“You have nothing to worry about, My Liege. I did hear it rumored that this man was one of the mysteriarchs. I questioned Captain Sang-drax about him, and according to the captain, this biue-skinned fellow is only the boy’s manservant.” Agah’ran nodded, lay back among the pillows, and closed the painted eyelids. The slaves bore him off. Tretar waited until certain he was no longer needed, then—smiling to himself in satisfaction—he went off to put the first steps of his plan into action.
CHAPTER 21
ROYAL PALACE
VOLKARAN ISLES
MID REALM
KING STEPHEN’S CASTLE ON THE ISLE OF PROVIDENCE WAS FAR DIFFERENT in appearance from his elven counterpart’s on Aristagon. The Imperanon was a vast collection of gracefully designed and elegant buildings, with spiraling towers and minarets decorated with tile mosaics, painted furbelows, and carved curlicues. King Stephen’s fortress was solid, massive, constructed on square lines; its grim, tooth-edged towers rose dark and unlovely into the smoke-colored sky. The difference in the stone could be seen in the flesh, so the saying went.
Night on the Imperanon was ablaze with flambeaux and candelabra. On Volkaran, lambent light from the Firmament glittered on the scaled skin of guard-dragons, perched atop the towers. Watch fires shone red in the twilight, lighting the way for returning dragon marauders and providing warmth for the human watchers, whose eyes ceaselessly scanned the skies for elven dragonships.
The fact that no elven dragonship had dared fly Volkaran’s skies for a long while did not make the watchers less vigilant. There were some, living in the town of Firstfall, which crowded close to the castle walls, who whispered that Stephen did not watch for elven dragonships. No, he watched for enemies closer to home, flying the kiratrack,* not the kanatrack. Alfred, who lived among the humans for a time, wrote the following discourse on the race. The title is A Baffling History.*
*Directional reference system. Defined in detail in Dragon Wing, vol. r, The Death Gate Cycle. For general purposes, kiratrack corresponds to west, kanatrack is east, backward is north, and backtrack is south. This statement implies that Stephen is more worried about dragons flying from Ulyndia than from the elven kingdoms.
*Found in the library of Castle Volkaran. Alfred wrote the history in the human language, undoubtedly with the intent of using it to instruct the humans in their own folly. True to his vacillating nature, the Sartan could never bring himself to show the book to the king, but placed it in the library, apparently in the forlorn hope that Stephen or Anne might stumble across it.
The elves in Arianus would not have grown strong and powerful if the humans had been able to unite. United as a race, the humans could have formed a wall through which the elves could not have penetrated. The humans could have easily taken advantage of the various elven clan wars to have established strong footholds on Aristagon (or, at the very least, keep from being pushed off!).
But the humans, who consider elves foppish and weak, made the mistake of discounting them. The various human factions, with their long history of blood feuds, were far more interested in battling each other than in fending off elven attacks. The humans, in essence, defeated themselves, leaving themselves so weak that all the powerful Paxar had to do was stamp their feet and shout, “Boo!” and the humans fled in terror.
The humans were driven off Aristagon. They flew to the Volkaran Isles and the larger continent of Ulyndia, and here they might have regrouped, united. During the Brotherblood War that raged among the elves, the humans could have easily recaptured all the territory they had lost. It is altogether possible that they might have taken the Imperanon, for the humans had among them then the mysteriarchs, whose skills in magic are far greater than those attained by the elves, with the exception of the Kenkari. And the Kenkari were, in this war, supposedly neutral.
But their own race’s internecine wars offended and sickened the powerful mysteriarchs. Finding that their efforts to bring peace to the warring factions were in vain, the mysteriarchs left the Mid Realm, traveled up to the High Realm, to the cities built by the Sartan, where the mysteriarchs hoped to live in peace. Their departure left the humans vulnerable to attack by the Tribus elves, who, having defeated and forcibly united the elven clans, turned their attention to the human raiders, who had been attacking and pirating elven water shipments from Drevlin.