“You’ve thought of something, haven’t you, Durnik?” Queen Porenn observed.
“What manner of barrier could possibly keep the villains from rushing to the aid of their comrades?” Mandorallen asked.
Durnik shrugged. “Fire would probably work.”
Javelin shook his head and pointed at the low gorse bushes in the field beside them. “Everything in this area is still green,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to burn very well.”
Durnik smiled. “It doesn’t have to be areal fire.”
“Could you do that, Polgara?” Barak asked, his eyes coming alight.
She considered it a moment. “Not in three places at once,” she replied.
“But thereare three of us, Pol,” the smith reminded her. “You could block one group with an illusion of fire; I could take the second; and Garion the third. We could pen all three groups in their separate gullies, and then, after we’ve finished with the first group, we could move on to the next.” He frowned slightly. “The only problem with it is that I’m not sure exactly how to go about creating the illusion.”
“It’s not too difficult, dear ” Aunt Pol assured him. “It shouldn’t take long for you and Garion to get the knack of it.”
“What do you think?” Queen Porenn asked Javelin.
“It’s dangerous,” he told her, “very dangerous.”
“Do we have any choice?”
“Not that I can think of right offhand.”
That’s it, then,” Garion said. “If the rest of you will tell the troops what we’re going to do, Durnik and I can start learning how to build imaginary bonfires.”
It was perhaps an hour later when the Rivan troops moved out tensely, each man walking through the gray-green gorse with his hand close to his weapon. The low range of hills lay dark ahead of them, and the weedy track they followed led directly into the boulder-strewn ravine where the unseen Bear-cultists waited in ambush. Garion steeled himself as they entered that ravine, drawing in his will and carefully remembering everything Aunt Pol had taught him.
The plan worked surprisingly well. As the first group of cultists dashed from the concealment of their gully with their weapons aloft and shouts of triumph on their lips, Garion, Durnik, and Polgara instantly blocked the mouths of the other three gullies. The charging cult members faltered, their triumph changing to chagrin as they gaped at the sudden flames that prevented their comrades from joining the fray.
Garion’s Rivans moved immediately to take advantage of that momentary hesitation. Step by step the first group of cultists were pushed back into the narrow confines of the gully that had concealed them.
Garion could pay only scant attention to the progress of the fight. He sat astride his horse with Lelldorin at his side, concentrating entirely upon projecting the images of flame and the sense of heat and the crackle of fire across the mouth of the gully opposite the one where the fight was in progress.
Dimly through the leaping flames, he could see the members of the cult trying to shield their faces from an intense heat that was not really there. And then the one thing that had not occurred to any of them happened. The trapped cult-members in Garion’s gully began to throw buckets full of water hastily dipped from a stagnant pond on the imaginary flames. There was, of course, no hiss of steam nor any other visible effect of that attempt to quench the illusion. After several moments a cult member, cringing and wincing, stepped through the fire. “It isn’t real!” he shouted back over his shoulder. “The fire isn’t real!”
“This
is, though,” Lelldorin muttered grimly, sinking an arrow into the man’s chest. The cultist threw up his arms and toppled over backward into the fire -which had no effect on his limp body. That, of course, gave the whole thing away. First a few and then a score or more cult members ran directly through Garion’s illusion. Lelldorin’s hands blurred as he shot arrow after arrow into the milling ranks at the mouth of the gully. “There’re too many of them, Garion,” he shouted. “I can’t hold them. We’ll have to fall back.”
“Aunt Pol!” Garion yelled. “They’re breaking through!”
“Push them back,” she called to him. “Use your will.”
He concentrated even more and pushed a solid barrier of his will at the men emerging from the gully. At first it seemed that it might even work, but the effort he was exerting was enormous, and he soon began to tire. The edges of his hastily erected barrier began to fray and tatter, and the men he was trying so desperately to hold back began to find those weak spots.
Dimly, even as he bent all of his concentration on maintaining the barrier, he heard a sullen rumble, almost like distant thunder.
“Garion!” Lelldorin cried. “Horsemen -hundreds of them!”
In dismay, Garion looked quickly up the ravine and saw a sudden horde of riders coming down the steep cut from the east. “Aunt Pol!” he shouted, even as he reached back over his shoulder to draw Iron-grip’s great sword.
The wave of riders, however, veered sharply just as they reached him and crashed directly into the front ranks of the cultists who were on the verge of breaking through his barrier. This new force was composed of lean, leather-tough men in black, and their eyes had a peculiar angularity to them.
“Nadraks! By the Gods, they’re Nadraks!” Garion heard Barak shout from somewhere across the ravine.
“What arethey doing here?” Garion muttered, half to himself.
“Garion!” Lelldorin exclaimed. “That man in the middle of the riders -isn’t that Prince Kheldar?”
The new troops charging into the furious melee quickly turned the tide of battle. They charged directly into the faces of the startled cultists who were emerging from the mouths of the gullies, inflicting dreadful casualties.
Once he had committed his horsemen, Silk dropped back to join Garion and Lelldorin in the center of the ravine.
“Good day, gentlemen,” he greeted them with aplomb. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”
“Where did you get all the Nadraks?” Garion demanded, trembling with sudden relief.
“In Gar og Nadrak, of course.”
“Why would they want to help us?”
“Because I paid them.” Silk shrugged. “You owe me a great deal of money, Garion.”
“How did you find so many so fast?” Lelldorin asked.
“Yarblek and I have a fur-trading station just across the border. The trappers who brought in their furs last spring were just lying around, drinking and gambling, so I hired them.”
“You got here just in time,” Garion said.
“I noticed that. Those fires of yours were a nice touch.”
“Up until the point where they started throwing water on them. That’s when things started to get tense.”
A few hundred of the trapped cultists managed to escape the general destruction by scrambling up the steep sides of the gullies and fleeing out onto the barren moors; but for most of their fellows, there was no escape.
Barak rode out of the gully where the Rivan troops were mopping up the few survivors of the initial charge. “Do you want to give them the chance to surrender?” he asked Garion.
Garion remembered the conversation he and Polgara had had several days previously. “I suppose we should,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“You don’thave to, you know,” Barak told him. “Under the circumstances, no one would blame you if you wiped them out to the very last man.”
No,” Garion said, “I don’t think I really want to do that. Tell the ones that are left that we’ll spare their lives if they throw down their weapons.”
Barak shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
“Silk, you lying little thief!” a tall Nadrak in a felt coat and an outrageous fur hat exclaimed. He was roughly searching the body of a slain cultist. “You said that they all had money on them and that they were loaded down with gold chains and bracelets. All this one has on him is fleas.”
“Perhaps I exaggerated just a trifle, Yarblek,” Silk said urbanely to his partner.
“I ought to gut you, do you know that?”
“Why, Yarblek,” Silk replied with feigned astonishment, “is that any way to talk to your brother?”
“Brother!” the Nadrak snorted, rising and planting a solid kick in the side of the body that had so sorely disappointed him.
“That’s what we agreed when we went into partnership -that we were going to treat each other like brothers.”
“Don’t twist words on me, you little weasel. Besides, I stuck a knife in my brother twenty years ago -for lying to me.”
As the last of the trapped and outnumbered cultists threw down their arms in surrender, Polgara, Ce’Nedra, and Errand came cautiously up the ravine, accompanied by the filthy, hunchbacked Beldin.
“Your Algar reinforcements are still several days away.” the ugly little sorcerer told Garion. ” I tried to hurry them along, but they’re very tenderhearted with their horses. Where did you get all the Nadraks?”