Guardians of the West

bit his lip.
    "Answer me!"
    "He sent a messenger," the man replied sullenly.
    A sudden thought occurred to Garion. "Was this Ulfgar of yours behind the attempt to kill my wife?" he demanded.
    "Wife!" The cultist sneered. "No Alorn takes a Tolnedran mongrel to wife. You -Iron-grip's heir- should know that better than any man. Naturally we tried to kill the Tolnedran wench. It was the only way to rid Aloria of the infection you brought here."
    "You're starting to irritate me, friend," Garion said bleakly. "Don't do that."
    "Let's get back to this messenger," Belgarath said. "You say that the baby is where we can't reach him, but you're still here, aren't you? Could it just possibly be that it was the messenger who was the actual abductor and that you and your friends are merely underlings?"
    The cultist's eyes grew wild, and he looked this way and that like a trapped animal. His limbs began to tremble violently .
    "I think we're approaching a question that you don't want to answer, friend," Belgarath suggested.
    It came almost like a blow. There was a wrenching kind of feeling to it, almost as if someone were reaching inside a skull to twist and crush the brain within. The captive shrieked, gave Belgarath one wild look, then spun, took three quick steps, and hurled himself off the edge of the cliff behind him.
    "Question me now!" he shrieked as he plummeted down into the twilight that was rising out of the dark, angry waters surging about the rocks at the foot of the cliff. Then, even as he fell, Garion heard peal upon peal of insane laughter fading horribly as the fanatic dropped away from them.
    Aunt Pol started quickly toward the edge, but Belgarath reached out and took her arm. "Let him go, Pol," he said.
    "It wouldn't be a kindness to save him now. Someone put something in his mind that crushed out his sanity as soon as he was asked that certain question."
    "Who could possibly do that?" she asked.
    "I don't know, but I'm certainly going to find out."
    The shrieking laughter, still fading, continued to echo up to where they stood. And then it ended abruptly far below.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
    A sudden summer storm had come howling in off the Great Western Sea two days after the fight on the cliffs and it raked the island with shrieking winds and sheets of rain that rattled against the windows of the council chamber high in the south tower. The bone-thin Javelin, who had arrived with the others aboard the Seabird that morning, slouched in his chair, looking out at the raging storm and thoughtfully tapping his fingers together. "Where did the trail finally lead?" he asked.
    "Right down to the water's edge in a secluded cove," Garion replied.
    "Then I think we'll have to assume that this abductor made a clean escape with the prince. The timing might have been a little tight, but the men aboard the ships that were patrolling the coast would have been concentrating on the shore line, and a ship that had gotten well out to sea before they arrived could have escaped their notice."
    Barak was piling an armload of logs in the cavernous fireplace. "Why were those others left behind, then?" he asked. "That doesn't make any sense at all."
    "We're talking about Bear-cultists, Barak," Silk told him. "They're not supposed to make sense."
    "There's a certain logic to it, though," the Earl of Seline pointed out. "If what the cultist said before he died is true, this Ulfgar has declared war on Belgarion. Isn't it entirely possible that those men were left behind specifically to waylay him? One way or another, he was certain to follow that trail."
    "There's still something that doesn't quite ring true." Javelin frowned. "Let me think about it for a bit."
    "We can sort out their motives later," Garion said. "The important thing right now is to find out where they've taken my son."
    "Rheon, most likely," Anheg said. "We've destroyed Jarviksholm. Rheon's the only strong point they've got left."
    "That's not entirely certain, Anheg," Queen Porenn disagreed. "This scheme to abduct Prince Geran was obviously planned quite some time ago, and you destroyed Jarviksholm only last week. It's unlikely that the abductors even knew about it. I don't think we can rule out the possibility that the prince was taken to Cherek."
    Anheg rose and began pacing up and down, a dark scowl on his face. "She's got a point," he admitted finally. "These child stealers were Chereks, after all. It's quite possible that they tried to take him to Jarviksholm, but when