‘They’re your countrymen, Mandorin. That in itself should oblige you to warn them.’
‘They are mine enemies,’ he said stubbornly.
‘They’re still human. Decency alone should spur you to warn them, and you are a decent man.’
That got his attention. His face was troubled for a moment or so, but he finally came around. ‘It shall be as you say, Ancient One,’ he promised. ‘It shall not truly be necessary, however.’
‘Oh?’
‘Once we have concluded our business with the Asturians, I shall myself, with some few companions, mount an expedition into the mountains of Ulgo. Methinks it will be no great chore to exterminate these troublesome creatures.’
Mandorallen himself would not have said it any differently.
It was about fifteen hundred years after the cracking of the world when Beldin came back from Mallorea to fill us in on Torak and his Angaraks. Belmakor left his entertainments in Maragor to join us, but there was still no sign of Belzedar.
We gathered in the Master’s tower and took our usual chairs. The fact that Belzedar’s chair was empty bothered us all, I think.
‘It was absolute chaos in Mallorea for a while,’ Beldin reported. ‘The Grolims from Mal Yaska were selecting their sacrificial victims almost exclusively from the officer corps of the army, and the Generals were arresting and executing every Grolim they could lay their hands on, charging them with all sorts of specious crimes. Finally Torak got wind of it, and he put a stop to it.’
‘Pity,’ Belmakor murmured. ‘What did he do?’
‘He summoned the military high command and the Grolim hierarchy to Cthol Mishrak and delivered an ultimatum. He told them that if they didn’t stop their secret little war, they could all just jolly well pick up and move to Cthol Mishrak where he could keep an eye on them. That got their immediate attention. They could live in at least semi-autonomy in Mal Zeth and Mal Yaska, and the climate in those two cities isn’t all that bad. Cthol Mishrak’s like a suburb of Hell. It’s on the southern edge of an arctic swamp, and it’s so far north that the days are only about two hours long in the winter time - if you can call what comes after dawn up there “day”. Torak’s put a perpetual cloud-bank over the place, so it never really gets light. “Cthol Mishrak” means “the City of Endless Night”, and that comes fairly close to describing it. The sun never touches the ground, so the only thing that grows around there is fungus.’
Beltira shuddered. ‘Why would he do that?’ he asked, his expression baffled.
Beldin shrugged. ‘Who knows why Torak does anything? He’s crazy. Maybe he’s trying to hide his face. I think that what finally brought the generals and the Grolims to heel, though, was the fact that the disciple Ctuchik runs things in Cthol Mishrak. I’ve met Urvon, and he can chill the blood of a snake just by looking at it. Ctuchik’s reputed to be even worse.’
‘Have you found out who the third disciple is yet?’ I asked.
Beldin shook his head. ‘Nobody’s willing to talk about him. I get the impression that he’s not an Angarak.’
‘That is very unlike my brother,’ Aldur mused. ‘Torak doth hold the other races of man in the profoundest of contempt.’
‘I could be wrong, Master,’ Beldin admitted, ‘but the Angaraks themselves seem to believe that he’s not one of them. Anyway, the threat of being required to return to Cthol Mishrak brought out the peaceful side of Urvon’s nature, and Urvon rules in Mal Yaska. He started making peace overtures to the generals almost immediately.’
‘Does Urvon really have that much autonomy?’ Belkira asked.
‘Up to a point, yes. Torak concentrates on the Orb and leaves the administrative details to his disciples. Ctuchik’s absolute master in Cthol Mishrak, and Urvon sits on a throne in Mal Yaska. He adores being adored. The only other power center in Angarak Mallorea is Mal Zeth. Logic suggests that Torak’s third disciple is there - probably working behind the scenes. Anyway, once Urvon and the generals declared peace on each other, Torak told them to behave themselves and sent them home. They hammered out the details later. The Grolims have absolute sway in Mal Yaska, and the generals in Mal Zeth. All the other towns and districts are ruled jointly. Neither side likes it very much, but they don’t have much choice.’
‘Is that the way things stand right now?’ Belkira asked.
‘It’s moved on a bit from there. Once the generals got the Grolims out of their hair, they were free to turn their attention to the Karands.’
‘Ugly brutes,’ Belmakor observed. ‘The first time I saw one, I couldn’t believe he was human.’
‘They’ve been sort of humanized now,’ Beldin told him. ‘The Angaraks started having trouble with the Karands almost as soon as they came up out of the Dalasian Mountains. The Karands have a sort of loose confederation of seven kingdoms in the northeast quadrant of the continent. Torak’s new ocean did some radical things to the climate up there. They’d been in the middle of an ice age in Karanda - lots of snow, glaciers, and all that, but all the steam that came boiling out of the crack in the world melted it off almost overnight. There used to be a little stream called the Magan that meandered down out of the Karandese Mountains in a generally southeasterly direction until it emptied out into the ocean down in Gandahar. When the glaciers melted all at once, it stopped being so gentle. It gouged a huge trench three quarters of the way across the continent. That sent the Karands off in search of high ground. Unfortunately, the high ground they located just happened to be in lands claimed by the Angaraks.’
‘I wouldn’t call it all that unfortunate,’ Belmakor said. ‘If the Angaraks are busy with the Karands, they won’t come pestering us.’
‘The unfortunate part came later,’ Beldin told him. ‘As long as the generals were squabbling with the Grolims, they didn’t have time to deal with the Karands. Once Torak settled that particular problem, the generals moved their army up to the borders of the Karandese Kingdom of Pallia, and then they invaded. The Karands were no match for them, and they crushed Pallia in about a month. The Grolims started sharpening their gutting knives, but the generals wanted to leave Pallia intact - paying tribute, of course. They suggested that the Karands in Pallia be converted to the worship of Torak. That made the Grolims crazy. The notion of Angarak superiority may have originated with Torak, but the Grolims picked it up and ran with it. So far as they were concerned, the other races of mankind were good only as slaves or sacrifices. Anyway, to keep it short, Torak thought it over and eventually sided with the military. Their solution gives him more worshipers, for one thing, and it’ll give him a much bigger army just in case Belar ever finds a way to lead his Alorns onto the Mallorean continent. Alorns seem to make Torak nervous, for some reason.’
‘You know,’ Belmakor said, ‘they have the same effect on me. Maybe it has something to do with their tendency to go berserk at the slightest provocation.’
‘Torak took the whole idea one step further,’ Beldin went on. ‘He wasn’t satisfied with just Pallia. He ordered the Grolims to go out and convert all of Karanda. “I will have them all”, he told the Grolims. “Any man who liveth in all of boundless Mallorea shall bow down to me, and if any of ye shirk in this stern responsibility, ye shall feel my displeasure most keenly”. That got the Grolims’ attention, and they went out to convert the heathens.’
‘This is troubling,’ Aldur said. ‘So long as my brother had only his Angaraks, we could easily match his numbers. His decision to accept other races alters our circumstances.’
‘He’s not having all that much success, Master,’ Beldin advised him. ‘He succeeded in converting the Karands, largely because his army’s superior to those howling barbarians, but when the generals got to the borders of the Melcene Empire, they ran head-on into elephant cavalry. It was very messy, I’m told. The generals pulled back and swept down into Dalasia instead.’ He looked at Belmakor. ‘I thought you said that the Dals had cities down there.’
‘They used to - at least they did the last time I was there.’
‘Well, there aren’t any there now - except for Kell, of course. When the Angaraks moved in, there wasn’t anything there but farming villages with mud and wattle huts.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Belmakor asked in bafflement. ‘They had beautiful cities. Tol Honeth looks like a slum by comparison.’
‘They had reasons,’ Aldur assured him. ‘The destruction of their cities was a subterfuge to keep the Angaraks from realizing how sophisticated they really are.’
‘They didn’t look all that sophisticated to me,’ Beldin said. ‘They still plow their fields with sticks, and they’ve got almost as much spirit as sheep.’
‘Also a subterfuge, my son.’
‘The Angaraks didn’t have any trouble converting them, Master. The idea of having a God after all these eons - even a God like Torak - brought them in by the thousands. Was that a pretense, too?’
Aldur nodded. ‘The Dals will go to any lengths to conceal their real tasks from the unlearned.’