Polgara the Sorceress (63 page)

‘Who’s UL?’

The God of the Ulgos. He’s the father of the other Gods.’

Brand’s eyes grew wide, and he swallowed hard.

‘We’re getting away from the subject here. The Universe came into being with a Purpose. Then there was a cosmic accident – a star exploded in a place where it wasn’t supposed to – and the Purpose was divided. Those two Purposes have been fighting with each other ever since. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but you get the point, I’m sure.’

‘I’ve seen lots of family squabbles, Pol.’

‘I guess it
is
sort of like a family squabble at that. Anyway, these two Purposes can’t meet directly. The whole Universe would explode if they did, so they have to work through surrogates.’

‘The Child of Light and the Child of Dark?’

‘Exactly. Every now and then these two meet – usually for a very short period of time – about a half-second, actually.’

‘You can’t have much of a duel in a half-a-second, Pol.’

‘Stop thinking of it as a duel, Brand. That’s not what it is.’

‘That’s a relief. Torak’s the Child of Dark, isn’t he?’

‘Usually, yes.’

‘A man wouldn’t have much chance in a duel with a God, would he?’

“That depends on the man. Since
this
meeting’s going to take place during a war, there probably will be a duel – or at least the appearance of a duel. You and Torak will bang your swords off each other for a while, but the EVENT won’t have anything to do with that.’

‘EVENT?’

‘A word we use to describe these meetings. It’s sort of like an abbreviation. Don’t get carried away with the fact that Torak’s a God and you aren’t. That has nothing to do with what’s going to happen.’

‘What
is
going to happen, Pol?’

‘You’re going to make a choice.’

‘A choice? That’s all? What are the options?’

‘We don’t know.
You
will when the time comes, though.
Father was the Child of Light once – when he and Bear-shoulders were on the way to Cthol Mishrak. Zedar was the Child of Dark that time, and when they met, father chose
not
to kill Zedar. As it turned out, that was the right choice.’

‘What if I choose wrong when the time comes?’

I shrugged. ‘We’ll lose.’

‘Pol!’
his protest was anguished.

I laid my hand on his. I liked this man. ‘Don’t worry, Brand. You won’t be permitted to make the wrong choice.’

Then we’ll win?’

‘That’s not certain either. Torak also has to choose. His choice may be better than yours. The two Purposes are very evenly matched. Sometimes one wins, and sometimes the other does.’

‘Then I’m not going to be anything but the voice of this Purpose? It makes the choice, and I announce it?’

‘No dear one.
You
make the choice.’

‘I wish I were dead,’ he said glumly.

That’s not one of the choices available to you, Brand. At this point, I don’t even think you could kill yourself. Like it or not, you
are
going to meet Torak in Arendia, and you
are
going to make a choice.’

‘What if I refuse to make a choice?’

‘That’s also a choice, Brand. You can’t get out of this. Now, stop worrying about the fact that Torak’s a God and you aren’t. That doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. You’ll be equals when the two of you meet. That’s all the rank you need. Father and I’ll explain this to the others, so there won’t be any arguments. You
will
be in command.’ I paused. ‘We’ll put it to the other kings rather gently,’ I continued, ‘so I don’t think you’ll need to beat Eldrig over the head with it. A casual announcement that you’re the Purpose of the Universe might make him start questioning your sanity.’

‘I’m already questioning it, Pol,’ he admitted. ‘Is this conversation really happening, or am I just imagining it?’

I unfastened a brooch from the neck of my gown and quite deliberately stabbed him in the back of the hand with the pin.

He gave a startled exclamation and jerked his hand back. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.

‘Let it bleed, Brand,’ I told him. Then I blotted the drop of blood from his hand with my handkerchief and handed the frilly little piece of cloth to him. ‘Keep this tucked away somewhere, dear one,’ I instructed. ‘You must
never
question your own sanity in this. Any time you start to have doubts, take this out and look at the blood spot. This conversation is
really
happening, and you really
are
the Child of Light – or you will be when the time comes. I’m a physician, Brand, so you can believe me when I tell that you’re not insane. Now, go wash that hand, and I’ll bandage it for you.’

We held our meetings in the traditional conference room high in one of the towers of Iron-grip’s Citadel. A lot of memories crowded in on me there, but I pushed them back to concentrate on the business at hand. Most of our discussions involved a guessing game. Torak had surprised us once, and we couldn’t really afford another surprise like that, so we argued at some length about his next probable move. King Rhodar of the lost nation of Drasnia didn’t say very much, but he didn’t have to. His face was careworn anyway, and his mournful, sorrowing presence was a constant rebuke to all of us and a constant reminder of the consequences of guessing wrong.

Since we couldn’t really respond until Torak made his next move, the conference didn’t produce anything very meaningful. My only real contribution was the suggestion that it might be the neighborly thing to do to advise the other western kingdoms that the end of the world was at hand.

Father and I left the Isle of the Winds by ship, and we were deposited on a rainy beach on the north side of the Hook of Arendia to begin our search for the elusive Asturians.

After the Mimbrates had destroyed Vo Astur, the Asturian nobility had taken to the woods to engage in centuries of guerrilla warfare. In the Asturian view of the world, shooting a lone Mimbrate traveler in the back with an arrow constituted a major victory to be celebrated around the
campfires for weeks on end. The Mimbrates, quite naturally, disapproved of that practice, and so armored knights made periodic sweeps through the forest to locate and destroy those bands of enthusiasts. The Asturians grew quite adept at concealing their encampments, so father and I spent a delightful week and a half searching for the elusive Duke of Asturia, Eldallan. The almost perpetual rain seething down among the trees added whole new dimensions to the word ‘uncomfortable’.

Unless driven by hunger, predators normally sit out rain-storms in some sheltered place, but there was one wolf and one owl in that soggy forest who were obliged to move around almost constantly.

Have you any idea at all of just how bad a wet wolf smells when he gets near a campfire? Just the thought of father’s fragrance during our search turns my stomach.

As luck had it, a brief break in the weather dissipated the perpetual mist hanging in the forest, and I flew on up above the treetops and saw the smoke rising from a dozen or so campfires some distance off to the east. When we investigated, we found the encampment we’d been searching for.

Given their highly developed sense of romanticism, the costume of choice among the young Asturian ‘patriots’ consisted of green or brown tunics and hose and rakish caps decorated with long feathers. The Mimbrates had designated them as outlaws, and they were playing the part for all they were worth. Literature has its place, I suppose, but the ballads composed by third-rate poets extolling the exploits of this or that outlaw out to rob rich Mimbrates and to distribute the booty to the poor Asturian peasants set the imaginations of generations of brainless Asturian nobles afire, and they postured and posed in their green clothing and spent hours practicing with their bows, riddling whole battalions of straw dummies dressed in rusty Mimbrate armor with yard-long arrows.

All right, I’m prejudiced against Asturians. So what?

Duke Eldallan and his cohorts were less than cooperative when father and I entered their extensive encampment. We were not exactly taken prisoner, but there were a lot of arrows pointed in our general direction as we approached the rustic ‘throne’ where Eldallan sat with his eight-year-old daughter, Mayaserana, on his knee.

The Duke of Asturia was a thin man in his early thirties with long, carefully-combed blond hair. He wore forest green, his longbow was handy, and he obviously had a high opinion of himself. He received father’s introduction of us with a look of scepticism. My father’s customary shabby appearance obviously didn’t match the picture of ‘a mighty wizard’ as laid down in assorted Arendish epics. He might not have believed father, but a short while later he definitely believed me.

He shrugged off the news of the destruction of Drasnia as ‘an Alorn problem’, and made much of his near-religious obligation to exterminate the Mimbrates. I finally grew tired of his posturing and stepped in. ‘Why don’t you let me talk with him, father?’ I said. ‘I know Arends a little better than you do.’

‘Gladly,’ the Old Wolf grunted.

‘Please forgive my father, your Grace,’ I said to Eldallan. ‘Diplomacy’s not one of his strong points.’

Then Eldallan made the mistake of mentioning my former association with the Wacite Arends as if it had been some kind of major moral failing. I decided that since he wanted to be nasty about this, I’d give him more nasty than he was equipped to accept.

‘Very well, your Grace,’ I said rather coldly, ‘I’ll
show
you what the Angaraks did to Drasnia, and then I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you’d like to have the same thing happen here.’

‘Illusions!’ he snorted.

‘No, your Grace. Not illusions, but reality. I speak as the Duchess of Erat, and no true gentlemen would question the word of a noblewoman – or have I erred in assuming that there
are
gentlemen in Asturia?’

He bridled at that. ‘Are you questioning my honor?’

‘Aren’t you questioning mine?’

I don’t think he’d expected that. He choked on it a bit, and then he gave in. ‘Very well, your Grace,’ he said. ‘If you give me your word of honor that what you propose to show me really happened, I’ll have no choice but to accept it.’

‘Your Grace is too kind.’ I gently probed at his mind and found there an unreasoning terror of the notion of being burned alive. That gave me all that I needed.

I set a series of disconnected images before him and compelled him to watch them unfold with the force of my Will. There was enough generalized butchery in those images to keep him from guessing that I was concentrating my efforts on the one thing he feared the most. The seas of blood and the incidental dismemberments were in the nature of punctuation to the lovingly recreated scenes of screaming Drasnians trapped inside burning buildings or being bodily hurled into great bonfires by laughing Angaraks. I added the customary shrieks of agony and doused him with the sickening odor of burning flesh;

Eldallan began to scream and writhe in his chair, but I still went on and on until I was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t argue with us any more. I might have held him there longer, but the presence of his little daughter, Mayaserana, forced me to relent. Mayaserana was a beautiful little girl with dark hair and huge eyes, and her involuntary little screams and sobs as her father twisted and groaned tore at my heart.

‘What did you do to my father, bad Lady?’ she demanded in an accusing voice when I released Eldallan.

‘He’ll be fine in just a little bit, dear,’ I assured her. ‘He just had a nightmare, that’s all.’

‘But it’s daytime – and he isn’t even asleep.’

I took her in my arms. ‘That happens sometimes, Mayaserana,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be all right.’

After the Duke of Asturia had recovered, father proposed a truce between Asturia and Mimbre,’ – a temporary truce, you understand, just during the present emergency. Of course, if you just happen to find peace with the Mimbrates entertaining, you and Aldorigen might want to consider extending it.’

‘You’re surely not proposing an actual meeting between me and that Mimbrate butcher, are you?’

‘Only if you’ll both agree to be chained to the walls at opposite ends of the room, Eldallan. I’ll make arrangements with the Sendarian ambassador in Vo Mimbre. We’ll have the Sendars serve as go-betweens – at least until the Angaraks actually invade Arendia. When that happens, we’ll come up with a way to keep you and the Mimbrates at opposite ends of the battlefields.’

Then father and I went on down across the rain-soaked plain of southern Arendia to Vo Mimbre. Once again I was almost overwhelmed with memories. I don’t think my father has ever fully understood just how great an attachment I have for Arendia. Arends are a child-like people, and in a very real sense I had been their universal mother for almost six hundred years.

The dark-haired Duke – or ‘King’ as he preferred it – Aldorigen was terrified of snakes, of all things, and that seriously strained my creativity, since there aren’t very many snakes in Drasnia. I’ll confess to a deliberate falsehood here. I created an Angarak ‘custom’ out of whole cloth, and Duke Aldorigen found my imaginary snake pits into which whole Drasnian villages were cast while shrieking in terror entertaining enough to bring him around to our way of thinking.

All right, it was dishonest. Did you want me to suspend the story while we discuss the ethical implications of ‘ends justifying the means’ for a week or two?

After father had rammed his truce down Aldorigen’s throat and had more or less commanded the Sendarian ambassador to serve as liaison between Mimbre and Asturia, we prepared to leave the golden city. Before we left, however, I took a very long look at Aldorigen’s sandy-haired son, Korodullin. He was eight or nine years old, as I recall. To be honest, the word ‘coincidence’ never even occurred to me. I was just a little surprised to discover that the ‘bell’ which has periodically rung inside my head isn’t
always
set off by the descendants of Beldaran and Riva Iron-grip.
Other destined arrangements also make it ring. I clearly remember listening to it the first time Relg met Taiba. Oddly, though, I didn’t hear any bells the first time I met Durnik.