Enchanter's End Game

were taking place within Garion's mind. Minute and very subtle adjustments were shifting some of his most deeply ingrained attitudes and perceptions.
    Torak moved, stirring restlessly, as those same two forces met within him.
    Dreadful flashes of the sleeping God's mind assailed Garion, and he saw clearly the terrible subterfuge that lay behind Torak's offer of friendship and love. Had his fear of their duel drawn him into yielding, fully half of creation would have shimmered and vanished. More than that, what Torak had offered was not love but an enslavement so vile that it was beyond imagining.
    But he had not yielded. He had somehow evaded the overwhelming force of Torak's mind and had placed himself utterly in the hands of the Prophecy that had drawn him here. With an absolute denial of self, he had become the instrument of the Prophecy. He was no longer afraid. Sword in hand, the Child of Light awaited the moment when the Prophecy would release him to join in deadly struggle with the Dark God.
    Then, even as Silk desperately tried to arouse either Garion or Polgara to action, the stones of the floor buckled upward, and Belgarath rose from the earth.
    Garion, still abstracted and bemused, saw that all traces of the sometimes foolish old man he had known before were gone. The thieving old storyteller had vanished. Even the irritable old man who had led the quest for the Orb no longer existed. In their place stood the form of Belgarath the sorcerer, the Eternal Man, shimmering in the aura of his full power.

Chapter Twenty-three
    "WHERE IS ZEDAR?" Aunt Pol asked, raising her tearstreaked face from Durnik's lifeless body to stare with a dreadful intensity at her father.
    "I left him down there," Belgarath replied bleakly.
    "Dead?"
    "No."
    "Bring him back."
    "Why?"
    "To face me." Her eyes burned.
    The old man shook his head. "No, Pol," he said to her. "You've never killed anyone. Let's leave it that way."
    She gently lowered Durnik's body to the floor and rose to her feet, her pale face twisted with grief and an awful need. "Then I will go to him," she declared, raising both arms as if to strike at the earth beneath her feet.
    "No," Belgarath told her, extending his own hand, "you will not. "
    They stood facing each other, locked in a dreadful, silent struggle. Aunt Pol's look at first was one of annoyance at her father's interference. She raised one arm again to bring the force of her will crashing down at the earth, but once again Belgarath put forth his hand.
    "Let me go, father."
    "No."
    She redoubled her efforts, twisting as if trying to free herself from his unseen restraint. "Let me go, old man," she cried.
    "No. Don't do this, Pol. I don't want to hurt you."
    She tried again, more desperately this time, but once again Belgarath smothered her will with his. His face hardened, and he set his jaw.
    In a last effort, she flung the whole force of her mind against the barrier he had erected. Like some great rock, however, the old man remained firm. Finally her shoulders slumped, and she turned, knelt beside Durnik's body, and began to weep again.
    "I'm sorry, Pol," he said gently. "I never wanted to have to do that. Are you all right?"
    "How can you ask that?" she demanded brokenly, wringing her hands over Durnik's silent body.
    "That's not what I meant."
    She turned her back on him and buried her face in her hands.
    "I don't think you could have reached him anyway, Pol," the old man told her. "You know as well as I that what one of us does, another cannot undo."
    Silk, his ferretlike face shocked, spoke in a hushed voice. "What did you do to him?"
    "I took him down until we came to solid rock. And then I sealed him up in it."
    "Can't he just come up out of the earth the way you did?"
    "No. That's impossible for him now. Sorcery is thought, and no man can exactly duplicate the thought of another. Zedar's imprisoned inside the rock forever - or until I choose to free him." The old man looked mournfully at Durnik's body. "And I don't think I'll choose to do that."
    "He'll die, won't he?" Silk asked.
    Belgarath shook his head. "No. That was part of what I did to him. He'll lie inside the rock until the end of days."
    "That's monstrous, Belgarath," Silk said in a sick voice.
    "So was that," Belgarath replied grimly, pointing at Durnik.
    Garion could hear what they were saying and could see them all quite clearly, but it seemed somehow that they were actually someplace else. The others in the underground crypt seemed to