Enchanter's End Game

iron tower."
    "When was that?"
    "A very long time ago, Ce'Nedra. As nearly as we've been able to determine, it was precisely on the same day that Beldaran and I were born - and the day our mother died. It's a bit hard to say for sure. We were a bit casual about keeping track of time in those days."
    "If your mother had died and Belgarath was here, who took care of you?"
    "Beldin, of course." Polgara smiled. "He wasn't a very good mother, but he did the best he could until father returned."
    "Is that why you're so fond of him?"
    "One of the reasons, yes."
    The ominous cloudbank still did not move. It stretched across the sky as stationary as a range of mountains; as they rode toward it, it loomed higher and higher.
    "That's a very strange cloud," Durnik noted, looking speculatively at the thick curtain of purple ahead. "The storm is coming in behind us, but that cloud doesn't seem to be moving at all."
    "It doesn't move, Durnik," Polgara told him. "It never has moved. When the Angaraks built Cthol Mishrak, Torak put that cloud there to hide the city. It's been there ever since."
    "How long is that?"
    "About five thousand years."
    "The sun never shines there?"
    "Never."
    The Grolim Archpriests had begun to look about with a certain apprehension, and finally Urtag called a halt. "We must make ourselves known," he declared. "We don't want the watchers to mistake us for intruders."
    The other Archpriests nodded nervously, and then all removed polished steel masks from beneath their robes and carefully covered their faces with them. Then each of them untied a thick torch from his saddle and ignited it with a brief, mumbled incantation. The torches burned with a peculiarly green-tinged flame and gave off a reeking, sulfurous smoke.
    "I wonder what would happen if I were to blow out your torches," Polgara suggested with a hint of a mischievous smile. "I could, you know."
    Urtag gave her a worried look. "This is no time for foolishness, my Lady," he warned her. "The watchers are very savage with intruders. Our lives depend on those torches. Please don't do anything to bring down a disaster on us all."
    She laughed lightly and let it go at that.
    As they rode in beneath the cloud, it grew steadily darker. It was not precisely the clean darkness of night, but was rather a kind of dirty murkiness, a deep shade hovering in the air. They crested a rise and saw before them a cloud-enshrouded basin, and in its center, half obscured by the pervasive gloom, stood the ravaged City of Night. The vegetation around them had shrunk to a few sparse weeds and an unhealthy looking, stunted grass, pale and sick for want of sun. The boulders thrusting up out of the earth were splotched with a sort of leprous lichen that ate into the rock itself, and nodules of a white fungus lumped in grotesque profusion, spreading out across the dank soil as if the ground itself were diseased.
    With a slow, careful pace, their sputtering torches held above their heads, the Grolim Archpriests led the way down into the gloomy basin and across the unwholesome plain toward the shattered walls of Cthol Mishrak.
    As they entered the city, the princess saw furtive hints of movement among the tumbled stones. Shadowy forms scurried from place to place among the ruins, and the sound of their movements was the clicking scrape made by creatures whose feet were clawed. Some of the shapes were upright, others were not. Ce'Nedra grew cold and afraid. The watchers of Cthol Mishrak were neither beast nor human, and they seemed to exude a kind of indiscriminate malice toward all other living things. More than anything, she was afraid that one of them might suddenly turn and confront her with a face that might rip away her sanity by its hideousness.
    As they passed down a broken street, Urtag began to intone an ancient prayer to Torak, his voice hollow and shaking. The dank air grew colder, and the diseaselike lichen ate at the tumbled stones of the ruined houses. Mold seemed to cling to everything, and the pale fungus grew in grotesque lumps in corners and crannies. The smell of decay was everywhere, a damp, rotten stench, and slimy pools of stagnant water lay among the ruins.
    In the center of the city stood the rusted stump of a vast iron tower, the broken-off girders which had supported it thicker than a man's waist. Just to the south of the stump lay a broad, rusted trail of total destruction where the tower had fallen, crushing everything beneath it. Over the eons, the