“Torak could have put it here to trick us. For all we know, the box
could be empty, and the Orb’s someplace else.”
I knew who was supposed to open the box and take out the Orb. The
Purpose that had brought us to this place had planted that piece of
information in my head before we got here, but I also knew that it was
going to have to be voluntary. I was going to have to nudge them a
bit.
“The Orb knows you, Belgarath,” Cherek told me.
“You do it.”
I shook my head.
“I’m not supposed to. There are other things I have to do, and whoever
takes up the Orb will spend the rest of his life guarding it. One of
you gentlemen is going to have to do it.”
“You decide who it’s going to be,” Cherek said.
“I’m not permitted to do that.”
“It’s really very simple, Belgarath,” Dras told me.
“We’ll take turns trying to open the box. Whichever one of us doesn’t
die is the right one.”
“No,” I told him flatly.
“You’ve all got things you’re supposed to do, and dying here in Cthol
Mishrak isn’t one of them.” I squinted at the glowing box.
“I want you gentlemen to be absolutely honest about this.
The Orb’s the most powerful thing in the world. Whichever one of you
picks it up will be able to do anything, but the Orb doesn’t want to do
just anything. It’s got its own agenda, and if anybody tries to use it
for something outside that agenda, it won’t be happy. Torak already
found that out. Examine your hearts, gentlemen. I need somebody who’s
not ambitious.
I need somebody who’ll be willing to devote his whole life to guarding
the Orb without ever trying to use it. If the notion of having
infinite power at your fingertips appeals to you in the slightest,
you’re not the one.”
“That lets me out,” Cherek said with a slight shrug.
“I’m a king, and kings are supposed to be ambitious. The first time I
got drunk, I’d have to try to do something with it.” He looked at his
sons.
“It’s going to have to be one of you boys.”
“I could probably keep a grip on my ambition,” Dras said, “but I think
it ought to be somebody whose mind’s quicker than mine. I can handle a
fight, but thinking too much makes my head hurt.” It was a brutally
candid admission, and it raised my opinion of Dras considerably.
Riva and Algar looked at each other. Then Riva shrugged and smiled
that boyish smile of his.
“Oh, well,” he said.
“I haven’t really got anything better to do anyway.” And he reached
out, opened the box, and took out the Orb.
“Yes!” the voice in my head exulted.
“Well, now,” Algar said casually, “since we’ve settled that, why don’t
we go?”
That’s what really happened in Torak’s tower. All that blather about
“evil intent” in the Book of Alorn was made up out of whole cloth by
somebody who got carried away by his own creativity. I shouldn’t
really blame him for it, I guess. I do it all the time myself. The
real facts behind any story always seem sort of prosaic to me.
“Stick it inside your clothes someplace,” I told Riva.
“It’s a little excited right now, and that glow’s awfully
conspicuous.”
“Won’t I glow, too?” Riva asked dubiously.
“The way the box did, I mean?”
“Try it and find out.” I suggested.
“Does glowing hurt?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. Don’t worry, Riva. The Orb’s very fond of you.
It’s not going to hurt you.”
“Belgarath, it’s a rock. How can it be fond of anything?”
“It’s not an ordinary rock. Just put it away, Riva, and let’s get out
of here.”
He swallowed hard and tucked the Orb inside his fur tunic. Then he
held out one of his huge hands and examined it closely.
“No glow yet,” he noted.
“See? You’re going to have to learn to trust me, boy. You and I have
a long way to go together, and it’ll be difficult for both of us if
you’re going to ask me silly questions every time we turn around.”
“Silly?” he objected.
“After what it did to Torak, I don’t think my questions were silly.”
“Poor choice of terms, perhaps. Let’s go.”
I had a bad moment when we were retracing our steps and Torak cried
out. It was a howl of utter desolation; somewhere in his sleep the
Dragon God knew that we were taking the Orb. He was powerless to stop
us, but that shout almost made me jump out of my skin.
I don’t like being startled like that, which may account for what I did
then.
“Go back to sleep, Torak,” I told him. Then I threw his own words back
in his teeth.
“A word of advice for thee, brother of my Master, by way of thanks for
thine unintended service to me this day. Don’t come looking for the
Orb. My Master’s very gentle. I’m not. If you come anywhere near the
Orb, I’ll have you for lunch.”
It was sheer bravado, of course, but I had to say something to him, and
my little display of spitefulness may have served some purpose. When
he finally did wake up, he was in a state of inarticulate rage, and he
wasted a great deal of time punishing the Angaraks who’d been supposed
to prevent me from reaching his tower. That gave the Alorns and me a
fairly good head start.
We crept back down the stairs to the foot of the tower, listening
tensely for Grolims, but finding only an eerie silence. When we got to
the bottom, I looked out into the snowy square. It had remained
deserted.
My luck was holding.
“Let’s go!” Dras said impatiently. Prince Kheldar and I had a long
discussion about that some years back, and he told me that burglars
always suffer from that same impatience and that it makes getting away
almost more dangerous than breaking in. Your natural instinct after
you steal something is to take to your heels; but if you don’t want to
get caught, you’d better suppress that instinct.
The residual odor from my encounter with the Hounds was still very
strong on Torak’s doorstep, and the five of us were careful to breathe
shallowly until we reached the shelter of that dark alleyway from which
we’d emerged when we first got to the square.
“What do you think?” Cherek whispered to me as we followed that
twisting, smoky alley back toward the city wall.
“Will it be safe to go back the way we came?”
I was already working on that, and I hadn’t come up with an answer yet.
No matter how careful we’d been on our way here from the coast, there
were bound to be traces of our passage. I knew Torak well enough to be
fairly certain that he wouldn’t personally lead the search. He’d leave
that to underlings, and that meant Urvon or Ctuchik. Based on Beldin’s
description of him, I wasn’t particularly worried about Urvon. Ctuchik
was an unknown, though. I had no idea of what Torak’s other disciple
was capable of, and this probably wasn’t a good time to find out.
Going north was obviously out of the question. Torak already had
people in place at the land-bridge, and I didn’t want to have to fight
my way through them–assuming we could. Going west was probably quite
nearly as dangerous. I had to operate on the theory that Ctuchik could
do almost anything I could do, and he’d certainly be able to sense
those traces I mentioned before. I didn’t even consider going east.
There wasn’t much point in going deeper into Mallorea when safety lay
in the other direction.
That left only south.
“Are you gentlemen feeling up to a bit of a scuffle?” I asked Cherek
and his sons.
“What did you have in mind?” Cherek asked me.
“Why don’t we go pick a fight with the guards at the north gate?”
“I can think of a dozen reasons why we shouldn’t,” Riva said
dubiously.
“But I can think of a better one why we should. We don’t know how long
it’s going to be until Torak wakes up, and he’s not going to take the
loss of the Orb philosophically. As soon as his feet hit the floor,
he’s going to be organizing a pursuit.”
“That stands to reason, I suppose,” Iron-grip conceded.
“We want those pursuers to go off in the wrong direction if we can
possibly arrange it. A pile of dead Grolims at the north gate would
probably suggest that we went that way, wouldn’t you say?”
“It would to me, I guess.”
“Let’s go kill some Grolims, then.”
“Wait a minute.” Cherek objected.
“If we’re going to go back the way we came, we won’t want to draw