“That’s not the point. Whoever provided the skin was finished with it anyway. The problem is that human skin won’t hold ink.” He unrolled a foot or so of the scroll. “Look at that. It’s so faded that you can’t even make out the words.”
“Could you use something to bring them out again way you did with Anheg’s letter that time?”
“Garion, this scroll’s about three thousand years old. The solution of salts I used on Anheg’s letter would probably dissolve it entirely.”
“Sorcery then?”
Belgarath shook his head. “It’s just too fragile.” He started to swear again even as he carefully unrolled the scroll inch by inch, moving it this way and that to catch the sunlight. “Here’s something,” he grunted with some surprise.
“What does it say?”
“’. . . seek the path of the Child of Dark in the land of the serpents . . . ‘“ The old man looked up. “That’s something, anyway.”
“What does it mean?”
“Just what it says. Zandramas went to Nyissa. We’ll pick up the trail there.”
“Grandfather, we already knew that.”
“We suspected it, Garion. There’s a difference. Zandramas has tricked us into following false trails before. Now we know for certain that we’re on the right track.”
“It isn’t very much, Grandfather.”
“I know, but it’s better than nothing.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Would you just look at that?” Ce’Nedra said indignantly the following morning. She had just arisen and stood at the window, wrapped in a warm robe.
“Hmmm?” Garion murmured drowsily. “Look at what, dear?” He was burrowed deeply under the warm quilts and was giving some serious thought to going back to sleep. “You can’t see it from there, Garion. Come over here “ He sighed, slipped out of bed, and padded barefoot over to the window.
“Isn’t that disgusting?” she demanded.
The grounds of the Imperial Compound were blanketed m white, and large snowflakes were settling lazily through the dead-calm air.
“Isn’t it sort of peculiar for it to snow in Tol Honeth?” he asked.
“Garion, it never snows in Tol Honeth. The last time I saw snow here was when I was five years old.”
“It’s been an unusual winter.”
“Well, I’m going back to bed, and I’m not going to get up until every bit of it melts.”
“You don’t really have to go out in it, you know.”
“I don’t even want to look at it.” She flounced back to their canopied bed, let her robe drop to the floor, and climbed back under the quilts. Garion shrugged and started back toward the bed. Another hour or two of sleep seemed definitely in order.
“Please pull the curtains on the bed shut,” she told him, “and don’t make too much noise when you leave.”
He stared at her for a moment, then sighed. He closed the heavy curtains around the bed and sleepily began to dress.
“Do be a dear, Garion,” she said sweetly. “Stop by the kitchen and tell them that I’ll want my breakfast in here.”
Now that, he felt, was distinctly unfair. He pulled on the rest of his clothes, feeling surly.
“Oh, Garion?”
“Yes, dear?” He kept it neutral with some effort.
“Don’t forget to comb your hair. You always look like a straw stack in the morning.” Her voice already sounded drowsy and on the edge of sleep.
He found Belgarath sitting moodily before the window in an unlighted dining room. Although it was quite early, the old man had a tankard on the table beside him. “Can you believe this?” he said disgustedly, looking out at the softly felling snow.
“I don’t imagine that it’s going to last very long, Grandfather.”
“It never snows in To! Honeth.”
“That’s what Ce’Nedra was just saying.” Garion held out his hands to a glowing iron brazier.
“Where is she?”
“She went back to bed.”
“That’s probably not such a bad idea. Why didn’t you join her?”
“She decided that it was time for me to get up,”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“The same thought occurred to me.”
Belgarath scratched absently at his ear, still looking out at the snow. “We’re too far south for this to last for more than a day or so. Besides, the day after tomorrow is Erastide. A lot of people will be traveling after the holiday, so we won’t be quite so conspicuous.”
“You think we should wait?”
“It’s sort of logical. We wouldn’t make very good time slogging through all that, anyway.”
“What do you plan to do today, then?”
Belgarath picked up his tankard. “I think I’ll finish this and then go back to bed.”
Garion pulled up one of the red velvet upholstered chairs and sat down. Something had been bothering him for several days now, and he decided that this might be a good time to bring it out into the open. “Grandfather?”
“Yes?”
“Why is it that all of this seems to have happened before?”
“All of what?”
“Everything. There are Angaraks in Arendia trying to stir up trouble—just as they were when we were following Zedar. There are intrigues and assassinations in Tolnedra— the same as last time. We ran into a monster—a dragon this time instead of the Algroths—but it’s still pretty close to the same sort of thing. It seems almost as if we were repeating everything that happened when we were trying to find the Orb. We’ve even been running into the same people—Delvor, that customs man, even Jeebers.”
“You know, that’s a very interesting question, Garion.” Belgarath pondered for a moment, absently taking a drink from his tankard. “If you think about it in a certain way, though, it does sort of make sense.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“We’re on our way to another meeting between the Child of Light and the Child of Dark,” Belgarath explained. “That meeting is going to be a repetition of an event that’s been happening over and over again since the beginning of time. Since it’s the same event, it stands to reason that the circumstances leading up to it should also be similar.” He thought about it a moment longer. “Actually,” he continued, “they’d almost have to be, wouldn’t they?”
“That’s a little deep for me, I’m afraid.”
“There are two Prophecies—two sides of the same thing. Something happened an unimaginably long time ago to separate them.”
“Yes. I understand that.”
“When they got separated, things sort of stopped.”
“What things?”
“It’s kind of hard to put into words. Let’s call it the course of things that were supposed to happen—the future, I suppose. As long as those two forces are separate—and equal— the future can’t happen. We all just keep going through the same series of events over and over again.
“When will it end?”
“When one of the Prophecies finally overcomes the other. When the Child of Light finally defeats the Child of Darker the other way around.”
“I thought I already did that.”
“I don’t think it was conclusive enough, Garion.”
“I killed Torak, Grandfather. You can’t get much more conclusive than that, can you?”
“You killed Torak, Garion. You didn’t kill the park Prophecy. I think it’s going to take something more significant than a sword fight in the City of Night to settle this.”
“Such as what?”
Belgarath spread his hands. “I don’t know. I really don’t. This idea of yours could be very useful, though.”
“Oh?”
“If we’re going to go through a series of events that are similar to what happened last time, it could give us a notion of what to expect, couldn’t it? You might want to think about that—maybe spend a little time this morning remembering exactly what happened last time.” . “What are you going to do?”
Belgarath drained his tankard and stood up. “As I said— I’m going back to bed.”
That afternoon, a polite official in a brown mantle tapped on the door of the room where Garion sat reading and advised him that the Emperor Varana wanted to see him. Gar-ion set aside his book and followed the official through the echoing marble halls to Varana’s study.
“Ah, Belgarion,” Varana said as he entered. “A bit of news has just reached me that you might find interesting. Please, have a seat.”
“Information?” Garion asked, sitting in the leather-upholstered chair beside the Emperor’s desk.
“That man you mentioned the other day—Naradas—has been seen here in Tol Honeth.”
“Naradas? How did he manage to get down here that fast? The last I heard, he was riding north from the Great Fair in Arendia.”
“Has he been following you?”
“He’s been asking a lot of questions and spreading money around.”
“I can have him picked up, if you want. I have a few questions I’d like to ask him myself, and I could hold him for several months if need be.”
Garion thought about it. Finally he shook his head rather regretfully. “He’s a Malloreon Grolim, and he could be out of any kind of prison cell you could put him in within a matter of minutes.”