’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 that 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 they fortunately only stayed in power 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 they accomplished quite a bit. They expanded their highway system in Tolnedra proper, and they dispatched twenty legions ‘as a gesture of good will’ to what’s now Sendaria to construct the network of highways which 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 off-hand 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 and 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 an 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’d 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’ had probably 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 lieth 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 32
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.
I think that perhaps I’ll go to Riva and have a talk with Garion about that. I’m beginning to develop a theory, and I’d like to check it with him. That peculiar voice has spent much more time with him than it ever did with me, so he’s far more familiar with its quirks than I am. Every now and then, though, I get a strong feeling that I’ve been tampered with. I’ll be plodding along about half-asleep, and then something will happen - and it doesn’t always have to be something out of the ordinary. In fact, it usually isn’t. Most of the time it’s something so commonplace that nobody else even notices it. But when it does happen, something inside my head clicks together, and I’m moving before I’m even aware of it. I suspect that certain things were planted in my brain during that trip Cherek and his boys and I took to Cthol Mishrak. I’m not actually aware of them until that unremarkable incident comes along, and then I immediately know what I’m supposed to do.