I settled down for the night in a tree in the Asturian forest just south of the Camaar River, and I took wing again at first light the next day. I passed on down across Mimbre and on into Tolnedra before I stopped again.
Go ahead and say it. Yes, as a matter of fact, it is over a thousand miles from Val Alorn to Sthiss Tor, and no bird alive could possibly cover that much distance in three days, so I cheated. Does that answer your question?
It was humid in Sthiss Tor, and I hate places where the air’s chewy. I came to rest in a tree outside the garishly colored walls of the city of the snake people and considered my options. I immediately discarded the notion of my favorite alternative form. The snowy owl isn’t indigenous to Nyissa, and white birds do tend to stick out at night. The answer was fairly simple, of course, but I didn’t care for it very much. I’m sure that bats are hard-working, industrious, and nice to their mothers, but I’ve always had an unreasoning sort of prejudice against them for some reason. They have such ugly faces! I gritted my beak and changed form.
It took some getting used to, I’ll admit that. The flight of a bat is not at all like the flight of a bird. Feathers are sometimes inconvenient, but they make it much easier to fly. A bat has to literally claw his way through the air. I managed that part after a while, but it took me even longer to get used to the business of steering by echoes. Did you know that bats do that? They aren’t squeaking just for the fun of it, you know. A bat can fly in total darkness without ever running into anything. You would not believe how sharp their ears are. Once I’d assumed that form, I could hear the whine of a mosquito from a hundred yards away.
I flapped my way up into the air, passed over the nauseatingly colored wall of the city, and then zigzagged my way through the stinking alleys toward the grotesque palace that was the center of Sthiss Tor. Then I flew over the wall of the compound and perched – upside down – under a hideous statue of something that’d obviously grown out of the imagination of some drug-crazed sculptor. I watched as assorted functionaries passed in and out through a very large doorway. They were almost all a bit plump, and there wasn’t so much as a single whisker among them. I’d never fully understood the reasoning behind the Nyissan custom of obliging all of the Serpent Queen’s servants to be eunuchs. Given the appetites of that long line of Salmissras, the idea seems uneconomical, to say the very least. It was at that point that I began to reconsider my previous aversion to bats. The bat’s face may be ugly and his jointed wings ungainly, but his ears more than make up for those drawbacks. I could hear every word the palace eunuchs were saying. I could even hear the dry slither of all the snakes creeping around in dark corners. That made me a bit uncomfortable. The bat is a rodent, after all, and rodents are a staple in the diet of most reptiles.
‘It’s absolutely ridiculous, Rissus,’ one shaved-headed eunuch was saying to his companion. ‘Can’t she even read?’ He spoke in a rich contralto voice.
‘I’m sure she can, Salas,’ Rissus replied, ‘but she’s got her mind – or what’s left of it – on other things.’
‘You’d think her teachers would have warned her that the Angaraks have tried this before. How can she possibly be so gullible as to believe that a God would want to marry her?’
‘She’s been brought up to believe that Issa wants to marry her, Salas. If one God yearns for her company, why not another?’
‘Everybody knows what happened the last time one of our queens fell into that Angarak trap,’ Salas fretted. ‘This Asharak fellow’s leading her down that very same path, and the very same thing will happen. We’ll have Alorns swinging through the rafters like apes if this goes any further.’
‘Did you want to volunteer to tell her that?’
‘Not me, Rissus. Her pet snake’s molting right now, and he’s very short tempered. That’s not the way I want to die.’
Rissus shrugged. ‘The answer’s all around us, Salas. Asharak’s going to have to eat or drink sometime – eventually.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what’s got me so baffled. I’ve laced every meal and every flagon of wine that’s presented to him with enough sarka to kill a legion, but he absolutely refuses to eat or drink.’
‘What about odek?’ Salas suggested. ‘He’d absorb that right through his skin.’
‘He never takes his gloves off! How can I kill somebody if he won’t cooperate?’
‘Why not just run a knife into him?’
‘He’s a Murgo, Salas. I’m not going to get into a knife-fight with a Murgo. I think we’re going to have to hire a professional assassin.’
‘They’re awfully expensive, Rissus.’
‘Look upon it as a patriotic duty, old boy. I can juggle the numbers in my account books enough so that we can get our money back. Let’s go to the throne-room. Asharak usually visits the queen at midnight – between her other social engagements.’
Then the two of them went on inside the palace.
Even though I’d been hanging upside down, I’d found the conversation to be absolutely fascinating. I gathered that the current Salmissra wasn’t held in very high regard by her servants. She evidently had very limited intellectual gifts, and even those had been clouded by whichever of the dozens of narcotics available to her was her favorite. I was really disappointed in Chamdar, though. Couldn’t the Angaraks come up with something a bit more original than Zedar’s tired old ploy? The remark Rissus had made as the two of them were entering the palace seemed to present an opportunity just too good to pass up, though. If Chamdar was still posing as Asharak the Murgo, and if he had a more or less standing appointment with Salmissra at midnight, I could confront the both of them at the same time and take care of everything all at once. Thrift is another virtue like neatness. It does count, but not for very much.
I remembered that when father and I’d visited Sthiss Tor before the Battle of Vo Mimbre, Salmissra’s palace wasn’t very well lighted, and so I kept my disguise and flew in through that wide doorway. The ceilings were high and buried in deep shadows, and I wasn’t the only bat up there among the rafters. I flitted along the vaulted corridor leading to the throne-room, and when Salas and his friend entered, I was able to dart through high above them before they closed the door. Then I circled upward and came to roost – which is awkward for a bat – on the shoulder of the gigantic statue of the Serpent-God, Issa, which rose behind the dais upon which Salmissra’s throne stood.
The Serpent Queen wasn’t there, and the eunuchs lounged around on the polished floor talking idly. Several of them, I noticed, were semi-comatose, and I wondered which was really worse, beer or the assorted narcotics the Nyissans found so entertaining. I suspect that my major objection to beer, wine, and more potent beverages springs from the noise – and the smell. A drunken man tends to bellow like a bull, and he smells terrible. A drugged man just goes to sleep, and he doesn’t usually stink. I think it may be a question of aesthetics more than anything else. I pondered the question of exactly how I was going to approach Chamdar. The notion of assuming the form of an eagle the size of a barn briefly crossed my mind. I could seize him in my talons and soar up with him to a height of four or five miles and drop him.
‘No, Pol,’ mother’s voice said quite firmly. ‘We’re going to need him later.’
‘Spoilsport!’ I accused in my high-pitched bat-voice. ‘Can’t you knock or something, mother? I never know for sure whether you’re there or not.’
‘Just assume that I’m always here, Pol. You’ll be fairly close. Do you remember Countess Asrana?’
‘How could I ever forget her?’
‘You might want to think over just how she might deal with Chamdar.’
I did that for a moment, and then I quite nearly burst out laughing. ‘Oh, mother!’ I said gaily. “That’s a terrible thing to suggest.’
‘Good, though,’ she added.
The more I thought about it, the more I appreciated mother’s suggestion. The gay, light-hearted Asrana would have driven the humorless Grolim absolutely wild, and wil
d Grolims tend to make mistakes, mistakes so obvious that even a drugged Salmissra would see them immediately.
Then the Serpent Queen languidly entered her throne-room, and the assembled eunuchs all assumed their customary groveling posture. The queen, of course, might as well have been the same one father and I had spoken with prior to the Battle of Vo Mimbre. There’s nothing remarkable about that, since a close physical resemblance to the original Salmissra was the prime requirement for each of her successors. She undulated her way across the polished floor to her reclining throne, sat and began adoring herself in her mirror. I rather carefully probed at her mind, and what a chaos I found there! She was literally awash with several conflicting narcotics that combined to elevate her to a state of chemical ecstasy. When she was in that condition, she’d have probably believed that the sky was falling should anyone choose to tell her so. That most likely explained Chamdar’s lack of any originality. He didn’t have to come up with anything new or different. Zedar’s tired old fiction was good enough,
Then, almost before Salmissra had settled in, the door to the throne-room opened again and Chamdar himself was escorted in. He’d shaved off the shaggy beard he’d worn in Seline, and now I was able to see his scarred Murgo face.
The doorkeeper rapped the butt of his staff of office on the floor and announced, ‘The emissary of Ctuchik of Rak Cthol craves audience with her Divine Majesty!’ His tone was slightly bored.
‘The emissary approaches Divine Salmissra,’ the eunuchs intoned in unison, and they didn’t seem too excited either.
‘Ah,’ Salmissra almost drawled, ‘so good of you to drop by, Asharak.’
‘I am ever at your Divine Majesty’s service,’ he responded in his harshly accented voice. I gathered that the accent was a part of Chamdar’s disguise, because he certainly hadn’t spoken that way back at Seline.
I dropped off the back side of the statue and fluttered as quietly as I could to the floor behind the image of the Serpent-God. Then, carefully muffling the sound of what I was doing, I resumed my own form.
‘Have you come to remind me how much the Dragon-God adores me, Asharak?’ Salmissra asked in a decidedly kittenish manner.
Asharak responded even as I started to saunter around the massive statue. ‘The whole world is stunned by your exquisite beauty, your Majesty. My poor words cannot possibly convey the depth of my God’s longing for – ’ He broke off suddenly, staring at me in astonishment. ‘What are – ’ he half-choked.
‘Why, Chammy, dear,’ I said in a fair imitation of Asrana’s voice and manner, ‘fancy meeting you here! What a delightful surprise!’ Then I looked directly at the Serpent Queen. ‘Ah, there you are, Sally. Where the deuce have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.’ The whole speech had been classic Asrana.
‘What are you doing here?’ Chamdar demanded.
‘I just stopped by to say hello to Sally here,’ I replied. ‘It’s not at all polite to pass through without paying one’s respects, you know. Where have you been keeping yourself, dear boy? My father’s been looking all over for you. Have you been hiding from him again? Naughty, naughty, Chammy. He’ll be terribly put out with you, you know. Father can be such an old stick in the mud sometimes.’
‘Who is she?’ Salmissra demanded, ‘and why is she calling you by that name?’
‘Have you been riding that tired old horse again, Chammy? What a bore. “Asharak the Murgo?” Really Chammy, I’m disappointed in you.’ I looked at the confused-looking Queen of Nyissa. ‘Has he been lying to you, Sally? You didn’t really believe him, did you? “Asharak the Murgo” indeed! He’s worn the spots off that one in most of the civilized world. Everybody knows that his name’s really Chamdar, and that he’s Ctuchik’s favorite boot-licker. Chammy here’s been living on a steady diet of boot-polish for over a thousand years now.’
‘Who are you?’ Salmissra demanded. ‘And how dare you call me by that absurd name?’
‘My name’s Polgara, Sally, and I’ll call you whatever I jolly-well choose to call you.’ I dropped the light-hearted tone and delivered that announcement with a definite hint of steel in it.
I could almost feel the narcotics draining out of her blood. ‘Polgara?’ she exclaimed.
‘She lies!’ Chamdar declared, his own voice slightly shrill and his eyes going wild.
‘Oh, Chammy, how on earth would you know? You’ve been searching for me for a thousand and more years, and you’ve never once even seen me. If you’re the best Ctuchik can come up with, my father’s been overstating the peril. I could delete you without even working up an appetite.’ I knew that it was melodramatic to the point of absurdity, but I leveled my forefinger slightly off to one side of him and disintegrated a polished flagstone with a sizzling thunderbolt. I’ve seldom done that, so perhaps I over-did it just a bit. The fragments, all jagged and red-hot, sprayed the groveling eunuchs, and they all immediately stopped being bored. They scrambled away, squealing like terrified mice.
‘Oops,’ I said apologetically. ‘A little excessive, maybe. Sorry about the floor tiles, Sally. Now, where was I? Oh yes, now I remember.’ And I exploded several more flagstones in the general vicinity of Chamdar’s feet.
He began hopping around wildly. ‘There you are, Sally,’ I drawled. ‘Murgos do know how to dance. All you have to do is give them a bit of encouragement.’
‘Have you come here to kill me?’ Salmissra quavered.
‘Kill you? Good heavens no, Sally dear. You and I both know that isn’t what I’m going to do to you.’ I made only the slightest move with just one finger as I released my Will. What I was doing was only an illusion, after all, so I didn’t have to wave both arms when I did it. ‘Look in your mirror, Sally. That’s what I’m going to do to whichever Salmissra is unlucky enough to make me cross with her.’
Telling Salmissra – any Salmissra – to look in her mirror is almost like telling water to run downhill. She took one look at the large mirror beside her throne and screamed in absolute horror. Staring back at her with unblinking eyes and a flickering tongue was a very large, mottled snake. ‘No!’ the Serpent Queen shrieked, desperately feeling her face, her hair, and her body with violently trembling hands to assure herself that the hideous reflection wasn’t really what she looked like. ‘Make it go away!’ she squealed.
‘Not just yet, Sally, dear,’ I said in my best frigid tone. ‘I want you to remember that image. Now then, has Chammy here been trying to foist his tired old promise off on you? You didn’t really believe that Torak was going to marry you, did you?’
‘He told me so!’ Salmissra said, pointing an accusing finger at the now shaken Grolim.
‘Oh, Chammy, Chammy, Chammy!’ I chided. ‘Whatever am I going to do with you? You know that was a he. You know perfectly well that Torak’s heart belongs to another.’ I was gambling there of course. I wasn’t entirely sure that Chamdar had been at Vo Mimbre.
‘Who is it that Torak loves?’ Salmissra demanded in a slightly stricken voice. In spite of everything, I guess she still harbored some hopes.
‘Who?’ I said. ‘Why me of course, Sally. I thought everybody knew that. He even proposed to me once, and it absolutely broke his heart when I turned him down. Actually, that’s why he lost the duel with Brand at Vo Mimbre. The poor dear only has one eye, you know, and it was so full of tears of disappointment that he didn’t even see Brand’s sword coming. Don’t you just love it when your admirers fight duels with each other to prove their love? It’s so romantic to see all that blood spurting. I just quivered all over to see Torak standing there with that sword stuck right through his head like that.’
I heard a broken sob, and I glanced quickly at Chamdar. The Murgo was actually weeping! Of course Torak was his God.
‘Now, then, Sally, I think you’d better ask the fellow called Salas what happened to the Salmissra who ordered the murder of the Rivan King. If you believe Chammy’s lies you’ll be walking down the same path. If the Alorns catch up with you, they’ll burn
you at the stake. Think about that and then take another look in your mirror. It’s the stake or the snake, Sally, and that’s not really very much of a choice, is it?’ Then I leveled that well-known ‘steely gaze’ at the still red-eyed Chamdar. ‘Chammy, you naughty, naughty boy! Now you march right out of here and go back to Rak Cthol. Tell Ctuchik that he’d better come up with something new, because this one’s all worn out now. Oh, and give him my regards, will you? Tell him that I yearn for the day of our meeting.’
‘But – ’ he started to protest.
‘You heard her, Chamdar!’ Salmissra snapped. ‘Get out of my sight. And you’d better hurry. Your diplomatic immunity expires in about a half an hour, and after that, there’ll be a sizeable price on your head. Now get out!’
Chamdar fled.
‘Nice touch, there,’ I complimented Salmissra.
‘Can I really do that, Pol?’ she asked.
‘It’s your kingdom, dear,’ I assured her. ‘You can do anything you want to do.’
‘Is it possible for you and me to be friends?’ she asked.
‘I think we already are,’ I said, smiling.
“Then would you please get that awful snake out of my mirror?’
I spent several months in Sthiss Tor gradually leeching the assorted narcotics out of Salmissra’s blood until she reached the point of being able to think coherently. She was no mental giant, but once she came out of that drug-induced fog, she began to function rationally. The eunuchs who actually ran the government were more than a little upset by my intervention, so one evening after Salmissra had drifted off to sleep, I sent for Rissus, who probably wielded more power than most of his cohorts – enough at any rate that he had to take the usual precautions to keep them from poisoning him. He seemed a bit apprehensive when he entered the garish sitting-room of the Serpent Queen’s private apartment. ‘You wanted to see me, Lady Polgara?’ he said in his eunuch’s contralto.
‘Yes, Rissus,’ I said. ‘I thought that you and I ought to have a little chat.’
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 156
