Belgarath the Sorcerer (56 page)

Even Rhodar's cunning was strained to the limit when, after the siege of the Stronghold had plodded on for an interminable six years, the twins finally isolated the passage in the Mrin that told us where the battle was going to take place. The reference was obscure, but that's normal for the Mrin. All it really said was, ‘The Child of Light and the Child of Dark shall meet before the walls of the golden city.' The key word in that passage is ‘golden.' Those of you who've seen Vo Mimbre's yellow walls know where it comes from.

Anyway, we had to lead General Cerran and his colleagues rather gently until Cerran himself finally made the right decision. Rhodar, pretending to have received the information from his spies, laid out Torak's probable invasion route, and the rest of us found all sorts of things
wrong with the other potential battle-sites. Finally Cerran stabbed the map with one blunt finger. ‘There,' he said. ‘You should prepare your forces to meet Kal Torak at Vo Mimbre.'

‘The ground around there
looks
to be all right, I guess,' King Eldrig said, trying to sound a little dubious.

I stepped in at that point. ‘Isn't it awfully flat?' I objected. ‘Don't we want the advantage of high ground?'

‘We don't really need it, old one,' Cho-Ram told me. ‘The city itself is high enough to slow Kal Torak's army down. They'll come down the valley of the River Arend and take up positions around Vo Mimbre in preparation for another siege. Then we'll hit them from all sides and grind them up against the walls. General Cerran's right. It's the perfect place for the kind of battle we want.'

Eldrig and I raised a few more feeble objections, and then Brand and Rhodar sided with Cho-Ram, and that settled the matter. It was a cumbersome way to do business, but we really didn't have much choice.

Polgara came to my room in the Cherek embassy a few nights after we'd decided where we were going to meet Kal Torak, and she found me muttering swear-words at my copy of the Mrin Codex. ‘What
is
the matter with you, father?' she asked me. ‘You've been as cross as a bear with a sore paw for the past week.'

I slammed my fist down on the Mrin. ‘
This
is what's the matter!' I yelled at her. ‘It doesn't make any sense!'

‘It's not supposed to. Wasn't that the whole idea? It's
supposed
to sound like gibberish. Why don't you tell me about your problem, father? Maybe I can help.'

I drew in a deep breath. ‘All right. Brand's the Child of Light, isn't he - at least in this particular EVENT? If I'm reading this right he'll have to be in several places at the same time.'

‘Read it to me, father,' she said patiently. ‘You don't make all that much sense when you start to splutter.'

‘All right, let's see what
you
make of it.' I unrolled the
scroll, found the index-mark, and read that cursed passage to her. ‘“And the Child of Light shall take the jewel from its accustomed place and shall cause it to be delivered up to the Child of Light before the gates of the golden city.” That clearly implies a paradox, doesn't it? And paradoxes just don't happen.'

‘I don't see it that way, father. How long does one of these EVENTS last?'

‘As long as it takes, I suppose.'

‘Centuries, maybe? Years? Days? Or could it be just a few minutes, or perhaps even a single instant? How long did it take you to put Zedar to sleep in Morindland? That was one of these EVENTS, wasn't it? How long did it
really
take you, father?'

‘Not too long, I guess. What are you driving at, Pol?'

‘I get a strong feeling that the EVENTS are instantaneous. The Necessities are just too powerful for these confrontations to last for more than a few seconds at the very most. Any longer might rip the universe to pieces. The prophecies tell us what we have to do to get ready, and that can take eons, but the actual EVENT is something as simple as a decision - or even a single word. “Yes”, maybe, or “No”. The Mrin says that the final confrontation's going to be settled one way or the other by a choice, and choosing only takes an instant. I think that the last EVENT's not the
only
one that's going to involve choice. I think they
all
are. When you met Zedar in Morindland, you chose not to kill him. I think
that
was the EVENT. Everything else was just preparation.'

 

Now do you see what I mean about the subtlety of Polgara's mind? It might be pushing things a bit, but I
chose
to believe her explanation, and that turns that little conversation into an EVENT, doesn't it? It also implies that the EVENTS don't
always
involve face-to-face confrontations between the agents of the two Necessities. Now
there's
a concept almost guaranteed to give you a perpetual headache.

 

‘I'm going to have to go to Riva,' I told her.

‘Oh? Why?'

‘I have to pick up Iron-grip's sword. Brand's going to need it when the time comes. The Mrin says that the Orb's going to be the deciding factor, and that means the sword.'

‘Then you think the passage you read to me means that
you're
going to be the Child of Light who's supposed to take the Orb to Brand?'

‘It won't be the first time I've been saddled with it.' I shrugged. ‘If it turns out that I'm wrong, I won't even be able to get the sword off that wall. That's the nice thing about dealing with the Orb. It won't let you do something you're not supposed to do.'

I decided not to make an issue of my little errand. No, it wasn't one of those choices Pol had been talking about. It was based entirely on a desire not to embarrass myself. If it turned out that I
couldn't
get the sword off the wall, I'd wind up looking a bit foolish if I'd been pompously announcing my intentions. Vanity's ridiculous, but we all fall prey to it from time to time.

I spoke with the Cherek ambassador and arranged to sail on the next courier ship to Riva. I suppose I could have gone there on my own, but if all went well, I'd be bringing something heavy with me when I came back.

It wasn't a pleasant voyage. I don't like Cherek war-boats to begin with, and the foul weather that had plagued us for all those years didn't make things any better.

We tied up to the wharf at Riva, and I climbed up those steep, dripping stairs to the Citadel.

Brand's eldest son Rennig was in charge during his father's absence. The position of the Rivan Warder was not, strictly speaking, hereditary, but I was fairly certain that this time it would be passed on to Rennig. He was as solid and dependable as his father.

He was a bit wild-eyed when I was admitted into Brand's
study, though. ‘Thank the Gods!' he said, rising to his feet. ‘You got my message!'

‘What message?'

‘You mean you didn't? Why did you come, then?'

‘I've got something to attend to. What's happened, Rennig? I haven't seen you
this
excited since you were a little boy.'

‘You'd better come and see for yourself, Ancient One. I don't think you'd believe me if I told you. I'll send for the guards who saw it happen. I'm sure you'll want to talk with them.' He led me out into the corridor, and we went to the Hall of the Rivan King. That hall, the throne room, hadn't been used much during the centuries since Gorek's assassination, and it was damp and musty and not very well-lighted. Rennig took a torch from one of the rings set in the wall just outside the door, and we went inside, marching down past the fire-pits to the throne. As we drew nearer, I could see Iron-grip's sword hanging point down on the wall, but I could also see that there was something terribly wrong with it.

My Master's Orb was not on the pommel.

‘What's going on here, Rennig?' I demanded. ‘Where's the Orb?'

‘It's over here, Ancient One,' he told me. He pointed at a large round shield leaning against the wall about ten feet off to the right of the throne. It was a fairly standard Alorn shield, big, round, and heavy, with those thick steel straps Alorns always rivet to their shields. What was definitely
not
standard was the fact that my Master's Orb was embedded in the exact center of it.

‘Who did this?' My voice was shaking.

‘We don't know. The guards who were here that night had never seen her before.'

‘
Her?
A woman did this?'

He nodded. ‘I'd have had some doubts about it myself, Belgarath, but I've known both of those men since child
hood. They're honest men, and they'd never lie about something like this.'

‘No one can touch the Orb except -' I broke off as that passage in the Mrin started echoing in my head. ‘And the Child of Light shall take the jewel from its accustomed place -' I'd thought that it meant that this interim Child would take down the Sword and deliver it to Brand. I'd even believed that the passage was a set of instructions to
me
- that
I
was the one who was supposed to take it down off the wall and carry it back to Tol Honeth. But the passage wasn't talking about the sword. This woman, whoever she was, had removed it and set in the center of the shield instead. Pol had been right. Since no one could touch the Orb except the Child of Light, that particular position was being passed around - but a woman?

Then the two off-duty guardsmen came into the hall and walked rather hesitantly toward us. I suppose that someday I'm going to have to do something about my reputation for being bad-tempered. ‘Oh, come here,' I told them shortly. ‘I'm not going to bite you. You couldn't have done anything to stop her. When did this happen?'

‘About a week ago, Ancient One,' the taller of the two replied.

How convenient - and how predictable. The incident had occurred at almost exactly the same time as when I'd decided to come to Riva.

‘It was sorcery, Holy One,' the other guard asserted. ‘We were standing guard outside the door late at night, and a woman came down the corridor.'

‘We knew that something very strange was happening - particularly since she was on fire.'

‘On fire?'

‘Well, glowing, actually. There was bright blue light coming from her. We sort of backed away from her.'

‘She was a pretty woman,' the other guard put in. ‘At least she would have been if she hadn't been all blue. She opened the door to the Hall and went inside. We followed
her down to the throne. When she got there, she raised her hand and said, “Come to me”. It was almost as if she was calling a pet dog.'

‘This was all pretty strange,' the other man said, ‘but we've talked it over, and we both saw what happened next. The pommel-stone on that big sword just came loose and floated down to her hand - and it was glowing, too. Then she walked over to that shield - and I've never seen that shield in here before - and she set the stone against the middle of it, and it sort of melted its way right into the steel.'

‘Did she leave then?' I asked them.

‘She said something first.'

‘Oh? Did she say who she was?'

‘She only said, “One will come, and he will know what to do”. Then she sort of smiled and went back to the door. We followed her, but when we got out into the corridor, she was gone. That's all we saw, Ancient One. There wasn't a thing we could do to stop her.'

‘You've got that part right,' I told him. ‘
Nobody
could have stopped whoever she was.' I picked up the heavy shield with both hands. ‘This “ghost”, or whatever, was right about one thing. I
do
know what to do with this.'

‘That's the Orb, Holy Belgarath,' Rennig objected. ‘It's supposed to stay here on the Isle.'

‘Yes, it is,' I replied, ‘right up until the time we need it, and unless my calculations are off, your father's going to need it fairly soon.'

I brooded about the fact that the Orb was now part of a shield rather than a sword on my trip back to Tol Honeth. That obviously meant that Brand wasn't going to
kill
Torak. A shield by its very nature is defensive, and that began to change my thinking about the strategy the Tolnedran generals had put together for the battle that was going to be fought at Vo Mimbre. Maybe we
could
win from a defensive position.

Just about the only really significant thing I did during
the return voyage was to notify the twins about the alteration in the Orb's location. I was definitely going to need some instruction here.

The Angarak siege of the Algarian Stronghold dragged on for another year, then in the late spring of 4874, Beldin came back from southern Cthol Murgos to advise us that Urvon had assembled his army on the plains of Hagga and begun his march to the west. If General Cerran's calculations were correct, we had about one more year before the final battle. We'd know for certain when Torak broke off his siege of the Stronghold and also started west.

I spent much of the following summer scurrying around to make certain that everything was in place. Inevitably, hostilities periodically broke out between the warring factions in Arendia, and Polgara and I had to rush north from Tol Honeth to quiet things down again.

Although the twins labored mightily, we weren't able to get very many clues from the Mrin. That concerned me a great deal until I finally realized that the whole business of the fight between Brand and Torak was completely out of my hands. That particular revelation came to me in the early autumn when we all saw a marked change in Brand's behavior. ‘A word with you, Belgarath?' he said to me one rainy afternoon as our meeting with the Tolnedran generals was breaking up.

‘Of course,' I replied.

‘Let's go outside,' he suggested. ‘I think this needs to be sort of private, and I'd rather not have some Tolnedran spy carrying word of what we say to Ran Borune. He's a good man, I suppose, but he gets nervous when things he doesn't understand start cropping up.'