David and Leigh Eddings – Belgarath the Sorcerer

hold it up so that they can see it.”

“I thought you said I wasn’t supposed to.”

“I didn’t say that you were going to use it. I just told you to hold

it up.

I want the Chandim to be able to see it–and I want it to be able to

see them.”

“What good’s that going to do?”

Actually, I wasn’t really sure, but I had a strong hunch about what

would happen.

“It’d take too long to explain. Have I been wrong yet?”

“Well–I suppose not.”

“Then you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I know what I’m

doing.” I was praying rather fervently that I did, in fact, know what

I was doing.

It wasn’t very long before several dozen Hounds came loping around a

bend in that frozen river.

“All right, Riva,” I said.

“Now’s the time.

Raise up the Orb. Don’t give it any orders, just hold it up. Don’t

squeeze it. I know how strong your hands are. If you get excited and

crush the Orb, we’re in trouble.”

“I thought we already were,” Cherek muttered somewhere behind me.

“I heard that,” I threw back over my shoulder at him.

Riva sighed, took out the Orb, and held it over his head.

“Goodbye, father,” he said mournfully.

The Hounds running after us skidded to a stop on the slippery river as

they caught sight of the glowing Orb in Riva’s upraised hand.

Then the Orb stopped glowing. It flickered and then went dark.

Riva groaned.

Then the Orb woke up again, and it didn’t glow blue this time. The

light that blazed forth from it was pure white, and it was about three

times brighter than the sun.

The Chandim fled, howling in pain, stumbling, bumping into each other,

and with their toenails shrieking across the ice.

I don’t know if any of those Grolims ever regained their sight, but I

do know that they were all totally blind when they ran back up the

river.

“Well,” I said with a certain astonishment, “what do you know? It

worked after all. What an amazing thing!”

“Belgarath!” There was a note of anguish in Cherek’s voice.

“Are you saying that you didn’t know?”

“It was theoretically sound,” I replied, “but you never really know

about theories until you try them out.”

“What happened?” Dras demanded.

I shrugged.

“Riva’s forbidden to use the Orb. That’s why the Orb permits him to

touch it. He couldn’t do anything, but the Orb could–and it did. The

Orb doesn’t like Torak–or the Angaraks. It does like Riva, though. I

deliberately put him in danger, and that forced the Orb to take matters

into its own hands. It worked out rather well, don’t you think?”

They stared at me in absolute horror.

“Remind me never to play dice with you, Belgarath,” Dras said in a

trembling voice.

“You take too many chances.”

With Ctuchik and Torak both to drive them, more of the Hounds came back

down the river after us, and a fair number of Grolims, as well.

There were mounted men following along behind the Grolims, helmeted men

in mail shirts and carrying assorted weapons. Those were the first

Murgos I ever saw. I didn’t like them then, and my opinion of them

hasn’t improved over the years. Their horses were somewhat bigger than

the scrubby little ponies found on the other side of the Eastern Sea,

but the Murgos were still too big for their mounts.

All right, I’ll be mentioning Murgos and Nadraks and Thulls from time

to time as we go along, so I’m going to sort them out for you. The

three Angarak tribes that migrated to the western continent after the

destruction of Cthol Mishrak were not, in fact, tribes at all. They

were all Angaraks, but the almost two thousand years that they had

lived in the City of Endless Night had modified them. The differences

between them were not racial nor tribal, but rather were based on

class. The word

“Murgo” in old Angarak meant warrior; the word

“Nadrak” meant townsman; and the word

“Thull” meant peasant or serf. Murgos are built like soldiers, broad

shouldered, narrow-wasted, and generally athletic. Nadraks tend to be

leaner. Thulls are built like oxen. Torak had been so intent on

trying to subdue the Orb that he hadn’t paid any attention to what was

happening to the inhabitants of Cthol Mishrak as a result of two

thousand years of what might be called selective breeding, and he

assumed that they differed from each other because they were of

different tribes. That’s one of the reasons that the Angarak societies

he exported to the West didn’t work very well. Murgos felt that work

was beneath their dignity; Thulls were too stupid to set up anything

even resembling a government; and Nadraks had nobody to swindle but

each other.

Have you got all that straight? Try to remember it. I don’t want to

have to go through it all again. I repeat myself often enough as it

is.

The Hounds had been made wary by what had happened to their pack-mates,

so they held back while the Murgos and Grolims rushed to the attack. I

didn’t even have to tell Riva what to do this time. He took out the

Orb and held it up over his head.

Once again the Orb flickered and went out, and once again it took fire.

It went a little further this time, however. It was probably the first

time in its history that Cthol Mishrak had been fully illuminated, and

the western slopes of the Karandese Mountains and the Eastern Sea as

far north as the pole and as far west as the shores of Morindland were

engulfed in a light that was at least as bright as the light that

reached us at Korim three thousand years later.

The charging Murgos and Grolims were instantly incinerated by that

awful light. I discovered something about the Orb in that moment. It

had a certain innate sense of decency. It warned people before it

unleashed its power on them. That’s what the blinding of the Hounds

had been–a warning. There was only one, though. If people chose to

ignore the Orb’s first warning, they didn’t get a second.

The Alorns and I were stunned by the enormity of what had just

happened. The Hounds took advantage of our momentary confusion to

circle around along the riverbanks to get ahead of us, and that made it

possible for them to slow us down. That single flash of brilliant

light had temporarily blinded us, too, and we floundered along in the

darkness after it subsided. Our near blindness, coupled with the

periodic suicidal charges of individual Hounds, slowed us to the point

that we continued down-river at a crawl.

“How much farther to the coast?” Cherek panted.

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

“This isn’t turning out well, Belgarath.”

“You worry too much.” I turned teary eyes at his youngest son.

“Keep holding it up in the air, Riva. Let it see what’s coming after

us.”

We kept going down the river, our trip punctuated by a series of bright

flashes and what sounded like thunderclaps as the Orb exploded the

Hounds that came rushing at us from the riverbanks.

“They’re coming up from behind us, Belgarath!” Dras called from the

rear.

“Torak’s with them!”

I swore. I hadn’t expected this. It’s not like the Gods to take a

hand in these skirmishes.

“Is he supposed to do that?” I threw the question into the echoing

vaults of my mind.

“No, he’s not!” My passenger sounded suddenly very angry.

“He’s cheating!”

“Does that mean that the rules have been suspended?”

“I think it does. Be careful though. We don’t want to blow up this

whole side of the universe.”

I choked a little on that.

“Do you want me to do it?”

“Absolutely not! If you take up the Orb, it’ll attach itself to you,

and you’ll never be able to get rid of it. You’d have to become its

guardian, and you don’t have time for that. Tell Riva what to do.

Don’t let him destroy Torak, whatever happens. He’s not the one who’s

supposed to do that.”

“Cherek!” I said sharply.

“Take Dras and Algar! Hold those people back while I talk to Rival”

The king of Aloria nodded grimly, and the three of them spread out on

the ice, their weapons ready. The Murgo skirmishers in the forefront

of the advancing Angaraks got a quick lesson in the virtue of prudence

at that point. It’s not a good idea to try to attack large Alorns when

they’re ready for you.

“Listen very carefully, Riva,” I told Iron-grip.

“I want you to concentrate on your hand.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to understand. Just look at the Angaraks and think

about what you’d like to do to them, but think about your hand at the

same time. The Orb’s a weapon, but you don’t have to swing it. Just