Guardians of the West

by David Eddings

  ‘Ce’Nedra!’ he said sharply. ‘You’ve got to wake up. Please don’t die, Ce’Nedra!’ But there was no sign, no movement from his wife. Still holding the amulet, Garion began to weep. ‘Aunt Pol,’ he cried brokenly, ‘what can I do?’

  ‘Garion?’ It was Aunt Pol’s startled voice, coming to him across the empty miles.

  ‘Aunt Pol,’ he sobbed, ‘help me!’

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Ce’Nedra. She—she’s been drowned!’ and the full horror of it struck him like some great, overwhelming blow, and he began to sob again, great, tearing sobs.

  ‘Stop that!’ Aunt Pol’s voice cracked like a whip. ‘Where?’ she demanded. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Here in the baths. She’s not breathing, Aunt Pol. I think she’s dead.’

  ‘Stop babbling, Garion!’ Her voice was like a slap in the face. ‘How long has it been since her breathing stopped?’

  ‘A few minutes—I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t have any time to lose. Have you got her out of the water?’

  ‘Yes—but she’s not breathing, and her face is like ashes.’

  ‘Listen carefully. You’ve got to force the water out of her lungs. Put her down on her face and push on her back. Try to do it in the same rhythm as normal breathing, and be careful not to push too hard. You don’t want to hurt the baby.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do as I say, Garion!’

  He turned his silent wife over and began to carefully push down on her ribs. As astonishing amount of water came out of the tiny girl’s mouth, but she remained still and unmoving.

  Garion stopped and took hold of the amulet again. ‘Nothing’s happening, Aunt Pol.’

  ‘Don’t stop.’

  He began pushing on Ce’Nedra’s ribs again. He was about ready to despair, but then she coughed, and he almost wept with relief. He continued to push at her back. She coughed again, and then she began to cry weakly. Garion put his hand on the amulet. ‘She’s crying, Aunt Pol! She’s alive!’

  ‘Good. You can stop now. What happened?’

  ‘Some woman tried to kill her here in the baths. Silk and Brand are chasing the woman now.’

  There was a long silence. ‘I see,’ Aunt Pol said finally. ‘Now listen, Garion—carefully. Ce’Nedra’s lungs will be very weak after this. The main danger right now is congestion and fever. You’ve got to keep her warm and quiet. Her life—and the baby’s—depend on that. As soon as her breathing is stronger, get her into bed. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  Garion moved quickly, gathering up every towel and robe he could find to make a bed for his weakly crying wife. As he covered her with a cloak, Silk returned, his face grim, and Brand, puffing noticeably, was right behind him.

  ‘Is she all right?’ the big Warder asked, his face desperately concerned.

  ‘I think so,’ Garion said. ‘I got her breathing started again. Did the woman get away?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Silk replied. ‘She ran upstairs until she reached the battlements. When she got up there, I was right behind her. She saw that there was no way to escape, so she threw herself off.’

  Garion felt a surge of satisfaction at that. ‘Good,’ he said without thinking.

  ‘No. Not really. We needed to question her. Now we’ll never find out who sent her here to do this.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Brand had gone sadly to the silent body of his niece. ‘My poor Arell,’ he said, his voice full of tears. He knelt beside her and took hold of the dagger protruding from her back. ‘Even in death, she served her queen,’ he said almost proudly.

  Garion looked at him.

  ‘The dagger’s stuck,’ Brand explained, tugging at it. ‘The woman who killed her couldn’t get it out. That’s why she was trying to drown Ce’Nedra. If she’d been able to use this knife, we’d have been too late.’

  ‘I’m going to find out who’s responsible for this,’ Garion declared from between clenched teeth. ‘I think I’ll have him flayed.’

  ‘Flaying is good,’ Silk agreed. ‘Or boiling. Boiling has always been my favorite.’

  ‘Garion,’ Ce’Nedra said weakly, and all thoughts of vengeance fled from Garion’s mind as he turned to her. While he held his wife close to him, he dimly heard Silk speaking quietly to Brand.

  ‘After somebody picks up what’s left of our would-be assassin,’ the little man was saying in a terse voice, ‘I’d like to have all of her clothing brought to me.’

  ‘Her clothing?’

  ‘Right. The woman isn’t able to talk anymore, but her clothing might. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn about someone by looking at his undergarments. We want to find out who was behind this, and that dead woman out there is our only clue. I want to find out who she was and where she came from. The quicker I can do that, the quicker we can start heating up the oil.’

  ‘Oil?’

  ‘I’m going to simmer the man who was behind this—slowly and with a great deal of attention to every exquisite detail.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Polgara arrived late that same afternoon. No one saw fit to raise the question of how she had crossed the hundreds of intervening leagues in the space of hours instead of weeks. The sentry who had been standing watch atop the battlements and who escorted her to the sickroom, however, had a slightly wild look in his eyes, as if he had just seen something about which he would prefer not to speak.

  Garion, at the moment she arrived, was in the midst of a discussion with one of the court physicians about the therapeutic value of bleeding, and the conversation had reached the point where he had just picked up a sword to confront the startled medical man who was approaching the bed with lancet in hand. ‘If you try to open my wife’s veins with that,’ the young king declared firmly, ‘I’m going to open yours with this.’

  ‘All right,’ Polgara said crisply, ‘that will do, Garion.’ She removed her cloak and laid it across the back of a chair.

  ‘Aunt Pol,’ he gasped with relief.

  She had already turned to face the four physicians who had been tending the little queen. ‘Thank you for your efforts, gentlemen,’ she told them. ‘I’ll send for you if I need you.’ The note of dismissal in her voice was final, and the four quietly filed out.

  ‘Lady Polgara,’ Ce’Nedra said weakly from the bed.

  Polgara turned to her immediately. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, taking Ce’Nedra’s tiny hand in hers. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘My chest hurts, and I can’t seem to stay awake.’

  ‘We’ll have you up and about in no time at all, dear,’ Polgara assured her. She looked critically at the bed. ‘I think I’m going to need more pillows, Garion,’ she said. ‘I want to prop her up into a sitting position.’

  Garion quickly went through the sitting room to the door leading to the corridor outside.

  ‘Yes, your Majesty?’ the sentry said as Garion opened the door.

  ‘Do you want to get me about a dozen or so pillows?’

  ‘Of course, your Majesty.’ The sentry started down the corridor.

  ‘On second thought, make that two dozen,’ Garion called after him. Then he went back to the bedroom.

  ‘I mean it, Lady Polgara,’ Ce’Nedra was saying in a weak little voice. ‘If it ever gets to the point where you have to make a choice, save my baby. Don’t even think about me.’

  ‘I see,’ Polgara replied gravely. ‘I hope you’ve purged yourself of that particular nonsense now.’

  Ce’Nedra stared at her.

  ‘Melodrama has always made me just ever so faintly nauseous.’

  A slow flush crept up Ce’Nedra’s cheeks.

  ‘That’s a very good sign,’ Aunt Pol encouraged her. ‘If you can blush, it means that you’re well enough to take note of trivial things.’

  ‘Trivial?’

  ‘Such as being embarrassed about how truly stupid that last statement of yours really was. Your baby�
��s fine, Ce’Nedra. In fact, he’s better off right now than you are. He’s sleeping at the moment.’

  Ce’Nedra’s eyes had gone wide, and her hands were placed protectively over her abdomen. ‘You can see him?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘See isn’t exactly the right word, dear,’ Polgara said as she mixed two powders together in a glass. ‘I know what he’s doing and what he’s thinking about.’ She added water to the mixture in the glass and watched critically as the contents bubbled and fumed. ‘Here,’ she instructed, handing the glass to her patient, ‘drink this.’ Then she turned to Garion. ‘Build up the fire, dear. It’s autumn, after all, and we don’t want her getting chilled.’

  Brand and Silk had rather carefully examined the broken body of the would-be assassin and had shifted their attention to her clothing by the time Garion joined them late that evening. ‘Have you found out anything yet?’ he asked as he entered the room.

  ‘We know that she was an Alorn,’ Brand replied in his rumbling voice. ‘About thirty-five years old, and she didn’t work for a living. At least she didn’t do anything strenuous enough to put calluses on her hands.’

  ‘That’s not very much to go on,’ Garion said.

  ‘It’s a start,’ Silk told him, carefully examining the hem of a blood-stained dress.

  ‘It sort of points at the Bear-cult then, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Silk replied, laying aside the dress and picking up a linen shift. ‘When you’re trying to hide your identity, you pick an assassin from another country. Of course, that kind of thinking might be a little too subtle for the Bear-cult.’ He frowned. ‘Now, where have I seen this stitch before?’ he muttered, still looking at the dead woman’s undergarment.

  ‘I’m so very sorry about Arell,’ Garion said to Brand. ‘We were all very fond of her.’ It seemed like such an inadequate thing to say.

  ‘She would have appreciated that, Belgarion,’ Brand said quietly. ‘She loved Ce’Nedra very much.’

  Garion turned back to Silk with a feeling of frustration boiling up in him. ‘What are we going to do?’ he demanded. ‘If we can’t find out who was behind this, he’ll probably just try again.’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ Silk said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘We can save a lot of time if we can catch somebody who’s still alive. You can only get so much out of dead people.’

  ‘I wish we’d been a little more thorough when we wiped out the Bear-cult at Thull Mardu,’ Brand said.

  ‘I wouldn’t get my mind too set on the notion that the Bear-cult was responsible for this,’ Silk told him. ‘There are some other possibilities.’

  ‘Who else would want to hurt Ce’Nedra?’ Garion asked.

  Silk sprawled in a chair, scratching absently at his cheek and with his forehead furrowed with thought. ‘Maybe it wasn’t Ce’Nedra,’ he mused.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s altogether possible, you know, that the attempt was directed at the baby she’s carrying. There could be people out there in the world who do not want there to be an heir to Iron-grip’s throne.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Grolims come to mind rather quickly,’ Silk replied. ‘Or the Nyissans—or even a few Tolnedrans. I want to keep an open mind on the matter—until I find out a few more things.’ He held up the stained undergarment. ‘I’m going to start with this. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to take it down to the city and show it to every tailor and seamstress I can find. I might be able to get something out of the weave, and there’s a peculiar kind of stitching along the hem. If I can find somebody to identify it for me, it might give us something to work on.’

  Brand looked thoughtfully over at the still, blanket-draped form of the woman who had tried to kill Ce’Nedra. ‘She would have had to have entered the Citadel by way of one of the gates,’ he mused. ‘That means that she passed a sentry and that she had to have given him some kind of excuse for coming in. I’ll round up every man who’s been on sentry duty for the past week and bring them all down here to have a look at her. Once we know exactly when she got in, maybe we can start to backtrack her. I’d like to find the ship she arrived on and have a talk with the captain.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Garion asked quickly.

  ‘Probably you should stay close to Ce’Nedra’s room,’ Silk suggested. ‘Any time Polgara leaves for any reason at all, you ought to go in and take her place. There could be other attempts, you know, and I think we’ll all feel better if Ce’Nedra’s guarded rather closely.’

  Under Polgara’s watchful eyes, Ce’Nedra spent a quiet night, and her breathing was much stronger the next day. She complained bitterly about the taste of the medicines she was required to drink, and Polgara listened with a great show of interest to the queen’s extensive tirade. ‘Yes, dear,’ she agreed pleasantly. ‘Now drink it all down.’

  ‘Does it have to taste so awful?’ Ce’Nedra said with a shudder.

  ‘Of course it does. If medicine tasted good, sick people might be tempted to stay sick so that they could enjoy the medicine. The worse it tastes, the quicker you get well.’

  Late that afternoon, Silk returned with a disgusted look on his face. ‘I hadn’t realized how many ways it’s possible to attach two pieces of cloth together,’ he grumbled.

  ‘No luck, I take it,’ Garion said.

  ‘Not really,’ Silk replied, throwing himself into a chair. ‘I managed to pick up all sorts of educated guesses, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘One tailor was willing to stake his reputation on the fact that this particular stitch is used exclusively in Nyissa. A seamstress told me very confidently that this was an Ulgo garment. And one half-wit went so far as to say that the owner of the garment was a sailor, since this stitch is always used to repair torn sails.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Silk?’ Polgara asked curiously as she passed through the sitting room on her way back to Ce’Nedra’s bedside.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get someone to identify the stitching on the hem of this thing,’ he said in a disgusted tone, waving the blood-stained shift.

  ‘Here. Let me see it.’

  Silk wordlessly handed her the garment.

  She glanced at it almost casually. ‘Northeastern Drasnia,’ she told him, ‘from somewhere near the town of Rheon.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Silk came to his feet quickly.

  She nodded. ‘That kind of stitching was developed centuries ago—back in the days when all the garments up there were made from reindeer skin.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ Silk said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I ran around with this thing all day long—up and down all those stairs and in and out of every tailor shop in Riva—and all I had to do to find out what I wanted to know was show it to you.’

  ‘That’s not my fault, Prince Kheldar,’ she told him, handing back the shift. ‘If you don’t know enough to bring these little problems to me by now, then there probably isn’t much hope for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Polgara,’ he said drily.

  ‘Then the assassin was a Drasnian,’ Garion said.

  ‘A northeastern Drasnian,’ Silk corrected. ‘Those people up there are a strange sort—almost worse than the ones who live in the fens.’

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Standoffish, closemouthed, unfriendly, clannish, secretive. Everybody in northeast Drasnia behaves as if he had all the state secrets in the kingdom tucked up his sleeve.’

  ‘Why would they hate Ce’Nedra so much?’ Garion asked with a puzzled frown.

  ‘I wouldn’t make too much of the fact that this assassin was a Drasnian, Garion,’ Silk told him. ‘People who hire other people to do their killing for them don’t always go looking for their hirelings close to home—and, although there are a lot of assassins in the world, very few of them are women.’ He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘I do think that I’ll take a trip up to Rheon and have a look around, however.’

 
As the chill of winter set in, Polgara finally declared that Ce’Nedra was out of all danger. ‘I think I’ll stay, though,’ she added. ‘Durnik and Errand can manage at home for a few months, and I’d probably no sooner get home than I’d have to turn around and come back.’

  Garion looked at her blankly.

  ‘You didn’t actually think that I was going to let anybody else deliver Ce’Nedra’s first baby, did you?’

  It snowed heavily just before Erastide, and the steep streets of the city of Riva became virtually impassable. Ce’Nedra’s disposition soured noticeably. Her increasing girth made her awkward, and the depth of the snow in the city streets had rather effectively confined her to the Citadel. Polgara took the little queen’s outbursts and crying fits calmly, scarcely changing expression, even at the height of the eruptions. ‘You do want to have this baby, don’t you?’ she asked pointedly on one such occasion.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Ce’Nedra replied indignantly.

  ‘Well then, you have to go through this. It’s the only way I know of to fill the nursery.’

  ‘Don’t try to be reasonable with me, Lady Polgara,’ Ce’Nedra flared. ‘I’m not in the mood for reasonableness right now.’

  Polgara gave her a faintly amused look, and Ce’Nedra, in spite of herself, began to laugh. ‘I’m being silly, aren’t I?’

  ‘A bit, yes.’

  ‘It’s just that I feel so huge and ugly.’

  ‘That will pass, Ce’Nedra.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I could just lay eggs—the way birds do.’

  ‘I’d stick to doing it the old way, dear. I don’t think you have the disposition for sitting on a nest.’

  Erastide came and passed quietly. The celebration on the island was warm, but somewhat restrained. It seemed as if the whole population was holding its breath, waiting for a much larger reason for celebration. Winter ground on with each week adding more snow to the already high-piled drifts. A month or so after Erastide there was a brief thaw, lasting for perhaps two days, and then the frigid chill locked in again, turning the sodden snowbanks into blocks of ice. The weeks plodded by tediously, and everybody waited.