I will not fail mine. Do not fail thine. Now go."
Her eyes suddenly filled with helpless tears. She embraced him fiercely and then fled back into the house.
"Thanks, Ontrose," I said simply, clasping his hand.
"I wasn't making very much headway there."
"Care for her, Ancient One. She is the very core of my life."
"I will, Ontrose, and we'll remember you."
"That is, perhaps, the best that one can hope for. Now I must go and see to our defenses. Farewell, Ancient Belgarath."
"Farewell, Ontrose."
And so I took my weeping daughter out of the doomed city. We went north, crossed the River Camaar, and journeyed back through Muros toward the pass that led across the mountains to Algaria. I kept a very close watch on Polgara the whole time--I didn't want any backsliding, but it probably wasn't really necessary. She was, as Ontrose had so pointedly reminded her, a member of the nobility. She had her orders, and she was not likely to disobey.
She refused to talk to me, but that was to be expected, I guess. What I didn't expect was her adamant refusal to return to the Vale with me.
When we reached the tumbled ruin of her mother's cottage, she stopped.
"This is as far as I'm going," she told me.
"What?"
"You heard me, father. I'm going to stay here."
"You have work to do, Pol."
"That's too bad. You'll have to take care of it. Go back to your tower and snuggle up to your prophecies, but leave me out of it. We're through, father. This is the end of it. Now go away and don't bother me any more."
I could see that there was no point in trying to argue with her. I'd been through my own grief, so I had some idea of what she was enduring.
I'd have to keep an eye on her, of course--from a distance. She'd just spent hundreds of years in Arendia, and some of it might have rubbed off.
Arendish ladies turn suicidal at the drop of a hat. If the least little disappointment comes along, an Arendish lady immediately starts thinking about knives and poison and rivers and high towers they can jump from.
Pol would get over this eventually, but in the meantime, she'd have to be watched.
I went back to the Vale and enlisted the twins. I'd have used Beldin, too, but he'd gone back to Mallorea. We took turns hiding in the bushes near Poledra's cottage for the next five or six years. At first my brokenhearted daughter simply camped out in the ruins, but eventually she started making some minimal repairs. I felt that to be a good sign, and the twins and I started to relax a bit. We still watched her, though.
The First Borune Dynasty was still in power in Tol Honeth during the early centuries of the fourth millennium, and they'd established a professional diplomatic service--largely to keep things stirred up in Arendia.
Tolnedra definitely didn't want a unified Arendia on her northern border.
Tolnedran ambassadors were also dispatched to Val Alorn and Boktor, and trade was soon established. The Drasnians had made some tentative contacts with the Nadraks again, and the fur trade began to nourish. The Chereks were of necessity involved, since they were the only sailors in the world who could negotiate the treacherous currents in the Cherek Bore.
The inviolability of the Isle of the Winds drove the Borunes crazy for some reason. They were positive that the Cherek blockade was in place to hide some vast treasure on the Isle, and they desperately wanted a piece of it. As long as they were so hysterical about it, I decided that the best way to calm them down was to let them take a look for themselves to find out that there wasn't anything of value on the Isle. The isolation of the Rivans was starting to make me nervous. I remembered the lesson of Maragor all too well.
So I went to Val Alorn and told the Chereks to relax their blockade a bit. Tolnedrans want a treaty for everything, so the results were the Accords of Val Alorn--3097, I think. A fleet of Tolnedran merchant vessels set sail for the city of Riva almost immediately.
I'd assumed that the King of Cherek would advise the Rivans of the new arrangement, but he had h
is mind on the last clan war in Cherek, so he overlooked it. Thus the Rivans weren't expecting company, so they didn't open their gates. The Tolnedran merchants tried to set up shop on the beach, but the wind kept blowing their tents away, and the Rivans refused to come out of their city.
The Borune Dynasty had been going downhill steadily for a hundred years or so, and the last Borune Emperor, clearly an idiot, succumbed to the importunings of the merchant princes and dispatched legions to force the gates of the City of Riva. I'm not an expert on commerce, but it seems to me that trying to drive customers into your shop at sword-point is not a good way to do business.
The Rivans responded in a fairly predictable way. They opened the gates of their city, but they didn't come out for a shopping spree. They wiped out five Tolnedran legions and then systematically burned every ship in their harbor.
Ran Borune XXIV was incensed. He was preparing to launch the full might of the empire at the Isle of the Winds when a note from the Cherek Ambassador to Tol Honeth brought him up short.
The note is sort of a classic, so I'll repeat it here verbatim: Majesty: Know that Aloria will permit no attack upon Riva. The fleets of Cherek, whose masts rise as thick as the trees of the forest, will fall upon your flotilla, and the legions of Tolnedra will feed the fish from the hook of Arendia to the farthest reaches of the Sea of the Winds. The battalions of Drasnia will march south, crushing all in their paths and lay siege to your cities. The horsemen of Algaria shall sweep across the mountains and shall lay waste your empire from end to end with fire and sword.
Know that in the day you attack Riva will the Alorns make war upon you, and you shall surely perish, and your empire also.
And that more or less ended the Tolnedran threat in the North. Borune legal experts immediately dug into the Accords of Val Alorn looking for loopholes, but all they found was a deliberately obscure clause I'd inserted.
It read: "--but Aloria shall maintain Riva and keep it whole."
Cherek and Drasnia had agreed not to make war on Tolnedra, but Aloria hadn't. I've always been rather proud of that little bit of legal trickery.
After I'd explained the situation to the Rivan King, he relaxed his restrictions a bit and permitted the merchants to build a sort of village on the beach. It wasn't very profitable, but it kept the Tolnedrans from the brink of insanity.
The last Borune emperor died childless, and the usual circus erupted in Tol Honeth as the great families contested with each other for the throne. Unfortunately, perhaps, the major houses had been quietly importing poisons from Nyissa, and various candidates for the Imperial Throne and assorted members of the Council of Advisors gave ample evidence of the virulence of those poisons.
Eventually the Honeths won out--largely because they had enough money to buy the necessary votes and to pay the exorbitant prices the Nyissans charged for their poisons. The Honethite family had lapsed into almost total incompetence, however, and fortunately they stayed in power only for about three hundred years or so. Then the Borunes came to power again. The Second Borune Dynasty was also a fairly short one, but it accomplished quite a bit. They expanded their highway system in Tolnedra proper, and they dispatched twenty legions "as a gesture of goodwill" to what's now Sendaria to construct the network of highways that linked the city of Sendar and the port at Camaar with Muros in the interior and Darine on the northeast coast.
The Chereks didn't much care for that idea, since it permitted Tolnedran merchants to avoid the Cherek Bore entirely by shipping goods from Kotu to Darine and then overland to Camaar without Cherek hands ever touching them.
The last Emperor of the Second Borune Dynasty, the childless Ran Borune XII, took a direct hand in choosing his successor, and he passed imperial power on to the Horbite family. The Council of Advisors received no bribes, and the Honeths and the Vordues had no chance to muddy the waters by poisoning each other.
The Horbites proved to be a happy choice. Ran Horb I was competent, but his son, Ran Horb II, was probably the greatest emperor in all Tolnedran history. His achievements were staggering. He brought an end to open warfare in Arendia by allying himself with the weaker faction, the Mimbrates. I don't think either Polgara or I grieved very much when, in 3822, Vo Astur was destroyed and the Asturians were chased back into the forest. We both still remembered what the Asturians had done to the beautiful city of Vo Wacune.
Ran Horb II moved right on from there. He built an imperial highway, the Great West Road, up through Arendia, linking northern Tolnedra with the port at Camaar and with the entire highway system in Sendaria. He incidentally established that kingdom in 3827, reasoning that, so long as he controlled the highways, it was more efficient to let the Sendars govern themselves. He concluded a treaty with Cho-Dorn the Old, chief of the Clan-Chiefs of Algaria and built the Great North Road that reached from Muros up across northwestern Algaria to the causeway that ran up through the fens to Boktor, where it connected with the North Caravan Route into Gar og Nadrak.
He normalized trade with the Nyissans, and, in the twilight of his life, he concluded a treaty with the Murgos that established the South Caravan Route to Rak Goska.
There was grumbling in Val Alorn about all of this. Ran Horb II clearly saw that as long as the Chereks controlled the seas, Tolnedra would be more or less at their mercy. Ran Horb's highways bypassed the Chereks. Tolnedrans no longer had to go to sea. They could move their goods overland without ever smelling salt water.
This is not to imply that the highways were all completed during Ran Horb's lifetime. It took the rest of the Horbite Dynasty to complete that task. During the process, the modern world, the world as we currently know it, gradually began to take shape.
The highways made travel easier, of course, but my gratitude to Ran Horb II stems largely from his almost offhand creation of the Kingdom of Sendaria. The Mrin Codex, and to a lesser degree the Darine, told me quite clearly that I was going to need Sendaria later.
Oddly, when you consider their achievements, the Horbite Dynasty lasted for only one hundred fifty years. The son of Ran Horb VI was drowned in a boating accident when his father was quite old, so there was no heir to the imperial throne.
Then the ill-fated Ranite family came to power. The Ranites didn't accomplish anything during their ninety years in power because a hereditary ailment in their line inevitably struck them down in their prime. They went through seven emperors in ninety years, and most of them were sick all the time. In effect, they were nothing more than caretakers.
Then in 4001 the Vorduvians ascended the throne, and, since Tol Vordue is a seaport, they immediately began to let the Horbite highway system fall into disrepair. I'm not sure how many Vorduvian ships will have to be sunk by Cherek war boats before the Vorduvians begin to come to grips with reality.
I've never really cared all that much for the Vorduvians anyway, and that particular idiocy made me throw up my hands in disgust.
There was something nagging at me, though. I seemed to keep remembering a very obscure passage in the Mrin Codex. I went back to my tower and dug out my copy and went looking for it. One of the things that makes the Mrin Codex so difficult lies in the fact that it doesn't have any continuity. The past and the present and the future are all jumbled together, so it doesn't read chronologically. There's no way to know which EVENT is going to come first and which will come next. The scribes who took it all down made no attempt to reset it into anything resembling coherence, so when you go looking for something, you have to start at the beginning and plow your way through the whole incomprehensible mess.
I almost missed it. Maybe if I hadn't been so disgusted with the Vordues, I would have, but I was thinking about roads when I came across it again.
"Behold," it said, "when that which was straight becomes crooked, and that which was sound becomes unsound, it shall be a warning unto thee, Ancient and Beloved." That got my immediate attention. The Tolnedran roads were becoming unsound. There were places in Sendaria where they'd turned into deep bogs of
soupy mud--and, since they were impassable, people detoured out around them, and the straight was becoming crooked. It stretched things a bit, but I had become used to that in reading the Mrin. I read on eagerly.
"Beware," it continued, "for there is a serpent abroad in the land, and he shall bring the Guardian low." That didn't seem to mean anything at all. Then I took the scroll to the window and peered closely at it in full sunlight, I could faintly make out the fact that one of the scribes had scrubbed out the word "she" and substituted "he" instead. The three scribes had probably argued about it, and the one who'd written down that "she" probably had been overruled. But what if he'd been right? When you talk about a female snake in our part of the world, you're talking about Salmissra.
I read on.
"For the Guardian is weighted down with eld, and the serpent will come upon him unawares, and the venom of the serpent shall chill his heart and the hearts of all his issue besides. Hasten, Ancient and Beloved. The life of the last issue of the Guardian's line lie th in deadly peril. Save him, lest all be lost, and the darkness reign forever."
I stared at it in horror.
Gorek the Wise, king of Riva and Guardian of the Orb, was a very old man, and the Tolnedran roads were falling apart, and Salmissra had never been the sort you wanted to trust.
I'll grant you that it was very scanty, but the way those words kept screaming inside my head sent me flying down the steps of my tower four at a time.
I absolutely had to get to the Isle of the Winds immediately.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I'd begun to form the image of the falcon in my mind before I even hit the foot of the stairs, and as soon as I was outside I started sprouting feathers.
Falcons are faster than most other birds, and the screaming inside my head convinced me that speed was essential here. I didn't like flying--I still don't--but I've done a lot of things I haven't liked over the years. We do what we have to do, like it or not.
I don't think it ever occurred to me not to take Polgara along. I knew that she had something very important to do when we reached the Isle of the Winds. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I did know that this would be an absolute catastrophe if she weren't with me.
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