Part One

KELL

CHAPTER ONE

THE AIR WAS thin and cool and richly scented with the odor of trees which shed no leaves but stood dark green and resinous from one end of their lives to the other. The sunlight on the snow-fields above them was dazzling, and the sound of tumbling water seething down and down rocky streambeds to feed rivers leagues below on the plains of Darshiva and Gandahar was constantly in their ears. That tumble and roar of waters rushing to their destined meeting with the great River Magan was accompanied by the soft, melancholy sighing of an endless wind passing through the deep green forest of pine and fir and spruce which clad hills that reached toward the sky in a kind of unthinking yearning. The caravan route Garion and his friends followed rose up and up, winding along streambeds and mounting the sides of ridges. From atop each ridge they could see yet another, and looming over all was the spine of the continent where peaks beyond imagining soared upward to touch the very vault of heaven, peaks pure and pristine in their mantle of eternal snow. Garion had spent time in mountains before, but never had he seen such enormous peaks. He knew that those colossal spires were leagues and leagues away, but the mountain air was so clear that it seemed he could almost reach out and touch them.

There was an abiding peace here, a peace that washed away the turmoil and anxiety that had beset them all on the plains below and somehow erased care and even thought. Each turn and each ridge top brought new vistas, each filled with more splendor than the last until they could only ride in silence and wonder. The works of man shrank into insignificance here. Man would never, could never, touch these eternal mountains.

It was summer, and the days were long and filled with sunlight. Birds sang from the trees beside the winding track, and the smell of sun-warmed evergreens was touched lightly with the delicate odors of the acre upon acre of wildflowers carpeting the steep meadows. Occasionally, the wild, shrill cry of an eagle echoed from the rocks.

‘Have you ever considered moving your capital?’ Garion asked the Emperor of Mallorea, who rode beside him. His tone was hushed. To speak in a louder voice would somehow profane what lay around them.

‘No, not really, Garion,’ Zakath replied. ‘My government wouldn’t function here. The bureaucracy is largely Melcene. Melcenes appear to be prosaic people, but actually they aren’t. I’m afraid my officials would spend about half their time looking at the scenery and the other half writing bad poetry. Nobody would get any work done. Besides, you have no idea what it’s like up here in the winter.’

‘Snow?’

Zakath nodded. ‘People up here don’t bother to measure it in inches. They measure it in feet.’

‘Are there people up here? I haven’t seen any.’

‘There are a few – fur-trappers, gold-hunters, that sort of thing.’ Zakath smiled faintly. ‘I think it’s just an excuse, really. Some people prefer solitude.’

‘This is a good place for it.’

The Emperor of Mallorea had changed since they had left Atesca’s enclave on the banks of the Magan. He was leaner now, and the dead look was gone from his eyes. Like Garion and all the rest, he rode warily, his eyes and ears constantly alert. It was not so much his outward aspect that marked the change in him, however. Zakath had always been a pensive, even melancholy man, given often to periods of black depression, but filled at the same time with a cold ambition. Garion had often felt that the Mallorean’s ambition and his apparent hunger for power was not so much a driving need in him as it had been a kind of continual testing of himself, and, at perhaps a deeper level, deriving from an urge toward self-destruction. It had seemed almost that Zakath had hurled himself and all the resources of his empire into impossible struggles in the secret hope that eventually he would encounter someone strong enough to kill him and thereby relieve him of the burden of a life which was barely tolerable to him.

Such was no longer the case. His meeting with Cyradis on the banks of the Magan had forever changed him. A world which had always been flat and stale now seemed to be all new to him. At times, Garion even thought he detected a faint touch of hope in his friend’s face, and hope had never been a part of Zakath’s make-up.

As they rounded a wide bend in the track, Garion saw the she-wolf he had found in the dead forest back in Darshiva. She sat patiently on her haunches waiting for them. Increasingly, the behavior of the wolf puzzled him. Now that her injured paw was healed, she made sporadic sweeps through the surrounding forests in search of her pack, but always returned, seemingly unconcerned about her failure to locate them. It was as if she were perfectly content to remain with them as a member of their most unusual pack. So long as they were in forests and uninhabited mountains, this peculiarity of hers caused no particular problems, but they would not always be in the wilderness, and the appearance of an untamed and probably nervous wolf on the busy street of a populous city would be likely to attract attention, to say the very least.

‘How is it with you, little sister?’ he asked her politely in the language of wolves.

‘It is well,’ she replied.

‘Did you find any traces of your pack?’

‘There are many other wolves about, but they are not of my kindred. One will remain with you for yet a while longer. Where is the young one?’

Garion glanced back over his shoulder at the little two-wheeled carriage trundling along behind them. ‘He sits beside my mate in the thing with round feet.’

The wolf sighed. ‘If he sits much longer, he will no longer be able to run or hunt,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘and if your mate continues to feed him so much, she will stretch his belly, and he will not survive a lean season when there is little food.’

‘One will speak with her about it.’

‘Will she listen?’

‘Probably not, but one will speak with her all the same. She is fond of the young one and takes pleasure in having him near her.’

‘Soon one will need to teach him how to hunt.’

‘Yes. One knows. One will explain that to one’s mate.’

‘One is grateful.’ She paused, looking about a bit warily. ‘Proceed with some caution,’ she warned. ‘There is a creature who dwells here. One has caught his scent several times, though one has not seen him. He is quite large, however.’

‘How large?’

‘Larger than the beast upon which you sit.’ She looked pointedly at Chretienne. Familiarity had made the big gray stallion less nervous in the presence of the she-wolf, though Garion suspected that he would be much happier if she did not come quite so close.