With a bellow of triumph the Devil Horja straightened and seemed to explode. Bits and fragments of scaly hide flew in all directions as the monster shuddered free of the illusion which had bound him. He had two great arms and an almost human face surmounted by a pair of curving, needle-pointed horns. He had hoofs instead of feet, and his grayish skin dripped slime. He turned slowly and his burning eyes fixed on the gibbering magician.
“Horja!” the white-braided Morind shrieked, “I command you to-” The words faltered as he gaped in horror at the Devil which had suddenly escaped his control. “Horja! I am your master!” But Horja was already stalking toward him, his great hoofs crushing the grass as, step by step, he moved toward his former master.
In wild-eyed panic, the white-braided Morind flinched back, stepping unconsciously and fatally out of the protection of the circle and star drawn upon the ground.
Horja smiled then, a chilling smile, bent and caught the shrieking magician by each ankle, ignoring the blows rained on his head and shoulders by the skull-topped staff. Then the monster stood up, lifting the struggling man to hang upside down by the legs. The huge shoulders surged with an awful power, and, leering hideously, the Devil deliberately and with a cruel slowness tore the magician in two.
The Morindim fled.
Contemptuously the immense Devil hurled the chunks of his former master after them, spattering the grass with blood and worse. Then, with a savage hunting cry, he leaped in pursuit of them.
The three-eyed Agrinja had stood, still locked in a half crouch, watching the destruction of the white-braided Morind almost with indifference. When it was aver, he turned to cast eyes burning with hatred upon Belgarath.
The old sorcerer, drenched with sweat, raised his skull-staff in front of him, his face set with extreme concentration. The interior struggle rippled more intensely within the form of the monster, but gradually Belgarath’s will mastered and solidified the shape. Agrinja howled in frustration, clawing at the air until all hint of shifting or changing was gone. Then the dreadful hands dropped, and the monster’s head bowed in defeat.
“Begone,” Belgarath commanded almost negligently, and Agrinja instantly vanished.
Garion suddenly began to tremble violently. His stomach heaved; he turned, tottered a few feet away, and fell to his knees and began to retch.
“What happened?” Silk demanded in a shaking voice.
“It got away from him,” Belgarath replied calmly. “I think it was the blood that did it. When he saw that Agrinja was bleeding and that Horja wasn’t, he realized that he’d forgotten something. That shook his confidence, and he lost his concentration. Garion, stop that.”
“I can’t,” Garion groaned, his stomach heaving violently again. “How long will Horja chase the others?” Silk asked.
“Until the sun goes down,” Belgarath told him. “I imagine that the Weasel Clan is in for a bad afternoon.”
“Is there any chance that he’ll turn around and come after us?”
“He has no reason to. We didn’t try to enslave him. As soon as Garion gets his stomach under control again, we can go on. We won’t be bothered any more.”
Garion stumbled to his feet, weakly wiping his mouth. “Are you all right?” Belgarath asked him.
“Not really,” Garion replied, “but there’s nothing left to come up.”
“Get a drink of water and try riot to think about it.”
“Will you have to do that any more?” Silk asked, his eyes a bit wild.
“No.” Belgarath pointed. There were several riders along the crest of a hill perhaps a mile away. “The other Morindim in the area watched the whole thing. The word will spread, and nobody will come anywhere near us now. Let’s mount up and get going. It’s still a long way to the coast.”
In bits and pieces, as they rode for the next several days, Garion picked up as much information as he really wanted about the dreadful contest he had witnessed.
“It’s the shape that’s the key to the whole thing,” Belgarath concluded. “What the Morindim call Devil-Spirits don’t look that much different from humans. You form an illusion drawn out of your imagination and force the spirit into it. As long as you can keep it locked up in that illusion, it has to do what you tell it to. If the illusion falters for any reason, the spirit breaks free and resumes its real form. After that, you have no control over it whatsoever. I have a certain advantage in these matters. Changing back and forth from a man to a wolf has sharpened my imagination a bit.”
“Why did Beldin say you were a bad magician then?” Silk asked curiously.
“Beldin’s a purist,” the old man shrugged. “He feels that it’s necessary to get everything into the shape – down to the last scale and toenail. It isn’t, really, but he feels that way about it.”
“Do you suppose we could talk about something else?” Garion asked.
They reached the coastline a day or so later. The sky had remained overcast, and the Sea of the East lay sullen and rolling under dirty gray clouds. The beach along which they rode was a broad shingle of black, round stones littered with chunks of white, bleached driftwood. Waves rolled foaming up the beach, only to slither back with an endless, mournful sigh. Sea birds hung in the stiff breeze, screaming.
“Which way?” Silk asked.
Belgarath looked around. “North,” he replied.
“How far?”
“I’m not positive. It’s been a long time, and I can’t be sure exactly where we are.”
“You’re not the best guide in the world, old friend,” Silk complained.
“You can’t have everything.”
They reached the land bridge two days later, and Garion stared at it in dismay. It was not at all what he had expected, but consisted of a series of round, wave-eroded white boulders sticking up out of the dark water and running in an irregular line off toward a dark smudge on the horizon. The wind was blowing out of the north, carrying with it a bitter chill and the smell of polar ice. Patches of white froth stretched from boulder to boulder as the swells ripped themselves to tatters on submerged reefs.
“How are we supposed to cross that?” Silk objected.
“We wait until low tide,” Belgarath explained. “The reefs are mostly out of the water then.”
“Mostly?”
“We might have to wade a bit from time to time. Let’s strip these furs off our clothes before we start. It will give us something to do while we’re waiting for the tide to turn, and they’re starting to get a bit fragrant.”
They took shelter behind a pile of driftwood far up on the beach and removed the stiff, smelly furs from their clothing. Then they dug food out of their packs and ate. Garion noted that the stain that had darkened the skin on his hands had begun to wear thin and that the tattoodrawings on the faces of his companions had grown noticeably fainter.
It grew darker, and the period of twilight that separated one day from the next seemed longer than it had no more than a week ago.
“Summer’s nearly over up here,” Belgarath noted, looking out at the boulders gradually emerging from the receding water in the murky twilight.
“How much longer before low tide?” Silk asked.
“Another hour or so.”
They waited. The wind pushed at the pile of driftwood erratically and brushed the tall grass along the upper edge of the beach, bending and tossing it.
Finally Belgarath stood up. “Let’s go,” he said shortly. “We’ll lead the horses. The reefs are slippery, so be careful how you set your feet down.”
The passage along the reef between the first steppingstones was not all that bad, but once they moved farther out, the wind became a definite factor. They were frequently drenched with stinging spray, and every so often a wave, larger than the others, broke over the top of the reef and swirled about their legs, tugging at them. The water was brutally cold.
“Do you think we’ll be able to make it all the way across before the tide comes back in again?” Silk shouted over the noise.
“No,” Belgarath shouted back. “We’ll have to sit it out on top of one of the larger rocks.”
“That sounds unpleasant.”
“Not nearly so unpleasant as swimming.”
They were perhaps halfway across when it became evident that the tide turned. Waves more and more frequently broke across the top of the reef, and one particularly large pulled the legs of Garion’s horse out from under him. Garion struggled to get the frightened animal up again, pulling at the reins as the horse’s hoofs scrambled and slid on the slippery rocks of the reef. “We’d better find a place to stop, Grandfather,” he yelled above the crash of the waves. “We’ll be neck-deep in this before long.”
“Two more islands,” Belgarath told . “‘here’s a bigger one up ahead.”