“Come away from that thing, Garion,” Silk told him with a note of revulsion in his voice.
“It sort of helps to look at it,” Garion replied quite calmly, still staring at the altar and the bones. “It gives me something to think about beside being afraid.” He squared his shoulders, and his great sword shifted on his back. “I don’t really think the world needs this sort of thing. Maybe it’s time somebody did something about it.”
When he turned around, Belgarath was looking at him, his wise old eyes narrowed. “It’s a start,” the sorcerer observed. “Let’s eat and get some sleep.”
They took a quick breakfast, picketed their horses, and rolled themselves in their blankets under some bushes at the edge of the clearing. Not even the presence of the Grolim altar nor the peculiar resolve it had stirred in him was enough to keep Garion from falling asleep immediately.
It was almost noon when he awoke, pulled from sleep by a faint whispering sound in his mind. He sat up quickly, looking around to find the source of that disturbance, but neither the forest nor the brushchoked burn seemed to hold any threat. Belgarath stood not far away, looking up at the summer sky where a large, blue-banded hawk was circling.
“What are you doing here?” The old sorcerer did not speak aloud but rather cast the question at the sky with his mind. The hawk spiraled down to the clearing, flared his wings to avoid the altar, and landed on the turf. He looked directly at Belgarath with fierce yellow eyes, then shimmered and seemed to blur. When the shimmering was gone, the misshapen sorcerer Beldin stood in his place. He was still as ragged, dirty, and irritable as he had been the last time Garion had seen him.
“Is this all the farther you’ve managed to come?” he demanded harshly of Belgarath. “What have you been doing – stopping at every tavern along the way?”
“We ran into a small delay,” Belgarath replied calmly.
Beldin grunted with a sour look. “If you keep dawdling along like this, it will take you the rest of the year to get to Cthol Mishrak.”
“We’ll get there, Beldin. You worry too much.”
“Somebody has to. You’re being followed, you know.”
“How far back are they?”
“Five leagues or so.”
Belgarath shrugged. “That’s far enough. They’ll give up when we get to Morindland.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Have you been spending time with Polgara lately?” Belgarath asked dryly. “I thought I’d gotten away from all the ‘what-ifs.”‘
Beldin shrugged, a gesture made grotesque by the hump on his back. “I saw her last week,” he reported. “She has some interesting plans for you, you know.”
“She came to the Vale?” Belgarath sounded surprised.
“Passed through. She was with the red-haired girl’s army.”
Garion threw off his blanket. “With whose army?” he demanded.
“What’s going on down there?” Belgarath asked sharply.
Beldin scratched at his tangled hair. “I never really got the straight of it,” he admitted. “All I know is that the Alorns are following that little redheaded Tolnedran. She calls herself the Rivan Queen – whatever that means.”
“Ce’Nedra?” Garion was incredulous, though, for some reason, he knew that he shouldn’t be.
“I guess she went through Arendia like a pestilence,” Beldin continued. “After she passed, there wasn’t an able-bodied man left in the kingdom. Then she went on down into Tolnedra and goaded her father into convulsions – I didn’t know that he was subject to fits.”
“It crops up in the Borune line once in a while,” Belgarath said. “It’s nothing all that serious, but they try to keep it quiet.”
“Anyway,” the hunchback went on, “while Ran Borune was still frothing at the mouth, his daughter stole his legions. She’s persuaded about half the world to take up arms and follow her.” He gave Garion a quizzical look. “You’re supposed to marry her, aren’t you?”
Garion nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Beldin grinned suddenly. “You might want to give some thought to running away.”
“Ce’Nedra?” Garion blurted again.
“His wits seem a bit scrambled,” Beldin observed.
“He’s been under a strain, and his nerves aren’t too good just now,” Belgarath replied. “Are you going back to the Vale?”
Beldin nodded. “The twins and I are going to join Polgara when the campaign starts. She might need some help if the Grolims come at her in force.”
“Campaign?” Belgarath exclaimed. “What campaign? I told them just to march up and down and make a lot of noise. I specifically told them not to invade.”
“They ignored you, it seems. Alorns aren’t noted for restraint in such matters. Apparently they got together and decided to take steps. The fat one seems fairly intelligent. He wants to get a Cherek fleet into the Sea of the East to commit a few constructive atrocities on Mallorean shipping. The rest of it seems to be pretty much diversionary.”
Belgarath started to swear. “You can’t let them out of your sight for a single instant,” he raged. “How could Polgara lend herself to this idiocy?”
“The plan does have a certain merit, Belgarath. The more Malloreans they drown now, the fewer we have to fight later.”
“We never planned to fight them, Beldin. The Angaraks won’t unite unless Torak comes back to weld them together again – or unless they’re faced with a common enemy. We just talked with Drosta lek Thun, the Nadrak King, and he’s so sure that the Murgos and the Malloreans are about to go to war with each other that he wants to ally himself with the west just to get clear of it. When you get back, see if you can talk some sense into Rhodar and Anheg. I’ve got enough problems already.”
“Your problems are only starting, Belgarath. The twins had a visitation a couple of days ago.”
“A what?”
Beldin shrugged. “What else would you call it? They were working on something – quite unrelated to all this – and the pair of them suddenly went into a trance and began to babble at me. At first they were just repeating that gibberish from the Mrin Codex – you know the place – where the Mrin Prophet’s mind broke down and he degenerated into animal noises for a while. Anyway, they went back over that part – only this time it came out coherently.”
“What did they say?” Belgarath demanded, his eyes burning.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Of course I want to know.”
“All right. It went like this: ‘Behold, the heart of the stone shall relent, and the beauty that was destroyed shall be restored, and the eye that is not shall be made whole again.”‘
Belgarath stared at him. “That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Beldin told him.
“But what does it mean?” Garion asked.
“Just what it says, Belgarion,” Beldin replied. “For some reason the Orb is going to restore Torak.”
Garion began to tremble as the full impact of Beldin’s words struck him. “Torak’s going to win, then,” he said numbly.
“It didn’t say anything about winning or losing, Belgarion,” Beldin corrected him. “All it said was that the Orb is going to undo what it did to Torak when he used it to crack the world. It doesn’t say anything about why.”
“That’s always been the trouble with the Prophecy,” Belgarath observed. “It can mean any one of a dozen different things.”
“Or all of them,” Beldin added. “That’s what makes it so difficult to understand sometimes. We tend to concentrate on just one thing, but Prophecy includes everything at the same time. I’ll work on it and see if I can wring some sense out of it. If I come up with anything, I’ll let you know. I’d better be getting back.” He leaned slightly forward and curled his arms out in a vaguely winglike gesture. “Watch out for the Morindim,” he told Belgarath. “You’re a fair sorcerer, but magic’s altogether different, and sometimes it gets away from you.”
“I think I can handle it if I have to,” Belgarath replied tartly.
“Maybe,” Beldin said. “If you can manage to stay sober.” He shimmered back into the form of the hawk, beat his wings twice, and spiraled up out of the clearing and into the sky. Garion watched him until he was only a circling speck.
“That was a strange visit,” Silk said, rolling out of his blankets. “It looks as if quite a bit’s been going on since we left.”
“And none of it very good,” Belgarath added sourly. “Let’s get moving. We’re really going to have to hurry now. If Anheg gets his fleet into the Sea of the East and starts sinking Mallorean troop ships, ‘Zakath might decide to march north and come across the land bridge. If we don’t get there first, it could get very crowded up there.” The old man scowled darkly. “I’d like to put my hands on your uncle just about now,” he added. “I’d sweat a few pounds off him.”