‘Well,’ Belgarath whispered grimly, ‘that’s Ashaba.’
Garion looked at the dark house before him, half in apprehension and half with a kind of dreadful eagerness.
Something caught his eye then, and he thrust his head out to look along the front of the house across the court. At the far end, in a window on a lower floor, a dim light glowed, looking for all the world like a watchful eye.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Now what?’ Silk breathed, looking at the dimly lighted window. ‘We’ve got to cross that courtyard to get to the house, but we can’t be sure if there’s somebody watching from that window or not.’
‘You’ve been out of the academy for too long, Kheldar,’ Velvet murmured. ‘You’ve forgotten your lessons. If stealth is impossible, then you try boldness.’
‘You’re suggesting that we just walk up to the door and knock?’
‘Well, I hadn’t planned to knock, exactly.’
‘What have you got in mind, Liselle?’ Polgara asked quietly.
‘If there are people in the house, they’re probably Grolims, right?’
‘It’s more than likely,’ Belgarath said. ‘Most other people avoid this place.’
‘Grolims pay little attention to other Grolims, I’ve noticed,’ she continued.
‘You’re forgetting that we don’t have any Grolim robes with us,’ Silk pointed out.
‘It’s very dark in that courtyard, Kheldar, and in shadows that deep, any dark color would appear black, wouldn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ he admitted.
‘And we still have those green silk slavers’ robes in our packs, don’t we?’
He squinted at her in the darkness, then looked at Belgarath. ‘It goes against all my instincts,’ he said, ‘but it might just work, at that.’
‘One way or another, we’ve got to get into the house. We have to find out who’s in there—and why—before we can decide anything.’
‘Would Zandramas have Grolims with her?’ Ce’Nedra asked. ‘If she’s alone in that house and she sees a line of Grolims walking across the courtyard, wouldn’t that frighten her into running away with my baby?’
Belgarath shook his head. ‘Even if she does run, we’re close enough to catch her—particularly since the Orb can follow her no matter how much she twists and dodges. Besides, if she’s here, she’s probably got some of her own Grolims with her. It’s not really so far from here to Darshiva that she couldn’t have summoned them.’
‘What about him?’ Durnik whispered the question and pointed at Feldegast. ‘He hasn’t got a slavers’ robe.’
‘We’ll improvise something,’ Velvet murmured. She smiled at the juggler. ‘I’ve got a nice dark blue dressing gown that should set off his eyes marvelously. We can add a kerchief to resemble a hood and we can slip him by—if he stays in the middle of the group.’
‘’Twould be beneath me dignity,’ he objected.
‘Would you prefer to stay behind and watch the horses?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘’Tis a hard woman y’ are, me lady,’ he complained.
‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘Let’s do it,’ Belgarath decided. ‘I’ve got to get inside that house.’
It took only a few moments to retrace their steps to the place where the horses were tied and to pull the neatly folded slavers’ robes from their packs by the dim light of Feldegast’s lantern.
‘Isn’t this ridiculous, now?’ the juggler grumbled indignantly, pointing down at the blue satin gown Velvet had draped about him.
‘I think it looks just darling,’ Ce’Nedra said.
‘If there are people in there, aren’t they likely to be patrolling the corridors?’ Durnik asked.
‘Only on the main floor, Goodman,’ Feldegast replied. ‘The upper stories of the house be almost totally uninhabitable—on account of all the broken windows an’ the weather blowin’ around in the corridors fer all the world like they was part of the great outdoors. There be a grand staircase just opposite the main door, an’ with just a bit of luck we kin nip up the stairs an’ be out of sight with no one the wiser. Once we’re up there, we’re not likely t’ encounter a livin’ soul—unless ye be countin’ the bats an’ mice an’ an occasional adventuresome rat.’
‘You absolutely had to say that, didn’t you?’ Ce’Nedra said caustically.
‘Ah, me poor little darlin’.’ He grinned at her. ‘But quiet yer fears. I’ll be beside ye, an’ I’ve yet t’ meet the bat or mouse or rat I couldn’t best in a fair fight.’
‘It makes sense, Belgarath,’ Silk said. ‘If we all go trooping through the lower halls, sooner or later someone’s bound to notice us. Once we’re upstairs and out of sight, though, I’ll be able to reconnoiter and find out exactly what we’re up against.’
‘All right,’ the old man agreed, ‘but the first thing is to get inside.’
‘Let’s be off, then,’ Feldegast said, swirling his dressing gown about him with a flourish.
‘Hide that light,’ Belgarath told him.
They filed out through the entrance to the sally port and marched into the shadowy courtyard, moving in the measured, swaying pace Grolim priests assumed on ceremonial occasions. The lighted window at the end of the house seemed somehow like a burning eye that followed their every move.
The courtyard was really not all that large, but it seemed to Garion that crossing it took hours. Eventually, however, they reached the main door. It was large, black, and nail-studded, like the door of every Grolim temple Garion had ever seen. The steel mask mounted over it, however, was no longer polished. In the faint light coming from the window at the other end of the house, Garion could see that over the centuries it had rusted, making the coldly beautiful face look scabrous and diseased. What made it look perhaps even more hideous were the twin gobbets of lumpy, semiliquid rust running from the eye sockets down the cheeks. Garion remembered with a shudder the fiery tears that had run down the stricken God’s face before he had fallen.
They mounted the three steps to that bleak door, and Toth slowly pushed it open.
The corridor inside was dimly illuminated by a single flickering torch at the far end. Opposite the door, as Feldegast had told them, was a broad staircase reaching up into the darkness. The treads were littered with fallen stones, and cobwebs hung in long festoons from a ceiling lost in shadows. Still moving at that stately Grolim pace, Belgarath led them across the corridor and started up the stairs. Garion followed close behind him with measured tread, though every nerve screamed at him to run. They had gone perhaps halfway up the staircase when they heard a clinking sound behind them, and there was a sudden light at the foot of the stairs. ‘What are you doing?’ a rough voice demanded. ‘Who are you?’
Garion’s heart sank, and he turned. The man at the foot of the stairs wore a long, coatlike shirt of mail. He was helmeted and had a shield strapped to his left arm. With his right he held aloft a sputtering torch.
‘Come back down here,’ the mailed man commanded them.
The giant Toth turned obediently, his hood pulled far over his face and with his arms crossed so that his hands were inside his sleeves. With an air of meekness he started down the stairs again.
‘I mean all of you,’ the Temple Guardsman insisted. ‘I order you in the name of the God of Angarak.’
As Toth reached the foot of the stairs, the Guardsman’s eyes widened as he realized that the robe the huge man wore was not Grolim black. ‘What’s this?’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not Chandim! You’re—’ He broke off suddenly as one of Toth’s huge hands seized him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. He dropped his torch, kicking and struggling. Then, almost casually, Toth removed his helmet with his other hand and banged his head several times against the stone wall of the corridor. With a shudder, the mail-coated man went limp. Toth draped the unconscious form across his shoulder and started back up the stairs.
Silk bounded back down to the corridor, picked up the steel helmet and e
xtinguished torch, and came back up again. ‘Always clean up the evidence,’ he murmured to Toth. ‘No crime is complete until you’ve tidied up.’
Toth grinned at him.
As they neared the top of the stairs, they found the treads covered with leaves that had blown in from the outside, and the cobwebs hung in tatters like rotted curtains, swaying in the wind that came moaning in from the outside through the shattered windows.
The hall at the top of the stairs was littered. Dry leaves lay in ankle-deep windrows on the floor, skittering before the wind. A large, empty casement at the end of the corridor behind them was half covered with thick ivy that shook and rustled in the chill night wind blowing down off the slopes of the mountains. Doors had partially rotted away and hung in chunks from their hinges. The rooms beyond those doors were choked with leaves and dust, and the furniture and bedding had long since surrendered every scrap of cloth or padding to thousands of generations of industrious mice in search of nesting materials. Toth carried his unconscious captive into one of those rooms, bound him hand and foot, and then gagged him to muffle any outcry, should he awaken before dawn.
‘That light was at the other end of the house, wasn’t it?’ Garion asked. ‘What’s at that end?’
‘’Twas the livin’ quarters of Torak himself,’ Feldegast replied, adjusting his little lantern so that it emitted a faint beam of light. ‘His throne room be there, an’ his private chapel. I could even show ye t’ his personal bedroom, an’ ye could bounce up an’ down on his great bed—or what’s left of it—just fer fun, if yer of a mind.’
‘I think I could live without doing that.’
Belgarath had been tugging at one earlobe. ‘Have you been here lately?’ he asked the juggler.
‘Perhaps six months ago.’
‘Was anybody here?’ Ce’Nedra demanded.
‘I’m afraid not, me darlin’. ‘Twas as empty as a tomb.’
‘That was before Zandramas got here, Ce’Nedra,’ Polgara reminded her gently.
‘Why do ye ask, Belgarath?’ Feldegast said.
‘I haven’t been here since just after Vo Mimbre,’ Belgarath said as they continued down the littered hall. ‘The house was fairly sound then, but Angaraks aren’t really notorious for the permanence of their construction. How’s the mortar holding out?’
‘’Tis as crumbly as year-old bread.’
Belgarath nodded. ‘I thought it might be,’ he said. ‘Now, what we’re after here is information, not open warfare in the corridors.’
‘Unless the one who’s here happens to be Zandramas,’ Garion corrected. ‘If she’s still here with my son, I’ll start a war that’s going to make Vo Mimbre look like a country fair.’
‘And I’ll clean up anything he misses,’ Ce’Nedra added fiercely.
‘Can’t you control them?’ Belgarath asked his daughter.
‘Not under the circumstances, no,’ she replied. ‘I might even decide to join in myself.’
‘I thought that we’d more or less erased the Alorn side of your nature, Pol,’ he said to her.
‘That’s not the side that was just talking, father.’
‘My point,’ Belgarath said, ‘at least the point I was trying to make before everybody started flexing his—or her—muscles, is that it’s altogether possible that we’ll be able to hear and maybe even see what’s going on in the main part of the house from up here. If the mortar’s as rotten as Feldegast says it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to find—or make—some little crevices in the floor of one of these rooms and find out what we need to know. If Zandramas is here, that’s one thing, and we’ll deal with her in whatever way seems appropriate. But if the only people down there are some of Urvon’s Chandim and Guardsmen or a roving band of Mengha’s Karandese fanatics, we’ll pick up Zandramas’ trail and go on about our business without announcing our presence.’
‘That sounds reasonable,’ Durnik agreed. ‘It doesn’t make much sense to get involved in unnecessary fights.’
‘I’m glad that someone in this belligerent little group has some common sense,’ the old man said.
‘Of course, if it is Zandramas down there,’ the smith added, ‘I’ll have to take steps myself.’
‘You, too?’ Belgarath groaned.
‘Naturally. After all, Belgarath, right is right.’
They moved on along the leaf-strewn corridor where the cobwebs hung from the ceiling in tatters and where there were skittering sounds in the corners.
As they passed a large double door so thick that it was still intact, Belgarath seemed to remember something. ‘I want to look in here,’ he muttered. As he opened those doors, the sword strapped across Garion’s back gave a violent tug that very nearly jerked him off his feet. ‘Grandfather!’ he gasped. He reached back, instructing the Orb to restrain itself, and drew the great blade. The point dipped to the floor, and then he was very nearly dragged into the room. ‘She’s been here,’ he exulted.
‘What?’ Durnik asked.
‘Zandramas. She’s been in this room with Geran.’
Feldegast opened the front of his lantern wider to throw more light into the room. It was a library, large and vaulted, with shelves reaching from the floor to the ceiling and filled with dusty, moldering books and scrolls.
‘So that was what she was looking for,’ Belgarath said.
‘For what?’ Silk asked.
‘A book. A prophecy, most likely.’ His face grew grim. ‘She’s following the same trail that I am, and this would probably be just about the only place where she could find an uncorrupted copy of the Ashabine Oracles.’
‘Oh!’ Ce’Nedra’s little cry was stricken. She pointed a trembling hand at the dust-covered floor. There were footprints there. Some of them had obviously been made by a woman’s shoes, but there were others as well—quite tiny. ‘My baby’s been here,’ Ce’Nedra said in a voice near tears, and then she gave a little wail and began to weep. ‘H—he’s walking,’ she sobbed, ‘and I’ll never be able to see his first steps.’
Polgara moved to her and took her into a comforting embrace.
Garion’s eyes also filled with tears, and his grip on the hilt of his sword grew so tight that his knuckles turned white. He felt an almost overpowering need to smash things.
Belgarath was swearing under his breath.
‘What’s the matter?’ Silk asked him.
‘That was the main reason I had to come here,’ the old man grated. ‘I need a clean copy of the Ashabine Oracles, and Zandramas has beaten me to it.’
‘Maybe there’s another.’
‘Not a chance. She’s been running ahead of me burning books at every turn. If there was more than one copy here, she’d have made sure that I couldn’t get my hands on it. That’s why she stayed here so long—ransacking this place to make sure that she had the only copy.’ He started to swear again.
‘Is this in any way significant?’ Eriond said, going to a table that, unlike the others in the room, had been dusted and even polished. In the precise center of that table lay a book bound in black leather and flanked on each side by a candlestick. Eriond picked it up, and as he did so, a neatly folded sheet of parchment fell out from between its leaves. The young man bent, picked it up, and glanced at it.
‘What’s that?’ Belgarath demanded.
‘It’s a note,’ Eriond replied. ‘It’s for you.’ He handed the parchment and the book to the old man.
Belgarath read the note. His face went suddenly pale and then beet red. He ground his teeth together with the veins swelling in his face and neck. Garion felt the sudden building up of the old sorcerer’s will.
‘Father!’ Polgara snapped, ‘No! Remember that we aren’t alone here!’
He controlled himself with a tremendous effort, then crumpled the parchment into a ball and hurled it at the floor so hard that it bounced high into the air and rolled across the room. He swung back the hand holding the book as if he were about to send it after the ball of parchment, but then seemed to
think better of it. He opened the book at random, turned a few pages, and then began to swear sulfurously. He shoved the book at Garion. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘hold on to this.’ Then he began to pace up and down, his face as black as a thundercloud, muttering curses and waving his hands in the air.
Garion opened the book, tilting it to catch the light. He saw at once the reason for Belgarath’s anger. Whole passages had been neatly excised—not merely blotted out, but cut entirely from the page with a razor or a very sharp knife. Garion also started to swear.
Silk curiously went over, picked up the parchment, and looked at it. He swallowed hard and looked apprehensively at the swearing Belgarath. ‘Oh, my,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Garion asked.
‘I think we’d all better stay out of your grandfather’s way for a while,’ the rat-faced man replied. ‘It might take him a little bit to get hold of himself.’
‘Just read it, Silk,’ Polgara said. ‘Don’t editorialize.’
Silk looked again at Belgarath who was now at the far end of the room pounding on the stone wall with his fist. ‘“Belgarath,”’ he read. ‘“I have beaten you, old man. Now I go to the Place Which Is No More for the final meeting. Follow me if you can. Perhaps this book will help you.”’
‘Is it signed?’ Velvet asked him.
‘Zandramas,’ he replied. ‘Who else?’
‘That is a truly offensive letter,’ Sadi murmured. He looked at Belgarath, who continued to pound his fist on the wall in impotent fury. ‘I’m surprised that he’s taking it so well—all things considered.’
‘It answers a lot of questions, though,’ Velvet said thoughtfully.
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