David and Leigh Eddings – Belgarath the Sorcerer

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 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 fortunately they stayed in

power only 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 it accomplished quite a bit. They expanded their highway system in

Tolnedra proper, and they dispatched twenty legions “as a gesture of

goodwill” to what’s now Sendaria to construct the network of highways

that 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 offhand 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 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 a

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 had 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” probably had 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 lie th in deadly

peril. Save him, lest all be lost, and the darkness reign forever.”

I stared at it in horror.

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