Enchanters' End Game

Garion, still abstracted and bemused, saw that all traces of the sometimes foolish old man he had known before were gone. The thieving old storyteller had vanished. Even the irritable old man who had led the quest for the Orb no longer existed. In their place stood the form of Belgarath the sorcerer, the Eternal Man, shimmering in the aura of his full power.

Chapter Twenty-three

"WHERE IS ZEDAR?" Aunt Pol asked, raising her tearstreaked face from Durnik's lifeless body to stare with a dreadful intensity at her father."I left him down there," Belgarath replied bleakly.

"Dead?"

"No."

"Bring him back."

"Why?"

"To face me." Her eyes burned.

The old man shook his head. "No, Pol," he said to her. "You've never killed anyone. Let's leave it that way."

She gently lowered Durnik's body to the floor and rose to her feet, her pale face twisted with grief and an awful need. "Then I will go to him," she declared, raising both arms as if to strike at the earth beneath her feet.

"No," Belgarath told her, extending his own hand, "you will not. "

They stood facing each other, locked in a dreadful, silent struggle. Aunt Pol's look at first was one of annoyance at her father's interference. She raised one arm again to bring the force of her will crashing down at the earth, but once again Belgarath put forth his hand.

"Let me go, father."

"No."

She redoubled her efforts, twisting as if trying to free herself from his unseen restraint. "Let me go, old man," she cried.

"No. Don't do this, Pol. I don't want to hurt you."

She tried again, more desperately this time, but once again Belgarath smothered her will with his. His face hardened, and he set his jaw.

In a last effort, she flung the whole force of her mind against the barrier he had erected. Like some great rock, however, the old man remained firm. Finally her shoulders slumped, and she turned, knelt beside Durnik's body, and began to weep again.

"I'm sorry, Pol," he said gently. "I never wanted to have to do that. Are you all right?"

"How can you ask that?" she demanded brokenly, wringing her hands over Durnik's silent body.

"That's not what I meant."

She turned her back on him and buried her face in her hands.

"I don't think you could have reached him anyway, Pol," the old man told her. "You know as well as I that what one of us does, another cannot undo."

Silk, his ferretlike face shocked, spoke in a hushed voice. "What did you do to him?"

"I took him down until we came to solid rock. And then I sealed him up in it."

"Can't he just come up out of the earth the way you did?"

"No. That's impossible for him now. Sorcery is thought, and no man can exactly duplicate the thought of another. Zedar's imprisoned inside the rock forever - or until I choose to free him." The old man looked mournfully at Durnik's body. "And I don't think I'll choose to do that."

"He'll die, won't he?" Silk asked.

Belgarath shook his head. "No. That was part of what I did to him. He'll lie inside the rock until the end of days."

"That's monstrous, Belgarath," Silk said in a sick voice.

"So was that," Belgarath replied grimly, pointing at Durnik.

Garion could hear what they were saying and could see them all quite clearly, but it seemed somehow that they were actually someplace else. The others in the underground crypt seemed to be on the periphery of his attention. For him there was only one other in the vaulted chamber, and that other was Kal Torak, his enemy.

The restless stirring of the drowsing God became more evident. Garion's peculiarly multiple awareness - in part his own, in part derived from the Orb, and as ever overlaid by the consciousness which he had always called the dry voice in his mind - perceived in that stirnng the pain that lay beneath the maimed God's movements. Torak was actually writhing as he half slept. An injured man would heal in time, and his pain would gradually diminish and ultimately disappear, because injury was a part of the human condition. A man was born to be hurt from time to time, and the mechanism for recovery was born with him. A God, on the other hand, was invulnerable, and he had no need for the ability to heal. Thus it was with Torak. The fire which the Orb had loosed upon him when he had used it to crack the world still seared his flesh, and his pain had not diminished in the slightest down through all the endless centuries since his maiming. Behind that steel mask, the flesh of the Dragon-God's face still smoked, and his burned eye still boiled endlessly in its socket. Garion shuddered, almost pitying that perpetual agony.

The child, Errand, pulled himself free from Ce'Nedra's trembling arms and crossed the flagstone floor of the tomb, his small face intent. He stopped, bent and put his hand on Durnik's shoulder. Gently he shook the dead man as if trying to wake him. His little face became puzzled when the smith did not respond. He shook again, a bit harder, his eyes uncomprehending.

"Errand," Ce'Nedra called to him, her voice breaking, "come back. There's nothing we can do."

Errand looked at her, then back at Durnik. Then he gently patted the smith's shoulder with a peculiar little gesture, sighed, and went back to the princess. She caught him suddenly in her arms and began to weep, burying her face against his small body. Once again with that same curious little gesture, he patted her flaming hair.

Then from the alcove in the far wall there came a long, rasping sigh, a shuddering expiration of breath. Garion looked sharply toward the alcove, his hand tightening on the hilt of his cold sword. Torak had turned his head, and his eyes were open. The hideous fire burned in the eye that was not as the God came awake.

Belgarath drew in his breath in a sharp hiss as Torak raised the charred stump of his left hand as if to brush away the last of his sleep, even as his right hand groped for the massive hilt of Cthrek Goru, his black sword. "Garion!" Belgarath said sharply.

But Garion, still locked in stasis by the forces focusing upon him, could only stare at the awakening God. A part of him struggled to shake free, and his hand trembled as he fought to lift his sword.

"Not yet," the voice whispered.

"Garion!" Belgarath actually shouted this time. Then, in a move seemingly born of desperation, the old sorcerer lunged past the bemused young man to fling himself upon the still recumbent form of the Dark God.

Torak's hand released the hilt of his sword and almost contemptuously grasped the front of Belgarath's tunic, lifting the struggling old man from him as one might lift a child. The steel mask twisted into an ugly sneer as the God held the helpless sorcerer out from him. Then, like a great wind, the force of Torak's mind struck, hurling Belgarath across the room, ripping away the front of his tunic. Something glittered across Torak's knuckles, and Garion realized that it was the silver chain of Belgarath's amulet-the polished medallion of the standing wolf. In a very peculiar way the medallion had always been the center of Belgarath's power, and now it lay in the grip of his ancient enemy.