Sadi shook his head, his shaven scalp gleaming in the orange firelight. "Impossible, Ancient One. A Mallorean fleet slipped up behind the Murgos a few years back, and King Urgit still has nightmares about it. He's closed all the west coast ports and has ships patrolling the sea lanes all the way around the tip of the Urga peninsula. No one sails along that coast without his specific permission."
"How far is it to Verkat?" Durnik asked.
Sadi squinted up at the stars. "Three or four months at this time of the year, Goodman."
Polgara had been humming quietly to herself as her needle ^flashed in the firelight. "Come here, Ce'Nedra," she said.
The little queen rose and went over to where she sat. Pol held up the green silk robe, measuring it against her tiny waist, then nodded in satisfaction.
Ce'Nedra wrinkled her nose. "Do they have to smell so bad?" she asked Sadi.
'I don't suppose they have to, but they always do, for some reason. Slaves have a certain odor about them, and it seems to rub off."
Aunt Pol was looking at Toth as she held another of the slaver's robes in her hands. "This could be a bit more challenging," she murmured.
The giant gave her a brief, almost shy smile and rose to put more wood on the fire. As he poked the coals with a stick, a column of winking red sparks rose to greet the stars hanging low in the night sky. From somewhere down the ridge, as if in response to those sparks, there came a deep, coughing roar.
"What's that?" Ce'Nedra cried.
"Lion." Sadi shrugged. "Sometimes they hunt along the slave route—the old and crippled ones at any rate."
"Why would they do that?"
"Sometimes slaves get too sick to walk any farther and they have to be left behind. An old lion can't chase anything that's very nimble, and . . ." He left it hanging in the air.
She stared at him in horror.
"You did ask, after all, your Majesty," he reminded her. "As a matter of fact, I don't like the idea very much myself. That's one of the reasons I left the slave trade to go into politics." He stood up and brushed off the back of his robe. "Now, if you dear people will excuse me, I have to go feed Zith. Please be careful when you go to your beds tonight. Sometimes she sneaks away after she's been fed. I think it amuses her to hide from me, and one never knows where she might turn up." He walked out of the circle of golden firelight toward the place where he had spread his blankets.
Silk stared after him, then turned back to the fire. "I don't know about the rest of you," he declared, "but I'm sleeping right here tonight."
The next morning after breakfast, they donned the evil-smelling robes of Nyissan slavers. At Belgarath's instruction, Garion once again covered the hilt of Iron-grip's sword. "I think we'd better keep the Orb well wrapped as long as we're in Cthol Murgos," the old man said. "It tends to get excited when there are Angaraks about."
They mounted their horses and followed the ancient highway up a ravine toward the jagged ridge top. As they rounded a bend, Polgara suddenly reined in her horse with a sharp hiss.
"What's the matter, Pol?" Durnik asked her.
She did not reply immediately, but her face grew pale. Her eyes flashed, and the white lock at her brow suddenly flamed. "Monstrous!" she said.
"What is it, Aunt Pol?" Garion asked.
"Look over there," she answered, pointing with a trembling hand. There were white bones scattered about on the rocky ground several yards from the road; lying among them was a vacant-eyed human skull.
"One of the slaves Sadi mentioned last night?" Silk suggested.
Polgara shook her head. "A part of the arrangement between Sariss and Naradas involved several men to escort Zandramas to the Murgo border," she reminded him. "When she got this far, she didn't need them any more."
Silk's face grew grim. "That seems to be in character. Every time she finishes with somebody, she kills him."
"She didn't just kill them," Polgara said with a look of revulsion. "She broke their legs and left them for the lions. They waited all day for nightfall, and then the lions came."
Ce'Nedra's face blanched. "How horrible!"
"Are you sure, Pol?" Durnik asked, his face slightly sick.
"Some things are so dreadful that they leave their traces in the very rocks."
Belgarath had been staring bleakly at the gnawed bones. "This isn't the first time she's done this. She's not satisfied with just killing people to cover her tracks. She has to commit atrocities."
"She's a monster," Ce'Nedra declared. "She feeds on horror."
"It's a bit more than that," Belgarath replied. "I think she's trying to leave messages for us." He jerked his head toward the scattered bones. "That wasn't really necessary. I think she's trying to scare us off."
"It won't work," Garion said very quietly. "All she's doing is adding to the final reckoning. When the time finally comes for her to pay it, I think she's going to find that all of this is more than she can afford."
At the top of the ridge, the ancient road they had been following ended abruptly, sharply marking the invisible line where Nyissa ended and Cthol Murgos began. From the ridge top they looked out over an endless, unbroken expanse of shattered black rock and miles-wide beds of dark brown gravel, shimmering under a broiling sun.
"Which way did Zandramas go from here?" Durnik asked Garion.
"She turned south," Garion replied, feeling the Orb pulling in a new direction.
"We could gain time if we cut straight across that out there, couldn't we?"
"Absolutely out of the question, Goodman Durnik," Sadi declared. "That's the Great Desert of Araga. It's as big as Algaria. The only water there is in the wells of the Dagashi, and you wouldn't want to get caught dipping into a Dagashi well."
"The Dagashi live out there?" Durnik asked, shading his eyes with one hand to look out at the fiery wasteland.
"They're the only ones who can," Sadi replied. "Perhaps that explains why they're so fearsome. We're going to have to follow this ridge line south for a hundred leagues or so to get around that waste. Then we'll strike out due southeast across Morcth and on down into the Great Southern Forest in Gorut."
Belgarath nodded. "Let's get started then."
They rode south, skirting the western edge of the Desert of Araga and staying well up in the hills, which sloped steeply down to the desert floor. As they rode, Garion noticed that the trees on this side of the ridge were stunted and sparsely distributed. There was no grass growing in the rock-strewn ground, and the heather had given way to scrubby thorn bushes. The sharp ridge line appeared to be an abrupt demarcation between two entirely different climates. What had been only pleasantly warm on the west side became oppressively hot here on the east. There were almost no streams, and the few springs they found were tiny and seeped their water grudgingly into tepid little puddles hidden among the rust-colored boulders.