Enchanter's End Game

to enslave him. As soon as Garion gets his stomach under control again, we can go on. We won't be bothered any more."
    Garion stumbled to his feet, weakly wiping his mouth. "Are you all right?" Belgarath asked him.
    "Not really," Garion replied, "but there's nothing left to come up."
    "Get a drink of water and try riot to think about it."
    "Will you have to do that any more?" Silk asked, his eyes a bit wild.
    "No." Belgarath pointed. There were several riders along the crest of a hill perhaps a mile away. "The other Morindim in the area watched the whole thing. The word will spread, and nobody will come anywhere near us now. Let's mount up and get going. It's still a long way to the coast."
    In bits and pieces, as they rode for the next several days, Garion picked up as much information as he really wanted about the dreadful contest he had witnessed.
    "It's the shape that's the key to the whole thing," Belgarath concluded. "What the Morindim call Devil-Spirits don't look that much different from humans. You form an illusion drawn out of your imagination and force the spirit into it. As long as you can keep it locked up in that illusion, it has to do what you tell it to. If the illusion falters for any reason, the spirit breaks free and resumes its real form. After that, you have no control over it whatsoever. I have a certain advantage in these matters. Changing back and forth from a man to a wolf has sharpened my imagination a bit."
    "Why did Beldin say you were a bad magician then?" Silk asked curiously.
    "Beldin's a purist," the old man shrugged. "He feels that it's necessary to get everything into the shape - down to the last scale and toenail. It isn't, really, but he feels that way about it."
    "Do you suppose we could talk about something else?" Garion asked.
    They reached the coastline a day or so later. The sky had remained overcast, and the Sea of the East lay sullen and rolling under dirty gray clouds. The beach along which they rode was a broad shingle of black, round stones littered with chunks of white, bleached driftwood. Waves rolled foaming up the beach, only to slither back with an endless, mournful sigh. Sea birds hung in the stiff breeze, screaming.
    "Which way?" Silk asked.
    Belgarath looked around. "North," he replied.
    "How far?"
    "I'm not positive. It's been a long time, and I can't be sure exactly where we are."
    "You're not the best guide in the world, old friend," Silk complained.
    "You can't have everything."
    They reached the land bridge two days later, and Garion stared at it in dismay. It was not at all what he had expected, but consisted of a series of round, wave-eroded white boulders sticking up out of the dark water and running in an irregular line off toward a dark smudge on the horizon. The wind was blowing out of the north, carrying with it a bitter chill and the smell of polar ice. Patches of white froth stretched from boulder to boulder as the swells ripped themselves to tatters on submerged reefs.
    "How are we supposed to cross that?" Silk objected.
    "We wait until low tide," Belgarath explained. "The reefs are mostly out of the water then."
    "Mostly?"
    "We might have to wade a bit from time to time. Let's strip these furs off our clothes before we start. It will give us something to do while we're waiting for the tide to turn, and they're starting to get a bit fragrant."
    They took shelter behind a pile of driftwood far up on the beach and removed the stiff, smelly furs from their clothing. Then they dug food out of their packs and ate. Garion noted that the stain that had darkened the skin on his hands had begun to wear thin and that the tattoodrawings on the faces of his companions had grown noticeably fainter.
    It grew darker, and the period of twilight that separated one day from the next seemed longer than it had no more than a week ago.
    "Summer's nearly over up here," Belgarath noted, looking out at the boulders gradually emerging from the receding water in the murky twilight.
    "How much longer before low tide?" Silk asked.
    "Another hour or so."
    They waited. The wind pushed at the pile of driftwood erratically and brushed the tall grass along the upper edge of the beach, bending and tossing it.
    Finally Belgarath stood up. "Let's go," he said shortly. "We'll lead the horses. The reefs are slippery, so be careful how you set your feet down."
    The passage along the reef between the first steppingstones was not all that bad, but once they moved farther out, the wind