Enchanters' End Game

  ‘Who comes to disturb the slumber of the Dragon-God of Angarak?’ a muffled voice demanded from behind the door.

  ‘I am Urtag, the Archpriest of Camat.’ The Grolim’s voice was frightened. ‘As commanded, I bring the prisoners to the Disciple of Torak.’

  There was a moment of silence, and then the rattling sound of an immense chain, followed by the grating of an enormous bolt. Then slowly, creakingly, the door opened.

  Ce’Nedra gasped. Standing in the doorway was Belgarath! It was a moment before her startled eyes began to sort out the subtle differences that informed her that the white-haired man before her was not indeed the old sorcerer, but rather someone who looked so much like him that they could easily pass for brothers. Subtle though the differences were, they were nonetheless profound. In the eyes of the man in the doorway there was a haunted look – a look compounded of grief and horror and a dreadful self-loathing, all overlaid with the helpless adoration of a man who has given himself utterly to a dreadful master.

  ‘Welcome to the tomb of the one-eyed God, Polgara,’ he greeted the sorceress.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Belzedar,’ she replied in an oddly neutral voice.

  ‘I’ve given up the right to that name,’ he told her, and his tone was faintly regretful.

  ‘It was your decision, Zedar.’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not. Maybe what I’m doing is also necessary.’ He pushed the door open wider. ‘Come inside, if you will. This crypt is habitable – if only barely.’ He looked directly at Urtag then. ‘You have performed a service, Urtag, Archpriest of Torak, and a service should not be unrewarded. Come.’ And he turned and led them back into the vaulted chamber beyond. The walls were of stone, massive blocks set without mortar, and bolted to the topmost tier were great iron arches supporting the ceiling and the immense ruin above. The great chill of masses of cold stone and iron was held off by large, glowing braziers set in each corner. In the center of the room stood a table and several chairs, and along one wall lay a cluster of loosely rolled pallets and a neat stack of gray woolen blankets. On the table stood a pair of large candles, their flame unwinking and steady in the dead air of the tomb.

  Zedar paused briefly at the table to pick up one of the candles, then led them across the flagstone floor to an arched alcove set in the far wall. ‘Your reward, Urtag,’ he said to the Grolim. ‘Come and behold the face of your God.’ He lifted the candle.

  Lying upon its back on a stone bier within the alcove lay a huge figure, robed and cowled in black. The face was concealed by a polished steel mask. The eyes of the mask were closed.

  Urtag took one terrifed look, then prostrated himself on the floor.

  There was a deep, rasping sigh, and the recumbent figure in the alcove moved slightly. As Ce’Nedra stared in horrified fascination, the vast, steel-covered face turned restlessly toward them. For a moment the polished left eyelid opened. Behind that eyelid burned the dreadful fire of the eye that was not. The steel face moved as if it were flesh, twisting into an expression of contempt at the priest groveling on the flagstones, and a hollow murmuring came from behind the polished lips.

  Urtag started violently and raised his suddenly stricken face, listening to the hollow muttering which he alone in the dim crypt could hear clearly. The hollow voice continued, murmuring in Urtag’s ears. The Archpriest’s face drained as he listened, and a look of unspeakable horror slowly twisted his features. The hollow muttering droned on. The words were indistinct, but the inflections were not. Desperately, Ce’Nedra covered her ears.

  Finally Urtag screamed and scrambled to his feet. His face had gone absolutely white, and his eyes were starting from their sockets. Gibbering insanely, Urtag fled, and the sound of his screams echoed back down the iron stairway as he ran in terror from the ruined tower.

  Chapter Twenty

  The whispering had begun almost as soon Belgarath, Silk, and Garion reached the coast of Mallorea. It was indistinct at first, little more than a sibilant breath sounding perpetually in Garion’s ears, but in the days that followed as they moved steadily south, occasional words began to emerge. The words were the sort to be reckoned with – home, mother, love, and death – words upon which attention immediately fastened.

  Unlike the land of the Morindim which they had left behind, northernmost Mallorea was a land of rolling hills covered with a tough-stemmed, dark green grass. Occasional nameless rivers wound among those hills, roiling and turbulent beneath a lead gray sky. They had not seen the sun for what seemed weeks. A sort of dry overcast had moved in off the Sea of the East, and a stiff breeze, chill and smelling of the polar ice, pressed continually at their backs as they moved south.

  Belgarath now rode with extreme caution. There was no sign of that half-doze that was his custom in more civilized parts of the world, and Garion could feel the subtle push of the old man’s mind as he probed ahead for any hidden dangers. So delicate was the sorcerer’s searching that it seemed only a slowly expiring breath, light, tentative, concealed artfully in the sound of the breeze passing through the tall grass.

  Silk also rode warily, pausing frequently to listen, and seeming on occasion to sniff at the air. Often he would even go so far as to dismount and put his ear to the turf, to see if he might pick up the muffled tread of unseen horses approaching.

  ‘Nervous work,’ the little man said as he remounted after one such pause.

  ‘Better to be a little overcautious than to blunder into something,’ Belgarath replied. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘I think I heard a worm crawling around down there,’ Silk answered brightly. ‘He didn’t say anything, though. You know how worms are.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘You did ask, Belgarath.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  ‘You heard him ask, didn’t you, Garion?’

  ‘That is probably the most offensive habit I’ve ever encountered in anyone,’ Belgarath told the little thief.

  ‘I know,’ Silk answered. ‘That’s why I do it. Infuriating, isn’t it? How far do we have to go before we come to woods again?’

  ‘Several more days. We’re still a goodly distance north of the tree line. Winter’s too long and summer too short for trees to grow up here.’

  ‘Boring sort of place, isn’t it?’ Silk observed, looking around at the endless grass and the rounded hills that all looked the same.

  ‘Under the circumstances, I can stand a little boredom. The alternatives aren’t all that pleasant.’

  ‘I can accept that.’

  They rode on, their horses wading through the knee-high, gray-green grass.

  The whispering inside Garion’s head began again. ‘Hear me, Child of Light.’ That sentence emerged quite clearly from the rest of the unintelligible sibilance. There was a dreadfully compelling quality in that single statement. Garion concentrated, trying to hear more.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ the familiar dry voice told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t do what he tells you to do.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Torak, of course. Who did you think it was?’

  ‘He’s awake?’

  ‘Not yet. Not fully at any rate – but then he’s never been entirely asleep either.’

  ‘What’s he trying to do?’

  ‘He’s trying to talk you out of killing him.’

  ‘He’s not afraid of me, is he?’

  ‘Of course he’s afraid. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen any more than you do, and he’s just as frightened of you as you are of him.’

  That immediately made Garion feel better. ‘What should I do about the way he keeps whispering to me?’

  ‘There’s not much you can do. Just don’t get into the habit of obeying his orders, that’s all.’

  They camped that evening as they usually did in a well-sheltered hollow between two hills and, as usual, they built no fire to give away their location.

  ‘I’m getti
ng a bit tired of cold suppers,’ Silk complained, biting down hard on a piece of dried meat. ‘This beef’s like a strip of old leather.’

  ‘The exercise is good for your jaws,’ Belgarath told him.

  ‘You can be a very unpleasant old man when you set your mind to it, do you know that?’

  ‘The nights are getting longer, aren’t they?’ Garion said to head off any further wrangling.

  ‘The summer’s winding down,’ Belgarath told him. ‘It will be autumn up here in another few weeks, and winter will be right on its heels.’

  ‘I wonder where we’ll be when winter comes,’ Garion said rather plaintively.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Silk advised. ‘Thinking about it isn’t going to help, and it’s only going to make you nervous.’

  ‘Nervouser,’ Garion corrected. ‘I’m already nervous.’

  ‘Is there such a word as “nervouser?”’ Silk asked Belgarath curiously.

  ‘There is now,’ Belgarath replied. ‘Garion just invented it.’

  ‘I wish I could invent a word,’ Silk said admiringly to Garion, his ferretlike little eyes gleaming mischievously.

  ‘Please don’t poke fun at me, Silk. I’m having enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ Belgarath suggested. ‘This conversation isn’t going anywhere, and we’ve got a long way to ride tomorrow.’

  That night the whispering invaded Garion’s sleep, and it seemed to convey its meaning in images rather than words. There was an offer of friendship – of a hand outstretched in love. The loneliness that had haunted his boyhood from the moment he had discovered that he was an orphan seemed to fade, to pass somehow behind him with that offer, and he found himself rather desperately wanting to run toward that hand reaching toward him.

  Then, very clearly, he saw two figures standing side by side. The figure of the man was very tall and very powerful, and the figure of the woman was so familiar that the very sight of her caught at Garion’s heart. The tall, powerful man seemed to be a stranger, and yet was not. His face went far beyond mere human handsomeness. It was quite the most beautiful face Garion had ever seen. The woman, of course, was not a stranger. The white lock at the brow and the glorious eyes were the most familiar things in Garion’s life. Side by side, the beautiful stranger and Aunt Pol reached out their arms to him.

  ‘You will be our son,’ the whispering voice told him. ‘Our beloved son. I will be your father, and Polgara your mother. This will be no imaginary thing, Child of Light, for I can make all things happen. Polgara will really be your mother, and all of her love will be yours alone; and I, your father, will love and cherish you both. Will you turn away from us and face again the bitter loneliness of the orphan child? Does that chill emptiness compare with the warmth of loving parents? Come to us, Belgarion, and accept our love.’

  Garion jerked himself out of sleep, sitting bolt upright, trembling and sweating. ‘I need help,’ he cried out silently, reaching into the vaults of his mind to find that other, nameless presence.

  ‘What’s your problem now?’ the dry voice asked him.

  ‘He’s cheating,’ Garion declared, outraged.

  ‘Cheating? Did somebody come along and make up a set of rules while I wasn’t watching?’

  ‘You know what I mean. He’s offering to make Aunt Pol my mother if I’ll do what he says.’

  ‘He’s lying. He can’t alter the past. Ignore him.’

  ‘How can I? He keeps reaching into my mind and putting his hand on the most sensitive spots.’

  ‘Think about Ce’Nedra. That’ll confuse him.’

  ‘Ce’Nedra?’

  ‘Every time he tries to tempt you with Polgara, think about your flighty little princess. Remember exactly how she looked when you peeked at her while she was bathing that time back in the Wood of the Dryads.’

  ‘I did not peek!’

  ‘Really? How is it that you remember every single detail so vividly, then?’

  Garion blushed. He had forgotten that his daydreams were not entirely private.

  ‘Just concentrate on Ce’Nedra. It will probably irritate Torak almost as much as it does me.’ The voice paused. ‘Is that all you can really think about?’ it asked then.

  Garion did not try to answer that.

  They pushed on southward under the dirty overcast and two days later they reached the first trees, scattered sparsely at the edge of the grassland where great herds of antlered creatures grazed as placidly and unafraid as cattle. As the three of them rode south, the scattered clumps of trees became thicker, and soon spread into a forest of dark-boughed evergreens.

  The whispering blandishments of Torak continued, but Garion countered them with thoughts of his red-haired little princess. He could sense the irritation of his enemy each time he intruded these daydreams upon the carefully orchestrated images Torak kept trying to instill in his imagination. Torak wanted him to think of his loneliness and fear and of the possibility of becoming a part of a loving family, but the intrusion of Ce’Nedra into the picture confused and baffled the God. Garion soon perceived that Torak’s understanding of men was severely limited. Concerned more with elementals, with those towering compulsions and ambitions which had inflamed him for the endless eons, Torak could not cope with the scattered complexities and conflicting desires that motivated most men. Garion seized on his advantage to thwart the insidious and compelling whispers with which Torak tried to lure him from his purpose.

  The whole business was somehow peculiarly familiar. This had happened before – not perhaps in exactly the same way, but very similarly. He sorted through his memories, trying to pin down this strange sense of repetition. It was the sight of a twisted tree stump, lightning-blasted and charred, that suddenly brought it all flooding back in on him. The stump, when seen from a certain angle, bore a vague resemblance to a man on horseback, a dark rider who seemed to watch them as they rode by. Because the sky was overcast, the stump cast no shadow, and the image clicked into place. Throughout his childhood, hovering always on the edge of his vision, Garion had seen the strange, menacing shape of a dark-cloaked rider on a black horse, shadowless even in the brightest sunlight. That had been Asharak the Murgo, of course, the Grolim whom Garion had destroyed in his first open act as a sorcerer. But had it? There had existed between Garion and that dark figure which had so haunted his childhood a strange bond. They had been enemies; Garion had always known that; but in their enmity there had always been a curious closeness, something that seemed to pull them together. Garion quite deliberately began to examine a startling possibility. Suppose that the dark rider had not in fact been Asharak – or if it had been, suppose that Asharak had somehow been suffused by another, more powerful awareness.

  The more he thought about it, the more convinced Garion became that he had stumbled inadvertently across the truth of the matter. Torak had demonstrated that, even though his body slept, his awareness could still move about the world, twisting events to his own purposes. Asharak had been involved, certainly, but the dominating force had always been the consciousness of Torak. The Dark God had stood watch over him since infancy. The fear he had sensed in that dark shape that had hovered always on the edge of his boyhood had not been Asharak’s fear, but Torak’s. Torak had known who he was from the beginning, had known that one day Garion would take up the sword of the Rivan King and come to the meeting that had been ordained since before the world was made.

  Acting upon a sudden impulse, Garion put his left hand inside his tunic and took hold of his amulet. Twisting slightly, he reached up and laid the marked palm of his right hand on the Orb, which stood on the pommel of the great sword strapped across his back.

  ‘I know you now,’ he declared silently, hurling the thought at the murky sky. ‘You might as well give up trying to win me over to your side, because I’m not going to change my mind. Aunt Pol is not your wife, and I’m not your son. You’d better stop trying to play games with my thoughts and get ready, because I’m coming to ki
ll you.’

  The Orb beneath his hand flared with a sudden exultation as Garion threw his challenge into the Dark God’s teeth, and the sword at Garion’s back suddenly burst into a blue flame that flickered through the sheath enclosing it.

  There was a moment of deadly silence, and then what had been a whisper suddenly became a vast roar. ‘Come, then, Belgarion, Child of Light,’ Torak hurled back the challenge. ‘I await thee in the City of Night. Bring all thy will and all thy courage with thee, for I am ready for our meeting.’

  ‘What in the name of the seven Gods do you think you’re doing?’ Belgarath almost screamed at Garion, his face mottled with angry astonishment.

  ‘Torak’s been whispering at me for almost a week now,’ Garion explained calmly, taking his hand from the Orb. ‘He’s been offering me all kinds of things if I’d give up this whole idea. I got tired of it, so I told him to stop.’

  Belgarath spluttered indignantly, waving his hands at Garion.

  ‘He knows I’m coming, Grandfather,’ Garion said, trying to placate the infuriated old man. ‘He’s known who I was since the day I was born. He’s been watching me all this time. We’re not going to be able to take him by surprise, so why try? I wanted to let him know that I was on to him. Maybe it’s time for him to start worrying and being afraid just a little bit, too.’

  Silk was staring at Garion. ‘He’s an Alorn, all right,’ he observed finally.

  ‘He’s an idiot!’ Belgarath snapped angrily. He turned back to Garion. ‘Did it ever occur to you that there might be something out here to worry about besides Torak?’ he demanded.

  Garion blinked.

  ‘Cthol Mishrak is not unguarded, you young blockhead. You’ve just succeeded in announcing our presence to every Grolim within a hundred leagues.’

  ‘I didn’t think of that,’ Garion mumbled.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d thought. Sometimes I don’t think you know how to think.’