Enchanters' End Game

Urtag started violently and raised his suddenly stricken face, listening to the hollow muttering which he alone in the dim crypt could hear clearly. The hollow voice continued, murmuring in Urtag's ears. The Archpriest's face drained as he listened, and a look of unspeakable horror slowly twisted his features. The hollow muttering droned on. The words were indistinct, but the inflections were not. Desperately, Ce'Nedra covered her ears.

Finally Urtag screamed and scrambled to his feet. His face had gone absolutely white, and his eyes were starting from their sockets. Gibbering insanely, Urtag fled, and the sound of his screams echoed back down the iron stairway, as he ran in terror from the ruined tower.

Chapter Twenty

THE WHISPERING HAD begun almost as soon as Belgarath, Silk, and Garion reached the coast of Mallorea. It was indistinct at first, little more than a sibilant breath sounding perpetually in Garion's ears, but in the days that followed as they moved steadily south, occasional words began to emerge. The words were the sort to be reckoned with home, mother, love, and death - words upon which attention immediately fastened.Unlike the land of the Morindim which they had left behind, northern - most Mallorea was a land of rolling hills covered with a toughstemmed, dark green grass. Occasional nameless rivers wound among those hills, roiling and turbulent beneath a lead gray sky. They had not seen the sun for what seemed weeks. A sort of dry overcast had moved in off the Sea of the East, and a stiff breeze, chill and smelling of the polar ice, pressed continually at their backs as they moved south.

Belgarath now rode with extreme caution. There was no sign of that half doze that was his custom in more civilized parts of the world, and Garion could feel the subtle push of the old man's mind as he probed ahead for any hidden dangers. So delicate was the sorcerer's searching that it seemed only a slowly expiring breath, light, tentative, concealed artfully in the sound of the breeze passing through the tall grass.

Silk also rode warily, pausing frequently to listen, and seeming on occasion to sniff at the air. Often he would even go so far as to dismount and put his ear to the turf, to see if he might pick up the muffled tread of unseen horses approaching.

"Nervous work," the little man said as he remounted after one such pause.

"Better to be a little overcautious than to blunder into something," Belgarath replied. "Did you hear anything?"

"I think I heard a worm crawling around down there," Silk answered brightly. "He didn't say anything, though. You know how worms are."

"Do you mind?"

"You did ask, Belgarath."

"Oh, shut up!"

"You heard him ask, didn't you, Garion?"

"That is probably the most offensive habit I've ever encountered in anyone," Belgarath told the little thief.

"I know," Silk answered. "That's why I do it. Infuriating, isn't it? How far do we have to go before we come to woods again?"

"Several more days. We're still a goodly distance north of the tree line. Winter's too long and summer too short for trees to grow up here."

"Boring sort of place, isn't it?" Silk observed, looking around at the endless grass and the rounded hills that all looked the same.

"Under the circumstances, I can stand a little boredom. The alternatives aren't all that pleasant."

"I can accept that."

They rode on, their horses wading through the knee-high, gray-green grass.

The whispering inside Garion's head began again.

"Hear me, Child of Light."

That sentence emerged quite clearly from the rest of the unintelligible sibilance. There was a dreadfully compelling quality in that single statement. Garion concentrated, trying to hear more.

"I wouldn't do that, " the familiar dry voice told him.

"What?"

"Don't do what he tells you to do. "

"Who is it?"

"Torak, of course. Who did you think it was?"

"He's awake?"

"Not yet. Not fully at any rate - but then he's never been entirely asleep either."

"What's he trying to do?"

"He's trying to talk you out of killing him."

"He's not afraid of me, is he?"

"Of course he's afraid. He doesn't know what's going to happen any more than you do, and he's just as frightened of you as you are of him."

That immediately made Garion feel better. "What should I do about the way he keeps whispering to me?"

"There's not much you can do. Just don't get into the habit of obeying his orders, that's all. "

They camped that evening as they usually did in a well-sheltered hollow between two hills and, as usual, they built no fire to give away their location.

"I'm getting a bit tired of cold suppers," Silk complained, biting down hard on a piece of dried meat. "This beef's like a strip of old leather."

"The exercise is good for your jaws," Belgarath told him.

"You can be a very unpleasant old man when you set your mind to it, do you know that?"

"The nights are getting longer, aren't they?" Garion said to head off any further wrangling.

"The summer's winding down," Belgarath told him. "It will be autumn up here in another few weeks, and winter will be right on its heels."

"I wonder where we'll be when winter comes," Garion said rather plaintively.

"I wouldn't do that," Silk advised. "Thinking about it isn't going to help, and it's only going to make you nervous."

"Nervouser," Garion corrected. "I'm already nervous."

"Is there such a word as 'nervouser?' " Silk asked Belgarath curiously.

"There is now," Belgarath replied. "Garion just invented it."

"I wish I could invent a word," Silk said admiringly to Garion, his ferretlike little eyes gleaming mischievously.

"Please don't poke fun at me, Silk. I'm having enough trouble as it is."

"Let's get some sleep," Belgarath suggested. "This conversation isn't going anywhere, and we've got a long way to ride tomorrow."

That night the whispering invaded Garion's sleep, and it seemed to convey its meaning in images rather than words. There was an offer of friendship - of a hand outstretched in love. The loneliness that had haunted his boyhood from the moment he had discovered that he was an orphan seemed to fade, to pass somehow behind him with that offer, and he found himself rather desperately wanting to run toward that hand reaching toward him.

Then, very clearly, he saw two figures standing side by side. The figure of the man was very tall and very powerful, and the figure of the woman was so familiar that the very sight of her caught at Garion's heart. The tall, powerful man seemed to be a stranger, and yet was not. His face went far beyond mere human handsomeness. It was quite the most beautiful face Garion had ever seen. The woman, of course, was not a stranger. The white lock at the brow and the glorious eyes were the most familiar things in Garion's life. Side by side, the beautiful stranger and Aunt Pol reached out their arms to him.