Guardians of the West

different instructions."
    "You're operating on pure faith, Belgarath," Ce'Nedra accused him.
    "I know," he admitted. "I do that when I don't have anything else to fall back on."
    "What did you find at Mar Terrin?" Polgara asked.
    Belgarath made a vulgar sound. "The monks there may be very good at comforting the spirits of all those slaughtered Marags, but they're very bad at protecting manuscripts. The roof leaks in their library, and the copy of the Mallorean Gospels, naturally, was on a shelf right under the leak. It was so soggy that I could barely get the leaves apart, and the ink had run and smeared all over the pages. It was almost totally illegible. I spoke with the monks at some length about that." He scratched at one bearded cheek. "It looks as if I'm going to have to go a bit further afield to get what we need."
    "You found nothing at all, then?" Beldin asked.
    Belgarath grunted. "There was one passage in the Oracles that said that the Dark God will come again."
    Garion felt a sudden chill grip his stomach. "Torak?" he said. "Is that possible?"
    "I suppose you could take it to mean that, but if that's what it really means, then why would Torak have gone to the trouble of destroying so many of the other passages? If the entire purpose of the Oracles was to predict his own return, I expect that he'd have been overjoyed to keep them intact."
    "You're assuming that old burnt-face was rational," BeIdin growled. "I never noticed that quality in him very often."
    "Oh, no," Belgarath disagreed. "Everything Torak did was perfectly rational -as long as you accepted his basic notion that he was the sole reason for creation. No, I think the passage means something else."
    "Could you read any part of the Mallorean Gospels at father?" Aunt Pol asked him.
    "Just one little fragment. It said something about a choice between the Light and the Dark."
    Beldin snorted. "Now that would be something very unusual," he said. "The Seers at Kell haven't made a descision about anything since the world was made. They've been sitting on the fence for millennia."
    Late the following afternoon, the Sendarian army came into view on the snowy hilltops to the west. Garion felt a peculiar twinge of pride as the solid, steady men he had always thought of as his countrymen marched purposefully through the snow toward the now-doomed city of Rheon.
    "I might have gotten here sooner," General Brendig apologized as he rode up, "but we had to march around that quagmire where the Drasnian pikemen are bogged down."
    "Are they all right?" Queen Porenn asked him quickly.
    "Perfectly, your Majesty," the one-armed man replied. "They just can't go anywhere, that's all."
    "How much rest will your troops need before they'll be ready to join the assault, Brendig?" Belgarath asked him.
    Brendig shrugged. "A day ought to do it, Ancient One."
    "That will give us time enough to make our plans," the old man said. "Let's get your men bivouacked and fed, and then Garion can brief you on the way things stand here."
    In the strategy meeting in the garishly carpeted main tent that evening, they smoothed out the rough edges of their relatively simple plan of attack. Mandorallen's siege engines would continue to pound the city throughout the next day and on into the following night. On the next morning, a feigned assault would be mounted against the south gate to draw as many cultists as possible away from the hastily erected fortification inside the city. Another force would march out of the secure enclave in the north quarter of Rheon to begin the house-by-house occupation of the buildings facing the perimeter. Yet another force, acting on an inspired notion of General Brendig's, would use scaling ladders as bridges to go across the housetops and drop in behind the newly erected walls inside the city.
    "The most important thing is to take Ulfgar alive," Garion cautioned. "We have to get some answers from him. I need to know just what part he played in the abduction of my son and where Geran is, if he knows."
    "And I want to know just how many of the officers in my army he's subverted," Queen Porenn added.
    "It looks as if he's going to be doing a lot of talking," Yarblek said with an evil grin. "In Gar og Nadrak we have a number of very entertaining ways of loosening people's tongues."
    "Pol will handle that," Belgarath told him firmly. "She can get the answers we need without resorting to that sort of thing."
    "Are you getting soft, Belgarath?" Barak asked.
    "Not