David Eddings - Magician's Gambit

“They’re all right,” Silk assured him. “I left them picketed where the Nyissans won’t find them. They’ll be fine where they are until we pick them up.”

“You said when you came aboard that Ctuchik has the Orb now,” Polgara said to Belgarath. “How did that happen?”

The old man shrugged. “Beltira didn’t go into any of the details. All he told me was that Ctuchik was waiting when Zedar crossed the border into Cthol Murgos. Zedar managed to escape, but he had to leave the Orb behind.”

“Did you speak with Beltira?”

“With his mind,” Belgarath answered.

“Did he say why the Master wants us to go to the Vale?”

“No. It probably never occurred to him to ask. You know how Beltira is.”

“It’s going to take months, father,” Polgara objected with a worried frown. “It’s two hundred and fifty leagues to the Vale.”

“Aldur wants us to go there,” he answered. “I’m not going to start disobeying him after all these years.”

“And in the meantime, Ctuchik’s got the Orb at Rak Cthol.”

“It’s not going to do him any good, Pol. Torak himself couldn’t make the Orb submit to him, and he tried for over two thousand years. I know where Rak Cthol is; Ctuchik can’t hide it from me. He’ll be there with the Orb when I decide to go take it away from him. I know how to deal with that magician.” He said the word “magician” with a note of profound contempt in his voice.

“What’s Zedar going to be doing all that time?”

“Zedar’s got problems of his own. Beltira says that he’s moved Torak from the place where he had him hidden. I think we can depend on him to keep Torak’s body as far away from Rak Cthol as he possibly can. Actually, things have worked out rather well. I was getting a little tired of chasing Zedar anyway.”

Ce’Nedra found all this a bit confusing. Why were they all so caught up in the movements of a strangely named pair of Angarak sorcerers and this mysterious jewel which everyone seemed to covet? To her, one jewel was much the same as another. Her childhood had been surrounded by such opulence that she had long since ceased to attach much importance to ornaments. At the moment, her only adornment consisted of a pair of tiny gold earrings shaped like little acorns, and her fondness for them arose not so much from the fact that they were gold but rather from the tinkling sound the cunningly contrived clappers inside them made when she moved her head.

All of this sounded like one of the Morn myths she’d heard from a storyteller in her father’s court years before. There had been a magic jewel in that, she remembered. It was stolen by the God of the Angaraks, Torak, and rescued by a sorcerer and some Alorn kings who put it on the pommel of a sword kept in the throne room at Riva. It was somehow supposed to protect the West from some terrible disaster that would happen if it were lost. Curious—the name of the sorcerer in the legend was Belgarath, the same as that of this old man.

But that would make him thousands of years old, which was ridiculous! He must have been named after the ancient myth hero—unless he’d assumed the name to impress people.

Once again her eyes wandered to Garion’s face. The boy sat quietly in one corner of the cabin, his eyes grave and his expression serious. She thought perhaps that it was his seriousness that so piqued her curiosity and kept drawing her eyes to him. Other boys she had known—nobles and the sons of nobles—had tried to be charming and witty, but Garion never tried to joke or to say clever things to try to amuse her. She was not entirely certain how to take that. Was he such a lump that he didn’t know how he was supposed to behave? Or perhaps he knew but didn’t care enough to make the effort. He might at least try—even if only occasionally. How could she possibly deal with him if he was going to refuse flatly to make a fool of himself for her benefit?

She reminded herself sharply that she was angry with him. He had said that Queen Salmissra had been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and it was far, far too early to forgive him for such an outrageous statement. She was definitely going to have to make him suffer extensively for that insulting lapse. Her fingers toyed absently with one of the curls cascading down the side of her face, her eyes boring into Garion’s face.

The following morning ashfall that was the result of a massive volcanic eruption somewhere in Cthol Murgos had diminished sufficiently to make the deck of the ship habitable again. The jungle along the riverbank was still partially obscured in the dusty haze, but the air was clear enough to breathe, and Ce’Nedra escaped from the sweltering cabin below decks with relief.

Garion was sitting in the sheltered spot near the bow of the ship where he usually sat and he was deep in conversation with Belgarath. Ce’Nedra noted with a certain detachment that he had neglected to comb his hair that morning. She resisted her immediate impulse to go fetch comb and brush to rectify the situation. She drifted instead with artful dissimulation to a place along the rail where, without seeming to, she could conveniently eavesdrop.

“—It’s always been there,” Garion was saying to his grandfather. “It used to just talk to me—tell me when I was being childish or stupid—that sort of thing. It seemed to be off in one corner of my mind all by itself.”

Belgarath nodded, scratching absently at his beard with his good hand. “It seems to be completely separate from you,” he observed. “Has this voice in your head ever actually done anything? Besides talk to you, I mean.”

Garion’s face grew thoughtful. “I don’t think so. It tells me how to do things, but I think that I’m the one who has to do them. When we were at Salmissra’s palace, I think it took me out of my body to go look for Aunt Pol.” He frowned. “No,” he corrected. “When I stop and think about it, it told me how to do it, but I was the one who actually did it. Once we were out, I could feel it beside me—it’s the first time we’ve ever been separate. I couldn’t actually see it, though. It did take over for a few minutes, I think. It talked to Salmissra to smooth things over and to hide what we’d been doing.”

“You’ve been busy since Silk and I left, haven’t you?”

Garion nodded glumly. “Most of it was pretty awful. I burned Asharak. Did you know that?”

“Your Aunt told me about it.”

“He slapped her in the face,” Garion told him. “I was going to go after him with my knife for that, but the voice told me to do it a different way. I hit him with my hand and said ‘burn.’ That’s all, just ‘burn’ and he caught on fire. I was going to put it out until Aunt Pol told me he was the one who killed my mother and father. Then I made the fire hotter. He begged me to put it out, but I didn’t do it.” He shuddered.

“I tried to warn you about that,” Belgarath reminded him gently. “I told you that you weren’t going to like it very much after it was over.”

Garion sighed. “I should have listened. Aunt Pol says that once you’ve used this—” He floundered, looking for a word.

“Power?” Belgarath suggested.

“All right,” Garion assented. “She says that once you’ve used it, you never forget how, and you’ll keep doing it again and again. I wish I had used my knife instead. Then this thing in me never would have gotten loose.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” Belgarath told him quite calmly. “You’ve been bursting at the seams with it for several months now. You’ve used it without knowing it at least a half dozen times that I know about.”

Garion stared at him incredulously.

“Remember that crazy monk just after we crossed into Tolnedra? When you touched him, you made so much noise that I thought for a moment you’d killed him.”