“I wish Hettar was here,” Barak grunted, putting his shoulder against the rump of a balky packhorse.
“Talk to him, Barak,” Silk suggested.
“I am talking.”
“Try it without all the curse words.”
“There’s going to be some climbing involved,” Relg told them after they had pushed the last horse inside and stood in the total blackness of the cave. “As nearly as I can tell, the galleries run vertically, so we’ll have to climb from level to level.”
Mandorallen leaned against one of the walls, and his armor clinked. “That’s not going to work,” Belgarath told him. “You wouldn’t be able to climb in armor anyway. Leave it here with the horses, Mandorallen.”
The knight sighed and began removing his armor.
A faint glow appeared as Relg mixed powders in a wooden bowl from two leather pouches he carned inside his mail shirt.
“That’s better,” Barak approved, “but wouldn’t a torch be brighter?”
“Much brighter,” Relg agreed, “but then I wouldn’t be able to see. This will give you enough light to see where you’re going.”
“Let’s get started,” Belgarath said.
Relg handed the glowing bowl to Barak and turned to lead them up a dark gallery.
After they had gone a few hundred yards, they came to a steep slope of rubble rising up into darkness. “I’ll look,” Relg said and scrambled up the slope out of sight. After a moment or so, they heard a peculiar popping sound, and tiny fragments of rock showered down onto the rubble from above. “Come up now,” Relg’s voice came to them.
Carefully they climbed the rubble until they reached a sheer wall. “To your right,” Relg said, still above them. “You’ll find some holes in the rock you can use to climb up.”
They found the holes, quite round and about six inches deep. “How did you make these?” Durnik asked, examining one of the holes.
“It’s a bit difficult to explain,” Relg replied. “There’s a ledge up here. It leads to another gallery.”
One by one they climbed the rock face to join Relg on the ledge. As he had told them, the ledge led to a gallery that angled sharply upward.
They followed it toward the center of the peak, passing several passageways opening to the sides.
“Shouldn’t we see where they go?” Barak asked after they had passed the third or fourth passageway.
“They don’t go anyplace,” Relg told him. “How can you be sure?”
“A gallery that goes someplace feels different. That one we just passed comes to a blank wall about a hundred feet in.”
Barak grunted dubiously.
They came to another sheer face, and Relg stopped to peer up into the blackness.
“How high is it?” Durnik asked.
“Thirty feet or so. I’ll make some holes so we can climb up.” Relg knelt and slowly pushed one hand into the face of the rock. Then he tensed his shoulder and twisted his arm slightly. The rock popped with a sharp little detonation; when Relg pulled his hand out, a shower of fragments came with it. He brushed the rest of the debris out of the hole he had made, stood up and sank his other hand into the rock about two feet above the first hole.
“Clever,” Silk admired.
“It’s a very old trick,” Relg told him.
They followed Relg up the face and squeezed through a narrow crack at the top. Barak muttered curses as he wriggled through, leaving a fair amount of skin behind.
“How far have we come?” Silk asked. His voice had a certain apprehension in it, and he looked about nervously at the rock which seemed to press in all around them.
“We’re about eight hundred feet above the base of the pinnacle,” Relg replied. “We go that way now.” He pointed up another sloping passageway.
“Isn’t that back in the direction we just came?” Durnik asked.
“The cave zigzags,” Relg told him. “We have to keep following the galleries that lead upward.”
“Do they go all the way to the top?”
“They open out somewhere. That’s all I can tell for sure at this point.”
“What’s that?” Silk cried sharply.
From somewhere along one of the dark passageways, a voice floated out at them, singing. There seemed to be a deep sadness in the song, but the echoes made it impossible to pick out the words. About all they could be sure of was the fact that the singer was a woman.
After a moment, Belgarath gave a startled exclamation.
“What’s wrong?” Aunt Pol asked him.
“Marag!” the old man said. “That’s impossible.”
“I know the song, Pol. It’s a Marag funeral song. Whoever she is, she’s very close to dying.”
The echoes in the twisting passageways made it very difficult to pinpoint the singer’s exact location; but as they moved, the sound seemed to be getting closer.
“Down here,” Silk said finally, stopping with his head cocked to one side in front of an opening.
The singing stopped abruptly. “No closer,” the unseen woman warned sharply. “I have a knife.”
“We’re friends,” Durnik called to her.
She laughed bitterly at that. “I have no friends. You’re not going to take me back. My knife is long enough to reach my heart.”
“She thinks we’re Murgos,” Silk whispered.
Belgarath raised his voice, speaking in a language Garion had never heard before. After a moment, the woman answered haltingly, as if trying to remember words she had not spoken for years.
“She thinks it’s a trick,” the old man told them quietly. “She says she’s got a knife right against her heart, so we’re going to have to be careful.” He spoke again into the dark passageway, and the woman answered him. The language they were speaking was liquid, musical.
“She says she’ll let one of us go to her,” Belgarath said finally. “She still doesn’t trust us.”
“I’ll go,” Aunt Pol told him.
“Be careful, Pol. She might decide at the last minute to use her knife on you instead of herself.”
“I can handle it, father.” Aunt Pol took the light from Barak and moved slowly on down the passageway, speaking calmly as she went. The rest of them stood in the darkness, listening intently to the murmur of voices coming from the passageway, as Aunt Pol talked quietly to the Marag woman. “You can come now,” she called to them finally, and they went down the passageway toward her voice.
The woman was lying beside a small pool of water. She was dressed only in scanty rags, and she was very dirty. Her hair was a lustrous black, but badly tangled, and her face had a resigned, hopeless look on it. She had wide cheekbones, full lips, and huge, violet eyes framed with sooty black lashes. The few pitiful rags she wore exposed a great deal of her pale skin. Relg drew in a sharp breath and immediately turned his back.
“Her name is Taiba,” Aunt Pol told them quietly. “She escaped from the slave pens under Rak Cthol several days ago.”
Belgarath knelt beside the exhausted woman. “You’re a Marag, aren’t you?” he asked her intently.
“My mother told me I was,” she confirmed. “She’s the one who taught me the old language.” Her dark hair fell across one of her pale cheeks in a shadowy tangle.
“Are there any other Marags in the slave pens?”
“A few, I think. It’s hard to tell. Most of the other slaves have had their tongues cut out.”
“She needs food,” Aunt Pol said. “Did anyone think to bring anything?”
Durnik untied a pouch from his belt and handed it to her. “Some cheese,” he said, “and a bit of dried meat.”
Aunt Pol opened the pouch.
“Have you any idea how your people came to be here?” Belgarath asked the slave woman. “Think. It could be very important.”
Taiba shrugged. “We’ve always been here.” She took the food Aunt Pol offered her and began to eat ravenously.
“Not too fast,” Aunt Pol warned.
“Have you ever heard anything about how Marags wound up in the slave pens of the Murgos?” Belgarath pressed.
“My mother told me once that thousands of years ago we lived in a country under the open sky and that we weren’t slaves then,” Taiba replied. “I didn’t believe her, though. It’s the sort of story you tell children.”
“There are some old stories about the Tolnedran campaign in Maragor, Belgarath,” Silk remarked. “Rumors have been floating around for years that some of the legion commanders sold their prisoners to the Nyissan slavers instead of killing them. It’s the sort of thing a Tolnedran would do.”
“It’s a possibility, I suppose,” Belgarath replied, frowning.
“Do we have to stay here?” Relg demanded harshly. His back was still turned, and there was a rigidity to it that spoke his outrage loudly.
“Why is he angry with me?” Taiba asked, her voice dropping wearily from her lips in scarcely more than a whisper.
“Cover your nakedness, woman,” Relg told her. “You’re an affront to decent eyes.”