They all crowded around the two, trying to keep their jubilation quiet, conscious of the fact that they were virtually on top of an army of Murgos.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Relg said, jerking his shoulders uncomfortably until Silk finally slid off his back. “There’s a different kind of rock in the middle of the hill. I had to make certain adjustments.”
Silk stood, gasping and shuddering uncontrollably. Finally he turned on Relg. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he blurted. “Not ever.”
“What’s the trouble?” Barak asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I had feared we had lost thee, my friend,” Mandorallen said, grasping Silk’s hand.
“How did Brill catch you?” Barak asked.
“I was careless. I didn’t expect him to be here. His men threw a net over me as I was galloping through a ravine. My horse fell and broke his neck.”
“Hettar’s not going to like that.”
“I’ll cut the price of the horse out of Brill’s skin – someplace close to the bone, I think.”
“Why does Taur Urgas hate you so much?” Barak asked curiously.
“I was in Rak Goska a few years ago. A Tolnedran agent made a few false charges against me – I never found out exactly why. Taur Urgas sent some soldiers out to arrest me. I didn’t particularly feel like being arrested, so I argued with the soldiers a bit. Several of them died during the argument – those things happen once in a while. Unfortunately, one of the casualties was Taur Urgas’ oldest son. The king of the Murgos took it personally. He’s very narrow-minded sometimes.”
Barak grinned. “He’ll be terribly disappointed in the morning when he finds out that you’ve left.”
“I know,” Silk replied. “He’ll probably take this part of Cthol Murgos apart stone by stone trying to find me.”
“I think it’s time we left,” Belgarath agreed.
“I thought you’d never get around to that,” Silk said.
Chapter Twenty-three
THEY RODE HARD through the rest of the night and for most of the following day. By evening their horses were stumbling with exhaustion, and Garion was as numb with weariness as with the biting cold.
“We’ll have to find shelter of some kind,” Durnik said as they reined in to look for a place to spend the night. They had moved up out of the series of connecting valleys through which the South Caravan Route wound and had entered the ragged, barren wilderness of the mountains of central Cthol Murgos. It had grown steadily colder as they had climbed into that vast jumble of rock and sand, and the endless wind moaned among the treeless crags. Durnik’s face was creased with fatigue, and the gritty dust that drove before the wind had settled into the creases, etching them deeper. “We can’t spend the night in the open,” he declared. “Not with this wind.”
“Go that way,” Relg said, pointing toward a rockfall on the steep slope they were climbing. His eyes were squinted almost shut, though the sky was still overcast and the fading daylight was pale. “There’s shelter there – a cave.”
They had all begun to look at Relg in a somewhat different light since his rescue of Silk. His demonstration that he could, when necessary, take decisive action made him seem less an encumbrance and more like a companion. Belgarath had finally convinced him that he could pray on horseback just as well as he could on his knees, and his frequent devotions no longer interrupted their journey. His praying thus had become less an inconvenience and more a personal idiosyncrasy – somewhat like Mandorallen’s archaic speech or Silk’s sardonic witticisms.
“You’re sure there’s a cave?” Barak asked him.
Relg nodded. “I can feel it.”
They turned and rode toward the rockfall. As they drew closer, Relg’s eagerness became more obvious. He pushed his horse into the lead and nudged the tired beast into a trot, then a canter. At the edge of the rockslide, he swung down from his horse, stepped behind a large boulder, and disappeared.
“It looks as if he knew what he was talking about,” Durnik observed. “I’ll be glad to get out of this wind.”
The opening to the cave was narrow, and it took some pushing and dragging to persuade the horses to squeeze through; but once they were inside, the cave widened out into a large, low-ceilinged chamber.
Durnik looked around with approval. “Good place.” He unfastened his axe from the back of his saddle. “We’ll need firewood.”
“I’ll help you,” Garion said.
“I’ll go, too,” Silk offered quickly. The little man was looking around at the stone walls and ceiling nervously, and he seemed obviously relieved as soon as the three of them were back outside.
“What’s wrong?” Durnik asked him.
“After last night, closed-in places make me a little edgy,” Silk replied.
“What was it like?” Garion asked him curiously. “Going through stone, I mean?”
Silk shuddered. “It was hideous. We actually seeped into the rock. I could feel it sliding through me.”
“It got you out, though,” Durnik reminded him.
“I think I’d almost rather have stayed,” Silk shuddered again. “Do we have to talk about it?”
Firewood was difficult to find on that barren mountainside and even more difficult to cut. The tough, springy thornbushes resisted the blows of Durnik’s axe tenaciously. After an hour, as darkness began to close in on them, they had gathered only three very scanty armloads.
“Did you see anybody?” Barak asked as they reentered the cave.
“No,” Silk replied.
“Taur Urgas is probably looking for you.”
“I’m sure of it.” Silk looked around. “Where’s Relg?”
“He went back into the cave to rest his eyes,” Belgarath told him. “He found water – ice actually. We’ll have to thaw it before we can water the horses.”
Durnik’s fire was tiny, and he fed it with twigs and small bits of wood, trying to conserve their meager fuel supply. It proved to be an uncomfortable night.
In the morning Aunt Pol looked critically at Relg. “You don’t seem to be coughing any more,” she told him. “How do you feel?”
“I’m fine,” he replied, being careful not to look directly at her. The fact that she was a woman seemed to make him terribly uncomfortable, and he tried to avoid her as much as possible.
“What happened to that cold you had?”
“I don’t think it could go through the rock. It was gone when I brought him out of the hillside last night.”
She looked at him gravely. “I’d never thought of that,” she mused. “No one’s ever been able to cure a cold before.”
“A cold isn’t really that serious a thing, Polgara,” Silk told her with a pained look. “I’ll guarantee you that sliding through rock is never going to be a popular cure.”
It took them four days to cross the mountains to reach the vast basin Belgarath referred to as the Wasteland of Murgos and another half day to make their way down the steep basalt face to the black sand of the floor.
“What hath caused this huge depression?” Mandorallen asked, looking around at the barren expanse of scab-rock, black sand and dirty gray salt flats.
“There was an inland sea here once,” Belgarath replied. “When Torak cracked the world, the upheaval broke away the eastern edge and all the water drained out.”
“That must have been something to see,” Barak said.
“We had other things on our minds just then.”
“What’s that?” Garion asked in alarm, pointing at something sticking out of the sand just ahead of them. The thing had a huge head with a long, sharp-toothed snout. Its eye sockets, as big as buckets, seemed to stare balefully at them.
“I don’t think it has a name,” Belgarath answered calmly. “They Iived in the sea before the water escaped. They’ve all been dead now for thousands of years.”
As they passed the dead sea monster, Garion could see that it was only a skeleton. Its ribs were as big as the rafters of a barn, and its vast, bleached skull larger than a horse. The vacant eye sockets watched them as they rode past.
Mandorallen, dressed once again in full armor, stared at the skull. “A fearsome beast,” he murmured.
“Look at the size of the teeth,” Barak said in an awed voice. “It could bite a man in two with one snap.”
“That happened a few times,” Belgarath told him, “until people learned to avoid this place.”
They had moved only a few leagues out into the wasteland when the wind picked up, scouring along the black dunes under the slate-gray sky. The sand began to shift and move and then, as the wind grew even stronger, it began to whip off the tops of the dunes, stinging their faces.
“We’d better take shelter,” Belgarath shouted over the shrieking wind. “This sandstorm’s going to get worse as we move out farther from the mountains.”