"Go on with your story, my friend."
Senji cleared his throat—several times—and went on. " 'What the officials and learned men actually found out as a result of their experiment was that it is extremely dangerous to threaten the life of a sorcerer—even one as inept as Senji. The defenestrator found himself suddenly translocated to a position some fifteen hundred meters above the harbor, five miles distant. At one instant he had been wrestling Senji toward the window; at the next, he found himself standing on insubstantial air high above a fishing fleet. His demise occasioned no particular sorrow—except among the fishermen, whose nets were badly damaged by his rapid descent.' "
"That was a masterful passage," Beldin chortled, "but where did you discover the meaning of the word 'translocation'?"
"I was reading an old text on the exploits of Belgarath the Sorcerer, and I—" Senji stopped, going very pale, turned, and gaped at Garion's grandfather.
"It's a terrible letdown, isn't it?" Beldin said. "We always told him he ought to try to look more impressive."
"You're in no position to talk," the old man said.
"You're the one with the earthshaking reputation." Beldin shrugged. "I'm just a flunky. I'm along for comic relief."
"You're really enjoying this, aren't you, Beldin?"
"I haven't had so much fun in years. Wait until I tell Pol."
"You keep your mouth shut, you hear me?"
"Yes, O mighty Belgarath," Beldin said mockingly.
Belgarath turned to Garion. "Now you understand why Silk irritates me so much," he said.
"Yes, Grandfather, I think I do."
Senji was still a little wild-eyed.
"Take another drink, Senji," Beldin advised. "It's not nearly so hard to accept when your wits are half-fuddled."
Senji began to tremble. Then he drained his cup in one gulp without so much as a cough.
"Now there's a brave lad," Beldin congratulated him. "Please read on. Your story is fascinating."
Falteringly, the little alchemist continued. " 'In an outburst of righteous indignation, Senji then proceeded to chastise the department heads who had consorted to do violence to his person. It was finally only a personal appeal from the emperor himself that persuaded the old man to desist from some fairly exotic punishments.
After that, the department heads were more than happy to allow Senji to go his own way unmolested.
'On his own, Senji established a private academy students. While his pupils never became sorcerers of the magnitude of Belgarath, Polgara, Ctuchik, some of them were, nonetheless, able to perform rudimentary applications of the principle their master inadvertently discovered. This immediately elevated them far above the magicians and witches practicing their art forms within the confines of the university.' " Senji looked up. "There's more," he said, "but most of it deals with my experiments in the field of alchemy."
"I think that's the crucial part," Belgarath said. "Let's go back a bit. What were you feeling at the exact moment that you changed all that brass into gold?"
"Irritation," Senji shrugged, closing his book. "Or maybe more than that. I'd worked out my calculations so very carefully, but the bar of lead I was working on just lay there not doing anything. I was infuriated. Then I just sort of pulled everything around me inside, and I could feel an enormous power building up. I shouted 'Change!'—mostly at the lead bar, but there were some pipes running through the room as well, and my concentration was a little diffused."
"You're lucky you didn't change the walls, too," Beldin told him. "Were you ever able to do it again?"
Senji shook his head. "I tried, but I never seemed to be able to put together that kind of anger again."
"Are you always angry when you do this sort of thing?" the hunchback asked.
"Almost always," Senji admitted. "If I'm not angry, I can't be certain of the results. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't."
"That seems to be the key to it, Belgarath," Beldin said. "Rage is the common element in every case we've come across."
"As I remember, I was irritated the first time I did it as well," Belgarath conceded.
"So was I," Beldin said. "With you, I think."
"Why did you take it out on that tree, then?"
"At the last second I remembered that our Master was fond of you, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings by obliterating you."
"That probably saved your life. If you'd said 'be not,' you wouldn't be here now."
Beldin scratched at his stomach. "That might explain why we find so few cases of spontaneous sorcery," he mused. "When somebody's enraged at something, his first impulse is usually to destroy it. This might have happened many, many times, but the spontaneous sorcerers probably annihilated themselves in the moment of discovery."
"I wouldn't be at all surprised that you've hit it," Belgarath agreed.
Senji had gone pale again. "I think there's something I need to know here," he said.
"It's the first rule," Garion told him. "The universe won't let us unmake things. If we try, all the force turns inward, and we're the ones who vanish." With a shudder he remembered the obliteration of Ctuchik. He looked at Beldin. "Did I get that right?" he asked.
"Fairly close. The explanation is a little more complex, but you described the process pretty accurately."
"Did that by any chance happen to any of your students?" Belgarath asked Senji.
The alchemist frowned. "It might have," he admitted. "Quite a few of them disappeared. I thought they'd just gone off someplace, but maybe not."
"Are you taking any more students these days?"
Senji shook his head. "I don't have the patience for it any more. Only about one in ten could even grasp the concept, and the rest stood around whining and sniveling and blaming me for not explaining it any better. I went back to alchemy. I almost never use sorcery any more."
"We were told that you can actually do it," Garion said. "Turn brass or lead into gold, I mean."
"Oh, yes," Senji replied in an offhand way. "It's really fairly easy, but the process is more expensive than the gold is worth. That's what I'm trying to do now—simplify the process and substitute less expensive chemicals. I can't get anyone to fund my experiments, though."
Garion felt a sudden throbbing against his hip. Puzzled, he looked down at the pouch in which he was carrying the Orb. There was a sound in his ears, an angry sort of buzz that was unlike the shimmering sound the Orb usually made.