Magician's Gambit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Five

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

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

  "Well?" he said silently to it.

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

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

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

  "I don't actually have a name."

  "You're separate from me, though, aren't you? I mean, you're not just another part of me, are you?"

  "No," the voice replied, "we're quite separate."

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

  "What do you want?" Garion asked.

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

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

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

  "You're very old, aren't you?" Garion asked as the thought occurred to him.

  "That term doesn't have any meaning in my case."

  "Older than my grandfather?" Garion persisted.

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

  "Did you do it from inside his mind?"

  "Naturally."

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

  "He didn't know I was there."

  "I've always known you were there."

  "You're different. That's what we need to talk about."

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

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

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

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

  "What is it exactly that I have to do?"

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

  "Why are we talking about it then?"

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

  "All right," Garion agreed.

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

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

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

  "Maybe, " Garion conceded doubtfully. "Doroon
wasn't really that good at throwing rocks."

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

  "And if I don't?"

  "Faldor's window gets broken."

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

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

  "How long ago was it when this started?"

  "Before the world was made. Even before the Gods."

  "Will I succeed?" Garion asked.

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

  "Only now there's another one, too, isn't there?" Garion suggested. "Another awareness, I mean - one connected with the other set of possibilities."

  "You're even brighter than I thought."

  "And wouldn't it want things to keep going wrong?"

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

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

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

  "What?"

  "If you're successful, you'll live to see it happen."

  "All right," Garion said. "What do I have to do - now, I mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "I imagine you found that entertaining," she said dryly.

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

  "Oh? Is that the term for it?"

  "Try not to be so narrow-minded, Pol. The society functioned; that's what counts."

  "There's a bit more to it than that, father," she said. "What about their cannibalism?"

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

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

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

  Garion gagged and clenched his teeth together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "The monks of Mar Terrin," Wolf said. "Tolnedra's conscience. They aren't anything to worry about."

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

  Chapter Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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