slaughtered child.
‘It is in obedience to our Master’s command that my daughter
Polgara and I have sought thee out, Lord Mara,’ father lied smoothly.
‘Thy brother Torak hath mounted an invasion of the west, Lord.
Aldur, our Master, hath instructed us to advise thee of the
Dragon God’s coming.’
‘LET HIM COME,’Mara replied, still weeping.’HIS ANGARAKS
ARE NO MORE IMMUNE TO MADNESS THAN ARE THE
MURDERING CHILDREN OF NEDRA.’
Father bowed. ‘As thou seest fit, Lord Mara,’ he said. ‘Thus my
daughter and I have fulfilled the task lain upon us by our Master.
Now will we depart and trouble thee no more.’
‘That was quick,’ I muttered to him as we retraced our steps
through the illusion called Mar Amon.
Father shrugged. ‘Actually, it turned out even better than I’d
hoped.’
‘I didn’t exactly follow that,’ I admitted.
‘Maragor’s sort of a back door to Tolnedra,’ he explained. ‘Urvon
might be planning to come through northern Cthol Murgos and
invade Tolnedra from this direction instead of coming up through
Nyissa. Now Mara knows he’s coming, so we’ve closed that door.
Urvon’s army might be sane when they come into Maragor, but
they’ll be raving madmen when they go out.’ He looked rather
pleased with himself. ‘I might have hoped for a little more
commitment from Mara, but he’ll cover this front for us, and I’ll settle for
that. Let’s go have a talk with the Gorim. We might as well advise
everybody about what’s happening at the same time. Then we won’t
have to make this trip again.’
‘Are we going to enlist the Ulgos, then?’
‘I don’t think they’d care to attend, but let’s not insult them by
neglecting their invitation.’
‘Busy-work.’
‘That one missed me, Pol.’
‘We’re just running around telling people about a party they won’t
be interested in attending.’
‘Call it diplomatic courtesy, Pol.’
‘I’d rather call it a waste of time.’
‘There’s an element of that in all diplomacy. Let’s go to Prolgu,
shall we?’
The endless rain which had so bedeviled the low country during
the years since Torak’s Eclipse had fallen as snow in the mountains
of holy Ulgo, but father and I didn’t have to make the trip on
foot, so we avoided that particular unpleasantness. Flying when it’s
snowing is tiresome, but not nearly as tiresome as wading through
hip-deep snowbanks. It also avoided encounters with the frolicsome
creatures who live in the mountains of Ulgoland.
Prolgu, of course, is a mountain more than a city. The Algars
constructed that mountain they call the Stronghold, but the Ulgos
integrated Prolgu with the mountain where the original Gorim met
with UL and shamed the father of the Gods into accepting the
outcasts of the world.
We came to earth in an abandoned city like none other in all the
world. Most ancient cities were ruined as the result of war, and war
leaves some fairly visible marks on the walls and buildings. Prolgu,
however, had not been destroyed by any human agency. The Ulgos
had simply moved down into the caves beneath the city, leaving
their houses standing intact and vacant behind them. An abandoned
city would normally attract looters, but I rather think it might have
taken a very special kind of looter to trek to Prolgu to wander
through those empty streets in search of valuables. The mountain
of ulgo quite literally teem with creatures that look upon humans
as something to eat. Even the mice are dangerous, or so the story
goes.
I’ve rarely had occasion to go to Prolgu. My family’s made a
practice of dividing up our labors, and maintaining contact with the
Ulgos has always been one of my father’s tasks. We wandered,
seemingly without purpose, through the snow-clogged streets with
the blizzard swirling about us as evening approached and the light
began to fade.
‘Ah, there it is,’ father said finally, pointing at a house that seemed
no different from any of the others. ‘This snow isn’t making things
any easier.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to, father.’
‘Was that meant to be funny?’
‘No, not particularly.
Like all the houses of Prolgu. the one we entered had long since
lost its roof. and there was a dusting of snow on the floor when we
entered. Father led me to a central room and scraped here and there
with his foot for several minutes. ‘Well. finally,’ he muttered to
himself when he found the flagstone he’d been looking for. He
picked up a large rock from one corner of the room and banged on
the flagstone three times.
Nothing happened.
He banged again, and the sound seemed somehow hollow.
Then there was a low grinding sound. and the very large. flat stone’
tilted upward to reveal a dimly lighted space beneath. ‘Belgarath,’ a
hollow sounding voice came from down there, ‘Yad ho, groja UL.’
‘It’s a formality.’ father muttered to me. Then he said, ‘Yad ho.,
groja UL. Yad mar ishum.’
‘Veed mo, Belgarath. Mar ishum Ulgo.’
‘We’ve been invited to enter,’ father said to me. ‘Have you studied
the Ulgo language at all?’
‘Not intensively. The grammar’s Dalish, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s more ancient than Morind or Karandese, though. The
languages of isolated peoples tend to petrify – and you don’t get
much more isolated than the Ulgos. Let’s go on down and talk to
the Gorim.’
‘You’ll have to translate for me. father.’
‘Not really. The Gorim speaks our language.’
‘That’s helpful.’
The light in the caverns of Ulgo is of chemical origin, and it’s
very dim. I couldn’t see how big the caves were. but the echoes
were vast. I’m never entirely
comfortable in the Ulgo
strongly suggested that they
caves. The image of moles keeps intruding on me.
Theirs is an orderly society, though, and they live in neat apartments
cut into the walls of long, dim galleries, and they go about their
daily occupations in much the same way as they would if they lived
above ground. I rather wryly conceded that there was at least one
benefit to living underground. The weather was never a problem.
For the most part, the Ulgos ignored my father and me as we
passed through their galleries. We skirted several enormous chasms
and went along,, one edge of a dark lake as big as an underground
sea. That sea was fed by waterfalls cascading down from the surface
to whisper endlessly in the dimness. The echoes of those waterfalls
joined with the echoes of the Hymn to UL sung at regular intervals
by the devout, and those combined echoes turn all of Ulgo into one
vast cathedral.
The house of the Gorim of Ulgo is constructed of a marble so fine
that it puts the stately buildings of imperial Tol Honeth to shame.
It sits on a small islet in the center of a shallow underground lake,
and it’s reached by a formal-looking causeway. The white-robed
and white-bearded old Gorim, probably the holiest man in the
world, stood waiting for us at the far end of that causeway. I hadn’t
been in the Ulgo caves in over a millennium, but this Gorim was
very much like his predecessors.
‘It’s been a while, Belgarath,’ the Gorim greeted my father when
we reached the isle.
‘I know, Gorim,’ father apologized. ‘I’ve been busy, so I’ve been
sort of letting my social obligations slide. You haven’t met my
daughter, have you?’
‘Sacred Polgara? I don’t believe so.’
‘Sacred? You might want to wait until you know her a little better
before you start assigning descriptions to her, Gorim. Pol’s a little
on the prickly side.’
‘That’ll do, father,’ I told him. Then I curtsied to the Gorim. ‘Iad
Hara, Gorim an Ulgo,’ I greeted him.
‘Dalish?’ He seemed startled. ‘I haven’t heard anyone speak the
Dalish language in over a century. You’re gifted, Polgara.’
‘Probably not, Holy Gorim,’ I replied. ‘My studies have led me
down some fairly obscure paths. I don’t speak Ulgo as yet, though,
so I fell back on Dalish. My accent probably isn’t too good.’
‘It’s close. You might want to spend a month or two at Kell if
you feel the need of polishing it.’
‘After the current crisis, Pol,’ father cautioned.
,Is there another crisis afoot?’ the Gorim asked.
,Isn’t there always?’ father said sourly. ‘This one’s a bit more
serious, though.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ Gorim suggested. ‘If the world’s coming to an
end, maybe I’d better be sitting down when you tell me about it.’
I took to the Gorim of Ulgo immediately. He was a kindly old
man with an understated sense of humor. He didn’t laugh very
much when father told him that Torak had come out of Ashaba
and led his Malloreans across the land-bridge, however. ‘This is
troubling, Belgarath,’ he said with a frown.
‘Truly,’ father agreed. ‘May I speak bluntly?’
‘Of course.’
‘The people of Ulgo aren’t warriors, and they’re not accustomed
to the world above. If nothing else, sunlight would probably be