We trotted down the back-side of the dune and out among the gnarled, stunted trees. When we got to one of those clearings, I kicked the snow out of the way and had a look. ‘Ice,’ I said with a certain satisfaction. ‘Chop a hole in it, Dras. I need to have a look at the water.’
‘You’re dulling the edge of my axe, Belgarath,’ he complained.
‘You can sharpen it again. Start chopping.’
He muttered a few choice oaths, bunched those enormous shoulders, and began to chop ice.
‘Harder, Dras,’ I urged him. ‘I want to get down to water before the light goes.’
He began to chop harder and faster, sending splinters and chunks of ice in all directions. After several minutes, water began to seep up from the bottom of the hole.
I suppressed an urge to dance with glee. The water was brown. ‘That’s enough,’ I told the huge man. I knelt, scooped up a handful of water and tasted it. ‘Brackish,’ I announced. ‘It’s swamp-water, all right. It looks as if your auguries were right, Cherek. This is your lucky year. Let’s go back to the beach and have some breakfast.’
Algar fell in beside me as we started back. ‘I’d say it’s your lucky year too, Belgarath,’ he murmured quietly. ‘Father would have been a little grumpy if we’d missed that swamp.’
‘I can’t possibly lose, Algar,’ I replied gaily. ‘When we get back to the beach, I’ll borrow your brother’s dice and roll the main all day long.’
‘I don’t play dice. What are you talking about?’
‘It’s a game called hazard,’ I explained. ‘You’re supposed to call a number before your first roll. If it comes up, you win. That number’s called “the main”.’
‘And if it doesn’t come up, you lose?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that. Have Dras show you.’
‘I’ve got better things to do with my money, Belgarath, and I’ve heard stories about my brother’s dice.’
‘You don’t think he’d cheat you, do you? You are his brother.’
‘If there was money involved, Dras would cheat our own mother.’
You see what I mean about Drasnians?
We returned to our den, and Riva cooked an extensive breakfast. Cooking is a chore that nobody really likes – except for my daughter, of course – so it usually fell to the youngest. Oddly, Riva wasn’t a bad cook.
You didn’t know that, did you, Pol?
‘Will you recognize this place when you see it?’ Dras rumbled around a mouthful of bacon.
‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ I replied blandly, ‘since it’s the only city north of the river.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘It’ll sort of stand out,’ I continued. ‘It’s got a perpetual cloud-bank over it.’
He frowned. ‘What causes that?’
‘Torak, from what Beldin says.’
‘Why would he do that?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe he hates the sun.’ I didn’t want to get too exotic in my explanation. Little things confused Dras. A big one might have unraveled his whole brain.
I apologize to the entire Drasnian nation for that last remark. Dras was brave and strong and absolutely loyal, but sometimes he was just a little slow of thought. His descendants have more than overcome that. If anyone doesn’t believe that, I invite him to try having business dealings with Prince Kheldar.
‘All right then,’ I told them after we’d eaten, ‘Torak’s mind is very rigid. Once he gets hold of an idea, he won’t let go of it. He almost certainly knows about that bridge – particularly since the Karands use it to go over to trade with the Morindim, and the Karands are Torak-worshipers now. They probably only use the bridge in the summer when there isn’t any ice, though. I don’t think Torak would even take the ice into account.’
‘Where are we going with this?’ Cherek asked.
‘I’m sure Torak’s expecting us, but he’s expecting us to come at him from the north – from the direction of the bridge. If he’s put people out there to stop us, that’s where they’ll be.’
Riva laughed delightedly. ‘But we won’t be coming from the north, will we? We’ll be coming from the west instead.’
‘Good point,’ Algar murmured with an absolutely straight face. He concealed it very well, but Algar was much brighter than his brothers – or his father, for that matter. Maybe that’s why he didn’t waste his breath trying to talk to them.
‘I can do certain things to keep the Angaraks facing north,’ I continued. ‘Now that the blizzard’s blown off, I’ll decorate the snowbanks up there near your bridge with footprints and perfume the bushes with our scent. That should throw the Chandim off.’
‘Chandim?’ Dras gave me that blank stare.
‘The Hounds of Torak. They’ll be trying to sniff us out. I’ll give them enough clues to make them do their sniffing up north of here. If we’re half-way careful, we should be able to reach Cthol Mishrak without being noticed.’
‘You knew this all along, didn’t you, Belgarath?’ Riva said. ‘That’s why you made us cross the ice where we did instead of going up to the bridge.’
I shrugged. ‘Naturally,’ I replied modestly. It was a barefaced lie, of course. I’d only just put it all together myself. But a reputation for infallible cleverness doesn’t hurt when you’re dealing with Alorns. The time might come very soon when I’d be making decisions based on hunches, and I wouldn’t have time for arguments.
It was dark again by the time we crawled out of our den and struck out across the snowy dunes toward the frozen bog to the east. We soon discovered that not all of the Chandim had gone north to lie in wait for us. We came across tracks as large as horses’ hooves in the fresh snow from time to time, and we could hear them baying off in the swamp now and again.
I’ll make a confession here. Despite my strong reservations about it, for once I did tamper with the weather – just a bit. I created a small portable fog-bank for us to hide in and a very docile little snow-cloud that followed us like a puppy, happily burying our tracks in new snow. It doesn’t really take much to make a cloud happy. I kept both the fog and the cloud tightly controlled, though, so their effects didn’t alter any major weather patterns. Between the two of them, they kept the Chandim from finding us with their eyes, and the new-fallen snow muffled the sound of our passage. Then I summoned a cooperative family of civet-cats to trail along behind us. Civet-cats are nice little creatures related to skunks, except that they have spots instead of stripes. Their means of dealing with creatures unlucky enough to offend them are the same, though – as one of Torak’s Hounds discovered when he got too close. I don’t imagine he was very popular in his pack for the next several weeks.
We crept unobserved through that frozen swamp for several days, hiding in thickets during the brief daylight hours and traveling during the long arctic nights.
Then one morning our fog-bank turned opalescent. I let it dissipate so that we could take a look, but it really wasn’t necessary. I knew what was lighting up the fog. The sun had finally cleared the horizon. Winter was wearing on, and it was time for us to hurry. As the fog thinned, we saw that we were nearing the eastern edge of the swamp. A low range of hills rose a few miles ahead, and just beyond those hills was an inky black cloud-bank. ‘That’s it,’ I told Cherek and his boys, speaking very quietly.
‘That’s