Rivan Codex Series

by Eddings, David

  "Let's not get sidetracked," Wolf told him. The old man's face was grim. He looked at Aunt Pol, and something seemed to pass 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 passed 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, shifting his shoulders under his mail shirt. "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-encompassing 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, reassuring. "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 washing 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 lassitude. 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 sub
tle 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 amusement.

  "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 grass 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 passed 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."

  The figure of a naked woman with her arms chopped off and a sword thrust through her body was suddenly in front of Garion. She shrieked and moaned at him, and the stumps of her arms spurted blood directly into his face. Garion reached up to wipe off the blood, but his face was dry. Unconcerned, his horse walked through the gibbering ghost.

  "We have to get things back on the right course," the voice went on. "This certain thing you have to do is the key to the whole business. For a long time, what was supposed to happen and what was actually happening went off in different directions. Now they're starting to converge again. The point where they meet is the point where you'll have to act. If you succeed, things will be all right again; if you don't, everything will keep going wrong, and the purpose for which the universe came into existence will fail."

  "How long ago was it when this started?"

  "Before the world was made. Even before the Gods."

  "Will I succeed?" Garion asked.

  "I don't know," the voice replied. "I know what's supposed to happen - not what will. There's something else you need to know too. When this mistake occurred, it set off two separate lines of possibility, and a line of possibility has a kind of purpose. To have a purpose, there has to be awareness of that purpose. To put it rather simply, that's what I am - the awareness of the original purpose of the universe."

  "Only now there's another one, too, isn't there?" Garion suggested. "Another awareness, I mean - one connected with the other set of possibilities."

  "You're even brighter than I thought."

  "And wouldn't it want things to keep going wrong?"

  "I'm afraid so. Now we come to the important part. The spot in time where all this is going to be decided one way or another is getting very close, and you've got to be ready."

  "Why me?" Garion asked, brushing away a disconnected hand that appeared to be trying to clutch at his throat. "Can't somebody else do it?"

  "No," the voice told him. "That's not the way it works. The universe has been waiting for you for more millions of years than you could even imagine. You've been hurtling toward this event since before the beginning of time. It's yours alone. You're the only one who can do what needs to be done, and it's the most important thing that will ever happen - not just in this world but in all the worlds in all the universe. There are whole races of men on worlds so far away that the light from their suns will never reach this world, and they'll cease to exist if you fail. They'll never know you or thank you, but their entire existence depen
ds on you. The other line of possibility leads to absolute chaos and the ultimate destruction of the universe, but you and I lead to something else."

  "What?"

  "If you're successful, you'll live to see it happen."

  "All right," Garion said. "What do I have to do - now, I mean?"

  "You have enormous power. It's been given to you so that you can do what you have to do, but you've got to learn how to use it. Belgarath and Polgara are trying to help you learn, so stop fighting with them about it. You've got to be ready when the time comes, and the time is much closer than you might think."

  A decapitated figure stood in the trail, holding its head by the hair with its right hand. As Garion approached, the figure raised the head. The twisted mouth shrieked curses at him.

  After he had ridden through the ghost, Garion tried to speak to the mind within his mind again, but it seemed to be gone for the moment. They rode slowly past the tumbled stones of a ruined farmstead.

  Ghosts clustered thickly on the stones, beckoning and calling seductively.

  "A disproportionate number seem to be women," Aunt Pol observed calmly to Mister Wolf.

  "It was a peculiarity of the race," Wolf replied. "Eight out of nine births were female. It made certain adjustments necessary in the customary relationships between men and women."

  "I imagine you found that entertaining," she said dryly.

  "The Marags didn't look at things precisely the way other races do. Marriage never gained much status among them. They were quite libieral about certain things."