From somewhere off in the fog, he heard a faint clinking sound; it took him a moment to identify it. Finally he realized that what he was hearing was the sound of a mounted man wearing a mail shirt. He reached over in the darkness and took up his sword.
‘I still think you ought to tell us what you found in that house before you set it on fire,’ he heard someone say in a gruff, Mallorean-accented voice. The speaker was not close, but sounds at night traveled far, so Garion could clearly understand what was being said.
‘Oh, it wasn’t much, corporal,’ another Mallorean voice replied evasively. ‘A bit of this; a bit of that.’
‘I think you ought to share those things with the rest of us. We’re all in this together, after all.’
‘Isn’t it odd that you didn’t think of that until after I managed to pick up a few things? If you want to share in the loot, then you should pay attention to the houses and not spend all your time impaling the prisoners.’
‘We’re at war,’ the corporal declared piously. ‘It’s our duty to kill the enemy.’
‘Duty,’ the second Mallorean snorted derisively. ‘We’re deserters, corporal. Our only duty is to ourselves. If you want to spend your time butchering Murgo farmers, that’s up to you, but I’m saving up for my retirement.’
Garion carefully rolled out from under the tent flap. He felt a peculiar calm, almost as if his emotions had somehow been set aside. He rose and moved silently to where the packs were piled and burrowed his hand into them one by one until his fingers touched steel. Then, carefully, so that it made no sound, he drew out his heavy mail shirt. He pulled it on and shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to settle it into place.
Toth was standing guard near the horses, his huge bulk looming in the fog.
‘There’s something I have to take care of,’ Garion whispered softly to the mute giant.
Toth looked at him gravely, then nodded. He turned, untied a horse from the picket line, and handed him the reins. Then he put one huge hand on Garion’s shoulder, squeezed once in silent approval, and stepped back.
Garion did not want to give the Mallorean deserters time to lose themselves in the fog, so he pulled himself up onto the unsaddled horse and moved out of the willow thicket at a silent walk.
The fading voices that had come out of the fog had seemed to be moving in the direction of the forest, and Garion rode quietly after them, probing the foggy darkness ahead with his ears and with his mind.
After he had ridden for perhaps a mile, he heard a raucous laugh coming from somewhere ahead and slightly to the left. ‘Did you hear the way they squealed when we impaled them?’ a coarse voice came out of the clinging mist.
‘That does it,’ Garion grated from between clenched teeth as he drew his sword. He directed his horse toward the sound, then nudged his heels at the animal’s flanks. The horse moved faster, his hooves making no sound on the damp earth.
‘Let’s have some light,’ one of the deserters said.
‘Do you think it’s safe? There are patrols out looking for deserters.’
‘It’s after midnight. The patrols are all in bed. Go ahead and light the torch.’
After a moment, there was a fatally ruddy beacon glowing in the dark and reaching out to Garion.
His charge caught the deserters totally by surprise. Several of them were dead before they even knew that he was upon them. There were screams and shouts from both sides as he crashed through them, chopping them out of their saddles with huge strokes to the right and the left. His great blade sheared effortlessly through mail, bone, and flesh. He sent five of them tumbling to the ground as he thundered through their ranks. Then he whirled on the three who still remained. After one startled look, one of them fled; another dragged his sword from its sheath, and the third, who held the torch, sat frozen in astonished terror.
The Mallorean with the sword feebly raised his weapon to protect his head from the dreadful blow Garion had already launched. The great overhand sweep, however, shattered the doomed man’s sword blade and sheared down through his helmet halfway to his waist. Roughly, Garion kicked the twitching body off his sword and turned on the torch bearer.
‘Please!’ the terrified man cried, trying to back his horse away. ‘Have mercy!’
For some reason, that plaintive cry infuriated Garion all the more. He clenched his teeth together. With a single broad swipe, he sent the murderer’s head spinning off into the foggy darkness.
He pulled his horse up sharply, cocked his head for a moment to pick up the sound of the last Mallorean’s galloping flight, and set out in pursuit.
It took him only a few minutes to catch up with the fleeing deserter. At first he had only the sound to follow, but then he was able to make out the dim, shadowy form racing ahead of him in the fog. He veered slightly to the right, plunged on past the desperate man, then pulled his horse directly into the shadowy deserter’s path.
‘Who are you?’ the unshaven Mallorean squealed as he hauled his mount to a sudden, rearing stop. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I am justice,’ Garion grated at him and quite deliberately ran the man through.
The deserter stared in horrified amazement at the huge sword protruding from his chest. With a gurgling sigh, he toppled to one side, sliding limply off the blade.
Still without any real sense of emotion, Garion dismounted and wiped the blade of his sword on the dead man’s tunic. Almost as an afterthought, he caught the reins of the fellow’s horse, remounted, and turned back toward the place where he had killed the others. Carefully, one by one, he checked each fallen body for signs of life, then rounded up three more horses and rode back to the camp concealed in the willows.
Silk stood beside the huge Toth near the picket line. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded in a hoarse whisper as Garion dismounted.
‘We needed some more horses,’ Garion replied tersely, handing the reins of the captured mounts to Toth.
‘Mallorean ones, judging from the saddles,’ Silk noted. ‘How did you find them?’
‘Their riders were talking as they went by. They seemed to be quite amused by a visit they paid to a Murgo farmstead a few days ago.’
‘And you didn’t even invite me to go along?’ Silk accused.
‘Sorry,’ Garion said, ‘but I had to hurry. I didn’t want to lose them in the fog.’
‘Four of them?’ Silk asked, counting horses.
‘I couldn’t find the other four mounts.’ Garion shrugged. ‘These ought to be enough to make up for the ones we lost during the shipwreck, though.’
‘Eight?’ Silk looked a bit startled at that.
‘I came on them by surprise. It wasn’t much of a fight. Why don’t we get some sleep?’
‘Uh—Garion,’ Silk suggested, ‘it might not be a bad idea for you to wash up before you go back to bed. Ce’Nedra’s nerves are a little delicate, and she might be upset, if she wakes up and sees you covered with blood the way you are.’
The fog was even thicker the following morning. It was a heavy fog, chill and clinging, lying densely along the river bank and bedewing the tangled limbs of the willow thicket at their backs with strings of pearl-like droplets.
‘It hides us, at least,’ Garion observed, still feeling that peculiar remoteness.
‘It also hides anybody else who might be out there,’ Sadi told him, ‘or any thing. That forest up ahead has a bad reputation.’
‘Just how big is it?’
‘It’s probably the largest forest in the world,’ Sadi replied, lifting a pack up onto a horse’s back. ‘It goes on for hundreds of leagues.’ He looked curiously down the picket line. ‘Is it my imagination, or do we have more horses this morning?’
‘I happened across a few last night,’ Garion replied.
After breakfast, they packed up Polgara’s cooking utensils, mounted, and started out across the intervening grassland toward the forest lying hidden in the fog.
As Garion rode, he heard Silk and Durnik talki
ng right behind him. ‘Just what were you doing last night?’ Durnik asked directly. ‘When you found Zith in Liselle’s bodice, I mean?’
‘She’s going to make a report to Javelin when this is all over,’ Silk replied. ‘There are some things I’d rather he didn’t know. If I can get on friendly terms with her, maybe I can persuade her to overlook those things in her report.’
‘That’s really rather contemptible, you know. She’s just a girl.’
‘Believe me, Durnik, Liselle can take care of herself. The two of us are playing a game. I’ll admit that I hadn’t counted on Zith, though.’
‘Do Drasnians always have to play games?’
‘Of course. It helps to pass the time. Winters are very long and tedious in Drasnia. The games we play sharpen our wits and make us better at what we do when we aren’t playing.’ The little man raised his voice slightly. ‘Garion?’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Are we avoiding the place where you found those horses last night? We wouldn’t want to upset the ladies so soon after breakfast.’
‘It was over that way.’ Garion gestured off to the left.
‘What’s this?’ Durnik asked.
‘The extra animals came from a group of Mallorean deserters who used to creep up on isolated Murgo farmsteads,’ Silk replied lightly. ‘Garion saw to it that they won’t be needing horses any more.’
‘Oh,’ Durnik said. He thought about it for a moment. ‘Good,’ he said finally.
The dark trees loomed out of the fog as the company approached the edge of the forest. The leaves had turned brown and clung sparsely to the branches, for winter was not far off. As they rode in under the twisted branches, Garion looked about, trying to identify the trees, but they were of kinds that he did not recognize. They were gnarled into fantastic shapes, and their limbs seemed almost to writhe up and out from their massy trunks, reaching toward the sunless sky. Their gnarled stems were dotted with dark knots, deeply indented in the coarse bark, and those knots seemed somehow to give each tree a grotesque semblance of a distorted human face with wide, staring eyes and a gaping mouth twisted into an expression of unspeakable horror. The forest floor was deep with fallen leaves, blackened and sodden, and the fog hung gray beneath the branches spreading above.
Ce’Nedra drew her cloak more tightly about her and shuddered. ‘Do we have to go through this forest?’ she asked plaintively.
‘I thought you liked trees,’ Garion said.
‘Not these.’ She looked about fearfully. ‘There’s something very cruel about them. They hate each other.’
‘Hate? Trees?’
‘They struggle and push each other, trying to reach the sunlight. I don’t like this place, Garion.’
‘Try not to think about it,’ he advised.
They pushed deeper and deeper into the gloomy wood, riding in silence for the most part, their spirits sunk low by the pervasive gloom and by the cold antagonism seeping from the strange, twisted trees.
They took a brief, cold lunch, then rode on toward a somber twilight which seemed hardly more than a deepening of the foggy half-dark spread beneath the hateful trees.
‘I guess we’ve gone far enough,’ Belgarath said finally. ‘Let’s get a fire going and put up the tents.’
It might have been only Garion’s imagination or perhaps the cry of some hunting bird of prey, but as the first few flickering tongues of flame curled up around the sticks in the fire pit, it seemed that he heard a shriek coming from the trees themselves—a shriek of fear mingled with a dreadful rage. And as he looked around, the distorted semblances of human faces deeply indented in the surrounding tree trunks seemed to move in the flickering light, silently howling at the hated fire.
After they had eaten, Garion walked away from the fire. He still felt strangely numb inside, as if his emotions had been enclosed in some kind of protective blanket. He found that he could no longer even remember the details of last night’s encounter, but only brief, vivid flashes of blood spurting in ruddy torchlight, of riders tumbling limply out of their saddles, and of the torch bearer’s head flying off into the fog.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Belgarath asked quietly from just behind him.
‘Not really, Grandfather. I don’t think you’ll approve of what I did, so why don’t we just let it go at that? There’s no way that I could make you understand.’
‘Oh, I understand, Garion. I just don’t think that you accomplished anything, that’s all. You killed—how many was it?’
‘Eight.’
‘That many? All right—eight Malloreans. What did you prove by it?’
‘I wasn’t really out to prove anything, Grandfather. I just wanted to make sure that they never did it again. I can’t even be absolutely certain that they were the men who killed those Murgo farmers. They did kill some people someplace, though, and people who do that sort of thing need to be stopped.’
‘You did that, all right. Does it make you feel any better?’
‘No. I suppose not. I wasn’t even angry when I killed them. It was just something that had to be done, so I did it. Now it’s over, and I’d just as soon forget about it.’
Belgarath gave him a long, steady look. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘As long as you keep that firmly in mind, I guess you haven’t done yourself any permanent injury. Let’s go back to the fire. It’s chilly out here in the woods.’
Garion slept badly that night, and Ce’Nedra, huddled almost fearfully in his arms, stirred restlessly and often whimpered in her sleep.
The next morning, Belgarath rose and looked about with a dark scowl. ‘This is absurd,’ he burst out quite suddenly. ‘Where is the sun?’
‘Behind the clouds and fog, father,’ Polgara replied as she calmly brushed her long, dark hair.
‘I know that, Pol,’ he retorted testily, ‘but I need to see it—even if only briefly—to get our direction. We could wind up wandering around in circles.’
Toth, who had been building up the fire, looked over at the old man, his face impassive as always. He raised one hand and pointed in a direction somewhat at an oblique from that which they had been following the previous evening.
Belgarath frowned. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ he asked the giant.
Toth nodded.
‘Have you been through these woods before?’
Again the mute nodded, then firmly pointed once more in the same direction.
‘And if we go that way, we’re going to come out on the south coast in the vicinity of the Isle of Verkat?’
Toth nodded again and went back to tending the fire.
‘Cyradis said that he was coming along to aid us in the search, Grandfather,’ Garion reminded him.
‘All right. Since he knows the way, we’ll let him lead us through this forest. I’m tired of guessing.’
They had gone perhaps two leagues that cloudy morning, with Toth confidently leading them along a scarcely perceptible track, when Polgara quite suddenly reined in her horse with a warning cry. ‘Look out!’
An arrow sizzled though the foggy air directly at Toth, but the huge man swept it aside with his staff. Then a gang of rough-looking men, some Murgos and some of indeterminate race, came rushing out of the woods, brandishing a variety of weapons.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Silk rolled out of his saddle, his hands diving under his slaver’s robe for his daggers. As the bawling ruffians charged forward, he leaped to meet them, his heavy daggers extended in front of him like a pair of spears.
Even as Garion jumped to the ground, he saw Toth already advancing, his huge staff whirling as he bore down on the attackers, and Durnik, holding his axe in both hands, circling to the other side.
Garion swept Iron-grip’s sword from its scabbard and ran forward, swinging the flaming blade in great arcs. One of the ruffians launched himself into the air, twisting as he did so in a clumsy imitation of a maneuver Garion had seen Silk perform so many times in the past. This time, however, the technique f
ailed. Instead of driving his heels into Garion’s face or chest, the agile fellow encountered the point of the burning sword, and his momentum quite smoothly skewered him on the blade.
Silk ripped open an attacker with one of his daggers, spun, and drove his other knife directly into the forehead of another.
Toth and Durnik, moving in from opposite sides, drove several of the assailants into a tight knot, and methodically began to brain them one after another as they struggled to disentangle themselves from each other.
‘Garion!’ Ce’Nedra cried, and he whirled to see a burly, unshaven man pull the struggling little queen from her saddle with one hand, even as he raised the knife he held in the other. Then he dropped the knife, and both his hands flew up to grasp the slim, silken cord that had suddenly been looped about his neck from the rear. Calmly, the golden-haired Velvet, her knee pushed firmly against the wildly threshing man’s back, pulled her cord tighter and tighter. Ce’Nedra watched in horror as her would-be killer was efficiently strangled before her eyes.
Garion grimly turned and began to chop his way through the now-disconcerted attackers. The air around him was suddenly filled with shrieks, groans, and chunks of clothing and flesh. The ragged-looking men he faced flinched back as his huge sword laid a broad windrow of quivering dead in his wake. Then they broke and ran.
‘Cowards!’ a black-robed man screamed after the fleeing villains. He held a bow in his hand and he raised it, pointing his arrow directly at Garion. Then he suddenly doubled over sharply, driving his arrow into the ground before him as one of Silk’s daggers flickered end over end to sink solidly into his stomach.
‘Is anybody hurt?’ Garion demanded, spinning around quickly, his dripping sword still in his hand.
‘They are.’ Silk laughed gaily, looking around with some satisfaction at the carnage in the forest clearing.
‘Please stop!’ Ce’Nedra cried to Velvet in an anguished voice.
‘What?’ the blond girl asked absently, still leaning back against the silken cord drawn tightly about the neck of the now-limp man she had just strangled. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ce’Nedra,’ she apologized. ‘My attention wandered a bit, I guess.’ She released the cord, and the black-faced dead man toppled to the ground at her feet.