Guardians of the West

"No!" Garion exclaimed.

"I wouldn't interfere, Garion," Silk advised. "It is Anheg's kingdom, after all, and he can deal with traitors and criminals in any way he sees fit."

"That's barbaric!"

"Moderately so, yes. As I said, though, Chereks have a certain casual brutality in their nature."

"But shouldn't we at least question the prisoners first?"

"Javelin's attending to that."

Garion stared at the crowd of soldiers working in the last ruddy light of the setting sun. "I'm sorry." he said, choking in revulsion, "but that's going entirely too far. I'm going to put a stop to it right now."

"I'd stay out of it, Garion."

"Oh, no -not when he starts crucifying women!"

"He's what?" Silk turned to stare at the soldiers. Suddenly the blood drained from the little man's face, and he sprang to his feet. With Garion close on his heels, he ran across the intervening turf. "Have you lost your mind entirely?" he demanded hotly of the bony Chief of Drasnian Intelligence, who sat calmly at a rough table in the center of a group of soldiers.

"What seems to be your problem, Kheldar?"

"Do you know who that is that you just crucified?"

"Naturally. I questioned her myself." His fingers moved almost idly, but Silk stood directly in front of the table, cutting off Garion's view of the thin man's hands.

"Get her down from there!" Silk said, though his voice seemed for some reason to have lost the edge of its outrage.

"Why don't you attend to your own business, Kheldar?" Javelin suggested. "Leave me to mine." He turned to a burly Cherek standing nearby. "Prince Kheldar and the Rivan King will be leaving now." he said coldly. "Would you escort them, please. I think that they should be somewhere at least a quarter of a mile from here."

"I'll kill him," Silk fumed as he and Garion were herded away. "I'll kill him with my own two bare hands."

As soon as the soldiers had led them to a spot some distance from Javelin and had turned to go back to their grisly work, however, the little man regained his composure with astonishing speed.

"What was that all about?" Garion asked.

"The girl he just crucified is his own niece, Liselle," Silk replied quite calmly.

"You can't be serious!"

"I've known her since she was a child. He promised to explain later. His explanation had better be very good, though, or I'm going to carve out his tripes." He removed a long dagger from under his pearl-gray doublet and tested the edge with his thumb.

It was after dark when Javelin came looking for them. "Oh, put that away, Kheldar," he said disgustedly, looking at Silk's dagger.

"I may need it in a minute," Silk replied. "Start talking, Javelin, and you'd better make it very convincing, or I'll have your guts in a pile right between your feet."

"You seem upset."

"You noticed. How clever of you."

"I did what I did for a very specific reason."

"Wonderful. I thought you were just amusing yourself."

"I can do without the sarcasm, Silk. You should know by now that I never do anything without a reason. You can put your mind at rest about Liselle. She's probably already been released."

"Released?"

"Escaped, actually. There were a dozen of cultists hiding in those woods. Your eyes must be going bad on you if you didn't see them. Anyway, by now, every prisoner we crucified has been released and is on the way to safety back in the mountains."

"Exactly what is this all about, Javelin?"

"It's really very simple. We've been trying for years to get someone into the upper echelons of the Bear-cult. They have just rescued a genuine heroine -a martyr to the cause. Liselle's clever enough to use that to work her way into their higher councils."

"How did she get here in the first place?"

Javelin shrugged. "She put on a mail shirt, and I slipped her on board Trellheim's ship. After the fighting was nearly over, I just slipped her in with the other prisoners."

"Won't the others who were just rescued say that she was never in the city?" Garion asked.

"No, your Majesty, I don't think so," Javelin replied. "She's going to say that she lived in the northeast quarter of Jarviksholm. The others we crucified all came from the southwest quarter. Jarviksholm is a fairly good-sized town. Nobody could really say for sure that she wasn't there all along."

"I still can't believe that you would actually do that to her," Silk said.

"It took a fair amount of convincing and a great deal of fast talking on her part to persuade me," Javelin admitted.

Silk stared at him.

"Oh, yes," Javelin said. "Hadn't you guessed? The whole thing was her idea in the first place."

Suddenly Garion heard a hollow rushing sound, and a moment later Ce'Nedra's voice came to him quite clearly.

"Garion!" she cried out in anguish. "Garion, come home immediately! Someone has stolen our baby!"

CHAPTER TWENTY

Polgara looked at Garion critically as they stood together in a high, open meadow above the still-burning city of Jarviksholm while the pale light of dawn washed the stars out of the sky. "Your wing feathers are too short," she told him.Garion made the feathers longer.

"Much better," she said. Then her look became intense, and she also shimmered into the shape of a speckled falcon, "I've never liked these hard feathers," she murmured, clicking her hooked beak. Then she looked at Garion, her golden eyes fierce. "Try to remember everything I told you, dear. We won't go too high on your first flight." She spread her wings, took a few short steps with her taloned feet, and lifted herself effortlessly into the air.

Garion tried to imitate what she had just done and drove himself beak-first into the turf.

She swooped back in. "You have to use your tail, too, Garion," she said. "The wings give the power, but the tail gives direction. Try it again." The second attempt was a bit smoother. He actually flew for about fifty yards before he crashed into a tree.

"That was very nice, dear. Just try to watch where you're going."

Garion shook his head, trying to clear the ringing from his ears and the speckles of light from in front of his eyes.

"Straighten your feathers, dear, and let's try it again."

"It's going to take months for me to learn this, Aunt Pol. Wouldn't it just be faster to sail to Riva on the Seabird?"