of the Serpent Queen. Well, I’m a pretty good storyteller, 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 bearskins
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 smoky 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, just unrolling 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.”
I quickly laid a couple of books on the scroll to keep the place.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t like scrolls. Left to their own
devices, they’ll roll themselves back up without any outside assistance
as soon as you let go of them.
I picked up the Mrin again and rolled my way through it until I came to
the place I’d just remembered.
“Behold,” it said, “all shall seem lost, but curb thy despair, for the
Rivan King shall return.”
They weren’t identical, but they were very close. I stared at the two
passages with my heart sinking like a rock. A rather horrid prospect
was looming in front of me. I knew how to wring coherence out of the
Mrin now, but the sheer size of that job made me weak just thinking
about it.
There were matching passages in those documents. The Mrin had no sense
of time, but the Darine did. All I had to do to get a coherent time
sequence for the Mrin was to compile a comparative concordance.
Then I read the next line of the Mrin.
“I had fullest confidence in thee, Ancient and Beloved, knowing full
well that the solution would come to thee–eventually.”
Now that was really offensive, even though it confirmed my discovery.
The Necessity knew the past and the present and the future, so it knew
that I’d ultimately break its code. The clever remark was there for no
reason other than to draw my attention to the fact so that I wouldn’t
dismiss it out of hand. Evidently it thought I was stupid.
Incidentally, Garion, the next time your friend pays you a visit, you
might tell him that I’ve occasionally taken advantage of his clever
little trick.
Why should I wrack my brains trying to make sense of that solid wall of
gibberish we call the Mrin Codex when he’s speckled it with those very