Rivan Codex Series

by Eddings, David

  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 talking 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 farmlands," 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 through 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 manoeuver Garion had seen Silk perform so many times in the past. This time, however, the technique failed. 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.

  "Nice job," Silk congratulated her.

  "Fairly routine." She shrugged, carefully coiling up her garrote.

  "You seem to be taking it quite calmly."

  "There's no particular reason to get excited, Kheldar. It's part of what we were trained to do, after all."

  He looked as if he were about to reply, but her matter-of-fact tone obviously baffled him.

  "Yes?" she asked.

  "Nothing."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  "Stop that!" Durnik said in disgust to Sadi, who was moving about the clearing casually sticking his small, poisoned dagger into each of the bodies littering the ground.

  "Just making sure, Goodman," Sadi replied coolly. "It's not prudent to leave an enemy behind you who might be feigning death." He moved over to the black-robed man whom Silk had felled. "What's this?" he said with some surprise. "This one's still alive." He reached down to push the dying man's hood aside to look at his face, then pulled back his hand with a sharp intake of his breath. "You'd better have a look at this one, Belgarath," he said.

  Belgarath crossed the clearing to the eunuch's side.

  "Doesn't that purple lining on the inside of his hood mean that he's a Grolim?" Sadi asked.

  Belgarath nodded bleakly. He bent and lightly touched the hilt of Silk's dagger that still protruded from the robed man's stomach. "He doesn't have much time left," he said. "Can you get him conscious enough to answer a few questions?"

  "I can try," Sadi told him. He went to his horse and took a vial of yellow liquid from his red case. "Could you get me a cup of water, Goodman?" he asked Durnik.

  The smith's face was disapproving, but he fetched a tin cup from one of the packs and filled it from one of their water bags.

  Sadi carefully measured a few drops of the yellow liquid into the cup, then swirled it around a few times. He knelt beside the dying man and almost tenderly lifted his head. "Here," he said gently, "drink this. It might make you feel better." He supported the Grolim's head on his arm and held the cup to his lips. Weakly, the stricken man drank, then lay back. After a moment, a serene smile came to his ashen face.

  "There, isn't that better?"

  "Much better," the dying man croaked.

  "That was quite a skirmish, wasn't it?"

  "We thought to surprise you," the Grolim admitted, "but we were the ones who got the surprise."

  "Your Master—what was his name again? I'm terrible at names."

  "Morgat," the Grolim supplied with a bemused look on his face, "Hierarch of Rak Cthan."

  "Oh, yes, now I remember. Anyway, Mor
gat should have given you more men to help you."

  "I hired the men myself—at Rak Cthaka. They told me that they were professionals, but—" He began to cough weakly.

  "Don't tire yourself," Sadi said. He paused. "What's Morgat's interest in us?" he asked.

  "He's acting on the instructions of Agachak," the Grolim replied, his voice little more than a whisper. "Agachak is not one to take chances, and some very serious accusations were made back at Rak Urga, I understand. Agachak has ordered that every Grolim priest of the purple seek you out."

  Sadi sighed. "It's more or less what I'd expected," he said mournfully. "People always seem to distrust me. Tell me, how did you ever manage to find us?"

  "It was Cthrag Yaska," the Grolim replied, his breathing growing even more labored. "Its accursed song rings across Cthol Murgos like a beacon, drawing every Grolim of the purple directly to you." The dying man drew in a deep breath, and his unfocused eyes suddenly became alert. "What was in that cup?" he demanded sharply. He pushed Sadi's arm away and tried to rise to a sitting position. A great gush of blood spurted from his mouth, and his eyes went blank. He shuddered once with a long, gurgling groan. Then he fell limply back.

  "Dead," Sadi noted clinically. "That's the problem with oret. It's a little hard on the heart, and this fellow wasn't in very good shape to begin with. I'm sorry, Belgarath, but it was the best I could do."

  "It was enough, Sadi," the old man replied bleakly. "Come with me, Garion," he said. "Let's go someplace quiet. You and I are going to have to have a long talk with the Orb."

  "Do you suppose that you could hold off on that, Belgarath?" Sadi asked, looking around nervously. "I think we want to get as far away from here as we can—almost immediately."

  "I hardly expect those fellows to come back, Sadi," Silk drawled.

  "That's not what concerns me, Kheldar. It's not prudent to remain in the vicinity of so many dead bodies in this forest, and we've lingered much too long already."

  "Would you like to explain that?" Garion asked.

  "Do you remember the warning the Sendar on the road gave to you and Kheldar?"