"Archpriests," Polgara noted coldly. "We're to be escorted with some ceremony, I take it."
The Grolim who had commanded their escort went quickly up the gravel stand toward the waiting group and prostrated himself before them, speaking with a hushed reverence. One of the Archpriests, an aged man with a deeply lined face and sunken eyes, dismounted rather stiffly and came down to where Ce'Nedra and her friends had just stepped from the small boat.
"My Queen," he said to Polgara, bowing respectfully. "I am Urtag, Archpriest of the district of Camat. I am here with my brethren to escort you to the City of Night."
"I'm disappointed not to find Zedar waiting," the sorceress replied coldly. "I trust he's not indisposed."
Urtag gave her a quick look of irritation. "Do not rail against your foreordained fate, Queen of Angarak," he advised her.
"I have two fates awaiting me, Urtag," she said. "Which one I will follow has not yet been decided."
"I do not have any doubts about the matter," he declared.
"That's probably because you've never dared to look at the alternatives," she replied. "Shall we go, Urtag? A windy beach is hardly the place for philosophical discussion."
The Grolim Archpriests had brought horses with them, and the party was soon mounted and riding away from the sea across a line of low, wooded hills in a generally northeasterly direction. The trees bordering the upper edge of the gravel beach had been dark-boughed spruces, but once they topped the first rise they entered a vast forest of white-barked aspens. To Ce'Nedra's eyes, the stark, white trunks looked almost corpselike, and the entire forest had a gloomy, unhealthy quality about it.
"Mistress Pol," Durnik said in a voice that was scarcely more than a whisper, "shouldn't we be working on some kind of plan?"
"For what, Durnik?" she asked him.
"For our escape, of course."
"But we don't want to escape, Durnik."
"We don't?"
"The Grolims are taking us to the place we want to go."
"Why do we want to go to this Cthol Mishrak of theirs?"
"We have something to do there."
"From everything I've heard it's a bad sort of place," he told her. "Are you sure you haven't made some mistake?"
She reached out and laid her hand on his arm. "Dear Durnik," she said, "you'll just have to trust me."
"Of course, Mistress Pol," he replied immediately. "But shouldn't I know what to expect? If I should have to take steps to protect you, I ought to be prepared."
"I'd tell you if I knew, Durnik," she said, "but I don't know what we should expect. All I know is that the four of us are supposed to go to Cthol Mishrak. What's going to happen there needs us in order for it to be complete. Each of us has something to do there."
"Even me?"
"Especially you, Durnik. At first I didn't understand who you really are. That's why I tried to keep you from coming along. But now I do understand. You have to be there because you're going to do the one thing that's going to turn the entire outcome one way or the other."
"What is it?"
"We don't know."
His eyes grew wide. "What if I do it wrong?" he asked in a worried voice.
"I don't think you can," she reassured him. "From everything I understand, what you're going to do will flow very naturally out of who and what you are." She gave him a brief, wry little smile. "You won't be able to do it wrong, Durnik - any more than you'd be able to lie or cheat or steal. It's built into you to do it right, so don't worry about it."
"That's all very well for you to say, Mistress Pol," he replied, "but if you don't mind, I will worry about it just a bit - privately, of course."
She laughed then, a light, fond little laugh. "You dear, dear man," she said impulsively taking his hand. "Whatever would we do without you?"
Durnik blushed and tried to look away, but her glorious eyes held his, and he blushed even more.
After they had passed through the forest of aspen, they entered a strangely desolate landscape. White boulders stuck up out of tangled weeds like tombstones in a long-abandoned graveyard, and dead trees thrust their crooked limbs at the overcast sky like pleading fingers. The horizon ahead was covered with a bank of darker cloud, a cloud so intensely black that it seemed almost purple. Oddly, Ce'Nedra noted, the cloudbank did not seem to be moving at all. There was no sign anywhere of any human habitation, and the route they followed was not even marked by a trail.
"Does no one live there?" the princess asked Polgara.
"Cthol Mishrak is deserted except for a few Grolims," the sorceress replied. "Torak smashed the city and drove its people out the day my father and King Cherek and his sons stole the Orb back from the iron tower."
"When was that?"
"A very long time ago, Ce'Nedra. As nearly as we've been able to determine, it was precisely on the same day that Beldaran and I were born - and the day our mother died. It's a bit hard to say for sure. We were a bit casual about keeping track of time in those days."
"If your mother had died and Belgarath was here, who took care of you?"
"Beldin, of course." Polgara smiled. "He wasn't a very good mother, but he did the best he could until father returned."
"Is that why you're so fond of him?"
"One of the reasons, yes."
The ominous cloudbank still did not move. It stretched across the sky as stationary as a range of mountains; as they rode toward it, it loomed higher and higher.
"That's a very strange cloud," Durnik noted, looking speculatively at the thick curtain of purple ahead. "The storm is coming in behind us, but that cloud doesn't seem to be moving at all."
"It doesn't move, Durnik," Polgara told him. "It never has moved. When the Angaraks built Cthol Mishrak, Torak put that cloud there to hide the city. It's been there ever since."
"How long is that?"
"About five thousand years."
"The sun never shines there?"
"Never."
The Grolim Archpriests had begun to look about with a certain apprehension, and finally Urtag called a halt. "We must make ourselves known," he declared. "We don't want the watchers to mistake us for intruders."
The other Archpriests nodded nervously, and then all removed polished steel masks from beneath their robes and carefully covered their faces with them. Then each of them untied a thick torch from his saddle and ignited it with a brief, mumbled incantation. The torches burned with a peculiarly green-tinged flame and gave off a reeking, sulfurous smoke.