The Seeress of Kell Read Free

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 were not so much a driving need in him as they 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 that 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 that 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 makeup.
    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