‘Torak is asleep – and he’s likely to remain so for a number of years yet.’
‘Our information indicates that it will not be nearly so long. Belgarath himself is convinced that the time is near at hand.’
His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I must hand you all over to the Grolims, then,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped to wait until Polgara had regained her strength before subjecting her to the journey; but if what you say is true, there is little time to waste. Advise your friends to make their preparations, Princess. You will depart for Thull Zelik tomorrow morning.’
‘As your Majesty wishes,’ Ce’Nedra replied, a chill going down her spine as she bowed her head in acquiescence.
‘I am a secular man, Princess,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘I bow to the altar of Torak when the occasion demands it, but I make no pretence at excessive piety. I will not involve myself in a religious dispute between Belgarath and Zedar, and I most certainly will not stand between Torak and Aldur when they confront each other. I would strongly advise you to follow the same course.’
‘That decision is not mine to make, your Majesty. My part in this was decided for me long before I was born.’
He looked amused. ‘The Prophecy, you mean? We Angaraks have one also, Princess, and I don’t imagine yours is any more reliable than ours. Prophecy is no more than a trick of the priesthood to maintain its grip on the gullible.’
‘Then you believe in nothing, my Lord?’
‘I believe in my own power. Nothing else makes any sense.’
The Grolims who escorted them in easy stages northward across the summer-browned plains of Mishrak ac Thull toward Thull Zelik were coldly proper. Ce’Nedra could not be sure if their behavior was the result of warnings from the Emperor of Mallorea or their fear of Polgara. The stifling heat was past now, and the air smelled faintly of the dusty end of summer. The Thullish plain was dotted with villages, random collections of thatch-roofed cottages and dirt streets. The villagers watched, sullen and afraid, as the priests of Torak rode through the little towns, their faces cold and aloof.
The plain to the west of Thull Zelik was covered with the red tents of the vast staging area that had been erected for the Mallorean army. With the exception of caretaker detachments, however, the huge camp was empty. The troops already in Mishrak ac Thull were with ‘Zakath near Thull Mardu, and the steady stream of new arrivals had been quite suddenly cut off.
Thull Zelik itself was like any port town in the world, smelling of salt water, fish, tar, and rotting seaweed. The gray stone buildings were low and squat, almost like the Thulls themselves, and the cobblestoned streets all sloped down to the harbor, which lay in the curve of a broad estuary and faced a somewhat similar harbor on the other side.
‘What city is that?’ Ce’Nedra curiously asked one of the Grolims as she looked across the dirty water toward the far shore.
‘Yar Marak,’ the black-robed priest answered curtly.
‘Ah,’ she said, remembering now her tedious geography lessons. The two cities, one Thullish, the other Nadrak, faced each other across the estuary at the mouth of the River Cordu, and the boundary between Mishrak ac Thull and Gar og Nadrak ran down the precise center of the river.
‘When the Emperor returns from Thull Mardu, I imagine he’ll take steps to eradicate that place over there,’ one of the other Grolims added. ‘He was not pleased with the behavior of King Drosta on the battlefield, and some chastisement seems in order.’
They proceeded directly down a cobbled avenue to the harbor, where but a few ships were moored to the wharves.
‘My crew absolutely refuses to put to sea,’ the Mallorean captain of the ship upon which they were to embark reported to the Grolims. ‘The Chereks out there are like a pack of wolves, burning and sinking everything afloat.’
‘The Cherek fleet is farther south,’ the priest in charge of the detachment of Grolims declared.
‘The Cherek fleet is everywhere, revered priest,’ the captain disagreed. ‘Two days ago they burned four coastal towns two hundred leagues to the south of here, and yesterday they sank a dozen ships a hundred leagues to the north. You wouldn’t believe how fast they can move. They don’t even take the time to loot the towns they burn.’ He shuddered. ‘They’re not men! They’re a natural disaster.’
‘We will set sail within the hour,’ the Grolim insisted.
‘Not unless your priests know how to man oars and handle the rigging,’ the captain told him. ‘My men are terrified. They won’t sail.’
‘We’ll convince them,’ the Grolim said darkly. He gave a few orders to his under-priests. An altar was quickly erected on the high stern deck, and a brazier filled with glowing coals was placed to one side of it.
The leader of the Grolims took his place at the altar and began chanting in a deep, hollow voice, his arms raised to the sky. In his right hand he held a gleaming knife. At random, his cohorts selected a sailor and dragged him, screaming and struggling, to the stern deck. As Ce’Nedra watched with horror, he was bent backward across the altar and butchered with an almost casual efficiency. The Grolim who had wielded the knife lifted the dead man’s dripping heart. ‘Behold our offering, Dragon-God of Angarak!’ he cried in a great voice, then turned and deposited the heart in the smoking brazier. The heart steamed and sizzled horribly for a moment, then began to blacken and shrivel as the fire consumed it. From the bow of the ship a gong clanged in iron celebration of the sacrifice.
The Grolim at the altar, his bloody hands dripping, turned to confront the ashen-faced sailors crowded amidships. ‘Our ceremonies will continue until the ship sails,’ he told them. ‘Who will be the next to give his heart to our beloved God?’
The ship set sail immediately.
Ce’Nedra, sick with revulsion, turned her face away. She looked at Polgara, whose eyes burned with hatred and who seemed in the grip of an overpowering interior struggle. Ce’Nedra knew her, and she knew that it was only by a tremendous effort of her will that Polgara was able to keep herself from unleashing a terrible retribution on the blood-stained Grolim at the altar. Beside her, protected in the clasp of one of her arms, stood Errand. On the child’s face was an expression Ce’Nedra had never seen there before. His look was sad, compassionate, and at the same time filled with a kind of iron-hard resolution, as if, had he but the power, he would destroy every altar to Torak in all the world.
‘You will go belowdecks now,’ one of their Grolim captors told them. ‘It will be a matter of some days before we reach the shores of boundless Mallorea.’
They sailed north, hugging the Nadrak coastline, fearfully ready to run for any beach that offered itself, should Cherek ships appear on the horizon. At a certain point, the Mallorean captain peered about at the empty sea, swallowed hard, and swung his tiller over for the quick, terrified dash across open water to the east.
Once, a day or more out from the Nadrak coast, they saw a dreadful column of thick black smoke rising far to the south, and a day or so farther on they sailed through a sea littered with charred debris where bodies, pale and bloated, bobbed in the dark waves of the eastern sea. The frightened sailors pulled their oars with all their strength, not even needing the encouragement of whips to row faster.
Then, one murky morning when the sky behind them threatened rain squalls and the air was oppressively heavy with the advancing storm, a low, dark smudge appeared on the horizon ahead of them, and the sailors doubled their efforts, rushing desperately toward the safety of the Mallorean coast ahead.
The beach upon which the small boats from their ship landed them was a sloping shingle of dark, salt-crusted gravel where the waves made a strange, mournful sighing as they receded. Awaiting them some distance up from the water’s edge sat a mounted party of Grolims, their black robes belted at the waist with crimson sashes.
‘Archpriests,’ Polgara noted coldly. ‘We’re to be escorted with some ceremony, I take it.’
The Grolim who had commanded their escort went quickly up the grav
el stand toward the waiting group and prostrated himself before them, speaking with a hushed reverence. One of the Archpriests, an aged man with a deeply lined face and sunken eyes, dismounted rather stiffly and came down to where Ce’Nedra and her friends had just stepped from the small boat.
‘My Queen,’ he said to Polgara, bowing respectfully. ‘I am Urtag, Archpriest of the district of Camat. I am here with my brethren to escort you to the City of Night.’
‘I’m disappointed not to find Zedar waiting,’ the sorceress replied coldly. ‘I trust he’s not indisposed.’
Urtag gave her a quick look of irritation. ‘Do not rail against your foreordained fate, Queen of Angarak,’ he advised her.
‘I have two fates awaiting me, Urtag,’ she said. ‘Which one I will follow has not yet been decided.’
‘I do not have any doubts about the matter,’ he declared.
‘That’s probably because you’ve never dared to look at the alternatives,’ she replied. ‘Shall we go, Urtag? A windy beach is hardly the place for philosophical discussion.’
The Grolim Archpriests had brought horses with them, and the party was soon mounted and riding away from the sea across a line of low, wooded hills in a generally northeasterly direction. The trees bordering the upper edge of the gravel beach had been dark-boughed spruces, but once they topped the first rise, they entered a vast forest of white-barked aspens. To Ce’Nedra’s eyes, the stark, white trunks looked almost corpse-like, and the entire forest had a gloomy, unhealthy quality about it.
‘Mistress Pol,’ Durnik said in a voice that was scarcely more than a whisper, ‘shouldn’t we be working on some kind of plan?’
‘For what, Durnik?’ she asked him.
‘For our escape, of course.’
‘But we don’t want to escape, Durnik.’
‘We don’t?’
‘The Grolims are taking us to the place we want to go.’
‘Why do we want to go to this Cthol Mishrak of theirs?’
‘We have something to do there.’
‘From everything I’ve heard it’s a bad sort of place,’ he told her. ‘Are you sure you haven’t made some mistake?’
She reached out and laid her hand on his arm. ‘Dear Durnik,’ she said, ‘you’ll just have to trust me.’
‘Of course, Mistress Pol,’ he replied immediately. ‘But shouldn’t I know what to expect? If I should have to take steps to protect you, I ought to be prepared.’
‘I’d tell you if I knew, Durnik,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what we should expect. All I know is that the four of us are supposed to go to Cthol Mishrak. What’s going to happen there needs us in order for it to be complete. Each of us has something to do there.’
‘Even me?’
‘Especially you, Durnik. At first I didn’t understand who you really are. That’s why I tried to keep you from coming along. But now I do understand. You have to be there because you’re going to do the one thing that’s going to turn the entire outcome one way or the other.’
‘What is it?’
‘We don’t know.’
His eyes grew wide. ‘What if I do it wrong?’ he asked in a worried voice.
‘I don’t think you can,’ she reassured him. ‘From everything I understand, what you’re going to do will flow very naturally out of who and what you are.’ She gave him a brief, wry little smile. ‘You won’t be able to do it wrong, Durnik – any more than you’d be able to lie or cheat or steal. It’s built into you to do it right, so don’t worry about it.’
‘That’s all very well for you to say, Mistress Pol,’ he replied, ‘but if you don’t mind, I will worry about it just a bit – privately, of course.’
She laughed then, a light, fond little laugh. ‘You dear, dear man,’ she said, impulsively taking his hand. ‘Whatever would we do without you?’
Durnik blushed and tried to look away, but her glorious eyes held his, and he blushed even more.
After they had passed through the forest of aspen, they entered a strangely desolate landscape. White boulders stuck up out of tangled weeds like tombstones in a long-abandoned graveyard, and dead trees thrust their crooked limbs at the overcast sky like pleading fingers. The horizon ahead was covered with a bank of darker cloud, a cloud so intensely black that it seemed almost purple. Oddly, Ce’Nedra noted, the cloudbank did not seem to be moving at all. There was no sign anywhere of any human habitation, and the route they followed was not even marked by a trail.
‘Does no-one live there?’ the princess asked Polgara.
‘Cthol Mishrak is deserted except for a few Grolims,’ the sorceress replied. ‘Torak smashed the city and drove its people out the day my father and King Cherek and his sons stole the Orb back from the iron tower.’
‘When was that?’
‘A very long time ago, Ce’Nedra. As nearly as we’ve been able to determine, it was precisely on the same day that Beldaran and I were born – and the day our mother died. It’s a bit hard to say for sure. We were a bit casual about keeping track of time in those days.’
‘If your mother had died and Belgarath was here, who took care of you?’
‘Beldin, of course.’ Polgara smiled. ‘He wasn’t a very good mother, but he did the best he could until Father returned.’
‘Is that why you’re so fond of him?’
‘One of the reasons, yes.’
The ominous cloudbank still did not move. It stretched across the sky as stationary as a range of mountains; as they rode toward it, it loomed higher and higher.
‘That’s a very strange cloud,’ Durnik noted, looking speculatively at the thick curtain of purple ahead. ‘The storm is coming in behind us, but that cloud doesn’t seem to be moving at all.’
‘It doesn’t move, Durnik,’ Polgara told him. ‘It never has moved. When the Angaraks built Cthol Mishrak, Torak put that cloud there to hide the city. It’s been there ever since.’
‘How long is that?’
‘About five thousand years.’
‘The sun never shines there?’
‘Never.’
The Grolim Archpriests had begun to look about with a certain apprehension, and finally Urtag called a halt. ‘We must make ourselves known,’ he declared. ‘We don’t want the watchers to mistake us for intruders.’
The other Archpriests nodded nervously, and then all removed polished steel masks from beneath their robes and carefully covered their faces with them. Then each of them untied a thick torch from his saddle and ignited it with a brief, mumbled incantation. The torches burned with a peculiarly green-tinged flame and gave off a reeking, sulfurous smoke.
‘I wonder what would happen if I were to blow out your torches,’ Polgara suggested with a hint of a mischievous smile. ‘I could, you know.’
Urtag gave her a worried look. ‘This is no time for foolishness, my Lady,’ he warned her. ‘The watchers are very savage with intruders. Our lives depend on those torches. Please don’t do anything to bring down a disaster on us all.’
She laughed lightly and let it go at that.
As they rode in beneath the cloud, it grew steadily darker. It was not precisely the clean darkness of night, but was rather a kind of dirty murkiness, a deep shade hovering in the air. They crested a rise and saw before them a cloud-enshrouded basin, and in its center, half-obscured by the pervasive gloom, stood the ravaged City of Night. The vegetation around them had shrunk to a few sparse weeds and an unhealthy-looking, stunted grass, pale and sick for want of sun. The boulders thrusting up out of the earth were splotched with a sort of leprous lichen that ate into the rock itself, and nodules of a white fungus lumped in grotesque profusion, spreading out across the dank soil as if the ground itself were diseased.
With a slow, careful pace, their sputtering torches held above their heads, the Grolim Archpriests led the way down into the gloomy basin and across the unwholesome plain toward the shattered walls of Cthol Mishrak.
As they entered the city, the princess saw furtive hints of m
ovement among the tumbled stones. Shadowy forms scurried from place to place among the ruins, and the sound of their movements was the clicking scrape made by creatures whose feet were clawed. Some of the shapes were upright, others were not. Ce’Nedra grew cold and afraid. The watchers of Cthol Mishrak were neither beast nor human, and they seemed to exude a kind of indiscriminate malice toward all other living things. More than anything, she was afraid that one of them might suddenly turn and confront her with a face that might rip away her sanity by its hideousness.
As they passed down a broken street, Urtag began to intone an ancient prayer to Torak, his voice hollow and shaking. The dank air grew colder, and the diseaselike lichen ate at the tumbled stones of the ruined houses. Mold seemed to cling to everything, and the pale fungus grew in grotesque lumps in corners and crannies. The smell of decay was everywhere, a damp, rotten stench, and slimy pools of stagnant water lay among the ruins.
In the center of the city stood the rusted stump of a vast iron tower, the broken-off girders which had supported it thicker than a man’s waist. Just to the south of the stump lay a broad, rusted trail of total destruction where the tower had fallen, crushing everything beneath it. Over the eons, the iron had rusted down into a sort of damp red mud that outlined the enormous dimensions of the fallen structure.
The stump had eroded down the years, rounding off the broken edges. The rust mingled in places with a kind of thick black ooze that ran down the faces of the iron plates like gobbets of clotted blood.
Urtag, trembling visibly now, dismounted before a vast, arched portal and led them through a half-open iron door. The echoing chamber they entered was as large as the Imperial throne room in Tol Honeth. Wordlessly, his torch held high over his head, Urtag led them across the pitted floor to another iron-arched doorway and then down a flight of clanging iron steps that reached into the darkness beneath. At the bottom of the stairs, perhaps fifty feet below the wreckage above, stood another door of black iron, studded with great, round rivet-heads. Hesitantly, Urtag rapped his knuckles on the door, and the sound of his rapping echoed hollowly in the chamber beyond.