Belgarath the Sorcerer (23 page)

The last I saw of them, they were blundering blindly across that open square, stopping every few yards to roll in the snow again. They didn't bark or howl, but they
did
whimper a lot.

I resumed my own form, waved Cherek and the boys in, and then set my fingertips to that pitted iron door. I could sense the lock, but it wasn't a very good one, so I clicked it open with a single thought and began to inch the door open very slowly. It still made noise. It sounded very loud in that silent square, but I don't imagine that the sound really carried all that far.

When Cherek and his sons got to within a few yards of me, they stopped. ‘Well, come on,' I whispered to them.

‘Ah - that's all right, Belgarath,' Cherek whispered back. ‘Why don't you go on ahead? We'll follow you.' He seemed to be trying to hold his breath.

‘Don't be an idiot,' I snapped at him. ‘The smell's out here where the Hounds were. None of it splashed on me - not in this form anyway.'

They still seemed very reluctant to come any closer.

I muttered a few choice oaths and slipped sideways through the doorway into the absolute darkness beyond it. I fumbled briefly in the pouch at my waist, brought out a stub of a candle, and touched fire to it with my thumb.

 

Yes, it
was
a little risky, but I'd been told that Torak wouldn't be able to interfere. I wanted to make sure of that before we went any farther.

 

The Alorns edged through the minimally open doorway and looked around the chamber at the bottom of the tower nervously. ‘Which way?' Cherek whispered.

‘Up those stairs, I'd imagine,' I replied, pointing at the iron stairway spiraling up into the darkness. ‘There's not much point to building a tower if you don't plan to live at the top of it. Let me check around down here first, though.'

I shielded my candle and went around the interior wall of the room. When I got behind the stairs, I came to a door I hadn't seen before. I put my fingertips to it and I could sense the stairs on the other side. They were going down. This was one of the things that I was supposed to do when I got inside the tower. I didn't know why I was supposed to do it, but I
had
to know where those stairs were. I kept the memory of their location in my head for over three thousand years. Then, when I came back to Cthol Mishrak with Garion and Silk, I finally understood why.

Now, though, I went back around to the foot of those iron stairs that wound upward. ‘Let's go up,' I suggested.

Cherek nodded, took my candle, and then drew his sword. He started up the stairs with Riva and Algar close behind him while Dras and I brought up the rear.

It was a long climb. Torak's tower was very high. It didn't really
have
to be that high, but you know how Torak was. When you get right down to it, I'm about half surprised that his tower didn't reach up to the stars.

Eventually, though, we reached the top, where there was another one of those iron doors.

‘What now?' Cherek whispered to me.

‘You might as well open it,' I told him. ‘Torak isn't
supposed
to be able to do anything about us, but we'll never know until we go in. Try to be quiet, though.'

He drew in a deep breath, handed the candle to Algar, and put his hand on the latch.

‘Slowly,' I cautioned.

He nodded and turned the handle with excruciating caution.

As Beldin had surmised, Torak had done something to the iron of his tower to keep it from rusting, so the door made surprisingly little noise as Bear-shoulders inched it open.

He looked inside briefly. ‘He's here,' he whispered to us. ‘I think he's asleep.'

‘Good,' I grunted. ‘Let's move right along. This night isn't going to last forever.'

We filed cautiously into that chamber behind the iron door. I immediately saw that among his other faults, Torak was a plagiarist. His tower room closely resembled my Master's room at the top of
his
tower - except that everything in Torak's tower was made of iron. It was dimly illuminated by the fire burning on his hearth.

The Dragon God lay tossing and writhing on his iron bed. That fire was still burning, I guess. He'd covered his ruined face with a steel mask that very closely resembled his features as they had originally appeared. It was a beautiful job, but the fact that a replica of that mask adorns every Angarak temple in the world makes it just a little ominous in retrospect. Unlike those calm replicas, though, the mask that covered Torak's face actually moved, and the expression on those polished features wasn't really very pretty. He was clearly in torment. It's probably cruel, but I didn't have very much sympathy for him. The chilling thing about the mask was the fact that the left eye slit was open, and Torak's left eye was the one thing that was still visibly burning.

As the maimed God twisted and turned in his pain-haunted slumber, that burning eye seemed to follow us, watching, watching, even though Torak himself was powerless to prevent what we were going to do.

Dras went to the side of the bed, tentatively hefting his war-axe. ‘I could save the world an awful lot of trouble here,' he suggested.

‘Don't be absurd,' I told him. ‘Your axe would only bounce off him, and it
might
just wake him up,' I looked around that room and immediately saw the door directly opposite the one we'd entered. Since those were the only two doors in the room, it narrowed down the search considerably. ‘Let's go, gentlemen,' I told the towering Alorns. ‘It's time to do what we came to do.' It
was
time. Don't ask me how I knew, but it was definitely the right time. I crossed
Torak's room and opened the door with that burning eye watching my every step.

The room beyond that door wasn't very big - hardly more than a closet. An iron table sat in the precise center of it, a table that was really no more than a pedestal, and an iron box not much more than a hand's breadth high sat on the exact center of that pedestal. The box was glowing as if it had just been removed from a forge, but it was not the cherry red of heated iron.

The glow was blue.

‘Why's it glowing like that?' Dras whispered.

‘Maybe it's glad to see us,' I replied. How was
I
supposed to know why it was glowing?

‘Is it safe to touch that box?' Algar asked shrewdly.

‘I'm not sure,' I replied. ‘The Orb itself is dangerous, but I don't know about the box.'

‘One of us is going to have to open it,' Algar said. ‘Torak could have put it here to trick us. For all we know, the box could be empty, and the Orb's someplace else.'

I knew who was supposed to open the box and take out the Orb. The Purpose that had brought us to this place had planted that piece of information in my head before we got here, but I
also
knew that it was going to have to be voluntary. I was going to have to nudge them a bit.

‘The Orb knows you, Belgarath,' Cherek told me. ‘
You
do it.'

I shook my head. ‘I'm not supposed to. There are other things I have to do, and whoever takes up the Orb will spend the rest of his life guarding it. One of you gentlemen is going to have to do it.'

‘
You
decide who it's going to be,' Cherek said.

‘I'm not permitted to do that.'

‘It's really very simple, Belgarath,' Dras told me. ‘We'll take turns trying to open the box. Whichever one of us doesn't die is the right one.'

‘No,' I told him flatly. ‘You've
all
got things you're supposed to do, and dying here in Cthol Mishrak isn't one of them.' I squinted at the glowing box. ‘I want you gentlemen to be absolutely honest about this. The Orb's the most powerful thing in the world. Whichever one of you picks
it up will be able to do
anything
, but the Orb doesn't
want
to do just anything. It's got its own agenda, and if anybody tries to use it for something outside that agenda, it won't be happy. Torak already found that out. Examine your hearts, gentlemen. I need somebody who's
not
ambitious. I need somebody who'll be willing to devote his whole life to guarding the Orb without ever trying to use it. If the notion of having infinite power at your fingertips appeals to you in the slightest, you're not the one.'

‘That lets me out,' Cherek said with a slight shrug. ‘I'm a king, and kings are
supposed
to be ambitious. The first time I got drunk, I'd
have
to try to do something with it.' He looked at his sons. ‘It's going to have to be one of you boys.'

‘I could probably keep a grip on my ambition,' Dras said, ‘but I think it ought to be somebody whose mind's quicker than mine. I can handle a fight, but thinking too much makes my head hurt.' It was a brutally candid admission, and it raised my opinion of Dras considerably.

Riva and Algar looked at each other. Then Riva shrugged and smiled that boyish smile of his. ‘Oh, well,' he said. ‘I haven't really got anything better to do anyway.' And he reached out, opened the box, and took out the Orb.

-
Yes!
- the voice in my head exulted.

‘Well, now,' Algar said casually, ‘since we've settled that, why don't we go?'

 

That's what
really
happened in Torak's tower. All that blather about ‘evil intent' in the BOOK OF ALORN was made up out of whole cloth by somebody who got carried away by his own creativity. I shouldn't really blame him for it, I guess. I do it all the time myself. The
real
facts behind any story always seem sort of prosaic to me.

 

‘Stick it inside your clothes someplace,' I told Riva. ‘It's a little excited right now, and that glow's awfully conspicuous.'

‘Won't I glow, too?' Riva asked dubiously. The way the box did, I mean?'

‘Try it and find out,' I suggested.

‘Does glowing hurt?' he asked.

‘I don't think so. Don't worry, Riva. The Orb's very fond of you. It's not going to hurt you.'

‘Belgarath, it's a rock. How can it be fond of anything?'

‘It's not an ordinary rock. Just put it away, Riva, and let's get out of here.'

He swallowed hard and tucked the Orb inside his fur tunic. Then he held out one of his huge hands and examined it closely. ‘No glow yet,' he noted.

‘See? You're going to have to learn to trust me, boy. You and I have a long way to go together, and it'll be difficult for both of us if you're going to ask me silly questions every time we turn around.'

‘
Silly?
' he objected. ‘After what it did to Torak,
I
don't think my questions were silly.'

‘Poor choice of terms, perhaps. Let's go.'

I had a bad moment when we were retracing our steps. Torak cried out in his sleep. It was a howl of utter desolation that suggested that somewhere in his sleep he knew that we were taking the Orb. He was powerless to stop us, but that shout almost made me jump out of my skin.

I don't like being startled like that, which may account for what I did then. ‘Go back to sleep, Torak,' I told him. Then, I threw his own words back in his teeth. ‘A word of advice for thee, brother of my Master, by way of thanks for thine unintended service to me this day. Don't come looking for the Orb. My Master's very gentle. I'm not. If you come anywhere near the Orb, I'll have you for lunch.'

It was sheer bravado, of course, but I had to say
something
to him, and my little display of spitefulness may have served some purpose. When he finally
did
wake up, he was in a state of inarticulate rage, and he wasted a great deal of time punishing the Angaraks who'd been supposed to
prevent me from reaching his tower. That gave the Alorns and me a fairly good head start.

We crept back down the stairs to the foot of the tower, listening tensely for Grolims, but finding only an eerie silence. When we got to the bottom, I looked out into the snowy square. It had remained deserted. My luck was holding.

‘Let's
go
!' Dras said impatiently. Prince Kheldar and I had a long discussion about that some years back, and he told me that burglars always suffer from that same impatience, and that it makes getting away almost more dangerous than breaking in. Your natural instinct after you steal something is to take to your heels; but if you don't want to get caught, you'd better suppress that instinct.

The residual odor from my encounter with the Hounds was still very strong on Torak's doorstep, and the five of us were careful to breathe shallowly until we reached the shelter of that dark alleyway from which we'd emerged when we first got to the square.

‘What do you think?' Cherek whispered to me as we followed that twisting, smoky alley back toward the city wall. ‘Will it be safe to go back the way we came?'

I was already working on that, and I hadn't come up with an answer yet. No matter how careful we'd been on our way here from the coast, there were bound to be traces of our passage. I knew Torak well enough to be fairly certain that he wouldn't personally lead the search. He'd leave that to underlings, and that meant Urvon or Ctuchik. Based on Beldin's description of him, I wasn't particularly worried about Urvon. Ctuchik was an unknown, though. I had no idea of what Torak's other disciple was capable of, and this probably wasn't a good time to find out.

Going north was obviously out of the question. Torak already had people in place at the land-bridge, and I didn't want to have to fight my way through them, assuming we could. Going west was probably quite nearly as dangerous. I had to operate on the theory that Ctuchik could do almost
anything I could do, and
I'd
certainly be able to sense those traces I mentioned before. I didn't even consider going east. There wasn't much point in going deeper into Mallorea when safety lay in the other direction.

That left only south. ‘Are you gentlemen feeling up to a bit of a scuffle?' I asked Cherek and his sons.

‘What did you have in mind?' Cherek asked me.

‘Why don't we go pick a fight with the guards at the north gate?'

‘I can think of a dozen reasons why we shouldn't,' Riva said dubiously.

‘But I can think of a better one why we should. We don't know how long it's going to be until Torak wakes up, and he's not going to take the loss of the Orb philosophically. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he's going to be organizing a pursuit.'

‘That stands to reason, I suppose,' Iron-grip conceded.

‘We want those pursuers to go off in the wrong direction if we can possibly arrange it. A pile of dead Grolims at the north gate would probably suggest that we went that way, wouldn't you say?'

‘It would to
me
, I guess.'

‘Let's go kill some Grolims, then.'

‘Wait a minute,' Cherek objected. ‘If we're going to go back the way we came, we won't
want
to draw attention to that gate.'

‘But we
aren't
going back the way we came.'

‘Which way are we going then?'

‘South, actually - well, southwest would probably be closer.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Trust me.'

He started to swear. Evidently hearing that remark irritated him as much as it always irritated me.

There were six black-robed Grolims at the north gate, and we made quick work of them. There were a few muffled cries, of course, and some fairly pathetic groaning,
but the fact that there weren't any windows in the houses of Cthol Mishrak kept any people inside from hearing them.

‘All right,' Dras said, wiping his bloody axe on a fallen Grolim, ‘now what?'

‘Let's go back to your tunnel.'

‘Belgarath,' he objected, ‘We want to get
away
from the city. We don't want to go back over the wall.'

‘We'll go out through the gate, crawl through your tunnel, and circle around the city until we come to the river on the south side of it.'

‘There's a trail around the outside of the wall,' Riva pointed out. ‘Why use the tunnel at all?'

‘Because the Hounds would pick up our scent. We want them to think we've gone north. We'll need some time to get out ahead of them.'

‘Very clever,' Algar murmured.

‘I don't understand,' Dras said.

‘The river's probably frozen, isn't it?' Algar asked him.

‘I suppose so.'

‘Wouldn't that make it sort of like a highway - without any trees or hills to slow us down?'

Dras considered it. Then comprehension slowly dawned on his big face. ‘You know, Algar,' he said, ‘I think you're right. Belgarath
is
a very clever old man.'

‘Do you suppose we could congratulate him some other time,' Riva said to them. ‘I'm the one who's carrying the loot, and I'd like to put some distance between this place and my backside.'

I saw that I was going to have to rearrange Riva's thinking. ‘Loot' wasn't really a proper term to use when he was referring to my Master's Orb.

We hurried past the sprawled bodies of the gate-guards, rounded the bend in the path and plunged back into the snowbank on the left side. It wasn't too long until we came out of the tunnel at the city wall. There was a sort of beaten pathway in the snow along the outside of the wall where Grolims or ordinary Angaraks had been patrolling, and we
followed that eastward until we reached the corner. Then we turned and followed it south through the drifts toward the river. Altogether, I'd imagine that it took us about two hours to reach the riverbank.

As I'd been fairly sure it would be, the frozen river was clear of snow. It wound like a wide black ribbon through the snow-clogged countryside.

‘That's lucky,' Dras noted. ‘We won't leave any tracks.'

‘That was sort of the idea,' I told him just a bit smugly.

‘How did you know that there wouldn't be about three feet of snow on top of the ice?' he asked me.

‘That blizzard came in out of the west. There's nothing out there in that river for the wind to pile snow up behind, so it swept the ice clean for us. The snow's probably all stacked up against the mountains of western Karanda.'

‘You think of everything, don't you, Belgarath?'

‘I try. Let's get out on the ice and head down to the coast. I'm starting to get homesick.'

We rather carefully brushed out the tracks we made going down the riverbank. Then we crossed the ice to the far side to avoid the light of the torches atop the city wall and started down-river.

We didn't exactly skate along, but there was a certain amount of sliding. After about three hours, the murky clouds hovering over the region began to lighten along the southern horizon.

‘The sun's coming up,' Algar noted. ‘Is that going to wake Torak up?'

I wasn't certain about that. ‘I'll check,' I replied. The passenger riding along between my ears had told me not to try to talk to him until we were clear of the city. Well, we were clear now, so I chanced it. -
Do you want to wake up?
- I asked.

-
Don't be insulting
. -

-
I didn't do it on purpose. The question of someone waking up is looming rather large right now. We've got what we came for. Is that the end of this particular EVENT?
-

-
More or less. It's not completely over until you get back across the Sea of the East
. -

-
Can you tell me when Torak's going to wake up?
-

-
No. You'll know when it happens
. -

-
A hint or two would help here
. -

-
Sorry, Belgarath. Just keep going. You're doing well so far
. -

-
Thanks
. - I didn't say it very graciously.