I was a bit surprised to find that the twins weren’t around when I got home. They’d left a rather cryptic note for me - something about an urgent summons from Polgara. I tried to reach out to them with my mind, but for some reason I couldn’t get them to answer. I swore a little bit, and then I turned around to go back to Cherek. I was starting to get just a little tired of all this traveling.

It was late in the summer when I reached Val Alorn again, and I went on out to the village where Pol lived with her little family. She wasn’t there, however. The twins were minding things instead. They were just a bit evasive when I asked them where she was. ‘She asked us not to tell you, Belgarath,’ Beltira said with a slightly pained expression.

‘And I’m asking you to ignore her,’ I told him flatly. ‘All right, you two, give. I don’t have time to tear the world apart looking for her. Where’d she go?’

They looked at each other. ‘She’s a long way ahead of him by now,’ Belkira said to his brother. ‘I don’t think he could catch her, so we might as well tell him.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Beltira agreed. ‘She’s gone to Nyissa, Belgarath.’

‘Nyissa? What for?’

‘Pol’s got ways to get information - and instructions. You knew about that, of course, didn’t you?’

I’d known that Pol received her own instructions. It simply never occurred to me that hers might come from a different source than mine. I nodded.

‘Anyway,’ Beltira went on, ‘Pol received a warning that Ctuchik’s been following up on something Zedar did back at the beginning of the fifth millennium. He’s been in contact with the current Salmissra, and he’s just about persuaded her to join with him. Pol was instructed to go to Sthiss Tor to talk her out of it.’

‘Why Pol?’ I asked him. ‘I could have taken care of that.’

‘Pol didn’t go into too much detail,’ Belkira replied. ‘You know how she can be sometimes. Evidently, it’s something that requires a woman’s touch.’

‘We aren’t the only ones who have prophecies, Belgarath,’ Beltira reminded me. ‘The Salmissras have their own ways to see into the future. They’ve all been far more afraid of Polgara than they have been of you. Pol’s going to do something pretty awful to one of the Serpent Queens, I guess, and she’s gone to Sthiss Tor to ask the current Salmissra if she’s volunteering to be the one it happens to. That all by itself should be enough to persuade Salmissra to break off her contacts with Ctuchik.’

‘All right, but why all this subterfuge? Why didn’t she just tell me about it? Why did she sneak around behind my back?’

Belkira smiled. ‘She explained it to us,’ he said. ‘You don’t really want us to repeat what she said, do you?’

‘I think I can probably live with it. Go ahead and tell me.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. She said that you’re tiresomely overprotective, and that every time she sets out to do something, you argue with her about it for weeks on end. Then she said that she was going to do this whether you liked it or not, and that things would go more smoothly if you kept your nose out of it.’ He grinned at me.

‘I don’t think that’s particularly funny, Belkira.’

‘It was when she said it. I’ve glossed over some of the words she used. Pol’s got quite a vocabulary, hasn’t she?’

I gave him a long, steady look. ‘Why don’t we just drop it?’ I suggested.

‘Anything you say, brother.’

‘The next time she talks with you, ask her to stop by the Vale on her way home. Tell her that I’m looking forward to a little chat.’

Then I turned around and went on back to the Vale.

About a month later, Pol obediently came to my tower. I’d calmed down by then, so I didn’t berate her - at least not too much.

‘You seem to be taking this very well, old man,’ she noted.

‘There’s not much point in screaming about something after it’s over. Exactly what was Ctuchik up to?’

‘The usual,’ she replied. ‘He’s trying to subvert enough people in the west to help him when the time comes. The Murgos have re-opened the South Caravan Route, and they’re flooding into the west again. I think we’d all better start concentrating on the Mrin Codex. Ctuchik seems to believe that things are coming to a head. He’s doing everything he can to drive the western kingdoms apart. He definitely doesn’t want us to be unified next time the way we were at Vo Mimbre. Angarak alliances are tenuous at best, and it seems that Ctuchik wants to sow dissension in the west to off-set that.’

‘You’re getting very good at this, Pol.’

‘I’ve had a good teacher.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and for a minute there, I felt unaccountably grateful to that unpredictable daughter of mine.

‘Don’t mention it.’ She grinned at me.

‘Why don’t you go on back to Cherek and send the twins home? If anybody’s going to get anything definite out of the Mrin, they’ll be the ones who’ll do it.’

‘Whatever you say, father.’

It took the twins until the turn of the century to start getting what we needed out of the Mrin Codex. In the spring of the year 5300 they came to my tower bubbling over with excitement. ‘It’s just about to happen, Belgarath!’ Beltira exclaimed. ‘The Godslayer will arrive during this century!’

‘It’s about time,’ I said. ‘What took you two so long to dig it out?’

‘We weren’t supposed to find it until now,’ Belkira replied.

‘Would you like to clarify that?’

‘The Necessity’s got a much tighter control than we’ve ever realized,’ he said. ‘The passage that told us that this is the century when it’s all going to happen is right out there in plain sight. We’ve all read it dozens of times, but it didn’t make any sense until now. Last night, though, the meaning of it just fell into place in our minds. We’ve talked it over, and we’re both sure that no matter how much we struggle with the Mrin, we’re not going to understand what any given passage means until the Necessity’s ready for us to understand it. In a peculiar sort of way, the understanding itself is a part of the EVENT.’

‘That’s a mighty cumbersome way to do business,’ I objected. ‘Why would the Necessity play those kind of games with all of us?’

‘We talked about that too, Belgarath,’ Beltira told me. ‘It almost seems designed to keep you from tampering. We think that the Necessity’s rather fond of you, but it knows you too well to give you enough time to step in and try to change things.’

‘You do try to do that a lot, you know,’ Belkira said, grinning at me.

Chapter 47

I suppose I should have been offended by the twins’ insulting line of speculation, but I guess I really wasn’t. I’d known Garion’s friend for long enough now to have a pretty clear idea of his opinion of me, and I have tried to tamper with things on occasion. I guess it goes back to something I’ve said before; I’m not temperamentally equipped to just sit back and let destiny take its course. No matter how clever I think I am, though, Garion’s friend is always about two jumps ahead of me. I should be used to that by now, I guess, but I’m not.

A part of the reason that I didn’t get too excited about those unflattering observations was the fact that I was much more excited by the information that we’d finally reached the century during which the Godslayer would be born. I pestered poor Polgara unmercifully during the first three decades of the fifty-fourth century. I’d stop by every two or three months to find out if the heir’s wife was pregnant, and I insisted on being present at every birth in that little family.

Pol was living in Medalia in central Sendaria at the time, and the current heir’s name was Darral. I was very disappointed when, in 5329, Darral’s wife, Alara, gave birth to a baby boy and the infant’s birth wasn’t accompanied by any of the necessary signs and portents. He wasn’t the Godslayer. Pol named him Geran, and it somehow seemed very right.

Maybe it was the fact that Darral was a stone-cutter that moved my daughter to relocate the family to the mountain village of Annath, just on the Sendarian side of the Algarian border, in 5834. There were extensive stone-quarries in the area, so Darral could find steady work.

I had a few qualms about that. The name Annath seemed to send a chill through me for some reason. It wasn’t that Annath was such a bad little town. It was much like every mountain village in the world. It had one street, which is normal for a town built at the bottom of a steep valley, and as it had grown, the houses of the new arrivals were simply added on to each end of that street. It made the town a little strung out, but that didn’t bother anybody. People who live in the mountains are used to walking. The sides of the valley were covered with aspens, and that gave Annath a light and airy atmosphere. Some mountain towns are up to their ears in fir and spruce, and they’re perpetually gloomy as a result. Annath wasn’t like that, but it chilled me all the same.