Rivan Codex Series

by Eddings, David

It was some time after midnight when Silk returned to the large, firelit room in Garion's headquarters. "It's a very unpleasant night out there," the little man said, shivering and rubbing his hands together. He went over to stand in front of the fire.

  "Well, are they planning any surprises for us?" Barak asked him, lifting a copper tankard.

  "Oh, yes," Silk replied. "They're building walls across the streets several houses back from our perimeter and they're putting them just around corners so you won't see them until you're right on top of them."

  "With archers and tubs of boiling pitch in all the houses nearby?" Barak asked glumly.

  "Probably." Silk shrugged. "Do you have any more of that ale? I'm chilled to the bone."

  "We'll have to work on this a bit," Javelin mused.

  "Good luck," Barak said sourly, going to the ale keg. "I hate fighting in towns. Give me a nice open field any time."

  "But the towns are where all the loot is," Yarblek said to him.

  "Is that all you ever think about?"

  "We're in this life to make a profit, my friend," the rawboned Nadrak replied with a shrug.

  "You sound just like Silk."

  "I know. That's why we went into partnership."

  It continued to snow lightly throughout the following day. The citizens of Rheon made a few more probing attacks on Garion's defensive perimeter, but for the most part they contented themselves with merely shooting arrows at anything that moved.

  About midmorning the next day, Errand picked his way over the rubble of the fallen north wall and went directly to the house from which Garion was directing operations.

  When he entered, his young face was tight with exhilaration, and he was panting noticeably. "That's exciting," he said.

  "What is?" Garion asked him.

  "Dodging arrows."

  "Does Aunt Pol know you're here?"

  "I don't think so. I wanted to see the city, so I just came."

  "You're going to get us both in trouble, do you know that?"

  Errand shrugged. "A scolding doesn't hurt all that much. Oh, I thought you ought to know that Hettar's here -or he will be in an hour or so. He's just a few miles to the south."

  "Finally!" Garion said with an explosive release of his breath. "How did you find out?"

  "Horse and I went out for a ride. He gets restless when he's penned up. Anyway, we were up on that big hill to the south, and I saw the Algars coming."

  "Well, let's go meet them."

  "Why don't we?"

  When Garion and his young friend reached the top of the hill south of Rheon, they saw wave upon wave of Algar clansmen flowing over the snowy moors at a brisk canter. A single horseman detached himself from the front rank of that sea of horses and men and pounded up the hill, his long black scalplock flowing behind him. "Good morning, Garion," Hettar said casually as he reined in. "You've been well, I trust?"

  "Moderately " Garion grinned at him.

  "You've got snow up here."

  Garion looked around in feigned astonishment. "Why, I do believe you're right. I hadn't even noticed that."

  Another rider came up the hill, a man in a shabby, hooded cloak. "Where's your Aunt, Garion?" the man called when he was halfway up the hill.

  "Grandfather?" Garion exclaimed with surprise. "I thought you were going to Mar Terrin."

  Belgarath made an indelicate sound. " I did," he replied as he reined in his horse, "and it was an absolutely wasted trip. I'll tell you about it later. What's been going on here?"

  Briefly Garion filled them in on the events of the past several weeks.

  "You've been busy," Hettar noted.

  "The time goes faster when you keep occupied."

  "Is Pol inside the city, then?" Belgarath asked him.

  "No. She and Ce'Nedra and the other ladies are staying in the camp we built when we first got here. The cultists have been counterattacking against our positions inside, so I didn't think it was entirely safe for them to be there."

  "That makes sense. Why don't you round up everybody and bring them to the camp. I think we need to talk about a few things."

  "All right, Grandfather."

  It was shortly after noon when they gathered in the main tent in the Rivan encampment outside the city.

  "Were you able to find anything useful, father?" Polgara asked Belgarath as the old man entered the tent.

  Belgarath sprawled in a chair. "Some tantalizing hints was about all," he replied. "I get the feeling that Anheg's copy of the Ashabine Oracles has been rather carefully pruned somewhere along the way -or more likely at the very beginning. The modifications seem to be a part of the original text."

  "Prophets don't usually tamper with their own prophecies," Polgara noted.

  "This one would have -particularly if parts of the prophecy said things he didn't want to believe."

  "Who was it?"

  "Torak. I recognized his tone and his peculiar turn of phrase almost immediately."

  "Torak?" Garion exclaimed, feeling a sudden chill.

  Belgarath nodded. "There's an old Mallorean legend that says that after he destroyed Cthol Mishrak, Torak had a castle built at Ashaba in the Karandese Mountains. Once he moved in, an ecstasy came over him, and he composed the Ashabine Oracles. Anyway, the legend goes on to say that after the ecstasy had passed, Torak fell into a great rage. Apparently there were things in the prophecy that he didn't like. That could very well account for the tampering I detected. We've always been told that the word gives meaning to the event."

  "Can you do that?"

  "No. But Torak was so arrogant that he may have believed he could."

  "But that puts us at a dead end, doesn't it?" Garion asked with a sinking feeling. "I mean -the Mrin Codex said that you had to look at all the mysteries, and if the Ashabine Oracles aren't correct-" He lifted his hands helplessly.

  "There's a true copy somewhere," Belgarath replied confidently. "There has to be- otherwise the Codex would have given me different instructions."

  "You're operating on pure faith, Belgarath," Ce'Nedra accused him.

  "I know," he admitted. "I do that when I don't have anything else to fall back on."

  "What did you find at Mar Terrin?" Polgara asked.

  Belgarath made a vulgar sound. "The monks there may be very good at comforting the spirits of all those slaughtered Marags, but they're very bad at protecting manuscripts. The roof leaks in their library, and the copy of the Mallorean Gospels, naturally, was on a shelf right under the leak. It was so soggy that I could barely get the leaves apart, and the ink had run and smeared all over the pages. It was almost totally illegible. I spoke with the monks at some length about that." He scratched at one bearded cheek. "It looks as if I'm going to have to go a bit further afield to get what we need."

  "You found nothing at all, then?" Beldin asked.

  Belgarath grunted. "There was one passage in the Oracles that said that the Dark God will come again."

  Garion felt a sudden chill grip his stomach. "Torak?" he said. "Is that possible?"

  "I suppose you could take it to mean that, but if that's what it really means, then why would Torak have gone to the trouble of destroying so many of the other passages? If the entire purpose of the Oracles was to predict his own return, I expect that he'd have been overjoyed to keep them intact."

  "You're assuming that old burnt-face was rational," BeIdin growled. "I never noticed that quality in him very often."

  "Oh, no," Belgarath disagreed. "Everything Torak did was perfectly rational -as long as you accepted his basic notion that he was the sole reason for creation. No, I think the passage means something else."

  "Could you read any part of the Mallorean Gospels at father?" Aunt Pol asked him.

  "Just one little fragment. It said something about a choice between the Light and the Dark."

  Beldin snorted. "Now that would be something very unusual," he said. "The Seers at Kell haven't made a about anything since the world was made. They've been sitting
on the fence for millennia."

  Late the following afternoon, the Sendarian army came into view on the snowy hilltops to the west. Garion felt a peculiar twinge of pride as the solid, steady men he had always thought of as his countrymen marched purposefully through the snow toward the now-doomed city of Rheon.

  "I might have gotten here sooner," General Brendig apologized as he rode up, "but we had to march around that quagmire where the Drasnian pikemen are bogged down."

  "Are they all right?" Queen Porenn asked him quickly.

  "Perfectly, your Majesty," the one-armed man replied. "They just can't go anywhere, that's all."

  "How much rest will your troops need before they'll be ready to join the assault, Brendig?" Belgarath asked him.

  Brendig shrugged. "A day ought to do it, Ancient One."

  "That will give us time enough to make our plans," the old man said. "Let's get your men bivouacked and fed, and then Garion can brief you on the way things stand here."

  In the strategy meeting in the garishly carpeted main tent that evening, they smoothed out the rough edges of their relatively simple plan of attack. Mandorallen's siege engines would continue to pound the city throughout the next day and on into the following night. On the next morning, a feigned assault would be mounted against the south gate to draw as many cultists as possible away from the hastily erected fortification inside the city. Another force would march out of the secure enclave in the north quarter of Rheon to begin the house-by-house occupation of the buildings facing the perimeter. Yet another force, acting on an inspired notion of General Brendig's, would use scaling ladders as bridges to go across the housetops and drop in behind the newly erected walls inside the city.

  "The most important thing is to take Ulfgar alive," Garion cautioned. "We have to get some answers from him. I need to know just what part he played in the abduction of my son and where Geran is, if he knows."

  " And I want to know just how many of the officers in my army he's subverted," Queen Porenn added.

  "It looks as if he's going to be doing a lot of talking," Yarblek said with an evil grin. "In Gar og Nadrak we have a number of very entertaining ways of loosening people's tongues."

  "Pol will handle that," Belgarath told him firmly. "She can get the answers we need without resorting to that sort of thing."

  "Are you getting soft, Belgarath?" Barak asked.

  "Not likely," the old man replied, "but if Yarblek here gets carried away, it might go a little too far, and you can't get answers out of a dead man."

  "But afterward?" Yarblek asked eagerly.

  "I don't really care what you do with him afterward."

  The next day, Garion was in a small, curtained-off area in the main tent going over his maps and his carefully organized lists, trying to determine if there was anything he had overlooked. He had begun of late to feel as if the entire army were resting directly on his shoulders.

  "Garion," Ce'Nedra said, entering his cubicle, "some friends have arrived."

  He looked up.

  "Brand's three sons," she told him, "and that glass blower Joran." Garion frowned. "What are they doing here?" he asked. "I told them all to stay at Riva."

  They say that they've got something important to tell you."

  He sighed. "You'd better have them come in, then."

  Brand's three gray-cloaked sons and the serious-faced Joran entered and bowed. Their clothes were mud-spattered, and their faces weary. "We are not deliberately disobeying your orders, Belgarion," Kail assured him quickly, "but we discovered something very important that you have to know."

  "Oh? What's that?"

  " After you left Riva with the army, your Majesty," Kail's older brother Verdan explained, "we decided to go over the west coast of the island inch by inch. We thought there might be some clues that we overlooked in our first search."

  "Besides," Brin added, "we didn't have anything else to do."

  "Anyway," Verdan continued, "we finally found the ship those Chereks had used to come to the island."

  Their ship?" Garion asked, suddenly sitting up. "I thought that whoever it was who abducted my son used it to get off the island."

  Verdan shook his head. "The ship had been deliberately sunk, your Majesty. They filled it with rocks and then chopped holes in the bottom. We sailed right over it five times until a calm day when there wasn't any surf. It was lying on the bottom in about thirty feet of water."

  "How did the abductor get off the island, then?"

  "We had that same thought, Belgarion," Joran said. "It occurred to us that, in spite of everything, the abductor might still be on the Isle of the Winds. We started searching. That's when we found the shepherd."

  "Shepherd?"

  "He'd been alone with his flock up in the meadows on the western side of the Isle," Kail explained. "He was completely unaware of what had happened in the city. Anyway, we asked him if he had seen anything unusual at about the time Prince Geran was taken from the Citadel, and he said that he had seen a ship sail into a cove on the West coast at about that time and that somebody carrying something wrapped in a blanket got on board. Then the ship put out to sea, leaving the others behind. Belgarion, it was the same cove where the trail the Orb was following ended."

  "Which way did the ship go?"

  "South,"

  "There's one other thing, Belgarion," Joran added. "The shepherd was positive that the ship was Nyissan."

  "Nyissan?"

  "He was absolutely certain. He even described the snake banner she was flying."

  Garion got quickly to his feet. "Wait here," he told them. Then he went to the flap in the partition. "Grandfather, Aunt Pol, could you step in here for a moment?"

  "What is it, dear?" Polgara asked as she and the old sorcerer came into Garion's makeshift office, with Silk trailing curiously behind.

  "Tell them," Garion said to Kail.

  Quickly, Brand's second son repeated what they had just told Garion.

  "Salmissra?" Polgara suggested to her father.

  "Not necessarily, Pol. Nyissa is full of intrigue, and the Queen isn't behind it all -particularly after what you did to her." He frowned. "Why would a Cherek abandon one of his own boats to ride aboard a Nyissan scow? That doesn't make sense."

  "That's another question we'll have to ask Ulfgar, once we get our hands on him," Silk said.

  At dawn the next morning, a large body of troops comprised of elements from all the forces gathered for the siege began to march across the valley to the south of the city toward the steep hill and Rheon. They carried scaling ladders and battering rams in plain sight to make the defenders believe that this was a major assault.

  In the quarter of the city occupied by Garion's troops, however, Silk led a sizeable detachment of men through the dawn murk across the rooftops to clear away the cult archers and the smeared men with their boiling pitch pots occupying those houses on either side of the hastily built walls erected to bar entrance into the rest of the city.

  Garion, flanked by Barak and Mandorallen, waited in a snowy street near the perimeter of the occupied quarter.

  "This is the part I hate," he said tensely. "The waiting."

  "I must confess to thee that I myself find this lull just before a battle unpleasant," Mandorallen replied.

  "I thought Arends loved a battle." Barak grinned at his friend.

  "It is our favorite pastime," the great knight admitted, checking one of the buckles under his armor. "This interim just 'ere we join with the enemy, however, is irksome. Sober, even melancholy, thoughts distract the mind from the main purpose at hand."

  "Mandorallen," Barak laughed. "I've missed you."

  The shadowy form of Yarblek came up the street to join them. He had put aside his felt overcoat and now wore a heavy steel breastplate and carried a wicked-looking axe.

  "Everything's ready," he told them quietly. "We can start just as soon as the little thief gives us the signal."

  "Are you sure your men can pull down those wa
lls?" Barak asked him.

  Yarblek nodded. "Those people didn't have time enough to set the stones in mortar," he said. "Our grappling hooks can jerk down the walls in a few minutes."

  "You seem very fond of that particular tool," Barak observed.

  Yarblek shrugged. "I've always found that the best way to get through a wall is to yank it down."

  "In Arendia, our preference is the battering ram," Mandorallen said.

  "Those are good, too," Yarblek agreed, "but the trouble with a ram is that you're right under the wall when it falls. I've never particularly enjoyed having building stones bouncing off the top of my head."

  They waited.

  "Has anybody seen Lelldorin?" Garion asked.

  "He went with Silk," Barak replied. "He seemed to think that he could find more targets from up on a roof."

  "He was ever an enthusiast." Mandorallen smiled. "I confess, however, that I have never seen his equal with the longbow."

  "There it is," Barak said, pointing at a flaming arrow arching high above the rooftops. "That's the signal."

  Garion drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "All right. Sound your horn, Mandorallen, and let's get started."

  The brazen note of Mandorallen's horn shattered the stillness. From every street and alleyway, Garion's army poured out to begin the final assault on Rheon. Rivans, Algars, Nadraks, and the solid men of Sendaria crunched through the snow toward the perimeter with their weapons in their hands. Three score of Yarblek's leather-clad mercenaries ran on ahead, their grappling hooks swinging from their hands.

  With Barak at his side, Garion clambered over the treacherous, sliding rubble of the houses that had been pulled down to form the perimeter and over the half-frozen bodies of arrow-stitched cultists who had fallen earlier. A few -though not many- cultists had escaped the hasty floor-by-floor search of Silk's men in the houses facing the perimeter and they desperately showered the advancing troops with arrows. At Brendig's sharp command, detachments of Sendars veered and broke into each house to neutralize those remaining defenders efficiently.

  The scene beyond the perimeter was one of enormous confusion. Advancing behind a wall of shields, Garion's army swept the streets clear of the now-desperate cultists. The air was thick with arrows and curses, and several houses were already shooting flames out through their roofs.