there might be a copy of the Oracles hidden somewhere at Ashaba
intrigued me enough so that I got up, fixed myself some breakfast, and
then went on over to Beldin’s tower.
“Let’s get started,” I told him.
He was wise enough not to make any clever remarks. We went to the
window of his tower, pulled on our feathers, and left. We flew in a
generally northeasterly direction and soon crossed the Eastern
Escarpment to Mishrak ac Thull. Thulldom had been devastated by the
war, but that hadn’t been our idea. Kal Torak’s Malloreans had
enlisted the Thulls by the simple expedient of destroying all their
towns and villages and burning their crops. This left the Thulls with
no alternatives. They had to join the army or starve. The women,
children, and aged were left to fend for themselves in a land with no
houses and nothing to eat. My opinion of Torak hadn’t been high in the
first place, and it went down precipitously when I saw the plight of
the Thulls.
When we reached the coast, Beldin veered north. Hawks and falcons have
a great deal of stamina, but not so much so that we were willing to try
crossing the expanse of the Sea of the East in one jump. Gar og Nadrak
wasn’t quite as devastated as Thulldom, but conditions there were also
fairly miserable.
We winged our way north along the coast of Morindland and crossed over
to Mallorea, following the string of islands that formed the
land-bridge. Then Beldin led the way across the Barrens to the
Karandese Mountains and then on south to Ashaba.
Ashaba’s not a town in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s really
nothing more than a very large castle with a number of Karandese
villages in the surrounding forest. The villages were there to support
the Grolims who’d lived in the palace. Torak himself probably didn’t
have to eat, but Grolims get hungry once in a while, I guess, and the
ground around the castle, like the ground at Cthol Mishrak, was dead
and unproductive.
Even the soil rejected Torak.
The house at Ashaba was black basalt, naturally. It was Torak’s
favorite color–or lack of it. It stood on the east side of a sterile
plateau that seemed incapable of sustaining any kind of vegetation
except for leprous grey lichens and dead-white toadstools, and it was
backed up against a lowering cliff.
The place was immense, and it was surmounted with ugly, graceless
towers and spires that stabbed up toward the scudding clouds roiling
overhead. It was walled in, naturally. It was an Angarak building,
and Angaraks put walls around everything–even pigpens. Our simplest
course would have been to come to roost inside the wall, but Beldin
veered off and settled to earth just outside the main gate. I swooped
in and dropped to the ground beside him even as he was shimmering back
into his own form.
I also changed back.
“What’s the problem?”
“Let’s probe around a bit before we go blundering in. Torak may have
left a few surprises behind.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
Beldin concentrated, his ugly face twisting with the effort.
“There’s nobody home,” he said after a moment.
“Any sign of Hounds?”
“Look for yourself. I’m going to poke around and see if there are any
traps lurking inside.”
I sensed nothing at all. There weren’t even any rats inside. So far
as I could tell, there weren’t even any bugs.
“Anything?” Beldin asked.
“Nothing at all. Did you find anything?”
“No. The place is safe.” He squinted at the gate, and I felt his Will
building. Then he released it, and the huge iron gate burst inward
with a thunderous detonation.
“What did you do that for?” I demanded.
“Just me quaint way o’ leavin’ my callin’ card, don’t y’ know,” he
replied in that tired old Wacite brogue he was so fond of.
“Old burnt-face might come back someday, an’ I’d like fer him t’ know
that we stopped by.”
“I think you’re getting senile.”
“Well, you’re the expert on that. Let’s go inside.”
We went through the shattered gate, crossed the courtyard, and warily
approached a huge, nail-studded black door surmounted by the inevitable
polished steel mask. Evidently Torak had felt that any house he lived
in was by definition a temple, “Be my guest,” Beldin offered, pointing
at the door.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I took hold of the massive iron door handle,
twisted it, and opened the door, The house of Torak had an entryway
that was about the size of a grand ballroom, and there was a majestic
staircase just opposite the door.
“Should we start down here?” Beldin asked me.
“No, let’s go up to the top and work our way down. You would recognize
Old Angarak script if you saw it, wouldn’t you?”
“I think so. It looks kind of spidery, doesn’t it?”
“More or less. We’ll split up. Look into any book you find in a
language you can read, and gather up any in Old Angarak script. I’ll
sort through them later.”
The place was vast–more for show, I think, than out of any real need
for that much room. Many of the chambers on the upper floors didn’t
even have furniture in them. It still took us weeks to thoroughly
investigate the house, though, since it was at least as big as Anheg’s
palace at Val Alorn.
At first, Beldin grew very excited each time he found a book or scroll
written in Old Angarak, but most of them turned out to be nothing more
than copies of the Book of Torak. Most of the people at Ashaba had
been Grolims, and every Grolim in the world owns a copy of the Holy
Book of the Angaraks. After the first few times he came running down a
hallway waving one of those books in the air, I sat him down and
patiently gave him some instruction in the Old Angarak alphabet. After
that he was able to recognize copies of the Book of Torak and to
discard them.
We finally found Torak’s library on the second floor of the castle, and
it was there that we spent so much time. There might be more books at
the University of Tol Honeth or the one in Melcene, but not very
many.
A pair of ordinary scholars would have taken decades to examine all
those books, but Beldin and I have certain advantages. We can identify
the contents of a book without too great an exertion.
Finally, after we’d worked our way through the last shelf, way back in
one of the corners, Beldin hurled a book across the room and swore for
about a quarter of an hour.
“This is ridiculous!” he roared.
“There has to be a copy here!”
“There might be,” I agreed, “but I don’t think we’re going to find
it.
Zedar was the one who ultimately wound up taking down Torak’s ravings,
and Zedar’s a master at hiding things. For all we know, the Oracles
are concealed inside some other book–or inside dozens of other books,
a page here and a page there. There could be a complete copy
someplace, but I don’t think it’ll be right out in the open. It might
even be hidden under the floor or in the wall of some room we’ve
already searched. I don’t think we’re going to have any luck, brother.
We can check out the ground floor if you want, but I think we’re just
wasting our time. If there does happen to be a copy here and Zedar’s
the one who hid it, we aren’t going to find it. He knows you and me
well enough to have thought up a way to counteract anything we might
come up with to locate it.”
“I guess you’re right, Belgarath,” he admitted glumly.
“Let’s rip the ground floor apart and then go home. This place stinks,
and I need some fresh air.”
And so we abandoned our search and went home. For the time being, at
least, we were going to have to rely on our own prophecies without any
help from Torak’s.
I took that vacation I’d been promising myself, but after a month or
so, I started to get bored. I went on over to Sendaria to check in
with Polgara and to tell her about the little expedition to Ashaba.
She’d set Gelane up in business as a cooper in the town of Seline in
northern Sendaria, and the heir to Iron-grip’s throne spent most of his
time making barrels and kegs. When he wasn’t doing that, he was
“walking out” with a pretty little blonde girl, the daughter of a local
blacksmith.
“Are you sure she’s the right one?” I asked Pol.
She sighed.
“Yes, father,” she replied in that long-suffering tone of voice.
“Just exactly how do you know, Pol? There’s nothing in the Mrin or the
Darine that identifies these girls–at least nothing I’ve ever come