Demon Lord of Karanda

God's face before he had fallen.
    They mounted the three steps to that bleak door, and Toth slowly pushed it open.
    The corridor inside was dimly illuminated by a single flickering torch at the far end. Opposite the door, as Feldegast had told them, was a broad staircase reaching up into the darkness. The treads were littered with fallen stones, and cobwebs hung in long festoons from a ceiling lost in shadows. Still moving at that stately Grolim pace, Belgarath led them across the corridor and started up the stairs. Garion followed close behind him with measured tread, though every nerve screamed at him to run. They had gone perhaps halfway up the staircase when they heard a clinking sound behind them, and there was a sudden light at the foot of the stairs, "What are you doing?" a rough voice demanded. "Who are you?"
    Garion's heart sank, and he turned. The man at the foot of the stairs wore a long, coat-like shirt of mail. He was helmeted and had a shield strapped to his left arm.
    With his right he held aloft a sputtering torch.
    "Come back down here," the mailed man commanded them. The giant Toth turned obediently, his hood pulled over his face with his arms crossed so that his hands were inside his sleeves. With an air of meekness he started the stairs again.
    "I mean all of you," the Temple Guardsman insisted. "I order you in the name of the God of Angarak." As Toth reached the foot of the stairs, the Guardsman's eyes widened as he realized that the robe the huge man wore was not Grolim black. "What's this?" he exclaimed. "You're not Chandim! You're-" He broke off as one of Toth's huge hands seized him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. He dropped his torch, kicking and struggling. Then, almost casually, Toth removed his helmet with his other hand and banged his head several times against the stone wall of the corridor.
    With a shudder, the mail-coated man went limp. Toth draped the unconscious form across his shoulder and started back up the stairs.
    Silk bounded back down to the corridor, picked up the steel helmet and extinguished torch, and came back up again. "Always clean up the evidence," he murmured to Toth. "No crime is complete until you've tidied up."
    Toth grinned at him.
    As they neared the top of the stairs, they found the treads covered with leaves that had blown in from the outside, and the cobwebs hung in tatters like rotted curtains, swaying in the wind that came moaning in from the outside through the shattered windows.
    The hall at the top of the stairs was littered. Dry leaves lay in ankle-deep windrows on the floor, skittering before the wind. A large, empty casement at the end of the corridor behind them was half covered with thick ivy that shook and rustled in the chill night wind blowing down off the slopes of the mountains. Doors had partially rotted away and hung in chunks from their hinges. The rooms beyond those doors were choked with leaves and dust, and the furniture and bedding had long since surrendered every scrap of cloth or padding to thousands of generations of industrious mice in search of nesting materials. Toth carried his unconscious captive into one of those rooms, bound him hand and foot, and then gagged him to muffle any outcry, should he awaken before dawn.
    "That light was at the other end of the house, wasn't it?" Garion asked. "What's at that end?"
    "'Twas the livin' quarters of Torak himself," Feldegast replied, adjusting his little lantern so that it emitted a faint beam of light. "His throne room be there, an' his private chapel. I could even show ye t' his personal bedroom, an' ye could bounce up an' down on his great bed -or what's left of it- just fer fun, if yer of a mind."
    "I think I could live without doing that." Belgarath had been tugging at one earlobe. "Have you been here lately?" he asked the juggler.
    "Perhaps six months ago."
    "Was anybody here?" Ce'Nedra demanded.
    "I'm afraid not, me darlin'. 'Twas as empty as a tomb."
    "That was before Zandramas got here, Ce'Nedra," Polgara reminded her gently.
    "Why do ye ask, Belgarath?" Feldegast said.
    "I haven't been here since just after Vo Mimbre," Belgarath said as they continued down the littered hall. "The house was fairly sound then, but Angaraks aren't really notorious for the permanence of their construction.
    How's the mortar holding out?"
    "'Tis as crumbly as year-old bread."
    Belgarath nodded. "I thought it might be," he said.
    "Now, what we're after here is information, not open warfare