Magician's Gambit

1

Her Imperial Highness, Princess Ce’Nedra, jewel of the House of Borune and the loveliest flower of the Tolnedran Empire, sat cross-legged on a sea chest in the oak-beamed cabin beneath the stern of Captain Greldik’s ship, nibbling thoughtfully on the end of a tendril of her coppery hair as she watched the Lady Polgara attend to the broken arm of Belgarath the Sorcerer. The princess wore a short, pale-green Dryad tunic, and there was a smudge of ash on one of her cheeks. On the deck above she could hear the measured beat of the drum that paced the oar strokes of Greldik’s sailors as they rowed upstream from the ash-choked city of Sthiss Tor.

It was all absolutely dreadful, she decided. What had begun as merely another move in the interminable game of authority and rebellion against it that she had been playing with her father, the Emperor, for as long as she could remember had suddenly turned deadly serious. She had never really intended for things to go this far when she and Master Jeebers had crept from the Imperial Palace in Tol Honeth that night so many weeks ago. Jeebers had soon deserted her—he had been no more than a temporary convenience, anyway—and now she was caught up with this strange group of grim-faced people from the north in a quest she could not even understand. The Lady Polgara, whose very name sent a chill through the princess, had rather bluntly informed her in the Wood of the Dryads that the game was over and that no evasion, wheedling, or coaxing would alter the fact that she, Princess Ce’Nedra, would stand in the Hall of the Rivan King on her sixteenth birthday—in chains if necessary. Ce’Nedra knew with absolute certainty that Lady Polgara had meant exactly that, and she had a momentary vision of being dragged, clanking and rattling in her chains, to stand in total humiliation in that grim hall while hundreds of bearded Alorns laughed at her. That had to be avoided at any cost. And so it had been that she had accompanied them—not willingly, perhaps—but never openly rebellious. The hint of steel in Lady Polgara’s eyes always seemed to carry with it the suggestion of manacles and clinking chains, and that suggestion cowed the princess into obedience far more than all the Imperial power her father possessed had ever been able to do.

Ce’Nedra had only the faintest idea of what these people were doing. They seemed to be following someone or something, and the trail had led them here into the snake-infested swamps of Nyissa. Murgos seemed to be somehow involved, throwing frightful obstacles in their path, and Queen Salmissra also seemed to take an interest, even going so far as to have young Garion abducted.

Ce’Nedra interrupted her musing to look across the cabin at the boy. Why would the queen of Nyissa want him? He was so ordinary. He was a peasant, a scullion, a nobody. He was a nice enough boy, certainly, with rather plain, sandy hair that kept tumbling down across his forehead, making her fingers itch to push it back. He had a nice enough face—in a plain sort of way—and he was somebody she could talk to when she was lonely or frightened, and somebody she could fight with when she felt peevish, since he was only slightly older than she was. But he completely refused to treat her with the respect due her—he probably didn’t even know how. Why all this excruciating interest in him? She pondered that, looking thoughtfully at him.

She was doing it again. Angrily she jerked her eyes from his face. Why was she always watching him? Each time her thoughts wandered, her eyes automatically sought out his face, and it wasn’t really that exciting a face to look at. She had even caught herself making up excuses to put herself into places where she could watch him. It was stupid!

Ce’Nedra nibbled at her hair and thought and nibbled some more, until once again her eyes went back to their minute study of Garion’s features.

“Is he going to be all right?” Barak, the Earl of Trellheim, rumbled, tugging absently at his great red beard as he watched the Lady Polgara put the finishing touches on Belgarath’s sling.

“It’s a simple break,” she replied professionally, putting away her bandages. “And the old fool heals fast.”

Belgarath winced as he shifted his newly splinted arm. “You didn’t have to be so rough, Pol.” His rust-colored old tunic showed several dark mud smears and a new rip, evidence of his encounter with a tree.

“It had to be set, father,” she told him. “You didn’t want it to heal crooked, did you?”

“I think you actually enjoyed it,” he accused.

“Next time you can set it yourself,” she suggested coolly, smoothing her gray dress.

“I need a drink,” Belgarath grumbled to the hulking Barak.

The Earl of Trellheim went to the narrow door. “Would you have a tankard of ale brought for Belgarath?” he asked the sailor outside.

“How is he?” the sailor inquired.

“Bad-tempered,” Barak replied. “And he’ll probably get worse if he doesn’t get a drink pretty soon.”

“I’ll go at once,” the sailor said.

“Wise decision.”

This was yet another confusing thing for Ce’Nedra. The noblemen in their party all treated this shabby-looking old man with enormous respect; but so far as she could tell, he didn’t even have a title. She could determine with exquisite precision the exact difference between a baron and a general of the Imperial Legions, between a grand duke of Tolnedra and a crown prince of Arendia, between the Rivan Warder and the king of the Chereks; but she had not the faintest idea where sorcerers fit in. The materially oriented mind of Tolnedra refused even to admit that sorcerers existed. While it was quite true that Lady Polgara, with titles from half the kingdoms of the West, was the most respected woman in the world, Belgarath was a vagabond, a vagrant, frequently a public nuisance. And Garion, she reminded herself, was his grandson.

“I think it’s time you told us what happened, father,” Lady Polgara was saying to her patient.

“I’d really rather not talk about it,” he replied shortly.

She turned to Prince Kheldar, the peculiar little Drasnian nobleman with the sharp face and sardonic wit, who lounged on a bench with an impudent expression on his face. “Well, Silk?” she asked him.

“I’m sure you can see my position, old friend,” the prince apologized to Belgarath with a great show of regret. “If I try to keep secrets, she’ll only force things out of me—unpleasantly, I imagine.”

Belgarath looked at him with a stony face, then snorted with disgust.

“It’s not that I want to say anything, you realize.”

Belgarath turned away.

“I knew you’d understand.”

“The story, Silk!” Barak insisted impatiently. “It’s really very simple,” Kheldar told him.

“But you’re going to complicate it, right?”

“Just tell us what happened, Silk,” Polgara said.

The Drasnian sat up on his bench. “It’s not really much of a story,” he began. “We located Zedar’s trail and followed it down into Nyissa about three weeks ago. We had a few encounters with some Nyissan border guards—nothing very serious. Anyway, the trail of the Orb turned east almost as soon as it crossed the border. That was a surprise. Zedar had been headed for Nyissa with so much single-mindedness that we’d both assumed that he’d made some kind of arrangement with Salmissra. Maybe that’s what he wanted everybody to think. He’s very clever, and Salmissra’s notorious for involving herself in things that don’t really concern her.”

“I’ve attended to that,” Lady Polgara said somewhat grimly.

“What happened?” Belgarath asked her.

“I’ll tell you about it later, father. Go on, Silk.”

Silk shrugged. “There isn’t a great deal more to it. We followed Zedar’s trail into one of those ruined cities up near the old Marag border. Belgarath had a visitor there—at least he said he did. I didn’t see anybody. At any rate, he told me that something had happened to change our plans and that we were going to have to turn around and come on downriver to Sthiss Tor to rejoin all of you. He didn’t have time to explain much more, because the jungles were suddenly alive with Murgos—either looking for us or for Zedar, we never found out which. Since then we’ve been dodging Murgos and Nyissans both—traveling at night, hiding—that sort of thing. We sent a messenger once. Did he ever get through?”

“The day before yesterday,” Polgara replied. “He had a fever, though, and it took a while to get your message from him.”

Kheldar nodded. “Anyway, there were Grolims with the Murgos, and they were trying to find us with their minds. Belgarath was doing something to keep them from locating us that way. Whatever it was must have taken a great deal of concentration, because he wasn’t paying too much attention to where he was going. Early this morning we were leading the horses through a patch of swamp. Belgarath was sort of stumbling along with his mind on other things, and that was when the tree fell on him.”

“I might have guessed,” Polgara said. “Did someone make it fall?”

“I don’t think so,” Silk answered. “It might have been an old deadfall, but I rather doubt it. It was rotten at the center. I tried to warn him, but he walked right under it.”

“All right,” Belgarath said.

“I did try to warn you.”

“Don’t belabor it, Silk.”

“I wouldn’t want them to think I didn’t try to warn you,” Silk protested.

Polgara shook her head and spoke with a profound note of disappointment in her voice. “Father!”

“Just let it lie, Polgara,” Belgarath told her.

“I dug him out from under the tree and patched him up as best I could,” Silk went on. “Then I stole that little boat and we started downriver. We were doing fine until all this dust started falling.”

“What did you do with the horses?” Hettar asked. Ce’Nedra was a little afraid to this tall, silent Algar lord with his shaved head, his black leather clothing, and his flowing black scalp lock. He never seemed to smile, and the expression on his hawklike face at even the mention of the word “Murgo” was as bleak as stone. The only thing that even slightly humanized him was his overwhelming concern for horses.

“They’re all right,” Silk assured him. “I left them picketed where the Nyissans won’t find them. They’ll be fine where they are until we pick them up.”

“You said when you came aboard that Ctuchik has the Orb now,” Polgara said to Belgarath. “How did that happen?”

The old man shrugged. “Beltira didn’t go into any of the details. All he told me was that Ctuchik was waiting when Zedar crossed the border into Cthol Murgos. Zedar managed to escape, but he had to leave the Orb behind.”

“Did you speak with Beltira?”

“With his mind,” Belgarath answered.

“Did he say why the Master wants us to go to the Vale?”

“No. It probably never occurred to him to ask. You know how Beltira is.”

“It’s going to take months, father,” Polgara objected with a worried frown. “It’s two hundred and fifty leagues to the Vale.”

“Aldur wants us to go there,” he answered. “I’m not going to start disobeying him after all these years.”

“And in the meantime, Ctuchik’s got the Orb at Rak Cthol.”

“It’s not going to do him any good, Pol. Torak himself couldn’t make the Orb submit to him, and he tried for over two thousand years. I know where Rak Cthol is; Ctuchik can’t hide it from me. He’ll be there with the Orb when I decide to go take it away from him. I know how to deal with that magician.” He said the word “magician” with a note of profound contempt in his voice.

“What’s Zedar going to be doing all that time?”

“Zedar’s got problems of his own. Beltira says that he’s moved Torak from the place where he had him hidden. I think we can depend on him to keep Torak’s body as far away from Rak Cthol as he possibly can. Actually, things have worked out rather well. I was getting a little tired of chasing Zedar anyway.”

Ce’Nedra found all this a bit confusing. Why were they all so caught up in the movements of a strangely named pair of Angarak sorcerers and this mysterious jewel which everyone seemed to covet? To her, one jewel was much the same as another. Her childhood had been surrounded by such opulence that she had long since ceased to attach much importance to ornaments. At the moment, her only adornment consisted of a pair of tiny gold earrings shaped like little acorns, and her fondness for them arose not so much from the fact that they were gold but rather from the tinkling sound the cunningly contrived clappers inside them made when she moved her head.

All of this sounded like one of the Morn myths she’d heard from a storyteller in her father’s court years before. There had been a magic jewel in that, she remembered. It was stolen by the God of the Angaraks, Torak, and rescued by a sorcerer and some Alorn kings who put it on the pommel of a sword kept in the throne room at Riva. It was somehow supposed to protect the West from some terrible disaster that would happen if it were lost. Curious—the name of the sorcerer in the legend was Belgarath, the same as that of this old man.

But that would make him thousands of years old, which was ridiculous! He must have been named after the ancient myth hero—unless he’d assumed the name to impress people.

Once again her eyes wandered to Garion’s face. The boy sat quietly in one corner of the cabin, his eyes grave and his expression serious. She thought perhaps that it was his seriousness that so piqued her curiosity and kept drawing her eyes to him. Other boys she had known—nobles and the sons of nobles—had tried to be charming and witty, but Garion never tried to joke or to say clever things to try to amuse her. She was not entirely certain how to take that. Was he such a lump that he didn’t know how he was supposed to behave? Or perhaps he knew but didn’t care enough to make the effort. He might at least try—even if only occasionally. How could she possibly deal with him if he was going to refuse flatly to make a fool of himself for her benefit?

She reminded herself sharply that she was angry with him. He had said that Queen Salmissra had been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and it was far, far too early to forgive him for such an outrageous statement. She was definitely going to have to make him suffer extensively for that insulting lapse. Her fingers toyed absently with one of the curls cascading down the side of her face, her eyes boring into Garion’s face.

The following morning ashfall that was the result of a massive volcanic eruption somewhere in Cthol Murgos had diminished sufficiently to make the deck of the ship habitable again. The jungle along the riverbank was still partially obscured in the dusty haze, but the air was clear enough to breathe, and Ce’Nedra escaped from the sweltering cabin below decks with relief.

Garion was sitting in the sheltered spot near the bow of the ship where he usually sat and he was deep in conversation with Belgarath. Ce’Nedra noted with a certain detachment that he had neglected to comb his hair that morning. She resisted her immediate impulse to go fetch comb and brush to rectify the situation. She drifted instead with artful dissimulation to a place along the rail where, without seeming to, she could conveniently eavesdrop.

“—It’s always been there,” Garion was saying to his grandfather. “It used to just talk to me—tell me when I was being childish or stupid—that sort of thing. It seemed to be off in one corner of my mind all by itself.”

Belgarath nodded, scratching absently at his beard with his good hand. “It seems to be completely separate from you,” he observed. “Has this voice in your head ever actually done anything? Besides talk to you, I mean.”

Garion’s face grew thoughtful. “I don’t think so. It tells me how to do things, but I think that I’m the one who has to do them. When we were at Salmissra’s palace, I think it took me out of my body to go look for Aunt Pol.” He frowned. “No,” he corrected. “When I stop and think about it, it told me how to do it, but I was the one who actually did it. Once we were out, I could feel it beside me—it’s the first time we’ve ever been separate. I couldn’t actually see it, though. It did take over for a few minutes, I think. It talked to Salmissra to smooth things over and to hide what we’d been doing.”

“You’ve been busy since Silk and I left, haven’t you?”

Garion nodded glumly. “Most of it was pretty awful. I burned Asharak. Did you know that?”

“Your Aunt told me about it.”

“He slapped her in the face,” Garion told him. “I was going to go after him with my knife for that, but the voice told me to do it a different way. I hit him with my hand and said ‘burn.’ That’s all, just ‘burn’ and he caught on fire. I was going to put it out until Aunt Pol told me he was the one who killed my mother and father. Then I made the fire hotter. He begged me to put it out, but I didn’t do it.” He shuddered.

“I tried to warn you about that,” Belgarath reminded him gently. “I told you that you weren’t going to like it very much after it was over.”

Garion sighed. “I should have listened. Aunt Pol says that once you’ve used this—” He floundered, looking for a word.

“Power?” Belgarath suggested.

“All right,” Garion assented. “She says that once you’ve used it, you never forget how, and you’ll keep doing it again and again. I wish I had used my knife instead. Then this thing in me never would have gotten loose.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” Belgarath told him quite calmly. “You’ve been bursting at the seams with it for several months now. You’ve used it without knowing it at least a half dozen times that I know about.”

Garion stared at him incredulously.

“Remember that crazy monk just after we crossed into Tolnedra? When you touched him, you made so much noise that I thought for a moment you’d killed him.”

“You said Aunt Pol did that.”

“I lied,” the old man admitted casually. “I do that fairly often. The whole point, though, is that you’ve always had this ability. It was bound to come out sooner or later. I wouldn’t feel too unhappy about what you did to Chamdar. It was a little exotic perhaps—not exactly the way I might have done it—but there was a certain justice to it, after all.”

“It’s always going to be there, then?”

“Always. That’s the way it is, I’m afraid.”

The Princess Ce’Nedra felt rather smug about that. Belgarath had just confirmed something she herself had told Garion. If the boy would just stop being so stubborn, his Aunt and his grandfather and of course she herself—all of whom knew much better than he what was right and proper and good for him—could shape his life to their satisfaction with little or no difficulty.

“Let’s get back to this other voice of yours,” Belgarath suggested. “I need to know more about it. I don’t want you carrying an enemy around in your mind.”

“It’s not an enemy,” Garion insisted. “It’s on our side.”

“It might seem that way,” Belgarath observed, “but things aren’t always what they seem. I’d be a lot more comfortable if I knew just exactly what it is. I don’t like surprises.”

The Princess Ce’Nedra, however, was already lost in thought. Dimly, at the back of her devious and complex little mind, an idea was beginning to take shape—an idea with very interesting possibilities.

2

The trip up to the rapids of the River of the Serpent took the better part of a week. Although it was still swelteringly hot, they had all by now grown at least partially accustomed to the climate. Princess Ce’Nedra spent most of her time sitting on deck with Polgara, pointedly ignoring Garion. She did, however, glance frequently his way to see if she could detect any signs of suffering.

Since her life was entirely in the hands of these people, Ce’Nedra felt keenly the necessity for winning them over. Belgarath would be no problem. A few winsome little-girl smiles, a bit of eyelash fluttering, and a spontaneous-seeming kiss or two would wrap him neatly around one of her fingers. That particular campaign could be conducted at any time she felt it convenient, but Polgara was a different matter. For one thing, Ce’Nedra was awed by the lady’s spectacular beauty. Polgara was flawless. Even the white lock in the midnight of her hair was not so much a defect as it was a sort of accent—a personal trademark. Most disconcerting to the princess were Polgara’s eyes. Depending on her mood, they ranged in color from gray to a deep, deep blue and they saw through everything. No dissimulation was possible in the face of that calm, steady gaze. Each time the princess looked into those eyes, she seemed to hear the clink of chains. She definitely had to get on Polgara’s good side.

“Lady Polgara?” the princess said one morning as they sat together on deck, while the steaming, gray-green jungle slid by on either bank and the sweating sailors labored at their oars.

“Yes, dear?” Polgara looked up from the button she was sewing on one of Garion’s tunics. She wore a pale blue dress, open at the throat in the heat.

“What is sorcery? I was always told that such things didn’t exist.” It seemed like a good place to start the discussion.

Polgara smiled at her. “Tolnedran education tends to be a bit onesided.”

“Is it a trick of some kind?” Ce’Nedra persisted. “I mean, is it like showing people something with one hand while you’re taking something away with the other?” She toyed with the laces on her sandals.

“No, dear. It’s nothing at all like that.”

“Exactly how much can one do with it?”

“We’ve never explored that particular boundary,” Polgara replied, her needle still busy. “When something has to be done, we do it. We don’t bother worrying about whether we can or not. Different people are better at different things, though. It’s somewhat on the order of some men being better at carpentry while others specialize in stonemasonry.”

“Garion’s a sorcerer, isn’t he? How much can he do?” Now why had she asked that?

“I was wondering where this was leading,” Polgara said, giving the tiny girl a penetrating look.

Ce’Nedra blushed slightly.

“Don’t chew on your hair, dear,” Polgara told her. “You’ll split the ends.”

Ce’Nedra quickly removed the curl from between her teeth.

“We’re not sure what Garion can do yet,” Polgara continued. “It’s probably much too early to tell. He seems to have talent. He certainly makes enough noise whenever he does something, and that’s a fair indication of his potential.”

“He’ll probably be a very powerful sorcerer then.”

A faint smile touched Polgara’s lips. “Probably so,” she replied. “Always assuming that he learns to control himself.”

“Well,” Ce’Nedra declared, “we’ll just have to teach him to control himself then, won’t we?”

Polgara looked at her for a moment, and then she began to laugh. Ce’Nedra felt a bit sheepish, but she also laughed.

Garion, who was standing not far away, turned to look at them. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing you’d understand, dear,” Polgara told him.

He looked offended and moved away, his back stiff and his face set. Ce’Nedra and Polgara laughed again.

When Captain Greldik’s ship finally reached the point where rocks and swiftly tumbling water made it impossible to go any farther, they moored her to a large tree on the north bank, and the party prepared to go ashore. Barak stood sweating in his mail shirt beside his friend Greldik, watching Hettar oversee the unloading of the horses. “If you happen to see my wife, give her my greetings,” the red-bearded man said.

Greldik nodded. “I’ll probably be near Trellheim sometime during the coming winter.”

“I don’t know that you need to tell her that I know about her pregnancy. She’ll probably want to surprise me with my son when I get home. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for her.”

Greldik looked a little surprised. “I thought you enjoyed spoiling things for her, Barak.”

“Maybe it’s time that Merel and I made peace with each other. This little war of ours was amusing when we were younger, but it might not be a bad idea to put it aside now—for the sake of the children, if nothing else.”

Belgarath came up on deck and joined the two bearded Chereks. “Go to Val Alorn,” he told Captain Greldik. “Tell Anheg where we are and what we’re doing. Have him get word to the others. Tell him that I absolutely forbid their going to war with the Angaraks just now. Ctuchik has the Orb at Rak Cthol, and if there’s a war, Taur Urgas will seal the borders of Cthol Murgos. Things are going to be difficult enough for us without that to contend with.”

“I’ll tell him,” Greldik replied doubtfully. “I don’t think he’ll like it much, though.”

“He doesn’t have to like it,” Belgarath said bluntly. “He just as to do it.”

Ce’Nedra, standing not far away, felt a little startled when she heard the shabby-looking old man issuing his peremptory commands. How could he speak so to sovereign kings? And what if Garion, as a sorcerer, should someday have a similar authority? She turned and gazed at the young man who was helping Durnik the smith calm an excited horse. He didn’t look authoritative. She pursed her lips. A robe of some kind might help, she thought, and maybe some sort of book of magic in his hands—and perhaps just the hint of a beard. She narrowed her eyes, imagining him so robed, booked and bearded.

Garion, obviously feeling her eyes on him, looked quickly in her direction, his expression questioning. He was so ordinary. The image of this plain, unassuming boy in the finery she had concocted for him in her mind was suddenly ludicrous. Without meaning to, she laughed. Garion flushed and stiffly turned his back on her.

Since the rapids of the River of the Serpent effectively blocked all further navigation upriver, the trail leading up into the hills was quite broad, indicating that most travelers struck out overland at that point.

As they rode up out of the valley in the midmorning sunlight, they passed rather quickly out of the tangled jungle growth lining the river and moved into a hardwood forest that was much more to Ce’Nedra’s liking. At the crest of the first rise, they even encountered a breeze that seemed to brush away the sweltering heat and stink of Nyissa’s festering swamps. Ce’Nedra’s spirits lifted immediately. She considered the company of Prince Kheldar, but he was dozing in his saddle, and Ce’Nedra was just a bit afraid of the sharp-nosed Drasnian. She recognized immediately that the cynical, wise little man could probably read her like a book, and she didn’t really care for that idea. Instead she rode forward along the column to ride with Baron Mandorallen, who led the way, as was his custom. Her move was prompted in part by the desire to get as far away from the steaming river as possible, but there was more to it than that. It occurred to her that this might be an excellent opportunity to question this Arendish nobleman about a matter that interested her.

“Your Highness,” the armored knight said respectfully as she pulled her horse in beside his huge charger, “dost think it prudent to place thyself in the vanguard thus?”

“Who would be so foolish as to attack the bravest knight in the world?” she asked with artful innocence.

The baron’s expression grew melancholy, and he sighed.

“And why so great a sigh, Sir Knight?” she bantered.

“It is of no moment, your Highness,” he replied.

They rode along in silence through the dappled shade where insects hummed and darted and small, scurrying things skittered and rustled in the bushes at the side of the trail.

“Tell me,” the princess said finally, “have you known Belgarath for long?”

“All my life, your Highness.”

“Is he highly regarded in Arendia?”

“Highly regarded? Holy Belgarath is the paramount man in the world! Surely thou knowest that, Princess.”

“I’m Tolnedran, Baron Mandorallen,” she pointed out. “Our familiarity with sorcerers is limited. Would an Arend describe Belgarath as a man of noble birth?”

Mandorallen laughed. “Your Highness, holy Belgarath’s birth is so far lost in the dim reaches of antiquity that thy question has no meaning.”

Ce’Nedra frowned. She did not particularly like being laughed at. “Is he or is he not a nobleman?” she pressed.

“He is Belgarath,” Mandorallen replied, as if that explained everything. “There are hundreds of barons, earls by the score, and lords without number, but there is only one Belgarath. All men give way to him.”

She beamed at him. “And what about Lady Polgara?”

Mandorallen blinked, and Ce’Nedra saw that she was going too fast for him. “The Lady Polgara is revered above all women,” he said in puzzled response. “Highness, could I but know the direction of throe inquiry, I might provide thee with more satisfactory response.”

She laughed. “My dear Baron, it’s nothing important or serious just curiosity, and a way to pass the time as we ride.”

Durnik the smith came forward at a trot just then, his sorrel horse’s hoofbeats thudding on the packed earth of the trail. “Mistress Pol wants you to wait for a bit,” he told them.

“Is anything wrong?” Ce’Nedra asked.

“No. It’s just that there’s a bush not far from the trail that she recognized. She wants to harvest the leaves—I think they have certain medicinal uses. She says it’s very rare and only found in this part of Nyissa.” The smith’s plain, honest face was respectful as it always was when he spoke of Polgara. Ce’Nedra had certain private suspicions about Durnik’s feelings, but she kept them to herself. “Oh,” he went on, “she said to warn you about the bush. There might be others around. It’s about a foot tall and has very shiny green leaves and a little purple flower. It’s deadly poisonous—even to touch.”

“We will not stray from the trail, Goodman,” Mandorallen assured him, “but will abide here against the lady’s permission to proceed.” Durnik nodded and rode on back down the trail.

Ce’Nedra and Mandorallen pulled their horses into the shade of a broad tree and sat waiting. “How do the Arends regard Garion?” Ce’Nedra asked suddenly.

“Garion is a good lad,” Mandorallen replied, somewhat confused.

“But hardly noble,” she prompted him.

“Highness,” Mandorallen told her delicately, “throe education, I fear, hath led thee astray. Garion is of the line of Belgarath and Polgara. Though he hath no rank such as thou and I both have, his blood is the noblest in the world. I would give precedence to him without question should he ask it of me—which he would not, being a modest lad. During our sojourn at the court of King Korodullin at Vo Mimbre, a young countess pursued him most fervently, thinking to gain status and prestige by marriage to him.”

“Really?” Ce’Nedra asked with a hard little edge coming into her voice.

“She sought betrothal and trapped him often with blatant invitation to dalliance and sweet conversation.”

“A beautiful countess?”

“One of the great beauties of the kingdom.”

“I see.” Ce’Nedra’s voice was like ice.

“Have I given offense, Highness?”

“It’s not important.”

Mandorallen sighed again.

“What is it now?” she snapped.

“I perceive that my faults are many.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the perfect man.” She regretted that instantly.

“Nay, Highness. I am marred beyond thy conception.”

“A bit undiplomatic, perhaps, but that’s no great flaw—in an Arend.”

“Cowardice is, your Highness.”

She laughed at the notion. “Cowardice? You?”

“I have found that fault in myself,” he admitted.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed. “If anything, your fault lies in the other direction.”

“It is difficult to believe, I know,” he replied. “But I assure thee with great shame that I have felt the grip of fear upon my heart.”

Ce’Nedra was baffled by the knight’s mournful confession. She was struggling to find some proper reply when a great crashing rush burst out of the undergrowth a few yards away. With a sudden start of panic, her horse wheeled and bolted. She caught only the briefest glimpse of something large and tawny leaping out of the bushes at her—large, tawny, and with a great gaping mouth. She tried desperately to cling to her saddle with one hand and to control her terrified horse with the other, but its frantic flight took him under a low branch, and she was swept off its back to land unceremoniously in the middle of the trail. She rolled to her hands and knees and then froze as she faced the beast that had so clumsily burst forth from concealment.

She saw at once that the lion was not very old. She noted that, though his body was fully developed, he had only a half grown mane. Clearly, he was an adolescent, unskilled at hunting. He roared with frustration as he watched the fleeing horse disappear back down the trail, and his tail lashed. The princess felt a momentary touch of amusement—he was so young, so awkward. Then her amusement was replaced by irritation with this clumsy young beast who had caused her humiliating unhorsing. She rose to her feet, brushed off her knees, and looked at him sternly. “Shoo!” she said with an insistent flip of her hand. She was, after all, a princess, and he was only a lion—a very young and foolish lion.

The yellow eyes fell on her then and narrowed slightly. The lashing tail grew suddenly quite still. The young lion’s eyes widened with a sort of dreadful intensity, and he crouched, his belly going low to the ground. His upper lip lifted to reveal his very long, white teeth. He took one slow step toward her, his great paw touching down softly.

“Don’t you dare,” she told him indignantly.

“Remain quite still, Highness,” Mandorallen warned her in a deathly quiet voice. From the corner of her eye she saw him slide out of his saddle. The lion’s eyes flickered toward him with annoyance.

Carefully, one step at a time, Mandorallen crossed the intervening space until he had placed his armored body between the lion and the princess. The Lion watched him warily, not seeming to realize what he was doing until it was too late. Then, cheated of another meal, the cat’s eyes went flat with rage. Mandorallen drew his sword very carefully; then, to Ce’Nedra’s amazement, he passed it back hilt—first to her. “So that thou shall have means of defending thyself, should I fail to withstand him,” the knight explained.

Doubtfully, Ce’Nedra took hold of the huge hilt with both hands. When Mandorallen released his grip on the blade, however, the point dropped immediately to the ground. Try though she might, Ce’Nedra could not even lift the huge sword.

Snarling, the lion crouched even lower. His tail lashed furiously for a moment, then stiffened out behind him. “Mandorallen, look out!” Ce’Nedra screamed, still struggling with the sword.

The lion leaped.

Mandorallen flung his steel-cased arms wide and stepped forward to meet the cat’s charge. They came together with a resounding crash, and Mandorallen locked his arms around the beast’s body. The lion wrapped his huge paws around Mandorallen’s shoulders and his claws screeched deafeningly as they raked the steel of the knight’s armor. His teeth grated and ground as he gnawed and bit at Mandorallen’s helmeted head. Mandorallen tightened his deadly embrace.

Ce’Nedra scrambled out of the way, dragging the sword behind her, and stared wide-eyed with fright at the dreadful struggle.

The lion’s clawing became more desperate, and great, deep scratches appeared on Mandorallen’s armor as the Mimbrate’s arms tightened inexorably. The roars became yowls of pain, and the lion struggled now not to fight or kill, but to escape. He wriggled and thrashed and tried to bite. His hind paws came up to rake furiously on Mandorallen’s armored trunk. His yowls grew more shrill, more filled with panic.

With a superhuman effort, Mandorallen jerked his arms together. Ce’Nedra heard the cracking of bones with a sickening clarity, and an enormous fountain of blood erupted from the cat’s mouth. The young lion’s body quivered, and his head dropped. Mandorallen unclenched his locked hands, and the dead beast slid limply from his grasp to the ground at his feet.

Stunned, the princess stared at the stupendous man in blood-smeared and clawed armor standing before her. She had just witnessed the impossible. Mandorallen had killed a lion with no weapon but his mighty arms—and all for her!

Without knowing why, she found herself crowing with delight. “Mandorallen!” She sang his name. “You are my knight!”

Still panting from his efforts, Mandorallen pushed up his visor. His blue eyes were wide, as if her words had struck him with a stunning impact. Then he sank to his knees before her. “Your Highness,” he said in a choked voice, “I pledge to thee here upon the body of this beast to be thy true and faithful knight for so long as I have breath.”

Deep inside her, Ce’Nedra felt a profound sort of click—the sound of two things, fated from time’s beginning to come together, finally meeting. Something—she did not know exactly what—but something very important had happened there in that sun-dappled glade.

And then Barak, huge and imposing, came galloping up the trail with Hettar at his side and the others not far behind. “What happened?” the big Cherek demanded, swinging down from his horse.

Ce’Nedra waited until they had all reined in to make her announcement. “The lion there attacked me,” she said, trying to make it sound like an everyday occurrence. “Mandorallen killed him with his bare hands.”

“I was in fact wearing these, Highness,” the still-kneeling knight reminded her, holding up his gauntleted fists.

“It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ce’Nedra swept on.

“Why are you down on your knees?” Barak asked Mandorallen. “Are you hurt?”

“I have just made Sir Mandorallen my very own knight,” Ce’Nedra declared, “and as is quite proper, he knelt to receive that honor from my hands.” From the corner of her eye she saw Garion in the act of sliding down from his horse. He was scowling like a thundercloud. Silently, Ce’Nedra exulted. Leaning forward then, she placed a sisterly kiss on Mandorallen’s brow. “Rise, Sir Knight,” she commanded, and Mandorallen creaked to his feet.

Ce’Nedra was enormously pleased with herself.

The remainder of the day passed without incident. They crossed a low range of hills and came down into a little valley as the sun settled slowly into a cloudbank off to the west. The valley was watered by a small stream, sparkling and cold, and they stopped there to set up their night’s encampment. Mandorallen, in his new role as knight-protector, was suitably attentive, and Ce’Nedra accepted his service graciously, casting occasional covert glances at Garion to be certain that he was noticing everything.

Somewhat later, when Mandorallen had gone to see to his horse and Garion had stomped off to sulk, she sat demurely on a moss-covered log congratulating herself on the day’s accomplishments.

“You’re playing a cruel game, Princess,” Durnik told her bluntly from the spot a few feet away where he was building a fire.

Ce’Nedra was startled. So far as she could remember, Durnik had never spoken directly to her since she had joined the party. The smith was obviously uncomfortable in the presence of royalty and, indeed, seemed actually to avoid her. Now, however, he looked straight into her face, and his tone was reproving.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she declared.

“I think you do.” His plain, honest fact was serious, and his gaze was steady.

Ce’Nedra lowered her eyes and flushed slowly.

“I’ve seen village girls play this same game,” he continued. “Nothing good ever comes of it.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anybody, Durnik. There isn’t really anything of that sort between Mandorallen and me—we both know that.”

“Garion doesn’t.”

Ce’Nedra was amazed. “Garion?”

“Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

“Of course not!” she objected indignantly. Durnik’s look was profoundly skeptical.

“Such a thing never entered my mind,” Ce’Nedra rushed on. “It’s absolutely absurd.”

“Really?”

Ce’Nedra’s bold front collapsed. “He’s so stubborn,” she complained. “He just won’t do anything the way he’s supposed to.”

“He’s an honest boy. Whatever else he is or might become, he’s still the plain, simple boy he was at Faldor’s farm. He doesn’t know the rules of the gentry. He won’t lie to you or flatter you or say things he doesn’t really feel. I think something very important is going to happen to him before very long—I don’t know what—but I do know it’s going to take all his strength and courage. Don’t weaken him with all this childishness.”

“Oh, Durnik,” she said with a great sigh. “What am I going to do?”

“Be honest. Say only what’s in your heart. Don’t say one thing and mean another. That won’t work with him.”

“I know. That’s what makes it all so difficult. He was raised one way, and I was raised another. We’re never going to get along.” She sighed again.

Durnik smiled, a gentle, almost whimsical smile. “It’s not all that bad, Princess,” he told her. “You’ll fight a great deal at first. You’re almost as stubborn as he is, you know. You were born in different parts of the world, but you’re not really all that different inside. You’ll shout at each other and shake your fingers in each others’ faces; but in time that will pass, and you won’t even remember what you were shouting about. Some of the best marriages I know of started that way.”

“Marriage!”

“That’s what you’ve got in mind, isn’t it?”

She stared at him incredulously. Then she suddenly laughed. “Dear, dear Durnik,” she said. “You don’t understand at all, do you?”

“I understand what I see,” he replied. “And what I see is a young girl doing everything she possibly can to catch a young man.”

Ce’Nedra sighed. “That’s completely out of the question, you know—even if I felt that way—which of course I don’t.”

“Naturally not.” He looked slightly amused.

“Dear Durnik,” she said again, “I can’t even allow myself such thoughts. You forget who I am.”

“That isn’t very likely,” he told her. “You’re usually very careful to keep the fact firmly in front of everybody.”

“Don’t you know what it means?”

He looked a bit perplexed. “I don’t quite follow.”

“I’m an Imperial Princess, the jewel of the Empire, and I belong to the Empire. I’ll have absolutely no voice in the decision about whom I’m going to marry. That decision will be made by my father and the Council of Advisers. My husband will be rich and powerful—probably much older than I am—and my marriage to him will be to the advantage of the Empire and the House of Borune. I probably won’t even be consulted in the matter.”

Durnik looked stunned. “That’s outrageous!” he objected.

“Not really,” she told him. “My family has the right to protect its interests, and I’m an extremely valuable asset to the Borunes.” She sighed again, a forlorn little sigh. “It might be nice, though—to be able to choose for myself, I mean. If I could, I might even look at Garion the way you seem to think I have been looking—even though he’s absolutely impossible. The way things are, though, all he can ever be is a friend.”

“I didn’t know,” he apologized, his plain, practical face melancholy.

“Don’t take it so seriously, Durnik,” she said lightly. “I’ve always known that this was the way things have to be.”

A large, glistening tear, however, welled into the corner of her eye, and Durnik awkwardly put his work-worn hand on her arm to comfort her. Without knowing why, she threw her arms around his neck, buried her face in his chest, and sobbed.

“There, there,” he said, clumsily patting her shaking shoulder. “There, there.”

3

Garion did not sleep well that night. Although he was young and inexperienced, he was not stupid, and Princess Ce’Nedra had been fairly obvious. Over the months since she had joined them, he had seen her attitude toward him change until they had shared a rather specialized kind of friendship. He liked her; she liked him. Everything had been fine up to that point. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone? Garion surmised that it probably had something to do with the inner workings of the female mind. As soon as a friendship passed a certain point—some obscure and secret boundary—a woman quite automatically became overwhelmed by a raging compulsion to complicate things.

He was almost certain that her transparent little game with Mandorallen had been aimed at him, and he wondered if it might not be a good idea to warn the knight to spare him more heartbreak in the future. Ce’Nedra’s toying with the great man’s affections was little more than the senseless cruelty of a spoiled child. Mandorallen must be warned. His Arendish thick-headedness might easily cause him to overlook the obvious.

And yet, Mandorallen had killed the lion for her. Such stupendous bravery could quite easily have overwhelmed the flighty little princess. What if her admiration and gratitude had pushed her over the line into infatuation? That possibility, coming to Garion as it did in those darkest hours just before dawn, banished all possibility of further sleep. He arose the next morning sandy-eyed and surly and with a terrible worry gnawing at him.

As they rode out through the blue-tinged shadows of early morning with the slanting rays of the newly risen sun gleaming on the treetops above them, Garion fell in beside his grandfather, seeking the comfort of the old man’s companionship. It was not only that, however. Ce’Nedra was riding demurely with Aunt Pol just ahead, and Garion felt very strongly that he should keep an eye on her.

Mister Wolf rode in silence, looking cross and irritable, and he frequently dug his fingers under the splint on his left arm.

“Leave it alone, father,” Aunt Pol told him without turning around.

“It itches.”

“That’s because it’s healing. Just leave it alone.”

He grumbled about that under his breath.

“Which route are you planning to take to the Vale?” she asked him.

“We’ll go around by way of Tol Rane,” he replied.

“The season’s moving on, father,” she reminded him. “If we take too long, we’ll run into bad weather in the mountains.”

“I know that, Pol. Would you rather cut straight across Maragor?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Is Maragor really all that dangerous?” Garion asked.

Princess Ce’Nedra turned in her saddle and gave him a withering look. “Don’t you know anything?” she asked him with towering superiority.

Garion drew himself up, a dozen suitable responses to that coming to mind almost at once.

Mister Wolf shook his head warningly. “Just let it pass,” the old man told him. “It’s much too early to start in on that just now.”

Garion clenched his teeth together.

They rode for an hour or more through the cool morning, and Garion gradually felt his temper improving. Then Hettar rode up to speak with Mister Wolf. “There are some riders coming,” he reported.

“How many?” Wolf asked quickly.

“A dozen or more—coming in from the west.”

“They could be Tolnedrans.”

“I’ll see,” Aunt Pol murmured. She lifted her face and closed her eyes for a moment. “No,” she said. “Not Tolnedrans. Murgos.”

Hettar’s eyes went flat. “Do we fight?” he asked with a dreadful kind of eagerness, his hand going to his sabre.

“No,” Wolf replied curtly. “We hide.”

“There aren’t really that many of them.”

“Never mind, Hettar,” Wolf told him. “Silk,” he called ahead, “there are some Murgos coming toward us from the west. Warn the others and find us all a place to hide.”

Silk nodded curtly and galloped forward.

“Are there any Grolims with them?” the old man asked Aunt Pol.

“I don’t think so,” she answered with a small frown. “One of them has a strange mind, but he doesn’t seem to be a Grolim.”

Silk rode back quickly. “There’s a thicket off to the right,” he told them. “It’s big enough to hide in.”

“Lets go, then,” Wolf said.

The thicket was fifty yards back among the larger trees. It appeared to be a patch of dense brush surrounding a small hollow. The ground in the hollow was marshy, and there was a spring at its center.

Silk had swung down from his horse and was hacking a thick bush off close to the ground with his short sword. “Take cover in here,” he told them. “I’ll go back and brush out our tracks.” He picked up the bush and wormed his way out of the thicket.

“Be sure the horses don’t make any noise,” Wolf told Hettar. Hettar nodded, but his eyes showed his disappointment.

Garion dropped to his knees and wormed his way through the thick brush until he reached the edge of the thicket; then he sank down on the leaves covering the ground to peer out between the gnarled and stumpy trunks.

Silk, walking backward and swing his bush, was sweeping leaves and twigs from the forest floor over the tracks they had made from the trail to the thicket. He was moving quickly, but was careful to obliterate their trail completely.

From behind them, Garion heard a faint snap and rustle in the leaves, and Ce’Nedra crawled up and sank to the ground at his side. “You shouldn’t be this close to the edge of the brush,” he told her in a low voice.

“Neither should you,” she retorted.

He let that pass. The princess had a warm, flowerlike smell; for some reason, that made Garion very nervous.

“How far away do you think they are?” she whispered.

“How would I know?”

“You’re a sorcerer, aren’t you?”

“I’m not that good at it.”

Silk finished brushing away the tracks and stood for a moment studying the ground as he looked for any trace of their passage he might have missed. Then he burrowed his way into the thicket and crouched down a few yards from Garion and Ce’Nedra.

“Lord Hettar wanted to fight them,” Ce’Nedra whispered to Garion. “Hettar always wants to fight when he sees Murgos.”

“The Murgos killed his parents when he was very young. He had to watch while they did it.”

She gasped. “How awful!”

“If you children don’t mind,” Silk said sarcastically, “I’m trying to listen for horses.”

Somewhere beyond the trail they had just left, Garion heard the thudding sound of horses’ hooves moving at a trot. He sank down deeper into the leaves and watched, scarcely breathing.

When the Murgos appeared, there were about fifteen of them, mailshirted and with the scarred cheeks of their race. Their leader, however, was a man in a patched and dirty tunic and with coarse black hair. He was unshaven, and one of his eyes was out of line with its fellow. Garion knew him.

Silk drew in a sharp breath with an audible hiss. “Brill,” he muttered.

“Who’s Brill?” Ce’Nedra whispered to Garion.

“I’ll tell you later,” he whispered back. “Shush!”

“Don’t shush me!” she flared.

A stem look from Silk silenced them.

Brill was talking sharply to the Murgos, gesturing with short, jerky movements. Then he raised his hands with his fingers widespread and stabbed them forward to emphasize what he was saying. The Murgos all nodded, their faces expressionless, and spread out along the trail, facing the woods and the thicket where Garion and the others were hiding. Brill moved farther up the trail. “Keep your eyes open,” he shouted to them. “Let’s go.”

The Murgos started to move forward at a walk, their eyes searching. Two of them rode past the thicket so close that Garion could smell the sweat on their horses’ flanks.

“I’m getting tired of that man,” one of them remarked to the other.

“I wouldn’t let it show,” the second one advised.

“I can take orders as well as any man,” the first one said, “but that one’s beginning to irritate me. I think he would look better with a knife between his shoulder blades.”

“I don’t think he’d like that much, and it might be a little hard to manage.”

“I could wait until he was asleep.”

“I’ve never seen him sleep.”

“Everybody sleeps—sooner or later.”

“It’s up to you,” the second replied with a shrug, “but I wouldn’t try anything rash—unless you’ve given up the idea of ever seeing Rak Hagga again.”

The two of them moved on out of earshot.

Silk crouched, gnawing nervously at a fingernail. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and his sharp little face was intent. Then he began to swear under his breath.

“What’s wrong, Silk?” Garion whispered to him.

“I’ve made a mistake,” Silk answered irritably. “Let’s go back to the others.” He turned and crawled through the bushes toward the spring at the center of the thicket.

Mister Wolf was seated on a log, scratching absently at his splinted arm. “Well?” he asked, looking up.

“Fifteen Murgos,” Silk replied shortly. “And an old friend.”

“It was Brill,” Garion reported. “He seemed to be in charge.”

“Brill?” The old man’s eyes widened with surprise.

“He was giving orders and the Murgos were following them,” Silk said. “They didn’t like it much, but they were doing what he told them to do. They seemed to be afraid of him. I think Brill’s something more than an ordinary hireling.”

“Where’s Rak Hagga?” Ce’Nedra asked. Wolf looked at her sharply.

“We heard two of them talking,” she explained. “They said they were from Rak Hagga. I thought I knew the names of all the cities in Cthol Murgos, but I’ve never heard of that one.”

“You’re sure they said Rak Hagga?” Wolf asked her, his eyes intent.

“I heard them too,” Garion told him. “That was the name they used—Rak Hagga.”

Mister Wolf stood up, his face suddenly grim. “We’re going to have to hurry then. Taur Urgas is preparing for war.”

“How do you know that?” Barak asked him.

“Rak Hagga’s a thousand leagues south of Rak Goska, and the southern Murgos are never brought up into this part of the world unless the Murgo king is on the verge of going to war with someone.”

“Let them come,” Barak said with a bleak smile.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get our business attended to first. I’ve got to go to Rak Cthol, and I’d prefer not to have to wade through whole armies of Murgos to get there.” The old man shook his head angrily. “What is Taur Urgas thinking of?” he burst out. “It’s not time yet.”

Barak shrugged. “One time’s as good as another.”

“Not for this war. Too many things have to happen first. Can’t Ctuchik keep a leash on that maniac?”

“Unpredictability is part of Taur Urgas’ unique charm,” Silk observed sardonically. “He doesn’t know himself what he’s going to do from one day to the next.”

“Knowest thou the king of the Murgos?” Mandorallen inquired.

“We’ve met,” Silk replied. “We’re not fond of each other.”

“Brill and his Murgos should be gone by now,” Mister Wolf said. “Let’s move on. We’ve got a long way to go, and time’s starting to catch up with us.” He moved quickly toward his horse.

Shortly before sundown they went through a high pass lying in a notch between two mountains and stopped for the night in a little glen a few miles down on the far side.

“Keep the fire down as much as you can, Durnik,” Mister Wolf warned the smith. “Southern Murgos have sharp eyes and they can see the light from a fire from miles away. I’d rather not have company in the middle of the night.”

Durnik nodded soberly and dug his firepit somewhat deeper than usual.

Mandorallen was attentive to the Princess Ce’Nedra as they set up for the night, and Garion watched sourly. Though he had violently objected each time Aunt Pol had insisted that he serve as Ce’Nedra’s personal attendant, now that the tiny girl had her knight to fetch and carry for her, Garion felt somehow that his rightful position had in some way been usurped.

“We’re going to have to pick up our pace,” Wolf told them after they had finished a meal of bacon, bread, and cheese. “We’ve got to get through the mountains before the first storms hit, and we’re going to have to try to stay ahead of Brill and his Murgos.” He scraped a space clear on the ground in front of him with one foot, picked up a stick and began sketching a map in the dirt. “We’re here.” He pointed. “Maragor’s directly ahead of us. We’ll circle to the west, go through Tol Rane, and then strike northeast toward the Vale.”

“Might it not be shorter to cross Maragor?” Mandorallen suggested, pointing at the crude map.

“Perhaps,” the old man replied, “but we won’t do that unless we have to. Maragor’s haunted, and it’s best to avoid it if possible.”

“We are not children to be frightened of insubstantial shades,” Mandorallen declared somewhat stiffly.

“No one’s doubting your courage, Mandorallen,” Aunt Pol told him, “but the spirit of Mara wails in Maragor. It’s better not to offend him.”

“How far is it to the Vale of Aldur?” Durnik asked.

“Two hundred and fifty leagues,” Wolf answered. “We’ll be a month or more in the mountains, even under the best conditions. Now we’d better all get some sleep. Tomorrow’s likely to be a hard day.”

4

When they rose the next morning as the first pale hint of light was appearing on the eastern horizon, there was a touch of silvery frost on the ground and a thin scum of ice around the edges of the spring at the bottom of the glen. Ce’Nedra, who had gone to the spring to wash her face, lifted a leaf thin shard from the water and stared at it.

“It’s much colder up in the mountains,” Garion told her as he belted on his sword.

“I’m aware of that,” she replied loftily.

“Forget it,” he said shortly and stamped away, muttering.

They rode down out of the mountains in the bright morning sunlight, moving at a steady trot. As they rounded a shoulder of outcropping rock, they saw the broad basin that had once been Maragor, the District of the Marags, stretching out below them. The meadows were a dusty autumn green, and the streams and lakes sparkled in the sun. A tumbled ruin, looking tiny in the distance, gleamed far out on the plain.

Princess Ce’Nedra, Garion noticed, kept her eyes averted, refusing even to look.

Not far down the slope below them, a cluster of crude huts and lopsided tents lay in a steep gully where a frothy creek had cut down through the rocks and gravel. Dirt streets and paths wandered crookedly up and down the sides of the gully, and a dozen or so ragged-looking men were hacking somewhat dispiritedly at the creek bank with picks and mattocks, turning the water below the shabby settlement a muddy yellow brown.

“A town?” Durnik questioned. “Out here?”

“Not exactly a town,” Wolf replied. “The men in those settlements sift gravel and dig up the streambanks, looking for gold.”

“Is there gold here?” Silk asked quickly, his eyes bright.

“A little,” Wolf said. “Probably not enough to make it worth anyone’s time to look for it.”

“Why do they bother, then?”

Wolf shrugged. “Who knows?”

Mandorallen and Barak took the lead, and they moved down the rocky trail toward the settlement. As they approached, two men came out of one of the huts with rusty swords in their hands. One, a thin, unshaven man with a high forehead, wore a greasy Tolnedran jerkin. The other, much taller and bulkier, was dressed in the ragged tunic of an Arendish serf.

“That’s far enough,” the Tolnedran shouted. “We don’t let armed men come in here until we know what their business is.”

“You’re blocking the trail, friend,” Barak advised him. “You might find that unhealthy.”

“One shout from me will bring fifty armed men,” the Tolnedran warned.

“Don’t be an idiot, Reldo,” the big Arend told him. “That one with all the steel on him is a Mimbrate knight. There aren’t enough men on the whole mountain to stop him, if he decides to go through here.” He looked warily at Mandorallen. “What’re your intentions, Sir Knight?” he asked respectfully.

“We are but following the trail,” Mandorallen replied. “We have no interest in thy community.”

The Arend grunted. “That’s good enough for me. Let them pass, Reldo.” He slid his sword back under his rope belt.

“What if he’s lying?” Reldo retorted. “What if they’re here to steal our gold?”

“What gold, you jackass?” the Arend demanded with contempt. “There isn’t enough gold in the whole camp to fill a thimble—and Mimbrate knights don’t lie. If you want to fight with him, go ahead. After it’s over, we’ll scoop up what’s left of you and dump you in a hole someplace.”

“You’ve got a bad mouth, Berig,” Reldo observed darkly.

“And what do you plan to do about it?”

The Tolnedran glared at the larger man and then turned and walked away, muttering curses.

Berig laughed harshly, then turned back to Mandorallen. “Come ahead, Sir Knight,” he invited. “Reldo’s all mouth. You don’t have to worry about him.”

Mandorallen moved forward at a walk. “Thou art a long way from home, my friend.”

Berig shrugged. “There wasn’t anything in Arendia to keep me, and I had a misunderstanding with my lord over a pig. When he started talking about hanging, I thought I’d like to try my luck in a different country.”

“Seems like a sensible decision.” Barak laughed.

Berig winked at him. “The trail goes right on down to the creek,” he told them, “then up the other side behind those shacks. The men over there are Nadraks, but the only one who might give you any trouble is Tarlek. He got drunk last night, though, so he’s probably still sleeping it off.”

A vacant-eyed man in Sendarian clothing shambled out of one of the tents. Suddenly he lifted his face and howled like a dog. Berig picked up a rock and shied it at him. The Sendar dodged the rock and ran yelping behind one of the shacks. “One of these days I’m going to do him a favor and stick a knife in him,” Berig remarked sourly. “He bays at the moon all night long.”

“What’s his problem?” Barak asked.

Berig shrugged. “Crazy. He thought he could make a dash into Maragor and pick up some gold before the ghosts caught him. He was wrong.”

“What did they do to him?” Durnik asked, his eyes wide.

“Nobody knows,” Berig replied. “Every so often somebody gets drunk or greedy and thinks he can get away with it. It wouldn’t do any good, even if the ghosts didn’t catch you. Anybody coming out is stripped immediately by his friends. Nobody gets to keep any gold he brings out, so why bother?”

“You’ve got a charming society here,” Silk observed wryly.

Berig laughed. “It suits me. It’s better than decorating a tree in my lord’s apple orchard back in Arendia.” He scratched absently at one armpit. “I guess I’d better go do some digging,” he sighed. “Good luck.” He turned and started toward one of the tents.

“Let’s move along,” Wolf said quietly. “These places tend to get rowdy as the day wears on.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about them, father,” Aunt Pol noticed.

“They’re good places to hide,” he replied. “Nobody asks any questions. I’ve needed to hide a time or two in my life.”

“I wonder why?”

They started along the dusty street between the slapped-together shacks and patched tents, moving down toward the roiling creek. “Wait!” someone called from behind. A scruffy-looking Drasnian was running after them, waving a small leather pouch. He caught up with them, puffing. “Why didn’t you wait?” he demanded.

“What do you want?” Silk asked him.

“I’ll give you fifty pennyweight of fine gold for the girl,” the Drasnian panted, waving his leather sack again.

Mandorallen’s face went bleak, and his hand moved toward his sword hilt.

“Why don’t you let me deal with this, Mandorallen?” Silk suggested mildly, swinging down from his saddle.

Ce’Nedra’s expression had first registered shock, then outrage. She appeared almost on the verge of explosion before Garion reached her and put his hand on her arm. “Watch,” he told her softly.

“How dare—”

“Hush. Just watch. Silk’s going to take care of it.”

“That’s a pretty paltry offer,” Silk said, his fingers flicking idly.

“She’s still young,” the other Drasnian pointed out. “She obviously hasn’t had much training yet. Which one of you owns her?”

“We’ll get to that in a moment,” Silk replied. “Surely you can make a better offer than that.”

“It’s all I’ve got,” the scruffy man answered plaintively, waving his fingers, “and I don’t want to go into partnership with any of the brigands in this place. I’d never get to see any of the profits.”

Silk shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he refused. “It’s out of the question. I’m sure you can see our position.”

Ce’Nedra was making strangled noises.

“Be quiet,” Garion snapped. “This isn’t what it seems to be.”

“What about the older one?” the scruffy man suggested, sounding desperate. “Surely fifty pennyweight’s a good price for her.”

Without warning Silk’s fist lashed out, and the scruffy Drasnian reeled back from the apparent blow. His hand flew to his mouth, and he began to spew curses.

“Run him off, Mandorallen,” Silk said quite casually.

The grim-faced knight drew his broadsword and moved his warhorse deliberately at the swearing Drasnian. After one startled yelp, the man turned and fled.

“What did he say?” Wolf asked Silk. “You were standing in front of him, so I couldn’t see.”

“The whole region’s alive with Murgos,” Silk replied, climbing back on his horse. “Kheran says that a dozen parties of them have been through here in the last week.”

“You knew that animal?” Ce’Nedra demanded.

“Kheran? Of course. We went to school together.”

“Drasnians like to keep an eye on things, Princess,” Wolf told her. “King Rhodar has agents everywhere.”

“That awful man is an agent of King Rhodar?” Ce’Nedra asked incredulously.

Silk nodded. “Actually Kheran’s a margrave,” he said. “He has exquisite manners under normal circumstances. He asked me to convey his compliments.”

Ce’Nedra looked baffled.

“Drasnians talk to each other with their fingers,” Garion explained. “I thought everybody knew that.”

Ce’Nedra’s eyes narrowed at him.

“What Kheran actually said was, ‘Tell the red-haired wench that I apologize for the insult,’” Garion informed her smugly. “He needed to talk to Silk, and he had to have an excuse.”

“Wench?”

“His word, not mine,” Garion replied quickly.

“You know this sign language?”

“Naturally.”

“That’ll do, Garion,” Aunt Pol said firmly.

“Kheran recommends that we get out of here immediately,” Silk told Mister Wolf. “He says that the Murgos are looking for somebody—us, probably.”

From the far side of the camp there were sudden angry voices. Several dozen Nadraks boiled out of their shanties to confront a group of Murgo horsemen who had just ridden up out of a deep gully. At the forefront of the Nadraks hulked a huge, fat man who looked more animal than human. In his right hand he carried a brutal-looking steel mace. “Kordoch!” he bellowed. “I told you I’d kill you next time you came here.”

The man who stepped out from among the Murgo horses to face the hulking Nadrak was Brill. “You’ve told me a lot of things, Tarlek,” he shouted back.

“This time you get what’s coming to you, Kordoch,” Tarlek roared, striding forward and swinging his mace.

“Stay back,” Brill warned, stepping away from the horses. “I don’t have time for this right now.”

“You don’t have any time left at all, Kordoch—for anything.” Tarlek was grinning broadly. “Would anyone like to take this opportunity to say good—bye to our friend over there?” he said. “I think he’s about to leave on a very long journey.”

But Brill’s right hand had dipped suddenly inside his tunic. With a flickering movement, he whipped out a peculiar-looking triangular steel object about six inches across. Then, in the same movement, he flipped it, spinning and whistling, directly at Tarlek. The flat steel triangle sailed, flashing in the sun as it spun, and disappeared with a sickening sound of shearing bone into the hulking Nadrak’s chest. Silk hissed with amazement.

Tarlek stared stupidly at Brill, his mouth agape and his left hand going to the spurting hole in his chest. Then his mace slid out of his right hand, his knees buckled, and he fell heavily forward.

“Let’s get out of here!” Mister Wolf barked. “Down the creek! Go!”

They plowed into the rocky streambed at a plunging gallop, and the muddy water sprayed out from under their horses’ hooves. After several hundred yards they turned sharply to scramble up a steep gravel bank.

“That way!” Barak shouted, pointing toward more level ground. Garion did not have time to think, only to cling to his horse and try to keep up with the others. Faintly, far behind, he could hear shouts.

They rode behind a low hill and reined in for a moment at Wolf’s signal. “Hettar,” the old man said, “see if they’re coming.”

Hettar wheeled his horse and loped up to a stand of trees on the brow of the hill.

Silk was muttering curses, his face livid.

“What’s your problem now?” Barak demanded.

Silk kept on swearing.

“What’s got him so worked up?” Barak asked Mister Wolf.

“Our friend’s just had a nasty shock,” the old man answered. “He misjudged somebody—so did I, as a matter of fact. That weapon Brill used on the big Nadrak is called an adder-sting.”

Barak shrugged. “It looked like just an odd-shaped throwing knife to me.

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” Wolf told him. “It’s as sharp as a razor on all three sides, and the points are usually dipped in poison. It’s the special weapon of the Dagashi. That’s what has got Silk so upset.”

“I should have known,” Silk berated himself. “Brill’s been a little too good all along to be just an ordinary Sendarian footpad.”

“Do you know what they’re talking about, Polgara?” Barak asked.

“The Dagashi are a secret society in Cthol Murgos,” she told him. “Trained killers—assassins. They answer only to Ctuchik and their own elders. Ctuchik’s been using them for centuries to eliminate people who get in his way. They’re very efficient.”

“I’ve never been that curious about the peculiarities of Murgo culture,” Barak replied. “If they want to creep around and kill each other, so much the better.” He glanced up the hill quickly to find out if Hettar had seen anything behind them. “That thing Brill used might be an interesting toy, but it’s no match for armor and a good sword.”

“Don’t be so provincial, Barak,” Silk said, beginning to regain his composure. “A well-thrown adder-sting can cut right through a mail shirt; if you know how, you can even sail it around corners. Not only that, a Dagashi could kill you with his hands and feet, whether you’re wearing armor or not.” He frowned. “You know, Belgarath,” he mused, “we might have been making a mistake all along. We assumed that Asharak was using Brill, but it might have been the other way around. Brill has to be good, or Ctuchik wouldn’t have sent him into the West to keep an eye on us.” He smiled then, a chillingly bleak little smile. “I wonder just how good he is.” He flexed his fingers. “I’ve met a few Dagashi, but never one of their best. That might be very interesting.”

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” Wolf told him. The old man’s face was grim. He looked at Aunt Pol, and something seemed to pass between them.

“You’re not serious,” she said.

“I don’t think we’ve got much choice, Pol. There are Murgos all around us—too many and too close. I don’t have any room to move; they’ve got us pinned right up against the southern edge of Maragor. Sooner or later, we’re going to get pushed out onto the plain anyway. At least, if we make the decision ourselves, we’ll be able to take some precautions.”

“I don’t like it, father,” she stated bluntly.

“I don’t care much for it myself,” he admitted, “but we’ve got to shake off all these Murgos or we’ll never make it to the Vale before winter sets in.”

Hettar rode back down the hill. “They’re coming,” he reported quietly. “And there’s another group of them circling in from the west to cut us off.”

Wolf drew in a deep breath. “I think that pretty well decides it, Pol,” he said. “Let’s go.”

As they passed into the belt of trees dotting the last low line of hills bordering the plain, Garion glanced back once. A half dozen dust clouds spotted the face of the miles-wide slope above them. Murgos were converging on them from all over the mountains.

They galloped on into the trees and thundered through a shallow draw. Barak, riding in the lead, suddenly held up his hand. “Men ahead of us,” he warned.

“Murgos?” Hettar asked, his hand going to his sabre.

“I don’t think so,” Barak replied. “The one I saw looked more like some of those we saw back at the settlement.”

Silk, his eyes very bright, pushed his way to the front. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Let me talk to them.” He pushed his horse into a dead run, plunging directly into what seemed to be an ambush. “Comrades!” he shouted. “Get ready! They’re coming—and they’ve got the gold!”

Several shabby-looking men with rusty swords and axes rose from the bushes or stepped out from behind trees to surround the little man. Silk was talking very fast, gesticulating, waving his arms and pointing back toward the slope looming behind them.

“What’s he doing?” Barak asked.

“Something devious, I imagine,” Wolf replied.

The men surrounding Silk looked dubious at first, but their expressions gradually changed as he continued to talk excitedly. Finally he turned in his saddle to look back. He jerked his arm in a broad, overhead sweep. “Let’s go!” he shouted. “They’re with us!” He spun his horse to scramble up the graveled side of the gully.

“Don’t get separated,” Barak warned, shifting his shoulders under his mail shirt. “I’m not sure what he’s up to, but these schemes of his sometimes fall apart.”

They pounded down through the grim-looking brigands and up the side of the gully on Silk’s heels.

“What did you say to them?” Barak shouted as they rode.

“I told them that fifteen Murgos had made a dash into Maragor and come out with three heavy packs of gold.” The little man laughed. “Then I said that the men at the settlement had turned them back and that they were trying to double around this way with the gold. I told them that we’d cover this next gully if they’d cover that one back there.”

“Those scoundrels will swarm all over Brill and his Murgos when they try to come through,” Barak suggested.

“I know.” Silk laughed. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

They rode on at a gallop. After about a half mile, Mister Wolf raised his arm, and they all reined in. “This should be far enough,” he told them. “Now listen very carefully, all of you. These hills are alive with Murgos, so we’re going to have to go into Maragor.”

Princess Ce’Nedra gasped, and her face turned deathly pale.

“It will be all right, dear,” Aunt Pol soothed her.

Wolf’s face was grimly serious. “As soon as we ride out onto the plain, you’re going to start hearing certain things,” he continued. “Don’t pay any attention. Just keep riding. I’m going to be in the lead and I want you all to watch me very closely. As soon as I raise my hand, I want you to stop and get down off your horses immediately. Keep your eyes on the ground and don’t look up, no matter what you hear. There are things out there that you don’t want to see. Polgara and I are going to put you all into a kind of sleep. Don’t try to fight us. Just relax and do exactly what we tell you to do.”

“Sleep?” Mandorallen protested. “What if we are attacked? How may we defend ourselves if we are asleep?”

“There isn’t anything alive out there to attack you, Mandorallen,” Wolf told him. “And it isn’t your body that needs to be protected; it’s your mind.”

“What about the horses?” Hettar asked.

“The horses will be all right. They won’t even see the ghosts.”

“I can’t do it,” Ce’Nedra declared, her voice hovering on the edge of hysteria. “I can’t go into Maragor.”

“Yes, you can, dear,” Aunt Pol told her in that same calm, soothing voice. “Stay close to me. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Garion felt a sudden profound sympathy for the frightened little girl, and he drew his horse over beside hers. “I’ll be here, too,” he told her. She looked at him gratefully, but her lower lip still trembled, and her face was very pale.

Mister Wolf took a deep breath and glanced once at the long slope behind them. The dust clouds raised by the converging Murgos were much closer now. “All right,” he said, “let’s go.” He turned his horse and began to ride at an easy trot down toward the mouth of the gully and the plain stretching out before them.

The sound at first seemed faint and very far away, almost like the murmur of wind among the branches of a forest or the soft babble of water over stones. Then, as they rode farther out onto the plain, it grew louder and more distinct. Garion glanced back once, almost longingly at the hills behind them. Then he pulled his horse close in beside Ce’Nedra’s and locked his eyes on Mister Wolf’s back, trying to close his ears.

The sound was now a chorus of moaning cries punctuated by occasional shrieks. Behind it all, and seeming to carry and sustain all the other sounds, was a dreadful wailing—a single voice surely, but so vast and all-encompassing that it seemed to reverberate inside Garion’s head, erasing all thought.

Mister Wolf suddenly raised his hand, and Garion slid out of his saddle, his eyes fixed almost desperately on the ground. Something flickered at the edge of his vision, but he refused to look.

Then Aunt Pol was speaking to them, her voice calm, reassuring. “I want you to form a circle,” she told them, “and take each others’ hands. Nothing will be able to enter the circle, so you’ll all be safe.”

Trembling in spite of himself, Garion stretched out his hands. Someone took his left, he didn’t know who; but he instantly knew that the tiny hand that clung so desperately to his right was Ce’Nedra’s.

Aunt Pol stood in the center of their circle, and Garion could feel the force of her presence there washing over all of them. Somewhere outside the circle, he could feel Wolf. The old man was doing something that swirled faint surges through Garion’s veins and set off staccato bursts of the familiar roaring sound.

The wailing of the dreadful, single voice grew louder, more intense, and Garion felt the first touches of panic. It was not going to work. They were all going to go mad.

“Hush, now,” Aunt Pol’s voice came to him, and he knew that she spoke inside his mind. His panic faded, and he felt a strange, peaceful lassitude. His eyes grew heavy, and the sound of the wailing grew fainter. Then, enfolded in a comforting warmth, he fell almost at once into a profound slumber.

5

Garion was not exactly sure when it was that his mind shook off Aunt Pol’s soft compulsion to sink deeper and deeper into protective unawareness. It could not have been long. Falteringly, like someone rising slowly from the depths, he swam back up out of sleep to find himself moving stiffly, even woodenly, toward the horses with the others. When he glanced at them, he saw their faces were blank, uncomprehending. He seemed to hear Aunt Pol’s whispered command to “sleep, sleep, sleep,” but it somehow lacked the power necessary to compel him to obey.

There was to his consciousness, however, a subtle difference. Although his mind was awake, his emotions seemed not to be. He found himself looking at things with a calm, lucid detachment, uncluttered by those feelings which so often churned his thoughts into turmoil. He knew that in all probability he should tell Aunt Pol that he was not asleep, but for some obscure reason he chose not to. Patiently, he began to sort through the notions and ideas surrounding that decision, trying to isolate the single thought which he knew must lie behind the choice not to speak. In his search, he touched that quiet corner where the other mind stayed. He could almost sense its sardonic amusement.

“Well?” he said silently to it.

“I see that you’re finally awake,” the other mind said to him. “No,” Garion corrected rather meticulously, “actually a part of me is asleep, I think.”

“That was the part that kept getting in the way. We can talk now. We have some things to discuss.”

“Who are you?” Garion asked, absently following Aunt Pol’s instructions to get back on his horse.

“I don’t actually have a name.”

“You’re separate from me, though, aren’t you? I mean, you’re not just another part of me, are you?”

“No,” the voice replied, “we’re quite separate.”

The horses were moving at a walk now, following Aunt Pol and Mister Wolf across the meadow.

“What do you want?” Garion asked.

“I need to make things come out the way they’re supposed to. I’ve been doing that for a very long time now.”

Garion considered that. Around him the wailing grew louder, and the chorus of moans and shrieks became more distinct. Filmy, half formed tatters of shape began to appear, floating across the grass toward the horses. “I’m going to go mad, aren’t I?” he asked somewhat regretfully. “I’m not asleep like the others are, and the ghosts will drive me mad, won’t they?”

“I doubt it,” the voice answered. “You’ll see some things you’d probably rather not see, but I don’t think it will destroy your mind. You might even learn some things about yourself that will be useful later on.”

“You’re very old, aren’t you?” Garion asked as the thought occurred to him.

“That term doesn’t have any meaning in my case.”

“Older than my grandfather?” Garion persisted.

“I knew him when he was a child. It might make you feel better to know that he was even more stubborn than you are. It took me a very long time to get him started in the direction he was supposed to go.”

“Did you do it from inside his mind?”

“Naturally.”

Garion noted that his horse was walking obliviously through one of the filmy images that was taking shape in front of him. “Then he knows you, doesn’t he—if you were in his mind, I mean?”

“He didn’t know I was there.”

“I’ve always known you were there.”

“You’re different. That’s what we need to talk about.”

Rather suddenly, a woman’s head appeared in the air directly in front of Garion’s face. The eyes were bulging, and the mouth was agape in a soundless scream. The ragged, hacked-off stump of its neck streamed blood that seemed to dribble off into nowhere. “Kiss me,” it croaked at him. Garion closed his eyes as his face passed through the head.

“You see,” the voice pointed out conversationally. “It’s not as bad as you thought it was going to be.”

“In what way am I different?” Garion wanted to know.

“Something needs to be done, and you’re the one who’s going to do it. All the others have just been in preparation for you.”

“What is it exactly that I have to do?”

“You’ll know when the time comes. If you find out too soon, it might frighten you.” The voice took on a somewhat wry note. “You’re difficult enough to manage without additional complications.”

“Why are we talking about it then?”

“You need to know why you have to do it. That might help you when the time comes.”

“All right,” Garion agreed.

“A very long time ago, something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen,” the voice in his mind began. “The universe came into existence for a reason, and it was moving toward that purpose smoothly. Everything was happening the way it was supposed to happen, but then something went wrong. It wasn’t really a very big thing, but it just happened to be in the right place at the right time—or perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time might be a better way to put it. Anyway, it changed the direction of events. Can you understand that?”

“I think so,” Garion replied, frowning with the effort. “Is it like when you throw a rock at something but it bounces off something else instead and goes where you don’t want it to go—like the time Doroon threw that rock at the crow and it hit a tree limb and bounced off and broke Faldor’s window instead?”

“That’s exactly it,” the voice congratulated him. “Up to that point there had always been only one possibility—the original one. Now there were suddenly two. Let’s take it one step further. If Doroon—or you had thrown another rock very quickly and hit the first rock before it got to Faldor’s window, it’s possible that the first rock might have been knocked back to hit the crow instead of the window.”

“Maybe,” Garion conceded doubtfully. “Doroon wasn’t really that good at throwing rocks.”

“I’m much better at it than Doroon,” the voice told him. “That’s the whole reason I came into existence in the first place. In a very special way, you are the rock that I’ve thrown. If you hit the other rock just right, you’ll turn it and make it go where it was originally intended to go.

“And if I don’t?”

“Faldor’s window gets broken.”

The figure of a naked woman with her arms chopped off and a sword thrust through her body was suddenly in front of Garion. She shrieked and moaned at him, and the stumps of her arms spurted blood directly into his face. Garion reached up to wipe off the blood, but his face was dry. Unconcerned, his horse walked through the gibbering ghost.

“We have to get things back on the right course,” the voice went on. “This certain thing you have to do is the key to the whole business. For a long time, what was supposed to happen and what was actually happening went off in different directions. Now they’re starting to converge again. The point where they meet is the point where you’ll have to act. If you succeed, things will be all right again; if you don’t, everything will keep going wrong, and the purpose for which the universe came into existence will fail.”

“How long ago was it when this started?”

“Before the world was made. Even before the Gods.”

“Will I succeed?” Garion asked.

“I don’t know,” the voice replied. “I know what’s supposed to happen—not what will. There’s something else you need to know too. When this mistake occurred, it set off two separate lines of possibility, and a line of possibility has a kind of purpose. To have a purpose, there has to be awareness of that purpose. To put it rather simply, that’s what I am—the awareness of the original purpose of the universe.”

“Only now there’s another one, too, isn’t there?” Garion suggested. “Another awareness, I mean—one connected with the other set of possibilities.”

“You’re even brighter than I thought.”

“And wouldn’t it want things to keep going wrong?”

“I’m afraid so. Now we come to the important part. The spot in time where all this is going to be decided one way or another is getting very close, and you’ve got to be ready.”

“Why me?” Garion asked, brushing away a disconnected hand that appeared to be trying to clutch at his throat. “Can’t somebody else do it?”

“No,” the voice told him. “That’s not the way it works. The universe has been waiting for you for more millions of years than you could even imagine. You’ve been hurtling toward this event since before the beginning of time. It’s yours alone. You’re the only one who can do what needs to be done, and it’s the most important thing that will ever happen—not just in this world but in all the worlds in all the universe. There are whole races of men on worlds so far away that the light from their suns will never reach this world, and they’ll cease to exist if you fail. They’ll never know you or thank you, but their entire existence depends on you. The other line of possibility leads to absolute chaos and the ultimate destruction of the universe, but you and I lead to something else.”

“What?”

“If you’re successful, you’ll live to see it happen.”

“All right,” Garion said. “What do I have to do—now, I mean?”

“You have enormous power. It’s been given to you so that you can do what you have to do, but you’ve got to learn how to use it. Belgarath and Polgara are trying to help you learn, so stop fighting with them about it. You’ve got to be ready when the time comes, and the time is much closer than you might think.”

A decapitated figure stood in the trail, holding its head by the hair with its right hand. As Garion approached, the figure raised the head. The twisted mouth shrieked curses at him.

After he had ridden through the ghost, Garion tried to speak to the mind within his mind again, but it seemed to be gone for the moment. They rode slowly past the tumbled stones of a ruined farmstead.

Ghosts clustered thickly on the stones, beckoning and calling seductively.

“A disproportionate number seem to be women,” Aunt Pol observed calmly to Mister Wolf.

“It was a peculiarity of the race,” Wolf replied. “Eight out of nine births were female. It made certain adjustments necessary in the customary relationships between men and women.”

“I imagine you found that entertaining,” she said dryly.

“The Marags didn’t look at things precisely the way other races do. Marriage never gained much status among them. They were quite liberal about certain things.”

“Oh? Is that the term for it?”

“Try not to be so narrow-minded, Pol. The society functioned; that’s what counts.”

“There’s a bit more to it than that, father,” she said. “What about their cannibalism?”

“That was a mistake. Somebody misinterpreted a passage in one of their sacred texts, that’s all. They did it out of a sense of religious obligation, not out of appetite. On the whole, I rather liked the Marags. They were generous, friendly, and very honest with each other. They enjoyed life. If it hadn’t been for the gold here, they’d probably have worked out their little aberration.”

Garion had forgotten about the gold. As they crossed a small stream, he looked down into the sparkling water and saw the butter-yellow flecks glittering among the pebbles on the bottom.

A naked ghost suddenly appeared before him. “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” she leered. Then she took hold of the sides of the great slash that ran up her abdomen, pulled it open and spilled out her entrails in a pile on the bank of the stream.

Garion gagged and clenched his teeth together.

“Don’t think about the gold!” the voice in his mind said sharply. “The ghosts come at you through your greed. If you think about gold, you’ll go mad.”

They rode on, and Garion tried to push the thought of gold out of his mind.

Mister Wolf, however, continued to talk about it. “That’s always been the problem with gold. It seems to attract the worst kind of people—the Tolnedrans in this case.”

“They were trying to stamp out cannibalism, father,” Aunt Pol replied. “That’s a custom most people find repugnant.”

“I wonder how serious they’d have been about it if all that gold hadn’t been lying on the bed of every stream in Maragor.”

Aunt Pol averted her eyes from the ghost of a child impaled on a Tolnedran spear. “And now no one has the gold,” she said. “Mara saw to that.”

“Yes,” Wolf agreed, lifting his face to listen to the dreadful wail that seemed to come from everywhere. He winced at a particularly shrill note in the wailing. “I wish he wouldn’t scream so loud.”

They passed the ruins of what appeared to have been a temple. The white stones were tumbled, and grass grew up among them. A broad tree standing nearby was festooned with hanging bodies, twisting and swinging on their ropes. “Let us down,” the bodies murmured. “Let us down.”

“Father!” Aunt Pol said sharply, pointing at the meadow beyond the fallen temple. “Over there! Those people are real.”

A procession of robed and hooded figures moved slowly through the meadow, chanting in unison to the sound of a mournfully tolling bell supported on a heavy pole they carried on their shoulders.

“The monks of Mar Terrin,” Wolf said. “Tolnedra’s conscience. They aren’t anything to worry about.”

One of the hooded figures looked up and saw them. “Go back!” he shouted. He broke away from the others and ran toward them, recoiling often from things Garion could not see. “Go back!” he cried again. “Save yourselves! You approach the very center of the horror. Mar Amon lies just beyond that hill. Mara himself rages through its haunted streets!”

6

The procession of monks moved on, the sound of their chanting and slowly tolling bell growing fainter as they crossed the meadow. Mister Wolf seemed deep in thought, the fingers of his good hand stroking his beard. Finally he sighed rather wryly. “I suppose we might as well deal with him here and now, Pol. He’ll just follow us if we don’t.”

“You’re wasting your time, father,” Aunt Pol replied. “There’s no way to reason with him. We’ve tried before.”

“You’re probably right,” he agreed, “but we should try at least. Aldur would be disappointed if we didn’t. Maybe when he finds out what’s happening, he’ll come around to the point where we can at least talk to him.”

A piercing wail echoed across the sunny meadow, and Mister Wolf made a sour face. “You’d think that he’d have shrieked himself out by now. All right, let’s go to Mar Amon.” He turned his horse toward the hill the wild-eyed monk had pointed out to them. A maimed ghost gibbered at him from the air in front of his face. “Oh, stop that!” he said irritably. With a startled flicker, the ghost disappeared.

There had perhaps been a road leading over the hill at some time in the past. The faint track of it was dimly visible through the grass, but the thirty-two centuries which had passed since the last living foot had touched its surface had all but erased it. They wound to the top of the hill and looked down into the ruins of Mar Amon. Garion, still detached and unmoved, perceived and deduced things about the city he would not have otherwise noted. Though the destruction had been nearly total, the shape of the city was clearly evident. The street—for there was only one—was laid out in a spiral, winding in toward a broad, circular plaza in the precise center of the ruins. With a peculiar flash of insight, Garion became immediately convinced that the city had been designed by a woman. Men’s minds ran to straight lines, but women thought more in terms of circles.

With Aunt Pol and Mister Wolf in the lead and the rest following in wooden-faced unconsciousness, they started down the hill to the city. Garion rode at the rear, trying to ignore the ghosts rising from the earth to confront him with their nudity and their hideous maiming. The wailing sound which they had heard from the moment they had entered Maragor grew louder, more distinct. The wail had sometimes seemed to be a chorus, confused and distorted by echoes, but now Garion realized that it was one single, mighty voice, filled with a grief so vast that it reverberated through all the kingdom.

As they approached the city, a terrible wind seemed to come up, deadly chill and filled with an overpowering charnel-house stench. As Garion reached automatically to draw his cloak tighter about him, he saw that the cloak did not in any way react to that wind, and that the tall grass through which they rode did not bend before it. He considered it, turning it over in his mind as he tried to close his nostrils to the putrid stench of decay and corruption carried on that ghostly wind. If the wind did not move the grass, it could not be a real wind. Furthermore, if the horses could not hear the wails, they could not be real wails either. He grew colder and he shivered, even as he told himself that the chill—like the wind and the grief laden howling—was spiritual rather than real.

Although Mar Amon, when he had first glimpsed it from the top of the hill, had appeared to be in total ruin, when they entered the city Garion was startled to see the substantial walls of houses and public buildings surrounding him; and somewhere not far away he seemed to hear the sound of laughing children. There was also the sound of singing off in the distance.

“Why does he keep doing this?” Aunt Pol asked sadly. “It doesn’t do any good.”

“It’s all he has, Pol,” Mister Wolf replied.

“It always ends the same way, though.”

“I know, but for a little while it helps him forget.”

“There are things we’d all like to forget, father. This isn’t the way to do it.”

Wolf looked admiringly at the substantial-seeming houses around them. “It’s very good, you know.”

“Naturally,” she said. “He’s a God, after all—but it’s still not good for him.”

It was not until Barak’s horse inadvertently stepped directly through one of the walls—disappearing through the solid-looking stone and then reemerging several yards farther down the street—that Garion understood what his Aunt and grandfather were talking about. The walls, the buildings, the whole city was an illusion—a memory. The chill wind with its stink of corruption seemed to grow stronger and carried with it now the added reek of smoke. Though Garion could still see the sunlight shining brightly on the grass, it seemed for some reason that it was growing noticeably darker. The laughter of children and the distant singing faded; instead, Garion heard screams.

A Tolnedran legionnaire in burnished breastplate and plumed helmet, as solid-looking as the walls around them, came running down the long curve of the street. His sword dripped blood, his face was fixed in a hideous grin, and his eyes were wild.

Hacked and mutilated bodies sprawled in the street now, and there was blood everywhere. The waiting climbed into a piercing shriek as the illusion moved on toward its dreadful climax.

The spiral street opened at last into the broad circular plaza at the center of Mar Amon. The icy wind seemed to howl through the burning city, and the dreadful sound of swords chopping through flesh and bone seemed to fill Garion’s entire mind. The air grew even darker.

The stones of the plaza were thick with the illusory memory of uncounted scores of Marag dead lying beneath rolling clouds of dense smoke. But what stood in the center of the plaza was not an illusion, nor even a ghost. The figure towered and seemed to shimmer with a terrible presence, a reality that was in no way dependent upon the mind of the observer for its existence. In its arms it held the body of a slaughtered child that seemed somehow to be the sum and total of all the dead of haunted Maragor; and its face, lifted in anguish above the body of that dead child, was ravaged by an expression of inhuman grief. The figure wailed; and Garion, even in the half somnolent state that protected his sanity, felt the hair on the back of his neck trying to rise in honor.

Mister Wolf grimaced and climbed down from his saddle. Carefully stepping over the illusions of bodies littering the plaza, he approached the enormous presence. “Lord Mara,” he said, respectfully bowing to the figure.

Mara howled.

“Lord Mara,” Wolf said again. “I would not lightly intrude myself upon thy grief, but I must speak with thee.”

The dreadful face contorted, and great tears streamed down the God’s cheeks. Wordlessly, Mara held out the body of the child and lifted his face and wailed.

“Lord Mara!” Wolf tried once again, more insistent this time.

Mara closed his eyes and bowed his head, sobbing over the body of the child.

“It’s useless, father,” Aunt Pol told the old man. “When he’s like this, you can’t reach him.”

“Leave me, Belgarath,” Mara said, still weeping. His huge voice rolled and throbbed in Garion’s mind. “Leave me to my grief.”

“Lord Mara, the day of the fulfillment of the prophecy is at hand,” Wolf told him.

“What is that to me?” Mara sobbed, clutching the body of the child closer. “Will the prophecy restore my slaughtered children to me? I am beyond its reach. Leave me alone.”

“The fate of the world hinges upon the outcome of events which will happen very soon, Lord Mara,” Mister Wolf insisted. “The kingdoms of East and West are girding for the last war, and Torak One-Eye, thy accursed brother, stirs in his slumber and will soon awaken.”

“Let him awaken,” Mara replied and bowed down over the body in his arms as a storm of fresh weeping swept him.

“Wilt thou then submit to his dominion, Lord Mara?” Aunt Pol asked him.

“I am beyond his dominion, Polgara,” Mara answered. “I will not leave this land of my murdered children, and no man of God will intrude upon me here. Let Torak have the world if he wants it.”

“We might as well leave, father,” Aunt Pol said. “Nothing’s going to move him.”

“Lord Mara,” Mister Wolf said to the weeping God, “we have brought before thee the instruments of the prophecy. Wilt thou bless them before we go?”

“I have no blessings, Belgarath,” Mara replied. “Only curses for the savage children of Nedra. Take these strangers and go.”

“Lord Mara,” Aunt Pol said firmly, “a part is reserved for thee in the working-out of the prophecy. The iron destiny which compels us all compels thee as well. Each must play that part laid out for him from the beginning of days, for in the day that the prophecy is turned aside from its terrible course, the world will be unmade.”

“Let it be unmade,” Mara groaned. “It holds no more joy for me, so let it perish. My grief is eternal, and I will not abandon it, though the cost be the unmaking of all that has been made. Take these children of the prophecy and depart.”

Mister Wolf bowed with resignation, turned, and came back toward the rest of them. His expression registered a certain hopeless disgust.

“Wait!” Mara roared suddenly. The images of the city and its dead wavered and shimmered away. “What is this?” the God demanded.

Mister Wolf turned quickly.

“What hast thou done, Belgarath?” Mara accused, suddenly towering into immensity. “And thou, Polgara. Is my grief now an amusement for thee? Wilt thou cast my sorrow into my teeth?”

“My Lord?” Aunt Pol seemed taken aback by the God’s sudden fury.

“Monstrous!” Mara roared. “Monstrous!” His huge face convulsed with rage. In terrible anger, he strode toward them and then stopped directly in front of the horse of Princess Ce’Nedra. “I will rend thy flesh!” he shrieked at her. “I will fill thy brain with the worms of madness, daughter of Nedra. I will sink thee in torment and horror for all the days of thy life.”

“Leave her alone!” Aunt Pol said sharply.

“Nay, Polgara,” he raged. “Upon her will fall the brunt of my wrath.” His dreadful, clutching fingers reached out toward the uncomprehending princess, but she stared blankly through him, unflinching and unaware.

The God hissed with frustration and whirled to confront Mister Wolf. “Tricked!” he howled. “Her mind is asleep.”

“They’re all asleep, Lord Mara,” Wolf replied. “Threats and horrors don’t mean anything to them. Shriek and howl until the sky falls down; she cannot hear thee.”

“I will punish thee for this, Belgarath,” Mara snarled, “and Polgara as well. You will all taste pain and terror for this arrogant despite of me. I will wring the sleep from the minds of these intruders, and they will know the agony and madness I will visit upon them all.” He swelled suddenly into vastness.

“That’s enough! Mara! Stop!” The voice was Garion’s, but Garion knew that it was not he who spoke.

The Spirit of Mara turned on him, raising his vast arm to strike, but Garion felt himself slide from his horse to approach the vast threatening figure. “Your vengeance stops here, Mara,” the voice coming from Garion’s mouth said. “The girl is bound to my purpose. You will not touch her.” Garion realized with a certain alarm that he had been placed between the raging God and the sleeping princess.

“Move out of my way, boy, lest I slay thee,” Mara threatened.

“Use your mind, Mara,” the voice told him, “if you haven’t howled it empty by now. You know who I am.”

“I will have her!” Mara howled. “I will give her a multitude of lives and tear each one from her quivering flesh.”

“No,” the voice replied, “you won’t. ”

The God Mara drew himself up again, raising his dreadful arms; but at the same time, his eyes were probing—and more than his eyes. Garion once again felt a vast touch on his mind as he had in Queen Salmissra’s throne room when the Spirit of Issa had touched him. A dreadful recognition began to dawn in Mara’s weeping eyes. His raised arms fell. “Give her to me,” he pleaded. “Take the others and go, but give the Tolnedran to me. I beg it of thee.”

“No.” What happened then was not sorcery—Garion knew it instantly. The noise was not there nor that strange, rushing surge that always accompanied sorcery. Instead, there seemed to be a terrible pressure as the full force of Mara’s mind was directed crushingly at him. Then the mind within his mind responded. The power was so vast that the world itself was not large enough to contain it. It did not strike back at Mara, for that dreadful collision would have shattered the world, but it stood rather, calmly unmoved and immovable against the raging torrent of Mara’s fury. For a fleeting moment, Garion shared the awareness of the mind within his mind, and he shuddered back from its immensity. In that instant, he saw the birth of uncounted suns swirling in vast spirals against the velvet blackness of the void, their birth and gathering into galaxies and ponderously turning nebulae encompassing but a moment. And beyond that, he looked full in the face of time itself—seeing its beginning and its ending in one awful glimpse.

Mara fell back. “I must submit,” he said hoarsely, and then he bowed to Garion, his ravaged face strangely humble. He turned away and buried his face in his hands, weeping uncontrollably.

“Your grief will end, Mara,” the voice said gently. “One day you will find joy again.”

“Never,” the God sobbed. “My grief will last forever.”

“Forever is a very long time, Mara,” the voice replied, “and only I can see to the end of it.”

The weeping God did not answer, but moved away from them, and the sound of his wailing echoed again through the ruins of Mar Amon. Mister Wolf and Aunt Pol were both staring at Garion with stunned faces. When the old man spoke, his voice was awed. “Is it possible?”

“Aren’t you the one who keeps saying that anything is possible, Belgarath?”

“We didn’t know you could intervene directly,” Aunt Pol said.

“I nudge things a bit from time to time—make a few suggestions. If you think back carefully, you might even remember some of them.”

“Is the boy aware of any of this?” she asked.

“Of course. We had a little talk about it.”

“How much did you tell him?”

“As much as he could understand. Don’t worry, Polgara, I’m not going to hurt him. He realizes how important all this is now. He knows that he needs to prepare himself and that he doesn’t have a great deal of time for it. I think you’d better leave here now. The Tolnedran girl’s presence is causing Mara a great deal of pain.”

Aunt Pol looked as if she wanted to say more, but she glanced once at the shadowy figure of the God weeping not far away and nodded. She turned to her horse and led the way out of the ruins.

Mister Wolf fell in beside Garion after they had remounted to follow her. “Perhaps we could talk as we ride along,” he suggested. “I have a great many questions.”

“He’s gone, Grandfather,” Garion told him.

“Oh,” Wolf answered with obvious disappointment.

It was nearing sundown by then, and they stopped for the night in a grove about a mile away from Mar Amon. Since they had left the ruins, they had seen no more of the maimed ghosts. After the others had been fed and sent to their blankets, Aunt Pol, Garion, and Mister Wolf sat around their small fire. Since the presence in his mind had left him, following the meeting with Mara, Garion had felt himself sinking deeper toward sleep. All emotion was totally gone now, and he seemed no longer able to think independently.

“Can we talk to the—other one?” Mister Wolf asked hopefully.

“He isn’t there right now,” Garion replied.

“Then he isn’t always with you?”

“Not always. Sometimes he goes away for months—sometimes even longer. He’s been there for quite a long while this time—ever since Asharak burned up.”

“Where exactly is he when he’s with you?” the old man asked curiously.

“In here.” Garion tapped his head.

“Have you been awake ever since we entered Maragor?” Aunt Pol asked.

“Not exactly awake,” Garion answered. “Part of me was asleep.”

“You could see the ghosts?”

“Yes.”

“But they didn’t frighten you?”

“No. Some of them surprised me, and one of them made me sick.”

Wolf looked up quickly. “It wouldn’t make you sick now though, would it?”

“No. I don’t think so. Right at first I could still feel things like that a little bit. Now I can’t.”

Wolf looked thoughtfully at the fire as if looking for a way to phrase his next question. “What did the other one in your head say to you when you talked together?”

“He told me that something had happened a long time ago that wasn’t supposed to happen and that I was supposed to fix it.”

Wolf laughed shortly. “That’s a succinct way of putting it,” he observed. “Did he say anything about how it was going to turn out?”

“He doesn’t know.”

Wolf sighed. “I’d hoped that maybe we’d picked up an advantage somewhere, but I guess not. It looks like both prophecies are still equally valid.”

Aunt Pol was looking steadily at Garion. “Do you think you’ll be able to remember any of this when you wake up again?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“All right then, listen carefully. There are two prophecies, both leading toward the same event. The Grolims and the rest of the Angaraks are following one; we’re following the other. The event turns out differently at the end of each prophecy.”

“I see.”

“Nothing in either prophecy excludes anything that will happen in the other until they meet in that event,” she continued. “The course of everything that follows will be decided by how that event turns out. One prophecy will succeed; the other will fail. Everything that has happened and will happen comes together at that point and becomes one. The mistake will be erased, and the universe will go in one direction or the other, as if that were the direction it had been going from its very beginning.The only real difference is that something that’s very important will never happen if we fail.”

Garion nodded, feeling suddenly very tired.

“Beldin call it the theory of convergent destinies,” Mister Wolf said. “Two equally possible possibilities. Beldin can be very pompous sometimes.”

“It’s not an uncommon failing, father,” Aunt Pol told him.

“I think I’d like to sleep now,” Garion said.

Wolf and Aunt Pol exchanged a quick glance. “All right,” Aunt Pol said. She rose and took him by the arm and led him to his blankets.

After she had covered him, drawing the blankets up snugly, she laid one cool hand on his forehead. “Sleep, my Belgarion,” she murmured.

And he did that.