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 burning 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 to 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.’