‘It was in a room adjoining the one where he spends all his time. He didn’t want that iron box in the same room with him. The temptation to open it might have been too great for him.’
‘Well,’ I said blandly, ‘I guess that takes care of all of that, then. I’m glad you came along when you did, brother. I wasn’t really too eager to go to Mallorea. I’ll go fetch Cherek and his sons while you go pick up the Orb. Then we can all go back to the Vale.’ I waited for a little bit to give him a moment to exult over his success in deceiving me. ‘Isn’t that sort of what you’d expect from a drunken lecher with scant morality and little seriousness?’ I added, throwing his own words back in his teeth. Then I sighed with genuine regret. ‘Why, Belzedar?’ I asked him. ‘Why have you betrayed our Master?’
His head came up sharply, and his look was stricken.
‘You ought to pay more attention, old boy,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been almost on top of you for the past ten hours. Did you really think it was necessary to set fire to Etchquaw?’ I’ll admit that I was goading him. He was still my brother, and I didn’t want to be the one to strike the first blow. I bored in inexorably. ‘You’re Torak’s third disciple, aren’t you, Zedar? You’ve gone over to the other side. You’ve sold your soul to that one-eyed monster in Cthol Mishrak. What did he offer you, Zedar? What is there in this whole world that was worth what you’ve done?’
He actually broke down at that point. ‘I had no choice, Belgarath,’ he sobbed. ‘I’d thought that I could deceive Torak – that I could pretend to accept him and serve him – but he put his hand on my soul and tore it out of me. His touch, Belgarath! Dear God, his touch!’
I braced myself. I knew what was coming. Zedar always overacted. It was his one great weakness.
He started by throwing fire into my face. Between one spurious sob and the next, his arm whipped back and then flashed forward with a great blob of incandescent flame nestled in his palm.
I brushed it aside with a negligent gesture. ‘Not good enough, brother,’ I told him. Then I knocked him cart-wheeling through the snow with my fist. It was tactically sound. He’d have felt my Will building anyway, and I got an enormous satisfaction out of punching him in the mouth.
He came up spitting blood and teeth, and trying to gather his wits. I didn’t give him time for that, however. He spent the next several minutes dancing in the snow, dodging the lightning bolts I threw at him. I still didn’t want to kill him, so I gave him an instant of warning before I turned each bolt loose. It did keep him off-balance, though, and the sizzling noise when the bolts hit the snow really distracted him.
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 thunder-claps 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.
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.
