‘I didn’t expect it, father. He’s always been so sensible.’
‘Is this priest attached to the local Alorn church?’
‘No. As far as I can tell, he’s not from Seline.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘He’s fairly bulky, but that could be the robe. I couldn’t really see very much of his face. That beard of his seems to start just underneath his lower eyelids.’
‘Is his hair blond? I mean, does he look like an ordinary Alorn?’
‘No. He’s very dark. His hair and beard are almost coal black.’
‘That doesn’t really mean anything. There are a lot of dark-haired Drasnians and Algars. Does Gelane go there often?’
‘Almost every night.’
‘I’ll follow him this evening, then. I want to have a look at this shaggy priest of Belar. Go on back home, Pol. I’ll stay away from Gelane’s shop today. Suspicion’s built into Bear-Cultists, and if Gelane gets any hint that I’m around, he might decide to skip this evening’s meeting.’
I loafed around Seline for the rest of the day, keeping my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut. Now that I knew what I was looking for, picking out members of the Bear-Cult wasn’t too hard. They were all Alorns, of course, and they had that shifty-eyed, nervous suspicion and overdramatic caution about them that stupid people with secrets to hide all seem to share.
The thing that baffled me was the fact that there was a chapter of the Cult anywhere at all in Sendaria. Sendars, no matter what their racial background, are just too sensible to get caught up in that kind of fanaticism.
I loitered in the street outside Gelane’s barrel works as evening descended on Seline. It was just getting dark when he furtively emerged from the shop with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Gelane was about eighteen by now, and the slenderness he’d shown as a child had been replaced by a stocky muscularity. Inevitably, he was now sporting a beard. All Bear-Cultists wear beards, for some reason. He started down the street toward the lake-shore, and I went off in the other direction. I knew where he was going, so I didn’t really have to follow him every step of the way.
I went out one of the other gates, chose the form of a barn-owl, and flew on ahead, so I reached the meeting place in that grove of trees a quarter of an hour before Gelane did. The cultists who were already there were shambling around the fire in that peculiar swaying walk that Bear-Cultists seem to think approximates the walk of a bear. I’ve seen a lot of bears in my time, and I’ve never seen one walk that way. Actually, you very seldom see a bear trying to walk on his hind feet at all.
The Alorns were chanting all the usual slogans in unison. I guess idiocy’s more fun when it’s shared, and there’s nothing in this world that’s more idiotic than the Bear-Cult. I’ve never understood the idea behind choral chanting, but it always seems to comfort religious fanatics of whatever stripe.
When Gelane, now wearing his own bear-skin tunic, arrived, the other cultists all bowed low to him, proclaiming - again in unison - ‘All hail the Rivan King, Godslayer, and Overlord of the West. Where he leads us, we will follow.’
The secret that Pol and I had so carefully kept for almost nine hundred years was obviously out of the bag now. I started muttering curses, savagely biting them off with my hooked beak.
When I finally got my anger under control, I carefully probed the minds of the individual cultists gathered around their hero. Most of them were just the usual dimwitted Alorns that have always filled the ranks of the Cult. A couple of them, however, were not. I picked the word ‘Kahsha’ out of their thoughts, and Kahsha is the mountain in the Desert of Araga that’s the headquarters of the Dagashi. Chamdar had finally gotten ahead of me. I started swearing again.
Then the priest of Belar arrived. As Pol had told me, his shaggy beard covered most of his face, but it didn’t hide his eyes - those angularly-shaped eyes of the typical Angarak. How could Gelane and the other Alorns around that fire have been so stupid that they hadn’t noticed that? When the robed priest reached the fire and I could make out his face more clearly, I redoubled my swearing.
The priest of Belar who’d led Iron-grip’s heir astray was Chamdar himself.
It all fell in around my ears at that point. The Dagashi in the Nyissan robe back in Tol Honeth had known exactly what he was doing. Chamdar would not have gone running off to Tol Honeth or to any other city in the west in response to my carefully arranged fashion statement, because Chamdar had known where Pol and Gelane were all the time. I’d just wasted better than half a year persuading ladies all over the western kingdoms to duplicate Pol’s distinctive trade-mark, and it hadn’t accomplished a thing. This time, Chamdar had tricked me!
‘You’d better get here right away, Pol.’ I sent the thought out as a whisper - largely because Chamdar was no more than twenty feet from the tree where I was perched. Fortunately, he was talking to the cultists at the time, so he didn’t hear me.
He was in the process of pronouncing a benediction on the Rivan King, ‘who shall lead us into the kingdoms of the south, where all whom we meet shall be converted to the worship of the Bear-God.’
Then Gelane started to talk, and I saw no evidence whatsoever of that self-effacing modesty that’s been the predominant characteristic of his family since the time of Prince Geran. Gelane was obviously very full of himself. ‘Behold!’ he declaimed. ‘I am the Godslayer of whom the prophecies speak. I, Gelane, am the Rivan King, and Overlord of the West, and I call upon the kingdoms of the west to submit to me. Where I lead, you will follow, and all of Angarak will tremble before me.’
That went on for quite some time, and he was still admiring himself when Pol arrived.
Just to set the record straight here, let me say at this point that Gelane’s descent into idiocy wasn’t his own idea. Garion can give you a very detailed description of just how subtly Chamdar can take over somebody else’s mind. At Faldor’s farm when he was growing up, Garion probably saw Asharak the Murgo about every other week, and he was prevented from telling anyone about it. The process is an old Grolim trick that’s been kicking around in Angarak societies since before the cracking of the world. The absurdities implicit in the Angarak religion almost demand that the Grolims have some means to control the thoughts of others. Now that I think about it, though, all religions do that - except mine, of course.
Polgara had wisely chosen the form of the brownish-colored spotted owl when she came to that grove to join me. White birds do tend to stick out in the dark. She settled onto the limb beside me and listened to Gelane’s extended self-congratulation without comment.
‘The so-called priest of Belar is Chamdar, Pol,’ I whispered to her.
‘So that’s what he looks like,’ she replied, her hooked beak clicking. ‘What now, father?’
‘I was hoping you could come up with an idea. I’m at my wit’s end on this one. Chamdar’s got Gelane totally under his control at this point. We have to break him clear of that control.’
‘There’s something that might work,’ she said. She sat looking at Gelane with those huge, unblinking eyes. ‘Are you willing to gamble?’
‘My whole life’s been a gamble, Pol.’
‘Yes. I’ve noticed. I used something back at Vo Wacune once when an Asturian spy had wormed his way into the Duke’s confidence. Chamdar’s a Grolim, though, so there might be some way he can counter it. If Gelane’s completely under Chamdar’s domination, he won’t believe anything we tell him about his master, will he?’
‘Probably not. What have you got in mind?’
‘Chamdar’s got to expose himself, then.’
‘How do you plan to manage that?’
‘All I have to do is make Chamdar’s thoughts audible. That’s how I persuaded the Wacite Duke that his new friend wasn’t all he seemed to be. The Asturian spy was only an ordinary man, though. This might not work on a Grolim.’
‘You’d better give it a try, Pol. Otherwise, I’m going to have to do something fairly serious to Gelane.’
‘Just how serious, father?’
‘We can’t have Iron-grip’s heir under Chamdar’s control. That’s unthinkable. I might have to erase most of Gelane’s mind. He won’t be able to make barrels any more, but he’ll still be able to father children.’
‘You can do that?’
‘Yes, I can. I wouldn’t like it much, though.’
That’s going too far, father.’
‘We don’t have any choice, Pol. We’ve lost heirs before. It’s the line that’s important, not individuals, and the line must not be under Grolim domination.’
I think that notion made Pol concentrate all the harder. There are some limitations on what you can do when you’re not in your natural form, so she swooped to earth behind the tree we’d been perched in and changed back.
I tend to be a little noisy when I use the Will and the Word - out of sheer arrogance, most likely - but Pol’s always been very subtle. Even though I knew in a general sort of way what she was going to do, I could scarcely hear so much as a whisper when she released her Will with a single murmured Word.