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.