The Belgariad, Vol. 2 (30 page)

From out of the center of the dreadful cloud overhead, swirling fingers of murky black twitched and reached down toward the earth with hideous roaring sounds. With a last, almost convulsive jerk, one of those huge, swirling funnels touched the earth in the midst of the redclad Malloreans. Debris sprayed up and out from the point of the dreadful vortex as, with ponderous immensity, it cut an erratic course two hundred yards wide directly through the enemy ranks. Men and horses were ripped to pieces by the insane winds within the swirling column of cloud, and bits of armor and shreds of red tunics - and worse - showered down on the stunned and terrified Malloreans on either side of the swath of absolute destruction moving inexorably through their midst.

"Beautiful!" Beldin exulted, hopping up and down in a grotesque display of glee.

There was the sudden sound of a great horn, and the close-packed ranks of Drasnian pikemen and Tolnedran legionnaires facing the faltering ranks of the Malloreans opened. From behind them, his armor streaming water, Mandorallen led the charge of the Mimbrate knights. Full upon the confused and demoralized Malloreans they fell, and the sound of the impact as they struck was a terrible, rending crash, punctuated by screams. Rank upon rank was crushed beneath the charge, and the terrified Malloreans wavered and then broke and fled. Even as they ran, the clans of Algar swept in among them from the flanks, their sabres flashing in the rain.

At a second blast of Mandorallen's horn, the charging Mimbrates reined in, wheeled and galloped back, leaving a vast wreckage behind them.

The rain slackened fitfully, little more than errantly passing showers now, and patches of blue appeared among the racing clouds overhead. The Grolim storm had broken and dispersed back across the plains of Mishrak ac Thull.

Ce'Nedra looked toward the south bank and saw that the storm there had also dispersed and that the forces under the command of King Cho-Hag and King Korodullin were assaulting the front ranks of the demoralized Murgo army. Then the princess looked sharply at the south channel of the river. The last bridges of Cherek ships had broken loose during the violent storm, and there was now only open water on that side of the island. The last troops remaining in the city were streaming across the bridge over the north channel. A tall Sendarian lad was among the last to cross. As soon as he reached the bank, he came immediately upriver. As he drew nearer, Ce'Nedra recognized him. It was Rundorig, Garion's boyhood friend from Faldor's farm, and he was openly weeping.

"Goodman Durnik," he sobbed as he reached them, "Doroon's dead."

"What did you say?" Lady Polgara demanded, raising her tired face suddenly.

"Doroon, Mistress Pol," Rundorig wept. "He drowned. We were crossing over to the south bank when the
storm broke the ropes holding the ships. Doroon fell into the river, and he didn't know how to swim. I tried to save him, but he went under before I could reach him." The tall young man buried his face in his hands.

Polgara's face went absolutely white, and her eyes filled with sudden tears. "Take care of him, Durnik," she told the smith, then turned and walked away, her head bowed in her grief.

"I tried, Durnik," Rundorig blurted, still sobbing. "I really tried to reach him - but there were too many people in my way. I couldn't get to him in time. I saw him go under, and there was nothing I could do."

Durnik's face was very grave as he put his arm about the weeping boy's shoulders. The smith's eyes were also filled, and he said nothing. Ce'Nedra, however, could not weep. She had reached out her hand and plucked these unwarlike young men from their homes and dragged them halfway across the world, and now one of Garion's oldest friends had died in the chill waters of the River Mardu. His death was on her head, but she could not weep. A terrible fury suddenly filled her. She turned to Olban. "Kill them!" she hissed from between clenched teeth.

"My Queen?" Olban gaped at her.

"Go!" she commanded. "Take your sword and go. Kill as many Angaraks as you can - for me, Olban. Kill them for me!" And then she could weep.

Olban looked first at the sobbing little princess and then at the milling ranks of the Malloreans, still reeling from the savagery of the Mimbrate assault. His face grew exultant as he drew his sword. "As my Queen commands!" he shouted and ran to his horse.

Even as the decimated front ranks of the Malloreans fled, hurried by the sabre-wielding Algars, greater and greater numbers of their countrymen reached the field, and soon the low hills to the north were covered with them. Their red tunics made it look almost as if the earth itself were bleeding. It was not the Malloreans, however, who mounted the next attack. Instead, thick-bodied Thulls in mud-colored smocks marched reluctantly into position. Directly behind the Thulls, mounted Malloreans urged them on with whips.

"Basic Mallorean strategy," Beldin growled. "'Zakath wants to let the Thulls do most of the dying. He'll try to save his own troops for the campaign against Taur Urgas."

Ce'Nedra raised her tearstreaked face. "What do we do now?" she asked the misshapen sorcerer.

"We kill Thulls," he said bluntly. "A charge or two by the Mimbrates ought to break their spirits. Thulls don't make very good soldiers, and they'll run away as soon as we give them the chance."

Even as the sluggish forces of Mishrak ac Thull flowed like a mudslide downhill toward the solid line of pikemen and legionnaires, the Asturian archers just to the rear of the infantry raised their bows and filled the air with a solid, arching sheet of yard-long arrows. The Thulls quailed as rank after rank melted under the withering storm of arrows. The shouts of the Malloreans at the rear became more desperate, and the crack of their whips filled the air.

And then Mandorallen's horn sounded, the ranks of infantry opened, and the armored knights of Mimbre charged again. The Thulls took one look at the steel-clad men and horses crashing toward them and immediately bolted. The Mallorean whip-men were swarmed under and trampled in the panic-stricken flight of the Thull army.

"So much for the Thulls." Beldin grunted with satisfaction as he watched the rout. He grinned an evil grin.

"I imagine that 'Zakath will speak firmly to King Gethell about this."

Mandorallen's knights thundered back to their positions behind the infantry, and the two armies glared at each other across a field littered with Angarak dead.
Ce'Nedra began to shiver as a sudden chill swept the battlefield.

Although the sun had broken through the ragged clouds as the Grolim storm rapidly dispersed, there was no warmth to it. Even though all trace of wind had died, it grew colder. Then from the ground and from the dark surface of the river, tendrils of fog began to rise.

Beldin hissed. "Polgara," he snapped to the grieving sorceress, "I need you."

"Leave me alone, Uncle," she replied in a voice still choked with sorrow.

"You can cry later," he told her harshly. "The Grolims are drawing the heat out of the air. If we don't stir up a wind, the fog's going to get so thick you'll be able to walk on it."

She turned, and her face was very cold. "You don't respect anything, do you?" she said flatly.

"Not much," he admitted, "but that's beside the point. If the Grolims can build up a good fog bank, we'll have the whole stinking Mallorean army on top of us before we can even see them coming. Let's go, Pol.

People get killed; it happens. You can get sentimental about it later." He held out his gnarled, lumpy hand to her.

The tendrils of fog had begun to thicken, lying in little pockets now. The littered battlefield in front of the infantry lines seemed to waver, and then disappeared entirely as the fog congealed into a solid wall of white.

"Wind, Pol," Beldin said, taking hold of her hand. "As much wind as you can raise."

The struggle which ensued then was a silent one. Polgara and Beldin, their hands joined together, gathered in their wills and then reached out with them, probing, searching for some weakness in the mass of deadcalm air that imprisoned the thickening fog along the banks of the river. Fitful little gusts of breeze swirled the eddying fog, then died as quickly as they had arisen.

"Harder, Pol," Beldin urged. His ugly face streamed with rivulets of sweat as he struggled with the vast inertness of unmoving air.

"It's not going to work this way, Uncle," she declared, pulling her hand free. Her face showed her own strain. "There's nothing to get hold of. What are the twins doing?"

"The Hierarchs of Rak Cthol are riding with Taur Urgas," the hunchback replied. "The twins have their hands full dealing with them. They won't be able to help."

Polgara straightened then, steeling herself. "We're trying to work too close," she said. "Every time we start a little local breeze, a dozen Grolims jump in and smother it."

"All right," Beldin agreed.

"We'll have to reach out farther," she continued. "Start the air moving somewhere out beyond their range so that by the time it gets here, it has so much momentum that they can't stop it."

Beldin's eyes narrowed. "That's dangerous, Pol," he told her. "Even if we can do it, it's going to exhaust the both of us. If they throw anything else at us, neither of us will have any strength left to fight them."

"It's a gamble, Uncle," she admitted, "but the Grolims are stubborn. They'll try to protect this fog bank even after all chance of maintaining it has gone. They'll get tired, too. Maybe too tired to try anything else."

"I don't like maybes."
"Have you got a better idea?"

"Not right now, no."

"All right, then."

They joined hands again.

It took, it seemed to the princess, an eternity. With her heart in her throat she stared at the two of them as they stood with their hands joined and their eyes closed - reaching out with their minds toward the hot, barren uplands to the west, trying with all their strength to pull that heated air down into the broad valley of the River Mardu. All around her, Ce'Nedra seemed to feel the oppressive chill of Grolim thought lying heavily on the stagnant air, holding it, resisting all effort to dissipate the choking fog.

Polgara was breathing in short gasps, her chest heaving and her face twisted with an inhuman striving.

Beldin, his knotted shoulders hunched forward, struggled like a man attempting to lift a mountain.

And then Ce'Nedra caught the faintest scent of dust and dry, sunparched grass. It was only momentary, and she thought at first that she had imagined it. Then it came again, stronger this time, and the fog eddied sluggishly. But once more that faint scent died, and with it the breath of air that had carried it.

Polgara groaned then, an almost strangled sound, and the fog began to swirl. The wet grass at Ce'Nedra's feet, drenched with droplets of mist, bent slightly, and the dusty smell of the Thullish uplands grew stronger.

It seemed that the blanket of concentration that had held the fog motionless became more desperate as the Grolims fought to stop the quickening breeze pouring down the valley from the acrid stretches to the west.

The blanket began to tatter and to fall apart as the weaker of the Grolims, pushed beyond their capacity, collapsed in exhaustion.

The breeze grew stronger, became a hot wind that rippled the surface of the river. The grass bent before it, and the fog began to seethe like some vast living thing, writhing at the touch of the arid wind.

Ce'Nedra could see the still-burning city of Thull Mardu now, and the infantry lines drawn up on the plain beside the river.

The hot, dusty wind blew stronger, and the fog, as insubstantial as the thought that had raised it from the earth, dissolved, and the morning sun broke through to bathe the field in golden light.

"Polgara!" Durnik cried in sudden alarm.

Ce'Nedra whirled in time to see Polgara, her face drained deathly white, slowly toppling to the earth.

LELLDORIN OF WILDANTOR had been nervously pacing back and forth along the ranks of his bowmen, stopping often to listen for any sound coming out of the fog from the field lying in front of the massed infantry. "Can you hear anything?" he asked urgently of a Tolnedran legionnaire standing nearby.

The Tolnedran shook his head.
That same whisper came out of the fog from a dozen different places.

"Can you hear anything?"

"Can you hear anything?"

"What are they doing?"

Somewhere to the front, there was a faint clink.

"There!" everyone cried almost in unison.

"Not yet!" Lelldorin snapped to one of his countrymen who was raising his bow. "It could be just a wounded Thull out there. Save your arrows."

"Is that a breeze?" a Drasnian pikeman asked. "Please, Belar, let it be a breeze."

Lelldorin stared into the fog, nervously fingering his bowstring. Then he felt a faint touch of air on his cheek.

"A breeze," someone exulted.

"A breeze." The phrase raced through the massed army.

Then the faint breath of air died, and the fog settled again, seeming thicker than ever.

Someone groaned bitterly.

The fog stirred then and began to eddy sluggishly. It was a breeze! Lelldorin held his breath.

The fog began to move, flowing gray over the ground like water.

"There's something moving out there!" a Tolnedran barked. "Get ready!"

The flowing fog moved faster, thinning, melting in the hot, dusty breeze blowing down the valley. Lelldorin strained his eyes to the front. There were moving shapes out there, no more than seventy paces from the infantry.

Then, as if all its stubborn resistance had broken at once, the fog shimmered and dissolved, and the sun broke through. The entire field before them was filled with Malloreans. Their stealthy forward pace froze momentarily as they flinched in the sudden light of the sun.

"Now!" Lelldorin shouted, raising his bow. Behind him, his archers with one universal motion followed his action, and the sudden release of a thousand bowstrings all at once was like some vast, thrumming note. A whistling sheet of arrows soared over the heads of the solidly standing infantry, seemed to hang motionless in the air for a moment, then hurtled into the close-packed Mallorean ranks.