The Younger Gods. David Eddings

to take care of it myself, but before I could even start, the whole Land of Dhrall was crawling with outlanders. You’ve got to learn to trust me, Dahlaine.’

      ‘Longbow suggested something you might want to consider, though,’ Zelana stepped in. ‘The assorted outlanders are helping us to hold back the Creatures of the Wasteland, but Longbow seems to think that it’s much more important that the more greedy outlanders come to realize that the people of the Land of Dhrall are quite capable of making life very unpleasant for any invaders. The outlanders are helping, but they’re also learning. The greed of the Amarite Church down in the Trogite Empire was almost legendary, but you dealt with that in a way that advised all outlanders that an attempted invasion of our part of the world could be a ghastly mistake.’

      ‘And your blue fire in Crystal Gorge made it more obvious,’ Dahlaine added. ‘Nobody in his right mind walks into fire. Some of the more greedy outlanders might want to come back, but I don’t think they will.’ He hesitated. ‘You seem to be very attached to us, for some reason,’ he said rather carefully.

      ‘You are my children,’ the glowing form replied, ‘and I will protect you. You’ve come a long, long way, but you might want to go back a bit and have a look at where – and when – this began.’

      Zelana’s mind suddenly reeled as memories came rushing back from so far in the distant past that there was no word for that many years. The suggestion of the hazy figure of glowing light had seemed to set off bells inside Zelana’s mind.

      Dahlaine’s eyes suddenly went very wide as – evidently – the same memories came flooding over him.

      ‘All in all, you did quite well, my son,’ Misty Lady continued. ‘Your notion of the Dreamers was brilliant, and it’s worked almost perfectly – except that you’ll have to come up with a way to persuade the Dreamers to reunite with their previous identities. Things are just a little touchy this time, however, so I want all of you children to back away and let me deal with the situation in Aracia’s Domain. It’s almost reached the point that she’d rather die than hand her Domain over to Enalla. We’ve got to get her under control, because she’s getting very close to total insanity. If she crosses that line, we’ll lose her, and that will lead to a disaster – not immediately maybe – but if she’s a raving lunatic when she wakes up from her sleep-cycle, the entire Land of Dhrall will be at risk – and that risk will make the invasion of the Creatures of the Wasteland look like some child’s game by comparison.’

       2

      Z elana was certain that it was just after sunrise when the commanders of the outlander forces, led by the bleak-faced Longbow, came through the door and out onto the balcony that encircled Dahlaine’s map room.

      ‘The map seems to have changed a bit,’ Longbow said, looking down at the map Dahlaine had put in place after Balacenia and the strange, mist-covered figure of ‘Mother’ had left.

      Dahlaine shrugged. ‘We’ve finished here in my part of the Land of Dhrall,’ he explained, ‘so I laid out a “lumpy map” of sister Aracia’s Domain. Ordinarily, we’d have relied on Aracia for a map, but her view of her Domain is just a bit vague, since she almost never leaves her temple.’

      ‘Being worshiped would probably take quite a bit of time,’ Sorgan Hook-Beak said, peering down at the well-illuminated map. ‘Just exactly where is this “temple-town” that’s got everybody so worked up?’

      Dahlaine reached out with his hand, and a bright beam of light came from his forefinger and illuminated a spot on the representation of the east coast.

      ‘That’s a useful idea there, Lord Dahlaine,’ Sorgan said, ‘particularly when we’re all standing ten feet or so above the map.’

      ‘It does seem to work fairly well,’ Dahlaine replied modestly.

      ‘And where’s this “Long-Pass” that everybody keeps on talking about?’

      Dahlaine’s glowing little spot of light moved along the eastern edge of the map to a sizeable replica of a bay with a fairly wide river running down to it.

      ‘Then the river’s not in any way connected to your sister’s temple-town?’ Sorgan asked.

      Dahlaine shook his head. ‘The east coast of the Land of Dhrall gets some savage floods almost every year,’ he explained. ‘Aracia didn’t want her temple destroyed that often, so she had her servants build it farther south where there aren’t any major rivers coming down out of the mountains. The ground’s sort of marshy, but Aracia’s workers laid in a substantial base before they started construction.’

      ‘How long ago was it when they built the temple?’ Keselo asked.

      ‘Eight – maybe ten – centuries ago, wouldn’t you say, Zelana?’ Dahlaine asked.

      ‘You couldn’t prove that by me, brother mine,’ Zelana replied. ‘I was living in my grotto on the Isle of Thurn then.’

      ‘Do all those priests who worship your sister plant crops of any kind near the temple?’ Sorgan asked.

      Dahlaine shook his head. ‘The farmers of Aracia’s Domain deliver large amounts of food to keep most of our sister’s priests quite fat, at least.’

      ‘Fat seems to show up quite often in the world of priests,’ Longbow observed.

      ‘Professional hazard, wouldn’t you say, big brother?’ Zelana suggested. ‘Priests spend much of their time stuffing food into their mouths.’

      ‘And that makes them so fat that their hearts wear out and they fall over dead,’ Dahlaine added.

      ‘Now there’s an idea,’ Rabbit said. ‘If we just happened to pile twenty or thirty tons of food on the steps of sister Aracia’s temple, her priests would eat themselves to death inside a week.’

      ‘I like that notion, brother,’ Zelana said. ‘We wouldn’t violate our limitations by providing food for dear Aracia’s priests, would we? And if they ate too much and fell over dead, it wouldn’t be our fault, would it?’

      Dahlaine squinted at the ceiling. ‘You might want to take that up with Mother, Zelana. If we feed Aracia’s priests too much and they die as a result, wouldn’t that almost be the same as poisoning them?’

      ‘Spoilsport,’ Zelana grumbled. ‘Can you imagine how much screaming would come from Aracia’s temple if she woke up one morning to discover that all of her priests had died during the night?’

      ‘We’ll keep the idea in reserve, dear sister,’ Dahlaine said. ‘Let’s push on, though.’ He looked at Narasan. ‘Who would you say is the head of sister Aracia’s priesthood?’

      ‘They call him Takal Bersla,’ Narasan replied, ‘and he’s almost as fat as Adnari Estarg of the Amarite Church was – before that overgrown spider had him for lunch. Bersla has made a career out of oration. He spends hours every day telling your sister how holy she is, and Aracia’s almost paralyzed by Bersla’s overdone speeches. Padan kept track one day not long after we’d arrived at Aracia’s temple, and Bersla talked to your sister for six straight hours. Then he ate lunch – a lunch that would have overstuffed four or five normal people – and then he stood up and orated for another five or six hours. The man’s a talking machine, but your sister can’t seem to get enough of all that tedious adoration.’

      ‘It sounds to me like she’s getting even worse, Dahlaine,’ Zelana observed. ‘She drinks in adoration in almost the same way that a drunkard pours beer into his mouth.’

      ‘It’s not a good sign, Lord Dahlaine,’ Sorgan said. ‘If her mind has slipped that far, getting her attention might be a little difficult.’

      ‘Not necessarily,