Guardians of the West

he could skim rapidly over page after page of mundane material and that his eye would stop automatically at the prophetic passages buried in the midst of ordinary text. He was surprised to find so many of these passages hidden away in the most unlikely places. In most cases it was obvious that the writers had not even been aware of what they had inserted. A sentence would frequently break off, leap into prophecy, and then take up again exactly where it had stopped. Garion was positive that upon rereading the text, the unconscious prophet who had inserted the material would not even see what he had just written.
    The Mrin Codex, however, and to a lesser degree the Darine, remained the core of the whole thing. Passages from other works clarified or expanded, but the two major prophecies put it all down in uncontaminated form. Garion began to cross index as he went along, identifying each new passage with a number and then linking those numbers to the series of letter codes he had assigned to the paragraphs of the Mrin scroll. Each paragraph of the Mrin, he discovered, usually had three or four corroborating or explanatory lines gleaned from other works -all except that crucial blotted passage.
    "And how did the search go today, dear?" Ce'Nedra asked brightly one evening when he returned, grouchy and out of sorts, to the royal apartment. She was nursing Geran at the time, and her face was aglow with tenderness as she held her baby to her breast.
    "I'm just about to give it all up," he declared, flinging himself into a chair. "I think it might be better just to lock up that library and throw away the key."
    She looked at him fondly and smiled. "Now you know that wouldn't do any good, Garion. You know that after a day or so you wouldn't be able to stand it, and no door is so stout that you can't break it down."
    "Maybe I should just burn all those books and scrolls," he said morosely. "I can't concentrate on anything else any more. I know there's something hidden under that blot, but I can't find a single clue anywhere to what it might be."
    "If you burn that library, Belgarath will probably turn you into a radish," she warned with a smile. "He's very fond of books, you know."
    "It might be nice to be a radish for a while," he replied.
    "It's really very simple, Garion," she said with that infuriating placidity. "Since all the copies are blotted, why don't you go look at the original?"
    He stared at her.
    "It has to be somewhere, doesn't it?"
    "Well -I suppose so, yes."
    "Find out where it is, then, and go look -or send for it."
    "I never thought of that."
    "Obviously. It's much more fun to rant and rave and be unpleasant about it."
    "You know, that's really a very good idea, Ce'Nedra."
    "Naturally. You men always want to complicate things so much. Next time you have a problem, dear, just bring it to me. I'll tell you how to solve it."
    He let that pass.
    The first thing the following morning, Garion went down into the city and called on the Rivan Deacon in the Temple of Belar. The Rivan Deacon was a sober-faced, gentle man. Unlike the priests of Belar in the major temples on the continent, who were frequently more involved in politics than in the care of their flocks, the leader of the Rivan Church concerned himself almost exclusively with the well-being -physical as well as spiritual- of the common people. Garion had always rather liked him.
    "I've never actually seen it myself, your Majesty." the Deacon replied in response to Garion's question, "but I've always been told that it's kept in that shrine on the banks of the Mrin River -between the edge of the fens and Boktor."
    "Shrine?"
    "The ancient Drasnians erected it on the site where the Mrin Prophet was kept chained," the Deacon explained. "After the poor man died, King Bull-neck directed that a memorial of some sort be put up there. They built the shrine directly over his grave. The original scroll is kept there in a large crystal case. A group of priests is there to protect it. Most people wouldn't be allowed to touch it; but considering the fact that you're the Rivan King, I'm sure that they'll make an exception."
    "Then it's always been there?"
    "Except during the time of the Angarak invasion during the fourth millennium. It was taken by ship to Val Alorn for safekeeping just before Boktor was burned. Torak wanted to get his hands on it, so it was felt wiser to get it out of the country."
    "That makes sense," Garion said. "Thank you for the information, your