Queen of Sorcery

23

The earth was still the same. The trees had not changed, nor had the sky. It was still spring, for the seasons had not altered their stately march. But for Garion nothing would ever again be the way that it had been.

They rode down through the Wood of the Dryads to the banks of the River of the Woods which marked the southern boundary of Tolnedra, and from time to time as they rode he caught strange glances from his friends. The looks were speculative, thoughtful, and Durnik—good, solid Durnik—behaved as if he were almost afraid. Only Aunt Pol seemed unchanged, unconcerned. “Don’t worry about it, Belgarion,” her voice murmured in his mind.

“Don’t call me that,” he replied with an irritated thought.

“It’s your name,” the silent voice said. “You might as well get used to it.

“Leave me alone. ”

And then the sense of her presence in his mind was gone.

It took them several days to reach the sea. The weather remained intermittently cloudy, though it did not rain. A stiff onshore breeze was blowing when they rode out onto the wide beach at the mouth of the river. The surf boomed against the sand, and whitecaps flecked the tops of the waves.

Out beyond the surf, a lean, black Cherek war-boat swung at anchor, the air above her alive with screeching gulls. Barak pulled his horse in and shaded his eyes. “She looks familiar,” he rumbled, peering intently at the narrow ship.

Hettar shrugged. “They all look the same to me.”

“There’s all the difference in the world,” Barak said, sounding a bit injured. “How would you feel if I said that all horses looked the same?”

“I’d think you were going blind.”

Barak grinned at him. “It’s exactly the same thing,” he said.

“How do we let them know we’re here?” Durnik asked.

“They know already,” Barak said, “unless they’re drunk. Sailors always watch an unfriendly shore very carefully.”

“Unfriendly?” Durnik asked.

“Every shore is unfriendly when a Cherek war-boat comes in sight,” Barak answered. “It’s some kind of superstition, I think.”

The ship came about and her anchor was raised. Her oars came out like long, spidery legs, and she seemed to walk through the froth-topped combers toward the mouth of the river. Barak led the way toward the riverbank, then rode along the broad flow until he found a spot deep enough so that the ship could be moored next to the shore.

The fur-clad sailors who threw Barak a mooring line looked familiar, and the first one who leaped across to the riverbank was Greldik, Barak’s old friend.

“You’re a long ways south,” Barak said as if they had only just parted.

Greldik shrugged. “I heard you needed a ship. I wasn’t doing anything, so I thought I’d come down and see what you were up to.”

“Did you talk to my cousin?”

“Grinneg? No. We made a run down from Kotu to the harbor at Tol Horb for some Drasnian merchants. I ran into Elteg—you remember him—black beard, only one eye?”

Barak nodded.

“He told me that Grinneg was paying him to meet you here. I remembered that you and Elteg didn’t get along very well, so I offered to come down instead.”

“And he agreed?”

“No,” Greldik replied, pulling at his beard. “As a matter of fact, he told me to mind my own business.”

“I’m not surprised,” Barak said. “Elteg always was greedy, and Grinneg probably offered him a lot of money.”

“More than likely.” Greldik grinned. “Elteg didn’t say how much, though.”

“How did you persuade him to change his mind?”

“He had some trouble with his ship,” Greldik said with a straight face.

“What kind of trouble?”

“It seems that one night after he and his crew were all drunk, some scoundrel slipped aboard and chopped down his mast.”

“What’s the world coming to?” Barak asked, shaking his head.

“My thought exactly,” Greldik agreed.

“How did he take it?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid,” Greldik said sadly. “When we rowed out of the harbor, he sounded as if he was inventing profanities on the spot. You could hear him for quite some distance.”

“He should learn to control his temper. That’s the kind of behavior that gives Chereks a bad name in the ports of the world.”

Greldik nodded soberly and turned to Aunt Pol. “My Lady,” he said with a polite bow, “my ship is at your disposal.”

“Captain,” she asked, acknowledging his bow. “How long will it take you to get us to Sthiss Tor?”

“Depends on the weather,” he answered, squinting at the sky. “Probably ten days at the most. We picked up fodder for your horses on the way here, but we’ll have to stop for water from time to time.”

“We’d better get started then,” she said.

It took a bit of persuading to get the horses aboard the ship, but Hettar managed it without too much difficulty. Then they pushed away from the bank, crossed the bar at the mouth of the river and reached the open sea. The crew raised the sails, and they quartered the wind down along the gray-green coastline of Nyissa.

Garion went forward to his customary place in the bow of the ship and sat there, staring bleakly out at the tossing sea. The image of the burning man back in the forest filled his mind.

There was a firm step behind him and a faint, familiar fragrance.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Aunt Pol asked.

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Many things,” she told him.

“You knew I could do that kind of thing, didn’t you?”

“I suspected it,” she said, sitting down beside him. “There were several hints. One can never be sure, though, until it’s used for the first time. I’ve known any number of people who had the capability and just never used it.”

“I wish I never had,” Garion said.

“I don’t see that you really had much choice. Chamdar was your enemy.”

“But did it have to be that way?” he demanded. “Did it have to be fire?”

“The choice was yours,” she answered. “If fire bothers you so much, don’t do it that way next time.”

“There isn’t going to be a next time,” he stated flatly. “Not ever.”

“Belgarion,” her voice snapped within his mind, “stop this foolishness at once. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. ”

“Quit that,” he said aloud. “Stay out of my mind—and don’t call me Belgarion.”

“You are Belgarion,” she insisted. “Like it or not, you will use the power again. Once it’s been released, you can never cage it up. You’ll get angry or frightened or excited, and you’ll use it without even thinking. You can no more choose not to use it than you can choose not to use one of your hands. The important thing now is to teach you how to control it. We can’t have you blundering through the world uprooting trees and flattening hills with random thoughts. You must learn to control it and yourself. I didn’t raise you to let you become a monster.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “I’m already a monster. Didn’t you see what I did back there?”

“All this self pity is very tedious, Belgarion,” her voice told him. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.” She stood up. “Do try to grow up a little, dear,” she said aloud. “It’s very hard to instruct someone who’s so self absorbed that he won’t listen.”

“I’ll never do it again,” he told her defiantly.

“Oh yes, you will, Belgarion. You’ll learn and you’ll practice and you’ll develop the discipline this requires. If you don’t want to do it willingly, then we’ll have to do it the other way. Think about it, dear, and make up your mind—but don’t take too long. It’s too important to be put off.” She reached out and gently touched his cheek; then she turned and walked away.

“She’s right, you know,” the voice in his mind told him.

“You stay out of this,” Garion said.

In the days that followed, he avoided Aunt Pol as much as possible, but he could not avoid her eyes. Wherever he went on the narrow ship, he knew that she was watching him, her eyes calm, speculative.

Then, at breakfast on the third day out, she looked at his face rather closely as if noticing something for the first time. “Garion,” she said, “you’re starting to look shaggy. Why don’t you shave?”

Garion blushed furiously and put his fingers to his chin. There were definitely whiskers there—downy, soft, more like fuzz than bristles, but whiskers all the same.

“Thou art truly approaching manhood, young Garion,” Mandorallen assured him rather approvingly.

“The decision doesn’t have to be made immediately, Polgara,” Barak said, stroking his own luxuriant red beard. “Let the whiskers grow for a while. If they don’t turn out well, he can always shave them off later.”

“I think your neutrality in the matter is suspect, Barak,” Hettar remarked. “Don’t most Chereks wear beards?”

“No razor’s ever touched my face,” Barak admitted. “But I just don’t think it’s the sort of thing to rush into. It’s very hard to stick whiskers back on if you decide later that you wanted to keep them after all.”

“I think they’re kind of funny,” Ce’Nedra said. Before Garion could stop her, she reached out two tiny fingers and tugged the soft down on his chin. He winced and blushed again.

“They come off,” Aunt Pol ordered firmly.

Wordlessly, Durnik went below decks. When he came back, he carried a basin, a chunk of brown-colored soap, a towel, and a fragment of mirror. “It isn’t really hard, Garion,” he said, putting the things on the table in front of the young man. Then he took a neatly folded razor out of a case at his belt. “You just have to be careful not to cut yourself, that’s all. The whole secret is not to rush.”

“Pay close attention when you’re near your nose,” Hettar advised. “A man looks very strange without a nose.”

The shaving proceeded with a great deal of advice, and on the whole it did not turn out too badly. Most of the bleeding stopped after a few minutes, and, aside from the fact that his face felt as if it had been peeled, Garion was quite satisfied with the results.

“Much better,” Aunt Pol said.

“He’ll catch cold in his face now,” Barak predicted.

“Will you stop that?” she told him.

The coast of Nyissa slid by on their left, a blank wall of tangled vegetation, festooned with creepers and long tatters of moss. Occasional eddies in the breeze brought the foul reek of the swamps out to the ship. Garion and Ce’Nedra stood together in the prow of the ship, looking toward the jungle.

“What are those?” Garion asked, pointing at some large things with legs slithering around on a mud bank along a stream that emptied into the sea.

“Crocodiles,” Ce’Nedra answered.

“What’s a crocodile?”

“A big lizard,” she said.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Very dangerous. They eat people. Haven’t you ever read about them?”

“I can’t read,” Garion admitted without thinking.

“What?”

“I can’t read,” Garion repeated. “Nobody ever taught me how.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s not my fault,” he said defensively.

She looked at him thoughtfully. She had seemed almost half afraid of him since the meeting with Chamdar, and her insecurity had probably been increased by the fact that, on the whole, she had not treated him very well. Her first assumption that he was only a servant boy had gotten their whole relationship off on the wrong foot, but she was far too proud to admit that initial mistake. Garion could almost hear the little wheels clicking around in her head. “Would you like to have me teach you how?” she offered. It was probably the closest thing he’d ever get to an apology from her.

“Would it take very long?”

“That depends on how clever you are.”

“When do you think we could start?”

She frowned. “I’ve got a couple of books, but we’ll need something to write on.”

“I don’t know that I need to learn how to write,” he said. “Reading ought to be enough for right now.”

She laughed. “They’re the same thing, you goose.”

“I didn’t know that,” Garion said, flushing slightly. “I thought—” He floundered with the whole idea. “I guess I never really thought about it,” he concluded lamely. “What sort of thing do we need to write on?”

“Parchment’s the best,” she said, “and a charcoal stick to write with—so we can rub it off and write on the parchment again.”

“I’ll go talk to Durnik,” he decided. “He’ll be able to think of something.”

Durnik suggested sailcloth and a charred stick. Within an hour Garion and Ce’Nedra were sitting in a sheltered spot in the bow of the ship their heads close together over a square of canvas nailed to a plank. Garion glanced up once and saw Aunt Pol not far away. She was watching the two of them with an indecipherable expression. Then he lowered his eyes again to the strangely compelling symbols on the canvas.

His instruction went on for the next several days. Since his fingers were naturally nimble, he quickly picked up the trick of forming the letter.

“No, no,” Ce’Nedra said one afternoon, “you’ve spelled it wrong, used the wrong letters. Your name’s Garion, not Belgarion.”

He felt a sudden chill and looked down at the canvas square. The name was spelled out quite clearly—“Belgarion.”

He looked up quickly. Aunt Pol was standing where she usually stood, her eyes on him as always.

“Stay out of my mind!” He snapped the thought at her.

“Study hard, dear,” her voice urged him silently. “Learning of any kind is useful, and you have a great deal to learn. The sooner you get the habit, the better.” Then she smiled, turned and walked away.

The next day, Greldik’s ship reached the mouths of the River of the Serpent in central Nyissa, and his men struck the sail and set their oars into the locks along the sides of the ship in preparation for the long pull upriver to Sthiss Tor.

24

There was no air. It seemed as if the world had suddenly been turned into a vast, reeking pool of stagnant water. The River of the Serpent had a hundred mouths, each creeping sluggishly through the jellied muck of the delta as if reluctant to join the boisterous waves of the sea. The reeds which grew in that vast swamp reached a height of twenty feet and were as thick as woven fabric. There was a tantalizing sound of a breeze brushing the tops of the reeds, but down among them, all thought or memory of breeze was lost. There was no air. The delta steamed and stank beneath a sun that did not burn so much as boil. Each breath seemed to be half water. Insects rose in clouds from the reeds and settled in mindless gluttony on every inch of exposed skin, biting, feeding on blood.

They were a day and a half among the reeds before they reached the first trees, low, scarcely more than bushes. The main river channel began to take shape as they moved slowly on into the Nyissan heartland. The sailors sweated and swore at their oars, and the ship moved slowly against the current, almost as if she struggled against a tide of thick oil that clung to her like some loathsome glue.

The trees grew taller, then immense. Great, gnarled roots twisted up out of the ooze along the banks like grotesquely misshapen legs, and trunks vast as castles reached up into the steaming sky. Ropey vines undulated down from the limbs overhead, moving, seeming to writhe with a kind of vegetable will of their own in the breathless air. Shaggy tatters of grayish moss descended in hundred-foot-long streamers from the trees, and the river wound spitefully in great coils that made their journey ten times as long as it needed to be.

“Unpleasant sort of place,” Hettar grumbled, dispiritedly looking out over the bow at the weedy surface of the river ahead. He had removed his horsehide jacket and linen undertunic, and his lean torso gleamed with sweat. Like most of them, he was covered with the angry welts of insect bites.

“My very thought,” Mandorallen agreed.

One of the sailors shouted and jumped up, kicking at his oar-handle. Something long, slimy, and boneless had crawled unseen up his oar, seeking his flesh with an eyeless voracity.

“Leech,” Durnik said with a shudder as the hideous thing dropped with a wet plop back into the stinking river. “I’ve never seen one so big. It must be a foot long or more.”

“Probably not a good place for swimming,” Hettar observed.

“I wasn’t considering it,” Durnik said.

“Good.” Aunt Pol, wearing a light linen dress, came out of the cabin beneath the high stern where Greldik and Barak were taking turns at the tiller. She had been caring for Ce’Nedra, who had drooped and wilted like a flower in the brutal climate of the river.

“Can’t you do something?” Garion demanded of her silently.

“About what?”

“All of this.” He looked around helplessly.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Drive of the bugs, if nothing else.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself, Belgarion?”

He set his jaw. “No!” It was almost a silent shout.

“It isn’t really very hard.”

“No.”

She shrugged and turned away, leaving him seething with frustration. It took them three more days to reach Sthiss Tor. The city was embraced in a wide coil of the river and was built of black stone. The houses and buildings were low and for the most part were windowless. In the center of the city a vast pile of a building rose with strangely shaped spires and domes and terraces, oddly alien-looking. Wharves and jetties poked out into the turbid river, and Greldik guided his ship toward one which was much larger than the rest. “We have to stop at customs,” he explained.

“Inevitably,” Durnik said.

The exchange at customs was brief. Captain Greldik announced that he was delivering the goods of Radek of Boktor to the Drasnian trade enclave. Then he handed a jingling purse to the shaven-headed customs official, and the ship was allowed to proceed without inspection.

“You owe me for that, Barak,” Greldik said. “The trip here was out of friendship, but the money’s something else again.”

“Write it down someplace,” Barak told him. “I’ll take care of it when I get back to Val Alorn.”

“If you ever get back to Val Alorn,” Greldik said sourly.

“I’m sure you’ll remember me in your prayers, then,” Barak said. “I know you pray for me all the time anyway, but now you’ve got a bit more incentive.”

“Is every official in the whole world corrupt?” Durnik demanded irritably. “Doesn’t anyone do his job the way it’s supposed to be done without taking bribes?”

“The world would come to an end if one of them did,” Hettar replied. “You and I are too simple and honest for these affairs, Durnik. We’re better off leaving this kind of thing to others.”

“It’s disgusting, that’s all.”

“That may be true,” Hettar agreed, “but I’m just as happy that the customs man didn’t look below decks. We might have had some trouble explaining the horses.”

The sailors had backed the ship into the river again and rowed toward a series of substantial wharves. They pulled up beside the outer wharf, shipped their oars and looped the hawsers around the tar-blackened pilings of a mooring spot.

“You can’t moor here,” a sweaty guard told them from the wharf. “This is for Drasnian ships.”

“I’ll moor anyplace it suits me,” Greldik said shortly.

“I’ll call out the soldiers,” the guard threatened. He took hold of one of their hawsers and pulled out a long knife.

“If you cut that rope, friend, I’ll come down there and tear off your ears,” Greldik warned.

“Go ahead and tell him,” Barak suggested. “It’s too hot for fighting.”

“My ship’s carrying Drasnian goods,” Greldik told the guard on the wharf, “belonging to a man named Radek—from Boktor, I think.”

“Oh,” the guard said, putting away his knife, “why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Because I didn’t like your attitude,” Greldik replied bluntly. “Where do I find the man in charge?”

“Droblek? His house is just up that street past the shops. It’s the one with the Drasnian emblem on the door.”

“I’ve got to talk with him,” Greldik said. “Do I need a pass to go off the wharf? I’ve heard some strange things about Sthiss Tor.”

“You can move around inside the enclave,” the guard informed him. “You only need a pass if you want to go into the city.”

Greldik grunted and went below. A moment later he came back with several packets of folded parchment. “Do you want to talk to this official?” he asked Aunt Pol. “Or do you want me to take care of it?”

“We’d better come along,” she decided. “The girl’s asleep. Tell your men not to disturb her.”

Greldik nodded and spoke briefly to his first mate. The sailors ran a plank across to the wharf, and Greldik led the way ashore. Thick clouds were rolling in overhead, darkening the sun.

The street which ran down to the wharf was lined on both sides with the shops of Drasnian merchants, and Nyissans moved torpidly from shop to shop, stopping now and then to haggle with the sweating shop-keepers. The Nyissan men all wore loose-fitting robes of a light, iridescent fabric, and their heads were all shaved completely bald. As he walked along behind Aunt Pol, Garion noticed with a certain distaste that the Nyissans wore elaborate makeup on their eyes, and that their lips and cheeks were rouged. Their speech was rasping and sibilant, and they all seemed to affect a lisp.

The heavy clouds had by now completely obscured the sky, and the street seemed suddenly dark. A dozen wretched, near-naked men were repairing a section of cobblestones. Their unkempt hair and shaggy beards indicated that they were not Nyissan, and there were shackles and chains attached to their ankles. A brutal-looking Nyissan stood over them with a whip, and the fresh welts and cuts on their bodies spoke mutely of the freedom with which he used it. One of the miserable slaves accidentally dropped an armload of crudely squared-off stones on his foot and opened his mouth with an animal-like howl of pain. With horror, Garion saw that the slave’s tongue had been cut out.

“They reduce men to the level of beasts,” Mandorallen growled, his eyes burning with a terrible anger. “Why has this cesspool not been cleansed?”

“It was once,” Barak said grimly. “Just after the Nyissans assassinated the Rivan King, the Alorns came down here and killed every Nyissan they could find.”

“Their numbers appear undiminished,” Mandorallen said, looking around.

Barak shrugged. “It was thirteen hundred years ago. Even a single pair of rats could reestablish their species in that length of time.”

Durnik, who was walking beside Garion, gasped suddenly and averted his eyes, blushing furiously.

A Nyissan lady had just stepped from a litter carried by eight slaves. The fabric of her pale green gown was so flimsy that it was nearly transparent and left very little to the imagination. “Don’t look at her, Garion,” Durnik whispered hoarsely, still blushing. “She’s a wicked woman.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Aunt Pol said with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe we should have left Durnik and Garion on the ship.”

“Why’s she dressed like that?” Garion asked, watching the nearly nude woman.

“Undressed, you mean.” Durnik’s voice was strangled with outrage.

“It’s the custom,” Aunt Pol explained. “It has to do with the climate. There are some other reasons, of course, but we don’t need to go into those just now. All Nyissan women dress that way.”

Barak and Greldik were watching the woman also, their broad grins appreciative.

“Never mind,” Aunt Pol told them firmly.

Not far away a shaven-headed Nyissan stood leaning against a wall, staring at his hand and giggling senselessly. “I can see right through my fingers,” he announced in a hissing lisp. “Right through them.”

“Drunk?” Hettar asked.

“Not exactly,” Aunt Pol answered. “Nyissans have peculiar amusements—leaves, berries, certain roots. Their perceptions get modified. It’s a bit more serious than the common drunkenness one finds among Alorns.”

Another Nyissan shambled by, his gait curiously jerky and his expression blank.

“Doth this condition prevail widely?” Mandorallen asked.

“I’ve never met a Nyissan yet who wasn’t at least partially drugged,” Aunt Pol said. “It makes them difficult to talk to. Isn’t that the house we’re looking for?” She pointed at a solid building across the street.

There was an ominous rumble of thunder off to the south as they crossed to the large house. A Drasnian servant in a linen tunic answered their knock, let them into a dimly lighted antechamber, and told them to wait.

“An evil city,” Hettar said quietly. “I can’t see why any Alorn in his right mind would come here willingly.”

“Money,” Captain Greldik replied shortly. “The Nyissan trade is very profitable.”

“There are more important things than money,” Hettar muttered.

An enormously fat man came into the dim room. “More light,” he snapped at his servant. “You didn’t have to leave them here in the dark.”

“You said that the lamps just made it hotter,” the servant protested in a surly tone. “I wish you’d make up your mind.”

“Never mind what I said; just do as I say.”

“The climate’s making you incoherent, Droblek,” the servant noted acidly. He lit several lamps and left the room muttering to himself.

“Drasnians make the world’s worst servants,” Droblek grumbled.

“Shall we get down to business?” He lowered his vast bulk into a chair. The sweat rolled continually down his face and into the damp collar of his brown silk robe.

“My name’s Greldik,” the bearded seaman said. “I’ve just arrived at your wharves with a shipload of goods belonging to the merchant, Radek of Boktor.” He presented the folded packets of parchment.

Droblek’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t know that Radek was interested in the southern trade. I thought he dealt mostly in Sendaria and Arendia.”

Greldik shrugged indifferently. “I didn’t ask him. He pays me to carry his goods in my ship, not to ask questions about his business.”

Droblek looked at them all, his sweating face expressionless. Then his fingers moved slightly.—Is everything here what it seems to be? The Drasnian secret language made his fat fingers suddenly nimble.

Can we speak openly here? Aunt Pol’s fingers asked him. Her gestures were stately, somehow archaic. There was a kind of formality to her movements that Garion had not seen in the signs made by others.

As openly as anyplace in this pest-hole—Droblek replied,—You have a strange accent, lady. There’s something about it that it seems I should remember—

I learned the language a very long time ago—she replied.—You know who Radek of Boktor really is, of course—

“Naturally,” Droblek said aloud. “Everyone knows that. Sometimes he calls himself Ambar of Kotu—when he wants to have dealings that are not, strictly speaking, legitimate.”

“Shall we stop fencing with each other, Droblek?” Aunt Pol asked quietly. “I’m quite certain you’ve received instructions from King Rhodar by now. All this dancing about is tiresome.”

Droblek’s face darkened. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I’ll need a bit more in the way of verification.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Droblek,” Barak rumbled at the fat man. “Use your eyes. You’re an Alorn; you know who the lady is.”

Droblek looked suddenly at Aunt Pol, his eyes going very wide. “It’s not possible,” he gasped.

“Would you like to have her prove it to you?” Hettar suggested. The house shook with a sudden crash of thunder.

“No, no,” Droblek refused hastily, still staring at Aunt Pol. “It just never occurred to me—I mean, I just never—” He floundered with it.

“Have you heard from Prince Kheldar or my father?” Aunt Pol asked crisply.

“Your father? You mean—? Is he involved in this too?”

“Really, Droblek,” she said tartly, “don’t you believe the communications King Rhodar sends you?”

Droblek shook his head like a man trying to clear his mind. “I’m sorry, Lady Polgara,” he said. “You surprised me, that’s all. It takes a moment to get used to. We didn’t think you’d be coming this far south.”

“It’s obvious then that you haven’t received any word from Kheldar or the old man.”

“No, my Lady,” Droblek said. “Nothing. Are they supposed to be here?”

“So they said. They were either going to meet us here or send word.”

“It’s very hard to get messages any place in Nyissa,” Droblek explained. “The people here aren’t very reliable. The prince and your father could be upcountry, and their messenger could very well have gone astray. I sent a messenger to a place not ten leagues from the city once, and it took six months to arrive. The Nyissan who was carrying it found a certain berry patch along the way. We found him sitting in the middle of the patch, smiling.” Droblek made a sour face. “There was moss growing on him,” he added.

“Dead?” Durnik asked.

Droblek shrugged. “No, just very happy. He enjoyed the berries very much. I dismissed him at once, but he didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, he’s still sitting there.”

“How extensive is your network here in Sthiss Tor?” Aunt Pol asked.

Droblek spread his pudgy hands modestly. “I manage to pick up a bit of information here and there. I’ve got a few people in the palace and a minor official at the Tolnedran embassy. The Tolnedrans are very thorough.” He grinned impishly. “It’s cheaper to let them do all the work and then buy the information after they’ve gathered it.”

“If you can believe what they tell you,” Hettar suggested.

“I never take what they say at face value,” Droblek said. “The Tolnedran ambassador knows that I’ve bought his man. He tries to trip me up with false leads now and then.”

“Does the ambassador know that you know?” Hettar asked.

“Of course he does.” The fat man laughed. “But he doesn’t think that I’m aware of the fact that he knows that I know.” He laughed again. “It’s all terribly complicated, isn’t it?”

“Most Drasnian games usually are,” Barak observed.

“Does the name Zedar mean anything to you?” Aunt Pol asked.

“I’ve heard it, naturally,” Droblek said.

“Has he been in touch with Salmissra?”

Droblek frowned. “I couldn’t say for sure. I haven’t heard that he has, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t. Nyissa’s a murky sort of place, and Salmissra’s palace is the murkiest spot in the whole country. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that go on there.”

“I’d believe them,” Aunt Pol said, “and probably things you haven’t even begun to guess.” She turned back to the others. “I think we’re at a standstill. We can’t make any kind of move until we hear from Silk and the Old Wolf.”

“Could I offer you my house?” Droblek asked.

“I think we’ll stay on board Captain Greldik’s ship,” she told him. “As you say, Nyissa’s a murky place, and I’m sure that the Tolnedran ambassadors bought a few people in your establishment.”

“Naturally,” Droblek agreed. “But I know who they are.”

“We’d better not chance it,” she told him. “There are several reasons for our avoiding Tolnedrans just now. We’ll stay aboard the ship and keep out of sight. Let us know as soon as Prince Kheldar gets in touch with you.”

“Of course,” Droblek said. “You’ll have to wait until the rain lets up, though. Listen to it.” There was the thundering sound of a downpour on the roof overhead.

“Will it last long?” Durnik asked.

Droblek shrugged. “An hour or so usually. It rains every afternoon during this season.”

“I imagine it helps to cool the air,” the smith said.

“Not significantly,” the Drasnian told him. “Usually it just makes things worse.” He mopped the sweat from his fat face.

“How can you live here?” Durnik asked.

Droblek smiled blandly. “Fat men don’t move around all that much. I’m making a great deal of money, and the game I’m playing with the Tolnedran ambassador keeps my mind occupied. It’s not all that bad, once you get used to it. It helps if I keep telling myself that.”

They sat quietly then, listening to the pounding rain.

25

For the next several days they all remained aboard Greldik’s ship, waiting for word from Silk and Mister Wolf. Ce’Nedra recovered from her indisposition and appeared on deck wearing a pale-colored Dryad tunic which seemed to Garion to be only slightly less revealing than the gowns worn by Nyissan women. When he rather stiffly suggested that she ought to put on a few more clothes, however, she merely laughed at him. With a single-mindedness that made him want to grind his teeth, she returned to the task of teaching him to read and write. They sat together in an out-of the-way spot on deck, poring over a tedious book on Tolnedran diplomacy. The whole business seemed to Garion to be taking forever, though in fact his mind was very quick, and he was learning surprisingly fast. Ce’Nedra was too thoughtless to compliment him, though she seemed to await his next mistake almost breathlessly, delighting it seemed in each opportunity to ridicule him. Her proximity and her light, spicy perfume distracted him as they sat close beside each other, and he perspired as much from their occasional touch of hand or arm or hip as he did from the climate. Because they were both young, she was intolerant and he was stubborn. The sticky, humid heat made them both short-tempered and irritable, so the lessons erupted into bickering more often than not.

When they arose one morning, a black, square-rigged Nyissan ship rocked in the river current at a nearby wharf. A foul, evil kind of reek carried to them from her on the fitful morning breeze.

“What’s that smell?” Garion asked one of the sailors.

“Slaves,” the sailor answered grimly, pointing at the Nyissan ship. “You can smell them twenty miles away when you’re at sea.”

Garion looked at the ugly black ship and shuddered.

Barak and Mandorallen drifted across the deck and joined Garion at the rail. “Looks like a scow,” Barak said of the Nyissan ship, his voice heavy with contempt. He was stripped to the waist, and his hairy torso ran with sweat.

“It’s a slave ship,” Garion told him.

“It smells like an open sewer,” Barak complained. “A good fire would improve it tremendously.”

“A sorry trade, my Lord Barak,” Mandorallen said. “Nyissa hath dealt in human misery for untold centuries.”

“Is that a Drasnian wharf?” Barak asked with narrowed eyes.

“No,” Garion answered. “The sailors say that everything on that side’s Nyissan.”

“That’s a shame,” Barak growled.

A group of mail-shirted men in black cloaks walked out onto the wharf where the slave ship was moored and stopped near the vessel’s stern.

“Oh-oh,” Barak said. “Where’s Hettar?”

“He’s still below,” Garion replied. “What’s the matter?”

“Keep an eye out for him. Those are Murgos.”

The shaven-headed Nyissan sailors pulled open a hatch on their ship and barked a few rough orders down into the hold. Slowly, a line of dispirited-looking men came up. Each man wore an iron collar, and a long chain fastened them together.

Mandorallen stiffened and began to swear.

“What’s wrong?” Barak asked.

“Arendishmen!” the knight exclaimed. “I had heard of this, but I did not believe it.”

“Heard of what?”

“An ugly rumor hath persisted in Arendia for some years,” Mandorallen answered, his face white with rage. “We are told that some of our nobles have upon occasion enriched themselves by selling their serfs to the Nyissans.”

“Looks like it’s more than a rumor,” Barak said.

“There,” Mandorallen growled. “See that crest upon the tunic of that one there? It’s the crest of Vo Toral. I know the Baron of Vo Toral for a notorious spendthrift, but had not thought him dishonorable. Upon my return to Arendia, I will denounce him publicly.”

“What good’s that going to do?” Barak asked.

“He will be forced to challenge me,” Mandorallen said grimly. “I will prove his villainy upon his body.”

Barak shrugged. “Serf or slave—what’s the difference?”

“Those men have rights, my Lord,” Mandorallen stated. “Their Lord is required to protect them and care for them. The oath of knighthood demands it of us. This vile transaction hath stained the honor of every true Arendish knight. I shall not rest until I have bereft that foul baron of his miserable life.”

“Interesting idea,” Barak said. “Maybe I’ll go with you.”

Hettar came up on deck, and Barak moved immediately to his side and began talking quietly to him, holding one of his arms firmly.

“Make them jump around a bit,” one of the Murgos ordered harshly. “I want to see how many are lame.”

A heavy-shouldered Nyissan uncoiled a long whip and began to flick it deftly at the legs of the chained men. The slaves began to dance feverishly on the wharf beside the slave ship.

“Dog’s blood!” Mandorallen swore, and his knuckles turned white as he gripped the railing.

“Easy,” Garion warned. “Aunt Pol says we’re supposed to stay pretty much out of sight.”

“It cannot be borne!” Mandorallen cried.

The chain that bound the slaves together was old and pitted with rust. When one slave tripped and fell, a link snapped, and the man found himself suddenly free. With an agility born of desperation, he rolled quickly to his feet, took two quick steps and plunged off the wharf into the murky waters of the river.

“This way, man!” Mandorallen called to the swimming slave.

The burly Nyissan with the whip laughed harshly and pointed at the escaping slave. “Watch,” he told the Murgos.

“Stop him, you idiot,” one of the Murgos snapped. “I paid good gold for him.”

“It’s too late.” The Nyissan looked on with an ugly grin. “Watch.” The swimming man suddenly shrieked and sank out of sight. When he came up again, his face and arms were covered with the slimy, footlong leeches that infested the river. Screaming, the struggling man tore at the writhing leeches, ripping out chunks of his own flesh in his efforts to pull them off.

The Murgos began to laugh.

Garion’s mind exploded. He gathered himself with an awful concentration, pointed one hand at the wharf just beyond their own ship and said, “Be there!” He felt an enormous surge as if some vast tide were rushing out of him, and he reeled almost senseless against Mandorallen. The sound inside his head was deafening.

The slave, still writhing and covered with the oozing leeches, was suddenly lying on the wharf. A wave of exhaustion swept over Garion; if Mandorallen had not caught him, he would have fallen.

“Where did he go?” Barak demanded, still staring at the turbulent spot on the surface of the river where the slave had been an instant before. “Did he go under?”

Wordlessly and with a shaking hand, Mandorallen pointed at the slave, who lay still weakly struggling on the Drasnian wharf about twenty yards in front of the bow of their ship.

Barak looked at the slave, then back at the river. The big man blinked with surprise.

A small boat with four Nyissans at the oars put out from the other wharf and moved deliberately toward Greldik’s ship. A tall Murgo stood in the bow, his scarred face angry.

“You have my property,” he shouted across the intervening water. “Return the slave to me at once.”

“Why don’t you come and claim him, Murgo?” Barak called back. He released Hettar’s arm. The Algar moved to the side of the ship, stopping only to pick up a long boathook.

“Will I be unmolested?” the Murgo asked a bit doubtfully.

“Why don’t you come alongside, and we’ll discuss it?” Barak suggested pleasantly.

“You’re denying me my rights to my own property,” the Murgo complained.

“Not at all,” Barak told him. “Of course there might be a fine point of law involved here. This wharf is Drasnian territory, and slavery isn’t legal in Drasnia. Since that’s the case, the man’s not a slave anymore.”

“I’ll get my men,” the Murgo said. “We’ll take the slave by force if we have to.”

“I think we’d have to look on that as an invasion of Alorn territory,” Barak warned with a great show of regret. “In the absence of our Drasnian cousins, we’d almost be compelled to take steps to defend their wharf for them. What do you think, Mandorallen?”

“Thy perceptions are most acute, my Lord,” Mandorallen replied. “By common usage, honorable men are morally obliged to defend the territory of kinsmen in their absence.”

“There,” Barak said to the Murgo. “You see how it is. My friend here is an Arend, so he’s totally neutral in this matter. I think we’d have to accept his interpretation of the affair.”

Greldik’s sailors had begun to climb the rigging by now, and they clung to the ropes like great, evil-looking apes, fingering their weapons and grinning at the Murgo.

“There is yet another way,” the Murgo said ominously.

Garion could feel a force beginning to build, and a faint sound seemed to echo inside his head. He drew himself up, putting his hands on the wooden rail in front of him. He felt a terrible weakness, but he steeled himself and tried to gather his strength.

“That’s enough of that,” Aunt Pol said crisply, coming up on deck with Durnik and Ce’Nedra behind her.

“We were merely having a little legal discussion,” Barak said innocently.

“I know what you were doing,” she snapped. Her eyes were angry. She looked coldly across the intervening stretch of river at the Murgo.

“You’d better leave,” she told him.

“I have something to retrieve first,” the man in the boat called back.

“I’d forget about it!”

“We’ll see,” he said. He straightened and began muttering as if to himself, his hands moving rapidly in a series of intricate gestures. Garion felt something pushing at him almost like a wind, though the air was completely still.

“Be sure you get it right,” Aunt Pol advised quietly. “If you forget even the tiniest part of it, it’ll explode in your face.”

The man in the boat froze, and a faintly worried frown crossed his face. The secret wind that had been pushing at Garion stopped. The man began again, his fingers weaving in the air and his face fixed with concentration.

“You do it like this, Grolim,” Aunt Pol said. She moved her hand slightly, and Garion felt a sudden rush as if the wind pushing at him had turned and begun to blow the other way. The Grolim threw his hands up and reeled back, stumbling and falling into the bottom of his boat. As if it had been given a heavy push, the boat surged backward several yards.

The Grolim half raised, his eyes wide and his face deathly pale.

“Return to your master, dog,” Aunt Pol said scathingly. “Tell him to beat you for not learning your lessons properly.”

The Grolim spoke quickly to the Nyissans at the oars, and they immediately turned the boat and rowed back toward the slave ship.

“We had a nice little fight brewing there, Polgara,” Barak complained. “Why did you have to spoil it?”

“Grow up,” she ordered bluntly. Then she turned on Garion, her eyes blazing and the white lock at her brow like a streak of fire. “You idiot! You refuse any kind of instruction, and then you burst out like a raging bull. Have you the slightest conception of what an uproar translocation causes? You’ve alerted every Grolim in Sthiss Tor to the fact that we’re here.”

“He was dying,” Garion protested, gesturing helplessly at the slave lying on the wharf. “I had to do something.”

“He was dead as soon as he hit the water,” she said flatly. “Look at him.”

The slave had stiffened into an arched posture of mortal agony, his head twisted back and his mouth agape. He was obviously dead.

“What happened to him?” Garion asked, feeling suddenly sick.

“The leeches are poisonous. Their bites paralyze their victims so that they can feed on them undisturbed. The bites stopped his heart. You exposed us to the Grolims for the sake of a dead man.”

“He wasn’t dead when I did it!” Garion shouted at her. “He was screaming for help.” He was angrier than he had ever been in his life.

“He was beyond help.” Her voice was cold, even brutal.

“What kind of monster are you?” he asked from between clenched teeth. “Don’t you have any feelings? You’d have just let him die, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t think this is the time or place to discuss it.”

“No! This is the time-right now, Aunt Pol. You’re not even human, did you know that? You left being human behind so long ago that you can’t even remember where you lost it. You’re four thousand years old. Our whole lives go by while you blink your eyes. We’re just an entertainment for you—an hour’s diversion. You manipulate us like puppets for your own amusement. Well, I’m tired of being manipulated. You and I are finished!”

It probably went further than he’d intended, but his anger had finally run away with him, and the words seemed to rush out before he could stop them.

She looked at him, her face as pale as if he had suddenly struck her. Then she drew herself up. “You stupid boy,” she said in a voice that was all the more terrible because it was so quiet. “Finished? You and I? How can you even begin to understand what I’ve had to do to bring you to this world? You’ve been my only care for over a thousand years. I’ve endured anguish and loss and pain beyond your ability to understand what the words mean—all for you. I’ve lived in poverty and squalor for hundreds of years at a time—all for you. I gave up a sister I loved more than my life itself—all for you. I’ve gone through fire and despair worse than fire a dozen times over—all for you. And you think this has all been an entertainment for me?—some idle amusement? You think the kind of care I’ve devoted to you for a thousand years and more comes cheaply? You and I will never be finished, Belgarion. Never! We will go on together until the end of days if necessary. We will never be finished. You owe me too much for that!”

There was a dreadful silence. The others, shocked by the intensity of Aunt Pol’s words, stood staring first at her and then at Garion.

Without speaking further, she turned and went below decks again. Garion looked around helplessly, suddenly terribly ashamed and terribly alone.

“I had to do it, didn’t I?” he asked of no one in particular and not entirely sure exactly what it was that he meant.

They all looked at him, but no one answered his question.

26

By midafternoon the clouds had rolled in again, and the thunder began to rumble off in the distance as the rain swept in to drown the steaming city once more. The afternoon thunderstorm seemed to come at the same time each day, and they had even grown accustomed to it. They all moved below deck and sat sweltering as the rain roared down on the deck above them.

Garion sat stiffly, his back planted against a rough-hewn oak rib of the ship and watched Aunt Pol, his face set stubbornly and his eyes unforgiving.

She ignored him and sat talking quietly with Ce’Nedra.

Captain Greldik came through the narrow companionway door, his face and beard streaming water. “The Drasnian-Droblek—is here,” he told them. “He says he’s got word for you.”

“Send him in,” Barak said.

Droblek squeezed his vast bulk through the narrow door. He was totally drenched from the rain and stood dripping on the Hoor. He wiped his face. “It’s wet out there,” he commented.

“We noticed,” Hettar said.

“I’ve received a message,” Droblek told Aunt Pol. “It’s from Prince Kheldar.”

“Finally,” she said.

“He and Belgarath are coming downriver,” Droblek reported. “As closely as I can make out, they should be here in a few days—a week at the most. The messenger isn’t very coherent.”

Aunt Pol looked at him inquiringly.

“Fever,” Droblek explained. “The man’s a Drasnian, so he’s reliable—one of my agents at an upcountry trading post—but he’s picked up one of the diseases that infest this stinking swamp. He’s a little delirious just now. We hope we can break the fever in a day or so and get some sense out of him. I came as soon as I got the general idea of his message. I thought you’d want to know immediately.”

“We appreciate your concern,” Aunt Pol said.

“I’d have sent a servant,” Droblek explained, “but messages sometimes go astray in Sthiss Tor, and servants sometimes get things twisted around.” He grinned suddenly. “That’s not the real reason, of course.”

Aunt Pol smiled, “Of course not.”

“A fat man tends to stay in one place and let others do his walking around for him. From the tone of King Rhodar’s message, I gather that this business might be the most important thing happening in the world just now. I wanted to take part in it.” He made a wry face. “We all lapse into childishness from time to time, I suppose.”

“How serious is the condition of the messenger?” Aunt Pol asked.

Droblek shrugged. “Who can say? Half of these pestilential fevers in Nyissa don’t even have names, and we can’t really tell one from another. Sometimes people die very quickly from them; sometimes they linger for weeks. Now and then someone even recovers. About all we can do is make them comfortable and wait to see what happens.”

“I’ll come at once,” Aunt Pol said, rising. “Durnik, would you get me the green bag from our packs? I’ll need the herbs I have in it.”

“It’s not always a good idea to expose oneself to some of these fevers, my Lady,” Droblek cautioned.

“I won’t be in any danger,” she said. “I want to question your messenger closely, and the only way I’ll be able to get any answers from him is to rid him of his fever.”

“Durnik and I’ll come along,” Barak offered.

She looked at him.

“It doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side,” the big man said, belting on his sword.

“If you wish.” She put on her cloak and turned up the hood. “This may take most of the night,” she told Greldik. “There are Grolims about, so have your sailors stay alert. Put a few of the more sober ones on watch.”

“Sober, my Lady?” Greldik asked innocently.

“I’ve heard the singing coming from the crew’s quarters, Captain,” she said a bit primly, “Chereks don’t sing unless they’re drunk. Keep the lid on your ale-barrel tonight. Shall we go, Droblek?”

“At once, my Lady,” the fat man assented with a sly look at Greldik.

Garion felt a certain relief after they had gone. The strain of maintaining his rancor in Aunt Pol’s presence had begun to wear on him. He found himself in a difficult position. The horror and self-loathing which had gnawed at him since he had unleashed the dreadful fire upon Chamdar in the Wood of the Dryads had grown until he could scarcely bear it. He looked forward to each night with dread, for his dreams were always the same. Over and over again he saw Chamdar, his face burned away, pleading, “Master, have mercy.” And over and over again he saw the awful blue flame that had come from his own hand in answer to that agony. The hatred he had carried since Val Alorn had died in that flame. His revenge had been so absolute that there was no possible way he could evade or shift the responsibility for it. His outburst that morning had been directed almost more at himself than at Aunt Pol, He had called her a monster, but it was the monster within himself he hated. The dreadful catalogue of what she had suffered over uncounted years for him and the passion with which she had spoken—evidence of the pain his words had caused her—twisted searingly in his mind. He was ashamed, so ashamed that he could not even bear to look into the faces of his friends. He sat alone and vacant-eyed with Aunt Pol’s words thundering over and over in his mind.

The rain slackened on the deck above them as the storm passed. Swirling little eddies of raindrops ran across the muddy surface of the river in the fitful wind. The sky began to clear, and the sun sank into the roiling clouds, staining them an angry red. Garion went up on deck to wrestle alone with his troubled conscience.

After a while he heard a light step behind him. “I suppose you’re proud of yourself?” Ce’Nedra asked acidly.

“Leave me alone.”

“I don’t think so. I think I want to tell you just exactly how we all felt about your little speech this morning.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“That’s too bad. I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“I won’t listen.”

“Oh yes, you will,” She took him by the arm and turned him around. Her eyes were blazing and her tiny face filled with a huge anger. “What you did was absolutely inexcusable,” she said. “Your Aunt raised you from a baby. She’s been a mother to you.”

“My mother’s dead.”

“The Lady Polgara’s the only mother you ever knew, and what did you give her for thanks? You called her a monster. You accused her of not caring.”

“I’m not listening to you,” Garion cried. Knowing that it was childish—even infantile—he put his hands over his ears. The Princess Ce’Nedra always seemed to bring out the worst in him.

“Move your hands!” she commanded in a ringing voice. “You’re going to hear me even if I have to scream.”

Garion, afraid that she meant it, took his hands away.

“She carried you when you were a baby,” Ce’Nedra went on, seeming to know exactly where the sorest spot on Garion’s wounded conscience lay. “She watched your very first steps. She fed you; she watched over you; she held you when you were afraid or hurt. Does that sound like a monster? She watches you all the time, did you know that? If you even so much as stumble, she almost reaches out to catch you. I’ve seen her cover you when you’re asleep. Does that sound like someone who doesn’t care?”

“You’re talking about something you don’t understand,” Garion told her. “Please, just leave me alone.”

“Please?” she repeated mockingly. “What a strange time for you to remember your manners. I didn’t hear you saying please this morning. I didn’t hear a single please. I didn’t hear any thank you’s either. Do you know what you are, Garion? You’re a spoiled child, that’s what you are.”

That did it! To have this pampered, willful little princess call him a spoiled child was more than Garion could bear. Infuriated, he began to shout at her. Most of what he said was wildly incoherent, but the shouting made him feel better.

They started with accusations, but the argument soon degenerated into name-calling. Ce’Nedra was screeching like a Camaar fishwife, and Garion’s voice cracked and warbled between a manly baritone and a boyish tenor. They shook their fingers in each other’s faces and shouted. Ce’Nedra stamped her feet, and Garion waved his arms. All in all, it was a splendid little fight. Garion felt much better when it was over. Yelling insults at Ce’Nedra was an innocent diversion compared to some of the deadly things he’d said to Aunt Pol that morning, and it allowed him to vent his confusion and anger harmlessly.

In the end, of course, Ce’Nedra resorted to tears and fled, leaving him feeling more foolish than ashamed. He fumed a bit, muttering a few choice insults he hadn’t had the opportunity to deliver, and then he sighed and leaned pensively on the rail to watch night settle in over the dank city.

Though he would not have cared to admit it, even to himself, he was grateful to the princess. Their descent into absurdity had cleared his head. Quite clearly now he saw that he owed Aunt Pol an apology. He had lashed out at her out of his own sense of deep-seated guilt, trying somehow to shift the blame to her. Quite obviously there was no way to evade his own responsibility. Having accepted that, he seemed for some reason to feel better.

It grew darker. The tropical night was heavy, and the smell of rotting vegetation and stagnant water rolled in out of the trackless swamps. A vicious little insect crawled down inside his tunic and began to bite him somewhere between his shoulders where he could not reach.

There was absolutely no warning—no sound or lurch of the ship or any hint of danger. His arms were seized from behind and a wet cloth was pressed firmly over his mouth and nose. He tried to struggle, but the hands holding him were very strong. He tried to twist his head to get his face clear enough to shout for help. The cloth smelled strange—cloying, sickeningly sweet, thick somehow. He began to feel dizzy, and his struggles grew weaker. He made one last effort before the dizziness overcame him and he sank down into unconsciousness.

27

They were in a long hallway of some sort. Garion could see the flagstone floor quite clearly. Three men were carrying him face down, and his head bobbed and swung on his neck uncomfortably. His mouth was dry, and the thick, sweet smell that had impregnated the cloth they had crushed to his face lingered. He raised his head, trying to look around.

“He’s awake,” the man holding one of his arms said.

“Finally,” one of the others muttered. “You held the cloth to his face too long, Issus.”

“I know what I’m doing,” the first one said.

“Put him down.”

“Can you stand?” Issus asked Garion. His shaved head was stubbled, and he had a long scar running from his forehead to his chin directly through the puckered vacancy of an empty eye-socket. His belted robe was stained and spotted.

“Get up,” Issus ordered in a hissing kind of voice. He nudged Garion with his foot. Garion struggled to rise. His knees were shaky, and he put his hand on the wall to steady himself. The stones were damp and covered with a kind of mold.

“Bring him,” Issus told the others. They took Garion’s arms and half-dragged, half-carried him down the damp passageway behind the one-eyed man. When they came out of the corridor, they were in a vaulted area that seemed not so much like a room but rather a large roofed place. Huge pillars, covered with carvings, supported the soaring ceiling, and small oil lamps hung on long chains from above or sat on little stone shelves on the pillars. There was a confused sense of movement as groups of men in varicolored robes drifted from place to place in a kind of langorous stupor.

“You,” Issus snapped at a plump young man with dreamy eyes, “tell Sadi, the chief eunuch, that we have the boy.”

“Tell him yourself,” the young man said in a piping voice. “I don’t take orders from your kind, Issus.”

Issus slapped the plump young man sharply across the face.

“You hit me!” the plump one wailed, putting his hand to his mouth. “You made my lip bleed—see?” He held out his hand to show the blood.

“If you don’t do what I tell you to do, I’ll cut your fat throat,” Issus told him in a flat, unemotional voice.

“I’m going to tell Sadi what you did.”

“Go ahead. And as long as you’re there, tell him that we’ve got the boy the queen wanted.”

The plump young man scurried away.

“Eunuchs!” One of the men holding Garion’s arm spat.

“They have their uses,” the other said with a coarse laugh.

“Bring the boy,” Issus ordered. “Sadi doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

They pulled Garion across the lighted area.

A group of wretched-looking men with unkempt hair and beards sat chained together on the floor. “Water,” one of them croaked. “Please.” He stretched out an imploring hand.

Issus stopped and stared at the slave in amazement. “Why does this one still have its tongue?” he demanded of the guard who stood over the slaves.

The guard shrugged. “We haven’t had time to attend to that yet.”

“Take time,” Issus told him. “If one of the priests hear it talk, they’ll have you questioned. You wouldn’t like that.”

“I’m not afraid of the priests,” the guard said, but he looked nervously over his shoulder.

“Be afraid,” Issus advised him. “And water these animals. They’re no good to anybody dead.” He started to lead the men holding Garion through a shadowy area between two pillars, then stopped again. “Get out of my way,” he said to something lying in the shadows. Grudgingly, the thing began to move. With revulsion Garion realized that it was a large snake.

“Get over there with the others,” Issus told the snake. He pointed toward a dimly lighted corner where a large mass seemed to be undulating, moving with a kind of sluggish seething. Faintly Garion could hear the dry hiss of scales rubbing together. The snake which had barred their way flicked a nervous tongue at Issus, then slithered toward the dim corner.

“Someday you’re going to get bitten, Issus,” one of the men warned. “They don’t like being ordered around.”

Issus shrugged indifferently and moved on.

“Sadi wants to talk to you,” the plump young eunuch said spitefully to Issus as they approached a large polished door. “I told him that you hit me. Maas is with him.”

“Good,” Issus said. He pushed the door open. “Sadi,” he called sharply, “tell your friend I’m coming in. I don’t want him making any mistakes.”

“He knows you, Issus,” a voice on the other side of the door said. “He won’t do anything by mistake.”

Issus went in and closed the door behind him.

“You can leave now,” one of the men holding Garion told the young eunuch.

The plump one sniffed. “I go where Sadi tells me to go.”

“And come running when Sadi whistles, too.”

“That’s between Sadi and me, isn’t it?”

“Bring him in,” Issus ordered, opening the door again.

The two men pushed Garion into the room. “We’ll wait out here,” one of them said nervously.

Issus laughed harshly, pushed the door shut with his foot, and pulled Garion to the front of a table where a single oil lamp flickered with a tiny flame that barely held back the darkness. A thin man with deadlooking eyes sat at the table, lightly stroking his hairless head with the long fingers of one hand.

“Can you speak, boy?” he asked Garion. His voice had a strange contralto quality to it, and his silk robe was a solid crimson rather than varicolored.

“Could I have a drink of water?” Garion asked.

“In a minute.”

“I’ll take my money now, Sadi,” Issus said.

“As soon as we’re sure this is the right boy,” Sadi replied.

“Ask it what its name is,” a hissing whisper said from the darkness behind Garion.

“I will, Maas.” Sadi looked faintly annoyed at the suggestion. “I’ve done this before.”

“You’re taking too long,” the whisper said.

“Say your name, boy,” Sadi told Garion.

“Doroon,” Garion lied quickly. “I’m really very thirsty.”

“Do you take me for a fool, Issus?” Sadi asked. “Did you think just any boy would satisfy me?”

“This is the boy you told me to fetch,” Issus said. “I can’t help it if your information was wrong.”

“You say your name is Doroon?” Sadi asked.

“Yes,” Garion said. “I’m the cabin-boy on Captain Greldik’s ship. Where are we?”

“I’ll ask the questions, boy,” Sadi said.

“It’s lying,” the sibilant whisper came from behind Garion.

“I know that, Maas,” Sadi replied calmly. “They always do at first.”

“We don’t have time for all this,” the hiss said. “Give it oret. I need the truth immediately.”

“Whatever you say, Maas,” Sadi agreed. He rose to his feet and disappeared momentarily into the shadows behind the table. Garion heard a clink and then the sound of water pouring. “Remembering that this was your idea, Maas. If she becomes angry about it, I don’t want to be the one she blames.”

“She’ll understand, Sadi.”

“Here, boy,” Sadi offered, coming back into the light and holding out a brown earthenware cup.

“Uh-no, thank you,” Garion said. “I guess I’m not really thirsty after all.”

“You might as well drink it, boy,” Sadi told him. “If you don’t, Issus will hold you, and I’ll pour it down your throat. It isn’t going to hurt you.

“Drink,” the hissing voice commanded.

“Better do as they say,” Issus advised.

Helplessly Garion took the cup. The water had a strangely bitter taste and seemed to burn his tongue.

“Much better,” Sadi said, resuming his seat behind the table. “Now, you say your name is Doroon?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from, Doroon?”

“Sendaria.”

“Where exactly in Sendaria?”

“Near Darine on the north coast.”

“What are you doing on a Cherek ship?”

“Captain Greldik’s a friend of my father,” Garion said. For some reason he suddenly wanted to explain further. “My father wanted me to learn about ships. He says that being a sailor’s better than being a farmer. Captain Greldik agreed to teach me what I’d need to know to be a sailor. He says I’ll be good at it because I didn’t even get seasick, and I’m not afraid to climb up the ropes that hold the sails in place, and I’m almost strong enough to pull an oar already, and—”

“What did you say your name was, boy?”

“Garion—I mean—uh—Doroon. Yes, Doroon, and—”

“How old are you, Garion?”

“Fifteen last Erastide. Aunt Pol says that people who are born on Erastide are very lucky, only I haven’t noticed that I’m luckier than—”

“And who is Aunt Pol?”

“She’s my aunt. We used to live on Faldor’s farm, but Mister Wolf came and we—”

“Do people call her something besides Aunt Pol?”

“King Fulrach called her Polgara—that was when Captain Brendig took us all to the palace in Sendar. Then we went to King Anheg’s palace in Val Alorn, and—”

“Who’s Mister Wolf?”

“My grandfather. They call him Belgarath. I didn’t used to believe it, but I guess it has to be true because one time he—”

“And why did you all leave Faldor’s farm?”

“I didn’t know why at first, but then I found out that it was because Zedar stole the Orb of Aldur off the pommel of the Sword of the Rivan King, and we’ve got to get it back before Zedar can take it to Torak and wake him up and—”

“This is the boy we want,” the hissing voice whispered.

Garion turned around slowly. The room seemed brighter now, as if the tiny flame were putting out more light. In the corner, rearing out of its own coils and with a strangely flattened neck and glowing eyes was a very large snake.

“We can take it to Salmissra now,” the snake hissed. It lowered itself to the floor and crawled across to Garion. He felt its cold, dry nose touch his leg, and then, though a hidden part of his mind shrieked, he stood unresisting as the scaly body slowly mounted his leg and coiled upward until the snake’s head reared beside his face and its flickering tongue touched his face. “Be very good, boy,” the snake hissed in his ear, “very, very good.” The reptile was heavy, and its coils thick and cold.

“This way, boy,” Sadi told Garion, rising to his feet.

“I want my money,” Issus demanded.

“Oh,” Sadi said almost contemptuously, “that. It’s in that pouch there on the table.” Then he turned and led Garion from the room.

“Garion.” The dry voice that had always been in his mind spoke quietly to him. “I want you to listen carefully. Don’t say anything or let anything show on your face. Just listen to me. ”

“Who are you?” Garion asked silently, struggling with the fog in his brain.

“You know me,” the dry voice told him. “Now listen. They’ve given you something that makes you do what they want you to do. Don’t fight against it. Just relax and don’t fight it. ”

“But—I said things I shouldn’t have. I—”

“That doesn’t matter now. Just do as I say. If anything happens and it starts to get dangerous, don’t fight. I’ll take care of it—but I can’t do it if you’re struggling. You have to relax so that I can do what has to be done. If you suddenly find yourself doing things or saying things you don’t understand, don’t be afraid and don’t try to fight. It won’t be them; it will be me.”

Comforted by this silent reassurance, Garion walked obediently beside Sadi the eunuch while the coils of the snake, Maas, lay heavily about his chest and shoulders and the bluntly pointed reptilian head rested, almost nuzzling, against his cheek.

They entered a large room where the walls were heavily draped and crystal oil lamps hung glittering on silver chains. An enormous stone statue, its upper third lost in the shadows high above, raised its mass titanically at one end of the room, and directly in front of the statue was a low stone platform, carpeted and strewn with cushions. Upon the platform stood a heavy divan that was not quite a chair and not quite a couch.

There was a woman on the divan. Her hair was raven black, cascading in loose coils down her back and across her shoulders. About her head was an intricately wrought golden crown sparkling with jewels. Her gown was white and spun of the filmiest gauze. It did not in any way conceal her body, but rather seemed to be worn only to provide a material to which her jewels and adornments could be attached. Beneath the gauze, her skin was an almost chalky white, and her face was extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were pale, even colorless. A large, gold-framed mirror stood on a pedestal at one side of the divan, and the woman lounged at ease, admiring herself in the glass.

Two dozen shaven-headed eunuchs in crimson robes knelt in a cluster to one side of the dais, resting on their haunches and gazing at the woman and the statue behind her with worshipful adoration.

Among the cushions at the side of the divan lolled an indolent, pampered-looking young man whose head was riot shaved. His hair was elaborately curled, his cheeks were rouged, and his eyes were fantastically made up. He wore only the briefest of loincloths, and his expression was bored and sulky. The woman absently ran the fingers of one hand through his curls as she watched herself in the mirror.

“The queen has visitors,” one of the kneeling eunuchs announced in a singsong voice.

“Ah,” the others chanted in unison, “visitors.”

“Hail, Eternal Salmissra,” Sadi the eunuch said, prostrating himself before the dais and the pale-eyed woman.

“What is it, Sadi?” she demanded. Her voice was vibrant and had a strange, dark timbre.

“The boy, my Queen,” Sadi announced, his face still pressed to the floor.

“On your knees before the Serpent Queen,” the snake hissed in Garion’s ear. The coils tightened about Garion’s body, and he fell to his knees in their sudden crushing grip.

“Come here, Maas,” Salmissra said to the snake.

“The queen summons the beloved serpent,” the eunuch intoned. “Ah.”

The reptile uncoiled itself from about Garion’s body and undulated up to the foot of the divan, reared half its length above the reclining woman and then lowered itself upon her body, its thick length curving, fitting itself to her. The blunt head reached up to her face, and she kissed it affectionately. The long, forked tongue flickered over her face, and Maas began to whisper sibilantly in her ear. She lay in the embrace of the serpent, listening to its hissing voice and looking at Garion with heavy-lidded eyes.

Then, pushing the reptile aside, the queen rose to her feet and stood over Garion. “Welcome to the land of the snake-people, Belgarion,” she said in her purring voice.

The name, which he had heard only from Aunt Pol before, sent a strange shock through Garion, and he tried to shake the fog from his head.

“Not yet,” the dry voice in his mind warned him.

Salmissra stepped down from the dais, her body moving with a sinuous grace beneath her transparent gown. She took one of Garion’s arms and drew him gently to his feet; then she touched his face lingeringly. Her hand seemed very cold. “A pretty young man,” she breathed, almost as if to herself. “So young. So warm.” Her look seemed somehow hungry.

A strange confusion seemed to fill Garion’s mind. The bitter drink Sadi had given him still lay on his consciousness like a blanket. Beneath it he felt at once afraid and yet strangely attracted to the queen. Her chalky skin and dead eyes were repellent, yet there was a kind of lush invitation about her, an overripe promise of unspeakable delights. Unconsciously he took a step backward.

“Don’t be afraid, my Belgarion,” she purred at him. “I won’t hurt you—not unless you want me to. Your duties here will be very pleasant, and I can teach you things that Polgara hasn’t even dreamed of.”

“Come away from him, Salmissra,” the young man on the dais ordered petulantly. “You know I don’t like it when you pay attention to others.”

A flicker of annoyance showed in the queen’s eyes. She turned and looked rather coldly at the young man. “What you like or don’t like doesn’t really concern me anymore, Essia,” she said.

“What?” Essia cried incredulously.

“Do as I say at once!”

“No, Essia,” she told him.

“I’ll punish you,” he threatened.

“No,” she said, “you won’t. That sort of thing doesn’t amuse me anymore, and all your pouting and tantrums have begun to grow boring. Leave now.”

“Leave?” Essia’s eyes bulged with disbelief.

“You’re dismissed, Essia.”

“Dismissed? But you can’t live without me. You said so yourself.”

“We all say things we don’t mean sometimes.”

The arrogance went out of the young man like water poured from a bucket. He swallowed hard and began to tremble. “When do you want me to come back?” he whined.

“I don’t, Essia.”

“Never?” he gasped.

“Never,” she told him. “Now go, and stop making a scene.”

“What’s to become of me?” Essia cried. He began to weep, the makeup around his eyes running in grotesque streaks down his face.

“Don’t be tiresome, Essia,” Salmissra said. “Pick up your belongings and leave-now! I have a new consort.” She stepped back up on the dais.

“The queen has chosen a consort,” the eunuch intoned.

“Ah,” the others chanted. “Hail the consort of Eternal Salmissra, most fortunate of men.”

The sobbing young man grabbed up a pink robe and an ornately carved jewel box. He stumbled down from the dais. “You did this,” he accused Garion. “It’s all your fault.” Suddenly, out of the folds of the robe draped over his arm, he pulled a small dagger. “I’ll fix you,” he screamed, raising the dagger to strike.

There was no thought this time, no gathering of will. The surge of force came without warning, pushing Essia away, driving him back. He slashed futilely at the air with his little knife. Then the surge was gone.

Essia lunged forward again, his eyes insane and his dagger raised. The surge came again, stronger this time. The young man was spun away. He fell, and his dagger clattered across the floor.

Salmissra, her eyes ablaze, pointed at the prostrate Essia and snapped her fingers twice. So fast that it seemed almost like an arrow loosed from a bow, a small green snake shot from beneath the divan, its mouth agape and its hiss a kind of snarl. It struck once, hitting Essia high on the leg, then slithered quickly to one side and watched with dead eyes.

Essia gasped and turned white with horror. He tried to rise, but his legs and arms suddenly sprawled out from under him on the polished stones. He gave one strangled cry and then the convulsions began. His heels pattered rapidly on the floor, and his arms flailed wildly. His eyes turned vacant and staring, and a green froth shot like a fountain from his mouth. His body arched back, every muscle writhing beneath his skin, and his head began to pound on the floor. He gave one thrashing, convulsive leap, his entire body bounding up from the floor. When he came down, he was dead.

Salmissra watched him die, her pale eyes expressionless, incurious, with no hint of anger or regret.

“Justice is done,” the eunuch announced.

“Swift is the justice of the Queen of the Serpent People,” the others replied.

28

There were other things they made him drink—some bitter, some sickeningly sweet—and his mind seemed to sink deeper with each cup he raised to his lips. His eyes began to play strange tricks on him. It seemed somehow that the world had suddenly been drowned and that all of this was taking place under water. The walls wavered and the figures of the kneeling eunuchs seemed to sway and undulate like seaweed in the endless wash and eddy of tide and current. The lamps sparkled like jewels, casting out brilliant colors in slow-falling showers. Garion slumped, all bemused, on the dais near Salmissra’s divan, his eyes filled with light and his head washed clean of all thought. There was no sense of time, no desire, no will. He briefly and rather vaguely remembered his friends, but the knowledge that he would never see them again brought only a brief, passing regret, a temporary melancholy that was rather pleasant. He even shed one crystal tear over his loss, but the tear landed on his wrist and sparkled with such an unearthly beauty that he lost himself utterly in contemplating it.

“How did he do it?” the queen’s voice said somewhere behind him. Her voice was so beautifully musical that the sound of it pierced Garion’s very soul.

“It has power,” Maas replied, his serpent voice thrilling Garion’s nerves, vibrating them like the strings of a lute. “Its power is untried, undirected, but it is very strong. Beware of this one, beloved Salmissra. It can destroy quite by accident.”

“I will control him,” she said.

“Perhaps,” the snake replied.

“Sorcery requires will,” Salmissra pointed out. “I will take his will away from him. Your blood is cold, Maas, and you’ve never felt the fire that fills the veins with the taste of oret or athal or kaldiss. Your passions are also cold, and you can’t know how much the body can be used to enslave the will. I’ll put his mind to sleep and then smother his will with love.”

“Love, Salmissra?” the snake asked, sounding faintly amused.

“The term serves as well as any other,” she replied. “Call it appetite, if you wish.”

“That I can understand,” Maas agreed. “But don’t underestimate this one—or overestimate your own power. It does not have an ordinary mind. There’s something strange about it that I can’t quite penetrate.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “Sadi,” she called the eunuch.

“Yes, my Queen?”

“Take the boy. Have him bathed and perfumed. He smells of boats and tar and salt water. I don’t like such Alorn smells.”

“At once, Eternal Salmissra.”

Garion was led away to a place where there was warm water. His clothes were taken from him, and he was immersed and soaped and immersed again. Fragrant oils were rubbed into his skin, and a brief loincloth was tied about his waist. Then he was taken quite firmly by the chin and rouge was applied to his cheeks. It was during this process that he realized that the person painting his face was a woman. Slowly, almost incuriously, he let his eyes move around the bath chamber. He realized then that except for Sadi, everyone there was female. It seemed that something about that should bother him—something having to do with appearing naked in the presence of women—but he could not exactly remember what it was.

When the woman had finished painting his face, Sadi the eunuch took his arm and led him again through the dim, endless corridors back to the room where Salmissra half lay on her divan beneath the statue, admiring herself in the pedestaled mirror beside her.

“Much better,” she said, looking Garion up and down with a certain appreciation. “He’s much more muscular than I thought. Bring him here.”

Sadi led Garion to the side of the queen’s divan and gently pressed him down onto the cushions where Essia had lounged.

Salmissra reached out with a lingeringly slow hand and brushed her cold fingertips across his face and chest. Her pale eyes seemed to burn, and her lips parted slightly. Garion’s eyes fixed themselves on her pale arm. There was no trace of hair on that white skin.

“Smooth,” he said vaguely, struggling to focus on that peculiarity.

“Of course, my Belgarion,” she murmured. “Serpents are hairless, and I am the queen of the serpents.”

Slowly, puzzled, he raised his eyes to the lustrous black tresses tumbling down across one of her white shoulders.

“Only this,” she said, touching the curls with a sensuous kind of vanity.

“How?” he asked.

“It’s a secret.” She laughed. “Someday perhaps I’ll show you. Would you like that?”

“I suppose so.”

“Tell me, Belgarion,” she said, “do you think I’m beautiful?”

“I think so.”

“How old would you say I am?” She spread her arms so that he could see her body through the filmy gauze of her gown.

“I don’t know,” Garion said. “Older than I am, but not too old.” A brief flicker of annoyance crossed her face. “Guess,” she ordered somewhat harshly.

“Thirty perhaps,” he decided, confused.

“Thirty?” Her voice was stricken. Swiftly she turned to her mirror and examined her face minutely. “You’re blind, you idiot!” she snapped, still staring at herself in the glass. “That’s not the face of a woman of thirty. Twenty-three—twenty-five at the most.”

“Whatever you say,” he agreed.

“Twenty-three,” she stated firmly. “Not a single day over twenty-three.”

“Of course,” he said mildly.

“Would you believe that I’m nearly sixty?” she demanded, her eyes suddenly flint-hard.

“No,” Garion denied. “I couldn’t believe that—not sixty.”

“What a charming boy you are, Belgarion,” she breathed at him, her glance melting. Her fingers returned to his face, touching, stroking, caressing. Slowly, beneath the pale skin of her naked shoulder and throat, curious patches of color began to appear, a faint mottling of green and purple that seemed to shift and pulsate, growing first quite visible and then fading. Her lips parted again, and her breathing grew faster. The mottling spread down her torso beneath her transparent gown, the colors seeming to writhe beneath her skin.

Maas crept nearer, his dead eyes suddenly coming awake with a strange adoration. The vivid pattern of his own scaly skin so nearly matched the colors that began to emerge upon the body of the Serpent Queen that when he draped a caressing coil across one of her shoulders it became impossible to say exactly where lay the boundary between the snake and the woman.

Had Garion not been in a half stupor, he would have recoiled from the queen. Her colorless eyes and mottled skin seemed reptilian, and her openly lustful expression spoke of some dreadful hunger. Yet there was a curious attraction about her. Helplessly he felt drawn by her blatant sensuality.

“Come closer, my Belgarion,” she ordered softly. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Her eyes gloated over her possession of him.

Not far from the dais, Sadi the eunuch cleared his throat. “Divine Queen,” he announced, “the emissary of Taur Urgas requests a word with you.”

“Of Ctuchik, you mean,” Salmissra said, looking faintly annoyed. Then a thought seemed to cross her mind, and she smiled maliciously. The mottling of her skin faded. “Bring the Grolim in,” she instructed Sadi.

Sadi bowed and withdrew to return a moment later with a scar-faced man in the garb of a Murgo.

“Give welcome to the emissary of Taur Urgas,” the eunuch chanted. “Welcome,” the chorus replied.

“Carefully now,” the dry voice in his mind said to Garion. “That’s the one we saw at the harbor. ”

Garion looked more carefully at the Murgo and realized that it was true.

“Hail, Eternal Salmissra,” the Grolim said perfunctorily, bowing first to the queen and then to the statue behind her. “Taur Urgas, King of Cthol Murgos, sends greetings to the Spirit of Issa and to his handmaiden.”

“And are there no greetings from Ctuchik, High Priest of the Grolims?” she asked, her eyes bright.

“Of course,” the Grolim said, “but those are customarily given in private.”

“Is your errand here on behalf of Taur Urgas or of Ctuchik?” she inquired, turning to examine her reflection in the mirror.

“May we speak in private, your Highness?” the Grolim asked. “We are in private,” she said.

“But—” He looked around at the kneeling eunuchs in the room.

“My body servants,” she said. “A Nyissan queen is never left alone. You should know that by now.”

“And that one?” The Grolim pointed at Garion.

“He is also a servant—but of a slightly different kind.”

The Grolim shrugged. “Whatever you wish. I salute you in the name of Ctuchik, High Priest of the Grolims and Disciple of Torak.”

“The Handmaiden of Issa salutes Ctuchik of Rak Cthol,” she responded formally. “What does the Grolim High Priest want of me?”

“The boy, your Highness,” the Grolim said bluntly.

“Which boy is that?”

“The boy you stole from Polgara and who now sits at your feet.”

She laughed scornfully. “Convey my regrets to Ctuchik,” she said, “but that would be impossible.”

“It’s unwise to deny the wishes of Ctuchik,” the Grolim warned.

“It’s even more unwise to make demands of Salmissra in her own palace,” she said. “What is Ctuchik prepared to offer for this boy?”

“His eternal friendship.”

“What need has the Serpent Queen of friends?”

“Gold, then,” the Grolim offered with annoyance.

“I know the secret of the red gold of Angarak,” she told him. “I don’t wish to become a slave to it. Keep your gold, Grolim.”

“Might I say that the game you play is very dangerous, your Highness?” the Grolim said coolly. “You’ve already made Polgara your enemy. Can you afford the enmity of Ctuchik as well?”

“I’m not afraid of Polgara,” she answered. “Nor of Ctuchik.”

“The queen’s bravery is remarkable,” he said dryly.

“This is beginning to get tiresome. My terms are very simple. Tell Ctuchik that I have Torak’s enemy, and I will keep him—unless—” She paused.

“Unless what, your Highness?”

“If Ctuchik will speak to Torak for me, an agreement might be reached.”

“What sort of agreement?”

“I will give the boy to Torak as a wedding gift.”

The Grolim blinked.

“If Torak will make me his bride and give me immortality, I will deliver Belgarion up to him.”

“All the world knows that the Dragon God of Angarak is bound in slumber,” the Grolim objected.

“But he will not sleep forever,” Salmissra said flatly. “The priests of Angarak and the sorcerers of Aloria always seem to forget that Eternal Salmissra can read the signs in the heavens as clearly as they. The day of Torak’s awakening is at hand. Tell Ctuchik that upon the day that I am wed to Torak, Belgarion will be in his hands. Until that day, the boy is mine.”

“I shall deliver your message to Ctuchik,” the Grolim said with a stiff, icy bow.

“Leave, then,” she told him with an airy wave of her hand.

“So that is it,” the voice in Garion’s mind said as the Grolim left. “I should have known, I suppose.”

Maas the serpent suddenly raised his head, his great neck flaring and his eyes burning. “Beware!” he hissed.

“Of the Grolim?” Salmissra laughed. “I have nothing to fear from him.”

“Not the Grolim,” Maas said. “That one.” He flickered his tongue at Garion. “Its mind is awake.”

“That’s impossible,” she objected.

“Nevertheless, its mind is awake. It has to do, I think, with that metal thing around its neck.”

“Remove the ornament then,” she told the snake.

Maas lowered his length to the floor and slid around the divan toward Garion.

“Remain very still,” Garion’s inner voice told him. “Don’t try to fight. ”

Numbly, Garion watched the blunt head draw closer.

Maas raised his head, his hood flaring. His nervous tongue darted. Slowly he leaned forward. His nose touched the silver amulet hanging about Garion’s neck.

There was a bright blue spark as the reptile’s head came in contact with the amulet. Garion felt the familiar surge, but tightly controlled now, focused down to a single point. Maas recoiled, and the spark from the amulet leaped out, sizzling through the air, linking the silver disc to the reptile’s nose. The snake’s eyes began to shrivel and steam poured from his nostrils and his gaping mouth.

Then the spark was gone, and the body of the dead snake writhed and twisted convulsively on the polished stone floor of the chamber.

“Maas!” Salmissra shrieked.

The eunuchs scrambled out of the way of the wildly threshing body of the snake.

“My Queen!” a shaved-headed, functionary gibbered from the door, “the world is ending!”

“What?” Salmissra tore her eyes from the convulsions of the snake.

“The sun has gone out! Noon is as dark as midnight! The city is gone mad with terror!”

29

In the tumult which followed that announcement, Garion sat quietly on the cushions beside Salmissra’s throne. The quiet voice in his mind, however, was speaking to him rapidly. “Stay very still,” the voice told him. “Don’t say anything, and don’t do anything.”

“Get my astronomers here immediately!” Salmissra ordered. “I want to know why I wasn’t warned about this eclipse.”

“It’s not an eclipse, my Queen,” the bald functionary wailed, groveling on the polished floor not far from the still-writhing Maas. “The dark came like a great curtain. It was like a moving wall—no wind, no rain, no thunder. It swallowed the sun without a sound.” He began to sob brokenly. “We shall never see the sun again.”

“Stop that, you idiot,” Salmissra snapped. “Get on your feet. Sadi, take this babbling fool out of here and go look at the sky. Then come back to me here. I have to know what’s going on.”

Sadi shook himself almost like a dog coming out of the water and pulled his fascinated eyes off the dead, fixed grin on the face of Maas. He pulled the blubbering functionary to his feet and led him out of the chamber.

Salmissra turned then on Garion. “How did you do that?” she demanded, pointing at the twitching form of Maas.

“I don’t know,” he said. His mind was still sunk in fog. Only the quiet corner where the voice lived was alert.

“Take off that amulet,” she commanded.

Obediently, Garion reached his hands toward the medallion. Suddenly his hands froze. They would not move. He let them fall. “I can’t,” he said.

“Take it from him,” she ordered one of the eunuchs. The man glanced once at the dead snake, then stared at Garion. He shook his head and backed away in fright.

“Do as I say!” the Snake Queen ordered sharply.

From somewhere in the palace came a hollow, reverberating crash. There was the sound of nails screeching out of heavy wood and the avalanche noise of a wall collapsing. Then, a long way down one of the dim corridors, someone screamed in agony.

The dry consciousness in his mind reached out, probing. “At last,” it said with obvious relief.

“What’s going on out there?” Salmissra blazed.

“Come with me,” the voice in Garion’s mind said. “I need your help.” Garion put his hands under him and started to push himself up. “No. This way.” A strange image of separation rose in Garion’s mind.

Unthinking, he willed the separation and felt himself rising and yet not moving. Suddenly he had no sense of his body—no arms or legs—yet he seemed to move. He saw himself—his own body—sitting stupidly on the cushions at Salmissra’s feet.

“Hurry,” the voice said to him. It was no longer inside his mind but seemed to be somewhere beside him. A dim shape was there, formless but somehow very familiar.

The fog that had clouded Garion’s wits was gone, and he felt very alert. “Who are you?” he demanded of the shape beside him.

“There isn’t time to explain. Quickly, we have to lead them back before Salmissra has time to do anything.”

“Lead who?”

“Polgara and Barak.”

“Aunt Pol? Where is she?”

“Come,” the voice said urgently.

Together Garion and the strange presence at his side seemed to waft toward the closed door. They passed through it as if it were no more than insubstantial mist and emerged in the corridor outside.

Then they were flying, soaring down the corridor with no sense of air rushing past or even of movement. A moment later they came out into that vast open hall where Issus had first brought Garion when they had entered the palace. There they stopped, hovering in the fir.

Aunt Pol, her splendid eyes ablaze and a fiery nimbus about her, strode through the hall. Beside her hulked the great shaggy bear Garion had seen before. Barak’s face seemed vaguely within that bestial head, but there was no humanity in it. The beast’s eyes were afire with raging madness, and its mouth gaped horribly.

Desperate guards tried to push the bear back with long pikes, but the beast swiped the pikes away and fell upon the guards. Its vast embrace crushed them, and its flailing claws ripped them open. The trail behind Aunt Pol and the bear was littered with maimed bodies and quivering chunks of flesh.

The snakes which had lain in the corners were seething across the floor, but as they came into contact with the flaming light which surrounded Aunt Pol, they died even as Maas had died.

Methodically, Aunt Pol was blasting down doors with word and gesture. A thick wall barred her way, and she brushed it into rubble as if it had been made of cobwebs.

Barak raged through the dim hall, roaring insanely, destroying everything in his path. A shrieking eunuch tried desperately to climb one of the pillars. The great beast reared up and hooked his claws into the man’s back and pulled him down. The shrieks ended abruptly in a spurt of brains and blood when the massive jaws closed with a sickening crunch on the eunuch’s head.

“Polgara!” the presence beside Garion shouted soundlessly. “This way!”

Aunt Pol turned quickly.

“Follow us,” the presence said. “Hurry!”

Then Garion and that other part of himself were flying back down the corridor toward Salmissra and the semiconscious body they had recently vacated. Behind them came Aunt Pol and the ravening Barak.

Garion and his strange companion passed again through the heavy, closed door.

Salmissra, her naked body mottled now with rage rather than lust beneath her transparent gown, stood over the vacant-eyed form on the cushions. “Answer me!” she was shouting. “Answer me!”

“When we get back,” the shapeless presence said, “let me handle things. We have to buy some time.”

And then they were back. Garion felt his body shudder briefly, and he was looking out through his own eyes again. The fog which had benumbed him before came rushing back. “What?” his lips said, though he had not consciously formed the word.

“I said, is this your doing?” Salmissra demanded.

“Is what my doing?” The voice coming from his lips sounded like his, but there was a subtle difference.

“All of it,” she said. “The darkness. The attack on my palace.”

“I don’t think so. How could I? I’m only a boy.”

“Don’t lie to me, Belgarion,” she demanded. “I know who you are. I know what you are. It has to be you. Belgarath himself could not blot out the sun. I warn you, Belgarion, what you have drunk today is death. Even now the poison in your veins is killing you.”

“Why did you do that to me?”

“To keep you. You must have more or you will die. You must drink what only I can give you, and you must drink every day of your life. You’re mine, Belgarion, mine!”

Despairing shrieks came from just outside the door.

The Serpent Queen looked up, startled, then she turned to the huge statue behind her, bowed down in a strange ceremonial way and began to weave her hands through the air in a series of intricate gestures. She started to pronounce an involved formula in a language Garion had never heard before, a language filled with guttural hissings and strange cadences.

The heavy door exploded inward, blasted into splinters, and Aunt Pol stood in the shattered doorway, her white lock ablaze and her eyes dreadful. The great bear at her side roared, his teeth dripping blood and with tatters of flesh still hanging from his claws.

“I’ve warned you, Salmissra.” Aunt Pol spoke in a deadly voice.

“Stop where you are, Polgara,” the queen ordered. She did not turn around, and her fingers continued their sinuous weaving in the air. “The boy is dying,” she said. “Nothing can save him if you attack me.”

Aunt Pol stopped. “What have you done?” she demanded.

“Look at him,” Salmissra said. “He has drunk athal and kaldiss. Even now their fire is in his veins. He will need more very soon.” Her hands still moved in the air, and her face was fixed in extreme concentration. Her lips began moving again in that guttural hissing.

“Is it true?” Aunt Pol’s voice echoed in Garion’s mind.

“It seems to be,” the dry voice replied. “They made him drink things, and he seems different now. ”

Aunt Pol’s eyes widened. “Who are you?”

“I’ve always been here, Polgara. Didn’t you know that?”

“Did Garion know?”

“He knows that I’m here. He doesn’t know what it means.”

“We can talk about that later,” she decided. “Watch very closely. This is what you have to do.” A confused blur of images welled up in Garion’s mind. “Do you understand?”

“Of course. I’ll show him how.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“No, Polgara,” the dry voice said. “The power is his, not mine. Don’t worry. He and I understand each other. ”

Garion felt strangely alone as the two voices spoke together in his mind.

“Garion.” The dry voice spoke quietly. “I want you to think about your blood.”

“My blood?”

“We’re going to change it for a moment.”

“Why?”

“To burn away the poison they gave you. Now concentrate on your blood. ”

Garion did.

“You want it to be like this.” An image of yellow came into Garion’s mind. “Do you understand?”

“Yes. ”

“Do it, then. Now. ”

Garion put his fingertips to his chest and willed his blood to change. He suddenly felt as if he were on fire. His heart began to pound, and a heavy sweat burst out all over his body.

“A moment longer,” the voice said.

Garion was dying. His altered blood seared through his veins, and he began to tremble violently. His heart hammered in his chest like a tripping sledge. His eyes went dark, and he began to topple slowly forward.

“Now!” the voice demanded sharply. “Change it back. ”

Then it was over. Garion’s heart stuttered and then faltered back to its normal pace. He was exhausted, but the fog in his brain was gone. “It’s done, Polgara,” the other Garion said. “You can do what needs doing now.”

Aunt Pol had watched anxiously, but now her face became dreadfully stern. She walked across the polished floor toward the dais. “Salmissra,” she said, “turn around and look at me.”

The queen’s hands were raised above her head now, and the hissing words tumbled from her lips, rising finally to a hoarse shout.

Then, far above them in the shadows near the ceiling, the eyes of the huge statue opened and began to glow a deep emerald fire. A polished jewel on Salmissra’s crown began also to burn with the same glow.

The statue moved. The sound it made was a kind of ponderous creaking, deafeningly loud. The solid rock from which the huge shape had been hewn bent and flexed as the statue took a step forward and then another.

“Why-did—you-summon-me?” An enormous voice demanded through stiff, stony lips. The voice reverberated hollowly up from the massive chest.

“Defend thy handmaiden, Great Issa,” Salmissra cried, turning to look triumphantly at Aunt Pol. “This evil sorceress hath invaded thy domain to slay me. Her wicked power is so great that none may withstand her. I am thy promised bride, and I place myself under thy protection.”

“Who is this who defiles my temple?” the statue demanded in a vast roar. “Who dares to raise her hand against my chosen and beloved?” The emerald eyes flashed in dreadful wrath.

Aunt Pol stood alone in the center of the polished floor with the vast statue looming above her. Her face was unafraid. “You go too far, Salmissra,” she said. “This is forbidden.”

The Serpent Queen laughed scornfully. “Forbidden? What does your forbidding mean to me? Flee now, or face the wrath of Divine Issa. Contend if you will with a God!”

“If I must,” Aunt Pol said. She straightened then and spoke a single word. The roaring in Garion’s mind at that word was overwhelming. Then, suddenly, she began to grow. Foot by foot she towered up, rising like a tree, expanding, growing gigantic before Garion’s stunned eyes. Within a moment she faced the great stone God as an equal.

“Polgara?” the God’s voice sounded puzzled. “Why have you done this?”

“I come in fulfillment of the Prophecy, Lord Issa,” she said. “Thy handmaiden hath betrayed thee and thy brothers.”

“It cannot be so,” Issa said. “She is my chosen one. Her face is the face of my beloved.”

“The face is the same,” Aunt Pol said, “but this is not the Salmissra beloved of Issa. A hundred Salmissras have served thee in this temple since thy beloved died.”

“Died?” the God said incredulously.

“She lies!” Salmissra shrieked. “I am thy beloved, O my Lord. Let not her lies turn thee from me. Kill her.”

“The Prophecy approaches its day,” Aunt Pol said. “The boy at Salmissra’s feet is its fruit. He must be returned to me, or the Prophecy will fail.”

“Is the day of the Prophecy come so soon?” the God asked.

“It is not soon, Lord Issa,” Aunt Pol said. “It is late. Thy slumber hath encompassed eons.”

“Lies! All lies!” Salmissra cried desperately, clinging to the ankle of the huge stone God.

“I must test out the truth of this,” the God said slowly. “I have slept long and deeply, and now the world comes upon me unaware.”

“Destroy her, O my Lord!” Salmissra demanded. “Her lies are an abomination and a desecration of thy holy presence.”

“I will find the truth, Salmissra,” Issa said.

Garion felt a brief, enormous touch upon his mind. Something had brushed him—something so vast that his imagination shuddered back from its immensity. Then the touch moved on.

“Ahhh—” The sigh came from the floor. The dead snake Maas stirred. “Ahhh—Let me sleep,” it hissed.

“In but a moment,” Issa said. “What was your name?”

“I was called Maas,” the snake said. “I was counsellor and companion to Eternal Salmissra. Send me back, Lord. I cannot bear to live again.”

“Is this my beloved Salmissra?” the God asked.

“Her successor.” Maas sighed. “Thy beloved priestess died thousands of years ago. Each new Salmissra is chosen because of her resemblance to thy beloved.”

“Ah,” Issa said with pain in his huge voice. “And what was this woman’s purpose in removing Belgarion from Polgara’s care?”

“She sought alliance with Torak,” Maas said. “She thought to trade Belgarion to the Accursed One in exchange for the immortality his embrace would bestow upon her.”

“His embrace? My priestess would submit to the foul embrace of my mad brother?”

“Willingly, Lord,” Maas said. “It is her nature to seek the embrace of any man or God or beast who passes.”

A look of repugnance flickered across Issa’s stony face. “Has it always been so?” he asked.

“Always, Lord,” Maas said. “The potion which maintains her youth and semblance to thy beloved sets her veins afire with lust. That fire remains unquenched until she dies. Let me go, Lord. The pain!”

“Sleep, Maas,” Issa granted sorrowfully. “Take my thanks with you down into silent death.”

“Ahhh—” Maas sighed and sank down again.

“I too will return to slumber,” Issa said. “I must not remain, lest my presence rouse Torak to that war which would unmake the world.” The great statue stepped back to the spot where it had stood for thousands of years. The deafening creak and groan of flexing rock again filled the huge chamber. “Deal with this woman as it pleases thee, Polgara,” the stone God said. “Only spare her life out of remembrance of my beloved.”

“I will, Lord Issa,” Aunt Pol said, bowing to the statue.

“And carry my love to my brother, Aldur,” the hollow voice said, fading even as it spoke.

“Sleep, Lord,” Aunt Pol said. “May thy slumber wash away thy grief.”

“No!” Salmissra wailed, but the green fire had already died in the statue’s eyes, and the jewel on her crown flickered and went dark.

“It’s time, Salmissra,” Aunt Pol, vast and terrible, announced.

“Don’t kill me, Polgara,” the queen begged, falling to her knees. “Please don’t kill me.”

“I’m not going to kill you, Salmissra,” Aunt Pol told her. “I promised Lord Issa that I would spare your life.”

“I didn’t make any such promise,” Barak said from the doorway. Garion looked sharply at his huge friend, dwarfed now by Aunt Pol’s immensity. The bear was gone, and in its place the big Cherek stood, sword in hand.

“No, Barak. I’m going to solve the problem of Salmissra once and for all.” Aunt Pol turned back to the groveling queen. “You will live, Salmissra. You’ll live for a very long time—eternally, perhaps.”

An impossible hope dawned in Salmissra’s eyes. Slowly she rose to her feet and looked up at the huge figure rising above her. “Eternally, Polgara?” she asked.

“But I must change you,” Aunt Pol said. “The poison you’ve drunk to keep you young and beautiful is slowly killing you. Even now its traces are beginning to show on your face.”

The queen’s hands flew to her cheeks, and she turned quickly to look into her mirror.

“You’re decaying, Salmissra,” Aunt Pol said. “Soon you’ll be ugly and old. The lust which fills you will burn itself out, and you’ll die. Your blood’s too warm; that’s the whole problem.”

“But how—” Salmissra faltered.

“A little change,” Aunt Pol assured her. “Just a small one, and you’ll live forever.” Garion could feel the force of her will gathering itself. “I will make you eternal, Salmissra.” She raised her hand and spoke a single word. The terrible force of that word shook Garion like a leaf in the wind.

At first nothing seemed to happen. Salmissra stood fixed with her pale nakedness gleaming through her gown. Then the strange mottling grew more pronounced, and her thighs pressed tightly together. Her face began to shift, to grow more pointed. Her lips disappeared as her mouth spread, and its corners slid up into a fixed reptilian grin.

Garion watched in horror, unable to take his eyes off the queen. Her gown slid away as her shoulders disappeared and her arms adhered to her sides. Her body began to elongate, and her legs, grown completely together now, began to loop into coils. Her lustrous hair disappeared, and the last vestiges of humanity faded from her face. Her golden crown, however, remained firmly upon her head. Her tongue flickered as she sank down into the mass of her loops and coils. The hood upon her neck spread as she looked with flat, dead eyes at Aunt Pol, who had somehow during the queen’s transformation resumed her normal size.

“Ascend your throne, Salmissra,” Aunt Pol said.

The queen’s head remained immobile, but her coils looped and mounted the cushioned divan, and the sound of coil against coil was a dry, dusty rasp.

Aunt Pol turned to Sadi the eunuch. “Behold the Handmaiden of Issa, the queen of the snake-people, whose dominion shall endure until the end of days, for she is immortal now and will reign in Nyissa forever.”

Sadi’s face was ghastly pale, and his eyes bulged wildly. He swallowed hard and nodded.

“I’ll leave you with your queen, then,” she told him. “I’d prefer to go peacefully, but one way or another, the boy and I are leaving.”

“I’ll send word ahead,” Sadi agreed quickly. “No one will try to bar your way.”

“Wise decision,” Barak said dryly.

“All hail the Serpent Queen of Nyissa,” one of the crimson-robed eunuchs pronounced in a shaking voice, sinking to his knees before the dais.

“Praise her,” the others responded ritualistically, also kneeling. “Her glory is revealed to us.”

“Worship her.”

Garion glanced back once as he followed Aunt Pol toward the shattered door. Salmissra lay upon her throne with her mottled coils redundantly piled and her hooded head turned toward the mirror. The golden crown sat atop her head, and her flat, serpent eyes regarded her reflection in the glass. There was no expression on her reptile face, so it was impossible to know what she was thinking.

30

The corridors and vaulted halls of the palace were empty as Aunt Pol led them from the throne room where the eunuchs knelt, chanting their praises to the Serpent Queen. Sword in hand, Barak stalked grimly through the awful carnage that marked the trail he had left when he had entered. The big man’s face was pale, and he frequently averted his eyes from some of the more savagely mutilated corpses that littered their way.

When they emerged, they found the streets of Sthiss Tor darker than night and filled with hysterical crowds wailing in terror. Barak, with a torch he had taken from the palace wall in one hand and his huge sword in the other, led them into the street. Even in their panic the Nyissans made way for him.

“What is this, Polgara?” he growled over his shoulder, waving the torch slightly as if to brush the darkness away. “Is it some kind of sorcery?”

“No,” she answered. “It’s not sorcery.”

Tiny flecks of gray were falling through the torchlight. “Snow?” Barak asked incredulously.

“No,” she said. “Ashes.”

“What’s burning?”

“A mountain,” she replied. “Let’s get back to the ship as quickly as we can. There’s more danger from this crowd than from any of this.” She threw her light cloak about Garion’s shoulders and pointed down a street where a few torches bobbed here and there. “Let’s go that way.”

The ash began to fall more heavily. It was almost like dirty gray flour sifting down through the sodden air, and there was a dreadful, sulfurous stink to it.

By the time they reached the wharves, the absolute darkness had begun to pale. The ash continued to drift down, seeping into the cracks between the cobblestones and gathering in little windrows along the edges of the buildings. Though it was growing lighter, the falling ash, like fog, blotted out everything more than ten feet away.

The wharves were total chaos. Crowds of Nyissans, shrieking and wailing, were trying to climb into boats to flee from the choking ash that sifted with deadly silence down through the damp air. Mad with terror, many even leaped into the deadly waters of the river.

“We’re not going to be able to get through that mob, Polgara,” Barak said. “Stay here a moment.” He sheathed his sword, jumped up and caught the edge of a low roof. He pulled himself up and stood outlined dimly above them. “Ho, Greldik!” he roared in a huge voice that carried even over the noise of the crowd.

“Barak!” Greldik’s voice came back. “Where are you?”

“At the foot of the pier,” Barak shouted. “We can’t get through the crowd.”

“Stay there,” Greldik yelled back. “We’ll come and get you.”

After a few moments there was the tramp of heavy feet on the wharf and the occasional sound of blows. A few cries of pain mingled with the sounds of panic from the crowd. Then Greldik, Mandorallen and a half dozen burly sailors armed with clubs strode out of the ashfall, clearing a path with brutal efficiency.

“Did you get lost?” Greldik yelled up to Barak.

Barak jumped down from the roof. “We had to stop by the palace,” he answered shortly.

“We were growing concerned for thy safety, my Lady,” Mandorallen told Aunt Pol, pushing a gibbering Nyissan out of his way. “Good Durnik returned some hours ago.”

“We were delayed,” she said. “Captain, can you get us on board your ship?”

Greldik gave her an evil grin.

“Let’s go then,” she urged. “As soon as we get on board, it might be a good idea to anchor out in the river a little way. This ash will settle after a while, but these people are going to be hysterical until it does. Has there been any word from Silk or my father yet?”

“Nothing, my Lady,” Greldik said.

“What is he doing?” she demanded irritably of no one in particular. Mandorallen drew his broadsword and marched directly into the face of the crowd, neither slowing nor altering his course. The Nyissans melted out of his path.

The crowd pressing at the edge of the wharf beside Greldik’s ship was even thicker, and Durnik, Hettar and the rest of the sailors lined the rail with long boat-hooks, pushing the terror-stricken people away.

“Run out the plank,” Greldik shouted as they reached the edge of the wharf.

“Noble captain,” a bald Nyissan blubbered, clinging to Greldik’s fur vest. “I’ll give you a hundred gold pieces if you’ll let me aboard your ship.”

Disgusted, Greldik pushed him away.

“A thousand gold pieces,” the Nyissan promised, clutching Greldik’s arm and waving a purse.

“Get this baboon off me,” Greldik ordered.

One of the sailors rather casually clubbed the Nyissan into insensibility, then bent and yanked the purse from his grip. He opened the purse and poured the coins out into one hand. “Three pieces of silver,” he said with disgust. “All the rest is copper.” He turned back and kicked the unconscious man in the stomach.

They crossed to the ship one by one while Barak and Mandorallen held the crowd back with the threat of massive violence.

“Cut the hawsers,” Greldik shouted when they were all aboard. The sailors chopped the thick hawsers loose to a great cry of dismay from the Nyissans crowding the edge of the wharf. The sluggish current pulled the ship slowly away, and wails and despairing moans followed them as they drifted.

“Garion,” Aunt Pol said, “why don’t you go below and put on some decent clothes? And wash that disgusting rouge off your face. Then come back up here. I want to talk to you.”

Garion had forgotten how scantily he was dressed and he flushed slightly and went quickly below deck.

It had grown noticeably lighter when he came back up, dressed again in tunic and hose, but the gray ash still sifted down through the motionless air, making the world around them hazy and coating everything with a heavy layer of fine grit. They had drifted some distance out into the river, and Greldik’s sailors had dropped the anchor. The ship swung slowly in the sluggish current.

“Over here, Garion,” Aunt Pol called. She was standing near the prow, looking out into the dusty haze. Garion went to her a little hesitantly, the memory of what had happened at the palace still strong in his mind.

“Sit down, dear,” she suggested. “There’s something I have to talk with you about.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, sitting on the bench there.

“Garion.” She turned to look at him. “Did anything happen while you were in Salmissra’s palace?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said rather crisply. “You’re not going to embarrass us both by making me ask certain questions, are you?”

“Oh.” Garion blushed. “That! No, nothing like that happened.” He remembered the lush overripeness of the queen with a certain regret.

“Good. That was the one thing I was afraid of. You can’t afford to get involved in any of that sort of thing just yet. It has some peculiar effects on one in your rather special circumstances.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

“You have certain abilities,” she told him. “And if you start experimenting with that other thing before they’re fully matured, the results can sometimes be a bit unpredictable. It’s better not to confuse things at this point.”

“Maybe it’d be better if something had happened, then,” Garion blurted. “Maybe it would have fixed it so I couldn’t hurt people anymore.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “Your power’s too great to be neutralized so easily. Do you remember what we talked about that day when we left Tolnedra—about instruction?”

“I don’t need any instruction,” he protested, his tone growing sullen.

“Yes, you do,” she said, “and you need it now. Your power is enormous—more power than I’ve ever seen before, and some of it so complex that I can’t even begin to understand it. You must begin your instruction before something disastrous happens. You’re totally out of control, Garion. If you’re really serious about not wanting to hurt people, you should be more than willing to start learning how to keep any accidents from happening.”

“I don’t want to be a sorcerer,” he objected. “All I want to do is get rid of it. Can’t you help me do that?”

She shook her head. “No. And I wouldn’t even if I could. You can’t renounce it, my Garion. It’s part of you.”

“Then I’m going to be a monster?” Garion demanded bitterly. “I’m going to go around burning people alive or turning them into toads or snakes? And maybe after a while I’ll get so used to it that it won’t even bother me anymore. I’ll live forever—like you and grandfather—but I won’t be human anymore. Aunt Pol, I think I’d rather be dead.

“Can’t you reason with him?” Her voice inside his head spoke directly to that other awareness.

“Not at the moment, Polgara,” the dry voice replied. “He’s too busy wallowing in self pity. ”

“He must learn to control the power he has,” she said.

“I’ll keep him out of mischief,” the voice promised. “I don’t think there’s much else we can do until Belgarath gets back. He’s going through a moral crisis, and we can’t really tamper with him until he works out his own solutions to it. ”

“I don’t like to see him suffering this way. ”

“You’re too tender-hearted, Polgara. He’s a sturdy boy, and a bit of suffering won’t damage him. ”

“Will the two of you stop treating me as if I’m not even here?” Garion demanded angrily.

“Mistress Pol,” Durnik said, coming across the deck to them, “I think you’d better come quickly. Barak’s going to kill himself.”

“He’s what?” she asked.

“It’s something about some curse,” Durnik explained. “He says he’s going to fall on his sword.”

“That idiot! Where is he?”

“He’s back by the stern,” Durnik said. “He’s got his sword out, and he won’t let anybody near him.”

“Come with me.” She started toward the stern with Garion and Durnik behind her.

“We have all experienced battle madness, my Lord,” Mandorallen was saying, trying to reason with the big Cherek. “It is not a thing of which to be proud, but neither is it a cause for such bleak despair.”

Barak did not answer, but stood at the very stern of the ship, his eyes blank with horror and his huge sword weaving in a slow, menacing arc, holding everyone at bay.

Aunt Pol walked through the crowd of sailors and directly up to him.

“Don’t try to stop me, Polgara,” he warned.

She reached out quite calmly and touched the point of his sword with one finger. “It’s a little dull,” she said thoughtfully. “Why don’t we have Durnik sharpen it? That way it’ll slip more smoothly between your ribs when you fall on it.”

Barak looked a bit startled.

“Have you made all the necessary arrangements?” she asked.

“What arrangements?”

“For the disposal of your body,” she told him. “Really, Barak, I thought you had better manners. A decent man doesn’t burden his friends with that kind of chore.” She thought a moment. “Burning is customary, I suppose, but the wood here in Nyissa’s very soggy. You’d probably smolder for a week or more. I imagine we’ll have to settle for just dumping you in the river. The leeches and crayfish should have you stripped to the bone in a day or so.”

Barak’s expression grew hurt.

“Did you want us to take your sword and shield back to your son?” she asked.

“I don’t have a son,” he answered sullenly. He was obviously not prepared for her brutal practicality.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? How forgetful of me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important now. Were you just going to fall on your sword, or would you prefer to run up against the mast with the hilt? Either way works rather well.” She turned to the sailors. “Would you clear a path so the Earl of Tellheim can get a good run at the mast?”

The sailors stared at her.

“What did you mean about a son?” Barak asked, lowering his sword.

“It would only unsettle your mind, Barak,” she answered. “You’d probably make a mess of killing yourself if I told you about it. We’d really rather not have you lying around groaning for weeks on end. That sort of thing is so depressing, you know.”

“I want to know what you’re talking about!”

“Oh, very well,” she said with a great sigh. “Your wife Merel is with child—the result of certain courtesies you exchanged when we visited Val Alorn, I imagine. She looks like a rising moon at the moment, and your lusty brat is making her life miserable with his kicking.”

“A son?” Barak said, his eyes suddenly very wide.

“Really, Barak,” she protested. “You must learn to pay attention. You’ll never make anything of yourself if you keep blundering around with your ears closed like this.”

“A son?” he repeated, his sword sliding out of his fingers.

“Now you’ve dropped it,” she chided him. “Pick it up immediately, and let’s get on with this. It’s very inconsiderate to take all day to kill yourself like this.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he told her indignantly.

“You’re not?”

“Of course not,” he sputtered, and then he saw the faint flicker of a smile playing about the corners of her mouth. He hung his head sheepishly.

“You great fool,” she said. Then she took hold of his beard with both hands, pulled his head down and kissed his ash-dusted face soundly. Greldik began to chortle, and Mandorallen stepped forward and caught Barak in a rough embrace. “I rejoice with thee, my friend,” he said. “My heart soars for thee.”

“Brink up a cask,” Greldik told the sailors, pounding on his friend’s back. “We’ll salute Trellheim’s heir with the bright brown ale of timeless Cherek.”

“I expect this will get rowdy now,” Aunt Pol said quietly to Garion. “Come with me.” She led the way back toward the ship’s prow.

“Will she ever change back?” Garion asked when they were alone again.

“What?”

“The queen,” Garion explained. “Will she ever change back again?”

“In time she won’t even want to,” Aunt Pol answered. “The shapes we assume begin to dominate our thinking after a while. As the years go by, she’ll become more and more a snake and less and less a woman.”

Garion shuddered. “It would have been kinder to have killed her.”

“I promised Lord Issa that I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Was that really the God?”

“His spirit,” she replied, looking out into the hazy ashfall. “Salmissra infused the statue with Issa’s spirit. For a time at least the statue was the God. It’s all very complicated.” She seemed a bit preoccupied. “Where is he?” She seemed suddenly irritated.

“Who?”

“Father. He should have been here days ago.”

They stood together looking out at the muddy river.

Finally she turned from the railing and brushed at the shoulders of her cloak with distaste. The ash puffed from under her fingers in tiny clouds. “I’m going below,” she told him, making a face. “It’s just too dirty up here.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to me,” he said.

“I don’t think you’re ready to listen. It’ll wait.” She stepped away, then stopped. “Oh, Garion.”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t drink any of that ale the sailors are swilling. After what they made you drink at the palace, it would probably make you sick.”

“Oh,” he agreed a trifle regretfully. “All right.”

“It’s up to you, of course,” she said, “but I thought you ought to know.” Then she turned again and went to the hatch and disappeared down the stairs.

Garion’s emotions were turbulent. The entire day had been vastly eventful, and his mind was filled with a welter of confusing images.

“Be quiet,” the voice in his mind said.

“What?”

“I’m trying to hear something. Listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“There. Can’t you hear it?”

Faintly, as if from a very long way off, Garion seemed to hear a muffled thudding.

“What is it?”

The voice did not answer, but the amulet about his neck began to throb in time with the distant thudding.

Behind him he heard a rush of tiny feet.

“Garion!” He turned just in time to be caught in Ce’Nedra’s embrace. “I was so worried about you. Where did you go?”

“Some men came on board and grabbed me,” he said, trying to untangle himself from her arms. “They took me to the palace.”

“How awful!” she said. “Did you meet the queen?”

Garion nodded and then shuddered, remembering the hooded snake lying on the divan looking at itself in the mirror.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.

“A lot of things happened,” he answered. “Some of them weren’t very pleasant.” Somewhere at the back of his awareness, the thudding continued.

“Do you mean they tortured you?” Ce’Nedra asked, her eyes growing very wide.

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, what happened?” she demanded. “Tell me.”

He knew that she would not leave him alone until he did, so he described what had happened as best he could. The throbbing sound seemed to grow louder while he talked, and his right palm began to tingle. He rubbed at it absently.

“How absolutely dreadful,” Ce’Nedra said after he had finished. “Weren’t you terrified?”

“Not really,” he told her, still scratching at his palm. “Most of the time the things they made me drink made my head so foggy I couldn’t feel anything.”

“Did you really kill Maas?” she asked, “Just like that?” She snapped her fingers.

“It wasn’t exactly just like that,” he tried to explain. “There was a little more to it.”

“I knew you were a sorcerer,” she said. “I told you that you were that day at the pool, remember?”

“I don’t want to be,” he protested. “I didn’t ask to be.”

“I didn’t ask to be a princess either.”

“It’s not the same. Being a king or a princess is what one is. Being a sorcerer has to do with what one does.”

“I really don’t see that much difference,” she objected stubbornly.

“I can make things happen,” he told her. “Awful things, usually.”

“So?” she said maddeningly. “I can make awful things happen too or at least I could back in Tol Honeth. One word from me could have sent a servant to the whipping-post—or to the headsman’s block. I didn’t do it of course, but I could have. Power is power, Garion. The results are the same. You don’t have to hurt people if you don’t want to.”

“It just happens sometimes. It’s not that I want to do it.” The throbbing had become a nagging thing, almost like a dull headache.

“Then you have to learn to control it.”

“Now you sound like Aunt Pol.”

“She’s trying to help you,” the princess said. “She keeps trying to get you to do what you’re going to have to do eventually anyway. How many more people are you going to have to burn up before you finally accept what she says?”

“You didn’t have to say that.” Garion was stung deeply by her words.

“Yes,” she told him, “I think I did. You’re lucky I’m not your aunt. I wouldn’t put up with your foolishness the way Lady Polgara does.”

“You don’t understand,” Garion muttered sullenly.

“I understand much better than you think, Garion. You know what your problem is? You don’t want to grow up. You want to keep on being a boy forever. You can’t, though; nobody can. No matter how much power you have—whether you’re an emperor or a sorcerer—you can’t stop the years from going by. I realized that a long time ago, but then I’m probably much smarter than you are.” Then without any word of explanation, she raised up on her toes and kissed him lightly full on the lips.

Garion blushed and lowered his head in embarrassment.

“Tell me,” Ce’Nedra said, toying with the sleeve of his tunic, “was Queen Salmissra as beautiful as they say?”

“She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” Garion answered without thinking.

The princess caught her breath sharply. “I hate you,” she cried from between clenched teeth. Then she turned and ran sobbing in search of Aunt Pol.

Garion stared after her in perplexity. He turned then to stare moodily out at the river and the drifting ash. The tingling in his palm was becoming intolerable, and he scratched at it, digging in with his fingernails.

“You’ll just make it sore,” the voice in his mind said.

“It itches. I can’t stand it.”

“Stop being a baby.”

“What’s causing it?”

“Do you mean to say you really don’t know? You’ve got further to go than I thought. Put your right hand on the amulet. ”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Garion. ”

Garion reached inside his tunic, and put his burning palm on his medallion. As a key fitting into the lock for which it was made, the contact between his hand and the throbbing amulet seemed somehow enormously right. The tingling became that now—familiar surge, and the throbbing began to echo hollowly in his ears.

“Not too much,” the voice warned him. “You’re not trying to dry up the river, you know. ”

“What’s happening? What is all this?”

“Belgarath’s trying to find us.”

“Grandfather? Where?”

“Be patient. ”

The throbbing seemed to grow louder until Garion’s entire body quivered with each thudding beat. He stared out over the rail, trying to see through the haze. The settling ash, so light that it coated the muddy surface of the river, made everything more than twenty paces away indistinct. It was impossible to see the city, and the wails and cries from the hidden streets seemed somehow muffled. Only the slow wash of the current against the hull seemed clear.

Then a long way out on the river, something moved. It was not very large and seemed to be little more than a dark shadow ghosting silently with the current.

The throbbing grew even louder.

The shadow drew closer, and Garion could just begin to make out the shape of a small boat. An oar caught the surface of the water with a small splash. The man at the oars turned to look over his shoulder. It was Silk. His face was covered with gray ash, and tiny rivulets of sweat streaked his cheeks.

Mister Wolf sat in the stern of the little boat, muffled in his cloak and with his hood turned up.

“Welcome back, Belgarath,” the dry voice said.

“Who’s that?” Wolf’s voice in Garion’s mind sounded startled. “Is that you, Belgarion?”

“Not quite.” the voice replied. “Not yet anyway, but we’re getting closer.”

“I wondered who was making all the noise. ”

“He overdoes things sometimes. He’ll learn eventually.”

A shout came from one of the sailors clustered around Barak at the stern, and they all turned to watch the small boat drifting toward them. Aunt Pol came up from below and stepped to the rail. “You’re late,” she called.

“Something came up,” the old man answered across the narrowing gap. He pushed back his hood and shook the floury ash out of his cloak. Then Garion saw that the old man’s left arm was bound up in a dirty sling across the front of his body.

“What happened to your arm?” Aunt Pol asked.

“I’d rather not talk about it.” There was an ugly scratch running down one of Wolf’s cheeks into his short, white beard, and his eyes seemed to glitter with some huge irritation.

The grin on Silk’s ash-coated face was malicious as he dipped his oars once, deftly pulling the little boat in beside Greldik’s ship with a slight thump.

“I don’t imagine you can be persuaded to keep your mouth shut,” Wolf said irritably to the small man.

“Would I say anything, mighty sorcerer?” Silk asked mockingly, his ferret eyes wide with feigned innocence.

“Just help me aboard,” Wolf told him, his voice testy. His entire bearing was that of a man who had been mortally insulted.

“Whatever you say, ancient Belgarath,” Silk said, obviously trying to keep from laughing. He steadied Wolf as the old man awkwardly climbed over the ship’s rail.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mister Wolf curtly told Captain Greldik, who had just joined them.

“Which way, Ancient One?” Greldik asked carefully, clearly not wanting to aggravate the old man further.

Wolf stared hard at him.

“Upstream or down?” Greldik explained mollifyingly.

“Upstream, of course,” Wolf snapped.

“How was I supposed to know?” Greldik appealed to Aunt Pol. Then he turned and crossly began barking orders to his sailors.

Aunt Pol’s expression was a peculiar mixture of relief and curiosity. “I’m sure your story’s going to be absolutely fascinating, father,” she said as the sailors began raising the heavy anchors. “I simply can’t wait to hear it.”

“I can do without the sarcasm, Pol,” Wolf told her. “I’ve had a very bad day. Try not to make it any worse.”

That last was finally too much for Silk. The little man, in the act of climbing across the rail, suddenly collapsed in helpless glee. He tumbled forward to the deck, howling with laughter.

Mister Wolf glared at his laughing companion with a profoundly of fronted expression as Greldik’s sailors ran out their oars and began turning the ship in the sluggish current.

“What happened to your arm, father?” Aunt Pol’s gaze was penetrating, and her tone said quite clearly that she did not intend to be put off any longer.

“I broke it,” Wolf told her flatly.

“How did you manage that?”

“It was just a stupid accident, Pol. Those things happen sometimes.”

“Let me see it.”

“In a minute.” He scowled at Silk, who was still laughing. “Will you stop that? Go tell the sailors where we’re going.”

“Where are we going, father?” Aunt Pol asked him. “Did you find Zedar’s trail?”

“He crossed into Cthol Murgos. Ctuchik was waiting for him.”

“And the Orb?”

“Ctuchik’s got it now.”

“Are we going to be able to cut him off before he gets to Rak Cthol with it?”

“I doubt it. Anyway, we have to go to the Vale first.”

“The Vale? Father, you’re not making any sense.”

“Our Master’s summoned us, Pol. He wants us at the Vale, so that’s where we’re going.”

“What about the Orb?”

“Ctuchik’s got it, and I know where to find Ctuchik. He isn’t going anyplace. For right now, we’re going to the Vale.”

“All right, father,” she concurred placatingly. “Don’t excite yourself.” She looked at him closely. “Have you been fighting, father?” she asked dangerously.

“No, I haven’t been fighting.” He sounded disgusted.

“What happened, then?”

“A tree fell on me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Silk exploded into fresh howls of mirth at the old man’s grudging confession. From the stern of the ship where Greldik and Barak stood at the tiller, the slow beat of the drum began, and the sailors dug in with their oars. The ship slid through the oily water, moving upstream against the current, with Silk’s laughter trailing behind in the ash-laden air.