‘The Orb knows you, Belgarath,’ Cherek told me. ‘You do it.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not supposed to. There are other things I have to do, and whoever takes up the Orb will spend the rest of his life guarding it. One of you gentlemen is going to have to do it.’
‘You decide who it’s going to be,’ Cherek said.
‘I’m not permitted to do that.’
‘It’s really very simple, Belgarath,’ Dras told me. ‘We’ll take turns trying to open the box. Whichever one of us doesn’t die is the right one.’
‘No,’ I told him flatly. ‘You’ve all got things you’re supposed to do, and dying here in Cthol Mishrak isn’t one of them.’ I squinted at the glowing box. ‘I want you gentlemen to be absolutely honest about this. The Orb’s the most powerful thing in the world. Whichever one of you picks it up will be able to do anything, but the Orb doesn’t want to do just anything. It’s got its own agenda, and if anybody tries to use it for something outside that agenda, it won’t be happy. Torak already found that out. Examine your hearts, gentlemen. I need somebody who’s not ambitious. I need somebody who’ll be willing to devote his whole life to guarding the Orb without ever trying to use it. If the notion of having infinite power at your fingertips appeals to you in the slightest, you’re not the one.’
‘That lets me out,’ Cherek said with a slight shrug. ‘I’m a king, and kings are supposed to be ambitious. The first time I got drunk, I’d have to try to do something with it.’ He looked at his sons. ‘It’s going to have to be one of you boys.’
‘I could probably keep a grip on my ambition,’ Dras said, ‘but I think it ought to be somebody whose mind’s quicker than mine. I can handle a fight, but thinking too much makes my head hurt.’ It was a brutally candid admission, and it raised my opinion of Dras considerably.
Riva and Algar looked at each other. Then Riva shrugged and smiled that boyish smile of his. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I haven’t really got anything better to do anyway.’ And he reached out, opened the box, and took out the Orb.
- Yes! - the voice in my head exulted.
‘Well, now,’ Algar said casually, ‘since we’ve settled that, why don’t we go?’
That’s what really happened in Torak’s tower. All that blather about ‘evil intent’ in the BOOK OF ALORN was made up out of whole cloth by somebody who got carried away by his own creativity. I shouldn’t really blame him for it, I guess. I do it all the time myself. The real facts behind any story always seem sort of prosaic to me.
‘Stick it inside your clothes someplace,’ I told Riva. ‘It’s a little excited right now, and that glow’s awfully conspicuous.’
‘Won’t I glow, too?’ Riva asked dubiously. The way the box did, I mean?’
‘Try it and find out,’ I suggested.
‘Does glowing hurt?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so. Don’t worry, Riva. The Orb’s very fond of you. It’s not going to hurt you.’
‘Belgarath, it’s a rock. How can it be fond of anything?’
‘It’s not an ordinary rock. Just put it away, Riva, and let’s get out of here.’
He swallowed hard and tucked the Orb inside his fur tunic. Then he held out one of his huge hands and examined it closely. ‘No glow yet,’ he noted.
‘See? You’re going to have to learn to trust me, boy. You and I have a long way to go together, and it’ll be difficult for both of us if you’re going to ask me silly questions every time we turn around.’
‘Silly?’ he objected. ‘After what it did to Torak, I don’t think my questions were silly.’
‘Poor choice of terms, perhaps. Let’s go.’
I had a bad moment when we were retracing our steps. Torak cried out in his sleep. It was a howl of utter desolation that suggested that somewhere in his sleep he knew that we were taking the Orb. He was powerless to stop us, but that shout almost made me jump out of my skin.
I don’t like being startled like that, which may account for what I did then. ‘Go back to sleep, Torak,’ I told him. Then, I threw his own words back in his teeth. ‘A word of advice for thee, brother of my Master, by way of thanks for thine unintended service to me this day. Don’t come looking for the Orb. My Master’s very gentle. I’m not. If you come anywhere near the Orb, I’ll have you for lunch.’
It was sheer bravado, of course, but I had to say something to him, and my little display of spitefulness may have served some purpose. When he finally did wake up, he was in a state of inarticulate rage, and he wasted a great deal of time punishing the Angaraks who’d been supposed to prevent me from reaching his tower. That gave the Alorns and me a fairly good head start.
We crept back down the stairs to the foot of the tower, listening tensely for Grolims, but finding only an eerie silence. When we got to the bottom, I looked out into the snowy square. It had remained deserted. My luck was holding.
‘Let’s go!’ Dras said impatiently. Prince Kheldar and I had a long discussion about that some years back, and he told me that burglars always suffer from that same impatience, and that it makes getting away almost more dangerous than breaking in. Your natural instinct after you steal something is to take to your heels; but if you don’t want to get caught, you’d better suppress that instinct.
The residual odor from my encounter with the Hounds was still very strong on Torak’s doorstep, and the five of us were careful to breathe shallowly until we reached the shelter of that dark alleyway from which we’d emerged when we first got to the square.
‘What do you think?’ Cherek whispered to me as we followed that twisting, smoky alley back toward the city wall. ‘Will it be safe to go back the way we came?’
I was already working on that, and I hadn’t come up with an answer yet. No matter how careful we’d been on our way here from the coast, there were bound to be traces of our passage. I knew Torak well enough to be fairly certain that he wouldn’t personally lead the search. He’d leave that to underlings, and that meant Urvon or Ctuchik. Based on Beldin’s description of him, I wasn’t particularly worried about Urvon. Ctuchik was an unknown, though. I had no idea of what Torak’s other disciple was capable of, and this probably wasn’t a good time to find out.
Going north was obviously out of the question. Torak already had people in place at the land-bridge, and I didn’t want to have to fight my way through them, assuming we could. Going west was probably quite nearly as dangerous. I had to operate on the theory that Ctuchik could do almost anything I could do, and I’d certainly be able to sense those traces I mentioned before. I didn’t even consider going east. There wasn’t much point in going deeper into Mallorea when safety lay in the other direction.
That left only south. ‘Are you gentlemen feeling up to a bit of a scuffle?’ I asked Cherek and his sons.
‘What did you have in mind?’ Cherek asked me.
‘Why don’t we go pick a fight with the guards at the north gate?’
‘I can think of a dozen reasons why we shouldn’t,’ Riva said dubiously.
‘But I can think of a better one why we should. We don’t know how long it’s going to be until Torak wakes up, and he’s not going to take the loss of the Orb philosophically. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he’s going to be organizing a pursuit.’
‘That stands to reason, I suppose,’ Iron-grip conceded.
‘We want those pursuers to go off in the wrong direction if we can possibly arrange it. A pile of dead Grolims at the north gate would probably suggest that we went that way, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It would to me, I guess.’
‘Let’s go kill some Grolims, then.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Cherek objected. ‘If we’re going to go back the way we came, we won’t want to draw attention to that gate.’
‘But we aren’t going back the way we came.’
‘Which way are we going then?’
‘South, actually - well, southwest would probably be closer.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Trust me.’
He started to swear. Evidently hearing that remark irritated him as much as it always irritated me.
There were six black-robed Grolims at the north gate, and we made quick work of them. There were a few muffled cries, of course, and some fairly pathetic groaning, but the fact that there weren’t any windows in the houses of Cthol Mishrak kept any people inside from hearing them.
‘All right,’ Dras said, wiping his bloody axe on a fallen Grolim, ‘now what?’
‘Let’s go back to your tunnel.’
‘Belgarath,’ he objected, ‘We want to get away from the city. We don’t want to go back over the wall.’
‘We’ll go out through the gate, crawl through your tunnel, and circle around the city until we come to the river on the south side of it.’
‘There’s a trail around the outside of the wall,’ Riva pointed out. ‘Why use the tunnel at all?’