With Garion in the lead, they walked purposefully to the head of the stairs and started down as the Grolims, with a variety of weapons in their hands, rushed to the bottom.
“Get back!” Silk snapped at Velvet, who had resolutely joined them with one of her daggers held professionally low.
“Not a chance,” she said crisply. “I’m protecting my investment.”
‘ ‘What investment?”
“We can talk about it later. I’m busy right now.”
The Grolim leading the charge was a huge man, almost as big as Toth. He was swinging a massive axe, and his eyes were filled with madness. When he was perhaps five feet from Gar-ion, Sadi stepped up to the Rivan King’s shoulder and hurled a fistful of strangely colored powder full into the ascending Gro-lim’s face. The Grolim shook his head, pawing at his eyes. Then he sneezed. And then his eyes filled with horror, and he screamed. Howling in terror, he dropped his axe, spun, and bolted back down, shouldering his companions off the steps as he fled. When he reached the floor of the amphitheater, he did not stop, but ran toward the sea. He floundered out into waist-deep water and then stepped off the edge of an unseen terrace lurking beneath the surface. It did not appear that he knew how to swim.
“I thought you were out of that powder,” Silk said to Sadi even as he made a long, smooth, overhand cast with one of his daggers. A Grolim stumbled back, plucking at the dagger hilt protruding from his chest, missed his footing, and fell heavily backward down the stairway.
“I always keep a bit for contingencies,” Sadi replied, ducking under a sword swipe and deftly slicing a Grolim across the belly with his poisoned dagger. The Grolim stiffened, then slowly toppled out off the side of the staircase. A number of black-robed men, seeking to surprise them from the rear, were clambering up the rough sides of the stairway. Velvet knelt and coolly drove one of her daggers into the upturned face of a Grolim on the verge of reaching the top. With a hoarse cry he
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clutched at his face and fell backward, sweeping several of his companions off the wall as he plunged down.
Then the blond Drasnian girl darted to the other side of the stairs, shaking out her silken cord. She deftly looped it about the neck of a Grolim in the act of scrambling up onto the steps. She stepped under his flailing arms, turned until they were back to back, and leaned forward. The helpless Grolim’s feet came up off the step, and he clutched at the cord about his neck with both hands. His feet kicked futilely at the air for a few moments, bis face turning black, and then he went limp. Velvet turned back, unlooped her cord, and coolly kicked the inert body off the edge.
Durnik and Toth had moved up to take positions beside Gar-ion and Zakath, and the four of them moved implacably down the stairs, step by step, chopping and smashing at the black-robed figures rushing up to meet them. Dumik’s hammer seemed only slightly less dreadful than the swoid of the Rivan King. The Grolims fell before them as they moved inexorably down the stairs. Toth was chopping methodically with Durnik’s axe, his face as expressionless as that of a man felling a tree. Zakath was a fencer, and he feinted and parried with his massive, though nearly weightless, sword. His thrusts were quick and usually lethal. The steps beiow the dreadful quartet were soon littered with twisted bodies and were running with rivulets of blood.
‘ ‘Watch your footing,” Dumik warned as he crushed another Grolim’s skull. “The steps are getting slippery.”
Garion swept off another Grolim head. It bounced like a child’s ball down the steps even as the body toppled off the side of the stairway. Garion risked a quick look back over his shoulder. Belgarath and Beldin had joined Velvet to help the girl repel the black-robed men scrambling up the sides of the steps. Beldin seemed to take vicious delight in driving his hook-pointed knife into Grolim eyes, then, with a sharp twist and a jerk he would pull out sizable gobs of brains. Belgarath, his thumbs tucked into his rope belt, waited calmly. When a GroHm’s head appeared above the edge of the stair, the old man would draw back his foot and kick the priest of Torak full in the face. Since it was a thirty-foot drop from the stairs to the stones of the amphitheater, few of the Grolims he kicked off the side of the stairs tried the climb a second time.
When they reached the foot of the stairs, scarcely any of Zandramas’ Grolims survived. With his usual prudence, Sadi darted around first one side of the stairway and then the other,
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coolly sinking his poisoned dagger into the bodies of those Gro-lims who had fallen to the amphitheater floor, the inert dead as well as the groaning injured.
Zandramas seemed somewhat taken aback by the sheer violence of her foes’ descent. She held her ground nonetheless, drawing herself up in scornful defiance. Standing behind her, his mouth agape with terror, stood a man in a cheap crown and somewhat shopworn regal robes. His features bore a faint resemblance to those of Zakath, so Garion assumed that he was the Archduke Otrath. And then at last, Garion beheld his own young son. He had avoided looking at the boy during the bloody descent, since he had been unsure of what his own reaction might have been at a time when his concentration was vital. As Beldin had said, Geran was no longer a baby. His blond curls gave his face a softness, but there was no softness in his eyes as he met his father’s gaze. Geran was quite obviously consumed with hatred for the woman who firmly held his arm in her grasp.
Gravely, Garion raised his sword to his visor in salute, and, just as gravely, Geran lifted his free hand in response.
Then the Rivan King began an implacable advance, pausing only long enough to kick an unattached Grolim head out of his way. The uncertainty he had felt back in Dal Perivor had vanished now. Zandramas stood no more than a few yards away, and the fact that she was a woman no longer mattered. He raised his flaming sword and continued his advance.
The flickering shadow along the periphery of his vision grew darker, and he hesitated as his sense of dread increased. Try though he might, he could not stifle it. He faltered.
The shadow, vague at first, began to coalesce into a hideous face that towered behind the black-robed sorceress. The eyes were soullessly blank, and the mouth gaped open in an expression of unspeakable loss as if the owner of the face had been plunged into a horror beyond imagining from a place of light and glory. That loss, however, bespoke no compassion or gentleness, but rather expressed the implacable need of the hideous being to find others to share its misery.
“Behold the King of Hell!” Zandramas cried triumphantly. “Flee now and live a few moments longer ere he pulls you all down into eternal darkness, eternal flames, and eternal despair.”
Garion stopped. He could not advance on that ultimate horror.
And then a voice came to him out of his memories, and with
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the voice there came an image. He seemed to be standing in a damp clearing in a forest somewhere. A light, drizzling rain was falling from a heavy, nighttime sky, and the leaves underfoot were wet and soggy. Eriond, all unconcerned, was speaking to them. It had happened, Garion realized, just after their first encounter with Zandramas, who had assumed the shape of the dragon to attack them. “But the fire wasn’t real,” the young man was explaining. “Didn’t you all know that?” He looked slightly surprised at their failure to understand. “It was only an illusion. That’s all evil ever really is—an illusion. I’m sorry if any of you were worried, but I didn’t have time to explain.”
That was the key, Garion understood now. Hallucination was the product of derangement; illusion was not. He was not going mad. The face of the King of Hell was no more real than had been the illusion of Arell that Ce’Nedra had encountered in the forest below Kell. The only weapon the Child of Dark had to counter the Child of Light with was illusion, a subtle trickery directed at the mind. It was a powerful weapon, but very fragile. One ray of light could destroy it. He started forward again.
“Garion!” Silk cried.
“Ignore the face,” Garion told him. “It isn’t real. Zandramas is trying to frighten us into madness. The face isn’t there. It doesn’t even have as much substance as a shadow.”