"Are you mad?" Zakath exclaimed.

"Probably not, but then crazy people never really know, do they? Those people are Dals, and I seriously doubt that any Dal has ever hurt anybody since the beginning of time."

The leader of the strange column halted at the foot of the knoll and pushed back the cowl of his white robe. "We have been awaiting you," he announced. "The Holy Seeress has sent us to see you safely to Kell."

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

King Kheva of Drasnia was irritable that morning He had overheard a conversation the previous evening between his mother and an emissary of King Anheg of Cherek, and his irritation grew out of a sort of moral dilemma. To reveal to his mother that he had been eavesdropping would of course be quite out of the question, and so he could not discuss with her what he had heard until she broached the subject herself. It seemed quite unlikely that she would do so, and so Kheva was at an impasse.

It should be stated here that King Kheva was not really the sort of boy who would normally intrude on his mother's privacy He was basically a decent lad. But he was also a Drasnian. There is a national trait among Drasnians which, for want of a better term, might be called curiosity. All people are curious to a certain degree, but in Drasnians the trait was quite nearly compulsive. Some contended that it was their innate curiosity which has made spying their national industry. Others maintained with equal vigor that generations of spying had honed the Drasnians' natural curiosity to a fine edge. The debate was much like the endless argument about the chicken and the egg, and almost as pointless. Quite early in life, Kheva had trailed unobtrusively along behind one of the official court spies and thereby discovered the closet hidden behind the east wall of his mother's sitting room. Periodically he would slip into that closet in order to keep track of affairs of state and any other matters of interest. He was the king, after all, and thus he had a perfect right to the information. He reasoned that by spying, he could obtain it while sparing his mother the inconvenience of passing it on to him. Kheva was a considerate boy.

The conversation in question had concerned the mysterious disappearance of the Earl of Trellheim, his ship Seabird, and a number of other individuals, including Trellheim's son Unrak. Barak, Earl of Trellheim, was considered in some quarters to be an unreliable sort, and his companions in this vanishing were, if anything, even worse. The Alorn kings were disquieted by the potential for disaster represented by Barak and his cohorts roaming loose in the Gods only knew what ocean.