Then he enveloped himself in a cloud of absolute darkness, trying to hide. I dissolved his cloud and kept shooting lightning at him. He really didn’t like that. Zedar’s afraid of a lot of things, and lightning’s one of them. My thunderclaps and the sizzle and steam definitely upset him.
He tried more fire, but I smothered each of his flames before he even got it well-started. I suppose I might have toyed with him longer, but by now he fully understood that I had the upper hand. There was no real point in grinding his face in that any more, so I jumped on him and quite literally beat him into the ground with my bare hands. I could have done it any number of other ways, I guess, but his betrayal seemed to call for a purely physical chastisement. I hammered on him with my fists for a while, and right at first he gave as good as he got. We banged on each other for several minutes, but I was enjoying it far more than he was. I had a great deal of pent-up anger, and hitting him felt very, very good.
I finally gave him a good solid punch on the side of his head, and his eyes glazed over, and he slumped senseless into the snow.
‘That’ll teach you,’ I muttered to him, rising and standing over his unconscious body. It was a silly thing to say, but I had to say something.
I had a little problem, though. What was I going to do with him now? I wasn’t going to kill him, and the blow I had given him wouldn’t keep him unconscious for very long. I was certain that the rules of this encounter prohibited the voice inside my head from making any suggestions, so I was on my own.
I considered the inert form at my feet. In his present condition, Zedar posed no threat to anyone. All I really had to do was keep him in that condition. I took him by the shoulders and dragged him back in among the trees. Then I piled branches over him. In spite of everything, I didn’t want him to freeze to death or get smothered by a sudden snow-squall. Then I reached my hand in under the branches, found his face, and gathered my Will. ‘This all must have been exhausting for you, Zedar,’ I told him. ‘Why don’t you see if you can catch up on your sleep?’
Then I released my Will. I smiled and stood up. I’d gauged it rather carefully. Zedar would sleep for at least six months, and that would keep him out of my hair while the Alorns and I went to Cthol Mishrak to finish what we’d set out to do.
I felt quite pleased with myself as I resumed the form of the wolf.
Then I went looking for Bear-shoulders and his boys.
Chapter 14
Evidently the word of my Demon Lord had gotten around, because we didn’t encounter any more of the Morindim as we crossed the southern edge of their range. The moon had gone off to the south, but the northern lights illuminated the sky well enough, and we made good time. We soon reached the shore of Torak’s Sea.
Fortunately the beach was littered with huge piles of driftwood. Otherwise, I don’t think we’d have been able to tell where the land stopped and the sea began. The ground along that beach was nearly as flat as the frozen sea, and both were covered with knee-deep snow.
‘We go north along the beach from here,’ Riva told us. ‘After a while it swings east. The bridge is off in that direction.’
‘Let’s stay clear of your bridge,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘Torak knows we’re coming, and by now he knows that Zedar wasn’t able to stop us. He might have a few surprises waiting for us if we follow that string of islands. Let’s cross the ice instead.’
‘There aren’t any landmarks out there, Belgarath,’ he objected, ‘and we can’t even take our bearings on the sun. We’ll get lost.’
‘No we won’t, Riva. I’ve got a very good sense of direction.’
‘Even in the dark?’
‘Yes.’ I looked around, squinting into the bitterly cold wind sweeping down out of the northwest. ‘Let’s get behind that pile of driftwood,’ I told them. ‘We’ll build a fire, have a hot meal, and get some sleep. The next several days aren’t going to be very pleasant.’
Crossing open ice in the dead of winter is one of the more uncomfortable experiences you’ll ever have, I expect. Once you get out a ways from shore, the wind has total access to you, and the arctic wind blows continually. Of course, it sweeps the ice clear of snow, so at least you don’t have to wade through snowdrifts. There are enough other problems to make up for the absence of drifts, though. When people talk about crossing ice, they’re usually talking about a frozen lake, which is normally as flat as a table-top. Sea-ice isn’t like that because of the tides. The continual rising and falling of the water during the autumn and early winter keeps breaking up the ice before it gets duck enough to become stable, and that creates ridges and deep cracks that make crossing a stretch of sea-ice almost as difficult as crossing a range of mountains. I didn’t enjoy it very much.
The sun had long since abandoned the north, and the moon had wandered away, so I can’t really give you any idea of how long it took us to make it across - probably not as long as it seemed, since I reverted to the form of the wolf and I could keep going for a long time without slowing down. Moreover, my malicious running of the Alorns had conditioned them to the point that they could almost keep up with me.
Anyway, we finally reached the coast of Mallorea - just in time as it turned out, because a three-day blizzard came up almost as soon as we hit the beach. We took shelter under a mountainous pile of driftwood to wait out the storm. Dras turned out to be very useful at that point. He took his battle-axe to that jumble of logs and limbs and hollowed us out a very comfortable den near the center of the pile. We built a fire and gradually thawed out.
During one of his visits to the Vale, Beldin had sketched me out a rough map of Mallorea, and I spent a great deal of time hunched over that map while the blizzard was busy drifting about eight feet of snow over our shelter. ‘How far is your bridge up the coast from where we crossed?’ I asked Riva when the wind began to subside.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifty leagues or so, I guess.’
‘You’re a lot of help, Riva,’ I told him sourly. I stared at the map again. Beldin hadn’t known about the bridge, of course, so he hadn’t drawn it in, and he also hadn’t included a scale, so all I could do was guess. ‘As closely as I can make it out, we’re approximately due west of Cthol Mishrak,’ I told my friends.
‘Approximately?’ Bear-shoulders asked.
‘This map isn’t all that good. It gives me a general idea of where the city is, but that’s about all. When the wind dies down a bit more, we’ll scout around. Cthol Mishrak’s on a river, and there’s a swamp north of that river. If we find a swamp inland, we’ll know that we’re fairly close.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘Then we’ll have to go looking for it - or the river.’
Cherek squinted at my map. ‘We could be north of the swamp, Belgarath,’ he objected. ‘- or south of the river, for that matter. We could end up wandering around up here until summer time.’
‘Have you got anything better to do?’
‘Well, no, but-’
‘Let’s not start worrying until we find out what’s lying inland. Your auguries say this is your lucky year, so maybe we’ve come ashore in the right place.’
‘But you don’t believe in auguries.’
‘No, but you do. Maybe that’s all it takes. If you think you’re lucky, you probably are.’
‘I suppose I didn’t think of that,’ he said, his face suddenly brightening. You can convince an Alorn of almost anything if you talk fast enough.
We rolled up in our furs and slept at that point. There really wasn’t anything else to do, unless we wanted to sit around and watch Dras play with his dice. Drasnians love to gamble, but I got much more entertainment from dreaming about my wife.
I can’t be sure how long I slept, but some time later, Riva shook me awake. ‘I think you’d better reset that sense of direction of yours, Belgarath,’ he said accusingly.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I just went outside to see if the wind had died. The sun’s coming up.’
I sat up quickly. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Go wake up your father and brothers,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a little light for a while. Let’s take advantage of it to have a look inland. Tell them not to bother breaking down our camp. We’ll go take a look and then come back. I want it to be dark again before we start out.’
There were rounded mounds backing the beach where we’d sat out the storm, and once we got to them, Dras negligently hit the snow-covered side of one of them with his axe. ‘Sand,’ he reported. That sounded promising.
We topped the dunes and gazed out over a scrubby forest that looked almost like a jungle dotted here and there with broad clearings.
‘What do you think?’ Cherek asked me. ‘It looks sort of boggy. It’s frozen, of course, and knee-deep in snow, but those clearings would be open water in the summer if it is that swamp.’
‘Let’s go look,’ I said, squinting nervously at the fading ‘dawn’ along the southern horizon. ‘We’d better hurry if we want to reach it before it gets dark again.’