Magician's Gambit

get loose."
    "What happened?" Silk's face was startled.
    "A Grolim broke through," she replied.
    "Did he see us?"
    "For a moment. It doesn't matter. He's dead now."
    "You killed him? How?"
    "He forgot to defend himself. I followed his thought back."
    "He went crazy," Garion said in a choked voice, still filled with the horror of the encounter. "He jumped off something very high. He wanted to jump. It was the only way he could escape from what was happening to him." Garion felt sick.
    "It was awfully noisy, Pol," Belgarath said with a pained expression.
    "You haven't been that clumsy in years."
    "I had this passenger." She gave Garion an icy look.
    "It wasn't my fault," Garion protested. "You were holding on so tight I couldn't break loose. You had us all tied together."
    "You do that sometimes, Pol," Belgarath told her. "The contact gets a little too personal, and you seem to want to take up permanent residence. It has to do with love, I imagine."
    "Do you have any idea what they're talking about?" Barak asked Silk.
    "I wouldn't even want to guess."
    Aunt Pol was looking thoughtfully at Garion. "Perhaps it was my fault," she admitted finally.
    "You're going to have to let go someday, Pol," Belgarath said gravely.
    "Perhaps - but not just yet."
    "You'd better put the screen back up," the old man suggested. "They know we're out here now, and there'll be others looking for us."
    She nodded. "Think about sand again, Garion."
    The ash continued to settle as they rode through the afternoon, obscuring less and less with each passing mile. They were able to make out the shapes of the jumbled piles of rock around them and a few rounded spires of basalt thrusting up out of the sand. As they approached another of the low rock ridges that cut across the wasteland at regular intervals, Garion saw something dark and enormously high looming in the haze ahead.
    "We can hide here until dark," Belgarath said, dismounting behind the ridge.
    "Are we there?" Durnik asked, looking around.
    "That's Rak Cthol." The old man pointed at the ominous shadow. Barak squinted at it.
    "I thought that was just a mountain."
    "It is. Rak Cthol's built on top of it."
    "It's almost like Prolgu then, isn't it?"
    "The locations are similar, but Ctuchik the magician lives here. That makes it quite different from Prolgu."
    "I thought Ctuchik was a sorcerer," Garion said, puzzled. "Why do you keep calling him a magician?"
    "It's a term of contempt," Belgarath replied. "It's considered a deadly insult in our particular society."
    They picketed their horses among some large rocks on the back side of the ridge and climbed the forty or so feet to the top, where they took cover to watch and wait for nightfall.
    As the settling ash thinned even more, the peak began to emerge from the haze. It was not so much a mountain as a rock pinnacle towering up out of the wasteland. Its base, surrounded by a mass of shattered rubble, was fully five miles around, and its sides were sheer and black as night.
    "How high loth it reach?" Mandorallen asked, his voice dropping almost unconsciously into a half whisper.
    "Somewhat more than a mile," Belgarath replied.
    A steep causeway rose sharply from the floor of the wasteland to encircle the upper thousand or so feet of the black tower.
    "I imagine that took a while to build," Barak noted.
    "About a thousand years," Belgarath answered. "While it was under construction, the Murgos bought every slave the Nyissans could put their hands on."
    "A grim business," Mandorallen observed.
    "It's a grim place," Belgarath agreed.
    As the chill breeze blew off the last of the haze, the shape of the city perched atop the crag began to emerge. The walls were as black as the sides of the pinnacle, and black turrets jutted out from them, seemingly at random. Dark spires rose within the walls, stabbing up into the evening sky like spears. There was a foreboding, evil air about the black city of the Grolims. It perched, brooding, atop its peak, looking out over the savage wasteland of sand, rock, and sulfur-reeking bogs that encircled it. The sun, sinking into the banks of cloud and ash along the jagged western rim of the wasteland, bathed the grim fortress above them in a sotty crimson glow. The walls of Rak Cthol seemed to bleed. It was as if all the blood that had been spilled on all the altars of Torak since the worldbegan had been gathered together to stain the dread city above them and that all the oceans of the world would not be enough to