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.
‘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.
‘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