It was not exactly a bonfire, but it came close. It was big enough at any rate to illuminate a fair-sized clearing and the dozen or more men gathered there. I’d seen that sort of gathering before, and I started biting off a number of colorful phrases with my beak.
The fellow who seemed to be in charge of the little group had black hair, a dense black beard, and he wore the robe of a priest of Belar. It was fairly obvious that the other men were all of Alorn descent, since they were not only tall and blond, but they were also all wearing bearskin tunics. Somehow the Bear-Cult had found its way to Sendaria.
Then Gelane entered the clearing, and he wasn’t carrying the canvas bag anymore, but he was wearing what had been inside. The heir to the Rivan throne was wearing a bearskin tunic.
That’s when I started pillaging extinct languages for swear-words. How could Gelane have been so stupid?
The eyes of the black-haired priest of Belar came alight as Gelane, shaggy but regal, entered the clearing. ‘All hail!’ the ecclesiast declaimed, gesturing toward my nephew. ‘All hail the Rivan King, Godslayer and overlord of the west! Hail him who will lead us against the infidels of the south – against Arendia, against Tolnedra, against snake-infested Nyissa! There shall he covert the heathens of the south with his mighty sword to the worship of the one true God, Belar of Aloria!’
Chapter 35
I considered what I’d just seen and heard as I flew back to Seline, leaving Gelane to bask in the adoration of his worshipers. Rational Bear-Cultists – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – had always maintained the superficial fiction that their hunger to ‘convert’ the southern kingdoms grew out of a desire to unify the armies which would move against the Angaraks. Belar, of course, had never said anything about a conversion of his allies prior to any war. Stealing the worshipers of his brother Gods would have been the worst form of bad manners. Belar has his faults, but discourtesy isn’t one of them. The notion of conversion had been added by radical clergymen with their eyes far more firmly fixed on the treasure-houses of Tol Honeth than upon heaven. The black-bearded priest back at the campfire was obviously a revisionist of the first order. Very few in the west knew that Torak wasn’t really dead, and his apparent demise had neatly removed the cult’s reason for existence. The pious pronouncement that the goal of the cult was the destruction of Torak rather than the looting of southern treasuries had evaporated at Vo Mimbre. The priest of the newly-formed cult of Gelane was fast on his feet, I’ll give him that much.
‘Father, I need you.’ I sent the thought out even as I was changing back into my own form in the street outside the barrel-works.
‘What’s the matter?’ his thought came back.
‘We’ve got a problem. You’d better get here as soon as you can.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get here. Somebody might be eavesdropping. Wear a different face.’ It was a logical precaution, but my real purpose had been to spur my indolent father into moving instead of talking. My life would be so much easier if father’d just do what he’s told to do instead of wasting time arguing with me.
It was just getting light when I felt him as he altered his form on the outskirts of Seline. Gelane, who’d crept back into the house long after midnight, was still asleep, so I took a broom and went outside. I was sweeping off the steps when a bald-headed fat man came up the street. I naturally knew who he was. Sometimes my father’s so enthralled by appearances that he forgets how unimportant they really are. People are who they are. How they look has very little to do with it. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. I’ll admit that my tone was a little waspish. Then I led him into the shaving-littered shop and showed him Gelane’s bearskin tunic.
‘How long’s this been going on?’ he demanded, speaking quietly in the dim light of the barrel-works.
‘I’m not positive, father. Gelane’s been evasive for about the last six months, and he’s been going out every night. Enalla thinks he’s being unfaithful.’
‘His wife?’
I nodded and put the tunic back into the cupboard. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I suggested. ‘We need to talk.’
We went on down the street a ways, and I filled him in on recent events. Then I endured his scolding for allowing this to happen, and we finally got around to what we were going to do about it.
My father’s extended – and extended and extended – ‘History of the World’ will tell those of you patient enough to plow through it that he followed Gelane the following evening and witnessed the ceremonial adulation of the local cult when my errant nephew reached the bonfire in the woods. Then, once he’d gotten his emotions under control, the Old Wolf called me, suggesting that I join him. I thought that was nice of him.
A lot of things fell into place when father identified the bearded priest as Chamdar. There are ways father could have conjured up Chamdar’s image for me, but for some reason, neither of us had thought of using one of them. We never did really find out how Chamdar’d tracked me down, but I can make a fairly educated guess. Somewhere in some tavern an idle wayfarer had mentioned ‘that lucky dog’, and there’d been a Dagashi present. Then Chamdar had come to Seline to have a look for himself – ah, well, it was too late to start looking for that ‘cave in the mountains’ now. Clearly, Ctuchik’s underling had leeched Gelane’s identity from the young man’s thoughts – as well as Gelane’s yearning for celebrity – and the rest had been easy. The local chapter of the Bear-Cult was clearly specious, but the members weren’t intelligent enough to recognize rampant revisionism when they saw it. Gelane received the recognition – and adulation – he so yearned for, and Chamdar got his hands on a Rivan King.
We absolutely had to sever that connection. I knew of a way to do that, and it was far less drastic than father’s notion of erasing Gelane’s mind would have been. There were dangers involved in making Chamdar’s rambling thoughts audible. If he were to become aware of what I was doing, he quite probably would have killed Gelane on the spot – or at least tried to. To prevent that, I had to overlay his awareness with a kind of reflective reverie. His mind had to wander sufficiently to dull his alertness. It wasn’t easy, which is why I chose to do it myself rather than just hand it over to father. My father tends in the direction of blunt force when he does something. Subtlety’s never been one of his strong points.