I took a very deep breath, suppressing my urge to scream at him. ‘No, my Lord,’ I said in as mild a tone as I could manage. ‘Actually, I don’t.’

‘If I select one clan-chief over the others, it might be construed as favoritism, don’t you see? They’re simply going to have to settle it for themselves.’

‘The other races are already on the march, my Lord,’ I reminded him as patiently as I could.

‘We’ll be along, Belgarath,’ he assured me, ‘eventually.’

By then I knew Alorns well enough to realize that Belar’s ‘eventually’ would quite probably stretch out for several centuries.

The she-wolf at my side dropped to her haunches with her tongue lolling out. Her laughter didn’t improve my temper very much, I’ll confess.

‘Would you be open to a suggestion, my Lord?’ I asked the Bear-God in a civil tone.

‘Why, certainly, Belgarath,’ he replied. ‘To be honest with you, I’ve been racking my brains searching for a solution to this problem. I’d hate to disappoint my brothers, and I really don’t want to miss the war entirely.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same without you, my Lord,’ I assured him. ‘Now, as for your problem. Why don’t you just call all your clan-chiefs together and have them draw lots to decide which of them will be the leader of the Alorns?’

‘You mean just leave it all in the hands of pure chance?’

‘It is a solution, my Lord, and if you and I both promise not to tamper in any way, your clan-chiefs won’t have any cause for complaint, will they? They’ll all have an equal chance at the position, and if you order them to abide by the way the lot falls, it should put an end to all this …’ I choked back the word ‘foolishness.’

‘My people do like to gamble,’ he conceded. ‘Did you know that we invented dice?’

‘No,’ I said blandly. ‘I didn’t know that.’ To my own certain knowledge, every other race made exactly the same claim. ‘Why don’t we summon your clan-chiefs, my Lord? You can explain the contest - and the rules - to them, and we can get on with it. We certainly wouldn’t want to keep Torak waiting, would we? He’ll miss you terribly if you’re not there when the fighting starts.’

He grinned at me. As I’ve said before, Belar has his faults, but he was a likeable young God. ‘Oh, by the way, my Lord,’ I added, trying to make it sound like an afterthought, ‘if it’s all right with you, I’ll march south with your people.’ Somebody had to keep an eye on the Alorns.

‘Certainly, Belgarath,’ he replied. ‘Glad to have you.’

And so the Alorn clan-chiefs drew lots, and regardless of what Polgara may think, I did not tamper with the outcome. In my view, one clan-chief was almost the same as any other, and I really didn’t care who won - just as long as somebody did. As luck had it, the clan-chief who won was Chaggat, the ultimate great-grandfather of Cherek Bear-shoulders, the greatest king the Alorns have ever had. Isn’t it odd how those things turn out? I’ve since discovered that while I didn’t tamper and neither did Belar, something else did. The talkative friend Garion carries around in his head took a hand in the game. He was the one who selected Cherek’s ancestor to be the first King of the Alorns. But I’m getting ahead of myself - or had you noticed that?

Once the question of leadership had been settled, the Alorns started moving in a surprisingly short period of time - although it’s not all that surprising, if you stop and think about it. The Alorns of that era were semi-nomadic in the first place, so they were always ready to move on - largely, I think, because of their deep-seated aversion to orderliness. Prehistoric Alorns kept messy camps, and they found the idea of moving on to be far more appealing than the prospect of tidying up.

Anyway, we marched south, passing through the now-deserted lands of the Arends and the Tolnedrans. It was about midsummer when we reached the country formerly occupied by the Nyissans. We began to exercise a certain amount of caution at that point. We were getting fairly close to the northern frontier of the Angaraks, and it wasn’t very long before we began to encounter small, roving bands of the Children of Torak.

Alorns have their faults - lots of them - but they are good in a fight. It was there on the Angarak border that I first saw an Alorn berserker. He was a huge fellow with a bright red beard, as I recall. I’ve always meant to find out if he might have been a distant ancestor of Barak, Earl of Trellheim. He looked a lot like Barak, so there probably was some connection. At any rate, he outran his fellows and fell single-handedly on a group of about a dozen Angaraks. I considered the odds against him and started to look around for a suitable grave-site. As it turned out, however, it was the Angaraks who needed burying after he finished with them. Shrieking with maniacal laughter and actually frothing at the mouth, he annihilated the whole group. He even chased down and butchered the two or three who tried to run away. The children of the Bear-God, of course, stood there and cheered.

Alorns!

The frothing at the mouth definitely concerned my companion, though. It took me quite some time to persuade her that the red-bearded berserker wasn’t really rabid. Wolves, quite naturally, try to avoid rabid creatures, and my little friend was right on the verge of washing her paws of the lot of us.

Our encounters with the Children of the Dragon-God grew more frequent as we drew nearer and nearer to the High Places of Korim, which at that time was the center of Angarak power and population. We managed to obliterate a fair number of walled Angarak towns on our way south, and the reports filtering in from our flanks indicated that the other races involved in our assault on Torak’s people were also destroying towns and villages as we converged on Korim.

The engines devised by Belmakor and Beldin worked admirably, and our customary practice when we came on one of those walled towns was to sit back and lob boulders at the walls for a few days while my brothers and I raked the place with tornadoes and filled the streets with illusory monsters. Then, when the walls had been reduced to rubble and the inhabitants to gibbering terror, we’d charge in and kill all the people. I tried my best to convince Chaggat that it was really uncivilized to slaughter all those Angaraks and that he ought to give some consideration to taking prisoners. He gave me that blank, uncomprehending stare that all Alorns seem born with and said, ‘What for? What would I do with them?’

Unfortunately, the barbarians we accompanied took to Belsambar’s notion of burning people alive enthusiastically. In their defense, I’ll admit that they were the ones who actually had to do the fighting, and somebody who’s on fire has trouble concentrating on the business at hand. Quite often Chaggat’s Alorns would batter down a wall and rush into a town where all the inhabitants had already burned to death. That always seemed to disappoint the Alorns.

In his defense, I must say that Torak finally did mount a counter-attack. His Angaraks came swarming out of the Mountains of Korim like a plague, and we met them on all four sides. I don’t like war; I never have. It’s the stupidest way imaginable to resolve problems. In this case, however, we didn’t have much choice.

The outcome was ultimately a foregone conclusion. We outnumbered the Angaraks by about five to one or better, and we annihilated them. Go someplace else to look for the details of that slaughter. I don’t have the stomach to repeat what I saw during those awful two weeks. In the end, we drove them back into the High Places of Korim and began our inexorable advance on Torak’s ultimate stronghold, that city-temple that surmounted the highest peak. Our master frequently exhorted his brother to return the Orb, pointing out to him that his Angaraks verged on extinction, and that without his children, Torak was nothing. The Dragon-God wouldn’t listen, however.

The ruggedness of the terrain on the eastern slopes of the mountains of Korim had forced the Marags and Nyissans to make their approach from the south. Had it not been for that, the disaster which followed would have been far worse.

It was the prospect of losing all of his children that ultimately drove the Dragon-God over the line into madness. Faced with the choice of either surrendering the Orb or losing all of his worshipers, Torak, to put it bluntly, went crazy. The madness of man is bad enough, but the madness of a God? Horrible!

Driven to desperation, my Master’s brother took that ultimate step which only his madness would have suggested to him. He knew what would happen. There is no way that he could not have known. Nonetheless, faced with the extermination of all of Angarak, he raised the Orb. His control of my Master’s Orb was tenuous at best, but he raised it all the same.

And with it, he cracked the world.

The sound was like no sound I’d ever heard before - or have heard since. It was the sound of tearing rock. To this very day I still start up from a sound sleep, sweating and trembling, as the memory of that dreadful sound echoes down to me through five millennia.

The Melcenes, who are quite competent geologists, described what really happened to the world when Torak broke it apart. My own studies confirm their theories. The core of the world is still molten, and that primeval proto-continent, which we all thought so firm, actually floated on that seething underground sea of liquid rock, not unlike a raft.