Guardians of the West

‘Just let me get warm first,’ Silk said in a plaintive tone.

  They were delayed for several days just south of Aldurford by a savage blizzard that swept out of the mountains of Sendaria to howl across the open plains of northern Algaria. As luck had it, they reached the encampment of a nomadic band of roving herdsmen just as the storm broke and sat out the days of shrieking wind and driving snow in the comfortable wagons of the hospitable Algars. When the weather cleared at last, they pressed on to Aldurford, crossed the river, and reached the broad causeway that stretched across the snow-choked fens to Boktor.

  Queen Porenn, still lovely despite the dark circles under her eyes that spoke so eloquently of her sleepless concern, greeted them at the gates of King Rhodar’s palace. ‘Oh, Polgara,’ she said, overwhelmed with gratitude and relief as she embraced the sorceress.

  ‘Dear Porenn,’ Polgara said, enfolding the careworn little Drasnian Queen in her arms. ‘We’d have been here sooner, but we encountered bad weather. How’s Rhodar?’

  ‘A little weaker every day,’ Porenn replied with a kind of hopelessness in her voice. ‘Even Kheva tires him now.’

  ‘Your son?’

  Porenn nodded. ‘The next king of Drasnia. He’s only six—much too young to ascend the throne.’

  ‘Well, let’s see what we can do to delay that.’

  King Rhodar, however, looked even worse than Silk’s assessment of his condition had led them to believe. Errand remembered the King of Drasnia as a fat, jolly man with a quick wit and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Now he was listless, and his gray-hued skin hung on him in folds. He could not rise; perhaps even more serious was the fact that he could not lie down without his breath coming in painful, choking gasps. His voice, which had once been powerful enough to wake a sleeping army, had become a puny, querulous wheeze. He smiled a tired little smile of greeting when they entered, but after only a few minutes of conversation, he dozed off again.

  ‘I think I need to be alone with him,’ Polgara told the rest of them in a crisp, efficient voice, but the quick look she exchanged with Silk carried little hope for the ailing monarch’s recovery.

  When she emerged from Rhodar’s room, her expression was grave.

  ‘Well?’ Porenn asked, her eyes fearful.

  ‘I’ll speak frankly,’ Polgara said. ‘We’ve known each other too long for me to hide the truth from you. I can make his breathing a bit easier and relieve some of his discomfort. There are some things that will make him more alert—for short periods of time—but we have to use those sparingly, probably only when there are some major decisions to be made.’

  ‘But you cannot cure him.’ Porenn’s quiet voice hovered on the very edge of tears.

  ‘It’s not a condition that’s subject to cure, Porenn. His body is just worn out. I’ve told him for years that he was eating himself to death. He’s as heavy as three normal men. A man’s heart was simply not designed to carry that kind of weight. He hasn’t had any real exercise in the past several years, and his diet is absolutely the worst he could possibly have come up with.’

  ‘Could you use sorcery?’ the Drasnian Queen asked desperately.

  ‘Porenn, I’d have to rebuild him from the ground up. Nothing he has really functions right any more. Sorcery simply wouldn’t work. I’m sorry.’

  Two great tears welled up in Queen Porenn’s eyes. ‘How long?’ she asked in a voice scarcely more than a whisper.

  ‘A few months—six at the most.’

  Porenn nodded, and then, despite her tear-filled eyes, she lifted her chin bravely. ‘When you think he’s strong enough, I’d like to have you give him those potions that will clear his mind. He and I will have to talk. There are arrangements that are going to have to be made—for the sake of our son, and for Drasnia.’

  ‘Of course, Porenn.’

  The bitter cold of that long, cruel winter broke quite suddenly a couple of days later. A warm wind blew in off of the Gulf of Cherek during the night, bringing with it a gusty rainstorm that turned the drifts clogging the broad avenues of Boktor into sodden brown slush. Errand and Prince Kheva, the heir to the Drasnian throne, found themselves confined to the palace by the sudden change in the weather. Crown Prince Kheva was a sturdy little boy with dark hair and a serious expression. Like his father, the ailing King Rhodar, Kheva had a marked preference for the color red and he customarily wore a velvet doublet and hose in that hue. Though Errand was perhaps five years or so older than the prince, the two of them became friends almost immediately. Together they discovered the enormous entertainment to be found in rolling a brightly colored wooden ball down a long flight of stone stairs. After the bouncing ball knocked a silver tray from the hands of the chief butler, however, they were asked quite firmly to find other amusements.

  They wandered for a time through the echoing marble halls of the palace, Kheva in his bright red velvet and Errand in sturdy peasant brown, until they came at last to the grand ballroom. At one end of the enormous hall, a broad marble staircase with a crimson carpet down the center descended from the upper floors of the palace, and along each side of that imposing stair was a smooth marble balustrade. The two boys looked speculatively at those twin bannisters, both of them immediately recognizing the tremendous potential of all that slippery marble. There were polished chairs along each side of the ballroom, and each chair was padded with a red velvet cushion. The boys looked at the balustrades. Then they looked at the cushions. Then they both turned to be sure that no guard or palace functionary was in the vicinity of the large, double doors at the back of the ballroom.

  Errand prudently closed the doors; then he and Prince Kheva went to work. There were many chairs and many red velvet cushions. When those cushions were all piled in two heaps at the bottom of the marble stair railings, they made a pair of quite imposing mountains.

  ‘Well?’ Kheva said when all was in readiness.

  ‘I guess we might as well,’ Errand replied.

  Together they climbed the stairs and then each of them mounted one of the smooth, cool bannisters descending grandly toward the white marble floor of the ballroom far below.

  ‘Go!’ Kheva shouted, and the two of them slid down, gaining tremendous speed as they went and landing with soft thumps in the heaps of cushions awaiting them.

  Laughing with delight, the two boys ran back up the stairs again and once again they slid down. All in all, the afternoon went very well, until at last one of the cushions burst its seams and filled the quiet air of the grand ballroom with softly drifting goose down. It was, quite naturally, at that precise moment that Polgara came looking for them. Somehow it always happened that way. The moment anything was broken, spilled, or tipped over, someone in authority would appear. There was never an opportunity to tidy up, and so such situations always presented themselves in the worst possible light.

  The double doors at the far end of the ballroom opened, and Polgara, regally beautiful in blue velvet, stepped inside. Her face was grave as she regarded the guilty-looking pair lying at the foot of the stairs in their piles of cushions, with a positive blizzard of goose down swirling around them.

  Errand winced and held his breath.

  Very softly, she closed the doors behind her and walked slowly toward them, her heels sounding ominously loud on the marble floor. She looked at the denuded chairs lining each side of the ballroom. She looked at the marble balustrades. She looked at the two boys with feathers settling on them. And then, without any warning whatsoever, she began to laugh, a rich, warm, vibrant laugh that absolutely filled the empty hall.

  Errand felt somehow betrayed by her reaction. He and Kheva had gone out of their way to get themselves into trouble, and all she did was laugh about it. There was no scolding, no acid commentary, nothing but laughter. He definitely felt that this levity was out of place, an indication that she was not taking this thing as seriously as she ought. He felt a trifle bitter about the whole thing. He had earned the scolding she was denying him.

  ‘You boys will clea
n it up, won’t you?’ she asked them.

  ‘Of course, Lady Polgara,’ Kheva assured her quickly. ‘We were just about to do that.’

  ‘Splendid, your Highness,’ she said, the corners of her mouth still twitching. ‘Do try to gather up all of the feathers.’ And she turned and walked out of the ballroom, leaving the faint echo of her laughter hovering in the air behind her.

  After that, the boys were watched rather closely. There was nothing really obvious about it; it was just that there always seemed to be someone around to call a halt before things got completely out of hand.

  About a week later, when the rains had passed and the slush had mostly melted off the streets, Errand and Kheva were sitting on the floor of a carpeted room, building a fortress out of wooden blocks. At a table near the window Silk, splendidly dressed in rich black velvet, was carefully reading a dispatch he had received that morning from his partner, Yarblek, who had remained in Gar og Nadrak to tend the business. About midmorning, a servant came into the room and spoke briefly with the rat-faced little man. Silk nodded, rose, and came over to where the boys were playing. ‘What would you gentlemen say to a breath of fresh air?’ he asked them.

  ‘Of course,’ Errand replied, getting to his feet.

  ‘And you, cousin?’ Silk asked Kheva.

  ‘Certainly, your Highness,’ Kheva said.

  Silk laughed. ‘Must we be so formal, Kheva?’

  ‘Mother says I should always use the proper forms of address,’ Kheva told him seriously. ‘I guess it’s to help me keep in practice or something.’

  ‘Your mother isn’t here,’ Silk told him slyly, ‘so it’s all right to cheat a little.’

  Kheva looked around nervously. ‘Do you really think we should?’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ Silk replied. ‘Cheating is good for you. It helps you to keep your perspective.’

  ‘Do you cheat often?’

  ‘Me?’ Silk was still laughing. ‘All the time, cousin. All the time. Let’s fetch cloaks and take a turn about the city. I have to go by the headquarters of the intelligence service; and since I’ve been appointed your keeper for the day, the two of you had better come along.’

  The air outside was cool and damp, and the wind was brisk enough to whip their cloaks about their legs as they passed along the cobbled streets of Boktor. The Drasnian capital was one of the major commercial centers of the world, and the streets teemed with men of all races. Richly mantled Tolnedrans spoke on street corners with sober-faced Sendars in sensible brown. Flamboyantly garbed and richly jeweled Drasnians haggled with leather-garbed Nadraks, and there were even a few black-robed Murgos striding along the blustery streets, with their broad-backed Thullish porters trailing behind them, carrying heavy packs filled with merchandise. The porters, of course, were followed at a discreet distance by the ever-present spies.

  ‘Dear, sneaky old Boktor,’ Silk declaimed extravagantly, ‘where at least every other man you meet is a spy.’

  ‘Are those men spies?’ Kheva asked, looking at them with a surprised expression.

  ‘Of course they are, your Highness.’ Silk laughed again. ‘Everybody in Drasnia is a spy—or wants to be. It’s our national industry. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Well—I knew that there are quite a few spies in the palace, but I didn’t think they’d be out in the streets.’

  ‘Why should there be spies in the palace?’ Errand asked him curiously.

  Kheva shrugged. ‘Everybody wants to know what everybody else is doing. The more important you are, the more spies you have watching you.’

  ‘Are any of them watching you?’

  ‘Six that I know of. There are probably a few more besides—and of course, all the spies are being spied on by other spies.’

  ‘What a peculiar place,’ Errand murmured.

  Kheva laughed. ‘Once, when I was about three or so, I found a hiding place under a stair and fell asleep. Eventually, all the spies in the palace joined in the search for me. You’d be amazed at how many there really are.’

  This time, Silk laughed uproariously. ‘That’s really very bad form, cousin,’ he said. ‘Members of the royal family aren’t supposed to hide from the spies. It upsets them terribly. That’s the building over there.’ He pointed at a large stone warehouse standing on a quiet side street.

  ‘I always thought that the headquarters was in the same building with the academy,’ Kheva said.

  ‘Those are the official offices, cousin. This is the place where the work gets done.’

  They entered the warehouse and went through a cavernous room piled high with boxes and bales to a small, unobtrusive door with a bulky-looking man in a workman’s smock lounging against it. The man gave Silk a quick look, bowed, and opened the door for them. Beyond that somewhat shabby-looking door lay a large, well-lighted room with a dozen or more parchment-littered tables standing along the walls. At each table sat four or five people, all poring over the documents before them.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Errand asked curiously.

  ‘Sorting information,’ Silk replied. ‘There probably isn’t much that happens in the world that doesn’t reach this room eventually. If we really wanted to know, we could probably ask around and find out what the King of Arendia had for breakfast this morning. We want to go into that room over there.’ He pointed toward a solid-looking door on the far side of the room.

  The chamber beyond that door was plain, even bare. It contained a table and four chairs—nothing more. The man seated at the table in one of the chairs wore black hose and a pearl-gray doublet. He was as thin as an old bone, and even here, in the very midst of his own people, there was about him the sense of a tightly coiled spring. ‘Silk,’ he said with a terse nod.

  ‘Javelin,’ Silk replied. ‘You wanted to see me?’

  The man at the table looked at the two boys. He inclined his head briefly to Kheva. ‘Your Highness,’ he said.

  ‘Margrave Khendon,’ the prince responded with a polite bow.

  The seated man looked at Silk, his idle-appearing fingers twitching slightly.

  ‘Margrave,’ Kheva said almost apologetically, ‘my mother’s been teaching me the secret language. I know what you’re saying.’

  The man Silk had called Javelin stopped moving his fingers with a rueful expression. ‘Caught by my own cleverness, I see,’ he said. He looked speculatively at Errand.

  ‘This is Errand, the boy Polgara and Durnik are raising,’ Silk told him.

  ‘Ah,’ Javelin said, ‘the bearer of the Orb.’

  ‘Kheva and I can wait outside if you want to speak privately,’ Errand offered.

  Javelin thought about that. ‘That probably won’t be necessary,’ he decided. ‘I think we can trust you both to be discreet. Sit down, gentlemen.’ He pointed at the other three chairs.

  ‘I’m sort of retired, Javelin,’ Silk told him. ‘I’ve got enough other things to keep me busy just now.’

  ‘I wasn’t really going to ask you to get personally involved,’ Javelin replied. ‘All I really want is for you to find room for a couple of new employees in one of your enterprises.’

  Silk gave him a curious look.

  ‘You’re shipping goods out of Gar og Nadrak along the North Caravan Route,’ Javelin continued. ‘There are several villages near the border where the citizens are highly suspicious of strangers with no valid reason for passing through.’

  ‘And you want to use my caravans to give your men an excuse for being in those villages,’ Silk concluded.

  Javelin shrugged. ‘It’s not an uncommon practice.’

  ‘What’s going on in eastern Drasnia that you’re so interested in?’

  ‘The same thing that’s always going on in the outlying districts.’

  ‘The Bear-cult?’ Silk asked incredulously. ‘You’re going to waste time on them?’

  ‘They’ve been behaving peculiarly lately. I want to find out why.’

  Silk looked at him with one eyebrow raised. br />
  ‘Just call it idle curiosity if you like.’

  The look Silk gave him then was very hard. ‘Oh, no. You’re not going to catch me that easily, my friend.’

  ‘Aren’t you the least bit curious?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, I’m not. No amount of clever trickery is going to lure me into neglecting my own affairs to go off on another one of your fishing expeditions. I’m too busy, Javelin.’ His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. ‘Why don’t you send Hunter?’

  ‘Hunter’s busy someplace else, Silk, and stop trying to find out who Hunter is.’

  ‘It was worth a try. Actually I’m not interested at all. Not in the least.’ He sat back in his chair with his arms adamantly crossed. His long, pointed nose, however, was twitching. ‘What do you mean by “behaving peculiarly?”’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Silk repeated hastily. ‘I most definitely am not.’ His nose, however, was twitching even more violently. Angrily he got to his feet. ‘Give me the names of the men you want me to hire,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Of course, Prince Kheldar,’ Javelin said blandly. ‘I appreciate your sense of loyalty to your old service.’

  Errand remembered something that Silk had said in the large outer room. ‘Silk says that information about almost everything is brought to this building,’ he said to Javelin.

  ‘That might be an exaggeration, but we try.’

  ‘Then perhaps you might have heard something about Zandramas.’

  Javelin looked at him blankly.

  ‘It’s something that Belgarion and I heard about,’ Errand explained. ‘And Belgarath is curious about it, too. I thought you might have heard about it.’

  ‘I can’t say that I have,’ Javelin admitted. ‘Of course we’re a long way from Darshiva.’

  ‘What’s Darshiva?’ Errand asked.

  ‘It’s one of the principalities of the old Melcene Empire in eastern Mallorea. Zandramas is a Darshivan name. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No. We didn’t.’

  There was a light tap on the door.