David and Leigh Eddings – Belgarath the Sorcerer

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

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