Enchanter's End Game

The blackness beneath the trees was dotted with the pale, winking glow of fireflies, and crickets chirped interminably. As the first light of morning began to filter through the forest, they reached the edge of another burned-off area, and Belgarath reined in to peer cautiously out at the rank scrub, dotted here and there with charred snags. "We'd better have something to eat," he suggested. "The horses need some rest, and we can catch a bit of sleep before we go on." He looked around in the gradually increasing light. "Let's get away from the road, though." He turned his horse and led them off along the edge of the burn. After several hundred yards, they reached a small clearing that jutted out into the coarse brush. A spring trickled water into a mossy pool at the very edge of the trees, and the grass in the clearing was intensely green. The outer edge of the opening was hemmed in by brambles and a tangle of charred limbs. "This looks like a good place," Belgarath decided.
    "Not really," Silk disagreed. He was staring at a crudely squared-off block of stone standing in the center of the clearing. There were ugly black stains running down the sides of the stone.
    "For our purposes it is," the old man replied. "The altars of Torak are generally avoided, and we don't particularly want company." They dismounted at the edge of the trees, and Belgarath began rummaging through one of the packs for bread and dried meat. Garion was in a curiously abstracted mood. He was tired, and his weariness made him a bit light-headed. Quite deliberately, he walked across the springy turf to the blood-stained altar; he stared at it, his eyes meticulously recording details without considering their implication. The blackened stone sat solidly in the center of the clearing, casting no shadow in the pale dawn light. It was an old altar, and had not been used recently. The stains that had sunk into the pores of the rock were black with age, and the bones littering the ground around it were half sunk in the earth and were covered with a greenish patina of moss. A scurrying spider darted into the vacant eye socket of a mossy skull, seeking refuge in the dark, vaulted emptiness. Many of the bones were broken and showed the marks of the small, sharp teeth of forest scavengers who would feed on anything that was dead. A cheap, tarnished silver brooch lay with its chain tangled about a lumpy vertebra, and not far away a brass buckle, green with verdigris, still clung to a bit of moldering leather.
    "Come away from that thing, Garion," Silk told him with a note of revulsion in his voice.
    "It sort of helps to look at it," Garion replied quite calmly, still staring at the altar and the bones. "It gives me something to think about beside being afraid." He squared his shoulders, and his great sword shifted on his back. "I don't really think the world needs this sort of thing. Maybe it's time somebody did something about it."
    When he turned around, Belgarath was looking at him, his wise old eyes narrowed. "It's a start," the sorcerer observed. "Let's eat and get some sleep."
    They took a quick breakfast, picketed their horses, and rolled themselves in their blankets under some bushes at the edge of the clearing. Not even the presence of the Grolim altar nor the peculiar resolve it had stirred in him was enough to keep Garion from falling asleep immediately.
    It was almost noon when he awoke, pulled from sleep by a faint whispering sound in his mind. He sat up quickly, looking around to find the source of that disturbance, but neither the forest nor the brushchoked burn seemed to hold any threat. Belgarath stood not far away, looking up at the summer sky where a large, blue-banded hawk was circling.
    "What are you doing here?" The old sorcerer did not speak aloud but rather cast the question at the sky with his mind. The hawk spiraled down to the clearing, flared his wings to avoid the altar, and landed on the turf. He looked directly at Belgarath with fierce yellow eyes, then shimmered and seemed to blur. When the shimmering was gone, the misshapen sorcerer Beldin stood in his place. He was still as ragged, dirty, and irritable as he had been the last time Garion had seen him.
    "Is this all the farther you've managed to come?" he demanded harshly of Belgarath. "What have you been doing - stopping at every tavern along the way?"
    "We ran into a small delay," Belgarath replied calmly.
    Beldin grunted with a sour look. "If you keep dawdling along like