out of the sky sometime after midnight this very night, for all we
know.”
“Curb thine impatience, Beldin,” Aldur told him.
“There will be signs to advise us that the moment of the Choice draws
nigh. The cracking of the world was one such sign. There will be
others as well.”
“Such as?” Beldin pressed. Once he grabbed hold of an idea, Beldin
couldn’t let go of it.
“Before the light comes, there will be a time–a moment–of utter
darkness.”
“I’ll watch for it,” Beldin said sourly.
“As I understand it, there are two possible Destinies out there,”
Belmakor observed.
“Torak’s one of them, isn’t he?”
“My brother is a part of one of them, yes. Each of the Destinies is
comprised of innumerable parts, and each hath a consciousness that doth
exceed the awareness of any of those parts.”
“Which one came first, Master?” Belkira asked.
“We do not know. We are not permitted to know.”
“More games,” Beldin said in a tone of profoundest disgust.
“I hate games.”
“We must all play this one, however, gentle Beldin. The rules may not
be to our liking, but we must abide by them. for they are laid down by
the contending Purposes.”
“Why? It’s their fight. Why involve the rest of us? Why don’t they
just pick a time and place, meet, and have it out once and for all?”
“That they may not do, my son, for should they ever confront each other
directly, their struggle would destroy the whole of the universe.”
“I don’t think we’d want that,” Belkira said mildly. The twins are
Alorns, after all, and Alorns take a childish delight in gross
understatement.
“You are the other Destiny, aren’t you, Master?” Belsambar asked.
“Torak is the one, and you are the other.”
“I am a part of it, my son,” Aldur conceded.
“We are all parts of it.
That is why what we do is so important. One will come in the fullness
of time, however, who will be even more important. It is he who will
meet Torak and prepare the way for the Choice.”
And that was the very first time I ever heard of Belgarion. Aldur knew
he was coming, though, and he’d been patiently preparing for him since
he and his brothers had built the world. If you want to put it in the
simplest terms, I suppose you could say that the Gods created this
world to give Belgarion something to stand on while he set things right
again. It was a lot of responsibility for somebody like Garion, but I
suppose he was up to it. Things did turn out all right–more or
less.
Our Master’s explanation of what we were doing laid a heavy
responsibility on us, as well, and we felt it keenly. Even in the
midst of our labors, however, we all noticed that the world had been
enormously changed by what Torak had done to it. The presence of a new
ocean in what had been the center of the continent had a profound
effect on the climate, and the mountain range our Master and Belar had
raised to confine that ocean changed it even more. Summers became
dryer and hotter for one thing, and the winters became longer and
colder. That’s one of the reasons that I tend to get very angry when
someone starts playing around with the weather. I’ve seen what happens
when something or someone tampers with normal weather patterns. Garion
and I had a very long talk about that on one occasion, as I
recall–that is, I talked. He listened. At least I hope he did.
Garion has enormous power, and sometimes he turns it loose before he
thinks his way completely through a given course of action.
With the change of climate there also came a gradual alteration of the
world around us. The vast primeval forest on the northern edge of the
Vale began to thin out, for one thing, and it was replaced by
grassland.
I’m sure the Algars approve of that, but I preferred the trees
myself.
There was also a rather brutal alteration of the climate of the Far
North. Belar, however, persisted in his plan to find some way to close
with the Angaraks again, and his Alorns were obliged to endure truly
savage winters.
There in the Vale, however, we had more on our minds than the weather.
The cracking of the world set a lot of things in motion, and Aldur kept
the seven of us very busy making sure that things that were supposed to
happen did happen. We surmised that the Angaraks were doing the same
thing. The two contending Purposes undoubtedly were maneuvering for
position.
About twenty years after the cracking of the world, our Master summoned
us all to his tower and suggested that one of us ought to go to what’s
now Mallorea to find out what Torak and his people were up to.
“I’ll go,” Beldin volunteered.
“I fly better than the rest of you, and I can move around among the
Angaraks without attracting any attention.”
“Somehow your reasoning there escapes me, old boy,” Belmakor said.
“You’re a rather remarkable-looking fellow, you know.”
“That’s the whole point. When people look at me, all they can see is
this hump on my back and the fact that my arms are longer than my
legs.
They don’t bother to look at my face to find out what my race is.
There’s a kind of anonymity that goes with being deformed.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Belsambar offered.
“I’m an Angarak, after all, and I know the customs.”
“Thanks, brother, but no. You’ve got some fairly strong opinions about
Grolims. We wouldn’t be anonymous for very long if you started turning
every single priest of Torak inside out. I’m just going there to look,
and I’d rather that Torak didn’t know that I’m around.”
“I wouldn’t interfere, Beldin.”
“Let’s not take the chance. I love you too much to risk your life.”
“You really shouldn’t go alone, Beldin,” Belzedar told him, his eyes
strangely intent.
“I think perhaps I’d better go, too.”
“I’m not a child, Belzedar. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m sure of it, but we can cover more ground if there are two of us.
The other continent’s quite large, and the Angaraks have probably
spread out by now. The Master wants information, and two of us can get
it faster than one.”
Now that I think back about it, Belzedar’s arguments were just a bit
thin. Angarak society was the most tightly controlled in the world.
Torak was not going to let his people spread out; he would keep them
under his thumb. Belzedar had his own reasons for wanting to go to
Mallorea, and I should have realized that helping Beldin wasn’t one of
them.
The two of them argued for a while, but Beldin finally gave in.
“I
don’t care,” he said.
“Come along if it means so much to you.”
And so the next morning the two of them took the forms of hawks and
flew off toward the east.
We all dispersed not long after that. The Master had some fairly
extensive tasks for me in Arendia and Tolnedra.
The young she-wolf went with me, of course. I hadn’t even considered
leaving her behind, and it probably wouldn’t have done me any good if I
had. When we’d first met, she’d said,
“I will go along with you for a while.” Evidently, we hadn’t come to
the end of that “while” yet. I didn’t really mind, though. She was
good company.
The shortest route to northern Arendia lay across Ulgoland, so the wolf
and I went up into those mountains and proceeded in a generally
northwesterly direction. I made us a proper camp every night. Fire
had made her nervous right at first, but now she rather liked having a
fire in the evening.
After a few days I realized that we were going to be passing fairly
close to Prolgu. I didn’t really like the current Gorim very much;
this particular successor seemed to feel that Ulgos were better than
the rest of mankind. I reluctantly concluded that it’d be bad manners
to bypass Prolgu without paying a courtesy call, so I veered slightly
north in order to reach the city.
The route I chose to reach Prolgu ran up through a thickly wooded gorge
with a tumbling mountain stream running down the middle of it. It was
about midmorning, and the sunlight had just reached the damp got torn
of the gorge. I was wool-gathering, I suppose. A kind of peace and
serenity comes over me when I’m in the mountains.
Then the wolf laid her ears back and growled warningly.
“What’s the problem?” I asked her, speaking in the language of men
without even thinking about it.
“Horses,” she replied in wolvish.
“But perhaps they are not really horses. They smell of blood and of