Garion shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, but the song drew him back into that bemused reverie. Sharply, he heard the awful, hissing crackle of Asharak burning beneath the vast, ancient trees in the Wood of the Dryads and heard the Grolim’s desperate plea, “Master, have mercy.” Then there were the screams in Salmissra’s palace as Barak, transformed into that dreadful bear shape, clawed and ripped his way toward the throne room with Aunt Pol in her icy fury striding at his side.
And then the voice that had always been in his mind was there again. “Stop fighting with it.”
“What is it?” Garion demanded, trying to focus his thoughts.
“It’s the Orb.”
“What’s it doing?”
“It wants to know you. This is its way of finding things out.”
“Can’t it wait? We don’t really have time just now ”
“You can try to explain that, if you’d like.” The voice sounded amused. “It might listen, but I doubt it. It’s been waiting for you for a very long time. ”
“Why me?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of saying that?”
“Is it doing the same thing to the others?”
“To a lesser degree. You might as well relax. One way or another, it’s going to get what it wants. ”
There was a sudden ring of steel against steel somewhere off in the dark passageways and a startled cry. Then Garion heard the crunch of blows, and someone groaned. After that, there was silence.
A few moments later they heard the scuff of footsteps, and Barak and Mandorallen returned. “We couldn’t find that one who was coming along behind the rest of them,” Barak reported. “Is Belgarath showing any signs of coming around yet?”
Polgara shook her head. “He’s still completely dazed,” she replied.
“I’ll carry him then. We’d better go. It’s a long way back down, and these caves are going to be full of Murgos before long.”
“In a moment,” she said. “Relg, do you know where we are?”
“Roughly.”
“Take us back to the place where we left the slave woman,” she instructed in a tone that tolerated no objection.
Relg’s face went hard, but he said nothing.
Barak bent and picked up the unconscious Belgarath. Garion held out his arms, and the little boy obediently came to him, the Orb still held protectively against his chest. The child seemed peculiarly light, and Garion carried him with almost no effort. Relg lifted his faintly glowing wooden bowl to illuminate their path, and they started out again, twisting, turning, following a zigzag course that went deeper and deeper into the gloomy caves. The darkness of the peak above them seemed to bear down on Garion’s shoulders with a greater and greater weight the farther they went. The song in his mind swelled again, and the faint light Relg carried sent his thoughts roving once more. Now that he understood what was happening, it seemed to go more easily. The song opened his mind, and the Orb leeched out every thought and memory, passing through his life with a light, flickering touch. It had a peculiar kind of curiosity, lingering often on things Garion did not think were all that important and barely touching matters that had seemed so dreadfully urgent when they had occurred. It traced out in detail each step they had taken in their long journey to Rak Cthol. It passed with them to the crystal chamber in the mountains above Maragor where Garion had touched the stillborn colt and given life in that oddly necessary act of atonement that had somehow made up for the burning of Asharak. It went down with them into the Vale where Garion had turned over the large white rock in his first conscious attempt to use the Will and the Word objectively. It scarcely noticed the dreadful fight with Grul the Eldrak nor the visit to the caves of Ulgo, but seemed to have a great curiosity about the shield of imagining which Garion and Aunt Pol had erected to conceal their movements from the searching minds of the Grolims as they had approached Rak Cthol. It ignored the death of Brill and the sickening ceremonies in the Temple of Torak, but lingered instead on the conversation between Belgarath and Ctuchik in the Grolim High Priest’s hanging turret. And then, most peculiarly, it went back to sift through every one of Garion’s memories of Princess Ce’Nedra – of the way the sun caught her coppery hair, of the lithe grace of her movements, of her scent, of each unconscious gesture, of the flicker and play of emotion across her tiny, exquisite face. It lingered on her in a way that Garion eventually found unsettling. At the same time he found himself a bit surprised that so much of what the princess had said and done had stuck so firmly in his memory.
“Garion,” Aunt Pol said, “what is the matter with you? I told you to hold onto the child. Pay attention. This isn’t the time for daydreaming.”
“I wasn’t. I was-” How could he explain it?
“You were what?”
“Nothing.” They moved on, and there were periodic tremors as the earth settled uneasily. The huge basalt pinnacle swayed and groaned each time the earth shuddered and convulsed under its base; and at each new quiver, they stopped, almost fearing to breathe.
“How far down have we come?” Silk asked, looking around nervously.
“A thousand feet perhaps,” Relg replied.
“That’s all? We’ll be penned up in here for a week at this rate.”
Relg shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It will take as long as it takes,” he said in his harsh voice as they moved on.
There were Murgos in the next gallery, and another nasty little fight in the darkness. Mandorallen was limping when he came back,
“Why didn’t you wait for me as I told you to?” Barak demanded crossly.
Mandorallen shrugged. “They were but three, my Lord.”
“There’s just no point in trying to talk to you, do you know that?” Barak sounded disgusted.
“Are you all right?” Polgara asked the knight.
“A mere scratch, my Lady,” Mandorallen replied indifferently. “It is of no moment.”
The rock floor of the gallery shuddered and heaved again, and the booming noise echoed up through the caves. They all stood frozen, but the uneasy movement of the earth subsided after a few moments.
They moved steadily downward through the passageways and caves. The aftershocks of the earthquake that had shattered Rak Cthol and sent Ctuchik’s turret crashing to the floor of the wasteland of Murgos continued at intervals. At one point, hours later it seemed, a party of Murgos, perhaps a dozen strong, passed through a gallery not far ahead, their torches casting flickering shadows on the walls and their harsh voices echoing. After a brief, whispered conference, Barak and Mandorallen let them go by unmolested and unaware of the ternble violence lurking in the shadows not twenty yards away. After they were out of earshot, Relg uncovered his light again and selected yet another passageway. They moved on, descending, twisting, zigzagging their way down through the caves toward the foot of the pinnacle and the dubious safety of the wasteland which lay outside.
While the song of the Orb did not diminish in any way, Garion was at least able to think as he followed Silk along the twisting passageways with the little boy in his arms. He thought that perhaps it was because he had grown at least partially accustomed to it – or maybe its attention was concentrated on one of the others.
They had done it; that was the amazing thing. Despite all the odds against them, they had retrieved the Orb. The search that had so abruptly interrupted his quiet life at Faldor’s farm was over, but it had changed him in so many ways that the boy who had crept out through the gate at Faldor’s farm in the middle of a windswept autumn night no longer even existed. Garion could feel the power he had discovered within himself even now and he knew that power was there for a reason. There had been hints along the way – vague, half spoken, sometimes only implied – that the return of the Orb to its proper place was only a beginning of something much larger and much more serious. Garion was absolutely certain that this was not the end of it.
“It’s about time,”the dry voice in his mind said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Why do I have to explain this every single time?”
“Explain what?”
“That I know what you’re thinking. It’s not as if we were completely separate, you know.”
“All right, then. Where do we go from here?”
“To Riva.”
“And after that?”
“We’ll see.”
“You aren’t going to tell me?”
“No. Not yet. You haven’t come nearly as far as you think you have. There’s still a very long way to go. ”
“If you aren’t going to tell me anything, why don’t you just leave me alone?”