I’d just come up on deck on the morning of the third day when Beldin’s voice came banging on the side of my head. ‘Belgarath! Are you awake?’
‘Don’t shout. I can hear you.’
‘We’re in place, but let’s give the Drasnian pikemen a day or so to catch their breath. We ran them pretty hard coming down through the mountains.’
‘It’ll take us a few days to get to the mouth of the River of the Serpent anyway. Stay clear of the Tolnedran border. Ran Vordue has it sealed off, and we don’t want any incidents with the legions.’
‘How did you get him to do that?’
‘I pointed out certain advantages to him. Send a strike force south to block off any escape routes going in that direction. I’ll do the same from this side, and when those two columns meet, we can get started with this.’
‘Right.’
And that was more or less the way we did it. I’ll be the first to concede that the Tolnedran Legions were very useful, although they didn’t really do anything except stand there.
The Nyissans have always believed that their jungles would protect them. This time they were wrong. We’d run Radek’s pikemen to the verge of exhaustion, but we’d reached Nyissa before the rains set in. The swamps had nearly dried up, and the trees were parched. The Nyissans took to the woods, and we simply burned the woods out from under them. I’m told that the vast clouds of smoke drifting northward bothered the Honethites a great deal. They could almost smell their money burning. The Vorduvians, Borunes, and Horbites were able to view the matter philosophically, however.
Wars are never pretty, but the Alorn campaign in Nyissa was particularly ugly. The Algar cavalry drove the Nyissans ahead of them like a herd of terrified cows, and when the Nyissans tried to climb trees to escape them, the Drasnian pikemen came along and speared them out of the branches. The Chereks and Rivans set fires, and when the panic-stricken Nyissans tried to flee, Valcor’s berserkers simply drove them back into the flames. Frankly, the whole business sickened me, but we pushed on anyway.
It was a short, nasty war, and it left Nyissa a smoking wasteland. It accomplished its purpose, however. It was centuries before the Nyissans came out of their hiding places, and that effectively kept them from meddling in international affairs.
Eventually, we encircled Sthiss Tor, and after a couple of days we captured the city.
Beldin and I ran on ahead and reached Salmissra’s gaudy palace about three jumps ahead of the vengeful Rivans. We definitely didn’t want anybody to kill the Serpent Queen – at least not until we’d had a chance to ask her some questions. We sprinted down the corridor that led to her throne room, burst into that huge, dimly lighted hall, and closed and barred the door behind us.
Salmissra was alone and unguarded. The palace eunuchs were sworn to protect her, but evidently a eunuch’s oath doesn’t mean all that much to him if it’s going to involve bleeding. The Serpent Queen was in her usual place, lounging on her throne and admiring her reflection in the mirror as if nothing untoward were happening. She looked very vulnerable somehow. ‘Welcome to Sthiss Tor, gentlemen,’ she said in a dreamy sort of voice. ‘Don’t come too close,’ she warned, pointing negligently at the small green snakes nervously clustered around her throne. ‘My servants have all deserted me, but my little pets are still faithful.’ Her words were slurred, and her eyes seemed unfocused.
‘We’re not going to have much luck here, Belgarath,’ Beldin muttered to me. ‘She’s so drugged that she’s almost comatose.’
‘We’ll see,’ I replied shortly. I stepped a little closer to the throne, and the little green snakes hissed warningly. ‘Things haven’t turned out too well here, have they, Salmissra?’ I said to her. ‘You should have known what the Alorns would do, though. What possessed you to have Gorek murdered?’
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ she murmured.
There was a heavy pounding on the barred door.
‘Keep those enthusiasts off my back,’ I told Beldin.
‘All right,’ he replied, ‘but don’t be all day at this.’ I could feel his Will building.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked the dreamy queen.
‘Of course. There’s a whole body of literature in my library devoted to you and your exploits.’
‘Good. Then we won’t have to go through all those tiresome introductions. I spoke with a couple of your assassins at Riva. One of them told me that this stupid business wasn’t entirely your idea. Would you care to elaborate on that for me?’
‘Why not?’ Her indifference chilled me for some reason. ‘About a year ago a man came to Sthiss Tor, and he had a little proposition for me. His offer was very attractive, so I took him up on it. That’s really about all there was to it, Belgarath.’
‘What could he possibly have offered you to lure you into exposing yourself to the vengeance of the Alorns?’
‘Immortality, Ancient One, immortality.’
‘No man can offer that, Salmissra.’
‘The offer didn’t come from a man – or so I was led to believe.’
‘Who was this fellow who made you such a ridiculous proposal?’
‘Does the name Zedar ring any bells for you, Belgarath?’ She actually looked a bit amused.
A number of things fell into place for me – including the reason for my instructions not to kill Zedar. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ I suggested.
She sighed. ‘That would be a long and tedious story, old man.’ Her eyelids drooped shut.
I started to have some suspicions at that point. ‘Why don’t you summarize it, then?’ I suggested.
She sighed again. ‘Oh, very well,’ she replied. Then she looked around. ‘Does it seem to be getting chilly in here?’ she asked with a slight shudder.
‘Will you get on with it, Belgarath?’ Beldin demanded irritably. ‘I can’t keep those Alorns out much longer without hurting them.’
‘I don’t think we’ve got too much longer,’ I told him. Then I looked at the Serpent Queen. ‘You’ve taken poison, haven’t you, Salmissra?’ I asked her.
‘Naturally,’ she replied. ‘It’s the Nyissan sort of thing to do, isn’t it? Convey my apologies to your Alorns. I know they’ll be terribly disappointed.’
‘Exactly what did Zedar say to you?’
‘You’re a tiresome old man, Belgarath. All right, listen carefully. I don’t think I’ll have time to repeat this. Zedar came to me and said that he was speaking for Torak. He said that the Rivan King was the only thing standing between Torak and something he wanted, and that he’d give anything to the person who removed him. The offer was fairly simple. If I’d kill the Rivan King, Torak would marry me, and we’d rule the world jointly – forever. Zedar also told me that Torak would protect me from your Alorns. Did you happen to see the Dragon God on your way to Sthiss Tor?’
‘We must have missed him.’
‘I wonder what can be keeping him.’
‘Surely you weren’t gullible enough to believe all that?’
She straightened slightly and lifted her chin. She was a remarkably beautiful woman. ‘How old would you say I am?’ she asked me.
‘That’s impossible to tell, Salmissra. You take drugs that keep you from aging.’
‘It may look that way, but it’s not really true. Actually, I’m fifty-seven, and none of my predecessors have lived much past sixty. There are twenty little girls out in the jungle training to take my place when I die. I believed Zedar because I wanted to believe him. I suppose we never outlive our belief in fairy-stories, do we? I didn’t want to die, and Zedar seemed to be offering me a chance to live forever. I wanted that so much that I chose to believe what he told me. When you get right down to it, this is all your fault, you know.’
‘Mine? Where did you get that weird idea?’
‘If it hadn’t been for the fact that you’re a million years old, I wouldn’t have been so gullible. If one person can live forever, others can as well. You and your brother
s are the disciples of Aldur, and Aldur made you all immortal. Zedar, Ctuchik, and Urvon serve Torak, and they’ll live forever as well.’
‘Not if I can help it, they won’t,’ Beldin threw back over his shoulder.
She smiled faintly, and her eyes seemed glazed. ‘The notion of conferring immortality on his handmaiden doesn’t seem to have occurred to Issa, so I’ve only got about three more years to live. Zedar knew that, of course, and he used it to dupe me. I wish there were some way I could pay him back for that. He got everything he wanted from me, and all I got was a cup of foul-tasting poison.’
I looked around to make certain that nobody was hiding in one of the corners. ‘Zedar got nothing, Salmissra,’ I told her very quietly. ‘Your assassins missed somebody. The Rivan line’s still intact.’
She stared at me for a moment, and then she actually laughed. ‘What a wonderful old man you are,’ she said warmly. ‘Are you going to kill Zedar?’
‘Probably,’ I replied.
‘Tell him that the survivor you mentioned is my last gift to him before you put him away, would you? It’s a petty sort of vengeance, but it’s all that’s available to a dying old lady.’
‘Did Zedar tell you what Torak planned to do once the Rivan King was dead?’ I asked her.
‘We didn’t get into that,’ she murmured, ‘but it shouldn’t be hard to guess. Now that he believes that the Guardian of the Orb is dead, he’ll probably be paying you a call shortly. I wish I could be in a corner somewhere to watch the rest of his face crumble when he finds out that Zedar’s scheme didn’t work.’ Her head drooped, and her eyes went closed again.
‘Is she dead?’ Beldin asked me.
‘Close, I think.’
‘Belgarath?’ Her voice was only a whisper now.
‘Yes?’
‘Avenge me, would you please?’
‘You’ve got my word on that, Salmissra.’
‘Please don’t call me that, Ancient One. Once, when I was a little girl, my name was Illessa. I was very happy with that name. Then the palace eunuchs came to our village, and they looked at my face. That was when they took me away from my mother and told me that my name was Salmissra now. I’ve always hated that name. I didn’t want to be Salmissra. I wanted to keep on being Illessa, but they didn’t give me any choice. It was either become one of the twenty twelve-year-old Salmissras or die. Why couldn’t they let me keep my real name?’
‘It’s a lovely name, Illessa,’ I told her gently.
‘Thank you, Ancient One.’ She sighed a long quavering sigh. ‘Sometimes I wish –’
We never found out what she wished, because she died before she could tell us.
‘Well?’ Beldin said to me.
‘Well what?’
‘Aren’t you going to hit her?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Didn’t you promise Prince Geran you would?’
‘Some promises can’t be kept, Beldin.’
‘Sentimentalist!’ he snorted. ‘She wouldn’t mind now.’
‘I would.’ I translocated the little green snakes to the far side of the throne room, stepped up onto the dais and arranged the body of the Serpent Queen on her throne in a position that had some dignity. Then I patted her gently on the cheek. ‘Sleep well, Illessa,’ I murmured.
Then I stepped down from the dais. ‘Let’s get out of here, Beldin,’ I suggested. ‘I hate the smell of snakes.’
Chapter 34
You’re disappointed, aren’t you? You wanted a lurid description of my dreadful retribution on the body of the Serpent Queen. Well, I’m a pretty good story-teller, so if that’s the kind of story you really want, I suppose I could make it up for you. After you’ve calmed down a bit, though, I think you’ll be just a little ashamed of yourself.
Actually, I’m not very proud of what we did in Nyissa. If I’d been filled with rage and a hunger for vengeance, the things we did down there might have been understandable – not particularly admirable, maybe, but at least understandable. But I did it all in cold blood, and that makes it fairly monstrous, wouldn’t you say?
I suppose I should have known that Zedar had been behind the whole thing right from the start. It was all too subtle to have come from Ctuchik. Every time I start feeling uneasy about what I ultimately did to Zedar, I run over the long list of his offenses in my mind, and the fact that he duped Illessa into murdering Gorek and then left her to face the Alorns all alone stands fairly high on that list.
Enough of all this tedious self-justification.
The Alorns were still happily dismantling the city when Beldin and I came out of the palace. Most of the houses were made of stone, since wood decays rather quickly in the middle of a tropical swamp. The Alorns set fire to everything that would burn, and they took battering rams to the rest. Lurid orange flame seemed to be everywhere, and the streets were almost totally obscured by clouds of choking black smoke. I looked around sourly. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said. ‘The war’s over. There’s no need for all of this.’
‘Let ’em play,’ Beldin said indifferently. ‘We came here to wreck Nyissa, didn’t we?’
I grunted. ‘What’s Torak been up to?’ I asked him. ‘We didn’t get much chance to talk about that when I passed through the Vale.’
‘Torak’s still at Ashaba –’
A howling Cherek, dressed in bear-skins despite the climate, ran past us waving a torch. ‘I’d better have a talk with Valcor,’ I muttered. ‘The Bear-Cult’s been yearning to invade the southern kingdoms for the past twenty-five centuries. Now that they’re here, they might decide to expand the hostilities. Is Mal Zeth quiet? I mean are they making any preparations?’
Beldin laughed that short, ugly laugh of his and scratched vigorously at one armpit. He shook his head. The army’s in turmoil – there’s a new emperor shaking things up. But Torak isn’t mobilizing. He didn’t know anything about this.’ He squinted off down a smokey street where flames were belching out of windows. ‘I hope Zedar’s found himself a very deep hole to hide in. Old Burnt-face might get a little peevish when he finds out what’s happened.’
‘I suppose we can worry about that later. Do you want to take the Alorns home?’
‘Not particularly. Why?’
‘It won’t really take you very long, Beldin, and I’ve got something else to do.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I think I’d better go back to the Vale and dig into the Mrin Codex. If Torak does decide to exploit this, we’ll want to know that he’s coming. It’ll be one of those EVENTS, and the Mrin’s bound to cover it.’
‘Probably so, but you’ll have to make sense out of it first. Why not just let the Alorns find their way home by themselves?’
‘I want to make sure they go home. That means that somebody’s going to have to herd the Bear-Cult out of the south. Tell Brand what we found out from Illessa. Sort of hint around that you and I are going to take care of Zedar. Don’t get too specific about how long it’s likely to take us.’
‘Are you going to look in on Pol before you go back to the Vale?’
‘She can take care of herself. If anybody can, she can.’
He gave me a sly, sidelong look. ‘You’re very proud of her, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Have you ever considered telling her so?’
‘And spoil over a thousand years of bickering? Don’t be silly. Stop by the Vale before you go back to Mallorea. I might have dredged a few useful hints out of the Mrin by then.’
I left him standing on the palace steps and went on out of the wrecked and binning city to the edge of the jungle. I found a clearing, climbed up on a stump and changed into a falcon again. I was actually getting rather fond of that shape.
Flying through all the smoke from the burning jungle wasn’t particularly pleasant, so I kept climbing until I got above it. I’d received reports about the fires, naturally, and I’d passed through some smoldering burned-off areas on the way t
o Sthiss Tor myself, but I don’t think I’d fully grasped the extent of the fires until I got a mile or so above them. It actually appeared that the whole of Nyissa was burning.
When I got back to the Vale I told the twins about what had happened in Nyissa. Great tears of sympathy welled up in their eyes when I described Illessa’s last hour. The twins are very sentimental sometimes.
All right, I sympathized with her too. Do you want to make something out of it? Zedar had tricked Illessa and then left her hanging out to dry. Of course I felt sorry for her. Use your head.
I spent the next couple of weeks floundering my way through the Mrin. I’m rather proud of the self-control I exhibited there. I didn’t once hurl those stupid scrolls out the window.
The core of the difficulty with the Mrin lies in the way it jumps around. I think I’ve mentioned that before. As I struggled with that long display of incoherence, I began to see where Garion’s friend had blundered. The Mrin prophet wasn’t a very good choice as a spokesman. Regardless of what we may think about the power of that Necessity, the prophecies had to be filtered through the minds of the prophets, and the Mrin prophet had no conception of time. He lived in a world of eternal now, and the words of Necessity all came out together with ‘now’ and ‘then’ and ‘sometime next week’ scrambled together like an omelette.
It was pure luck when I stumbled across a possible solution. I’d pushed the Mrin aside in disgust and turned to the Darine simply to clear my head. Bormik had been crazy, but at least he’d known the difference between yesterday and tomorrow. I don’t think I was actually reading it. I was just unrolling it and looking at it. Bormik’s daughter had made fair copies of the hen-scratchings of her scribes, and she’d had beautiful penmanship. Her letters were graceful and her lines well-balanced. Bull-neck’s scribes should have gone to Darine and taken lessons from her. The Mrin was filled with blotches, scrubbed-out words, and crossed-out lines. A twelve-year-old just learning his letters could have produced a neater page. Suddenly my eyes stopped, and a familiar passage jumped out at me. ‘Be not dismayed, for the Rivan King shall return.’
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 50
