"My Queen?" Olban gaped at her.
"Go!" she commanded. "Take your sword and go. Kill as many Angaraks as you can - for me, Olban. Kill them for me!" And then she could weep.
Olban looked first at the sobbing little princess and then at the milling ranks of the Malloreans, still reeling from the savagery of the Mimbrate assault. His face grew exultant as he drew his sword. "As my Queen commands!" he shouted and ran to his horse.
Even as the decimated front ranks of the Malloreans fled, hurried by the sabre-wielding Algars, greater and greater numbers of their countrymen reached the field, and soon the low hills to the north were covered with them. Their red tunics made it look almost as if the earth itself were bleeding. It was not the Malloreans, however, who mounted the next attack. Instead, thick-bodied Thulls in mud-colored smocks marched reluctantly into position. Directly behind the Thulls, mounted Malloreans urged them on with whips.
"Basic Mallorean strategy," Beldin growled. "'Zakath wants to let the Thulls do most of the dying. He'll try to save his own troops for the campaign against Taur Urgas."
Ce'Nedra raised her tear-streaked face. "What do we do now?" she asked the misshapen sorcerer.
"We kill Thulls," he said bluntly. "A charge or two by the Mimbrates ought to break their spirits. Thulls don't make very good soldiers, and they'll run away as soon as we give them the chance."
Even as the sluggish forces of Mishrak ac Thull flowed like a mudslide downhill toward the solid line of pikemen and legionnaires, the Asturian archers just to the rear of the infantry raised their bows and filled the air with a solid, arching sheet of yard-long arrows. The Thulls quailed as rank after rank melted under the withering storm of arrows. The shouts of the Malloreans at the rear became more desperate, and the crack of their whips filled the air.
And then Mandorallen's horn sounded, the ranks of infantry opened, and the armored knights of Mimbre charged again. The Thulls took one look at the steel-clad men and horses crashing toward them and immediately bolted. The Mallorean whip-men were swarmed under and trampled in the panic-stricken flight of the Thull army.
"So much for the Thulls." Beldin grunted with satisfaction as he watched the rout. He grinned an evil grin. "I imagine that 'Zakath will speak firmly to King Gethell about this."
Mandorallen's knights thundered back to their positions behind the infantry, and the two armies glared at each other across a field littered with Angarak dead.
Ce'Nedra began to shiver as a sudden chill swept the battlefield.
Although the sun had broken through the ragged clouds as the Grolim storm rapidly dispersed, there was no warmth to it. Even though all trace of wind had died, it grew colder. Then from the ground and from the dark surface of the river, tendrils of fog began to rise.
Beldin hissed. "Polgara," he snapped to the grieving sorceress, "I need you."
"Leave me alone, Uncle," she replied in a voice still choked with sorrow.
"You can cry later," he told her harshly. "The Grolims are drawing the heat out of the air. If we don't stir up a wind, the fog's going to get so thick you'll be able to walk on it."
She turned, and her face was very cold. "You don't respect anything, do you?" she said flatly.
"Not much," he admitted, "but that's beside the point. If the Grolims can build up a good fog bank, we'll have the whole stinking Mallorean army on top of us before we can even see them coming. Let's go, Pol. People get killed; it happens. You can get sentimental about it later." He held out his gnarled, lumpy hand to her.
The tendrils of fog had begun to thicken, lying in little pockets now. The littered battlefield in front of the infantry lines seemed to waver, and then disappeared entirely as the fog congealed into a solid wall of white.
"Wind, Pol," Beldin said, taking hold of her hand. "As much wind as you can raise."
The struggle which ensued then was a silent one. Polgara and Beldin, their hands joined together, gathered in their wills and then reached out with them, probing, searching for some weakness in the mass of deadcalm air that imprisoned the thickening fog along the banks of the river. Fitful little gusts of breeze swirled the eddying fog, then died as quickly as they had arisen.
"Harder, Pol," Beldin urged. His ugly face streamed with rivulets of sweat as he struggled with the vast inertness of unmoving air.
"It's not going to work this way, Uncle," she declared, pulling her hand free. Her face showed her own strain. "There's nothing to get hold of. What are the twins doing?"
"The Hierarchs of Rak Cthol are riding with Taur Urgas," the hunchback replied. "The twins have their hands full dealing with them. They won't be able to help."
Polgara straightened then, steeling herself. "We're trying to work too close," she said. "Every time we start a little local breeze, a dozen Grolims jump in and smother it."
"All right," Beldin agreed.
"We'll have to reach out farther," she continued. "Start the air moving somewhere out beyond their range so that by the time it gets here, it has so much momentum that they can't stop it."
Beldin's eyes narrowed. "That's dangerous, Pol," he told her. "Even if we can do it, it's going to exhaust the both of us. If they throw anything else at us, neither of us will have any strength left to fight them."
"It's a gamble, Uncle," she admitted, "but the Grolims are stubborn. They'll try to protect this fog bank even after all chance of maintaining it has gone. They'll get tired, too. Maybe too tired to try anything else."
"I don't like maybes."
"Have you got a better idea?"
"Not right now, no."
"All right, then."
They joined hands again.
It took, it seemed to the princess, an eternity. With her heart in her throat she stared at the two of them as they stood with their hands joined and their eyes closed - reaching out with their minds toward the hot, barren uplands to the west, trying with all their strength to pull that heated air down into the broad valley of the River Mardu. All around her, Ce'Nedra seemed to feel the oppressive chill of Grolim thought lying heavily on the stagnant air, holding it, resisting all effort to dissipate the choking fog.
Polgara was breathing in short gasps, her chest heaving and her face twisted with an inhuman striving. Beldin, his knotted shoulders hunched forward, struggled like a man attempting to lift a mountain.
And then Ce'Nedra caught the faintest scent of dust and dry, sunparched grass. It was only momentary, and she thought at first that she had imagined it. Then it came again, stronger this time, and the fog eddied sluggishly. But once more that faint scent died, and with it the breath of air that had carried it.