“That’s impossible,” she objected.
“Nevertheless, its mind is awake. It has to do, I think, with that metal thing around its neck.”
“Remove the ornament then,” she told the snake.
Maas lowered his length to the floor and slid around the divan toward Garion.
“Remain very still, ” Garion’s inner voice told him. “Don’t try to fight. ”
Numbly, Garion watched the blunt head draw closer.
Maas raised his head, his hood flaring. His nervous tongue darted. Slowly he leaned forward. His nose touched the silver amulet hanging about Garion’s neck.
There was a bright blue spark as the reptile’s head came in contact with the amulet. Garion felt the familiar surge, but tightly controlled now, focused down to a single point. Maas recoiled, and the spark from the amulet leaped out, sizzling through the air, linking the silver disc to the reptile’s nose. The snake’s eyes began to shrivel and steam poured from his nostrils and his gaping mouth.
Then the spark was gone, and the body of the dead snake writhed and twisted convulsively on the polished stone floor of the chamber.
“Maasl” Salmissra shrieked.
The eunuchs scrambled out of the way of the wildly threshing body of the snake.
“My Queen!” a shaved-headed, functionary gibbered from the door, “the world is ending!”
“What?” Salmissra tore her eyes from the convulsions of the snake.
“The sun has gone out! Noon is as dark as midnight! The city is gone mad with terror!”
Chapter Twenty-nine
IN THE TUMULT WHICH FOLLOWED that announcement, Garion sat quietly on the cushions beside Salmissra’s throne. The quiet voice in his mind, however, was speaking to him rapidly. “Stay very still,”the voice told him. “Don’t say anything, and don’t do anything.”
“Get my astronomers here immediately!” Salmissra ordered. “I want to know why I wasn’t warned about this eclipse.”
“It’s not an eclipse, my Queen,” the bald functionary wailed, groveling on the polished floor not far from the still-writhing Maas. “The dark came like a great curtain. It was like a moving wall – no wind, no rain, no thunder. It swallowed the sun without a sound.” He began to sob brokenly. “We shall never see the sun again.”
“Stop that, you idiot,” Salmissra snapped. “Get on your feet. Sadi, take this babbling fool out of here and go look at the sky. Then come back to me here. I have to know what’s going on.”
Sadi shook himself almost like a dog coming out of the water and pulled his fascinated eyes off the dead, fixed grin on the face of Maas. He pulled the blubbering functionary to his feet and led him out of the chamber.
Salmissra turned then on Garion. “How did you do that?” she demanded, pointing at the twitching form of Maas.
“I don’t know,” he said. His mind was still sunk in fog. Only the quiet corner where the voice lived was alert.
“Take off that amulet,” she commanded.
Obediently, Garion reached his hands toward the medallion. Suddenly his hands froze. They would not move. He let them fall. “I can’t,” he said.
“Take it from him,” she ordered one of the eunuchs. The man glanced once at the dead snake, then stared at Garion. He shook his head and backed away in fright.
“Do as I say!” the Snake Queen ordered sharply.
From somewhere in the palace came a hollow, reverberating crash. There was the sound of nails screeching out of heavy wood and the avalanche noise of a wall collapsing. Then, a long way down one of the dim corridors, someone screamed in agony.
The dry consciousness in his mind reached out, probing. “At last, ” it said with obvious relief.
“What’s going on out there?” Salmissra blazed.
“Come with me, ” the voice in Garion’s mind said. “I need your help. ” Garion put his hands under him and started to push himself up. “No. This way. ” A strange image of separation rose in Garion’s mind.
Unthinking, he willed the separation and felt himself rising and yet not moving. Suddenly he had no sense of his body – no arms or legs – yet he seemed to move. He saw himself – his own body – sitting stupidly on the cushions at Salmissra’s feet.
“Hurry,” the voice said to him. It was no longer inside his mind but seemed to be somewhere beside him. A dim shape was there, formless but somehow very familiar.
The fog that had clouded Garion’s wits was gone, and he felt very alert. “Who are you?” he demanded of the shape beside him.
“There isn’t time to explain. Quickly, we have to lead them back before Salmissra has time to do anything.”
“Lead who?”
“Polgara and Barak.”
“Aunt Pol? Where is she?”
“Come,” the voice said urgently.
Together Garion and the strange presence at his side seemed to waft toward the closed door. They passed through it as if it were no more than insubstantial mist and emerged in the corridor outside.
Then they were flying, soaring down the corridor with no sense of air rushing past or even of movement. A moment later they came out into that vast open hall where Issus had first brought Garion when they had entered the palace. There they stopped, hovering in the fir.
Aunt Pol, her splendid eyes ablaze and a fiery nimbus about her, strode through the hall. Beside her hulked the great shaggy bear Garion had seen before. Barak’s face seemed vaguely within that bestial head, but there was no humanity in it. The beast’s eyes were afire with raging madness, and its mouth gaped horribly.
Desperate guards tried to push the bear back with long pikes, but the beast swiped the pikes away and fell upon the guards. Its vast embrace crushed them, and its flailing claws ripped them open. The trail behind Aunt Pol and the bear was littered with maimed bodies and quivering chunks of flesh.
The snakes which had lain in the corners were seething across the floor, but as they came into contact with the flaming light which surrounded Aunt Pol, they died even as Maas had died.
Methodically, Aunt Pol was blasting down doors with word and gesture. A thick wall barred her way, and she brushed it into rubble as if it had been made of cobwebs.
Barak raged through the dim hall, roaring insanely, destroying everything in his path. A shrieking eunuch tried desperately to climb one of the pillars. The great beast reared up and hooked his claws into the man’s back and pulled him down. The shrieks ended abruptly in a spurt of brains and blood when the massive jaws closed with a sickening crunch on the eunuch’s head.
“Polgara!” the presence beside Garion shouted soundlessly. “This way!”
Aunt Pol turned quickly.
“Follow us,” the presence said. “Hurry!”
Then Garion and that other part of himself were flying back down the corridor toward Salmissra and the semiconscious body they had recently vacated. Behind them came Aunt Pol and the ravening Barak.
Garion and his strange companion passed again through the heavy, closed door.
Salmissra, her naked body mottled now with rage rather than lust beneath her transparent gown, stood over the vacant-eyed form on the cushions. “Answer me!” she was shouting. “Answer me!”
“When we get back,” the shapeless presence said, “let me handle things. We have to buy some time.”
And then they were back. Garion felt his body shudder briefly, and he was looking out through his own eyes again. The fog which had benumbed him before came rushing back. “What?” his lips said, though he had not consciously formed the word.
“I said, is this your doing?” Salmissra demanded.
“Is what my doing?” The voice coming from his lips sounded like his, but there was a subtle difference.
“All of it,” she said. “The darkness. The attack on my palace.”
“I don’t think so. How could I? I’m only a boy.”
“Don’t lie to me, Belgarion,” she demanded. “I know who you are. I know what you are. It has to be you. Belgarath himself could not blot out the sun. I warn you, Belgarion, what you have drunk today is death. Even now the poison in your veins is killing you.”
“Why did you do that to me?”
“To keep you. You must have more or you will die. You must drink what only I can give you, and you must drink every day of your life. You’re mine, Belgarion, mine!”
Despairing shrieks came from just outside the door.
The Serpent Queen looked up, startled, then she turned to the huge statue behind her, bowed down in a strange ceremonial way and began to weave her hands through the air in a series of intricate gestures. She started to pronounce an involved formula in a language Garion had never heard before, a language filled with guttural hissings and strange cadences.
The heavy door exploded inward, blasted into splinters, and Aunt Pol stood in the shattered doorway, her white lock ablaze and her eyes dreadful. The great bear at her side roared, his teeth dripping blood and with tatters of flesh still hanging from his claws.