‘Centuries? Oh, come now, father. As powerful as those two contending Necessities are, a confrontation like that would destroy the whole universe. A single instant’s probably closer to the truth. Then, after the EVENT’S taken place, that particular Child of Light doesn’t really have any further need of the title, does he? He’s done what he’s supposed to do, and the title can be passed on. One Child of Light will take the sword down off the wall, another will carry it here from Riva, and it’ll be handed over to Brand. They’ll be passing the title along at the same time they pass the sword.’
‘I think you’re straining to make it all fit, Pol,’ he said.
‘Can you come up with anything else?’
‘Not really. I guess I’d better go to the Isle.’
‘Oh? What for?’
‘To get the sword, of course. Brand’s going to need it.’ He’d obviously leapt to a conclusion that seemed to me to have several large holes in it. He seemed to believe that he was going to be the Child of Light who’d take the sword down off the wall in the Hall of the Rivan King. By the time he got to Riva, though, mother’d already taken care of that, and the sword played no part in it. All glowing with blue light, she’d entered the Hall, removed the Orb from the pommel of Iron-grip’s sword, and embedded it in the center of a shield. I rather suspect that took some of the wind out of father’s sails. I also suspect that he began to understand – dimly – that mother wasn’t quite as dead as he’d believed. He seemed a bit crestfallen when he returned to Tol Honeth.
It was in the spring of 4874 that uncle Beldin returned again from southern Cthol Murgos to report that Urvon had left Rak Hagga to begin his trek across the continent. If General Cerran’s timetable was correct, we had less than a year to complete our preparations. One of those was already in progress. Brand reported to father that he was ‘hearing voices’. This isn’t the sort of thing a physician really wants to hear. When someone announces that he ‘hears voices’, the physician normally reserves a room for the poor fellow in the nearest asylum, since it’s a clear indication that the patient’s brains have sprung a leak.
Brand, however, hadn’t gone crazy. The voice he was hearing was that of the Necessity, and it was very carefully coaching him in exactly what he was going to have to do during his face-to-face confrontation with Torak. That confrontation was fast approaching, but for right now, our unseen friend was more concerned about the deployment of the Tolnedran forces. Quite obviously, General Cerran’s legions would tip the balance at Vo Mimbre. The problem, of course, was that the legions were in the south preparing to keep Urvon from reaching Vo Mimbre in time for the battle. The Necessity assured Brand that Urvon wasn’t going to be a problem, but convincing Cerran of that fact immediately raised yet another problem. ‘God told me so’ doesn’t really carry much weight in any argument. And the declaration that ‘I changed myself into a bird and flew on down there to have a look’ carries even less. We decided not to do it that way.
Then, in the early spring of 4875, Torak gave up at the Stronghold and started marching west. If Cerran’s timetable held true, the Angaraks would be at the gates of Vo Mimbre in about a month and a half – and the legions were still in the south. As I’d rather expected he would, UL took a hand in things at that point. The cat-eyed Ulgos came out of their caves by night and wreaked havoc in Torak’s sleeping army. The Angaraks didn’t move very fast after that.
It was while the Angaraks were cautiously inching their way across the mountains of Ulgo that Uncle Beldin gleefully advised my father that an unnatural snowstorm had buried Urvon and Ctuchik up to the ears in the great desert of Araga. And that, incidentally, explained the quarter-century-long rain-storm that’d plagued us all. The weather patterns had changed just in preparation for the blizzard that stopped Torak’s second army dead in its tracks.
Father was chortling with glee when he conveyed Beldin’s message to me, but he stopped chortling when I pointed out the fact that the blizzard wouldn’t mean anything until General Cerran knew that it’d happened. ‘I don’t think he’ll just take our word for it, father,’ I predicted. ‘He’ll demand proof, and there’s no way we can provide that proof – unless you’d like to pick him up and carry him down to that desert so that he can see for himself. He won’t abandon that southern frontier just on our say-so – particularly since both he and Ran Borune know that we’d really like their company at Vo Mimbre.’
We presented our information as having come from our ‘usual reliable sources’, and, as I’d suspected he might, General Cerran received the news with profound scepticism.
Eventually, it was Ran Borune who suggested a compromise. Half of the southern legions would come north, and the other half would stay where they were. Cerran was a soldier, so even when he received orders that he didn’t entirely agree with, he expanded them to make them work better. He added the eight ceremonial legions from Tol Honeth and nineteen training legions to make it appear that the Tolnedran presence at Vo Mimbre was larger than it really was. The ceremonial legions probably couldn’t march more than a mile without collapsing, and the raw recruits in the training legions could probably walk, but marching in step was still beyond their capabilities. When Torak looked out the window of his rusty tin palace, though, he’d see about seventy-five thousand legionaries bearing down on him, and he’d have no way of knowing that better than a third of them wouldn’t know which end of a sword was which. The Chereks would ferry the southern legions and the imaginary ones from around Tol Honeth and Tol Vordue to the River Arend. We could only hope that they’d get there in time.
Then the twins arrived, and they privately advised us that the battle would last for three days and that – as we’d expected – the whole issue would be decided by the meeting of Brand and Kal Torak. The chore facing my father and me was fairly simple. All we had to do was make sure that Torak didn’t reach Vo Mimbre before all our forces were in place, and that probably wouldn’t be much more difficult than reversing the tides or stopping the sun in its orbit.
The two of us left Tol Honeth as evening fell over the marble city, and we entered a grove of birch-trees a mile or so north of town.
‘You’d better tell him that you’ll be using our owl during all this, Pol,’ Mother’s voice suggested. ‘He won’t like it very much, but let’s get him into the habit of seeing the owl from time to time.’