The Seeress of Kell

deftly looped it about the neck of a Grolim in the act of scrambling up onto the steps. She stepped under his flailing arms, turned until they were back to back, and leaned forward. The helpless Grolim's feet came up off the step, and he clutched at the cord about his neck with both hands. His feet kicked futilely at the air for a few moments, his face turning black, and then he went limp. Velvet turned back, unlooped her cord, and coolly kicked the inert body off the edge.
    Durnik and Toth had moved up to take positions beside Garion and Zakath, and the four of them moved implacably down the stairs, step by step, chopping and smashing at the black-robed figures rushing up to meet them. Durnik's hammer seemed only slightly less dreadful than the sword of the Rivan King. The Grolims fell before them as they moved inexorably down the stairs. Toth was chopping methodically with Durnik's axe, his face as expressionless as that of a man felling a tree. Zakath was a fencer, and he feinted and parried with his massive, though nearly weightless, sword. His thrusts were quick and usually lethal. The steps below the dreadful quartet were soon littered with twisted bodies and were running with rivulets of blood.
    “Watch your footing,” Durnik warned as he crushed another Grolim's skull. "The steps are getting slippery."
    Garion swept off another Grolim head. It bounced like a child's ball down the steps even as the body toppled off the side of the stairway. Garion risked a quick look back over his shoulder. Belgarath and Beldin had joined Velvet to help the girl repel the black-robed men scrambling up the sides of the steps. Beldin seemed to take vicious delight in driving his hook-pointed knife into Grolim eyes, then, with a sharp twist and a jerk he would pull out sizable gobs of brains. Belgarath, his thumbs tucked into his rope belt, waited calmly. When a Grolim's head appeared above the edge of the stair, the old man would draw back his foot and kick the priest of Torak full in the face. Since it was a thirty-foot drop from the stairs to the stones of the amphitheater, few of the Grolims he kicked off the side of the stairs tried the climb a second time.
    When they reached the foot of the stairs, scarcely any of Zandramas' Grolims survived. With his usual prudence, Sadi darted around first one side of the stairway and then the other, coolly sinking his poisoned dagger into the bodies of those Grolims who had fallen to the amphitheater floor, the inert dead as well as the groaning injured.
    Zandramas seemed somewhat taken aback by the sheer violence of her foes' descent. She held her ground nonetheless, drawing herself up in scornful defiance. Standing behind her, his mouth agape with terror, stood a man in a cheap crown and somewhat shopworn regal robes. His features bore a faint resemblance to those of Zakath, so Garion assumed that he was the Archduke Otrath. And then at last, Garion beheld his own young son. He had avoided looking at the boy during the bloody descent, since he had been unsure of what his own reaction might have been at a time when his concentration was vital. As Beldin had said, Geran was no longer a baby. His blond curls gave his face a softness, but there was no softness in his eyes as he met his father's gaze. Geran was quite obviously consumed with hatred for the woman who firmly held his arm in her grasp.
    Gravely, Garion raised his sword to his visor in salute, and, just as gravely, Geran lifted his free hand in response.
    Then the Rivan King began an implacable advance, pausing only long enough to kick an unattached Grolim head out of his way. The uncertainty he had felt back in Dal Perivor had vanished now. Zandramas stood no more than a few yards away, and the fact that she was a woman no longer mattered. He raised his flaming sword and continued his advance.
    The flickering shadow along the periphery of his vision grew darker, and he hesitated as his sense of dread increased. Try though he might, he could not stifle it. He faltered.
    The shadow, vague at first, began to coalesce into a hideous face that towered behind the black-robed sorceress. The eyes were soullessly blank, and the mouth gaped open in an expression of unspeakable loss as if the owner of the face had been plunged into a horror beyond imagining from a place of light and glory. That loss, however, bespoke no compassion or gentleness, but rather expressed the implacable need of the hideous being to find others to share its