Garion’s heart sank, and he turned. The man at the foot of the stairs wore a long, coat-like shirt of mail. He was helmeted and had a shield strapped to his left arm.
With his right he held aloft a sputtering torch.
“Come back down here,” the mailed man commanded them. The giant Toth turned obediently, his hood pulled over his face with his arms crossed so that his hands were inside his sleeves. With an air of meekness he started the stairs again.
“I mean all of you,” the Temple Guardsman insisted. “I order you in the name of the God of Angarak.” As Toth reached the foot of the stairs, the Guardsman’s eyes widened as he realized that the robe the huge man wore was not Grolim black. “What’s this?” he exclaimed. “You’re not Chandim! You’re‑“ He broke off as one of Toth’s huge hands seized him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. He dropped his torch, kicking and struggling. Then, almost casually, Toth removed his helmet with his other hand and banged his head several times against the stone wall of the corridor.
With a shudder, the mail‑coated man went limp. Toth draped the unconscious form across his shoulder and started back up the stairs.
Silk bounded back down to the corridor, picked up the steel helmet and extinguished torch, and came back up again. “Always clean up the evidence,” he murmured to Toth. “No crime is complete until you’ve tidied up.”
Toth grinned at him.
As they neared the top of the stairs, they found the treads covered with leaves that had blown in from the outside, and the cobwebs hung in tatters like rotted curtains, swaying in the wind that came moaning in from the outside through the shattered windows.
The hall at the top of the stairs was littered. Dry leaves lay in ankle‑deep windrows on the floor, skittering before the wind. A large, empty casement at the end of the corridor behind them was half covered with thick ivy that shook and rustled in the chill night wind blowing down off the slopes of the mountains. Doors had partially rotted away and hung in chunks from their hinges. The rooms beyond those doors were choked with leaves and dust, and the furniture and bedding had long since surrendered every scrap of cloth or padding to thousands of generations of industrious mice in search of nesting materials. Toth carried his unconscious captive into one of those rooms, bound him hand and foot, and then gagged him to muffle any outcry, should he awaken before dawn.
“That light was at the other end of the house, wasn’t it?” Garion asked. “What’s at that end?”
“ ‘Twas the livin’ quarters of Torak himself,” Feldegast replied, adjusting his little lantern so that it emitted a faint beam of light. “His throne room be there, an’ his private chapel. I could even show ye t’ his personal bedroom, an’ ye could bounce up an’ down on his great bed ‑or what’s left of it‑ just fer fun, if yer of a mind.”
“I think I could live without doing that.” Belgarath had been tugging at one earlobe. “Have you been here lately?” he asked the juggler.
“Perhaps six months ago.”
“Was anybody here?” Ce’Nedra demanded.
“I’m afraid not, me darlin’. ‘Twas as empty as a tomb.”
“That was before Zandramas got here, Ce’Nedra,” Polgara reminded her gently.
“Why do ye ask, Belgarath?” Feldegast said.
“I haven’t been here since just after Vo Mimbre,” Belgarath said as they continued down the littered hall. “The house was fairly sound then, but Angaraks aren’t really notorious for the permanence of their construction.
How’s the mortar holding out?”
“ ‘Tis as crumbly as year‑old bread.”
Belgarath nodded. “I thought it might be,” he said.
“Now, what we’re after here is information, not open warfare in the corridors.”
“Unless the one who’s here happens to be Zandramas,” Garion corrected. “If she’s still here with my son, I’ll start a war that’s going to make Vo Mimbre look like a country fair.”
“And I’ll clean up anything he misses,” Ce’Nedra added fiercely.
“Can’t you control them?” Belgarath asked his daughter.”
“Not under the circumstances, no,” she replied. “I might even decide to join in myself.”
“I thought that we’d more or less erased the Alorn side of your nature, Pol,” he said to her.
“That’s not the side that was just talking, father.”
“My point,” Belgarath said, “at least the point I was trying to make before everybody started flexing his ‑or is her- muscles, is that it’s altogether possible that we’ll be able to hear and maybe even see what’s going on in the main part of the house from up here. If the mortar’s as rotten as Feldegast says it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to find ‑or make‑ some little crevices in the floor of one of these rooms and find out what we need to know. If Zandramas is here, that’s one thing, and we’ll deal with her in whatever way seems appropriate. But if the only people down there are some of Urvon’s Chandim and Guardsmen or a roving band of Mengha’s Karandese fanatics, we’ll pick up Zandramas’ trail and go on about our business without announcing our presence.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Durnik agreed. “It doesn’t make much sense to get involved in unnecessary fights.”
“I’m glad that someone in this belligerent little group has some common sense,” the old man said.
“Of course, if it is Zandramas down there,” the smith added, “I’ll have to take steps myself.”
“You, too?” Belgarath groaned.
“Naturally. After all, Belgarath, right is right.”
They moved on along the leaf‑strewn corridor where the cobwebs hung from the ceiling in tatters and where there were skittering sounds in the corners.
As they passed a large double door so thick that it was still intact, Belgarath seemed to remember something. “I want to look in here,” he muttered. As he opened those doors, the sword strapped across Garion’s back gave a violent tug that very nearly jerked him off his feet. “Grandfather!” he gasped. He reached back, instructing the Orb to restrain itself, and drew the great blade. The point dipped to the floor, and then he was very nearly dragged into the room. “She’s been here,” he exulted.
“What?” Durnik asked.
“Zandramas. She’s been in this room with Geran.” Feldegast opened the front of his lantern wider to throw more light into the room. It was a library, large and vaulted, with shelves reaching from the floor to the ceiling and filled with dusty, moldering books and scrolls.
“So that was what she was looking for,” Belgarath said.
“For what?” Silk asked.”
“A book. A prophecy, most likely.” His face grew grim. “She’s following the same trail that I am, and this would probably be just about the only place where she could find an uncorrupted copy of the Ashabine Oracles.”
“Oh!” Ce’Nedra’s little cry was stricken. She pointed a trembling hand at the dust‑covered floor. There were footprints there. Some of them had obviously been made by a woman’s shoes, but there were others as well ‑quite tiny. “My baby’s been here,” Ce’Nedra said in a voice near tears, and then she gave a little wail and began to weep. “H‑he’s walking,” she sobbed, “and I’ll never be able to see his first steps.”
Polgara moved to her and took her into a comforting embrace.
Garion’s eyes also filled with tears, and his grip on the hilt of his sword grew so tight that his knuckles turned white. He felt an almost overpowering need to smash things.
Belgarath was swearing under his breath.
“What’s the matter?” Silk asked him.
“That was the main reason I had to come here,” the old man grated. “I need a clean copy of the Ashabine Oracles, and Zandramas has beaten me to it.”
“Maybe there’s another.”
“Not a chance. She’s been running ahead of me burning books at every turn. If there was more than one copy here, she’d have made sure that I couldn’t get my hands on it. That’s why she stayed here so long ‑ransacking this place to make sure that she had the only copy.” He started to swear again.
“Is this in any way significant?” Eriond said, going to a table that, unlike the others in the room, had been dusted and even polished. In the precise center of that table lay a book bound in black leather and flanked on each side by a candlestick. Eriond picked it up, and as he did so, a neatly folded sheet of parchment fell out from between its leaves. The young man bent, picked it up, and glanced at it.
“What’s that?” Belgarath demanded.
“It’s a note,” Eriond replied. “It’s for you.” He handed the parchment and the book to the old man.
Belgarath read the note. His face went suddenly pale and then beet red. He ground his teeth together with the veins swelling in his face and neck. Garion felt the sudden building up of the old sorcerer’s will.