The serpent considered that, her head swaying rhythmically back and forth and her forked tongue flickering. At last she stopped her reptilian dance and leaned slowly forward until her tongue brushed the cringing eunuch’s cheek. “Live, Adiss,” she murmured. “Your words have not displeased me, and so my kiss grants the gift of life.” Then she reared her mottled form again and regarded Sariss with her dead eyes. “Do you have an explanation, Sariss? As our most excellent servant Adiss has pointed out, you are my Chief Eunuch. You affixed my seal. How did this discrepancy come to pass?”
“My Queen—” His mouth gaped open, and his dead-white face froze in an expression of stark terror.
The still-shaken Adiss half rose, his eyes filled with a sudden wild hope. He held up the parchment in his hand and turned to his crimson-robed companions kneeling to one side of the dais. “Behold,” he cried in a triumphant voice. “Behold the proof of the Chief Eunuch’s misconduct!”
The other eunuchs looked first at Adiss and then at the groveling and terrified Chief Eunuch. Their eyes also furtively tried to read the enigmatic expression on Salmissra’s face. “Ah,” they said in unison at last.
“I’m still waiting, Sariss,” the Serpent Queen whispered.
Sariss, however, quite suddenly scrambled to his feet and bolted toward the throne room door, squealing in mindless, animal panic. As fast as his sudden flight was, though, Issus was even faster. The shabby, one-eyed assassin bounded after the fleeing fat man, his horrid dagger leaping into his hand. With the other he caught the back of the Chief Eunuch’s crimson robe and jerked him up short. He raised his knife and looked inquiringly at Salmissra.
“Not yet, Issus,” she decided. “Bring him to me.”
Issus grunted and dragged his struggling captive toward the throne. Sariss, squealing and gibbering in terror, scrambled his feet ineffectually on the polished floor.
“I will have an answer from you, Sariss,” Salmissra whispered.
“Talk,” Issus said in a flat voice, setting his dagger point against the eunuch’s lower eyelid. He pushed slightly, and a sudden trickle of bright-red blood ran down the fat man’s cheek.
Sariss squealed and began to blubber. “Forgive me, your Majesty,” he begged. “The Malloreon Nadaras compelled it of me.”
“How did you do it, Sariss?” the serpent demanded implacably.
“M put your seal at the very bottom of the page, Divine Salmissra,” he blurted. “Then when I was alone, I added the other orders.”
“And were there other orders as well?” Aunt Pol asked him. “Will we encounter hindrances and traps on the trail of Zandramas?”
“No. Nothing. I gave no orders other than that Zandramas be escorted to the Murgo border and provided the maps she required. I pray you, your Majesty. Forgive me.”
“That is quite impossible, Sariss,” she hissed. “It had been my intention to hold myself aloof in the dispute between Polgara and Zandramas, but now I am involved because you have abused my trust in you.”
“Shall I kill him?” Issus asked calmly.
“No, Issus,” she replied. “Sariss and I will share a kiss, as is the custom in this place.” She looked oddly at him. “You are an interesting man, assassin,” she said. “Would you like to enter my service? I am certain that a position can be found for one of your talents.”
Adiss the eunuch gasped, his face suddenly going pale. “But your Majesty,” he protested, leaping to his feet, “your servants have always been eunuchs, and this man is—” He faltered, suddenly realizing the temerity of his rash outburst.
Salmissra’s dead eyes locked on his, and he sank white-faced to the floor again. “You disappoint me, Adiss,” she said in that dusty whisper. She turned back to the one-eyed assassin. “Well, Issus?” she said. “A man of your talents could rise to great eminence, and the procedure, I’m told, is a minor one. You would soon recover and enter the service of your queen.”
“Ah—I’m honored, your Majesty,” he replied carefully, “but I’d really prefer to remain more or less intact. There’s a certain edge my profession requires, and I’d rather not endanger that by tampering with things.” , “I see.” She swung her head briefly to look at the cow-Bering Adiss and then back to the assassin. “You have made an enemy today, however, I think—and one that may some day grow quite powerful.”
Issus shrugged. “I’ve had many enemies,” he replied. “A few of them are even still alive.” He gave the cowering eunuch a flinty look. “If Adiss wants to pursue the matter, he and I can discuss it privately some day—or perhaps late some night when our discussions won’t disturb anyone.”
“We must leave now,” Polgara said. “You have been most helpful, Salmissra. Thank you.”
“I am indifferent to your gratitude,” Salmissra replied. “I do not think that I will see you again, Polgara. I think that Zandramas is more powerful than you and that she will destroy you.”
“Only time can reveal that.”
“Indeed. Farewell, Polgara.”
“Good-bye, Salmissra.” Polgara deliberately turned her back on the dais. “Come along, Canon—Issus,” she said.
“Sariss,” Salmissra said in a peculiar, almost singing tone, “come to me.” Garion glanced back over his shoulder and saw that she had reared her mottled body until it rose high above the dais and her velvet-covered throne. She swayed rhythmically back and forth. Her dead eyes had come alight with a kind of dreadful hunger and they burned irresistibly beneath her scaly brows.
Sariss, his mouth agape and with his piglike eyes frozen and devoid of all thought, lurched toward the dais with jerky, stiff-legged steps.
“Come, Sariss,” Salmissra crooned. “I long to embrace you and give you my kiss.”
Aunt Pol, Garion, and Issus reached the ornately carved door and went quietly into the corridor outside. They had gone no more than a few yards when there came from the throne room a sudden shrill scream of horror, dying hideously into a gurgling, strangled squeal.
“I think that the position of Chief Eunuch just became vacant,” Issus observed dryly. Then, as they continued on down the dimly lighted hallway he turned to Polgara. “Now, my Lady,” he said, ticking the items off on his fingers, “first of all there was the fee for getting you and the young man into the palace. Then there was the business of persuading Sariss to take us to the throne room, and then …”
Part Two
RAK URGA
OAK ClQQA
CHAPTER NINE
It was almost dawn when they crept quietly out of Droblek’s house. A thick gray fog shrouded the narrow, twisting streets of Sthiss Tor as they followed Issus through the shabby quarter near the docks. The smell of the river and the reek of the surrounding swamps lay heavy in the foggy darkness, filling Garion’s nostrils with the odors of decay and stagnant water.
They emerged from a narrow alleyway, and Issus motioned them to a halt as he peered into the mist. Then he nodded. “Let’s go,” he whispered. “Try not to make any noise.” They hurried across a glistening cobblestone street, ill-lit by torches, each surrounded by a nimbus of hazy red light, and entered the deeper shadows of another garbage-strewn alley. At the far end of that alley, Garion could see the slow-moving surface of the river sliding ponderously by, pale in the fog.
The one-eyed assassin led them along another cobblestone street to the foot of a rickety wharf jutting out into the fog. He stopped in the shadows beside a dilapidated shack that stood partially out over the water and rumbled briefly at the door. He opened it slowly, muffling the protesting creak of a rusty hinge with a tattered piece of rag. “In here,” he muttered, and they followed him into the dank-smelling shack. “There’s a boat tied at the end of this wharf,” he told them in a half whisper. “Wait here while I go get it.” He went to the front of the shack, and Garion heard the creak of hinges as a trapdoor opened.
They waited, listening nervously to the skittering and squeaking of the rats that infested this part of town. The moments seemed to creep by as Garion stood watch beside the door, peering out through a crack between two rotting boards at the foggy street running along the edge of the river.
“All right,” he heard Issus say from below after what seemed like hours. “Be careful on the ladder. The rungs are slippery.”
One by one, they climbed down the ladder into the boat the one-eyed man had pulled into place under the wharf. “We have to be quiet,” he cautioned them after they had seated themselves. “There’s another boat out there on the river somewhere.”
“A boat?” Sadi asked in alarm. “What are they doing?”
Issus shrugged. “Probably something illegal.” Then he pushed his craft out into the shadows at the side of the wharf, settled himself on the center seat, and began to row, dipping his oars carefully into the oily surface of the river so that they made almost no sound.