Enchanter's End Game

marked.
    Then Belgarath went down into the valley lying just below the cave, seeking something. It did not take his probing mind long to find what he needed. As Garion watched with revulsion, the old man casually violated a grave. He dug up a grinning human skull and carefully tapped the dirt out of it. "I'll need some deer horns," he told Garion. "Not too large and fairly well-matched." He squatted, fierce-looking in his furs and tattoos, and began to scrub at the skull with handfuls of dry sand.
    There were weather-bleached horns lying here and there in the tall grass, since the deer of the region shed their antlers each winter. Garion gathered a dozen or so and returned to the cave to find his grandfather boring a pair of holes in the top of the skull. He critically examined the horns Garion had brought him, selected a pair of them and screwed them down into the holes. The grating sound of horn against bone set Garion's teeth on edge. "What do you think?" Belgarath asked, holding up the horned skull.
    "It's grotesque," Garion shuddered.
    "That was the general idea," the old man replied. He attached the skull firmly to the top of a long staff, decorated it with several feathers and then rose to his feet. "Let's pack up and leave," he said.
    They rode down through the treeless foothills and out into the bending, waist-high grass as the sun swung down toward the southwestern horizon to dip briefly behind the peaks of the range they had just crossed. The smell of the uncured pelts Silk had sewn to their clothing was not very pleasant, and Garion did his best not to look at the hideously altered skull surmounting Belgarath's staff as they rode.
    "We're being watched," Silk mentioned rather casually after an hour or so of riding.
    "I was sure we would be," Belgarath replied. "Just keep going."
    Their first meeting with the Morindim came just as the sun rose. They had paused on the sloping gravel bank of a meandering stream to water their mounts, and a dozen or so fur-clad riders, their dark faces tattooed into devil masks, cantered up to the opposite bank and stopped. They did not speak, but looked hard at the identifying marks Belgarath had so painstakingly contrived. After a brief, whispered consultation, they turned their horses and rode back away from the stream. Several minutes later, one came galloping back, carrying a bundle wrapped in a fox skin. He paused, dropped the bundle on the bank of the stream, and then rode off again without looking back.
    "What was that all about?" Garion asked.
    "The bundle's a gift-of sorts," Belgarath answered. "It's an offering to any devils who might be accompanying us. Go pick it up."
    "What's in it?"
    "A bit of this, a bit of that. I wouldn't open it, if I were you. You're forgetting that you're not supposed to talk."
    "There's nobody around," Garion replied, turning his head this way and that, looking for any sign of their being watched.
    "Don't be too sure of that," the old man replied. "There could be a hundred of them hiding in the grass. Go pick up the gift and we'll move along. They're polite enough, but they'll be a lot happier when we take our devils out of their territory."
    They rode on across the flat, featureless plain with a cloud of flies, drawn by the smell of their untanned fur garments, plaguing them. Their next meeting, several days later, was less congenial. They had moved into a hilly region where huge, rounded, white boulders rose out of the grass and where shaggy-coated wild oxen with great, sweeping horns grazed. A high overcast had moved in, and the gray sky diffused the light, making the brief twilight that marked the passage of one day into the next an only slightly perceptible darkening. They were riding down a gentle slope toward a large lake, which lay like a sheet of lead under the cloudy sky, when there suddenly arose from the tall grass all around them tattooed and fur-clad warriors holding long spears and short bows that appeared to be made of bone.
    Garion reined in sharply and looked at Belgarath for instruction. "Just look straight at them," his grandfather told him quietly, "and remember that you're not permitted to speak."
    "More of them coming," Silk said tersely, jerking his chin toward the crest of a nearby hill where perhaps a dozen Morindim, mounted on paint-decorated ponies, were approaching at a walk.
    "Let me do the talking," Belgarath said.
    "Gladly."
    The man in the lead of the mounted group was burlier than most of his companions,