Demon Lord Of Karanda (14 page)

Zakath laughed. ‘No. Sadi’s devised a means of keeping her at home.’ He looked whimsically at Garion. ‘Is she really as deadly as he says?’

Garion nodded. ‘She bit a Grolim at Rak Urga,’ he said. ‘He was dead in about a half a minute.’

Zakath shuddered. ‘You don’t have to tell Sadi about this,’ he said, ‘but snakes make my flesh creep.’

‘Talk to Silk. He could give you a whole dissertation about how much he dislikes them.’

‘He’s a complicated little fellow, isn’t he?’

Garion smiled. ‘Oh, yes. His life is filled with danger and excitement, and so his nerves are as tightly wound as lute strings. He’s erratic sometimes, but you get used to that after a while.’ He looked at the other man critically. ‘You’re looking particularly fit,’ he noted, sitting down on the other end of the leather couch. ‘Sea air must agree with you.’

‘I don’t think it’s really the air, Garion. I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve been sleeping eight to ten hours a night.’

‘Sleep? You?’

‘Astonishing, isn’t it?’ Zakath’s face went suddenly quite somber. ‘I’d rather that this didn’t go any further, Garion,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘Urgit told you what happened when I was young?’

Garion nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘My habit of not sleeping very much dates from then. A face that had been particularly dear to me haunted my dreams, and sleep became an agony to me.’

‘That didn’t diminish? Not even after some thirty years?’

‘Not one bit. I lived in continual grief and guilt and remorse. I lived only to revenge myself on Taur Urgas. Cho-Hag’s saber robbed me of that. I had planned a dozen different deaths for the madman—each more horrible than the one before—but he cheated me by dying cleanly in battle.’

‘No,’ Garion disagreed. ‘His death was worse than anything you could possibly have devised. I’ve talked with Cho-Hag about it. Taur Urgas went totally mad before Cho-Hag killed him, but he lived long enough to realize that he had finally been beaten. He died biting and clawing at the earth in frustration. Being beaten was more than he could bear.’

Zakath thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘That would have been quite dreadful for him, wouldn’t it? I think that maybe I’m less disappointed now.’

‘And was it your discovery that the Urga line is now extinct that finally laid the ghost that’s haunted your sleep all these years?’

‘No, Garion. I don’t think that had anything to do with it. It’s just that instead of the face that had always been there before, now I see a different face.’

‘Oh?’

‘A blindfolded face.’

‘Cyradis? I don’t know that I’d recommend thinking about her in that fashion.’

‘You misunderstand, Garion. She’s hardly more than a child, but somehow she’s touched my life with more peace and comfort than I’ve ever known. I sleep like a baby and I walk around all day with this silly euphoria bubbling up in me.’ He shook his head. ‘Frankly, I can’t stand myself like this, but I can’t help it for some reason.’

Garion stared out the window, not even seeing the play of sunlight on the waves nor the hovering gulls. Then it came to him so clearly that he knew that it was undeniably true. ‘It’s because you’ve come to that crossroads in your life that Cyradis mentioned,’ he said. ‘You’re being rewarded because you’ve chosen the right fork.’

‘Rewarded? By whom?’

Garion looked at him and suddenly laughed. ‘I don’t think you’re quite ready to accept that information yet,’ he said. ‘Could you bring yourself to believe that it’s Cyradis who’s making you feel good right now?’

‘In some vague way, yes.’

‘It goes a little deeper, but that’s a start.’ Garion looked at the slightly perplexed man before him. ‘You and I are caught up together in something over which we have absolutely no control,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve been through it before, so I’ll try to cushion the shocks that are in store for you as much as I can. Just try to keep an open mind about a peculiar way of looking at the world.’ He thought about it some more. ‘I think that we’re going to be working together—at least up to a point—so we might as well be friends.’ He held out his right hand.

Zakath laughed. ‘Why not?’ he said, taking Garion’s hand in a firm grip. ‘I think we’re both as crazy as Taur Urgas, but why not? We’re the two most powerful men in the world. We should be deadly enemies, and you propose friendship. Well, why not?’ He laughed again delightedly.

‘We have much more deadly enemies, Zakath,’ Garion said gravely, ‘and all of your armies—and all of mine—won’t mean a thing when we get to where we’re going.’

‘And where’s that, my young friend?’

‘I think it’s called “the place which is no more”.’

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. The whole phrase is a contradiction in terms. How can you go someplace which doesn’t exist any more?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Garion told him. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’

Two days later, they arrived at Mal Gemila, a port in southern Mallorea Antiqua, and took to horse. They rode eastward at a canter on a well-maintained highway that crossed a pleasant plain, green with spring. A regiment of red-tuniced cavalrymen cleared the road ahead of them, and their pace left the entourage which usually accompanied the Emperor far behind. There were way stations along the highway—not unlike the Tolnedran hostels dotting the roads in the west—and the imperial guard rather brusquely ejected other guests at these roadside stops to make way for the Emperor and his party.

As they pressed onward, day after day, Garion began slowly to comprehend the true significance of the word ‘boundless’ as it was applied to Mallorea. The plains of Algaria, which had always before seemed incredibly vast, shrank into insignificance. The snowy peaks of the Dalasian mountains, lying to the south of the road they traveled, raked their white talons at the sky. Garion drew in on himself, feeling smaller and smaller the deeper they rode into this vast domain.

Peculiarly, Ce’Nedra seemed to be suffering a similar shrinkage, and she quite obviously did not like it very much. Her comments became increasingly waspish; her observations more acid. She found the loose-fitting garments of the peasantry uncouth. She found fault with the construction of the gangplows that opened whole acres at a time behind patiently plodding herds of oxen. She didn’t like the food. Even the water—as clear as crystal, and as cold and sweet as might have sprung from any crevice in the Tolnedran mountains—offended her taste.

Silk, his eyes alight with mischief, rode at her side on the sunny midmorning of the last day of their journey from Mal Gemila. ‘Beware, your Majesty,’ he warned her slyly as they neared the crest of a hillside sheathed in pale spring grass so verdant that it almost looked like a filmy green mist. ‘The first sight of Mal Zeth has sometimes struck the unwary traveler blind. To be safe, why don’t you cover one eye with your hand? That way you can preserve at least partial sight.’

Her face grew frosty, and she drew herself to her full height in her saddle—a move that might have come off better had she been only slightly taller—and said to him in her most imperious tone, ‘
We
are not amused, Prince Kheldar, and
we
do not expect to find a barbarian city at the far end of the world a rival to the splendors of Tol Honeth, the only truly imperial city in the—’

And then she stopped—as they all did.

The valley beyond the crest stretched not for miles, but for leagues, and it was filled to overflowing with the city of Mal Zeth. The streets were as straight as tautly stretched strings, and the buildings gleamed—not with marble, for there was not marble enough in all the world to sheath the buildings of this enormous city—but rather with an intensely gleaming thick white mortar that seemed somehow to shoot light at the eye. It was stupendous.

‘It’s not much,’ Zakath said in an exaggeratedly deprecating tone. ‘Just a friendly little place we like to call home.’ He looked at Ce’Nedra’s stiff, pale little face with an artful expression. ‘We really should press on, your Majesty,’ he told her. ‘It’s a half-day’s ride to the Imperial palace from here.’

CHAPTER SIX

The gates of Mal Zeth, like those of Tol Honeth, were of bronze, broad and burnished. The city lying within those gates, however, was significantly different from the capital of the Tolnedran Empire. There was a peculiar sameness about the structures, and they were built so tightly against each other that the broad avenues of the city were lined on either side by solid, mortar-covered walls, pierced only by deeply inset, arched doorways with narrow white stairways leading up to the flat rooftops. Here and there, the mortar had crumbled away, revealing the fact that the buildings beneath that coating were constructed of squared-off timbers. Durnik, who believed that all buildings should be made of stone, noted that fact with a look of disapproval.

As they moved deeper into the city, Garion noticed the almost total lack of windows. ‘I don’t want to seem critical,’ he said to Zakath, ‘but isn’t your city just a little monotonous?’

Zakath looked at him curiously.

‘All the houses are the same, and there aren’t very many windows.’

‘Oh,’ Zakath smiled, ‘that’s one of the drawbacks of leaving architecture up to the military. They’re great believers in uniformity, and windows have no place in military fortifications. Each house has its own little garden, though, and the windows face that. In the summertime, the people spend most of their time in the gardens—or on the rooftops.’

‘Is the whole city like this?’ Durnik asked, looking at the cramped little houses all packed together.

‘No, Goodman,’ the Emperor replied. ‘This quarter of the city was built for corporals. The streets reserved for officers are a bit more ornate, and those where the privates and workmen live are much shabbier. Military people tend to be very conscious of rank and the appearances that go with it.’

A few doors down a side street branching off from the one they followed, a stout, red-faced woman was shrilly berating a scrawny-looking fellow with a hangdog expression as a group of soldiers removed furniture from a house and piled it in a rickety cart. ‘You had to go and do it, didn’t you, Actas?’ she demanded. ‘You had to get drunk and insult your captain. Now what’s to become of us? I spent all those years living in those pigsty privates’ quarters waiting for you to get promoted, and just when I think things are taking a turn for the better, you have to destroy it all by getting drunk and being reduced to private again.’

He mumbled something.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing, dear.’

‘I’m not going to let you forget this, Actas, let me tell you.’

‘Life does have its little ups and downs, doesn’t it?’ Sadi murmured as they rode on out of earshot.

‘I don’t think it’s anything to laugh about,’ Ce’Nedra said with surprising heat. ‘They’re been thrown out of their home over a moment’s foolishness. Can’t someone do something?’

Zakath gave her an appraising look, then beckoned to one of the redcloaked officers riding respectfully along behind them. ‘Find out which unit that man’s in,’ he instructed. ‘Then go to his captain and tell him that I’d take it as a personal favor if Actas were reinstated in his former rank—on the condition that he stays sober.’

‘At once, your Majesty.’ The officer saluted and rode off.

‘Why, thank you, Zakath,’ Ce’Nedra said, sounding a little startled.

‘My pleasure, Ce’Nedra.’ He bowed to her from his saddle. Then he laughed shortly. ‘I suspect that Actas’ wife will see to it that he suffers sufficiently for his misdeeds anyway.’

‘Aren’t you afraid that such acts of compassion might damage your reputation, your Majesty?’ Sadi asked him.

‘No,’ Zakath replied. ‘A ruler must always strive to be unpredictable, Sadi. It keeps the underlings off balance. Besides, an occasional act of charity toward the lower ranks helps to strengthen their loyalty.’

‘Don’t you ever do anything that isn’t motivated by politics?’ Garion asked him. For some reason, Zakath’s flippant explanation of his act irritated him.

‘Not that I can think of,’ Zakath said. ‘Politics is the greatest game in the world, Garion, but you have to play it all the time to keep your edge.’

Silk laughed. ‘I’ve said the exact same thing about commerce,’ he said. ‘About the only difference I can see is that in commerce you have money as a way of keeping score. How do you keep score in politics?’

Zakath’s expression was peculiarly mixed—half amused and half deadly serious. ‘It’s very simple, Kheldar,’ he said. ‘If you’re still on the throne at the end of the day, you’ve won. If you’re dead, you’ve lost—and each day is a complete new game.’

Silk gave him a long, speculative look, then looked over at Garion, his fingers moving slightly.—
I need to talk to you—at once
—

Garion nodded briefly, then leaned over in his saddle. He reined in.