Salmissra’s throne-room was a dimly-lighted hall that focused on the enormous statue of the Serpent-God. A dais stood in front of that statue, and Salmissra reclined on a throne that was more couch than chair upon that dais. Before her throne there knelt several dozen yellow-robed eunuchs who chanted slogans of adoration in unison. The Serpent Queen was very pale, almost chalk white. She had glossy black hair and peculiarly colorless eyes. I’ll admit that she was beautiful, and her gauze-like gown left very little to the imagination. She received our information with a reptilian indifference, not even bothering to take her eyes from her mirror. ‘Why should I involve myself in your war with the Angaraks?’ she asked.
‘It’s not just our war, Salmissra,’ I said. ‘It concerns all of us.’
‘Not me, it doesn’t. One of my predecessors discovered the folly of becoming involved in this private feud between the Alorns and the Angaraks. I’m not going to make that same mistake. Nyissa will remain neutral.’ Her pale eyes fixed themselves on my face, and I knew – without knowing how I knew – that one day the snake woman and I were going to have a confrontation, and Salmissra’s eyes clearly told me that she also knew that it was coming.
My father totally missed that silent interchange. Women have always had ways to communicate with each other that men can’t begin to comprehend. Father tried to persuade Salmissra that Urvon would obliterate Nyissa as he passed through on his way north. He was wasting his breath, of course. Salmissra didn’t care about what happened to Nyissa. Her only concern was herself. That was one of the characteristics her education had hammered into her. Her personal survival – and her personal appetites – were all that mattered to her. I realized that, even if father didn’t, so I cast my parting remarks to her on a personal level, suggesting that she might find being bent backward over a blood-soaked altar while several Grolims carved out her heart rather unpleasant.
That got her attention, even if nothing else did.
As father and I were leaving her musty-smelling palace, I asked him a question that’d been nagging at me just a bit. ‘Have the Nyissans compiled any kind of reference-works on their pharmacology?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Why?’
‘They have some very interesting herbal compounds. Salmissra was absolutely awash with about six or eight that I could detect.’
‘Really?’ He seemed a bit surprised. ‘I thought that was just her natural personality.’
‘It is, but she’s taking some things that enhance it. She has some very interesting appetites. When this is all over, I might just come down here and investigate. Some of those herbs might be very useful.’
‘Most of them are poisonous, Pol.’
‘Lots of things are poisonous, father. An overdose of most of the healing herbs can be fatal. Proper dosage is the key to herbal medicine.’
‘Your reputation as a physician might start to deteriorate if you begin experimenting with poison, Pol.’
‘Experimentation is the source of all medical advances, father. You lose a few patients along the way, but you save more in the long run.’
‘Sometimes you’re as cold-blooded as Salmissra is, Pol.’
‘Are you only just beginning to realize that, father? I’m disappointed in you.’
Well of course I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I wonder about you.
Chapter 31
‘That wasn’t particularly fruitful, was it, Pol?’ father grumbled as he and I left Salmissra’s gaudy palace and walked out into the rainy streets.
‘Did you really expect her to welcome you with open arms, father?’ I asked him. ‘You’ve never been all that popular in Nyissa, you know.’
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘at least she’s not going to welcome Urvon either. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. Let’s go to Maragor and see if we can get Mara’s attention.’
It was winter, the rainy season in Nyissa, but the climate change which had followed Torak’s Eclipse made it a little hard to distinguish one rainy season from another. I absolutely hate flying in the rain, but we didn’t really have much choice.
We followed the River of the Serpent up to the rapids near the headwaters and then veered north to cross the mountains to haunted Maragor’s southern frontier. We saw several of the rude mining camps that lined Maragor’s southern frontier. I clinically noted that there weren’t any camps north of that border. The gold-hunters were obsessed men, but not that obsessed.
The seething rain made it difficult for us to see the rolling basin that had been Maragor, but father knew the way, so I simply followed him to Mar Amon. When we were just outside the ruins, he dipped his falcon wings a couple of times, and we descended to a grove of winter-stripped beech trees that overlooked the ruin and resumed our own forms. ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant, Pol,’ father said glumly. ‘Mara’s even crazier than Torak, and he’s filled Maragor from end to end with phantoms he’s dredged up out of his own insanity. You’re going to see some fairly gruesome things, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ve heard all the stories, father.’
‘Stories are one thing, Pol. Actually seeing and hearing these apparitions is a little more hair-raising.’
‘I can deal with it, Old Wolf.’
‘Don’t get over-confident, Pol. Crazy or not, Mara’s still a God, and the sense of his presence is. still overwhelming. The Master’s presence is fairly gentle, but Mara tends to bowl people over just by putting in an appearance. Did you happen to come across Chaldan while you were in Arendia?’
‘No. Chaldan only talks to his priests – at least that’s what the priests say.’
He nodded. ‘Priests are pretty much the same the world over. They seem to feel that their exclusive contact with God gives them a certain job security. If just any old peasant can talk with God, the priests are redundant, and they might have to go out and get honest work.’
‘You’re in a cynical humor today.’
‘Blame it on the weather. Anyway, brace yourself. Our meeting with Mara’s likely to be moderately unpleasant. Gods hold grudges for a long time, and Mara still blames all of us for not coming to the aid of the Marags when the Tolnedrans invaded Maragor. I’ve met him several times, and he knows who I am – unless he’s forgotten me. I may have to lie to him just a bit here. We haven’t been specifically ordered to come here, so we’re sort of doing what we think the Master wants us to do. Just to be on the safe side, I’d better tell Mara that we’re acting on instructions. Mara’s not crazy enough to go up against the Master, so he won’t automatically obliterate us. But be careful here, Pol. Don’t drop your guard, and whatever you do, don’t let any random chunks of gold lying about distract you. If you even so much as think about gold, Mara will erase your mind.’
‘I’m not really that greedy, father.’
‘Really? Where did you get all the money you keep pulling out of your sleeve when you want to buy something, then?’
‘Prudent investments, father. If you cultivate money – prune it, water it, and fertilize it – it’ll grow for you the same as roses or radishes will. Don’t worry, Old Wolf. I’m not really interested in random gold.’
‘Good. Let’s go on into the city and see if I can talk some sense into Mara.’
Mar Amon is a very disturbing sort of place, not only because of the multitude of mutilated ghosts infesting it, but also because it’s part reality and part illusion. Mara has in effect rebuilt the city, replacing destroyed buildings with images of what they were before the Tolnedrans came. The buildings are insubstantial, but you can’t tell that by looking at them. As father and I followed that spiraling street that wound its way toward the central temple, we saw horrors enough to last a lifetime. The Tolnedran legionnaires are normally paid in brass coins, so they seldom see gold. The ground of Maragor was littered with it, and all semblance of discipline collapsed. The legions became nothing more than a greedy, mindless mob, and mobs commit atrocities. Mara almost lovingly recreated the victims of those atroci
ties and unleashed them to forever keep Maragor inviolate. I heartily approve of the chastisement Nedra imposed on his more rampantly greedy worshipers after the invasion of Maragor. A merchant prince from Tol Honeth can’t help thinking about gold when it’s lying all about him, and greed is an open door to insanity in Maragor. The monastery at Mar Terrin sounds like a very nice idea, but it is, in fact, the most hideous prison on the face of the earth. The inmates of that prison are condemned – not to death, but to perpetual insanity.
‘BELGARATH!’ Mara’s howl was more than thunder. ‘WHY HAST THOU INTRUDED THYSELF UPON MY GRIEF?’ The weeping God was immense, and in his arms he held the body of a slaughtered child.
‘It is in obedience to our Master’s command that my daughter Polgara and I have sought thee out, Lord Mara.’ father lied smoothly. ‘Thy brother Torak hath mounted an invasion of the west, Lord. Aldur, our Master, hath instructed us to advise thee of the Dragon-God’s coming.’
‘LET HIM COME,’ Mara replied, still weeping. ‘HIS ANGARAKS ARE NO MORE IMMUNE TO MADNESS THAN ARE THE MURDERING CHILDREN OF NEDRA.’
Father bowed. ‘As thou seest it, Lord Mara,’ he said. ‘Thus my daughter and I have fulfilled the task lain upon us by our Master. Now will we depart and trouble thee no more.’
‘That was quick,’ I muttered to him as we retraced our steps through the illusion called Mar Amon.
Father shrugged. ‘Actually, it turned out even better than I’d hoped.’
‘I didn’t exactly follow that,’ I admitted.
‘Maragor’s sort of a back door to Tolnedra,’ he explained. ‘Urvon might be planning to come through northern Cthol Murgos and invade Tolnedra from this direction instead of coming up through Nyissa. Now Mara knows he’s coming, so we’ve closed that door. Urvon’s army might be sane when they come into Maragor, but they’ll be raving madmen when they go out.’ He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘I might have hoped for a little more commitment from Mara, but he’ll cover this front for us, and I’ll settle for that. Let’s go have a talk with the Gorim. We might as well advise everybody about what’s happening at the same time. Then we won’t have to make this trip again.’
‘Are we going to enlist the Ulgos, then?’
‘I don’t think they’d care to attend, but let’s not insult them by neglecting their invitation.’
‘Busy-work.’
‘That one missed me, Pol.’
‘We’re just running around telling people about a party they won’t be interested in attending.’
‘Call it diplomatic courtesy, Pol.’
‘I’d rather call it a waste of time.’
‘There’s an element of that in all diplomacy. Let’s go to Prolgu, shall we?’
The endless rain which had so bedeviled the low country during the years since Torak’s Eclipse had fallen as snow in the mountains of holy Ulgo, but father and I didn’t have to make the trip on foot, so we avoided that particular unpleasantness. Flying when it’s snowing is tiresome, but not nearly as tiresome as wading through hip-deep snowbanks. It also avoided encounters with the frolicsome creatures who live in the mountains of Ulgoland.
Prolgu, of course, is a mountain more than a city. The Algars constructed that mountain they call the Stronghold, but the Ulgos integrated Prolgu with the mountain where the original Gorim met with UL and shamed the father of the Gods into accepting the outcasts of the world.
We came to earth in an abandoned city like none other in all the world. Most ancient cities were ruined as the result of war, and war leaves some fairly visible marks on the walls and buildings. Prolgu, however, had not been destroyed by any human agency. The Ulgos had simply moved down into the caves beneath the city, leaving their houses standing intact and vacant behind them. An abandoned city would normally attract looters, but I rather think it might have taken a very special kind of looter to trek to Prolgu to wander through those empty streets in search of valuables. The mountains of Ulgo quite literally teem with creatures that look upon humans as something to eat. Even the mice are dangerous, or so the story goes.
I’ve rarely had occasion to go to Prolgu. My family’s made a practice of dividing up our labors, and maintaining contact with the Ulgos has always been one of my father’s tasks. We wandered, seemingly without purpose, through the snow-clogged streets with the blizzard swirling about us as evening approached and the light began to fade.
‘Ah, there it is,’ father said finally, pointing at a house that seemed no different from any of the others. ‘This snow isn’t making things any easier.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to, father.’
‘Was that meant to be funny?’
‘No, not particularly.’
Like all the houses of Prolgu, the one we entered had long since lost its roof, and there was a dusting of snow on the floor when we entered. Father led me to a central room and scraped here and there with his foot for several minutes. ‘Well, finally,’ he muttered to himself when he found the flagstone he’d been looking for. He picked up a large rock from one corner of the room and banged on the flagstone three times.
Nothing happened.
He banged again, and the sound seemed somehow hollow.
Then there was a low grinding sound, and the very large, flat stone tilted upward to reveal a dimly lighted space beneath. ‘Belgarath,’ a hollow sounding voice came from down there, ‘Yad ho, groja UL.’
‘It’s a formality,’ father muttered to me. Then he said, ‘Yad ho, groja UL. Yad mar ishum.’
‘Veed mo, Belgarath. Mar ishum Ulgo.’
‘We’ve been invited to enter,’ father said to me. ‘Have you studied the Ulgo language at all?’
‘Not intensively. The grammar’s Dalish, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s more ancient than Morind or Karandese, though. The languages of isolated peoples tend to petrify – and you don’t get much more isolated than the Ulgos. Let’s go on down and talk to the Gorim.’
‘You’ll have to translate for me, father.’
‘Not really. The Gorim speaks our language.’
‘That’s helpful.’
The light in the caverns of Ulgo is of chemical origin, and it’s very dim. I couldn’t see how big the caves were, but the echoes strongly suggested that they were vast. I’m never entirely comfortable in the Ulgo caves. The image of moles keeps intruding on me. Theirs is an orderly society, though, and they live in neat apartments cut into the walls of long, dim galleries, and they go about their daily occupations in much the same way as they would if they lived above ground. I rather wryly conceded that there was at least one benefit to living underground. The weather was never a problem.
For the most part, the Ulgos ignored my father and me as we passed through their galleries. We skirted several enormous chasms and went along one edge of a dark lake as big as an underground sea. That sea was fed by waterfalls cascading down from the surface to whisper endlessly in the dimness. The echoes of those waterfalls joined with the echoes of the Hymn to UL sung at regular intervals by the devout, and those combined echoes turn all of Ulgo into one vast cathedral.
The house of the Gorim of Ulgo is constructed of a marble so fine that it puts the stately buildings of imperial Tol Honeth to shame. It sits on a small islet in the center of a shallow underground lake, and it’s reached by a formal looking causeway. The white-robed and white-bearded old Gorim, probably the holiest man in the world, stood waiting for us at the far end of that causeway. I hadn’t been in the Ulgo caves in over a millennium, but this Gorim was very much like his predecessors.
‘It’s been a while, Belgarath,’ the Gorim greeted my father when we reached the isle.
‘I know, Gorim,’ father apologized. ‘I’ve been busy, so I’ve been sort of letting my social obligations slide. You haven’t met my daughter, have you?’
‘Sacred Polgara? I don’t believe so.’
‘Sacred? You might want to wait until you know her a little better before you start assigning descriptio
ns to her, Gorim. Pol’s a little on the prickly side.’
‘That’ll do, father,’ I told him. Then I curtsied to the Gorim. ‘Iad Hara, Gorim an Ulgo,’ I greeted him.
‘Dalish?’ He seemed startled. ‘I haven’t heard anyone speak the Dalish language in over a century. You’re gifted, Polgara.’
‘Probably not, Holy Gorim,’ I replied. ‘My studies have led me down some fairly obscure paths. I don’t speak Ulgo as yet, though, so I fell back on Dalish. My accent probably isn’t too good.’
‘It’s close. You might want to spend a month or two at Kell if you feel the need of polishing it.’
‘After the current crisis, Pol,’ father cautioned.
‘Is there another crisis afoot?’ the Gorim asked.
‘Isn’t there always?’ father said sourly. “This one’s a bit more serious, though.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ Gorim suggested. ‘If the world’s coming to an end, maybe I’d better be sitting down when you tell me about it.’
I took to the Gorim of Ulgo immediately. He was a kindly old man with an understated sense of humor. He didn’t laugh very much when father told him that Torak had come out of Ashaba and led his Malloreans across the land-bridge, however. ‘This is troubling, Belgarath,’ he said with a frown.
‘Truly,’ father agreed. ‘May I speak bluntly?’
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 144
