The Malloreon: Book 04 - Sorceress of Darshiva

by David Eddings

  They carried out the chairs and found Silk waiting for them. Several bottles of wine and four goblets sat on the table. ‘All right, gentlemen,’ the little Drasnian said. ‘Seat yourself and have some wine. I’ll be right back. I want to check something I saw at the side of the house.’ He went around the corner and came back after a few minutes with a broad smirk on his face. He sat, poured himself a goblet of wine, leaned back in his chair, and put his feet up on the table with the air of a man planning to make a long stay of it. ‘I give him about five minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ Garion asked.

  ‘The merchant.’ Silk shrugged. ‘He’ll only be able to watch us sitting here for so long and then he’ll start to see things my way.’

  ‘You’re a cruel, cruel man, Prince Kheldar.’ Zakath laughed.

  ‘Business is business,’ Silk replied, taking a sip of his wine. ‘This really isn’t bad, you know,’ he said, holding up his goblet to admire the color of the wine.

  ‘What were you doing around at the side?’ Garion asked him.

  ‘There’s a carriage house there—with a large lock on the door. You don’t flee a town and lock a door unless there’s something valuable behind it, do you? Besides, locked doors always pique my curiosity.’

  ‘So? What was inside?’

  ‘Rather a nice little cabriolet, actually.’

  ‘What’s a cabriolet?’

  ‘A two-wheeled carriage.’

  ‘And you’re going to steal it.’

  ‘Of course. I told the merchant over there that we’d take only what we could carry. I didn’t tell him how we were going to carry it. Besides, Durnik wanted wheels to make something to carry your wolf in. That little carriage could save him all the trouble of building things. Friends should always help their friends, right?’

  As Silk had predicted, the merchant could only bear watching the three of them lounging at the table across from his shop for just so long. As his men finished loading the wagon, he came across the street. ‘All right,’ he said sullenly, ‘five half-crowns—but only so much as you can carry, mind.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Silk told him, counting out the coins on the table. ‘Would you care for a glass of wine? It’s really quite good.’

  The merchant snatched up the coins and turned without answering.

  ‘We’ll lock up for you when we leave,’ Silk called after him.

  The fat man did not look back.

  After the merchant and his men had ridden off down the street, Silk led his horse around to the side of the house while Garion and Zakath crossed the street to plunder the fat man’s shop.

  The little two-wheeled carriage had a folding top and a large leather-covered box across its back. Silk’s saddle horse looked a bit uncomfortable between the shafts of the carriage, and the sense of being followed by the wheeled thing definitely made him nervous.

  The box across the back of the cabriolet held an astonishing amount of supplies. They filled it with cheeses, rolls of butter, hams, slabs of bacon, and several bags of beans. Then they filled up the empty spaces with loaves of bread. When Garion picked up a large bag of meal, however, Silk firmly shook his head. ‘No,’ he said adamantly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know what Polgara makes with ground meal. I’m not deliberately going to volunteer to eat gruel for breakfast every morning for the next month. Let’s get that side of beef instead.’

  ‘We won’t be able to eat all that before it goes bad,’ Garion objected.

  ‘We have these two new mouths to feed, remember? I’ve seen your wolf and her puppy eat. The meat won’t have time to go bad, believe me.’

  They rode out of town with Silk idly lounging in the seat of the little carriage with the reins held negligently in his left hand. In his right, he held a wine bottle. ‘Now this is more like it,’ he said happily, taking a long drink.

  ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,’ Garion said a little tartly.

  ‘Oh, I am,’ Silk replied. ‘But after all, Garion, fair is fair. I stole it, so I get to ride in it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The others were clustered in the yard of an abandoned farmstead a league or so beyond the town. ‘I see you’ve been busy,’ Belgarath observed as Silk drove the little carriage up and stopped.

  ‘We needed something to carry the supplies in,’ Silk replied glibly.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I hope you were able to find something beside beans,’ Sadi said. ‘Soldiers’ rations tend to grow monotonous after a while.’

  ‘Silk swindled a shopkeeper,’ Garion said, opening the leather-covered box at the back of the carriage. ‘We did rather well, actually.’

  ‘Swindled?’ Silk protested.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Garion moved the side of beef so that Polgara could look into the box.

  ‘Well—I suppose so,’ Silk admitted, ‘but swindled is such an awkward way to sum up.’

  ‘It’s perfectly all right, Prince Kheldar.’ Polgara almost purred as she took a mental inventory of the items in the box. ‘To be honest with you, I don’t care how you came by all this.’

  He bowed. ‘My pleasure, Polgara,’ he said grandly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said absently, ‘I’m sure you enjoyed it.’

  ‘What did you find out?’ Beldin asked Garion.

  ‘Well, for one thing, Zandramas is ahead of us again,’ Garion replied. ‘She went through here a few days ago. She knows that Urvon’s army is coming down through the mountains. He might be moving a little faster than we thought though, because she’s ordering the civilian population to delay him. They’re more or less ignoring her.’

  ‘Wise decision.’ Beldin grunted. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘She told them that this is all going to be settled before the summer’s over.’

  ‘That agrees with what Cyradis told us at Ashaba,’ Belgarath said. ‘All right, then. We all know when the meeting’s going to happen. The only thing that’s left to find out is where.’

  ‘That’s why we’re all in such a hurry to get to Kell,’ Beldin said. ‘Cyradis is sitting on that information like a mother hen on a clutch of eggs.’

  ‘What is it?’ Belgarath burst out irritably.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘I’m missing something. It’s something important and it’s something you told me.’

  ‘I’ve told you lots of things, Belgarath. You don’t usually listen, though.’

  ‘This was a while back. It seems to me we were sitting in my tower, talking.’

  ‘We’ve done that from time to time over the last several thousand years.’

  ‘No. This was more recent. Eriond was there and he was just a boy.’

  ‘That would put it at about ten years or so ago, then.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What were we doing ten years ago?’

  Belgarath began to pace up and down, scowling. ‘I’d been helping Durnik. We were making Poledra’s cottage livable. You’d been here in Mallorea.’

  Beldin scratched reflectively at his stomach. ‘I think I remember the time. We were sharing a cask of ale you’d stolen from the twins, and Eriond was scrubbing the floor.’

  ‘What were you telling me?’

  Beldin shrugged. ‘I’d just come back from Mallorea. I was describing conditions here and telling you about the Sardion—although we didn’t know very much about it at that point.’

  ‘No.’ Belgarath shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it. You said something about Kell.’

  Beldin frowned, thinking back. ‘It must not have been very important, because neither of us seems to be able to remember it.’

  ‘It seems to me it was just something you said in passing.’

  ‘I say a lot of things in passing. They help to fill up the blank spaces in a conversation. Are you certain it was all that important?’

  Belgarath nodded. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘All right. Let’s see if we can track it down.’

  �
��Won’t this wait, father?’ Polgara asked.

  ‘No, Pol. I don’t think so. We’re right on the edge of it, and I don’t want to lose it again.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ Beldin said, his ugly face creased with thought. ‘I came in, and you and Eriond were cleaning. You offered me some of the ale you’d stolen from the twins. You asked me what I’d been doing since Belgarion’s wedding, and I told you I’d been keeping an eye on the Angaraks.’

  ‘Yes,’ Belgarath agreed. ‘I remember that part.’

  ‘I told you that the Murgos were in general despair about the death of Taur Urgas, and that the western Grolims had gone to pieces over the death of Torak.’

  ‘Then you told me about Zakath’s campaign in Cthol Murgos and about how he’d added the Kal to his name.’

  ‘That actually wasn’t my idea,’ Zakath said with a slightly pained look. ‘Brador came up with it—as a means of unifying Mallorean society.’ He made a wry face. ‘It didn’t really work all that well, I guess.’

  ‘Things do seem a bit disorganized here,’ Silk agreed.

  ‘What did we talk about then?’ Belgarath asked.

  ‘Well,’ Beldin replied, ‘as I remember it, we told Eriond the story of Vo Mimbre, and then you asked me what was going on in Mallorea. I told you that things were all pretty much the same—that the bureaucracy’s the glue that holds everything together, that there were plots and intrigues in Melcene and Mal Zeth, that Karanda and Darshiva and Gandahar were on the verge of open rebellion, and that the Grolims—’ He stopped, his eyes suddenly going very wide.

  ‘Are still afraid to go near Kell!’ Belgarath completed it in a shout of triumph ‘That’s it!’

  Beldin smacked his forehead with his open palm. ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ he exclaimed. Then he fell over on his back, howling with laughter and kicking at the ground in sheer delight. ‘We’ve got her, Belgarath!’ he roared. ‘We’ve got them all—Zandramas, Urvon, even Agachak! They can’t go to Kell!’

  Belgarath was also laughing uproariously. ‘How did we miss it?’

  ‘Father,’ Polgara said ominously. ‘This is beginning to make me cross. Will one of you please explain all the hysteria?’

  Beldin and Belgarath were capering hand in hand in a grotesque little dance of glee.

  ‘Will you two stop that?’ Polgara snapped.

  ‘Oh, this is just too rare, Pol,’ Beldin gasped, catching her in a bear hug.

  ‘Don’t do that! Just talk!’

  ‘All right, Pol,’ he said, wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘Kell is the holy place of the Dals. It’s the center of their whole culture.’

  ‘Yes, uncle. I know that.’

  ‘When the Angaraks overran Dalasia, the Grolims came in to erase the Dalasian religion and to replace it with the worship of Torak—the same way they did in Karanda. When they found out the significance of Kell, they moved to destroy it. The Dals had to prevent that, so they put their wizards to work on the problem. The wizards laid curses on the entire region around Kell.’ He frowned. ‘Maybe curses isn’t the right word,’ he admitted. ‘Enchantments might be closer, but it amounts to the same thing. Anyway, since the Grolims were the real danger to Kell, the enchantments were directed at them. Any Grolim who tries to approach Kell is struck blind.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?’ she asked him tartly.

  ‘I’ve never really paid that much attention to it. I probably even forgot about it. I don’t bother to go into Dalasia because the Dals are all mystics, and mysticism has always irritated me. The seers all talk in riddles, and necromancy seems like a waste of time to me. I wasn’t even sure if the enchantments really worked. Grolims are very gullible sometimes. A suggestion of a curse would probably work just as well as a real one.’

  ‘You know,’ Belgarath mused, ‘I think the reason we missed it was because we’ve been concentrating on the fact that Urvon, Zandramas, and Agachak are all sorcerers. We kept overlooking the fact that they’re also Grolims.’

  ‘Is this curse—or whatever you call it—aimed specifically at the Grolims?’ Garion asked. ‘Or would it affect us, too?’

  Beldin scratched at his beard. ‘It’s a good question, Belgarath,’ he said. ‘That’s not the sort of thing you’d want to risk lightly.’

  ‘Senji!’ Belgarath snapped his fingers.

  ‘I didn’t quite follow that.’

  ‘Senji went to Kell, remember? And even as inept as he is, he’s still a sorcerer.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ Beldin grinned. ‘We can go to Kell, and they can’t. They’ll have to follow us for a change.’

  ‘What about the demons?’ Durnik asked soberly. ‘Nahaz is already marching toward Kell, and as far as we know, Zandramas has Mordja with her. Would they be able to go to Kell? What I’m getting at is that even if Urvon and Zandramas can’t go there, couldn’t they just send the demons instead to get the information for them?’

  Beldin shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do them any good. Cyradis won’t let a demon anywhere near her copy of the Mallorean Gospels. No matter what other faults they have, the seers refuse to have anything to do with the agents of chaos.’

  ‘Could she prevent either of the demons from just taking what they want, though?’ Durnik looked worried. ‘Let’s face it, Beldin. A demon is a fairly awful thing.’

  ‘She can take care of herself,’ Beldin replied. ‘Don’t worry about Cyradis.’

  ‘Master Beldin,’ Zakath objected, ‘she’s little more than a child, and with her eyes bound like that, she’s utterly helpless.’

  Beldin laughed coarsely. ‘Helpless? Cyradis? Man, are you out of your mind? She could probably stop the sun if she needed to. We can’t even begin to make guesses about how much power she has.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Zakath looked baffled.

  ‘Cyradis is the focus of all the power of her race, Zakath,’ Polgara explained. ‘Not only the power of the Dals who are presently alive, but also that of all of them who have ever lived.’

  ‘Or who might live in the future, for all we know,’ Belgarath added.

  ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Beldin said. ‘We might want to discuss it some day. Anyway,’ he continued to Zakath, ‘Cyradis can do just about anything she has to do to make sure the final meeting takes place at the correct time and the correct place. Demons aren’t a part of that meeting, so she’ll probably just ignore them; and if they get too troublesome, she’ll just send them back where they came from.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  Beldin shook his head.

  ‘But she can?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘I’m having a little trouble with all this,’ Silk admitted. ‘If none of the Grolims can go to Kell without going blind, and if the demons aren’t going to find out anything, even if they do go there, why are they all running toward it? What good’s it going to do them?’

  ‘They’re putting themselves into a position where they can follow us when we come out,’ Belgarath replied. ‘They know we can go there and that we’ll find out where the meeting is going to take place. They probably plan to tag along behind when we leave.’

  ‘That’s going to make it very nervous when we leave Kell, isn’t it? We’ll have half the Grolims in the world right behind us.’

  ‘Everything will work out, Silk,’ Belgarath replied confidently.

  ‘Fatalism does not fill me with confidence at this point, old man,’ Silk said acidly.

  Belgarath’s expression became almost beatific. ‘Trust me,’ he said.

  Silk glared at him, threw his arms in the air, and then stamped away, swearing under his breath.

  ‘You know, I’ve been wanting to do that to him for years,’ the old man chuckled, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘I think it was actually worth the wait. All right. Let’s get things together again and move on.’

  They transferred some of the supplies from the box across the back of the little carriage to the pack hors
es, and then Durnik stood considering the vehicle thoughtfully. ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Silk asked him a bit defensively.

  ‘The horse has to be hitched between those shafts. If we put the wolf on the seat, she’ll be right behind him. He’ll bolt at that point. Nothing could stop him.’

  ‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ Silk said glumly.

  ‘It’s the smell of the wolf that sends horses into such a panic, isn’t it?’ Velvet asked.

  ‘That and the snapping and snarling,’ Durnik replied.

  ‘Belgarion can persuade her not to snap and snarl.’

  ‘What about the smell?’ Silk asked.

  ‘I’ll take care of that.’ She went to one of the packs and removed a small glass bottle. ‘I expect you to buy me some more of this, Prince Kheldar,’ she said firmly. ‘You stole the wrong kind of carriage, so it’s up to you to replace what I have to use to smooth over your blunder.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Perfume, Kheldar, and it’s dreadfully expensive.’ She looked at Garion, her smile dimpling her cheeks. ‘I’ll need you to translate for me,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want the wolf to misunderstand when I start to sprinkle this on her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  When the two of them returned from the sledlike contraption the wolf and her puppy were riding in, they found Ce’Nedra firmly ensconced on the front seat of the smart little carriage. ‘This will do very nicely, Prince Kheldar,’ she said brightly. ‘Thank you ever so much.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Was there something?’ she asked, her eyes wide.

  Silk’s expression grew surly, and he wandered away muttering to himself.

  ‘His morning has taken a turn for the worse, hasn’t it?’ Zakath observed to Garion.

  ‘He’s doing all right,’ Garion replied. ‘He got all the entertainment out of cheating that merchant and stealing the carriage. He gets unbearable if he has too many successes in a row. Ce’Nedra and Liselle usually manage to let the air out of him, though.’

  ‘You mean they cooked all that up between them?’

  ‘They didn’t have to. They’ve been doing it for so long now that they don’t even have to discuss it any more.’