or throat or belly.
It was aimed directly at Torak’s burning left eye.
Brand’s sword made a terrible sound as it slid through the visor of
Torak’s helmet and an even worse sound as it crunched through that
flaming eye and on into the brain of the maimed God of Angarak.
Torak screamed again, and it was not so much a scream of pain as it was
one of unutterable loss. He clutched at the blade protruding from his
eye and jerked it away. Then he threw away his helmet and clawed away
that steel mask.
It was the first time I’d seen his face since the day when he had
cracked the world. The right side was still unmarred and beautiful.
The left side was hideous. The revenge of my Master’s Orb had been too
horrible to imagine. There were still inflamed scars, of course, but
there were parts of Torak’s face where the flesh had been burned away
and bone showed through.
His left eye no longer flamed. It wept blood instead.
Most of the epic of Davoul the Lame is very badly written, but its
climax isn’t too bad, so I’ll quote it here.
. . . and raised he up and pushed his arms even into the sky and cried
out again. And cried he out one last time as he beheld the jewel which
he had named Cthrag Yaska and which had caused him to be smitten again,
and then, as a tree hewn away at the ground, the Dark God fell, and the
earth resounded with his fall.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
And that’s what really happened at Vo Mimbre. Whole libraries have
been written about the battle, but with only a few exceptions–mostly
written by Alorn scholars–those lurid accounts miss the truly
significant events that led up to the duel between Brand and Torak.
Everything we did was designed to force Torak to accept Brand’s
challenge. Once we put him in a situation where he didn’t have any
choice, the outcome was inevitable.
The fall of their God totally demoralized the Angaraks; and the Ulgo s
and various others had killed their kings and generals, so there wasn’t
anybody around to give them orders. Angaraks don’t function well
independently. Someone very wise once said,
“It’s all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect
man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?” That’s
the major argument against any kind of absolutism.
The Malloreans, of course, were doomed. They were surrounded by people
who had every reason to hate them, and forgiveness and mercy weren’t
very evident as the armies of the West fell on the luckless invaders
like the wrath of a whole pantheon of Gods.
The Murgos on the left flank really didn’t see any reason to rush to
the aid of their Mallorean cousins. Murgos don’t like Malloreans in
the first place, so there weren’t any strong ties between the two
races–not without Torak ramming brotherhood down their throats. There
weren’t really any orders given. The Murgos simply turned, fled south
to the banks of the River Arend on the east side of the city, and tried
to swim across. The current was very swift there, and the river was
deep. A few Murgos made it across, but not very many.
The Thulls had already bolted to the river just to the west of Vo
Mimbre. Thulls aren’t bright, but they’re strong, and they weren’t
weighted down with mail shirts the way the Murgos were, so a surprising
number of them made it across to the Tolnedran side. The Nadraks tried
to follow them, but Nadraks don’t swim very well, so probably no more
of them reached safety than did Murgos.
The slaughter continued until dark, and then the Alorns lit torches and
kept on killing Malloreans.
Finally General Cerran came to Brand.
“Isn’t that enough?” he demanded in a sick voice.
“No,” Brand replied firmly, adjusting the sling cradling his bandaged
left arm.
“They came here to butcher us. I’m going to make sure they don’t do it
again. No seed nor root is going to escape this cleansing.”
“That’s barbaric, Brand!”
“So was what happened to Drasnia.”
And after midnight when the torches had burned down, Brasa’s Ulgo s
went around and killed all the wounded. I didn’t care for that kind of
savagery any more than Cerran did, but I kept my nose out of it. Brand
was in charge now, and I still had things for him to do. Those things
were very important, and he might start getting stubborn and
uncooperative if I started giving him orders he didn’t like.
The dawn the following morning was bleary with smoke, and the only
Angaraks left on the field were the dead ones. Malloreans, Murgos,
Nadraks, Thulls, and black-robed Grolims lay scattered or piled in
heaps on that blood-soaked field. Brand’s cleansing was complete.
The Rivan Warder had slept for an hour or two at the end of that awful
night, but he came out of his tent when the sun rose to join my
brothers, my daughter, and me.
“Where is he?” he demanded.
“Where’s who?” Beldin said shortly.
“Torak. I want to have a look at the King of the World.”
“You can look for him if you want to,” Beldin told him, “but you’re not
going to find him. Zedar spirited him off during the night.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you tell him?” Beldin asked me.
“He didn’t need to know about it,” I replied.
“If he had known, he’d probably have tried to stop it.”
“He couldn’t have, you dunce–any more than you or I could have.”
“Does somebody want to explain this?” Brand’s voice had a testy edge
to it.
“It was part of the agreement between the Necessities,” I told him.
“Those agreements get very complicated sometimes, and they appear to
involve a lot of horse-trading. After they’d agreed that you’d win if
the duel took place on the third day, our Necessity was forced to agree
that you wouldn’t be permitted to keep Torak’s body. This wasn’t the
last EVENT, you know. We haven’t seen the last of Torak.”
“But he’s dead!”
“No, Brand,” Polgara told him, “actually, he’s not. You didn’t really
think that sword of yours could kill him, did you? There’s only one
sword in the world that can do that, and it’s still hanging on the wall
behind the throne of the Rivan King. That was another part of the
agreement, and it’s why the Orb was set in your shield instead of left
where it was. You aren’t the one who’s supposed to use that sword.”
“Hang it all, Polgara,” he burst out.
“Nobody survives a sword thrust through the head!”
“Torak can–and has. Your thrust rendered him comatose, but the time’s
going to come when he’ll wake up again.”
“When?”
“When the Rivan king returns. He’s the one who’s supposed to take down
that sword. When he does, Torak’ll wake up, and there’ll be another
EVENT.”
“Will that be the last one?”
“Probably, but we’re not entirely sure,” Beltira replied.
“There are several things in the Mrin that don’t seem to match up.”
“Is Gelane going to be able to handle it?” Brand asked Pol.
“He doesn’t seem all that muscular to me, and Torak’s a very serious
opponent.”
“I didn’t say it was going to be Gelane, Brand,” she corrected him.
“It probably won’t be, if I’m reading the signs correctly. It might be
his son–or somebody twenty generations out in the future.”
Brand’s shoulders slumped, and he winced and put his hand on his
wounded arm.
“Then all of this has been for nothing,” he sighed.
“I’d hardly call it nothing, Brand,” I disagreed.
“Torak was coming after the Orb, and he didn’t get it. That counts for
something, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose,” he conceded glumly. Then he looked out over the
corpse-littered battlefield.
“We’d better get rid of all these dead Angaraks,” he said.
“It’s summer, and there’ll be pestilence if we just leave them lying
there to rot.”
“Are you going to bury them?” Beltira asked him.
“No, I think we’ll burn them instead. I wouldn’t be very popular if I
took everybody’s sword away from him and handed him a shovel.”
“Where are you going to get that much wood?” Beldin asked.
“There’s a sizable forest on the northern edge of this plain,” Brand
replied with a shrug.
“As long as it’s so close, we might as well use it.”
And that’s what happened to those woods. We had a lot of dead Angaraks
on our hands, so we needed some very large bonfires.
It took several days to clean up the battlefield, and while we were all
concentrating on that, Aldorigen of Mimbre and Eldallan of Asturia went
off a ways to have that private discussion Eldallan had proposed before
the battle. Neither of them survived that discussion. The symbolic
significance of that useless meeting wasn’t lost on the older nobles of