Magician's Gambit Part 5

They rode behind a low hill and reined in for a moment at Wolf's signal. "Hettar," the old man said, "see if they're coming."

Hettar wheeled his horse and loped up to a stand of trees on the brow of the hill.

Silk was muttering curses, his face livid.

"What's your problem now?" Barak demanded.

Silk kept on swearing.

"What's got him so worked up?" Barak asked Mister Wolf.

"Our friend's just had a nasty shock," the old man answered. "He misjudged somebody - so did I, as a matter of fact. That weapon Brill used on the big Nadrak is called an adder-sting."

Barak shrugged. "It looked like just an odd-shaped throwing knife to me.

"There's a bit more to it than that," Wolf told him. "It's as sharp as a razor on all three sides, and the points are usually dipped in poison. It's the special weapon of the Dagas.h.i.+. That's what has got Silk so upset."

"I should have known," Silk berated himself. "Brill's been a little too good all along to be just an ordinary Sendarian footpad."

"Do you know what they're talking about, Polgara?" Barak asked.

"The Dagas.h.i.+ are a secret society in Cthol Murgos," she told him. "Trained killers-a.s.sa.s.sins. They answer only to Ctuchik and their own elders. Ctuchik's been using them for centuries to eliminate people who get in his way. They're very efficient."

"I've never been that curious about the peculiarities of Murgo culture," Barak replied. "If they want to creep around and kill each other, so much the better." He glanced up the hill quickly to find out if Hettar had seen anything behind them. "That thing Brill used might be an interesting toy, but it's no match for armor and a good sword."

"Don't be so provincial, Barak," Silk said, beginning to regain his composure. "A well-thrown adder-sting can cut right through a mail s.h.i.+rt; if you know how, you can even sail it around corners. Not only that, a Dagas.h.i.+ could kill you with his hands and feet, whether you're wearing armor or not." He frowned. "You know, Belgarath," he mused, "we might have been making a mistake all along. We a.s.sumed that Asharak was using Brill, but it might have been the other way around. Brill has to be good, or Ctuchik wouldn't have sent him into the West to keep an eye on us." He smiled then, a chillingly bleak little smile. "I wonder just how good he is." He flexed his fingers. "I've met a few Dagas.h.i.+, but never one of their best. That might be very interesting."

"Let's not get sidetracked," Wolf told him. The old man's face was grim. He looked at Aunt Pol, and something seemed to pa.s.s between them.

"You're not serious," she said.

"I don't think we've got much choice, Pol. There are Murgos all around us - too many and too close. I don't have any room to move; they've got us pinned right up against the southern edge of Maragor. Sooner or later, we're going to get pushed out onto the plain anyway. At least, if we make the decision ourselves, we'll be able to take some precautions."

"I don't like it, father," she stated bluntly.

"I don't care much for it myself," he admitted, "but we've got to shake off all these Murgos or we'll never make it to the Vale before winter sets in."

Hettar rode back down the hill. "They're coming," he reported quietly. "And there's another group of them circling in from the west to cut us off."

Wolf drew in a deep breath. "I think that pretty well decides it, Pol," he said. "Let's go."

As they pa.s.sed into the belt of trees dotting the last low line of hills bordering the plain, Garion glanced back once. A half dozen dust clouds spotted the face of the miles-wide slope above them. Murgos were converging on them from all over the mountains.

They galloped on into the trees and thundered through a shallow draw. Barak, riding in the lead, suddenly held up his hand. "Men ahead of us," he warned.

"Murgos?" Hettar asked, his hand going to his sabre.

"I don't think so," Barak replied. "The one I saw looked more like some of those we saw back at the settlement."

Silk, his eyes very bright, pushed his way to the front. "I've got an idea," he said. "Let me talk to them." He pushed his horse into a dead run, plunging directly into what seemed to be an ambush. "Comrades!" he shouted. "Get ready! They're coming - and they've got the gold!"

Several shabby-looking men with rusty swords and axes rose from the bushes or stepped out from behind trees to surround the little man. Silk was talking very fast, gesticulating, waving his arms and pointing back toward the slope looming behind them.

"What's he doing?" Barak asked.

"Something devious, I imagine," Wolf replied.

The men surrounding Silk looked dubious at first, but their expressions gradually changed as he continued to talk excitedly. Finally he turned in his saddle to look back. He jerked his arm in a broad, overhead sweep. "Let's go!" he shouted. "They're with us!" He spun his horse to scramble up the graveled side of the gully.

"Don't get separated," Barak warned, s.h.i.+fting his shoulders under his mail s.h.i.+rt. "I'm not sure what he's up to, but these schemes of his sometimes fall apart."

They pounded down through the grim-looking brigands and up the side of the gully on Silk's heels.

"What did you say to them?" Barak shouted as they rode.

"I told them that fifteen Murgos had made a dash into Maragor and come out with three heavy packs of gold." The little man laughed. "Then I said that the men at the settlement had turned them back and that they were trying to double around this way with the gold. I told them that we'd cover this next gully if they'd cover that one back there."

"Those scoundrels will swarm all over Brill and his Murgos when they try to come through," Barak suggested.

"I know." Silk laughed. "Terrible, isn't it?"

They rode on at a gallop. After about a half mile, Mister Wolf raised his arm, and they all reined in. "This should be far enough," he told them. "Now listen very carefully, all of you. These hills are alive with Murgos, so we're going to have to go into Maragor."

Princess Ce'Nedra gasped, and her face turned deathly pale.

"It will be all right, dear," Aunt Pol soothed her.

Wolf's face was grimly serious. "As soon as we ride out onto the plain, you're going to start hearing certain things," he continued. "Don't pay any attention. Just keep riding. I'm going to be in the lead and I want you all to watch me very closely. As soon as I raise my hand, I want you to stop and get down off your horses immediately. Keep your eyes on the ground and don't look up, no matter what you hear. There are things out there that you don't want to see. Polgara and I are going to put you all into a kind of sleep. Don't try to fight us. Just relax and do exactly what we tell you to do."

"Sleep?" Mandorallen protested. "What if we are attacked? How may we defend ourselves if we are asleep?"

"There isn't anything alive out there to attack you, Mandorallen," Wolf told him. "And it isn't your body that needs to be protected; it's your mind."

"What about the horses?" Hettar asked.

"The horses will be all right. They won't even see the ghosts."

"I can't do it," Ce'Nedra declared, her voice hovering on the edge of hysteria. "I can't go into Maragor."

"Yes, you can, dear," Aunt Pol told her in that same calm, soothing voice. "Stay close to me. I won't let anything happen to you."

Garion felt a sudden profound sympathy for the frightened little girl, and he drew his horse over beside hers. "I'll be here, too," he told her. She looked at him gratefully, but her lower lip still trembled, and her face was very pale.

Mister Wolf took a deep breath and glanced once at the long slope behind them. The dust clouds raised by the converging Murgos were much closer now. "All right," he said, "let's go." He turned his horse and began to ride at an easy trot down toward the mouth of the gully and the plain stretching out before them.

The sound at first seemed faint and very far away, almost like the murmur of wind among the branches of a forest or the soft babble of water over stones. Then, as they rode farther out onto the plain, it grew louder and more distinct. Garion glanced back once, almost longingly at the hills behind them. Then he pulled his horse close in beside Ce'Nedra's and locked his eyes on Mister Wolf's back, trying to close his ears.

The sound was now a chorus of moaning cries punctuated by occasional shrieks. Behind it all, and seeming to carry and sustain all the other sounds, was a dreadful wailing - a single voice surely, but so vast and all-encompa.s.sing that it seemed to reverberate inside Garion's head, erasing all thought.

Mister Wolf suddenly raised his hand, and Garion slid out of his saddle, his eyes fixed almost desperately on the ground. Something flickered at the edge of his vision, but he refused to look.

Then Aunt Pol was speaking to them, her voice calm, rea.s.suring. "I want you to form a circle," she told them, "and take each others' hands. Nothing will be able to enter the circle, so you'll all be safe."

Trembling in spite of himself, Garion stretched out his hands. Someone took his left, he didn't know who; but he instantly knew that the tiny hand that clung so desperately to his right was Ce'Nedra's.

Aunt Pol stood in the center of their circle, and Garion could feel the force of her presence there was.h.i.+ng over all of them. Somewhere outside the circle, he could feel Wolf. The old man was doing something that swirled faint surges through Garion's veins and set off staccato bursts of the familiar roaring sound.

The wailing of the dreadful, single voice grew louder, more intense, and Garion felt the first touches of panic. It was not going to work. They were all going to go mad.

"Hush, now," Aunt Pol's voice came to him, and he knew that she spoke inside his mind. His panic faded, and he felt a strange, peaceful la.s.situde. His eyes grew heavy, and the sound of the wailing grew fainter. Then, enfolded in a comforting warmth, he fell almost at once into a profound slumber.

Chapter Five.

GARION WAS NOT exactly sure when it was that his mind shook off Aunt Pol's soft compulsion to sink deeper and deeper into protective unawareness. It could not have been long. Falteringly, like someone rising slowly from the depths, he swam back up out of sleep to find himself moving stiffly, even woodenly, toward the horses with the others. When he glanced at them, he saw their faces were blank, uncomprehending. He seemed to hear Aunt Pol's whispered command to "sleep, sleep, sleep," but it somehow lacked the power necessary to compel him to obey.

There was to his consciousness, however, a subtle difference. Although his mind was awake, his emotions seemed not to be. He found himself looking at things with a calm, lucid detachment, uncluttered by those feelings which so often churned his thoughts into turmoil. He knew that in all probability he should tell Aunt Pol that he was not asleep, but for some obscure reason he chose not to. Patiently, he began to sort through the notions and ideas surrounding that decision, trying to isolate the single thought which he knew must lie behind the choice not to speak. In his search, he touched that quiet corner where the other mind stayed. He could almost sense its sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Well?" he said silently to it.

"I see that you're finally awake," the other mind said to him. "No," Garion corrected rather meticulously, "actually a part of me is asleep, I think."

"That was the part that kept getting in the way. We can talk now. We have some things to discuss."

"Who are you?" Garion asked, absently following Aunt Pol's instructions to get back on his horse.

"I don't actually have a name."

"You're separate from me, though, aren't you? I mean, you're not just another part of me, are you?"

"No," the voice replied, "we're quite separate."

The horses were moving at a walk now, following Aunt Pol and Mister Wolf across the meadow.

"What do you want?" Garion asked.

"I need to make things come out the way they're supposed to. I've been doing that for a very long time now."

Garion considered that. Around him the wailing grew louder, and the chorus of moans and shrieks became more distinct. Filmy, half formed tatters of shape began to appear, floating across the gra.s.s toward the horses. "I'm going to go mad, aren't I?" he asked somewhat regretfully. "I'm not asleep like the others are, and the ghosts will drive me mad, won't they?"

"I doubt it," the voice answered. "You'll see some things you'd probably rather not see, but I don't think it will destroy your mind. You might even learn some things about yourself that will be useful later on."

"You're very old, aren't you?" Garion asked as the thought occurred to him.

"That term doesn't have any meaning in my case."

"Older than my grandfather?" Garion persisted.

"I knew him when he was a child. It might make you feel better to know that he was even more stubborn than you are. It took me a very long time to get him started in the direction he was supposed to go."

"Did you do it from inside his mind?"

"Naturally."

Garion noted that his horse was walking obliviously through one of the filmy images that was taking shape in front of him. "Then he knows you, doesn't he - if you were in his mind, I mean?"

"He didn't know I was there."

"I've always known you were there."

"You're different. That's what we need to talk about."

Rather suddenly, a woman's head appeared in the air directly in front of Garion's face. The eyes were bulging, and the mouth was agape in a soundless scream. The ragged, hacked-off stump of its neck streamed blood that seemed to dribble off into nowhere. "Kiss me," it croaked at him. Garion closed his eyes as his face pa.s.sed through the head.

"You see," the voice pointed out conversationally. "It's not as bad as you thought it was going to be."

"In what way am I different?" Garion wanted to know.

"Something needs to be done, and you're the one who's going to do it. All the others have just been in preparation for you."

"What is it exactly that I have to do?"

"You'll know when the time comes. If you find out too soon, it might frighten you." The voice took on a somewhat wry note. "You're difficult enough to manage without additional complications."

"Why are we talking about it then?"

"You need to know why you have to do it. That might help you when the time comes."

"All right," Garion agreed.

"A very long time ago, something happened that wasn't supposed to happen," the voice in his mind began. "The universe came into existence for a reason, and it was moving toward that purpose smoothly. Everything was happening the way it was supposed to happen, but then something went wrong. It wasn't really a very big thing, but it just happened to be in the right place at the right time - or perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time might be a better way to put it. Anyway, it changed the direction of events. Can you understand that?"

"I think so," Garion replied, frowning with the effort. "Is it like when you throw a rock at something but it bounces off something else instead and goes where you don't want it to go - like the time Doroon threw that rock at the crow and it hit a tree limb and bounced off and broke Faldor's window instead?"

"That's exactly it," the voice congratulated him. "Up to that point there had always been only one possibility - the original one. Now there were suddenly two. Let's take it one step further. If Doroon - or you had thrown another rock very quickly and hit the first rock before it got to Faldor's window, it's possible that the first rock might have been knocked back to hit the crow instead of the window."

"Maybe, " Garion conceded doubtfully. "Doroon wasn't really that good at throwing rocks."

"I'm much better at it than Doroon," the voice told him. "That's the whole reason I came into existence in the first place. In a very special way, you are the rock that I've thrown. If you hit the other rock just right, you'll turn it and make it go where it was originally intended to go.

"And if I don't?"

"Faldor's window gets broken."