night?’
‘He has been lately.’
‘Good. I’ll follow him tonight then. Let’s find out where he’s going
and who’s become the center of his attention.’
‘He’ll see you if you try to follow him, Aunt Pol.’
‘He might, but he won’t know that it’s me. I’ll give Aravina
something to make her sleep this evening. You can watch over her while
I go find out what Gelane’s up to.’
As it turned out, what Gelane was ‘up to’ took me totally by
surprise. I’d been periodically in contact with my father, so I knew
that uncle Beldin had found the cave where Zedar was hiding his
comatose Master, and I also knew that father was in Tolnedra, hot
on the heels of a man who called himself ‘Asharak the Murgo’.
I’m sure that name rings a few bells. It turned out to be Chamdar’s
favorite pseudonym.
Anyway, Chamdar was supposedly sprinkling most of Tolnedra
with blood-red coins in his efforts to locate ‘a dark-haired lady with
a white streak in her hair’. Chamdar wasn’t slow, by any means, and
he’d neatly filched a page from father’s book. Before the Angarak
invasion, father’d spent centuries leading Chamdar a merry chase
around Sendaria, and now Chamdar returned the favor by doing
exactly the same thing to father in Tolnedra.
Father’s response was absolutely brilliant. It didn’t work, but it
was brilliant all the same. The ‘new hair style’ that suddenly erupted
in Tolnedra, Arendia, and Sendaria would have driven Chamdar to
distraction, I guess. He’d spent centuries looking for me, and now
he’d be coming across me every time he turned a corner in every
town from Tol Borune to Darine. The only problem with that Was
that as it turned out, Chamdar already knew exactly where I was.
After supper that evening, Gelane mumbled a highly
unconvincing story about an elusive debtor. Then he went downstairs, fetched
something out of a cupboard that supposedly contained only some
tools, and then left the shop. Once he was out in the street with a
canvas bag over his shoulder, he looked around furtively for any
signs of pursuit, but he didn’t look up at the rooftops, so he didn’t
see the brown-spotted owl watching him intently.
I’m certain that had Silk been there, he’d have groaned at just
how inept Gelane was in his efforts to be inconspicuous. Tiptoing
isn’t really the best way to escape notice. At any rate, he finally
reached the edge of town where it bordered on Lake Seline, and he
followed the lakeshore to a fairly extensive grove of trees lying
about a mile to the east of town. It was a dark, moonless night, and
Gelane was virtually invisible as he crept though the undergrowth.
I was up among the branches of the trees above him, and it wasn’t
long until I began catching fleeting glimpses of the ruddy glow of
a fire just a ways off. The fire was obviously Gelane’s destination,
so I drifted on ahead to have a look.
It was not exactly a bonfire, but it came close. It was big enough
at any rate to illuminate a fair-sized clearing and the dozen or more
men gathered there. I’d seen that sort of gathering before, and I
started biting off a number of colorful phrases with my beak.
The fellow who seemed to be in charge of the little group had
black hair, a dense black beard, and he wore the robe of a priest of
Belar. It was fairly obvious that the other men were all of Alorn.’
descent, since they were not only tall and blond, but they were also
all wearing bearskin tunics. Somehow the Bear-Cult had found its
way to Sendaria.
Then Gelane entered the clearing, and he wasn’t carrying the
canvas bag anymore, but he was wearing what had been inside. The
heir to the Rivan throne was wearing a bearskin tunic.
That’s when I started pillaging extinct languages for swear-words.
How could Gelane have been so stupid?
The eyes of the black-haired priest of Belar came alight as Gelane,
shaggy but regal, entered the clearing. ‘All hail!’ the ecclesiast
declaimed, gesturing toward my nephew. ‘All hail the Rivan King,
Godslayer and overlord of the west! Hail him who will lead us
against the infidels of the south – against Arendia, against Tolnedra,
against snake-infested Nyissa! There shall he convert the heathens of
the south with his mighty sword to the worship of the one true
God, Belar of Aloria!’
*CHAPTER35
I considered what I’d just seen and heard as I flew back to Seline,
leaving Gelane to bask in the adoration of his worshipers. Rational
Bear-Cultists – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – had always
,maintained the superficial fiction that their hunger to ‘convert’ the
southern kingdoms grew out of a desire to unify the armies which
would move against the Angaraks. Belar, of course, had never said
anything about a conversion of his allies prior to any war. Stealing
the worshipers of his brother Gods would have been the worst form
of bad manners. Belar has his faults, but discourtesy isn’t one of
them. The notion of conversion had been added by radical
clergymen with their eyes far more firmly fixed on the treasure-houses of
.Tol Honeth than upon heaven. The black-bearded priest back at the
‘campfire was obviously a revisionist of the first order. Very few in
,,the west knew that Torak wasn’t really dead, and his apparent
“demise had neatly removed the cult’s reason for existence. The pious
pronouncement that the goal of the cult was the destruction of Torak
rather than the looting of southern treasuries had evaporated at Vo
,Mimbre. The priest of the newly-formed cult of Gelane was fast on
his feet, I’ll give him that much.
‘Father, I need you.’ I sent the thought out even as I was changing
back into my own form in the street outside the barrel-works.
‘What’s the matter?’ his thought came back.
‘We’ve got a problem. You’d better get here as soon as you can.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get here. Somebody might be eavesdropping. Wear
a different face.’ It was a logical precaution, but my real purpose had
been to spur my indolent father into moving instead of talking. mY
life would be so much easier if father’d just do what he’s told to do
instead of wasting time arguing with me.
It was just getting light-when I felt him as he altered his form on
the outskirts of Seline. Gelane, who’d crept back into the house long
after midnight, was still asleep, so I took a broom and went outside.
I was sweeping off the steps when a bald-headed fat man came up
the street. I naturally knew who he was. Sometimes my father’s so
enthralled by appearances that he forgets how unimportant they
really are. People are who they are. How they look has very little
to do with it. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. I’ll admit that
my tone was a little waspish. Then I led him into the shaving-littered
shop and showed him Celane’s bearskin tunic.
‘How long’s this been going on?’ he demanded, speaking quietly
in the dim light of the barrel-works.
‘I’m not positive, father. Gelane’s been evasive for about the last
six months, and he’s been going out every night. Enalla thinks he’s
being unfaithful.’
‘His wife?’
I nodded and put the tunic back into the cupboard. ‘Let’s go
outside,’ I suggested. ‘We need to talk.’
We went on down the street a ways, and I filled him in on recent
events. Then I endured his scolding for allowing this to happen,
and we finally got around to what we were going to do about it.
My father’s extended – and extended and extended – ‘History of
the World’ will tell those of you patient enough to plow through it
that he followed Gelane the following evening and witnessed the
ceremonial adulation of the local cult when my errant nephew
reached the bonfire in the woods. Then, once he’d gotten his
emotions under control, the Old Wolf called me, suggesting that I join
him. I thought that was nice of him.
A lot of things fell into place when father identified the bearded
priest as Chamdar. There are ways father could have conjured up
Chamdar’s image for me, but for some reason. neither of us had
thought of using one of them. We never did really find out how
Chamdar’d tracked me down, but I can make a fairly educated
guess. Somewhere in some tavern an idle wayfarer had mentioned
‘that lucky dog’, and there’d been a Dagashi present. Then Chamdar
had come to Seline to have a look for himself – Ah, well, it was too
late to start looking for that ‘cave in the mountains’ now. Clearly,
Ctuchik’s underling had leeched Celane’s identity from the young
man’s thoughts – as well as Celane’s yearning for celebrity – and