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chose to accompany me.'
'Most remarkable,' the wolf said to me. 'Are they always so full of
questions?'
'It is the nature of man,' I told her.
'Curious creatures,' she said, shaking her head.
'What a wonder,'Belkira marveled. 'You have learned to converse
with the beasts. Pray, dear brother, instruct me in this art.'
'It is not an art,' I said. 'I took the form of a wolf on my journey.
The speech of the wolf came with the form and remained. It is no
great thing.'
THE RIVAN CODEX
And then we sat, awaiting the decision of our Master and his
brother Gods regarding the wayward Torak. when they came down,
their faces were solemn, and the other Gods departed without
speaking with us.
'There will be war,' our Master told us. 'My brothers have gone to
gather their people. Mara and Issa will come upon Torak from the
south; Nedra and Chaldan shall con-,e upon him from the west; Belar
and I will come upon him from the north. We will lay waste his
people, the Angaraks, until he returns the Orb. It must be so.'
'Then so be it,' I said, speaking for us all.
And so we prepared for war. We were but seven, and feared that
our Master might be held in low regard when our tiny number was
revealed to the hosts of the other Gods, but it was not so. We labored
to create the great engines of war and to cast illusions which
confounded the minds of the Angarak peoples of the traitor, Torak.
And after a few battles did we and the hosts of the other peoples
harry Torak and his people out onto that vast plain beyond Korim,
which is no more.*
*'The high places of Korim, which are no more' are visited at the end of the
Malloreon.
This is misdirection from Belgarath.
And then it was that Torak, knowing that the hosts of his brother
Gods could destroy all of Angarak, raised up the jewel which my
Master had wrought, and with it he let in the sea.
The sound was one such as I had never heard before. The earth
shrieked and groaned as the power of the Orb and the win of Torak
cracked open the fair plain; and, with a roar like ten thousand
thunders, the sea came in to seethe in a broad, foaming band between us
and the Angaraks. How many perished in that sudden drowning no
one will ever know. The cracked land sank beneath our feet, and the
mocking sea pursued us, swallowing the plain and the villages and
the cities which lay upon it. Then it was that the village of my birth
was lost forever, and that fair, sparkling river drowned beneath the
endlessly rolling sea.
A great cry went up from the hosts of the other Gods, for indeed
the lands of most of them were swallowed up by the sea which
Torak had let in.
'How remarkable,' the young wolf at my side observed.
'You say that overmuch,' I told her, somewhat sharply.
'Do you not find it so?'
'I do,' I said, 'but one should not say it so often lest one be thought
simple.'