Читать книгу Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection - David Eddings - Страница 26

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 thick 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, Belgarath,’ 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.’

I sat up quickly. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Go wake up your father and brothers,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a little light for a while. Let’s take advantage of it to have a look inland. Tell them not to bother breaking down our camp. We’ll go take a look and then come back. I want it to be dark again before we start out.’

There were rounded mounds backing the beach where we’d sat out the storm, and once we got to them, Dras negligently hit the snow-covered side of one of them with his axe. ‘Sand,’ he reported. That sounded promising.

We topped the dunes and gazed out over a scrubby forest that looked almost like a jungle dotted here and there with broad clearings.

‘What do you think?’ Cherek asked me. ‘It looks sort of boggy. It’s frozen, of course, and knee-deep in snow, but those clearings would be open water in the summer if it is that swamp.’

‘Let’s go look,’ I said, squinting nervously at the fading ‘dawn’ along the southern horizon. ‘We’d better hurry if we want to reach it before it gets dark again.’

We trotted down the back-side of the dune and out among the gnarled, stunted trees. When we got to one of those clearings, I kicked the snow out of the way and had a look. ‘Ice,’ I said with a certain satisfaction. ‘Chop a hole in it, Dras. I need to have a look at the water.’

‘You’re dulling the edge of my axe, Belgarath,’ he complained.

‘You can sharpen it again. Start chopping.’

He muttered a few choice oaths, bunched those enormous shoulders, and began to chop ice.

‘Harder, Dras,’ I urged him. ‘I want to get down to water before the light goes.’

He began to chop harder and faster, sending splinters and chunks of ice in all directions. After several minutes, water began to seep up from the bottom of the hole.

I suppressed an urge to dance with glee. The water was brown. ‘That’s enough,’ I told the huge man. I knelt, scooped up a handful of water and tasted it. ‘Brackish,’ I announced. ‘It’s swamp-water, all right. It looks as if your auguries were right, Cherek. This is your lucky year. Let’s go back to the beach and have some breakfast.’

Algar fell in beside me as we started back. ‘I’d say it’s your lucky year too, Belgarath,’ he murmured quietly. ‘Father would have been a little grumpy if we’d missed that swamp.’

‘I can’t possibly lose, Algar,’ I replied gaily. ‘When we get back to the beach, I’ll borrow your brother’s dice and roll the main all day long.’

‘I don’t play dice. What are you talking about?’

‘It’s a game called hazard,’ I explained. ‘You’re supposed to call a number before your first roll. If it comes up, you win. That number’s called “the main”.’

‘And if it doesn’t come up, you lose?’

‘It’s a little more complicated than that. Have Dras show you.’

‘I’ve got better things to do with my money, Belgarath, and I’ve heard stories about my brother’s dice.’

‘You don’t think he’d cheat you, do you? You are his brother.’

‘If there was money involved, Dras would cheat our own mother.’

You see what I mean about Drasnians?

We returned to our den, and Riva cooked an extensive breakfast. Cooking is a chore that nobody really likes – except for my daughter, of course – so it usually fell to the youngest. Oddly, Riva wasn’t a bad cook.

You didn’t know that, did you, Pol?

‘Will you recognize this place when you see it?’ Dras rumbled around a mouthful of bacon.

‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ I replied blandly, ‘since it’s the only city north of the river.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It’ll sort of stand out,’ I continued. ‘It’s got a perpetual cloud-bank over it.’

He frowned. ‘What causes that?’

‘Torak, from what Beldin says.’

‘Why would he do that?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe he hates the sun.’ I didn’t want to get too exotic in my explanation. Little things confused Dras. A big one might have unraveled his whole brain.

I apologize to the entire Drasnian nation for that last remark. Dras was brave and strong and absolutely loyal, but sometimes he was just a little slow of thought. His descendants have more than overcome that. If anyone doesn’t believe that, I invite him to try having business dealings with Prince Kheldar.

‘All right then,’ I told them after we’d eaten, ‘Torak’s mind is very rigid. Once he gets hold of an idea, he won’t let go of it. He almost certainly knows about that bridge – particularly since the Karands use it to go over to trade with the Morindim, and the Karands are Torak-worshipers now. They probably only use the bridge in the summer when there isn’t any ice, though. I don’t think Torak would even take the ice into account.’

‘Where are we going with this?’ Cherek asked.

‘I’m sure Torak’s expecting us, but he’s expecting us to come at him from the north – from the direction of the bridge. If he’s put people out there to stop us, that’s where they’ll be.’

Riva laughed delightedly. ‘But we won’t be coming from the north, will we? We’ll be coming from the west instead.’

‘Good point,’ Algar murmured with an absolutely straight face. He concealed it very well, but Algar was much brighter than his brothers – or his father, for that matter. Maybe that’s why he didn’t waste his breath trying to talk to them.

‘I can do certain things to keep the Angaraks facing north,’ I continued. ‘Now that the blizzard’s blown off, I’ll decorate the snowbanks up there near your bridge with footprints and perfume the bushes with our scent. That should throw the Chandim off.’

‘Chandim?’ Dras gave me that blank stare.

‘The Hounds of Torak. They’ll be trying to sniff us out. I’ll give them enough clues to make them do their sniffing up north of here. If we’re half-way careful, we should be able to reach Cthol Mishrak without being noticed.’

‘You knew this all along, didn’t you, Belgarath?’ Riva said. ‘That’s why you made us cross the ice where we did instead of going up to the bridge.’

I shrugged. ‘Naturally,’ I replied modestly. It was a barefaced lie, of course. I’d only just put it all together myself. But a reputation for infallible cleverness doesn’t hurt when you’re dealing with Alorns. The time might come very soon when I’d be making decisions based on hunches, and I wouldn’t have time for arguments.

It was dark again by the time we crawled out of our den and struck out across the snowy dunes toward the frozen bog to the east. We soon discovered that not all of the Chandim had gone north to lie in wait for us. We came across tracks as large as horses’ hooves in the fresh snow from time to time, and we could hear them baying off in the swamp now and again.

I’ll make a confession here. Despite my strong reservations about it, for once I did tamper with the weather – just a bit. I created a small portable fog-bank for us to hide in and a very docile little snow-cloud that followed us like a puppy, happily burying our tracks in new snow. It doesn’t really take much to make a cloud happy. I kept both the fog and the cloud tightly controlled, though, so their effects didn’t alter any major weather patterns. Between the two of them, they kept the Chandim from finding us with their eyes, and the new-fallen snow muffled the sound of our passage. Then I summoned a cooperative family of civet-cats to trail along behind us. Civet-cats are nice little creatures related to skunks, except that they have spots instead of stripes. Their means of dealing with creatures unlucky enough to offend them are the same, though – as one of Torak’s Hounds discovered when he got too close. I don’t imagine he was very popular in his pack for the next several weeks.

We crept unobserved through that frozen swamp for several days, hiding in thickets during the brief daylight hours and traveling during the long arctic nights.

Then one morning our fog-bank turned opalescent. I let it dissipate so that we could take a look, but it really wasn’t necessary. I knew what was lighting up the fog. The sun had finally cleared the horizon. Winter was wearing on, and it was time for us to hurry. As the fog thinned, we saw that we were nearing the eastern edge of the swamp. A low range of hills rose a few miles ahead, and just beyond those hills was an inky black cloud-bank. ‘That’s it,’ I told Cherek and his boys, speaking very quietly.

‘That’s what?’ Dras asked me.

‘Cthol Mishrak. I told you about the clouds, remember?’

‘Oh, yes. I guess I’d forgotten.’

‘Let’s take cover and wait for dark. We have to start being very careful now.’

We burrowed our way into a thicket growing out of a low hummock, and I passed my snow-cloud over our tracks once or twice and then sent it home with my thanks. As an afterthought, I also released the civet-cats.

‘You have a plan?’ Riva asked me.

‘I’m working on it,’ I replied shortly. Actually, I didn’t have a plan. I hadn’t really thought we’d live long enough to get this far. I decided that it might be a good time to have a chat with my friend in the attic.

– Are you still there? – I asked tentatively.

– No, I’m off somewhere chasing moonbeams. Where else would I be, Belgarath? –

– Silly question, I guess. Are you permitted to give me a description of the city? –

– No, but you’ve already got one. Beldin told you everything you need to know. You know that Torak’s in the iron tower and that the Orb’s there with him. –

– Should I get ready for anything? I mean, is there going to be another one of those meetings here in Cthol Mishrak? The notion of getting into a wrestling match with Torak doesn’t appeal to me very much. –

– No. That was all settled when you met Zedar. –

– We actually won one? –

– We win about half of them. Don’t get overconfident, though. Pure chance could trip you up. You know what to do when you get there, don’t you? –

And suddenly I did know. Don’t ask me how, I just did. – Maybe I’d better scout on ahead, – I suggested.

– Absolutely not. Don’t give yourself away by wandering around aimlessly. Take the Alorns, do what you came to do, and get out. –

– Are we on schedule? –

– Yes – if you get it done tonight. After tonight, you’re in trouble. Don’t try to talk to me again – not until you’re clear of the city. I won’t be permitted to answer you. Good luck. – Then he was gone again.

The light lasted for about three hours – which only seemed like about three years to me. When the lingering twilight finally faded, I was very jumpy. ‘Let’s go,’ I told the Alorns. ‘If we come across any Angaraks, put them down quickly, and don’t make any more noise than you absolutely have to.’

‘What’s the plan?’ Cherek asked me.

‘I’m going to make it up as we go along,’ I replied. Why should I be the only one with bad nerves?

He swallowed hard. ‘Lead the way,’ he told me. Say what you like about Alorns – and I usually do – but no one can fault their bravery.

We crept out of the thicket and waded through the snow until we reached the edge of the swamp. I wasn’t particularly worried about tracks, since the Grolims had been patrolling this part of the swamp regularly, and their tracks were everywhere, mingled with the occasional tracks of one of the Hounds. A few more wouldn’t mean anything.

Our luck was holding. A blizzard had come in out of the west, and the screaming wind had scoured all the snow off the hillsides facing the swamp. It was no more than an hour until we reached the top of the hill we were climbing, and then we got our first look at the City of Endless Night.

I could see Torak’s iron tower, of course, but that wasn’t what concerned me. The light wasn’t good, naturally, but it was good enough to reveal the fact that Cthol Mishrak had a wall around it. I swore.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dras asked me.

‘You see that wall?’

‘Yes.’

‘That means we’ll have to go through a gate, and you don’t look all that much like a Grolim.’

He shrugged. ‘You worry too much, Belgarath,’ he rumbled. ‘We’ll just kill the gate-guards and then walk in like we own the place.’

‘I think we might be able to come up with something a little better than that,’ Algar said quietly. ‘Let’s see how high the wall is.’

As I think I mentioned, the wind of that blizzard had swept the west side of the hills bare of snow – and drifted it all on the east side. We stared at those six-foot drifts. This wasn’t going at all well.

‘There’s no help for it, Belgarath,’ Cherek told me gravely. ‘We’re going to have to follow that road.’ He pointed at a narrow track that wound up the hill from the gate of the city.

‘Cherek,’ I replied in a pained tone, ‘that path’s as crooked as a broken-backed snake, and the snow’s piled up so high on both sides that we won’t be able to see anybody coming toward us. We’ll be right on top of him before we even know he’s there.’

He shrugged. ‘But we’ll be expecting him,’ he said. ‘He won’t be expecting us. That’s all the advantage we really need, isn’t it?’

It was sheer idiocy, of course, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything better – short of wading through the drifts, and we didn’t have time for that. We had an appointment in Cthol Mishrak, and I didn’t want to be late. ‘We’ll try it,’ I gave in.

We did encounter one Grolim on our way down to the city, but Algar and Riva jumped him before he could even cry out, and they made quick work of him with their daggers. Then they picked him up, swung him a few times, and threw him up over the top of the snowbank to the left while Dras kicked snow over the pool of blood in the middle of the trail.

‘My sons work well together, don’t they?’ Cherek noted with fatherly pride.

‘Very well,’ I agreed. ‘Now, how are we going to get off this trail before we reach the gate?’

‘We’ll get a little closer, and then we’ll burrow through the snow off to one side. The last one through can kick the roof of our tunnel down. Nobody’ll ever know we’ve been here.’

‘Clever. Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘Probably because you’re not used to living in snow-country. When I was about fifteen, there was a married woman in Val Alorn that sort of took my eye. Her husband was old, but very jealous. I had a snow-tunnel burrowed all the way around his house before the winter was over.’

‘What an absolutely fascinating sidelight on your boyhood. How old was she?’

‘Oh, about thirty-five or so. She taught me all sorts of things.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I could tell you about them, if you’d like.’

‘Some other time, maybe. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.’

I’ll wager you never read about that conversation in the BOOK OF ALORN.

Algar moved on slightly ahead of us, carefully peeking around each bend in that winding path. Finally he came back. ‘This is far enough,’ he said shortly. ‘The gate’s just around the next turn.’

‘How high’s the wall?’ his father asked.

‘Not bad,’ Algar replied, ‘only about twelve feet.’

‘Good,’ Cherek said. ‘I’ll lead out. You boys know what to do when you come along behind.’

They all nodded, taking no offense at being called ‘boys.’ Cherek lived to be over ninety, and he still called them ‘boys.’

Tunneling through snow isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds, if you’ve got some help. Cherek clawed his way through, angling slightly upward as he swam through toward a point some fifty feet or so to the left of the gate. Dras followed behind him, raising up every few inches to compress the snow above him. Riva went next, pushing at the sides with his shoulders to compress the snow there. ‘You next,’ Algar told me. ‘Bounce up and down on your belly to flatten the floor of the tunnel.’

‘This isn’t a permanent structure, Algar,’ I protested.

‘We do sort of plan to leave, don’t we, Belgarath?’

‘Oh. I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead.’

He was polite enough not to make an issue of that. ‘I’ll come last,’ he told me. ‘I know how to close up the entrance so that nobody’ll see it.’

Despite my sense of urgency, I knew that we still had at least fifteen hours until the sun would briefly peek over the southern horizon again. We burrowed like moles for a couple of hours, and then I bumped into Riva’s feet. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Why are we stopping?’

‘Father’s reached the wall,’ he replied. ‘You see? That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘Where did you fellows come up with this?’

‘We do it sometimes when we’re hunting, and it’s a very good way to sneak up on enemies.’

‘How are we going to get over the wall?’

‘I’ll stand on Dras’ shoulders, and Algar’ll stand on father’s. We’ll hoist ourselves up on top of the wall and then pull the rest of you up. It probably wouldn’t work if we were shorter. We came up with the idea during the last clan war.’ He peered on ahead. ‘We can move on now. Father’s out of the tunnel.’

We inched our way forward, and we were soon standing beside the wall. Cherek and Dras braced their hands against the stones, and Algar and Riva clambered up their backs, reached up, grabbed the top of the wall, and pulled themselves up.

‘Belgarath first,’ Riva whispered down. ‘Hold him up so I can reach his hand.’

Dras took me by the waist and lifted me up in the air. That’s how I found out how strong Riva’s hands were. I half-way expected to see blood come spurting out of the ends of my fingers when he seized my outstretched hand.

And then we were inside the city. Beldin had described Cthol Mishrak as a suburb of Hell, and I saw no reason to dispute that description. The buildings were all jammed together, and the narrow, twisting alleyways were covered over by the jutting second stories which butted tightly together overhead. The idea made some sense in a city so far north, I’ll grant you. At least the streets weren’t buried in snow, but the total lack of any windows in the buildings made the streets resemble hallways in some dungeon. They were poorly lighted by widely spaced torches that guttered and gave off clouds of pitchy smoke. It was depressing, but my friends and I didn’t really want brightly lighted boulevards. We were sneaking, and that’s an activity best performed in the dark.

I’m not certain if those narrow, smoky corridors were unpopulated by the arrangement between my friend in the attic and his opposite, or if it was a custom here in the City of Endless Night – which stands to reason, since the Hounds were out – but we didn’t encounter a soul as we worked our way deeper and deeper into the very heart of Angarak.

We finally emerged in the unlovely square in the middle of the city and looked through the perpetually murky air at the iron tower Beldin had described. It was naturally, when you take Torak’s personality into account, even higher than Aldur’s tower. It was absolutely huge and monumentally ugly. Iron doesn’t make for very pretty buildings. It was black, of course, and even from a distance it looked pitted. It had been there for almost two thousand years, after all. The Alorns and I weren’t really looking at that monument to Torak’s ego, however. We were looking at the pair of huge Hounds guarding the rivet-studded door.

‘Now what?’ Algar whispered.

‘Nothing simpler,’ Dras said confidently. ‘I’ll just walk across the square and bash out their brains with my axe.’

I had to head that off immediately. The other Alorns might very well see nothing at all wrong with his absurd plan. ‘It won’t work,’ I said quickly. ‘They’ll start baying as soon as they see you, and that’ll rouse the whole city.’

‘Well, how are we going to get past them then?’ he demanded truculently.

‘I’m working on it.’ I thought very fast, and it suddenly came to me. I knew it’d work, because it already had once. ‘Let’s pull back into this alley,’ I muttered. ‘I’m going to change again.’

‘You’re not as big as they are when you’re a wolf, Belgarath,’ Cherek pointed out.

‘I’m not going to change myself into a wolf,’ I assured him. ‘You’d better all step back a ways. I might be a little dangerous until I get it under control.’

They backed nervously away from me.

I didn’t turn myself into a wolf, or an owl, or an eagle, or even a dragon.

I became a civet-cat.

The Alorns backed away even farther.

The idea probably wouldn’t have worked if Torak’s Hounds had been real dogs. Even the stupidest dog knows enough to avoid a civet-cat or a skunk. The Chandim weren’t really dogs, though. They were Grolims, and they looked on the wild creatures around them with contempt. I flared out my spotted tail and, chittering warningly, I started across the snow-covered plaza toward them. When I got close enough for them to see me, one of them growled at me. ‘Go away,’ he said in a hideous voice. He actually seemed to chew on the words.

I kept moving toward them. Then, when I judged that they were in range, I turned around and pointed the dangerous end of my assumed form at them.

I don’t think I need to go into the details. The procedure’s a little disgusting, and I wouldn’t want to offend any ladies who might read this.

When a real dog has a brush with a skunk or a civet-cat, he does a lot of yelping and howling to let the world know how sorry he feels for himself, but the pair at the door weren’t real dogs. They did a lot of whining though, and they rolled around, digging their noses into the snow and pawing at their eyes.

I watched them clinically over my shoulder, and then I gave them another dose, just for good measure.

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.