Magician's Gambit

by David Eddings

  "I can find any cave - anywhere," Relg stated confidently.

  "All right then," Belgarath continued. "Assuming that all goes well, we'll go up through the caves and enter the city unobserved. We'll find Ctuchik and take the Orb away from him."

  "Won't he try to fight?" Durnik asked.

  "I certainly hope so," Belgarath replied fervently.

  Barak laughed shortly. "You're starting to sound like an Alorn, Belgarath."

  "That's not necessarily a virtue," Polgara pointed out.

  "I'll deal with the magician of Rak Cthol when the time comes," the sorcerer said grimly. "At any rate, once we've recovered the Orb, we'll go back down through the caves and make a run for it."

  "With all of Cthol Murgos hot on our heels," Silk added. "I've had dealings occasionally with Murgos. They're a persistent sort of people."

  "That could be a problem," Belgarath admitted. "We don't want their pursuit gaining too much momentum. If any army of Murgos inadvertently follows us into the West, it will be viewed as an invasion, and that will start a war we aren't ready for yet. Any ideas?" He looked around.

  "Turn them all into frogs," Barak suggested with a shrug. Belgarath gave him a withering look.

  "It was just a thought," Barak said defensively.

  "Why not just stay in the caves under the city until they give up the search?" Durnik offered.

  Polgara shook her head firmly. "No," she said. "There's a place we have to be at a certain time. We'll barely make it there as it is. We can't afford to lose a month or more hiding in some cave in Cthol Murgos."

  "Where do we have to be, Aunt Pol?" Garion asked her.

  "I'll explain later," she evaded, throwing a quick glance at Ce'Nedra. The princess perceived immediately that the appointment the Lady spoke of concerned her, and curiosity began to gnaw at her. .

  Mandorallen, his face thoughtful and his fingers lightly touching the ribs that had been cracked in his encounter with Grul, cleared his throat. "Does there perchance happen to be a map of the region we must enter somewhere nearby, Holy Gorim?" he asked politely.

  The Gorim thought for a moment. "I believe I have one somewhere," he replied. He tapped his cup lightly on the table and an Ulgo servingman immediately entered the chamber. The Gorim spoke briefly to him, and the servingman went out. "The map I recall is very old," the Gorim told Mandorallen, "and I'm afraid it won't be very accurate. Our cartographers have difficulty comprehending the distances involved in the world above."

  "The distances do not matter so much," Mandorallen assured him. "I wish but to refresh my memory concerning the contiguity of certain other realms upon the borders of Cthol Murgos. I was at best an indifferent student of geography as a schoolboy."

  The servingman returned and handed a large roll of parchment to the Gorim. The Gorim in turn passed the roll to Mandorallen.

  The knight carefully unrolled the chart and studied it for a moment. "It is as I recalled," he said. He turned to Belgarath. "Thou hast said, ancient friend, that no Murgo will enter the Vale of Aldur?"

  "That's right," Belgarath replied.

  Mandorallen pointed at the map. "The closest border from Rak Cthol is that which abuts Tolnedra," he showed them. "Logic would seem to dictate that our route of escape should lie in that direction - toward the nearest frontier."

  "All right," Belgarath conceded.

  "Let us then seem to make all haste toward Tolnedra, leaving behind us abundant evidence of our passage. Then, at some point where rocky ground would conceal signs of our change of direction, let us turn and strike out to the northwest toward the Vale. Might this not confound them? May we not confidently anticipate that they will continue to pursue our imagined course? In time, certainly, they will realize their error, but by then we will be many leagues ahead of them. Pursuing far to our rear, might not the further discouragement of the prohibited Vale cause them to abandon the chase entirely?"

  They all looked at the map.

  "I like it," Barak said, effusively slapping one huge hand on the knight's shoulder.

  Mandorallen winced and put his hand to his injured ribs.

  "Sorry, Mandorallen," Barak apologized quickly. "I forgot."

  Silk was studying the map intently. "It's got a lot to recommend it, Belgarath," he urged, "and if we angle up to here-" He pointed, "-we'll come out on top of the eastern escarpment. We should have plenty of time to make the descent, but they'll definitely want to think twice before trying it. It's a good mile straight down at that point."

  "We could send word to Cho-Hag," Hettar suggested. "If a few clans just happened to be gathered at the foot of the escarpment there, the Murgos would think more than twice before starting down."

  Belgarath scratched at his beard. "All right," he decided after a moment, "we'll try it that way. As soon as Relg leads us out of Ulgo, you go pay your father a visit, Hettar. Tell him what we're going to do and invite him to bring a few thousand warriors down to the Vale to meet us."

  The lean Algar nodded, his black scalp lock bobbing. His face, however, showed a certain disappointment.

  "Forget it, Hettar," the old man told him bluntly. "I never had any intention of taking you into Cthol Murgos. There'd be too many opportunities there for you to get yourself in trouble."

  Hettar sighed somewhat mournfully.

  "Don't take it so hard, Hettar," Silk bantered. "Murgos are a fanatic race. You can be practically certain that a few of them at least will try the descent - no matter what's waiting for them at the bottom. You'd almost have to make an example of them, wouldn't you?"

  Hettar's face brightened at that thought.

  "Silk," Lady Polgara said reprovingly.

  The little man turned an innocent face to her. "We have to discourage pursuit, Polgara," he protested.

  "Of course," she replied sarcastically.

  "It wouldn't do to have Murgos infesting the Vale, would it?"

  "Do you mind?"

  "I'm not really all that bloodthirsty, you know."

  She turned her back on him.

  Silk sighed piously. "She always thinks the worst of me."

  By now Ce'Nedra had had sufficient time to consider the implications of the promise she had so unhesitatingly given to UL. The others would soon leave, and she must remain behind. Already she was beginning to feel isolated, cut off from them, as they made plans which did not include her. The more she thought about it, the worse it became. She felt her lower lip beginning to quiver.

  The Gorim of the Ulgos had been watching her, his wise old face sympathetic. "It's difficult to be left behind," he said gently, almost as if his large eyes had seen directly into her thoughts, "and our caves are strange to you-dark and seemingly filled with gloom."

  Wordlessly she nodded her agreement.

  "In a day or so, however," he continued, "your eyes will become accustomed to the subdued light. There are beauties here which no one from the outside has ever seen. While it's true that we have no flowers, there are hidden caverns where gems bloom on the floors and walls like wild blossoms. No trees or foliage grow in our sunless world, but I know a cave wall where vines of pure gold twist in ropey coils down from the ceiling and spill out across the floor."

  "Careful, Holy Gorim," Silk warned. "The Princess is Tolnedran. If you show her that kind of wealth, she may go into hysterics right before your eyes."

  "I don't find that particularly amusing, Prince Kheldar," Ce'Nedra told him in a frosty tone.

  "I'm overcome with remorse, your Imperial Highness," he apologized with towering hypocrisy and a florid bow.

  In spite of herself, the princess laughed. The rat-faced little Drasnian was so absolutely outrageous that she found it impossible to remain angry with him.

  "You'll be as my beloved granddaughter while you stay in Ulgo, Princess," the Gorim told her. "We can walk together beside our silent lakes and explore long forgotten caves. And we can talk. The world outside knows little of Ulgo. It may well be that you will become the very first strange
r to understand us."

  Ce'Nedra impulsively reached out to take his frail old hand in hers. He was a dear old man. "I'll be honored, Holy Gorim," she told him with complete sincerity.

  They stayed that night in comfortable quarters in the Gorim's pyramid-shaped house -though the terms night and day had no meaning in this strange land beneath the earth. The following morning several Ulgos led the horses into the Gorim's cavern, traveling, the princess assumed, by some longer route than the one the party had followed, and her friends made their preparations to leave. Ce'Nedra sat to one side, feeling terribly alone already. Her eyes moved from face to face as she tried to fix each of them in her memory. When she came at last to Garion, her eyes brimmed.

  Irrationally, she had already begun to worry about him. He was so impulsive. She knew that he'd do things that would put him in danger once he was out of her sight. To be sure, Polgara would be there to watch over him, but it wasn't the same. She felt quite suddenly angry with him for all the foolish things he was going to do and for the worry his careless behavior was going to cause her. She glared at him, wishing that he would do something for which she could scold him.

  She had determined that she would not follow them out of the Gorim's house - that she would not stand forlornly at the edge of the water staring after them as they departed - but as they all filed out through the heavy-arched doorway, her resolution crumbled. Without thinking she ran after Garion and caught his arm.

  He turned with surprise, and she stretched up on her tiptoes, took his face between her tiny hands and kissed him. "You must be careful," she commanded. Then she kissed him again, spun and ran sobbing back into the house, leaving him staring after her in baffled astonishment.

  Part Four

  CTHOL MURGOS

  Chapter Nineteen

  THEY HAD BEEN In the darkness for days. The single dim light Relg carried could only provide a point of reference, something to follow. The darkness pressed against Garion's face, and he stumbled along the uneven floor with one hand thrust out in front of him to keep himself from banging his head into unseen rocks. It was not only the musty smelling darkness, however. He could sense the oppressive weight of the mountains above him and on all sides. The stone seemed to push in on him; he was closed in, sealed up in miles of solid rock. He fought continually with the faint, fluttering edges of panic and he often clenched his teeth to keep from screaming.

  There seemed to be no purpose to the twisting, turning route Relg followed. At the branching of passageways, his choices seemed random, but always he moved with steady confidence through the dark, murmuring caves where the memory of sounds whispered in the dank air, voices out of the past echoing endlessly, whispering, whispering. Relg's air of confidence as he led them was the only thing that kept Garion from giving in to unreasoning panic.

  At one point the zealot stopped.

  "What's wrong?" Silk asked sharply, his voice carrying that same faint edge of panic that Garion felt gnawing at his own awareness.

  "I have to cover my eyes here," Relg replied. He was wearing a peculiarly fashioned shirt of leaf mail, a strange garment formed of overlapping metal scales, belted at the waist and with a snug-fitting hood that left only his face exposed. From his belt hung a heavy, hookppointed knife, a weapon that made Garion cold just to look at it. He drew a piece of cloth out from under his mail shirt and carefully tied it over his face.

  "Why are you doing that?" Durnik asked him.

  "There's a vein of quartz in the cavern just ahead," Relg told him. "It reflects sunlight down from the outside. The light is very bright."

  "How can you tell which way to go if you're blindfolded?" Silk protested.

  "The cloth isn't that thick. I can see through it well enough. Let's go.

  They rounded a corner in the gallery they were following, and Garion saw light ahead. He resisted an impulse to run toward it. They moved on, the hooves of the horses Hettar was leading clattering on the stone floor. The lighted cavern was huge, and it was filled with a glittering crystal light. A gleaming band of quartz angled across the ceiling, illuminating the cavern with a blazing radiance. Great points of stone hung like icicles from the ceiling, and other points rose from the floor to meet them. In the center of the cavern another underground lake stretched, its surface rippled by a tiny waterfall trickling down into its upper end with an endless tinkling sound that echoed in the cave like a little silver bell and joined harmoniously with the faint, remembered sigh of the singing of the Ulgos miles behind. Garion's eyes were dazzled by color that seemed to be everywhere. The prisms in the crystalline quartz twisted the light, breaking it into colored fragments and filling the cave with the multihued light of the rainbow. Garion found himself quite suddenly wishing that he could show the dazzling cave to Ce'Nedra, and the thought puzzled him.

  "Hurry," Relg urged them, holding one hand across his brow as if to further shade his already veiled eyes.

  "Why not stop here?" Barak suggested. "We need some rest, and this looks like a good place."

  "It's the worst place in all the caves," Relg told him. "Hurry."

  "Maybe you like the dark," Barak said, "but the rest of us aren't that fond of it." He looked around at the cave.

  "Protect your eyes, you fool," Relg snapped.

  "I don't care for your tone, friend."

  "You'll be blind once we get past this place if you don't. It's taken your eyes two days to get used to the dark. You'll lose all of that if you stay here too long."

  Barak stared hard at the Ulgo for a moment. Then he grunted and nodded shortly. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't understand." He reached out to put his hand on Relg's shoulder in apology.

  "Don't touch me!" Relg cried, shrinking away from the big hand.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Just don't touch me - not ever." Relg hurried on ahead.

  "What's the matter with him?" Barak demanded.

  "He doesn't want you to defile him," Belgarath explained.

  "Defile him? Defile him?"

  "He's very concerned about his personal purity. The way he sees it, any kind of touch can soil him."

  "Soil? He's as dirty as a pig in a wallow."

  "It's a different kind of dirt. Let's move on."

  Barak strode along behind the rest of them, grumbling and sputtering in outrage. They moved into another dark passageway, and Garion looked longingly back over his shoulder at the fading light from the glowing cavern behind. Then they rounded a corner and the light was gone.

  There was no way to keep track of time in the murmuring darkness. They stumbled on, pausing now and then to eat or to rest, though Garion's sleep was filled with nightmares about mountains crushing in on him. He had almost given up all hope of ever seeing the sky again when the first faint cobweb touch of moving air brushed his cheek. It had been, as closely as he could judge, five days since they had left the last dimly lighted gallery of the Ulgos behind and plunged into this eternal night. At first he thought the faint hint of warmer air might only be his imagination, but then he caught the scent of trees and grass in the musty air of the cave, and he knew that somewhere ahead there lay an opening - a way out.

  The touch of warmer outside air grew stronger, and the smell of grass began to fill the passageway along which they crept. The floor began to slope upward, and imperceptibly it grew less dark. It seemed somehow that they moved up out of endless night toward the light of the first morning in the history of the world. The horses, plodding along at the rear, had also caught the scent of fresh air, and their pace quickened. Relg, however, moved slower, and then slower still. Finally he stopped altogether. The faint metallic rustling of his leaf mail shirt spoke loudly for him. Relg was trembling, bracing himself for what lay ahead. He bound his veil across his face again, mumbling something over and over in the snarling language of the Ulgos, fervent, almost pleading. Once his eyes were covered, he moved on again, reluctantly, his feet almost dragging.

  Then there was golden light ahead. The mouth of the
passageway was a jagged, irregular opening with a stiff tangle of limbs sharply outlined in front of it. With a sudden clatter of little hooves, the colt, ignoring Hettar's sharp command, bolted for the opening and plunged out into the light.

  Belgarath scratched at his whiskers, squinting after the little animal. "Maybe you'd better take him and his mother with you when we separate," he said to Hettar. "He seems to have a little trouble taking things seriously, and Cthol Murgos is a very serious place."

  Hettar nodded gravely.

  "I can't," Relg blurted suddenly, turning his back to the light and pressing himself against the rock wall of the passageway. "I can't do it."

  "Of course you can," Aunt Pol said comfortingly to him. "We'll go out slowly so you can get used to it a little at a time."

  "Don't touch me," Relg replied almost absently.

  "That's going to get very tiresome," Barak growled.

  Garion and the rest of them pushed ahead eagerly, their hunger for light pulling at them. They shoved their way roughly through the tangle of bushes at the mouth of the cave and, blinking and shading their eyes, they emerged into the sunlight. The light at first stabbed Garion's eyes painfully; but after a few moments, he found that he could see again. The partially concealed entrance to the caves was near the midpoint of a rocky hillside. Behind them, the snow-covered mountains of Ulgo glittered in the morning sun, outlined against the deep blue sky, and a vast plain spread before them like a sea. The tall grass was golden with autumn, and the morning breeze touched it into long, undulating waves. The plain reached to the horizon, and Garion felt as if he had just awakened from a nightmare.

  Just inside the mouth of the cave behind them, Relg knelt with his back to the light, praying and beating at his shoulders and chest with his fists.

  "Now what's he doing?" Barak demanded.

  "It's a kind of purification ritual," Belgarath explained. "He's trying to purge himself of all unholiness and draw the essence of the caves into his soul. He thinks it may help to sustain him while he's outside."