Enchanter's End Game

left." He settled a pointed felt cap at a jaunty angle. "What do you think?" he asked, striking a pose.
    "Doesn't look at all like a weasel, does he?" Belgarath asked Garion. Silk gave him a disgusted look, but said nothing.
    They went downstairs, led their horses out of the stables attached to the inn, and mounted. Silk's expression remained sour as they rode out of Yar Gurak. When they reached the top of a hill to the north of town, he slid off his horse, picked up a rock, and threw it rather savagely at the buildings clustered below.
    "Make you feel better?" Belgarath asked curiously.
    Silk remounted with a disdainful sniff and led the way down the other side of the hill.

Chapter two
    THEY RODE FOR the next few days through a wilderness of stone and stunted trees. The sun grew warmer each day, and the sky overhead was intensely blue as they pressed deeper and deeper into the snowcapped mountains. There were trails of sorts up here, winding, vagrant tracks meandering between the dazzling white peaks and across the high, pale green meadows where wildflowers nodded in the mountain breeze. The air was spiced with the resinous odor of evergreens, and now and then they saw deer grazing or stopping to watch them with large, startled eyes as they passed.
    Belgarath moved confidently in a generally eastward course and he appeared to be alert and watchful. There were no signs of the half doze in which he customarily rode on more clearly defined roads, and he seemed somehow younger up here in the mountains.
    They encountered other travelers - leather-clad Nadraks for the most part - although they did see a party of Drasnians laboring up a steep slope and, once, a long way off, what appeared to be a Tolnedran. Their exchanges with these others were brief and wary. The mountains of Gar og Nadrak were at best sketchily policed, and it was necessary for every man who entered them to provide for his own security.
    The sole exception to this suspicious taciturnity was a garrulous old gold hunter mounted on a donkey, who appeared out of the blue-tinged shadows under the trees one morning. His tangled hair was white, and his clothing was mismatched, appearing to consist mostly of castoffs he had found beside this trail or that. His tanned, wrinkled face was weathered like a well-cured old hide, and his blue eyes twinkled merrily. He joined them without any greeting or hint of uncertainty as to his welcome and began talking immediately as if taking up a conversation again that had only recently been interrupted.
    There was a sort of comic turn to his voice and manner that Garion found immediately engaging.
    "Must be ten years or more since I've followed this path," he began, jouncing along on his donkey as he fell in beside Garion. "I don't come down into this part of the mountains very much any more. The streambeds down here have all been worked over a hundred times at least. Which way are you bound?"
    "I'm not really sure," Garion replied cautiously. "I've never been up here before, so I'm just following along."
    "You'd find better gravel if you struck out to the north," the man on the donkey advised, "up near Morindland. Of course, you've got to be careful up there, but, like they say, no risk, no profit." He squinted curiously at Garion. "You're not a Nadrak, are you?"
    "Sendar," Garion responded shortly.
    "Never been to Sendaria," the old gold hunter mused. "Never been anyplace really - except up here." He looked around at the whitetopped peaks and deep green forests with a sort of abiding love. "Never really wanted to go anyplace else. I've picked these mountains over from end to end for seventy years now and never made much at it except for the pleasure of being here. Found a river bar one time, though, that had so much red gold in it that it looked like it was bleeding. Winter caught me up there, and I almost froze to death trying to come out."
    "Did you go back the next spring?" Garion couldn't help asking. "Meant to, but I did a lot of drinking that winter - I had gold enough. Anyway, the drink sort of addled my brains. When I set out the following year, I took along a few kegs for company. That's always a mistake. The drink takes you harder when you get up into the mountains, and you don't always pay attention to things the way you should." He leaned back in his donkey saddle, scratching reflectively at his stomach. "I went out onto the plains north of the mountains - up in Morindland. Seems that I thought at the time