Magician's Gambit

  "Do you suppose you could hurry, Polgara?" Barak asked. "It's a little chilly for standing around half-dressed."

  "Stop being such a baby," she said heartlessly.

  The ravine to which Silk and Ce'Nedra led them was a short way back upriver. A small mountain brook trickled from its mouth, and a dense thicket of spindly pines filled it seemingly from wall to wall. They followed the brook for a few hundred yards until they came to a small clearing in the center of the thicket. The pines around the inner edge of the clearing, pressed by the limbs of the others in the thicket, leaned inward, almost touching above the center of the open area.

  "Good spot." Hettar looked around approvingly. "How did you find it?"

  "She did." Silk nodded at Ce'Nedra.

  "The trees told me it was here," she said. "Young pine trees babble a lot." She looked at the clearing thoughtfully. "We'll build our fire there," she decided, pointing at a spot near the brook at the upper end of the clearing, "and set up our tents along the, edge of the trees just back from it. You'll need to pile rocks around the fire and clear away all the twigs from the ground near it. The trees are very nervous about the fire. They promised to keep the wind off us, but only if we keep our fire strictly under control. I gave them my word."

  A faint smile flickered across Hettar's hawklike face.

  "I'm serious," she said, stamping her little foot.

  "Of course, your Highness," he replied, bowing.

  Because of the incapacity of the others, the work of setting up the tents and building the firepit fell largely upon Silk and Hettar. Ce'Nedra commanded them like a little general, snapping out her orders in a clear, firm voice. She seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.

  Garion was sure that it was some trick of the fading light, but the trees almost seemed to draw back when the fire first flared up, though after a while they seemed to lean back in again to arch protectively over the little clearing. Wearily he got to his feet and began to gather sticks and dead limbs for firewood.

  "Now," Ce'Nedra said, bustling about the fire in a thoroughly businesslike way, "what would you all like for supper?"

  They stayed in their protected little clearing for three days while their battered warriors and Mandorallen's horse recuperated from the encounter with the Eldrak. The exhaustion which had fallen upon Garion when Aunt Pol had summoned all his strength to help call the spirit of Poledra was largely gone after one night's sleep, though he tired easily during the next day. He found Ce'Nedra's officiousness in her domain near the fire almost unbearable, so he passed some time helping Durnik hammer the deep crease out of Mandorallen's breastplate; after that, he spent as much time as possible with the horses. He began teaching the little colt a few simple tricks, though he had never attempted training animals before. The colt seemed to enjoy it, although his attention wandered frequently.

  The incapacity of Durnik, Barak, and Mandorallen was easy to understand, but Belgarath's deep silence and seeming indifference to all around him worried Garion. The old man appeared to be sunk in a melancholy reverie that he could not or would not shake off.

  "Aunt Pol," Garion said finally on the afternoon of the third day, "you'd better do something. We'll be ready to leave soon, and Grandfather has to be able to show us the way. Right now I don't think he even cares where he is."

  Aunt Pol looked across at the old sorcerer, who sat on a rock, staring into the fire. "Possibly you're right. Come with me." She led the way around the fire and stopped directly in front of the old man. "All right, father," she said crisply, "I think that's about enough."

  "Go away, Polgara," he told her.

  "No, father," she replied. "It's time for you to put it away and come back to the real world."

  "That was a cruel thing to do, Pol," he said reproachfully.

  "To mother? She didn't mind."

  "How do you know that? You never knew her. She died when you were born."

  "What's that got to do with it?" She looked at him directly. "Father," she declared pointedly, "you of all people should know that mother was extremely strong-minded. She's always been with me, and we know each other very well."

  He looked dubious.

  "She has her part to play in this just the same as the rest of us do. If you'd been paying attention all these years, you'd have realized that she's never really been gone."

  The old man looked around a little guiltily.

  "Precisely," Aunt Pol said with just the hint of a barb in her voice. "You really should have behaved yourself, you know. Mother's very tolerant for the most part, but there were times when she was quite vexed with you."

  Belgarath coughed uncomfortably.

  "Now it's time for you to pull yourself out of this and stop feeling sorry for yourself," she continued crisply.

  His eyes narrowed. "That's not entirely fair, Polgara," he replied.

  "I don't have time to be fair, father."

  "Why did you choose that particular form?" he asked with a hint of bitterness.

  "I didn't, father. She did. It's her natural form, after all."

  "I'd almost forgotten that," he mused.

  "She didn't."

  The old man straightened and drew back his shoulders. "Is there any food around?" he asked suddenly.

  "The princess has been doing the cooking," Garion warned him. "You might want to think it over before you decide to eat anything she's had a hand in."

  The next morning under a still-threatening sky, they struck their tents, packed their gear again, and rode down along the narrow bed of the brook back into the river valley.

  "Did you thank the trees, dear?" Aunt Pol asked the princess.

  "Yes, Lady Polgara," Ce'Nedra replied. "Just before we left."

  "That's nice," Aunt Pol said.

  The weather continued to threaten for the next two days, and finally the blizzard broke in full fury as they approached a strangely pyramidal peak. The sloping walls of the peak were steep, rising sharply up into the swirling snow, and they seemed to have none of the random irregularities of the surrounding mountains. Though he rejected the idea immediately, Garion could not quite overcome the notion that the curiously angular peak had somehow been constructed - that its shape was the result of a conscious design.

  "Prolgu," Belgarath said, pointing at the peak with one hand while he clung to his wind-whipped cloak with the other.

  "How do we get up there?" Silk asked, staring at the steep walls dimly visible in the driving snow.

  "There's a road," the old man replied. "It starts over there." He pointed to a vast pile of jumbled rock to one side of the peak.

  "We'd better hurry then, Belgarath," Barak said. "This storm isn't going to improve much."

  The old man nodded and moved his horse into the lead. "When we get up there," he shouted back to them over the sound of the shrieking wind, "we'll find the city. It's abandoned, but you may see a few things lying about-broken pots, some other things. Don't touch any of them. The Ulgos have some peculiar beliefs about Prolgu. It's a very holy place to them, and everything there is supposed to stay just where it is."

  "How do we get down into the caves?" Barak asked.

  "The Ulgos will let us in," Belgarath assured him. "They already know we're here."

  The road that led to the mountaintop was a narrow ledge, inclining steeply up and around the sides of the peak. They dismounted before they started up and led their horses. The wind tugged at them as they climbed, and the driving snow, more pellets than flakes, stung their faces.

  It took them two hours to wind their way to the top, and Garion was numb with cold by the time they got there. The wind seemed to batter at him, trying to pluck him off the ledge, and he made a special point of staying as far away from the edge as possible.

  Though the wind had been brutal on the sides of the peak, once they reached the top it howled at them with unbroken force. They passed through a broad, arched gate into the deserted city of Prolgu with snow swirling about them and the wind shrieking insan
ely in their ears.

  There were columns lining the empty streets, tall, thick columns reaching up into the dancing snow. The buildings, all unroofed by time and the endless progression of the seasons, had a strange, alien quality about them. Accustomed to the rigid rectangularity of the structures in the other cities he had seen, Garion was unprepared for the sloped corners of Ulgo architecture. Nothing seemed exactly square. The complexity of the angles teased at his mind, suggesting a subtle sophistication that somehow just eluded him. There was a massiveness about the construction that seemed to defy time, and the weathered stones sat solidly, one atop the other, precisely as they had been placed thousands of years before.

  Durnik seemed also to have noticed the peculiar nature of the structures, and his expression was one of disapproval. As they all moved behind a building to get out of the wind and to rest for a moment from the exertions of the climb, he ran his hand up one of the slanted corners. "Hadn't they ever heard of a plumb line?" he muttered critically.

  "Where do we go to find the Ulgos?" Barak asked, pulling his bearskin cloak even tighter about him.

  "It isn't far," Belgarath answered.

  They led their horses back out into the blizzard-swept streets, past the strange, pyramidal buildings.

  "An eerie place," Mandorallen said, looking around him. "How long hath it been abandoned thus?"

  "Since Torak cracked the world," Belgarath replied. "About five thousand years."

  They trudged across a broad street through the deepening snow to a building somewhat larger than the ones about it and passed inside through a wide doorway surmounted by a huge stone lintel. Inside, the air hung still and calm. A few flakes of snow drifted down through the silent air, sifting through the narrow opening at the top where the roof had been and lightly dusting the stone floor.

  Belgarath moved purposefully to a large black stone in the precise center of the floor. The stone was cut in such a way as to duplicate the truncated pyramidal shape of the buildings in the city, angling up to a flat surface about four feet above the floor. "Don't touch it," he warned them, carefully stepping around the stone.

  "Is it dangerous?" Barak asked.

  "No," Belgarath said. "It's holy. The Ulgos don't want it profaned. They believe that UL himself placed it here." He studied the floor intently, scraping away the thin dusting of snow with his foot in several places. "Let's see." He frowned slightly. Then he uncovered a single flagstone that seemed a slightly different color from those surrounding it. "Here we are," he grunted. "I always have to look for it. Give me your sword, Barak."

  Wordlessly the big man drew his sword and handed it to the old sorcerer.

  Belgarath knelt beside the flagstone he'd uncovered and rapped sharply on it three times with the pommel of Barak's heavy sword. The sound seemed to echo hollowly from underneath.

  The old man waited for a moment, then repeated his signal. Nothing happened.

  A third time Belgarath hammered his three measured strokes on the echoing flagstone. A slow grinding sound started in one corner of the large chamber.

  "What's that?" Silk demanded nervously.

  "The Ulgos," Belgarath replied, rising to his feet and dusting off his knees. "They're opening the portal to the caves."

  The grinding continued and a line of faint light appeared suddenly about twenty feet out from the east wall of the chamber. The line became a crack and then slowly yawned wider as a huge stone in the floor tilted up, rising with a ponderous slowness. The light from below seemed very dim.

  "Belgarath," a deep voice echoed from beneath the slowly tilting stone, "Yad ho, groja UL. "

  "Yad ho, groja UL. dad mar ishum, " Belgarath responded formally. "Peed mo, Belgarath. Mar ishum Ulgo, " the unseen speaker said.

  "What was that?" Garion asked in perplexity.

  "He invited us into the caves," the old man said. "Shall we go down now?"

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT TOOK ALL Of Hettar's force of persuasion to start the horses moving down the steeply inclined passageway that led into the dimness of the caves of Ulgo. Their eyes rolled nervously as they took step after braced step down the slanting corridor, and they all flinched noticeably as the grinding stone boomed shut behind them. The colt walked so close to Garion that they frequently bumped against each other, and Garion could feel the little animal's trembling with every step.

  At the end of the corridor two figures stood, each with his face veiled in a kind of filmy cloth. They were short men, shorter even than Silk, but their shoulders seemed bulky beneath their dark robes. Just beyond them an irregularly shaped chamber opened out, faintly lighted by a dim, reddish glow.

  Belgarath moved toward the two, and they bowed respectfully to him as he approached. He spoke with them briefly, and they bowed again, pointing toward another corridor opening on the far side of the chamber. Garion nervously looked around for the source of the faint red light, but it seemed lost in the strange, pointed rocks hanging from the ceiling.

  "We go this way," Belgarath quietly told them, crossing the chamber toward the corridor the two veiled men had indicated to him.

  "Why are their faces covered?" Durnik whispered.

  "To protect their eyes from the light when they opened the portal."

  "But it was almost dark inside that building up there," Durnik objected.

  "Not to an Ulgo," the old man replied.

  "Don't any of them speak our language?"

  "A few-not very many. They don't have much contact with outsiders. We'd better hurry. The Gorim is waiting for us."

  The corridor they entered ran for a short distance and then opened abruptly into a cavern so vast that Garion could not even see the other side of it in the faint light that seemed to pervade the caves.

  "How extensive are these caverns, Belgarath?" Mandorallen asked, somewhat awed by the immensity of the place.

  "No one knows for sure. The Ulgos have been exploring the caves since they came down here, and they're still finding new ones."

  The passageway they had followed from the portal chamber had emerged high up in the wall of the cavern near the vaulted roof, and a broad ledge sloped downward from the opening, running along the sheer wall. Garion glanced once over the edge. The cavern floor was lost in the gloom far below. He shuddered and stayed close to the wall after that.

  As they descended, they found that the huge cavern was not silent. From what seemed infinitely far away there was the cadenced sound of chanting by a chorus of deep male voices, the words blurred and confused by the echoes reverberating from the stone walls and seeming to die off, endlessly repeated. Then, as the last echoes of the chant faded, the chorus began to sing, their song strangely disharmonic and in a mournful, minor key. In a peculiar fashion, the disharmony of the first phrases echoing back joined the succeeding phrases and merged with them, moving inexorably toward a final harmonic resolution so profound that Garion felt his entire being moved by it. The echoes merged as the chorus ended its song, and the caves of Ulgo sang on alone, repeating that final chord over and over.

  "I've never heard anything like that," Ce'Nedra whispered softly to Aunt Pol.

  "Few people have," Polgara replied, "though the sound lingers in some of these galleries for days."

  "What were they singing?"

  "A hymn to UL. It's repeated every hour, and the echoes keep it alive. These caves have been singing that same hymn for five thousand years now."

  There were other sounds as well, the scrape of metal against metal, snatches of conversation in the guttural language of the Ulgos, and an endless chipping sound, coming, it seemed, from a dozen places.

  "There must be a lot of them down there," Barak observed, peering over the edge.

  "Not necessarily," Belgarath told him. "Sound lingers in these caves, and the echoes keep coming back over and over again."

  "Where does the light come from?" Durnik asked, looking puzzled. "I don't see any torches."

  "The Ulgos grind two different kinds of ro
ck to powder," Belgarath replied. "When you mix them, they give off a glow."

  "It's pretty dim light," Durnik observed, looking down toward the floor of the cavern.

  "Ulgos don't need all that much light."

  It took them almost half an hour to reach the cavern floor. The walls around the bottom were pierced at regular intervals with the openings of corridors and galleries radiating out into the solid rock of the mountain. As they passed, Garion glanced down one of the galleries. It was very long and dimly lighted with openings along its walls and a few Ulgos moving from place to place far down toward the other end.

  In the center of the cavern lay a large, silent lake, and they skirted the edge of it as Belgarath moved confidently, seeming to know precisely where he was going. Somewhere from far out on the dim lake, Garion heard a faint splash, a fish perhaps or the sound of a dislodged pebble from far above falling into the water. The echo of the singing they had heard when they entered the cavern still lingered, curiously loud in some places and very faint in others.

  Two Ulgos waited for them near the entrance to one of the galleries. They bowed and spoke briefly to Belgarath. Like the men who had met them in the portal chamber, both were short and heavy-shouldered. Their hair was very pale and their eyes large and almost black.

  "We'll leave the horses here," Belgarath said. "We have to go down some stairs. These men will care for them."

  The colt, still trembling, had to be told several times to stay with his mother, but he finally seemed to understand. Then Garion hurried to catch up to the others, who had already entered the mouth of one of the galleries.

  There were doors in the walls of the gallery they followed, doors opening into small cubicles, some of them obviously workshops of one kind or another and others just as obviously arranged for domestic use. The Ulgos inside the cubicles continued at their tasks, paying no attention to the party passing in the gallery. Some of the pale-haired people were working with metal, some with stone, a few with wood or cloth. An Ulgo woman was nursing a small baby.

  Behind them in the cavern they had first entered, the sound of the chanting began again. They passed a cubicle where seven Ulgos, seated in a circle, were reciting something in unison.