knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn’t argue. I sighed. ‘As my Master commands,’ I submitted regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I didn’t want it to escape me. But then I remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the Vale, so I swallowed my resentment – at least right there in front of him.
I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though. I put that poor man through absolute hell, I’m ashamed to admit. I degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he’d run away.
But he didn’t. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that sometimes made me want to scream. Didn’t the man have any spirit at all? To make matters even worse – to my profoundest mortification – he learned the secret of the Will and the Word within six months. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.
In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language, he wasn’t such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really wasn’t.
The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.
And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day – and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had the same thoughts at the same time and even finished each other’s sentences. Despite the fact that they’re Alorns, Belkira and Beltira are the gentlest men I’ve ever known. I’m quite fond of them, actually.
Makor was the next to arrive, and he came to us from so far away that I couldn’t understand how he had ever heard of my Master. Unlike the rest of us, who’d been fairly shabby when we’d arrived, Makor came strolling down the Vale dressed in a silk mantle, somewhat like the garb currently in fashion in Tol Honeth. He was a witty, urbane, well-educated man, and I took to him immediately.
Our Master questioned him briefly and decided that he was acceptable – with all the usual provisos.
‘But, Master,’ Belzedar objected vehemently, ‘he cannot become one of our fellowship. He is a Dal – one of the Godless ones.’
‘Melcene, actually, old boy,’ Makor corrected him in that ultra-civilized manner of his that always drove Belzedar absolutely wild. Now do you see why I was so fond of Makor?
‘What’s the difference?’ Belzedar demanded bluntly.
‘All the difference in the world, old chap,’ Makor replied, examining his fingernails. ‘We Melcenes separated from the Dals so long ago that we’re no more like them than Alorns are like Marags. It’s not really up to you, however. I was summoned, the same as the rest of you were, and that’s an end on it.’
I remembered the odd compulsion that had dragged me out of Gara, and I looked sharply at my Master. Would you believe that he actually managed to look slightly embarrassed?
Belzedar spluttered for a while, but, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he muffled his objections.
The next to join us was Sambar, an Angarak. Sambar – or Belsambar as he later became – was not his real name, of course. Angarak names are so universally ugly that my Master did him a favor when he renamed him. I felt a great deal of sympathy for the boy – he was only about fifteen when he joined us. I’ve never seen anyone so abject. He simply came to the tower, seated himself on the earth, and waited for either acceptance or death. Beltira and Belkira fed him, of course. They were shepherds, after all, and shepherds won’t let anything go hungry. After a week or so, when it became obvious that he absolutely would not enter the tower, our Master went down to him. Now that was something I’d never seen Aldur do before. He spoke with the lad at some length in a hideous language – old Angarak, I’ve since discovered – and turned him over to Beltira and Belkira for tutelage. If anyone ever needed gentle handling, it was Belsambar.
In time, the twins taught him to speak a normal language that didn’t involve so much spitting and snarling, and we learned his history. My distaste for Torak dates from that point in time. It may not have been entirely Torak’s fault, however. I’ve learned over the years that the views of any priesthood are not necessarily the views of the Gods they serve. I’ll give Torak the benefit of the doubt in this case – the practice of human sacrifice might have been no more than a perversion of his Grolim priests. But he did nothing to put a stop to it, and that’s unforgivable.
To cut all this windy moralizing short, Belsambar’s parents – both of them – had been sacrificed, and Belsambar had been required to watch as a demonstration of his faith. It didn’t really work out that way, though. Grolims can be so stupid sometimes. Anyway, at the tender age of nine, Belsambar became an atheist, rejecting not only Torak and his stinking Grolims, but all Gods.
That was when our Master summoned him. In his particular case, the summoning must have been a bit more spectacular than the vague urge that turned my face toward the Vale. Belsambar was clearly in a state of religious ecstasy when he reached us. Of course he was an Angarak, and they’re always a little strange in matters of religion.
It was Belmakor who first raised the notion of building our own towers. He was a Melcene, after all, and they’re obsessed with building things. I’ll admit that our Master’s tower was starting to get a bit crowded, though.
The construction of those towers took us several decades, as I recall. It was actually more in the nature of a hobby than it was a matter of any urgency. We did use what you might call our advantages in the construction, of course, but squaring off rocks is a tedious business, even if you don’t have to use a chisel. We did manage to clear away a lot of rock, though, and building material got progressively scarcer as the years rolled by.
I think it was late summer one year when I decided that it was time to finish up my tower so that I wouldn’t have it hanging over my head nagging at me. Besides, Belmakor’s tower was almost finished, and I was first disciple, after all. I didn’t think it would really be proper for me to let him outstrip me. We sometimes do things for the most childish of reasons, don’t we?
Since my brothers and I had virtually denuded the Vale of rocks, I went up to the edge of the forest lying to the north in search of building materials. I was poking around among the trees looking for a stream-bed or an outcropping of stone when I suddenly felt a baleful stare boring into the back of my neck. That’s an uncomfortable feeling that’s always irritated me for some reason. ‘You might as well come out,’ I said. ‘I know you’re there.’
‘Don’t try anything,’ an awful voice growled at me from a nearby thicket. ‘I’ll rip you to pieces if you do.’
Now that’s what I call an unpromising start. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I replied. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
That evoked the ugliest laugh I’ve ever heard. ‘You?’ the voice said scornfully, ‘You? Hurt me?’ And then the bushes parted and the most hideous creature I’ve ever seen emerged. He was grotesquely deformed with a huge hump on his back, gnarled, dwarfed legs, and long, twisted arms. This combination made it possible – even convenient – for him to go on all fours like a gorilla. His face was monumentally ugly,
