wasn’t going to let that happen if I could possibly stop it.
It didn’t take the twins and me very long to manufacture our
mangonels.
Zedar’s engines were sitting out in plain sight, so we plagiarized.
Aiming them wasn’t a particular problem either. Among his other
talents, Belmakor had been a mathematician, and he’d given the twins
several centuries of instruction. It took them only about fifteen
minutes to compute angles, trajectories, proper tension, and weights.
Our first throw dropped half a ton of fist-size rocks directly on top
of one of Zedar’s engines. The second one engulfed that monstrosity in
fire.
Did you know that people almost always run when they’re on fire? It
doesn’t do any good, of course, but they do it anyway. Burning Thulls
fell back into the ranks of Torak’s other troops, causing a great deal
of confusion, and after an hour or so, we’d eliminated the problem.
Zedar’d lost a whole night’s sleep for nothing.
At that point, he didn’t really have any choice but to mount another
frontal assault. I knew that something was coming, because I could
feel his Will building even as his troops were forming up for the
charge. When he released it, a howling wind-storm struck the walls of
Vo Mimbre.
No, he wasn’t trying to blow us off the top of the walls. He was
trying to deflect the arrows of our archers. I shudder to think of the
effort his windstorm caused him. Moving that much air’s a great deal
like trying to pick up a mountain.
The twins took steps without even bothering to consult with me. Working
in tandem, they erected a barrier of pure Will about a mile out from
the walls, neatly dividing Zedar’s wind-storm and sending it streaming
off to either side of the city. The air around Vo Mimbre became dead
calm, and the Asturian archers cut down whole battalions of charging
Malloreans.
The attack faltered, stopped, and then reversed.
Polgara came up and joined us on the walls late in the morning.
“You three have been busy, haven’t you?” she observed.
“You’re making so much noise that I can’t even hear myself think.
Zedar’s right on the verge of exhaustion, you know.”
“Good,” I said.
“I’m getting tired of playing games with him.”
“Don’t start gloating yet, father. Zedar’s not the only one out there,
you know. I’m getting the sense of a lot of other minds at work.
Zedar’s called in the Grolims to help him.”
“Can you get any idea of what he’ll try next, dear sister?” Belkira
asked her.
“Nothing specific,” she replied.
“They seem to be thinking about dirt.”
“Dirt?” Belkira exclaimed.
“What’s dirt got to do with anything? All that’s out there right now
is mud.”
“They’re drying it out. Zedar’s got his Grolims concentrating on
extracting the last trace of moisture out of that plain.”
“What on earth for?”
“I’m not privy to that information, uncle,” she told him.
“Zedar doesn’t confide in me, for some reason.”
“Zedar’s always been a tacky sort of person,” Belkira said.
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Belgarath, but I’ve never really
liked him all that much. Are you sure you didn’t leave a few things
out when you were educating him?”
Beltira would never have said that. My brothers weren’t exactly
identical, I discovered. It’s very easy to miss these subtle little
variations.
Identical twins look alike, but no two people are ever really the
same.
Pol’s left eyebrow was already up before she even looked at me.
“Yes?” she said.
“Was there something?”
“Never mind,” I said. I’ve never been entirely sure just how deeply
Polgara can reach into my thoughts, and I think I’d like to keep it
that way. Durnik doesn’t have any secrets from Pol, but I’ve got
secrets that I don’t even want to look at myself. If you’re going to
maintain any kind of self-respect, you’re going to have to keep secrets
from yourself.
It was late afternoon before we discovered why Zedar had been spending
so much time and effort drying out dirt. The wind-storm he’d kicked up
earlier in the day to deflect the Asturian arrows was still blowing
harmlessly off to either side of the city, but it changed direction and
came swirling across that now bone-dry plain picking up great clouds of
dust. After a few minutes, it was impossible to see anything out
there. The dust storm obviously was meant to conceal another assault.
Wildantor’s archers would have to shoot blind, and that’s not
particularly effective.
“We’d better do something, Belgarath!” Beltira shouted over the scream
of the wind.
“I’m working on it,” I told him, but try as I might, I couldn’t come up
with a thing.
Polgara was already ahead of me, though.
“We’ve got a river right here, father,” she said, “and Zedar’s half
killed himself raising this windstorm for us. What does that suggest
to you?”
“Nothing in particular. What does it suggest to you?”
“Oh, father, have your brains gone to sleep?”
“Don’t be coy, Pol. Out with it.”
“We need to lay all that dust, don’t we? I think a waterspout would
probably take care of it, don’t you?”
“Pol, that’s brilliant! Get the twins to help you. They stirred up
all kinds of bad weather during the War of the Gods.”
“We could probably use a little help from you, father.”
“You’ll get it, Pol.”
“Oh?”
“I think brother Zedar needs a quick lesson in good manners.”
“You’re going to reach out and stop his heart?”
“No. I’ve been told not to do anything permanent to him. But I can
distract him, and don’t think making him extremely uncomfortable will
violate any rules.”
“Have fun,” she told me, and then she and the twins went on around the
top of the wall to the side that faced the river.
I considered a number of options and finally settled on one that not
only would make him extremely uncomfortable, but would also humiliate
him. I went looking for him with my mind, and I eventually found him
on top of a hill about five miles away. Trust Zedar to stay as far
away from the fighting as he possibly could. I gathered in my Will and
then released it very slowly. I didn’t want him to know what I was
doing until it was too late.
He was looking out over his dust storm with a sense of smug
satisfaction.
He absently scratched his nose.
Then he vigorously dug his fingernails into one armpit. After that he
moved his attention to other parts of his body. His scratching grew
more and more feverish even as Polgara and the twins broke off a piece
of his windstorm and sent it whirling down the River Arend.
In a burst of sheer, fiendish creativity, I even made his toenails
itch.
After a few minutes, he was actually dancing, and he was digging at his
skin so hard that he was bleeding from a dozen different places.
When the wind Pol and the twins had borrowed came swirling back up the
River Arend, it was carrying tons of water with it, and that was more
than enough to settle the dust Zedar’d spent hours carefully drying
out.
The attack force that had been creeping through the dust storm was
largely comprised of Murgos, and once Wildantor’s archers could see
them, King Ad Rak Cthoros led a much smaller army back out of the range
of those far-reaching arrows.
Pol’s brief rainstorm had passed, but the setting sun sparkled on the
wet grass, and Torak was still outside the walls.
We had survived another day, and if all went well tomorrow we’d see the
end of all this.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I’M sure you noticed that Zedar’s ploys on that second day really
weren’t very effective. I’d always thought he was strong on planning,
but Zedar tended to get rattled in emergencies, and he’d frequently try
the first thing that popped into his head without thinking his way
completely through it. Add the fact that Torak left everything up to
him, but expected results, and you can see his problem. Zedar didn’t
work well under pressure.
Anyway, we’d survived the first two days of the battle. Vo Mimbre had
withstood everything the Angaraks had thrown at it, and if we were
reading the Mrin Codex right, things should start turning in our favor
now.
There was an Arendish poet known as Davoul the Lame at the Mimbrate
court during Aldorigen’s reign, and he’d been working on his prose
epic,
“The Latter Days of the House of Mimbre,” for about ten years when
Torak invaded Arendia. The invasion gave him something important to
include in his epic, and he was forever limping around the outskirts of
our discussions feverishly scribbling notes. I didn’t care much for
him. He was technically the official court poet, and that seems to
have gone to his head. The epic he was producing was cast in “high