obvious signals? I’m not above letting somebody else do my work for
me.
Then you might ask him who got in the last laugh. I’m sure he won’t
mind. He has an absolutely wonderful sense of humor.
I went back to the place in the Darine that more or less matched the
warning in the Mrin that’d sent Pol and me flying off to the Isle of
the Winds; then I settled down to work. It was very slow going, since
I had to virtually memorize the Mrin in the process. The Darine
usually gave only a brief summary of an event, and the Mrin expanded on
it. Certain key words linked the two, and after I’d matched up a
couple of those passages, I got a little better at pinpointing those
keys. I devised a system of index marks that I’d put in the margins to
correlate matching passages.
Once I’d found a match, I didn’t want to lose it. The more I worked on
it, the more I came to realize that the Darine was little more than a
map to the Mrin. Neither of them was very useful by itself, but when
you put them together, the message started to emerge. It was subtle
and very complex, but it almost absolutely guaranteed that nobody’d
accidentally get his hands on information that was none of his
business.
I slogged along for the better part of a year, and then Beldin came
back to the Vale.
“Did you get the Alorns back where they belong?” I asked him when he
came stumping up the stairs to my tower.
“Finally,” he said.
“You were right about the Bear-cult. They really wanted to stay in the
South. You’d better keep an eye on Valcor. He’s not quite a cultist,
but his sympathies sort of lean in that direction. Radek and Cho-Ram
finally managed to bring him to his senses, though.”
“Cultists don’t have any sense, Beldin.”
“They’re not quite suicidal, though. Radek and Cho-Ram chained up all
the cultists in their own ranks and started for home. The Chereks are
savages, but they’re no match for the legions all by themselves. Once
the Drasnians and Algars left, Valcor didn’t have any choice but to go
home, too.”
“Did Brand take sides?”
“He was in complete agreement with Radek and Cho-Ram. He’s got
responsibilities at home, so he wasn’t about to get involved in an
extended war in the South.” He looked at the scrolls on my work
table.
“Are you making any progress?”
“Some. It’s very slow going, though.” I explained the concordance I’d
been working on.
“Cunning,” he noted.
“Thank you.”
“Not you, Belgarath; the Necessity.”
“It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. You wouldn’t believe how long it
takes to match up some of those passages.”
“Have you talked with the twins about it?”
“They’re busy with something else.”
“Maybe they’d better put it aside. I think this is more important.”
“I can handle it, Beldin.”
“A little professional jealousy there, old boy? A prophecy isn’t
really a prophecy if you don’t unravel it until after the fact, you
know. To all intents and purposes, the twins have a single mind, don’t
they?”
“I suppose so.”
“When you try to do this, you have to keep hopping back and forth, but
they wouldn’t. Beltira could read the Darine, and Belkira the Mrin.
When they hit these correspondences, they’ll both know it instantly.
They’ll be able to do in minutes what takes you days.”
I blinked.
“They could, couldn’t they? I never thought of that.”
“Obviously. Let’s go drop your project into their laps. Then you’ll
be able to do something useful–like cutting firewood or digging
ditches.
Have you looked in on Pol?”
“I’ve been busy. Did it really take you a whole year to take the
Alorns home?”
“No. I made a quick trip to Mallorea to see if anything was stirring
yet.”
“Is there?”
“Not so far. Maybe word of what happened at Riva hasn’t reached Torak
yet. Let’s go get Pol. I think we’d all better get together and make
some plans before I go back and take up permanent residence in Mal
Zeth.”
“That might not be a bad idea. I’ve picked up a few hints about the
next couple of centuries while I was putting the concordance together.
I don’t think anything significant’s going to happen for a while, but
let’s all put our heads together on it. Sometimes I miss things.”
“You? Impossible.”
“Quit trying to be clever, Beldin. I’m not in the mood for it. Let’s
turn the concordance over to the twins and then go to Erat and talk to
Pol.”
The twins understood the idea behind the concordance immediately, and
Beldin had been right. With two sets of eyes, one reading Darine and
the other reading Mrin, they definitely could make headway faster than
I could. Then Beldin took the form of the blue-banded hawk he’s so
fond of, I converted myself into the falcon again, and we winged off to
the northwest to drop in on Polgara.
There’s an old fairy tale about a princess who’s locked up in a lonely
castle that’s completely surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny
trees.
Pol’s manor house in north-central Sendaria is very much like
that-except that her thicket has roses all over it. Those rosebushes
had been untended for centuries. The canes were as thick as tree
trunks, and they were covered with thorns that were at least four
inches long. Their tendrils were so interwoven that nobody was going
to get through them without ripping off most of his skin. Since the
house was totally concealed, nobody’d have any reason to take the
trouble, so Pol’s privacy was guaranteed.
We settled on her doorstep, changed back, and I pounded on the door,
sending echoes booming back into the house.
After a few moments, I heard Pol’s voice just inside.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Pol. Open up.”
She was wearing an apron, and she’d tied a kerchief around her head in
a kind of turban. She was holding a cloth-wrapped broom that had
cobwebs all over it.
“What are you doing, Pol?” Beldin asked her.
“Cleaning house.”
“By hand? Why don’t you do it the other way?”
“It’s my house, uncle. I’ll clean it any way I choose.”
He shook his head.
“You’re a strange person, Polgara,” he noted.
“You spend centuries learning all the shortcuts, and then you refuse to
use them.”
“It’s a matter of principle, uncle. You don’t have any principles, so
you wouldn’t understand.”
He bowed to her.
“Score one for you, Pol,” he said.
“An’ would y’ be willin’ t’ offer the hospitality of yer splendid house
t’ a couple o’ weary travelers, great lady?”
She ignored his attempt at humor.
“What do you two want?” She wasn’t very gracious about it.
“We’re having a little family get-together at the Vale, Pol,” I told
her.
“It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
“Out of the question.”
“Don’t be difficult, Polgara,” Beldin said.
“This is important. We need you.” He pushed his way past her into the
hallway.
“Did you chop a road right to my doorstep?”
“No,” he replied.
“We flew in.”
I looked around. The light was subdued because all of the windows in
the house were covered with rose vines, but I could see that the
entryway to my daughter’s house had a highly polished marble floor and
glowing wooden wainscoting.
“Are you just now getting around to tidying up, Pol?” I asked her.
“No. Geran and I’ve been at it since we got here. We’re on the third
floor now.”
“You’ve turned the crown prince of Riva into a cleaning boy? It’s very
democratic, Pol, but isn’t it a little inappropriate?”
“It won’t hurt him, father. Besides, he needs the exercise.”
Then Geran came warily down the stairway. He was wearing a
dust-stained peasant smock, and he was holding a sword. It wasn’t a
very big sword, but he handled it as if he knew how to use it.
“Grandfather!” he exclaimed when he saw me. He ran the rest of the
way down the stairs.
“Did you kill Salmissra?” he asked eagerly.
“She was dead the last time I looked,” I replied evasively.
“Did you hit her for me the way I asked you to?”
“That he did, lad,” Beldin stepped in to cover my tail feathers.
“That he did.”
Geran looked a bit apprehensively at the gnarled dwarf.
“This is Uncle Beldin, Geran,” Pol introduced them.
“You aren’t very tall, are you?” Geran noted.
“It has its advantages, lad,” Beldin replied.
“I almost never hit my head on a low-hanging limb.”
Geran laughed.
“I like him, Aunt Pol.”
“That wears off fairly soon.”
“Don’t carry tales, Pol,” Beldin chided.
“Let the boy draw his own conclusions.”
“I think we’d better bring Brand in on this,” I said.
“We’ve got a lot of things to talk about, and Brand’s the one who’s
going to have to stand watch over the Orb, so he’ll need to know what’s