The town of Vo Mandor surrounded the baron’s walled keep, and the town itself was also walled. It was approached by a long, steep causeway that was frequently interrupted by drawbridges designed to impede access. All in all, Vo Mandor was one of the bleaker places on earth.

The view from the top was magnificent, though.

Mandorin, the then-current baron, was a blocky widower in his mid-forties. He had massive shoulders, silver-shot dark hair, and a beautifully manicured beard. His manners were exquisite. When he bowed, the act was a work of art, and his speech was so sprinkled with interjected compliments that it often took him about a quarter of an hour to wend his way through a sentence.

I liked him, though. Isn’t that odd? Perhaps it’s a character defect. Good manners are such a rarity that I’ll endure excessive language and all sorts of bowing and scraping just to avoid the casual incivility so common in most of the rest of the world.

‘My Lady Polgara,’ the maroon-clad baron greeted me in the courtyard of his grim fortress, ‘the walls of my poor house do tremble as the very leaves at the presence of the paramount lady in all this world within their confines – e’en as the mountains themselves must be seized by convulsive ague as the sense of thy passage doth strike them into their very vitals.’

‘Nicely put, my Lord,’ I congratulated him. ‘Gladly would I linger in this happy place to hear more of thine exquisite speech, but necessity, that cruelest of masters, doth compel me to unseemly – even discourteous – haste.’ I’ve read my share of Arendish epics, and if Baron Mandorin thought he could outtalk me, he was greatly mistaken. I’ve learned over the years that the best way to deal with Arends is to talk them into insensibility. The only problem with that is that they’re as patient as stones, so it takes a while.

Eventually Baron Mandorin escorted me to his private study, a book-lined room carpeted and draped in blue high in the east tower of his castle, and we got down to business – after he’d fetched me a cushion to support my back in the already padded chair he offered me, set a plate of sweetmeats close at hand on the polished, dark wood table, sent for a pot of tea, and placed a footstool close by – just on the off chance that my feet might be tired.

‘Knowest thou my father, my Lord?’ I asked.

‘Holy Belgarath?’ he replied. ‘Intimately, my Lady – which doth raise the question whether any person in all this world could possibly know so towering an individual.’

‘I do, my Lord, and father doesn’t always tower. Sometimes he stoops, but we digress. It hath come to mine attention – and to my father’s – that there is discord in Arendia.’

Mandorin made a rueful face. ‘That, dear Lady, is the most cursory description of several eons of Arendish history it hath ever been my sad pleasure to hear. For ‘certes, discord lieth at the very soul of Arendish existence.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. In this particular situation, however, the discord hath its origins outside the boundaries of this most unhappy of realms. Wacune was rent by dissention, and Asturia hath but recently enjoyed the overturn of its government.’

‘Thou speakest as if these events had already passed into the pages of history, my Lady.’

‘Yes, my Lord, they did.’

‘I do surmise that it was thy hand which stilled the waves of contention in the northern duchies.’

‘I had some part in it, yes,’ I admitted modestly. ‘I exposed the identity of an outside agitator to Duke Kathandrion of Wacune and then proceeded on to Vo Astur and overthrew the government of the incompetent Duke Oldoran. Now I’ve come to Mimbre.’

‘I do sense a certain ominous tone in that particular pronouncement, my Lady.’

‘Set thy fears to rest, Baron Mandorin. Thine heart is pure, and thou hast nothing to fear from me. I doubt that I shall have occasion to turn thee into a toad nor stand thee on empty air some miles above us.’

He smiled and inclined his head slightly. ‘Prithee, my Lady,’ he said, ‘when we have leisure, might I beg instruction in the fine art of extravagant speech from thee?’

‘You’re doing fine already, Mandorin,’ I told him in ordinary language. ‘You don’t need any lessons. To work, then. In both Wacune and Asturia, there were men who seemed to be Tolnedran, but were not. They proposed to Kathandrion and separately to Oldoran an alliance with Ran Vordue, dangling the undisputed crown of Arendia before their eyes as a prize for acceptance. Doth this perchance resonate in any way within thy recent memory?’

I didn’t really need to ask, since his face had gone pale and his eyes were very wide.

‘It has a familiar ring to it, I gather?’

‘Indeed, my Lady. A similar proposal hath been broached to our own Duke Corrolin.’

‘I’d rather thought it might have been. Art thou, perchance, within the circle of Duke Corrolin’s immediate advisors?’

‘I do sit on the Privy Council,’ he admitted, ‘and I must confess that I was sore-tempted by this fortuitous offer of alliance with the mighty Tolnedran empire.’

‘I think I’ll need some details, Baron Mandorin. Before I can unseat an opponent, I need to know which horse he’s riding.’

He pondered that, evidently reassessing certain events which had recently taken place in Vo Mimbre. ‘Some months ago a Tolnedran diplomat did, in fact, arrive in the golden city with a proposal, which he assured Duke Corrolin did come directly from the Imperial throne. His credentials did appear immaculate.’

‘Did the Tolnedran ambassador to the court at Vo Mimbre recognize him, my Lord?’

‘The current ambassador from Tol Honeth had fallen ill a month perhaps ‘ere Kadon, the emissary in question, did enter the gates of Vo Mimbre. The illness is obscure, and it doth baffle the finest physicians in all of Mimbre. I do fear me that his Excellency’s days are numbered.’

‘Most convenient, my Lord. Coincidence, though rampant in this troubled world, doth sometimes require some small nudge from human agency to flower.’

‘Poison?’ he gasped, catching my meaning.

‘Quite possibly, my lord. I fear me that certain Nyissan compounds are entering the politics of the other western kingdoms. Prithee, expound unto me the details of the proposal carried to Vo Mimbre by the emissary Kadon.’

‘It doth bear a characteristic Tolnedran stamp, my Lady Polgara, for ‘certes, as all the world doth know, the Tolnedran mind is a masterpiece of complexity and devious motivation. In short, though it doth wound me sorely to offend thy delicate sensibilities by such brutal brevity, I shall speak unto thee in unadorned terms.’