A well-known defenestrator was retained to throw the irascible old alchemist from a high window in one of the towers of the University. The experiment had a three-fold purpose. What the various Departments wished to find out was: (a) If Senji was in fact unkillable, (b) what means he would take to save his life while plummeting toward the pavement, and (c) if it might be possible to discover the secret of flight by giving him no other alternative. What they actually found out was that it is extremely dangerous to threaten the life of a sorcerer—even one as inept as Senji. The defenestrator found himself translocated to a position some fifteen hundred meters above the harbor, five miles distant. At one instant he had been wrestling Senji toward the window; at the next, he found himself standing on insubstantial air high above a fishing fleet. His demise occasioned no particular sorrow—except among the fishermen, whose nets were badly damaged by his rapid descent. In an outburst of righteous indignation, Senji then proceeded to chastise the Department heads who had consorted to do violence to his person. It was finally only a personal appeal from the Emperor himself that persuaded the old man to desist from some fairly exotic punishments. (Senji’s penchant for the scatological had led him rather naturally into interfering with normal excretory functions as a means of chastisement.) Following the epidemic of mass constipation, the Departments were more than happy to allow Senji to go his own way unmolested.
On his own, Senji established a private academy and advertised for students. While his pupils never became sorcerers of the magnitude of Belgarath, Polgara, Ctuchik or Zedar, they were able to perform some rudimentary applications of the Will and the Word which immediately elevated them far above the magicians and witches practicing their art forms within the confines of the University.
It was during this period of peace and tranquillity that the first encounter with the Angaraks took place. Although they were victorious in that first meeting, the pragmatic Melcenes realized that eventually the Angaraks could overwhelm them by sheer weight of numbers.
During the period when the Angaraks turned their attention to the establishment of the Dalasian protectorates and Torak’s full concentration was upon the emerging Angarak kingdoms on the western continent, there was peace between the Angaraks and the Melcenes. It was a tentative peace— a very wary one—but it was peace nonetheless. The trade contacts between the two nations gave them a somewhat better understanding of each other, though the sophisticated Melcenes were amused by the preoccupation with religion which marked even the most worldly Angarak. Periodically over the next eighteen hundred years, relations between the two countries deteriorated into nasty little wars, seldom longer than a year or two in duration and from which both sides scrupulously avoided committing their full forces. Obviously neither side wished to risk an all-out confrontation.
In the hope of gaining more information about each other, the two nations ultimately established a time-honored practice. Children of various leaders were exchanged for certain periods of time. The sons of high-ranking bureaucrats in the city of Melcene were sent to Mal Zeth to live with the families of Angarak generals, and the sons of the generals were sent in turn to the Imperial capital to be raised there. The result of these exchanges was to produce a group of young men with a cosmopolitanism which in many was later to become the norm for the ruling class of the Mallorean Empire.75 It was one such exchange toward the end of the fourth millennium which ultimately resulted in the unification of the two peoples. At about the age of twelve, a youth named Kallath, the son of a high-ranking Angarak general, was sent to the city of Melcene to spend his formative years in the household of the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Minister, because of his position, had frequent official and social contacts with the Imperial Family, and Kallath soon became a welcome guest at the Imperial palace. The Emperor Molvan was an elderly man with but one surviving child, a daughter named Danera, who, as luck would have it, was perhaps a year younger than Kallath. Matters between the two young people progressed in a not uncommon fashion until Kallath, at the age of eighteen, was recalled to Mal Zeth to begin his military career. Kallath, obviously a young man of genius, rose meteorically through the ranks, reaching the position of Governor General of the District of Rakuth. He was by then twenty-eight, becoming thereby the youngest man ever to be elevated to the General Staff. A year later Kallath journeyed to Melcene, where he and Danera were married.
Kallath, in the years that followed, divided his time between Melcene and Mal Zeth, carefully building a power-base in each capital, and when Emperor Molvan died in 3829, Kallath was ready. There had been, of course, others in line for the Imperial throne, but during the years immediately preceding the old Emperor’s death, most of these potential heirs had died—frequently under mysterious circumstances. It was, nonetheless, over the violent objections of many of the noble families of Melcena that Kallath was declared Emperor of Melcena in 3830. These objections however, were quieted with a certain brutal efficiency by Kallath’s cohorts.
Journeying the following year to Mal Zeth, Kallath brought the Imperial Melcene army with him as far as the border of Delchin, where they stood poised. At Mal Zeth, Kallath delivered his ultimatum to the General Staff. His forces at that time were comprised of the army of his own district, Rakuth, as well as those of the eastern principalities in Karanda, where the Angarak military governors had already sworn allegiances to him. These forces, coupled with the Melcene Army on the Delchin border, gave Kallath absolute military supremacy on the continent. His demand to the General Staff was simple: he was to be appointed Overgeneral-Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of Angarak. There were precedents, certainly. In the past, an occasional brilliant general had been appointed to that office, though it was far more common for the General Staff to rule jointly. Kallath’s demand, however, brought something new into the picture. His position as Emperor of Melcena was hereditary, and he insisted that the office of Commander-in-Chief of Angarak also be inheritable. Helplessly, faced with Kallath’s overpowering military forces, the Angarak generals acceded to his demands. Kallath stood supreme on the continent. He was Emperor of Melcena and Commander-in-Chief of Angarak.
The integration of Melcena and Angarak which was to form modern Mallorea was turbulent, but in the end it can be said that Melcene patience won out over Angarak brutality. Over the years it became increasingly evident that the Melcene bureaucracy was infinitely more efficient than Angarak military administration. The first moves by the bureaucracy had to do with such mundane matters as standards and currency. From there it was but a short step to establishment of a continental Bureau of Roads. Within a few hundred years, the bureaucracy had expanded until it ran virtually every aspect of the life of the continent. As always, the bureaucracy gathered up every talented man in every corner of Mallorea, regardless of his race, and it soon became not at all uncommon for administrative units to be comprised of Melcenes, Karands, Dalasians and Angaraks. By 4400 the ascendancy of the bureaucrats was complete. In the interim, the title ‘Commander-in-Chief-of-Angarak’ had begun to gradually fall into disuse, in some measure perhaps because the bureaucracy customarily addressed all communications to ‘The Emperor’. Peculiarly, there appears not to have been a specific point at which ‘The Emperor of Melcene’ became the ‘Emperor of Mallorea’, and such usage was never formally approved until after the disastrous adventure in the west which culminated in the Battle of Vo Mimbre.
The conversion of the Melcenes to the worship of Torak was at best superficial. The sophisticated Melcenes pragmatically accepted the forms of Angarak worship out of a sense of political expediency, but the Grolims were unable to command the kind of abject submission to the Dragon God which had always characterized the Angarak.
In 4850, however, Torak himself suddenly emerged from his eons of seclusion. A vast shock ran through all of Mallorea as the living God of Angarak, his maimed face concealed behind the polished steel mask, appeared at the gates of Mal Zeth. The Emperor was disdainfully set aside and Torak once again
assumed his full authority as ‘Kal’—King and God. Messengers were immediately sent to Cthol Murgos, Mishrak ac Thull and Gar og Nadrak, and a council of war was held at Mal Zeth in 4852. The Dalasians, the Karands and the Melcenes were stunned by the sudden appearance of a figure they had always thought was purely mythical, and their shock was compounded by the presence of Torak’s Disciples, Zedar, Ctuchik and Urvon. Torak was a God, and did not speak except to issue commands. Ctuchik, Zedar and Urvon, however, were men, and they questioned and probed and saw everything with a kind of cold disdain. They saw immediately what Torak himself was strangely incapable of seeing—that Mallorean society had become almost totally secular—and they took steps to rectify that situation. A sudden reign of terror descended upon Mallorea. The Grolims were quite suddenly everywhere, and secularism was, in their eyes, a form of heresy. The sacrifices, which had become virtually unknown, were renewed with fanatic enthusiasm, and soon not a village in all of Mallorea did not have its altar and its reeking bonfire. In one stroke the Disciples of Torak overturned eons of rule by the military and the bureaucracy and returned the absolute domination of the Grolims. When they had finished, there was not one facet of Mallorean life that did not bow abjectly to the will of Torak.
The mobilization of Mallorea in preparation for the war with the west virtually depopulated the continent. The Angaraks and the Karands were eventually marched north to the land bridge crossing to northern-most Gar og Nadrak, and the Dalasians and Melcenes moved to Dal Zerba, where fleets were constructed to ferry them across the Sea of the East to southern Cthol Murgos. Torak’s overall strategy was profoundly simple. The northern Malloreans were to join with the Nadraks, the Thulls and the northern Murgos for the strike into Drasnia and Algaria; the southern Malloreans to join forces with the southern Murgos, await Torak’s command, and then march northwesterly. The goal was to crush the west between these two huge armies. The disaster which overtook the northern column at Vo Mimbre was in large measure set off by the lesser-known disaster which befell the southern forces in the Great Desert of Araga in central Cthol Murgos. The freak storm which swept in off the Great Western Sea in the early spring of 4875 caught the southern Murgos, the Melcenes and the Dalasians in that vast wasteland and literally buried them alive in the worst blizzard in recorded history. When the storm finally abated after about a week, the southern column was mired down in fourteen-foot snowdrifts which persisted until early summer. And then, with a sudden rise in temperature, the snow-melt turned the desert into a huge quagmire. It is now quite evident that the storm and the conditions which followed were not of natural origin. None of the various theories put forth to explain it, however, is quite satisfactory. Whatever the cause, the results were one of the great tragedies in human history. The southern army, trapped in that wasteland first by snow and cold and then by an ocean of mud, perished. The few survivors who came straggling back at the end of the summer told tales of horror so ghastly that they do not bear repeating.
The two-fold catastrophe which had occurred in the west, coupled with the apparent death of Torak at the hands of the Rivan Warder, utterly demoralized the societies of Mallorea and of the western Angarak Kingdoms. Expecting a counter-invasion, the Murgos retreated into fortified positions in the mountains. Thullish society disintegrated entirely, reverting to crude village life. The somewhat more resilient Nadraks took to the woods, and much of the independence of the modern-day Nadrak derives from that period of enforced self-reliance. In Mallorea, however, events took a different course. The doddering old Emperor emerged from retirement to reassume authority and to try to rebuild the shattered bureaucracy. Grolim efforts to maintain their control were met with universal hatred. Without Torak, the Grolims had no real power. Though most of his sons had perished at Vo Mimbre, one gifted child remained to the old Emperor, the son of his old age, a boy of about seven. The Emperor spent the few years remaining to him instructing, schooling and preparing his son, Korzeth, for the task of ruling his far-flung Empire. When advanced years finally rendered the old Emperor incompetent, Korzeth, then aged about fourteen, callously deposed his father and ascended the Imperial throne.
In the years following Vo Mimbre, Mallorean society had fractured back into its original components of Melcena, Karanda, Dalasia and ancient Mallorea. Indeed, there was even a movement in some quarters to further disintegrate the nation into those prehistoric kingdoms which had existed on the continent prior to the coming of the Angaraks. This movement toward separatism was particularly strong in the principality of Gandahar in southern Melcena, in Zamad and Voresebo in Karanda and in Perivor in the Dalasian protectorates. Deceived by Korzeth’s youth, these separatist regions rashly declared independence from the Imperial throne at Mal Zeth, and other districts and principalities, notably Ganesia, Darshiva and Likandia gave strong indications that they would soon follow suit. Korzeth moved immediately to stem the tide of revolution. The boy-emperor spent the rest of his life on horseback in perhaps the greatest internecine blood bath in history; but when he was done, he delivered a reunified Mallorea to his successor on the throne.
The new Emperors of Mallorea, the descendants of Korzeth, brought a different kind of rule to the continent. Prior to the calamity in the west, the Emperor of Mallorea had quite often been little more than a figurehead, and power had largely rested in the hands of the bureaucracy. Now, however, the Imperial throne was absolute. The center of power shifted from Melcene to Mal Zeth in keeping with the largely military orientation of Korzeth and his descendants. As is almost always the case when power is consolidated in the hands of one supreme ruler, intrigue became commonplace. Plots, ploys, conspiracies and the like abounded as various functionaries schemed to discredit opponents and to gain Imperial favor. Rather than move to stop these palace intrigues, the descendants of Korzeth encouraged them, shrewdly perceiving that men divided by mutual distrust and enmity would never unite to challenge the power of the throne.
’Zakath, the present Emperor, assumed the throne during his eighteenth year and gave early promise of enlightened rule. He appeared to be intelligent, sensitive and capable. It was a profound personal tragedy, however, which turned him from that course and helped to make him a man feared by half the world. In order for us to understand what happened to ’Zakath, we must first examine what was taking place in Cthol Murgos. As is generally the case when a nation survives for more than a few centuries, the Kings of Cthol Murgos may most conveniently be considered in dynasties.
Upon their first arrival in the west, the Murgos had debated the actual necessity for a king. Their aristocratic background, however, coupled with the fact that the nations around them all had kings, made the establishment of a Murgo throne inevitable. At first the Kings of Cthol Murgos were for the most part ceremonial, with the real power residing in the hands of the commanding generals of the nine military districts. The military commander of the District of Goska was elevated to the throne largely because he commanded the oldest military district in the kingdom and because it was decided early on that Rak Goska would be the capital the nation would present to the world.
In time, however, the Goska Dynasty became corrupt. The trappings of power with no real power behind them all too frequently leads to self-indulgence. While other kingdoms endure periodical bad kings in the hope of better successors, Murgos tend to be more abrupt. Thus, after several centuries of misrule by the admittedly limited kings of the Goska Dynasty, the military commanders of the other eight districts ruthlessly moved against the King and exterminated him, together with all his heirs, ministers and functionaries. The palace coup was followed by several decades of rule by a military Junta until, once again in need of a figurehead to present to the outside world, the generals offered the crown to the most capable of their number, the commander of the District of Gorut. The General of Gorut, however, declined to accept the crown unless the position of king was given a bit more meaning. This procedure has been repeated with every dynastic change-over until presently the King
of Cthol Murgos is the most nearly absolute monarch in the world.
The near-disaster which has enveloped Cthol Murgos for the past several centuries has been the result of an hereditary affliction strongly prevalent in the Urga Dynasty. The Urgas came to the throne with much promise, but the inherited affliction appeared in the second King, and has been almost inevitable in every Urga King since. The insanity in the house of Urga is difficult to diagnose, but it is characterized by extreme hysteria, suspicion, rapid fluctuation of mood, and ritualized behavior. In no Urga King have these symptoms been more pronounced than in the present occupant of the throne, Taur Urgas, the tenth Urga King.
The Rivan Codex Page 30