He was bundled to the ears in furs, and he was muttering to himself as he floundered along through the snow. Zedar talks to himself a lot. He always has.
I could not for the life of me figure out what he was up to. If he thought that he could keep up with those long-legged Alorns, he was sadly mistaken. I was sure that Cherek and his boys were at least ten miles ahead of him by now. He was still angling slightly up hill, and by the time the moon set again he’d reached the crest of the north range. Then he stopped.
I drifted to a nearby tree and watched him - owlishly.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist that.
- ‘Master!’ - His thought almost knocked me off the limb I was perched on. Lord, Zedar could be clumsy when he got excited.
- I hear thee, my son. - I recognized the voice. I was a bit astounded to discover that Torak was almost as clumsy as Zedar was. He was a God! Was that the best he could do? Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Torak’s divinity had made him so sure of himself that he got careless.
- I have failed, Master. - Zedar’s silent voice was trembling. Torak was not the sort to accept the failure of his underlings graciously.
- Failed? - There were all sorts of unpleasant implications in the maimed God’s tone. - I will not accept that, Zedar. Thou must not fail. -
- Our plan was flawed, Master. Belgarath is far more powerful than we had anticipated. -
- How did this come to pass, Zedar? He is thy brother. How is it that thou wert ignorant of the extent of his might? -
- He seeméd me but a foolish man, Master. His mind is not quick, nor his perceptions acute. He is, moreover, a drunken lecher with scant morality and little seriousness. -
You rarely hear anything good about yourself when you eavesdrop. Have you ever noticed that?
- How did he manage to thwart thee, my son? - There was a steely accusation in Torak’s voice.
- He hath in some manner unknown to me gained knowledge of the techniques by which the magicians of the Morindim raise and control the demons which are their slaves. I tell thee truly, Master, he doth far surpass those savages. -
Naturally he didn’t know how I’d learned Morind magic. He’d been in Mallorea when I’d gone to Morindland to take lessons.
- What did he do, Zedar? - Torak demanded. - I must know the extent of his capabilities ere I consult with the Necessity which guides us. -
It took me a moment to realize what I’d just heard. The other Necessity - the opposite of the one that had taken up residence in my head - was not in direct communication with Zedar! Torak stood between them! He was too jealous to permit anyone to have access to that spirit - or whatever you want to call it. There was my edge! I had them! I’d be told if I made a mistake. Zedar wouldn’t. I suddenly wanted to flap my wings and crow like a rooster.
I listened very carefully while Zedar described my confrontation with the Morindim and their demons. He exaggerated a bit. Zedar’s language was always a bit excessive, but he had a very good reason for it this time. His continued good health depended on his persuading Torak that I was well-nigh invincible.
There was a long silence after Zedar had finished his extravagant description of my Demon Lord.
- I will consider this and consult with the Necessity. - Torak said finally. - Dog the steps of thy brother whilst I devise some new means to delay him. We need not destroy him. The TIME of the EVENT is as important as the EVENT itself. -
The implications there were clear. There weren’t any other traps out there. They’d hung everything on the Morindim. I felt like grinning, but that’s a little hard to do with a hooked beak. There was no need now to wait any longer. I knew what I had to know. I decided to put Zedar out of action right here and now. I could fly over the top of him, change back to my own form, and fall on him like a collapsing roof.
- Not yet - the voice told me. - It isn’t time yet. -
- When then? -
- Just a few more minutes, and you might want to reconsider your plan. I think it might have some holes in it. -
After a moment’s thought, I realized that the voice was right. Falling on top of Zedar wasn’t a very good idea. I’d have just as much chance of knocking myself senseless as I would him. Besides, I wanted to talk with him a little first.
The sense of Torak’s somewhat nebulous presence was gone now. The maimed God in Cthol Mishrak was busy consulting with that other awareness. Zedar started down the hill through the evergreens, angling back to pick up our trail.
I flew over him and landed in the snow several hundred yards in front of him. Then I changed back into my own form and waited for him, leaning rather casually against a tree.
I could see that greenish light of his bobbing through the trees as he came toward me, and I took advantage of the time to put a lid on my towering anger. It’s not a good idea to let your emotions run away with you when you’re involved in a confrontation.
Then he came out of the trees on the other side of the clearing where I’d stationed myself.
‘What kept you?’ I asked him in a calm, run-of-the mill tone of voice.
‘Belgarath!’ he gasped.
‘You must be half-asleep, Belzedar. Couldn’t you feel my presence? I wasn’t trying to hide it.’
‘Thank the Gods you’re here,’ he said with feigned enthusiasm. He was quick on his feet; I’ll give him that. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you?’
‘I’ve been running as a wolf. That might have dulled my perceptions. What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you. You and the Alorns are running into an unnecessary danger.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s no need for you to go to Mallorea. I’ve already retrieved the Orb. This absurd quest of yours is just a waste of time.’
‘What an amazing thing. Let’s see it.’
‘Ah - I didn’t think it was safe to bring it up here with me. I wasn’t positive I could catch up with you, and I didn’t want to take it back to Mallorea, so I put it in a safe place.’
‘Good idea. How did you manage to get it away from Torak?’ As long as he was being so creative, I thought I’d give him a chance to expand on his wild story.
‘I’ve been at this for two thousand years, Belgarath. I’ve been working on Urvon all this time. He’s still a Grolim, but he’s afraid of the power of our Master’s jewel. He distracted Torak, and I was able to slip into that iron tower at Cthol Mishrak and steal the Orb.’
‘Where did Torak keep it?’ That particular bit of information might be very useful later on.
‘It was in a room adjoining the one where he spends all his time. He didn’t want that iron box in the same room with him. The temptation to open it might have been too great for him.’
‘Well,’ I said blandly, ‘I guess that takes care of all of that, then. I’m glad you came along when you did, brother. I wasn’t really too eager to go to Mallorea. I’ll go fetch Cherek and his sons while you go pick up the Orb. Then we can all go back to the Vale.’ I waited for a little bit to give him a moment to exult over his success in deceiving me. ‘Isn’t that sort of what you’d expect from a drunken lecher with scant morality and little seriousness?’ I added, throwing his own words back in his teeth. Then I sighed with genuine regret. ‘Why, Belzedar?’ I asked him. ‘Why have you betrayed our Master?’
His head came up sharply, and his look was stricken.
‘You ought to pay more attention, old boy,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been almost on top of you for die past ten hours. Did you really think it was necessary to set fire to Etchquaw?’ I’ll admit that I was goading him. He was still my brother, and I didn’t want to be the one to strike the first blow. I bored in inexorably. ‘You’re Torak’s third disciple, aren’t you, Zedar? You’ve gone over to the other side. You’ve sold your soul to that one-eyed monster in Cthol Mishrak. What did he offer you, Zedar? What is there in this whole world that was worth what you’ve done?’
He ac
tually broke down at that point. ‘I had no choice, Belgarath,’ he sobbed. ‘I’d thought that I could deceive Torak - that I could pretend to accept him and serve him - but he put his hand on my soul and tore it out of me. His touch, Belgarath! Dear God, his touch!’
I braced myself. I knew what was coming. Zedar always overacted. It was his one great weakness.
He started by throwing fire into my face. Between one spurious sob and the next, his arm whipped back and then flashed forward with a great blob of incandescent flame nestled in his palm.
I brushed it aside with a negligent gesture. ‘Not good enough, brother,’ I told him. Then I knocked him cart-wheeling through the snow with my fist. It was tactically sound. He’d have felt my Will building anyway, and I got an enormous satisfaction out of punching him in the mouth.
He came up spitting blood and teeth, and trying to gather his wits. I didn’t give him time for that, however. He spent the next several minutes dancing in the snow, dodging the lightning bolts I threw at him. I still didn’t want to kill him, so I gave him an instant of warning before I turned each bolt loose. It did keep him off-balance, though, and the sizzling noise when the bolts hit the snow really distracted him.
Then he enveloped himself in a cloud of absolute darkness, trying to hide. I dissolved his cloud and kept shooting lightning at him. He really didn’t like that. Zedar’s afraid of a lot of things, and lightning’s one of them. My thunderclaps and the sizzle and steam definitely upset him.
He tried more fire, but I smothered each of his flames before he even got it well-started. I suppose I might have toyed with him longer, but by now he fully understood that I had the upper hand. There was no real point in grinding his face in that any more, so I jumped on him and quite literally beat him into the ground with my bare hands. I could have done it any number of other ways, I guess, but his betrayal seemed to call for a purely physical chastisement. I hammered on him with my fists for a while, and right at first he gave as good as he got. We banged on each other for several minutes, but I was enjoying it far more than he was. I had a great deal of pent-up anger, and hitting him felt very, very good.
I finally gave him a good solid punch on the side of his head, and his eyes glazed over, and he slumped senseless into the snow.
‘That’ll teach you,’ I muttered to him, rising and standing over his unconscious body. It was a silly thing to say, but I had to say something.
I had a little problem, though. What was I going to do with him now? I wasn’t going to kill him, and the blow I had given him wouldn’t keep him unconscious for very long. I was certain that the rules of this encounter prohibited the voice inside my head from making any suggestions, so I was on my own.
I considered the inert form at my feet. In his present condition, Zedar posed no threat to anyone. All I really had to do was keep him in that condition. I took him by the shoulders and dragged him back in among the trees. Then I piled branches over him. In spite of everything, I didn’t want him to freeze to death or get smothered by a sudden snow-squall. Then I reached my hand in under the branches, found his face, and gathered my Will. ‘This all must have been exhausting for you, Zedar,’ I told him. ‘Why don’t you see if you can catch up on your sleep?’
Then I released my Will. I smiled and stood up. I’d gauged it rather carefully. Zedar would sleep for at least six months, and that would keep him out of my hair while the Alorns and I went to Cthol Mishrak to finish what we’d set out to do.
I felt quite pleased with myself as I resumed the form of the wolf.
Then I went looking for Bear-shoulders and his boys.
Chapter 14
Evidently the word of my Demon Lord had gotten around, because we didn’t encounter any more of the Morindim as we crossed the southern edge of their range. The moon had gone off to the south, but the northern lights illuminated the sky well enough, and we made good time. We soon reached the shore of Torak’s Sea.
Fortunately the beach was littered with huge piles of driftwood. Otherwise, I don’t think we’d have been able to tell where the land stopped and the sea began. The ground along that beach was nearly as flat as the frozen sea, and both were covered with knee-deep snow.
‘We go north along the beach from here,’ Riva told us. ‘After a while it swings east. The bridge is off in that direction.’
‘Let’s stay clear of your bridge,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘Torak knows we’re coming, and by now he knows that Zedar wasn’t able to stop us. He might have a few surprises waiting for us if we follow that string of islands. Let’s cross the ice instead.’
‘There aren’t any landmarks out there, Belgarath,’ he objected, ‘and we can’t even take our bearings on the sun. We’ll get lost.’
‘No we won’t, Riva. I’ve got a very good sense of direction.’
‘Even in the dark?’
‘Yes.’ I looked around, squinting into the bitterly cold wind sweeping down out of the northwest. ‘Let’s get behind that pile of driftwood,’ I told them. ‘We’ll build a fire, have a hot meal, and get some sleep. The next several days aren’t going to be very pleasant.’
Crossing open ice in the dead of winter is one of the more uncomfortable experiences you’ll ever have, I expect. Once you get out a ways from shore, the wind has total access to you, and the arctic wind blows continually. Of course, it sweeps the ice clear of snow, so at least you don’t have to wade through snowdrifts. There are enough other problems to make up for the absence of drifts, though. When people talk about crossing ice, they’re usually talking about a frozen lake, which is normally as flat as a table-top. Sea-ice isn’t like that because of the tides. The continual rising and falling of the water during the autumn and early winter keeps breaking up the ice before it gets duck enough to become stable, and that creates ridges and deep cracks that make crossing a stretch of sea-ice almost as difficult as crossing a range of mountains. I didn’t enjoy it very much.
The sun had long since abandoned the north, and the moon had wandered away, so I can’t really give you any idea of how long it took us to make it across - probably not as long as it seemed, since I reverted to the form of the wolf and I could keep going for a long time without slowing down. Moreover, my malicious running of the Alorns had conditioned them to the point that they could almost keep up with me.
Anyway, we finally reached the coast of Mallorea - just in time as it turned out, because a three-day blizzard came up almost as soon as we hit the beach. We took shelter under a mountainous pile of driftwood to wait out the storm. Dras turned out to be very useful at that point. He took his battle-axe to that jumble of logs and limbs and hollowed us out a very comfortable den near the center of the pile. We built a fire and gradually thawed out.
During one of his visits to the Vale, Beldin had sketched me out a rough map of Mallorea, and I spent a great deal of time hunched over that map while the blizzard was busy drifting about eight feet of snow over our shelter. ‘How far is your bridge up the coast from where we crossed?’ I asked Riva when the wind began to subside.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifty leagues or so, I guess.’
‘You’re a lot of help, Riva,’ I told him sourly. I stared at the map again. Beldin hadn’t known about the bridge, of course, so he hadn’t drawn it in, and he also hadn’t included a scale, so all I could do was guess. ‘As closely as I can make it out, we’re approximately due west of Cthol Mishrak,’ I told my friends.
‘Approximately?’ Bear-shoulders asked.
‘This map isn’t all that good. It gives me a general idea of where the city is, but that’s about all. When the wind dies down a bit more, we’ll scout around. Cthol Mishrak’s on a river, and there’s a swamp north of that river. If we find a swamp inland, we’ll know that we’re fairly close.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘Then we’ll have to go looking for it - or the river.’
Cherek squinted at my map. ‘We could be north of the swamp, Belgar
ath,’ he objected. ‘- or south of the river, for that matter. We could end up wandering around up here until summer time.’
‘Have you got anything better to do?’
‘Well, no, but-’
‘Let’s not start worrying until we find out what’s lying inland. Your auguries say this is your lucky year, so maybe we’ve come ashore in the right place.’
‘But you don’t believe in auguries.’
‘No, but you do. Maybe that’s all it takes. If you think you’re lucky, you probably are.’
‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ he said, his face suddenly brightening. You can convince an Alorn of almost anything if you talk fast enough.
We rolled up in our furs and slept at that point. There really wasn’t anything else to do, unless we wanted to sit around and watch Dras play with his dice. Drasnians love to gamble, but I got much more entertainment from dreaming about my wife.
I can’t be sure how long I slept, but some time later, Riva shook me awake. ‘I think you’d better reset that sense of direction of yours, Belgarath,’ he said accusingly.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I just went outside to see if the wind had died. The sun’s coming up.’
Belgarath the Sorcerer Page 21