Magician's Gambit

frequently bumped against each other, and Garion could feel the little animal's trembling with every step.
    At the end of the corridor two figures stood, each with his face veiled in a kind of filmy cloth. They were short men, shorter even than Silk, but their shoulders seemed bulky beneath their dark robes. Just beyond them an irregularly shaped chamber opened out, faintly lighted by a dim, reddish glow.
    Belgarath moved toward the two, and they bowed respectfully to him as he approached. He spoke with them briefly, and they bowed again, pointing toward another corridor opening on the far side of the chamber. Garion nervously looked around for the source of the faint red light, but it seemed lost in the strange, pointed rocks hanging from the ceiling.
    "We go this way," Belgarath quietly told them, crossing the chamber toward the corridor the two veiled men had indicated to him.
    "Why are their faces covered?" Durnik whispered.
    "To protect their eyes from the light when they opened the portal."
    "But it was almost dark inside that building up there," Durnik objected.
    "Not to an Ulgo," the old man replied.
    "Don't any of them speak our language?"
    "A few-not very many. They don't have much contact with outsiders. We'd better hurry. The Gorim is waiting for us."
    The corridor they entered ran for a short distance and then opened abruptly into a cavern so vast that Garion could not even see the other side of it in the faint light that seemed to pervade the caves.
    "How extensive are these caverns, Belgarath?" Mandorallen asked, somewhat awed by the immensity of the place.
    "No one knows for sure. The Ulgos have been exploring the caves since they came down here, and they're still finding new ones."
    The passageway they had followed from the portal chamber had emerged high up in the wall of the cavern near the vaulted roof, and a broad ledge sloped downward from the opening, running along the sheer wall. Garion glanced once over the edge. The cavern floor was lost in the gloom far below. He shuddered and stayed close to the wall after that.
    As they descended, they found that the huge cavern was not silent. From what seemed infinitely far away there was the cadenced sound of chanting by a chorus of deep male voices, the words blurred and confused by the echoes reverberating from the stone walls and seeming to die off, endlessly repeated. Then, as the last echoes of the chant faded, the chorus began to sing, their song strangely disharmonic and in a mournful, minor key. In a peculiar fashion, the disharmony of the first phrases echoing back joined the succeeding phrases and merged with them, moving inexorably toward a final harmonic resolution so profound that Garion felt his entire being moved by it. The echoes merged as the chorus ended its song, and the caves of Ulgo sang on alone, repeating that final chord over and over.
    "I've never heard anything like that," Ce'Nedra whispered softly to Aunt Pol.
    "Few people have," Polgara replied, "though the sound lingers in some of these galleries for days."
    "What were they singing?"
    "A hymn to UL. It's repeated every hour, and the echoes keep it alive. These caves have been singing that same hymn for five thousand years now."
    There were other sounds as well, the scrape of metal against metal, snatches of conversation in the guttural language of the Ulgos, and an endless chipping sound, coming, it seemed, from a dozen places.
    "There must be a lot of them down there," Barak observed, peering over the edge.
    "Not necessarily," Belgarath told him. "Sound lingers in these caves, and the echoes keep coming back over and over again."
    "Where does the light come from?" Durnik asked, looking puzzled. "I don't see any torches."
    "The Ulgos grind two different kinds of rock to powder," Belgarath replied. "When you mix them, they give off a glow."
    "It's pretty dim light," Durnik observed, looking down toward the floor of the cavern.
    "Ulgos don't need all that much light."
    It took them almost half an hour to reach the cavern floor. The walls around the bottom were pierced at regular intervals with the openings of corridors and galleries radiating out into the solid rock of the mountain. As they passed, Garion glanced down one of the galleries. It was very long and dimly lighted with openings along its walls and a few Ulgos moving from place to place far down toward the other end.
    In the center of the cavern lay a large, silent lake, and they skirted the edge of it as Belgarath