Guardians of the West

time rowing against the sluggish current of the Mrin River as it meandered its slow way through the fens.
    By nightfall they were ten leagues upriver from Kotu, and the captain prudently moored his ship to a dead snag with one of the tar-smeared hawsers. "It's not a good idea to try to find the channel in the dark," he told Garion. "One wrong turn and we could spend the next month wandering around in the fens."
    "You know what you're doing, Captain," Garion told him. "I'm not going to interfere."
    "Would you like a tankard of ale, your Majesty?" the captain offered.
    "That might not be a bad idea," Garion agreed.
    Later, he leaned against the railing with his tankard in hand, watching the darting lights of the fireflies and listening to the endless chorus of the frogs. It was a warm spring night, and the damp, rich odor of the fens filled his nostrils.
    He heard a faint splash, a fish maybe, or perhaps a diving otter.
    "Belgarion?" It was a strange, piping kind of voice, but it was quite distinct. It was also coming from the other side of the railing.
    Garion peered out into the velvet darkness.
    "Belgarion?" The voice came again. It was somewhere below him.
    "Yes?" Garion answered cautiously.
    "I need to tell you something." There was another small splash, and the ship rocked slightly. The hawser that moored her to the snag dipped, and a scampering shadow ran quickly up it and slid over the railing in a curiously fluid way. The shadow stood up, and Garion could clearly hear the water dripping from it. The figure was short, scarcely more than four feet tall, and it moved toward Garion with a peculiarly shuffling gait.
    "You are older," it said.
    "That happens," Garion replied, peering at the form as he tried to make out its face. Then the moon slid out from behind a cloud, and Garion found himself staring directly into the furry, wide-eyed face of a fenling. "Tupik?" he asked incredulously. "Is that you?"
    "You remember." The small, furry creature seemed pleased.
    "Of course I remember."
    The ship rocked again, and another furry shadow ran up the hawser. Tupik turned with irritation. "Poppi!" he chittered angrily. "Go home!"
    "No," she answered quite calmly.
    "You must do as I say!" he told her, stamping his feet on the deck.
    "Why?"
    Tupik stared at her in obvious frustration. " Are they all like that?" he demanded of Garion.
    "All what?"
    "Females." Tupik said the word with a certain disgust.
    "Most of them, yes."
    Tupik sighed.
    "How is Vordai?" Garion asked them.
    Poppi made a peculiarly disconsolate whimpering sound. "Our mother is gone," she said sadly.
    "I'm sorry."
    "She was very tired," Tupik said.
    "We covered her with flowers," Poppi said. "And then we closed up her house."
    "She would have liked that."
    "She said that one day you would come back," Tupik told him. "She was very wise."
    "Yes."
    "She said that we should wait until you came and then we were to give you a message."
    "Oh?"
    "There is an evil that moves against you."
    "I was beginning to suspect that."
    "Mother said to tell you that the evil has many faces and that the faces do not always agree, but that which is behind it all has no face and that it comes from much farther than you think."
    "I don't quite follow."
    "It is from beyond the stars."
    Garion stared at him.
    "That is what we were told to say," Poppi assured him.
    "Tupik said it exactly as mother told it to him."
    "Tell Belgarath about mother." Tupik said then. "And tell him that she sent him her thanks."
    "I will."
    "Good-bye, Belgarion," the fenling said. Poppi made a small, affectionate sound in her throat, pattered over, and nuzzled briefly at Garion's hand.
    And then the two of them slipped over the side and vanished in the dark waters of the fens.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    It was a dreary-looking place. The village huddled on the riverbank at the edge of a flat, featureless plain covered with coarse, dark-green grass. The underlying soil was alluvial clay, slick, gray, and unwholesome looking, and just beyond the wide bend in the Mrin River lay the endless green and brown expanse of the fens. The village itself consisted of perhaps two dozen dun-colored houses, huddled all together about the square stone structure of the shrine. Rickety docks, constructed of bone-white driftwood, stuck out into the river like skeletal fingers, and fishing nets hung on poles, drying and smelling in the humid, mosquito-infested air.
    Garion's ship arrived about noon, and he went immediately up from the