Polgara the Sorceress (65 page)

‘There was a change in the weather after Torak’s Eclipse,’ father explained. ‘It’s been raining more or less continually for the past fifteen or so years.’

‘Did we anticipate that?’

‘We probably should have. Our prophecies mention the rain, but we thought they were talking about some passing rain squall, not a semi-permanent climate change. Sometimes I get a little cross about being tampered with. Everything’s written down in the Darine and the Mrin, but I’m not permitted to understand what I’m reading until that overly-clever Necessity’s jolly-well ready to have me understand it. I honestly believe he thinks he’s funny.’

Gorim smiled faintly. ‘Now, there’s a concept we might want to investigate,’ he said.

‘I’d rather not,’ father said in a grumpy voice. ‘I don’t want to come to grips with the idea that the Universe is some vast, obscure joke.’ He shook his head. ‘What happened in Drasnia’s a fair indication that we’re looking at a very messy war, Gorim. Your people are devout, and the violence that’s staring us in the face isn’t the kind of thing they’re equipped to deal with. The Alorns, Tolnedrans, and Arends are built for this kind of thing, so why don’t we just let them deal with it? We’ll keep you advised, and when Torak starts moving his army across Ulgoland, we’ll give you enough warning so that you can seal up the mouths of your caves and leave the Angaraks to the Algroths, Hrulgin, and Eldrakyn.’

‘I shall consult with Holy UL,’ Gorim said. “The circumstances might prompt him to set aside his distaste for violence.’

‘That’s entirely up to him, Gorim,’ father said. ‘I’ve done many foolish things in my life, but trying to tell UL what to do isn’t going to be one of them.’

Our conversation became general after that, and the Gorim’s servants brought us supper. Ulgo cooking is
slightly bland, but I kept my opinion about that to myself. I wasn’t entirely certain whether or not the Ulgos might have religious objections to herbs and spices.

After we’d eaten, father and the Gorim talked for a while, and then the Old Wolf and I were provided with rooms where we could sleep. I was just drifting off when mother’s voice came to me.
‘Welcome to Ulgo, Pol,’
she said.

‘You sound like a resident, mother.’

‘Naturally,’
she said.
‘Where else did you think I was?’

‘I didn’t really think about it. I suppose I thought you were everywhere.’

‘These are caves, Pol, and a cave’s very much like a den, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that, I guess.’

‘Obviously. Holy UL wants to speak with us. Come along. I’ll guide you.’

I rose and dressed, and then I quietly left the Gorim’s house. Mother’s voice led me through the labyrinthine maze of galleries out to the edge of that underground city. The passageways we entered there showed fewer and fewer signs of human modification, and after I’d squeezed my way through a narrow embrasure, the rubble littering the uneven floor was a fair indication that we were in unexplored territory.

Then, just as I rounded a sharp turn, the sense of mother’s presence in my mind was suddenly gone – or more accurately, it had moved. Mother was just ahead of me, and now she was really there. The Ulgos light their subterranean world by mixing two chemicals that then give off a phosphorescent kind of glow. In this as yet unexplored gallery, the walls themselves glowed. That may have also been some chemical reaction, but I rather doubt it.

Tawny-haired and golden-eyed, mother sat quite calmly on a simple three-legged stool in a neat little room that contained a bed, a table and a small cooking stove. The walls were unfinished, and mother’s cooking utensils and dishes were neatly stacked on a ledge behind the stove. To put it succinctly, this was not a room; it was a den.

Mother rose to her feet and held out her arms to me, and I literally flew to embrace her. We clung to each other for
quite some time, and I’ll admit that I cried. Then she gently sat me at her small, rough table and made tea for us.

‘You said that UL wanted to speak with us, mother,’ I reminded her as we sat facing each other with our hands intertwined on the table-top.

‘He’s giving us a bit of time to get used to each other, Pol. UL has an exquisite sense of propriety, so he’s giving us this private time. How’s
he
been?’ Mother almost never used father’s name when speaking of him.

‘Father never changes, mother. You should know that.’

‘We can always hope.’ Then she laughed, and mother very seldom laughs. ‘And Beldin and the twins?’

‘They’re still the same too. We’re a very strange family, you know. We exist outside of time, so we don’t change just because a few thousand years have passed.’

‘You’re
going to change just a little rather soon.’

‘Oh?’

‘You and I are going to become
very
close.’

‘You’re being cryptic, mother.’

‘It’s the way of wolves to be cryptic.’

Then one of the walls of mother’s den began to glow with a soft, filmy light, and the Father of the Gods stepped out of the solid rock. I’d see him before, of course – when Beldaran had died and he’d come for her – but I’d been so distraught that I’d never been positive that he’d really been there. His presence filled me with awe. He looked very much like our Master, old and white bearded, but he seemed more robust – even muscular.

‘Ah,’ mother said, rising calmly, ‘there you are. Would you like a cup of tea?’ Her almost domestic greeting startled me.

‘An it please thee, Poledra,’ the God responded, taking a seat at the table.

‘You remember Polgara, of course,’ mother said to him.

The ancient God inclined his head slightly to me, and then he fixed me with a penetrating gaze that probably saw everything. ‘Thou art to be commended, Poledra,’ he said to mother. ‘Thou has wrought a masterpiece.’

‘She
did
turn out rather well, didn’t she?’ mother replied modestly.

‘She is equal – and more than equal – to her task.’ Then
he looked at me again. ‘Well met, Polgara,’ he greeted me. ‘How fares thine ancient father?’

‘He is well, most Holy,’ I replied. ‘The matter currently at hand doesn’t give him much leisure to pursue his bad habits, so he isn’t destroying his health the way he usually does.’

He actually laughed at that, and I began to feel a bit more at ease.

‘I have summoned thee for a reason, Polgara,’ he said then. ‘Much as I delight in exchanging pleasantries with thee, something will soon come to pass of which thou must be aware, lest the sudden surprise unseat thy reason.’

‘That sounds ominous, most Holy.’

‘Methinks it will not be so, Polgara. Thou hast ever been close to thy mother, but in this particular time thou wilt be even closer than thou and thy sister were whilst ye were both still enwombed.’

I gave him a puzzled look.

‘It hath long been the practice of the members of thy family to assume forms other than thine own.’

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘Necessity now requires that thou and thy mother assume the same form.’

‘We’ve done that already, most Holy. We’ve spent many happy hours flying together as owls.’

‘Thou has misperceived my meaning, Polgara. When I spake of “the same form”, I was not speaking of two separate owls. There will be but one owl, and it shall encompass both of ye within its substance. In short, at the proper moment shall ye both in combination create the image of but a single owl, and all simultaneous shall ye both cause your separate beings to flow into that image.’

‘Is that
possible?’
I exclaimed.

‘My son Aldur asked that self-same question,’ he said. ‘Thy thought is much as his.’

‘To what end, most Holy?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘What’s the purpose of this experiment?’

‘In this merging shalt thou and thy mother become so totally entwined and closed in that no hint of thy presence – either to the eye
or
to the mind – shall escape the enclosed
sphere of your combined being. Thus, no man or God shall be aware of the fact that what he says or does is being heard and observed.’

Truly? What an amazing thing! And who is to be honored by having mother and me spy on him?’

‘Who else, Polgara? Thou and thy mother will seek out the rusting habitation of my son, Torak, which even now doth roll and rattle across the plains of Algaria. My son is very lonely, as he hath been since he raised Aldur’s Orb and with its power did rend the earth asunder. Now is he outcast and despiséd, and he doth feel his. isolation most keenly. Oft doth he talk at some length with his disciples – random talk with no purpose other than to fend off his aching sense of isolation. At this particular time, his most constant confidant is Zedar the apostate, and their conversations are wide ranging.’

I took it up from there. Then mother and I will perch in the rafters of his rusty tin palace and eavesdrop on all his plans, strategies, and goals?’

‘The information thou must obtain doth have no bearing on military matters, Polgara. Torak knows of thee. Indeed, thou and thy father do fill his thoughts. He has a design of which thou
must
be aware. Thine awareness of that design shall be a preparation for a choice which thou wilt be obliged to make at some day in the future. I would not alarm thee for all this world, but the fate of the universe shall hinge upon thy choice.’

Holy UL may not have intended to alarm me, but he did nonetheless. ‘Couldst thou not advise me of thy son’s design, most Holy?’ I asked. ‘Coming face to face with Torak – even if he can’t see me – isn’t the sort of thing I look forward to.’

‘Thou art braver than whole armies, Polgara,’ he said, ‘and we all have supreme confidence in thee.’

‘I’ll be with you, Pol,’ mother assured me. ‘I won’t let Torak hurt you.’

‘I’m not really worried about that, mother, I’d just rather not be compelled to look into that diseased mind.’ I realized what I’d just said. ‘Nothing personal intended there, most Holy,’ I apologized to UL.

‘Thou hast not offended me, Polgara.’ Then he sighed. ‘Torak hath not always been as he is now,’ he said sadly. ‘Through no fault of its own, the Orb hath brutalized and corrupted my son. He is lost to me and to his brothers, Polgara, and his loss doth sear our souls.’ Then he rose to his feet. ‘Thy mother – as always – shall instruct thee in this. Be guided by her, and steel thine heart for that which thou art doomed to discover.’

And then he was gone.

‘He didn’t even touch his tea,’ mother complained.

Father and I left the caverns of Ulgo the following morning, and when we came out once more into the snow-clogged and empty city of Prolgu, he suggested that we might as well have a look at Torak’s army before returning to Riva. I didn’t come right out and say it, but his proposal startled me just a bit. In ordinary times father can best be described as a monument to indolence. Once I even heard uncle Beldin apologize to the twins for a temporary lapse in his own industriousness by saying, ‘Sorry, brothers, I’m feeling sort of Belgarathy today.’ The twins, of course, knew exactly what he meant by that. When a situation arises that requires his attention, though, father can go for weeks with little food and almost no sleep at all. His almost superhuman endurance in those situations never fails to astound me. As a physician, I know that ‘storing up sleep’ is a physically impossible absurdity. Father, however, has never made a study of medicine, so the term ‘physical impossibility’ doesn’t have much meaning for him.

Now there’s something for you to think about. If you don’t know that you
can’t
do something, isn’t there a remote possibility that you’ll go ahead and do it anyway in absolute defiance of physical law? That might be one of the drawbacks of education. If you don’t
know
that you can’t pick yourself up by the scruff of the neck and hold yourself at arm’s length, maybe you can.

I wonder if I could get Mandorallen to try that.

When father and I flew on down out of the Ulgo mountains, we were both pleased to discover that the rain had
temporarily let up, though the sky remained cloudy and threatening.

There’s a kind of unreality about the world when it’s viewed from a great height. Things which have enormous importance to those on the ground seem to shrink into insignificance. Men and their animals look like tiny creeping insects, and I’ve yet to see a national boundary etched across the face of the earth. I was startled nonetheless by the sheer size of the Angarak army crawling across the bland face of the Algarian plain. It’s been estimated that Torak invaded Drasnia with a half-million soldiers, and his campaign there hadn’t significantly reduced that number. As father and I drifted overhead, we saw the Algar cavalry units busily correcting that with their typical slash and run tactics. The folded – even wrinkled – surface of the plain provided many places of concealment for the small cavalry units, and they could – and did – come boiling out of those gullies and ravines at a dead run to amputate bits and pieces of the Angarak army as Torak doggedly lumbered southward toward the Stronghold. Taken individually, these little nicks and cuts weren’t really significant, but viewed in the aggregate, they could best be described as a continuing hemorrhage. I doubt that Torak even realized it, but he was slowly bleeding to death as he plodded south. The Angarak attempts to pursue and chastise their attackers only made things worse, since the Angarak pursuers rarely returned. I saw cavalry tactics at their finest down there. The initial assault of the Algar horsemen was relatively meaningless – a slap in the face, so to speak. Its only purpose was to sting the crack units of Angarak cavalry into pursuit – a pursuit that drew them into ambushes laid for them in various shallow ravines out beyond the edge of the main body of the army. Cho-Ram’s horsemen were methodically skimming the cream off Torak’s army.

When that process started to become tedious, the Algars entertained themselves by stampeding oceans of cattle right over the top of the assembled Malloreans, Murgos, Nadraks and Thulls. From a strategic point of view, Algaria was nothing more than a vast trap, and the Dragon-God had sprung it on himself.