Part of his mind seemed half asleep, but that secret, inner part was wide awake. The dry voice observed that something significant had just happened. The powerful compulsion not to speak about Asharak was obviously gone. Aunt Pol had somehow pulled it out of his mind entirely. His feeling about that was oddly ambiguous. That strange relationship between himself and dark-robed, silent Asharak had always been intensely private, and now it was gone. He felt vaguely empty and somehow violated. He sighed and went up the broad stairway toward his room.
There were a half dozen warriors in the hallway outside his room, probably part of Barak’s search for the man in the green cloak. Garion stopped. Something was wrong, and he shook off his half daze. This pan of the palace was much too populated to make it very likely that the spy would be hiding here. His heart began racing, and step by step he began to back away toward the top of the stairs he had just climbed. The warriors looked like any other Chereks in the palace-bearded, dressed in helmets, mail shirts, and furs, but something didn’t seem exactly right.
A bulky man in a dark, hooded cloak stepped through the doorway of Garion’s room into the corridor. It was Asharak. The Murgo was about to say something, but then his eyes fell on Garion. "Ah," he said softly. His dark eyes gleamed in his scarred face. "I’ve been looking for you, Garion," he said in that same soft voice. "Come here, boy."
Garion felt a tentative tug at his mind that seemed to slip away as if it somehow could not get a sure grip. He shook his head mutely and continued to back away.
"Come along now," Asharak said. "We’ve known each other far too long for this. Do as I say. You know that you must."
The tug became a powerful grasp that again slipped away. "Come here, Garion!" Asharak commanded harshly. Garion kept backing away, step by step.
"No," he said. Asharak’s eyes blazed, and he drew himself up angrily.
This time it was not a tug or a grasp, but a blow. Garion could feel the force of it even as it seemed somehow to miss or be deflected. Asharak’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed. "Who did this?" he demanded. "Polgara? Belgarath? It won’t do any good, Garion. I had you once, and I can take you again any time I want to. You’re not strong enough to refuse me."
Garion looked at his enemy and answered out of some need for defiance. "Maybe I’m not," he said, "but I think you’ll have to catch me first."
Asharak turned quickly to his warriors. "That’s the boy I want," he barked sharply. "Take him!"
Smoothly, almost as if it were done without thought, one of the warriors raised his bow and leveled an arrow directly at Garion. Asharak swung his arm quickly and knocked the bow aside just as the steel-pointed shaft was loosed. The arrow sang in the air and clattered against the stones of the wall a few feet to Garion’s left.
"Alive, idiot," Asharak snarled and struck the bowman a crushing blow to the side of the head. The bowman fell twitching to the stone floor.
Garion spun, dashed back to the stairs and plunged down three steps at a time. He didn’t bother to look back. The sound of heavy feet told him that Asharak and his men were after him. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned sharply to the left and fled down a long, dark passageway that led back into the maze of Anheg’s palace.
18
There were warriors everywhere, and the sounds of fighting. In the first instant of his flight, Garion’s plan had been simple. All he had to do was to find some of Barak’s warriors, and he would be safe. But there were other warriors in the palace as well. The Earl of Jarvik had led a small army into the palace by way of the ruined wings to the south, and fighting raged in the corridors.
Garion quickly realized that there was no way he could distinguish friend from enemy. To him, one Cherek warrior looked the same as another. Unless he could find Barak or someone else he recognized, he did not dare reveal himself to any of them. The frustrating knowledge that he was running from friends as well as enemies added to his fright. It was altogether possible—even quite likely—that he would run from Barak’s men directly into the arms of Jarvik’s.
The most logical thing to do would be to go directly back to the council hall, but in his haste to escape from Asharak, he had run down so many dim passageways and turned so many corners that he had no idea where he was or how to get back to the familiar parts of the palace. His headlong flight was dangerous. Asharak or his men could wait around any corner to seize him, and he knew that the Murgo could quickly re-establish that strange bond between them that Aunt Pol had shattered with her touch. It was that which had to be avoided at any cost. Once Asharak had him again, he would never let go. The only alternative to him was to find some place to hide.
He dodged into another narrow passageway and stopped, panting and with his back pressed tightly against the stones of the wall. Dimly, at the far end of this hallway, he could see a narrow flight of worn stone steps twisting upward in the flickering light of a single torch. He quickly reasoned that the higher he went, the less likely he would be to encounter anyone. The fighting would most likely be concentrated on the lower floors. He took a deep breath and went swiftly to the foot of the stairs.
Halfway up he saw the flaw in his plan. There were no side passages on the stairs, no way to escape and no place to hide. He had to get to the top quickly or chance discovery and capture, or even worse.
"Boy!" a shout came from below.
Garion looked quickly over his shoulder. A grim-faced Cherek in mail and helmet was coming up the stairs behind him, his sword drawn. Garion started to run, stumbling up the stairs.
There was another shout from above, and Garion froze. The warrior at the top was as grim as the one below and wielded a cruel-looking axe. He was trapped between them. Garion shrank back against the stones, fumbling for his dagger, though he knew it would be of little use. Then the two warriors saw each other. With ringing shouts they both charged. The one with the sword rushed up past Garion while the one with the axe lunged down.
The axe swung wide, missed and clashed a shower of sparks from the stones of the wall. The sword was more true. With his hair standing on end in horror, Garion saw it slide through the downward-plunging body of the axeman. The axe fell clattering down the stairs, and the axeman, still falling on top of his opponent, pulled a broad dagger from its sheath at his hip and drove it into the chest of his enemy. The impact as the two men came together tore them from their feet, and they tumbled, still grappled together down the stairs, their daggers flashing as each man struck again and again.
In helpless horror Garion watched as they rolled and crashed past him, their daggers sinking into each other with sickening sounds and blood spurting from their wounds like red fountains.
Garion retched once, clenched his teeth tightly, and ran up the stairs, trying to close his ears to the awful sounds coming from below as the two dying men continued their horrid work on each other.
He no longer even considered stealth; he simply ran-fleeing more from that hideous encounter on the stairs than from Asharak or the Earl of Jarvik. At last, after how long he could not have said, gasping and winded, he plunged through the partially open door of a dusty, unused chamber. He pushed the door shut and stood trembling with his back against it.
There was a broad, sagging bed against one wall of the room and a small window set high in the same wall. Two broken chairs leaned wearily in corners and an empty chest, its lid open, in a third, and that was all. The chamber was at least a place out of the corridors where savage men were killing each other, but Garion quickly realized that the seeming safety here was an illusion. If anyone opened this door, he would be trapped. Desperately he began to look around the dusty room.