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of course, was an unmitigated disaster. Preparations were then
made for a full-scale invasion of the Isle, until the now-famous note
from the Cherek ambassador persuaded the Emperor to abandon
the entire project.
In time the Rivans grudgingly consented to the construction of a
commercial enclave outside the city walls, and visiting merchants
were forced to be content with that single concession.
By custom, no merchant or emissary is ever permitted inside the
walls of the city itself, and most certainly not within the fortress at
the center of the city.
* This xenophobic restriction was significantly relaxed during the actual
writing.
There are but two exceptions to this. The first is the Alorn Council
which occurs once each ten years and during which the kings of
Algaria, Drasnia, Cherek and sometimes of Sendaria (when the King
of Sendaria chances to be an Alorn) journey to Riva and are
conveyed - alone - to the Rivan throne-room where, it is rumored,
they report to the Rivan Warder concerning the search for the heir to
the Rivan Throne. The other exception to this rule is in accordance
with the humiliating agreement of Vo Mimbre which requires that
each Tolnedran Imperial Princess present herself in her wedding
gown before a Rivan Throne for a three-day period on her sixteenth
birthday.
Note-Tolnedran Princesses for the past five hundred years since the great
Battle at Vo Mimbre have reported that the entire city of Riva is little
more than a walled defensive position with individual houses forming
salients, redoubts, bastions and the like, and that the streets are laid out
in such fashion that they are overlooked by and exposed to overhead
attack by each succeeding row of thick-walled houses. Moreover, the
roofs of Rivan houses are all of slate, and there is nothing exposed
within the city which will burn. The Fortress is a sheer tower with
enormously thick walls and but one very narrow iron door. The
throneroom is reported to be a very large chamber, musty and unused, in
which sits the Rivan Throne, a large seat of black basalt with a rusted
sword embedded, point downward in the back and having a large
greyish-colored pommel-stone - possibly some artifact or souvenir out
of the dim reaches of the Rivan past.
For the first thousand years of its history' the Isle of the Winds was
deliberately isolated, cut off from all contact with the civilized
world. For reasons which are largely unclear, Cherek warships
maintained a continual blockade of the port of Riva, allowing no
vessels of any nation to land there. Convinced that there was
enormous wealth on the island, Tolnedran and Sendarian merchants
pressured the Emperor at Tol Honeth for several generations to
force the Cherek Alorns to lift their blockade. This was finally
accomplished in the Accords of Val Alorn of 3097, and a horde of
Tolnedran and Sendarian ships descended on the harbor at Riva
only to be met by unscalable walls and a silent, locked gate. The
details of the efforts to persuade the Rivans to trade were discussed
elsewhere (see The History of Tolnedra).
The controversy ultimately was resolved peacefully, although for
time the west hovered perilously near the brink of open and
general war.
The single most significant event in Rivan history was the
assassination of King Corek the Wise by a party of Nyissan merchants,
apparently upon the instruction of the Nyissan Queen in 4002. The