Castle of Wizardry (9 page)

"Thank you," Taiba said, binding the cloth across her eyes. "I didn't know that the sun could be so bright."

"You'll get used to it," Relg told her. "It just takes some time. Try to protect your eyes for the first few days." He seemed about to turn and ride on, then he looked at her curiously. "Haven't you ever seen the sun before?" he asked her.

"No," she replied. "Other slaves told me about it, though. The Murgos don't use women on their work gangs, so I was never taken out of the pens. It was always dark down there."

"It must have been terrible." Garion shuddered.

She shrugged. "The dark wasn't so bad. It was the light we were afraid of. Light meant that the Murgos were coming with torches to take someone to the Temple to be sacrificed."

The trail they followed turned again, and they rode out of the bright glare of sunlight. "Thank you," Taiba said to Relg, removing the veil from her eyes and holding it out to him.

"Keep it," he told her. "You'll probably need it again." His voice seemed oddly subdued, and his eyes had a strange gentleness in them. As he looked at her, the haunted expression crept back over his face.

Since they had left Rak Cthol, Garion had covertly watched these two. He knew that Relg, despite all his efforts, could not take his eyes off the Marag woman he had been forced to rescue from her living entombment in the caves. Although Relg still ranted about sin continually, his words no longer carried the weight of absolute conviction; indeed quite often, they seemed to be little more than a mechanical repetition of a set of formulas. Occasionally, Garion had noted, even those formulas had faltered when Taiba's deep violet eyes had turned to regard the Ulgo's face. For her part, Taiba was quite obviously puzzled. Relg's rejection of her simple gratitude had humiliated her, and her resentment had been hot and immediate. His constant scrutiny, however, spoke to her with a meaning altogether different from the words coming from his lips. His eyes told her one thing, but his mouth said something else. She was baffled by him, not knowing whether to respond to his look or his words.

"You've lived your whole life in the dark, then?" Relg asked her curiously.

"Most of it," she replied. "I saw my mother's face once - the day the Murgos came and took her to the Temple. I was alone after that. Being alone is the worst of it. You can bear the dark if you aren't alone."

"How old were you when they took your mother away?"

"I don't really know. I must have been almost a woman, though, because not long after that the Murgos gave me to a slave who had pleased them. There were a lot of slaves in the pens who did anything the Murgos wanted, and they were rewarded with extra food - or with women. I cried at first; but in time I learned to accept it. At least I wasn't alone any more."

Relg's face
hardened,
and Taiba saw the expression. "What should I have done?" she asked him. "When you're a slave, your body doesn't belong to you. They can sell you or give you to anybody they want to, and there's nothing you can do about it."

"There must have been something."

"Such as what?
I didn't have any kind of weapon to fight with -or to kill myself with - and you can't strangle yourself." She looked at Garion. "Did you know that? Some of the slaves tried it, but all you do is fall into unconsciousness, and then you start to breathe again. Isn't that curious?"

"Did you try to fight?" It seemed terribly important to Relg for some reason.

"What would have been the point? The slave they gave me to
was
stronger than I. He'd have just hit me until I did what he wanted."

"You should have fought," Relg declared adamantly. "A little pain is better than sin, and giving up like that is sin."

"Is it? If somebody forces you to do something and there's no possible way to avoid it, is it really sin?"

Relg started to answer, but her eyes, looking directly into his face, seemed to stop up his tongue. He faltered, unable to face that gaze. Abruptly he turned his mount and rode back toward the pack animals.

"Why does he fight with himself so much?" Taiba asked.

"He's completely devoted to his God," Garion explained. "He's afraid of anything that might take away some of what he feels he owes to UL."

"Is this UL of his really that jealous?"

"No, I don't think so, but Relg does."

Taiba pursed her lips into a sensual pout and looked back over her shoulder at the retreating zealot. "You know," she said, "I think he's actually afraid of me." She laughed then, that same low, wicked little laugh, and lifted her arms to run her fingers through the glory of her midnight hair. "No one's ever been afraid of me before - not ever. I think I rather like it. Will you excuse me?" She turned her horse without waiting for a reply and quite deliberately rode back after the fleeing Relg.

Garion thought about it as he rode on through the narrow, twisting canyon. He realized that there was
a strength
in Taiba that none of them had suspected, and he finally concluded that Relg was in for a very bad time.

He trotted on ahead to speak to Aunt Pol about it as she rode with her arms about Errand.

"It's really none of your business, Garion," she told him. "Relg and Taiba can work out their problems without any help from you."

"I was just curious, that's all. Relg's tearing himself apart, and Taiba's all confused about him. What's really going on between them, Aunt Pol?"

"Something very necessary," she replied.

"You could say that about nearly everything that happens, Aunt Pol." It was almost an accusation. "You could even say that the way Ce'Nedra and I quarrel all the time is necessary too, couldn't you?"

She looked slightly amused. "It's not exactly the same thing, Garion," she answered, "but there's a certain necessity about that too."

"That's ridiculous," he scoffed.

"Is it really? Then why do you suppose the two of you go out of your way so much to aggravate each other?"

He had no answer for that, but the entire notion worried him. At the same time the very mention of Ce'Nedra's name suddenly brought her sharply into his mind, and he realized that he actually missed her. He rode along in silence beside Aunt Pol for a while, feeling melancholy. Finally he sighed.

"And why so great a sigh?"

"It's all over, isn't it?"

"What's that?"

"This whole thing.
I mean - we've recovered the Orb. That's what this was all about, wasn't it?"

"There's more to it than that, Garion - much more - and we're not out of Cthol Murgos yet, are we?"

"You're not really worried about that, are you?" But then, as if her question had suddenly uncovered some lingering doubts in his own mind, he stared at her in sudden apprehension. "What would happen if we didn't?" he blurted. "If we didn't make it out, I mean. What would happen to the West if we didn't get the Orb back to Riva?"

"Things would become unpleasant."

"There'd be a war, wouldn't there? And the Angaraks would win, and there'd be Grolims everywhere with their knives and their altars." The thought of Grolims marching up to the gates of Faldor's farm outraged him.

"Don't go borrowing trouble, Garion. Let's worry about one thing at a time, shall we?"

"But what if-"

"Garion," she said with a pained look, "don't belabor the 'what ifs,' please. If you start that, you'll just worry everybody to death."

"You say 'what if' to grandfather all the time," he accused.

"That's different," she replied.

They rode hard for the next several days through a series of passes with the dry, bitter chill pressing at them like some great weight. Silk rode back often to look for any signs of pursuit, but their ruse seemed to have fooled the Murgos. Finally, about noon on a cold, sunless day when the wind was kicking up dust clouds along the horizon, they reached the broad, arid valley through which the south caravan route wound. They took cover behind a low hill while Silk rode on ahead to take a quick look.

"Thinkest thou that Taur Urgas hath joined in the search for us?" Mandorallen, dressed again in his armor, asked Belgarath.

"It's hard to say for sure," the old sorcerer replied. "He's a very unpredictable man."

"There's a Murgo patrol headed east on the caravan route," Silk reported when he returned. "It will be another half hour or so until they're out of sight."

Belgarath nodded.

"Do you think we'll be safe once we cross over into Mishrak ac Thull?" Durnik asked.

"We can't count on it," Belgarath replied. "Gethel, the king of the Thulls, is afraid of Taur Urgas, so he wouldn't make any kind of fuss about a border violation if Taur Urgas decided to follow us."

They waited until the Murgos had crossed a low ridge to the east and then moved out again.

For the next two days they rode steadily to the northwest. The terrain grew less rocky after they crossed into the land of the Thulls, and they saw the telltale dust clouds far behind them that spoke of mounted Murgo search parties. It was late in the afternoon of a murky day when they finally reached the top of the eastern escarpment.

Barak glanced back over his shoulder at the dust clouds behind them,
then
pulled his horse in beside Belgarath's. "Just how rough is the ground leading down into the Vale?" he asked.

"It's not the easiest trail in the world."

"Those Murgos are less than a day behind us, Belgarath. If we have to pick our way down, they'll be on top of us before we make it."

Belgarath pursed his lips, squinting at the dust clouds on the southern horizon. "Perhaps you're right," he said. "Maybe we'd better think this through." He raised his hand to call a halt. "It's time to make a couple of decisions," he told the rest of them. "The Murgos are a little closer than we really want them to be. It takes two to three days to make the descent into the Vale, and there are places where one definitely doesn't want to be rushed."

"We could always go on to that ravine we followed coming up," Silk suggested. "It only takes a half day to go down that way."

"But Lord Hettar and the Algar clans of King Cho-Hag await us in the Vale," Mandorallen objected. "Were we to go on, would we not lead the Murgos down into undefended country?"

"Have we got any choice?" Silk asked him.

"We could light fires along the way," Barak suggested. "Hettar will know what they mean."

"So would the Murgos," Silk said. "They'd ride all night and be right behind us every step of the way down."

Belgarath scratched sourly at his short white beard. "I think we're going to have to abandon the original plan," he decided. "We have to take the shortest way down, and that means the ravine, I'm afraid. We'll be on our own once we get down, but that can't be helped."

"Surely King Cho-Hag will have scouts posted along the foot of the escarpment," Durnik said, his plain face worried.

"We can hope so," Barak replied.

"All right," Belgarath said firmly, "we'll use the ravine. I don't altogether like the idea, but our options seem to have been narrowed a bit. Let's ride."

It was late afternoon when they reached the shallow gully at the top of the steep notch leading down to the plain below. Belgarath glanced once down the precipitous cut and shook his head. "Not in the dark," he decided. "Can you see any signs of the Algars?" he asked Barak, who was staring out at the plain below.

"I'm afraid not," the red-bearded man answered. "Do you want to light a fire to signal them?"

"No," the old man replied. "Let's not announce our intentions."

"I will need a small fire, though," Aunt Pol told him. "We all need a hot meal."

"I don't know if that's wise, Polgara," Belgarath objected.

"We'll have a hard day tomorrow, father," she said firmly. "Durnik knows how to build a small fire and keep it hidden."

"Have it your own way, Pol," the old man said in a resigned tone of voice.

"Naturally, father."

It was cold that night, and they kept their fire small and well sheltered. As the first light of dawn began to stain the cloudy sky to the east, they rose and prepared to descend the rocky cut toward the plain below.