“Yes, Garion?” the old man answered, rousing himself from his half doze.
“Why did Aunt Pol try to stop me? With the colt, I mean?”
“Because it was dangerous,” the old man replied. “Very dangerous.”
“Why dangerous?”
“When you try to do something that’s impossible, you can pour too much energy into it; and if you keep trying, it can be fatal.”
“Fatal?”
Wolf nodded. “You drain yourself out completely, and you don’t have enough strength left to keep your own heart beating.”
“I didn’t know that.” Garion was shocked.
Wolf ducked as he rode under a low branch. “Obviously.”
“Don’t you keep saying that nothing is impossible?”
“Within reason, Garion. Within reason.”
They rode on quietly for a few minutes, the sound of their horses’ hooves muffled by the thick moss covering the ground under the trees. “Maybe I’d better find out more about all this,” Garion said finally.
“That’s not a bad idea. What was it you wanted to know?”
“Everything, I guess.”
Mister Wolf laughed. “That would take a very long time, I’m afraid.”
Garion’s heart sank. “Is it that complicated?”
“No. Actually it’s very simple, but simple things are always the hardest to explain.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Garion retorted, a bit irritably.
“Oh?” Wolf looked at him with amusement. “Let me ask you a simple question, then. What’s two and two?”
“Four,” Garion replied promptly.
“Why?”
Garion floundered for a moment. “It just is,” he answered lamely.
“But why?”
“There isn’t any why to it. It just is.”
“There’s a why to everything, Garion.”
“All right, why is two and two four then?”
“I don’t know,” Wolf admitted. “I thought maybe you might.” They passed a dead snag standing twisted and starkly white against the deep blue sky.
“Are we getting anywhere?” Garion asked, even more confused now.
“Actually, I think we’ve come a very long way,” Wolf replied. “Precisely what was it you wanted to know?”
Garion put it as directly as he knew how. “What is sorcery?”
“I told you that once already. The Will and the Word.”
“That doesn’t really mean anything, you know.”
“All right, try it this way. Sorcery is doing things with your mind instead of your hands. Most people don’t use it because at first it’s much easier to do things the other way.”
Garion frowned. “It doesn’t seem hard.”
“That’s because the things you’ve been doing have come out of impulse. You’ve never sat down and thought your way through something – you just do it.”
“Isn’t it easier that way? What I mean is, why not just do it and not think about it?”
“Because spontaneous sorcery is just third-rate magic – completely uncontrolled. Anything can happen if you simply turn the power of your mind loose. It has no morality of its own. The good or the bad of it comes out of you, not out of the sorcery.”
“You mean that when I burned Asharak, it was me and not the sorcery?” Garion asked, feeling a bit sick at the thought.
Mister Wolf nodded gravely. “It might help if you remember that you were also the one who gave life to the colt. The two things sort of balance out.”
Garion glanced back over his shoulder at the colt, who was frisking along behind him like a puppy. “What you’re saying is that it can be either good or bad.”
“No,” Wolf corrected. “By itself it has nothing to do with good or bad. And it won’t help you in any way to make up your mind how to use it. You can do anything you want to with it – almost anything, that is. You can bite the tops off all the mountains or stick the trees in the ground upside down or turn all the clouds green, if you feel like it. What you have to decide is whether you should do something, not whether you can do it.”
“You said almost anything,” Garion noted quickly.
“I’m getting to that,” Wolf said. He looked thoughtfully at a lowflying cloud – an ordinary-looking old man in a rusty tunic and gray hood looking at the sky. “There’s one thing that’s absolutely forbidden. You can never destroy anything – not ever.”
Garion was baffled by that. “I destroyed Asharak, didn’t I?”
“No. You killed him. There’s a difference. You set fire to him, and he burned to death. To destroy something is to try to uncreate it. That’s what’s forbidden.”
“What would happen if I did try?”
“Your power would turn inward on you, and you’d be obliterated in an instant.”
Garion blinked and then suddenly went cold at the thought of how close he had come to crossing that forbidden line in his encounter with Asharak. “How do I tell the difference?” he asked in a hushed voice. “I mean, how do I go about explaining that I only meant to kill somebody and not destroy him?”
“It’s not a good area for experimentation,” Wolf told him. “If you really want to kill somebody, stick your sword in him. Hopefully you won’t have occasion to do that sort of thing too often.”
They stopped at a small brook trickling out of some mossy stones to allow their horses to drink.
“You see, Garion,” Wolf explained, “the ultimate purpose of the universe is to create things. It will not permit you to come along behind it uncreating all the things it went to so much trouble to create in the first place. When you kill somebody, all you’ve really done is alter him a bit. You’ve changed him from being alive to being dead. He’s still there. To uncreate him, you have to will him out of existence entirely. When you feel yourself on the verge of telling something to ‘vanish’ or ‘go away’ or ‘be not,’ you’re getting very close to the point of self destruction. That’s the main reason we have to keep our emotions under control all the time.”
“I didn’t know that,” Garion admitted.
“You do now. Don’t even try to unmake a single pebble.”
“A pebble?”
“The universe doesn’t make any distinction between a pebble and a man.” The old man looked at him somewhat sternly. “Your Aunt’s been trying to explain the necessity for keeping yourself under control for several months now, and you’ve been fighting her every step of the way.”
Garion hung his head. “I didn’t know what she was getting at,” he apologized.
“That’s because you weren’t listening. That’s a great failing of yours, Garion.”
Garion flushed. “What happened the first time you found out you could – well – do things?” he asked quickly, wanting to change the subject.
“It was something silly,” Wolf replied. “It usually is, the first time.”
“What was it?”
Wolf shrugged. “I wanted to move a big rock. My arms and back weren’t strong enough, but my mind was. After that I didn’t have any choice but to learn to live with it because, once you unlock it, it’s unlocked forever. That’s the point where your life changes and you have to start learning to control yourself.”
“It always gets back to that, doesn’t it?”
“Always,” Wolf said. “It’s not as difficult as it sounds, really. Look at Mandorallen.” He pointed at the knight, who was riding with Durnik. The two of them were in a deep discussion. “Now, Mandorallen’s a nice enough fellow – honest, sincere, toweringly noble – but let’s be honest. His mind has never been violated by an original thought – until now. He’s learning to control fear, and learning to control it is forcing him to think – probably for the first time in his whole life. It’s painful for him, but he’s doing it. If Mandorallen can learn to control fear with that limited brain of his, surely you can learn the same kind of control over the other emotions. After all, you’re quite a bit brighter than he is.”
Silk, who had been scouting ahead, came riding back to join them. “Belgarath,” he said, “there’s something about a mile in front of us that I think you’d better take a look at.”
“All right,” Wolf replied. “Think about what I’ve been saying, Garion. We’ll talk more about it later.” Then he and Silk moved off through the trees at a gallop.
Garion pondered what the old man had told him. The one thing that bothered him the most was the crushing responsibility his unwanted talent placed upon him.
The colt frisked along beside him, galloping off into the trees from time to time and then rushing back, his little hooves pattering on the damp ground. Frequently he would stop and stare at Garion, his eyes full of love and trust.
“Oh, stop that,” Garion told him.
The colt scampered away again.
Princess Ce’Nedra moved her horse up until she was beside Garion. “What were you and Belgarath talking about?” she asked.
Garion shrugged. “A lot of things.”
There was immediately a hard little tightening around her eyes. In the months that they had known each other, Garion had learned to catch those minute danger signals. Something warned him that the princess was spoiling for an argument, and with an insight that surprised him he reasoned out the source of her unspoken belligerence. What had happened in the cave had shaken her badly, and Ce’Nedra did not like to be shaken. To make matters even worse, the princess had made a few coaxing overtures to the colt, obviously wanting to turn the little animal into her personal pet. The colt, however, ignored her completely, fixing all his attention on Garion, even to the point of ignoring his own mother unless he was hungry. Ce’Nedra disliked being ignored even more than she disliked being shaken. Glumly, Garion realized how small were his chances of avoiding a squabble with her.