Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection

‘I’ve raised them, Dras. Aldur sent me up here to learn what I could about these people. I apprenticed myself to one of their magicians and learned all the tricks. Riva’s got it fairly close. If we carry dream-markers and curse-markers, the Morindim will avoid us.’

‘Pestilence-markers?’ Algar suggested. Algar never used more words than he absolutely had to. I’ve never fully understood what he was saving them for.

I considered it. ‘No,’ I decided. ‘Sometimes the Morindim feel that the best way to deal with pestilence is to stand off and shoot the infected people full of arrows.’

‘Inconvenient,’ Algar murmured.

‘We won’t encounter very many Morindim this far south anyway,’ I told them, ‘and the markers should make them keep their distance.’

As it turned out, I was wrong on that score. Riva and I fashioned the markers, and we set out toward the east, staying well up in the foothills. We hadn’t traveled for more than two days – nights, actually, since that was when the moon was out – when suddenly there were Morindim all around us. The markers kept them away, but it was only a matter of time until some magician would come along to take up the challenge.

I didn’t sleep very much during the course of our journey along those foothills. The north range is riddled with caves, and I’d hide the Alorns in one of them and then go out to scout around. I very nearly froze my paws off. Lord! it was cold up there!

It wasn’t too long until I started coming across counter-markers. For every curse, there’s a counter-curse, and the presence of those counter-markers told me louder than words that magicians were starting to converge on us. This was puzzling, because Morind magicians are all insanely jealous of each other and they almost never cooperate. Since the magicians control all aspects of the lives of their assorted clans, a gathering such as we were seeing was a virtual impossibility.

The moon, of course, ignored us and continued her inevitable course, waxing fuller and fuller every night until she reached that monthly fulfillment of hers. Cherek and his sons couldn’t understand why the moon kept coming up even though the sun didn’t. I tried to explain it to them, but when I got to the part about the real orbit of the moon and the apparent orbit of the sun, I lost them. Finally I just told them, ‘They follow different paths,’ and let it go at that. All they really had to know was that the moon would be in the arctic sky for about two weeks out of every month during the winter. Anything more would have just confused them. To be honest about it, I’d have been just as happy if the sun’s baby sister had dropped below the horizon before her pregnancy started to show. Once she became full, it was as bright as day up there. A full moon over a snow-covered landscape really puts out a lot of light, and that was terribly inconvenient. I suppose that was what the Morindim had been waiting for.

I’d hidden Cherek and the boys in a cave just before moon-set as usual, and then I went out to scout around. No more than a mile to the east of the cave, I saw Morindim – thousands of them.

I dropped to my haunches and started to swear – no mean trick for a wolf. The unnatural gathering of what appeared to be every clan in Morindland had completely blocked us off. We were in deep trouble.

When I finished swearing, I turned, loped back to the cave where the Alorns were sleeping, and resumed my own form. ‘You’d better wake up,’ I told them.

‘What’s the matter?’ Cherek asked, throwing off his fur robe.

‘All of Morindim is stretched across our path no more than a mile from here.’

‘They don’t do that,’ Riva protested. ‘The clans never gather together in the same place.’

‘Evidently the rules have changed.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Dras demanded.

‘Could we slip around them?’ Cherek asked.

‘Not hardly,’ I told him. ‘They’re stretched out for miles.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Dras said again. Dras tended to repeat himself when he got excited.

‘I’m working on it,’ I started thinking very fast. One thing was certain. Somebody was tampering with the Morindim. Riva was right; the clans never cooperated with each other. Someone had found a way to change that, and I didn’t think it was a Morind who’d done it. I cudgeled my brain, but I couldn’t come up with any way to get out of this. Each of the clans had a magician, and each magician had a pet demon. When the moon rose again, I was very likely to be up to my ears in creatures who normally lived in Hell. I was definitely going to need some help.

I have no idea of where the notion came from –

Let me correct that. Now that I think about it, I do know where it came from.

– Are you in there? – I asked silently.

– Of course. –

– I’ve got a problem here. –

– Yes, probably so. –

– What do I do? –

– I’m not permitted to tell you. –

– That didn’t seem to bother you back in the Vale. –

– That was different. Think, Belgarath. You know the Morindim, and you know how hard it is to control one of their demons. The magician has to concentrate very hard to keep his demon from turning on him. What does that suggest to you? –

-I do something to break their concentration? –

– Is that a question? If it is, I’m not allowed to answer. –

– All right, it’s not a question. What do you think of the idea? – just speculatively? Do your rules allow you to tell me if an idea is a bad one? –

– Just speculatively? I think that’s allowed. –

– It’ll make things a little awkward, but I think we can work around it. –

I suggested any number of possible solutions, and that silent voice inside my head rejected them one after another. I started to grow more and more exotic at that point. To my horror, that bodiless voice seemed to think that my most outrageous and dangerous notion had some possibilities. You should always try to curb your creativity in situations like that.

‘Are you mad?’ Riva exclaimed when I told the Alorns what I had in mind.

‘Let’s all hope not,’ I told him. ‘There isn’t any other way out, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to do it this way – unless we want to turn around and go home, and I don’t think that’s permitted.’

‘When are you going to do this?’ Cherek asked me.

‘Just as soon as the moon comes up again. I want to pick the time. I don’t want some tattooed magician out there picking it for me.’

‘Why wait?’ Dras demanded. ‘Why not do it now?’

‘Because I’ll need light to draw the symbols in the snow. I definitely don’t want to leave anything out. Try to get some sleep. It might be quite a while before we get the chance again.’ Then I went back outside to keep watch.

It was a nervous night – day, actually, since your days and nights get turned around during the arctic winter. When I’d suggested the plan to that voice of Necessity that seemed to have taken up residence inside my head for a time, I’d been grasping at straws, since I wasn’t really sure I could pull it off. Worrying isn’t a good way to spend any extended period of time.

When I judged that the moon was about ready to come up, I went back into the cave and woke up my friends. ‘I don’t want you standing too close to me,’ I advised them. ‘There’s no point in all of us getting killed.’

‘I thought you knew what you were doing!’ Dras objected. Dras was an excitable sort of fellow despite his size, and his normally deep voice sounded a little squeaky.

‘In theory, yes,’ I told him, ‘but I’ve never tried it before, so things could go wrong. I’ll have to wait until the magicians raise their demons before I do anything, so it might be sort of touch-and-go for a while. Just be ready to run. Let’s go.’

We came out of the cave, and I looked off toward the east. The pale glow along the horizon told me that it was very close to moon-rise, so we struck off in that direction, moving steadily toward the waiting Morindim. We topped a rise just as they were waking up. It’s an eerie thing to watch Morindim getting up in the winter. It resembles nothing quite so much as a suddenly animated graveyard, since they customarily bury themselves in snow before they go to sleep. The snow’s cold, of course, but the outside air is much colder. It’s a chilling thing to see them rising up out of the snow like men climbing up out of their graves.

The magicians probably hadn’t gotten any more sleep than I had. They had their own preparations to make. Each of them had stamped out the symbols in the snow and taken up positions inside those protective designs. They were already muttering the incantations when we came over the hill. And let me tell you, those Morind magicians are very careful not to speak too clearly when summoning demons. Those incantations are what you might call trade secrets, and the magicians guard them very jealously.

I decided that the hilltop was probably as good a place as any to make my stand, so I trampled my own design into the snow and stepped inside.