David Eddings - Magician's Gambit

“Garion, stop!”

What came was not a push but a sharp stab. Garion gasped and jerked his mind away, throwing the image of sand from him. Aunt Pol stiffened, and her eyes were blazing. Her hand flicked a short gesture, and she spoke a single world. The surge Garion felt as her will unleashed was overpowering. With a momentary dismay, he realized that his mind was still linked to hers. The merging that had held the image together was too strong, too complete to break. He felt himself drawn with her as their still joined minds lashed out like a whip. They flashed back along the faint trail of thought that had stabbed at the shield and they found its origin. They touched another mind, a mind filled with the exultation of discovery. Then, sure of her target now, Aunt Pol struck with the full force of her will. The mind they had touched flinched back, trying to break off the contact, but it was too late for that now. Garion could feel the other mind swelling, expanding unbearably. Then it suddenly burst, exploding into gibbering insanity, shattering as horror upon horror overwhelmed it. There was flight then, blind shrieking flight across dark stones of some kind, a flight with the single thought of a dreadful, final escape. The stones were gone, and there was a terrible sense of falling from some incalculable height. Garion wrenched his mind away from it.

“I told you to get clear,” Aunt Pol snapped at him.

“I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get loose.”

“What happened?” Silk’s face was startled.

“A Grolim broke through,” she replied.

“Did he see us?”

“For a moment. It doesn’t matter. He’s dead now.”

“You killed him? How?”

“He forgot to defend himself. I followed his thought back.”

“He went crazy,” Garion said in a choked voice, still filled with the horror of the encounter. “He jumped off something very high. He wanted to jump. It was the only way he could escape from what was happening to him.” Garion felt sick.

“It was awfully noisy, Pol,” Belgarath said with a pained expression.

“You haven’t been that clumsy in years.”

“I had this passenger.” She gave Garion an icy look.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Garion protested. “You were holding on so tight I couldn’t break loose. You had us all tied together.”

“You do that sometimes, Pol,” Belgarath told her. “The contact gets a little too personal, and you seem to want to take up permanent residence. It has to do with love, I imagine.”

“Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?” Barak asked Silk.

“I wouldn’t even want to guess.”

Aunt Pol was looking thoughtfully at Garion. “Perhaps it was my fault,” she admitted finally.

“You’re going to have to let go someday, Pol,” Belgarath said gravely.

“Perhaps—but not just yet.”

“You’d better put the screen back up,” the old man suggested. “They know we’re out here now, and there’ll be others looking for us.”

She nodded. “Think about sand again, Garion.”

The ash continued to settle as they rode through the afternoon, obscuring less and less with each passing mile. They were able to make out the shapes of the jumbled piles of rock around them and a few rounded spires of basalt thrusting up out of the sand. As they approached another of the low rock ridges that cut across the wasteland at regular intervals, Garion saw something dark and enormously high looming in the haze ahead.

“We can hide here until dark,” Belgarath said, dismounting behind the ridge.

“Are we there?” Durnik asked, looking around.

“That’s Rak Cthol.” The old man pointed at the ominous shadow. Barak squinted at it.

“I thought that was just a mountain.”

“It is. Rak Cthol’s built on top of it.”

“It’s almost like Prolgu then, isn’t it?”

“The locations are similar, but Ctuchik the magician lives here. That makes it quite different from Prolgu.”

“I thought Ctuchik was a sorcerer,” Garion said, puzzled. “Why do you keep calling him a magician?”

“It’s a term of contempt,” Belgarath replied. “It’s considered a deadly insult in our particular society.”

They picketed their horses among some large rocks on the back side of the ridge and climbed the forty or so feet to the top, where they took cover to watch and wait for nightfall.

As the settling ash thinned even more, the peak began to emerge from the haze. It was not so much a mountain as a rock pinnacle towering up out of the wasteland. Its base, surrounded by a mass of shattered rubble, was fully five miles around, and its sides were sheer and black as night.

“How high loth it reach?” Mandorallen asked, his voice dropping almost unconsciously into a half whisper.

“Somewhat more than a mile,” Belgarath replied.

A steep causeway rose sharply from the floor of the wasteland to encircle the upper thousand or so feet of the black tower.

“I imagine that took a while to build,” Barak noted.

“About a thousand years,” Belgarath answered. “While it was under construction, the Murgos bought every slave the Nyissans could put their hands on.”

“A grim business,” Mandorallen observed.

“It’s a grim place,” Belgarath agreed.

As the chill breeze blew off the last of the haze, the shape of the city perched atop the crag began to emerge. The walls were as black as the sides of the pinnacle, and black turrets jutted out from them, seemingly at random. Dark spires rose within the walls, stabbing up into the evening sky like spears. There was a foreboding, evil air about the black city of the Grolims. It perched, brooding, atop its peak, looking out over the savage wasteland of sand, rock, and sulfur-reeking bogs that encircled it. The sun, sinking into the banks of cloud and ash along the jagged western rim of the wasteland, bathed the grim fortress above them in a sotty crimson glow. The walls of Rak Cthol seemed to bleed. It was as if all the blood that had been spilled on all the altars of Torak since the world began had been gathered together to stain the dread city above them and that all the oceans of the world would not be enough to wash it clean again.

As the last trace of light slid from the sky, they moved carefully down off the ridge and crossed the ash-covered sand toward the rock tower looming above them. When they reached the shattered scree at its base, they dismounted, left the horses with Durnik and climbed up the steeply sloped rubble to the rock face of the basalt pinnacle that blotted out the stars. Although Relg had been shuddering and hiding his eyes a moment before, he moved almost eagerly now. He stopped and then carefully placed his hands and forehead against the icy rock.

“Well?” Belgarath asked after a moment, his voice hushed but carrying a note of dreadful concern: “Was I right? Are there caves?”

“There are open spaces,” Relg replied. “They’re a long way inside.”

“Can you get to them?”

“There’s no point. They don’t go anywhere. They’re just closed-in hollows.”

“Now what?” Silk asked.

“I don’t know,” Belgarath admitted, sounding terribly disappointed. “Let’s try a little farther around,” Relg suggested. “I can feel some echoes here. There might be something off in that direction.” He pointed.

“I want one thing clearly understood right here and now,” Silk announced, planting his feet firmly. “I’m not going to go through any more rock. If there’s going to be any of that, I’ll stay behind.”

“We’ll come up with something,” Barak told him.

Silk shook his head stubbornly. “No passing through rock,” he declared adamantly.

Relg was already moving along the face, his fingers lightly touching the basalt. “It’s getting stronger,” he told them. “It’s large and it goes up.” He moved on another hundred yards or so, and they followed, watching him intently. “It’s right through here,” he said finally, patting the rock face with one hand. “It might be the one we want. Wait here.” He put his hands against the rock and pushed them slowly into the basalt.