‘Now what?’ Algar whispered.
‘Nothing simpler,’ Dras said confidently. ‘I’ll just walk across the square and bash out their brains with my axe.’
I had to head that off immediately. The other Alorns might very well see nothing at all wrong with his absurd plan. ‘It won’t work,’ I said quickly. ‘They’ll start baying as soon as they see you, and that’ll rouse the whole city.’
‘Well, how are we going to get past them then?’ he demanded truculently.
‘I’m working on it.’ I thought very fast, and it suddenly came to me. I knew it’d work, because it already had once. ‘Let’s pull back into this alley,’ I muttered. ‘I’m going to change again.’
‘You’re not as big as they are when you’re a wolf, Belgarath,’ Cherek pointed out.
‘I’m not going to change myself into a wolf,’ I assured him. ‘You’d better all step back a ways. I might be a little dangerous until I get it under control.’
They backed nervously away from me.
I didn’t turn myself into a wolf, or an owl, or an eagle, or even a dragon.
I became a civet-cat.
The Alorns backed away even farther.
The idea probably wouldn’t have worked if Torak’s Hounds had been real dogs. Even the stupidest dog knows enough to avoid a civet-cat or a skunk. The Chandim weren’t really dogs, though. They were Grolims, and they looked on the wild creatures around them with contempt. I flared out my spotted tail and, chittering warningly, I started across the snow-covered plaza toward them. When I got close enough for them to see me, one of them growled at me. ‘Go away,’ he said in a hideous voice. He actually seemed to chew on the words.
I kept moving toward them. Then, when I judged that they were in range, I turned around and pointed the dangerous end of my assumed form at them.
I don’t think I need to go into the details. The procedure’s a little disgusting, and I wouldn’t want to offend any ladies who might read this.
When a real dog has a brush with a skunk or a civet-cat, he does a lot of yelping and howling to let the world know how sorry he feels for himself, but the pair at the door weren’t real dogs. They did a lot of whining though, and they rolled around, digging their noses into the snow and pawing at their eyes.
I watched them clinically over my shoulder, and then I gave them another dose, just for good measure.
The last I saw of them, they were blundering blindly across that open square, stopping every few yards to roll in the snow again. They didn’t bark or howl, but they did whimper a lot.
I resumed my own form, waved Cherek and the boys in, and then set my fingertips to that pitted iron door. I could sense the lock, but it wasn’t a very good one, so I clicked it open with a single thought and began to inch the door open very slowly. It still made noise. It sounded very loud in that silent square, but I don’t imagine that the sound really carried all that far.
When Cherek and his sons got to within a few yards of me, they stopped. ‘Well, come on,’ I whispered to them.
‘Ah - that’s all right, Belgarath,’ Cherek whispered back. ‘Why don’t you go on ahead? We’ll follow you.’ He seemed to be trying to hold his breath.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I snapped at him. ‘The smell’s out here where the Hounds were. None of it splashed on me - not in this form anyway.’
They still seemed very reluctant to come any closer.
I muttered a few choice oaths and slipped sideways through the doorway into the absolute darkness beyond it. I fumbled briefly in the pouch at my waist, brought out a stub of a candle, and touched fire to it with my thumb.
Yes, it was a little risky, but I’d been told that Torak wouldn’t be able to interfere. I wanted to make sure of that before we went any farther.
The Alorns edged through the minimally open doorway and looked around the chamber at the bottom of the tower nervously. ‘Which way?’ Cherek whispered.
‘Up those stairs, I’d imagine,’ I replied, pointing at the iron stairway spiraling up into the darkness. ‘There’s not much point to building a tower if you don’t plan to live at the top of it. Let me check around down here first, though.’
I shielded my candle and went around the interior wall of the room. When I got behind the stairs, I came to a door I hadn’t seen before. I put my fingertips to it and I could sense the stairs on the other side. They were going down. This was one of the things that I was supposed to do when I got inside the tower. I didn’t know why I was supposed to do it, but I had to know where those stairs were. I kept the memory of their location in my head for over three thousand years. Then, when I came back to Cthol Mishrak with Garion and Silk, I finally understood why.
Now, though, I went back around to the foot of those iron stairs that wound upward. ‘Let’s go up,’ I suggested.
Cherek nodded, took my candle, and then drew his sword. He started up the stairs with Riva and Algar close behind him while Dras and I brought up the rear.
It was a long climb. Torak’s tower was very high. It didn’t really have to be that high, but you know how Torak was. When you get right down to it, I’m about half surprised that his tower didn’t reach up to the stars.
Eventually, though, we reached the top, where there was another one of those iron doors.
‘What now?’ Cherek whispered to me.
‘You might as well open it,’ I told him. ‘Torak isn’t supposed to be able to do anything about us, but we’ll never know until we go in. Try to be quiet, though.’
He drew in a deep breath, handed the candle to Algar, and put his hand on the latch.
‘Slowly,’ I cautioned.
He nodded and turned the handle with excruciating caution.
As Beldin had surmised, Torak had done something to the iron of his tower to keep it from rusting, so the door made surprisingly little noise as Bear-shoulders inched it open.
He looked inside briefly. ‘He’s here,’ he whispered to us. ‘I think he’s asleep.’
‘Good,’ I grunted. ‘Let’s move right along. This night isn’t going to last forever.’
We filed cautiously into that chamber behind the iron door. I immediately saw that among his other faults, Torak was a plagiarist. His tower room closely resembled my Master’s room at the top of his tower - except that everything in Torak’s tower was made of iron. It was dimly illuminated by the fire burning on his hearth.
The Dragon God lay tossing and writhing on his iron bed. That fire was still burning, I guess. He’d covered his ruined face with a steel mask that very closely resembled his features as they had originally appeared. It was a beautiful job, but the fact that a replica of that mask adorns every Angarak temple in the world makes it just a little ominous in retrospect. Unlike those calm replicas, though, the mask that covered Torak’s face actually moved, and the expression on those polished features wasn’t really very pretty. He was clearly in torment. It’s probably cruel, but I didn’t have very much sympathy for him. The chilling thing about the mask was the fact that the left eye slit was open, and Torak’s left eye was the one thing that was still visibly burning.
As the maimed God twisted and turned in his pain-haunted slumber, that burning eye seemed to follow us, watching, watching, even though Torak himself was powerless to prevent what we were going to do.
Dras went to the side of the bed, tentatively hefting his war-axe. ‘I could save the world an awful lot of trouble here,’ he suggested.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ I told him. ‘Your axe would only bounce off him, and it might just wake him up,’ I looked around that room and immediately saw the door directly opposite the one we’d entered. Since those were the only two doors in the room, it narrowed down the search considerably. ‘Let’s go, gentlemen,’ I told the towering Alorns. ‘It’s time to do what we came to do.’ It was time. Don’t ask me how I knew, but it was definitely the right time. I crossed Torak’s room and opened the door with that burning eye watching my every step.
The room beyond that door wasn’t very big - hardly more than a closet. An iron table sat in the precise center of it, a table that was really no more than a pedestal, and an iron box not much more than a hand’s breadth high sat on the exact center of that pedestal. The box was glowing as if it had just been removed from a forge, but it was not the cherry red of heated iron.
The glow was blue.
Chapter 15
‘Why’s it glowing like that?’ Dras whispered.
‘Maybe it’s glad to see us,’ I replied. How was I supposed to know why it was glowing?
‘Is it safe to touch that box?’ Algar asked shrewdly.
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘The Orb itself is dangerous, but I don’t know about the box.’
‘One of us is going to have to open it,’ Algar said. ‘Torak could have put it here to trick us. For all we know, the box could be empty, and the Orb’s someplace else.’
I knew who was supposed to open the box and take out the Orb. The Purpose that had brought us to this place had planted that piece of information in my head before we got here, but I also knew that it was going to have to be voluntary. I was going to have to nudge them a bit.