power tucked inside his tunic, but he wasn’t supposed to use it. If my reasoning was correct, though, he wouldn’t have to. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘this is how we’ll work it. Riva, when those Hounds behind us come into sight, I want you to take out the Orb and hold it up so that they can see it.’
‘I thought you said I wasn’t supposed to.’
‘I didn’t say that you were going to use it. I just told you to hold it up. I want the Chandim to be able to see it – and I want it to be able to see them.’
‘What good’s that going to do?’
Actually, I wasn’t really sure, but I had a strong hunch about what would happen. ‘It’d take too long to explain. Have I been wrong yet?’
‘Well – I suppose not.’
‘Then you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I know what I’m doing.’ I was praying rather fervently that I did, in fact, know what I was doing.
It wasn’t very long before several dozen Hounds came loping around a bend in that frozen river. ‘All right, Riva,’ I said. ‘Now’s the time. Raise up the Orb. Don’t give it any orders, just hold it up. Don’t squeeze it. I know how strong your hands are. If you get excited and crush the Orb, we’re in trouble.’
‘I thought we already were,’ Cherek muttered somewhere behind me.
‘I heard that,’ I threw back over my shoulder at him.
Riva sighed, took out the Orb, and held it over his head. ‘Good bye, father,’ he said mournfully.
The Hounds running after us skidded to a stop on the slippery river as they caught sight of the glowing Orb in Riva’s upraised hand.
Then the Orb stopped glowing. It flickered and then went dark.
Riva groaned.
Then the Orb woke up again, and it didn’t glow blue this time. The light that blazed forth from it was pure white, and it was about three times brighter than the sun.
The Chandim fled, howling in pain, stumbling, bumping into each other, and with their toenails shrieking across the ice.
I don’t know if any of those Grolims ever regained their sight, but I do know that they were all totally blind when they ran back up the river.
‘Well,’ I said with a certain astonishment, ‘what do you know? It worked after all. What an amazing thing!’
‘Belgarath!’ There was a note of anguish in Cherek’s voice. ‘Are you saying that you didn’t know?’
‘It was theoretically sound,’ I replied, ‘but you never really know about theories until you try them out.’
‘What happened?’ Dras demanded.
I shrugged. ‘Riva’s forbidden to use the Orb. That’s why the Orb permits him to touch it. He couldn’t do anything, but the Orb could – and it did. The Orb doesn’t like Torak – or the Angaraks. It does like Riva, though. I deliberately put him in danger, and that forced the Orb to take matters into its own hands. It worked out rather well, don’t you think?’
They stared at me in absolute horror. ‘Remind me never to play dice with you, Belgarath,’ Dras said in a trembling voice. ‘You take too many chances.’
With Ctuchik and Torak both to drive them, more of the Hounds came back down the river after us, and a fair number of Grolims as well. There were mounted men following along behind the Grolims, helmeted men in mail shirts and carrying assorted weapons. Those were the first Murgos I ever saw. I didn’t like them then, and my opinion of them hasn’t improved over the years. Their horses were somewhat bigger than the scrubby little ponies found on the other side of the Sea of the East, but the Murgos were still too big for their mounts.
All right, I’ll be mentioning Murgos and Nadraks and Thulls from time to time as we go along, so I’m going to sort them out for you. The three Angarak tribes that migrated to the western continent after the destruction of Cthol Mishrak were not, in fact, tribes at all. They were all Angaraks, but the almost two thousand years that they had lived in the City of Night had modified them. The differences between them were not racial nor tribal, but rather were based on class. The word ‘Murgo’ in old Angarak meant warrior; the word ‘Nadrak’ meant townsman; and the word ‘Thull’ meant peasant or serf. Murgos are built like soldiers, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and generally athletic. Nadraks tend to be leaner. Thulls are built like oxen. Torak had been so intent on trying to subdue the Orb that he hadn’t paid any attention to what was happening to the inhabitants of Cthol Mishrak as a result of two thousand years of what might be called selective breeding, and he assumed that they differed from each other because they were of different tribes. That’s one of the reasons that the Angarak societies he exported to the west didn’t work very well. Murgos felt that work was beneath their dignity; Thulls were too stupid to set up anything even resembling a government; and Nadraks had nobody to swindle but each other.
Have you got all that straight? Try to remember it. I don’t want to have to go through it all again. I repeat myself often enough as it is.
The Hounds had been made wary by what had happened to their pack-mates, so they held back while the Murgos and Grolims rushed to the attack. I didn’t even have to tell Riva what to do this time. He took out the Orb and held it up over his head.
Once again the Orb flickered and went out, and once again it took fire. It went a little further this time, however. It was probably the first time in its history that Cthol Mishrak had been fully illuminated, and the western slopes of the Karandese mountains and the Sea of the East as far north as the pole and as far west as the shores of Morindland were engulfed in a light that was at least as bright as the light that reached us at Korim three thousand years later.
The charging Murgos and Grolims were instantly incinerated by that awful light. I discovered something about the Orb in that moment. It had a certain innate sense of decency. It warned people before it unleashed its power on them. That’s what the blinding of the Hounds had been – a warning. There was only one, though. If people chose to ignore the Orb’s first warning, they didn’t get a second.
The Alorns and I were stunned by the enormity of what had just happened, and the Hounds took advantage of our momentary confusion to circle around along the riverbanks to get ahead of us, and that made it possible for them to slow us down. That single flash of brilliant light had temporarily blinded us, too, and we floundered along in the darkness after it subsided. Our near-blindness, coupled with the periodic suicidal charges of individual Hounds, slowed us to the point that we continued down-river at a crawl.
‘How much farther to the coast?’ Cherek panted.
‘I have no idea,’ I admitted.
‘This isn’t turning out well, Belgarath.’
‘You worry too much.’ I turned teary eyes at his youngest son. ‘Keep holding it up in the air, Riva. Let it see what’s coming after us.’
We kept going down the river, our trip punctuated by a series of bright flashes and what sounded like thunderclaps as the Orb exploded the Hounds that came rushing at us from the riverbanks.
‘They’re coming
