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Chapter 3

In time, others came to us, some seemingly by accident, as I had come, and some by intent, seeking out my Master that they might learn from him. Such a one was Zedar.

I came upon him near our tower one golden day in autumn after I’d served my Master for five hundred years or so. This stranger had built a rude altar and was burning the carcass of a goat on it. That got us off on the wrong foot right at the outset. Even the wolves knew enough not to kill things in the Vale. The greasy smoke from his offering was fouling the air, and he was prostrated before his altar, chanting some outlandish prayer.

‘What are you doing?’ I demanded – quite abruptly, I’ll admit, since his noise and the stink of his sacrifice distracted my mind from a problem I’d been considering for the past half-century.

‘Oh, puissant and all-knowing God,’ he said, groveling in the dirt, ‘I have come a thousand leagues to behold thy glory and to worship thee.’

‘Puissant? Quit trying to show off your education, man. Now get up and stop this caterwauling. I’m no more a God than you are.’

‘Art thou not the great God Aldur?’

‘I’m his disciple, Belgarath. What is all this nonsense?’ I pointed at his altar and his smoking goat.

‘It is to please the God,’ he replied, rising and dusting off his clothes. I couldn’t be sure, but he looked rather like a Tolnedran – or possibly an Arend. In either case, his babble about a thousand leagues was clearly a self-serving exaggeration. He gave me a servile, fawning sort of look. ‘Tell me truly,’ he pleaded, ‘dost thou think he will find this poor offering of mine acceptable?’

I laughed. ‘I can’t think of a single thing you could have done that would offend him more.’

The stranger looked stricken. He turned quickly and reached out as if he were going to grab up the animal with his bare hands to hide it.

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ I snapped. ‘You’ll burn yourself!’

‘It must be hidden,’ he said desperately. ‘I would rather die than offend mighty Aldur.’

‘Just get out of the way,’ I told him.

‘What?’

‘Stand clear,’ I said, irritably waving him off, ‘unless you want to take a trip with your goat.’ Then I looked at his grotesque little altar, willed it to a spot five miles distant, and translocated it with a single word, leaving only a few tatters of confused smoke hanging in the air.

He collapsed on his face again.

‘You’re going to wear out your clothes if you keep doing that,’ I told him, ‘and my Master won’t find it very amusing.’

‘I pray thee, mighty disciple of most high Aldur,’ he said, rising and dusting himself off again, ‘instruct me so that I offend not the God.’ He must have been an Arend. No Tolnedran could possibly mangle the language the way he did.

‘Be truthful,’ I told him, ‘and don’t try to impress him with false show and flowery speech. Believe me, friend, he can see right straight into your heart, so there’s no way you can deceive him. I’m not sure which God you worshiped before, but Aldur’s like no other God in the whole world.’ What an asinine thing that was to say. No two Gods are ever the same.

‘And how may I become his disciple, as thou art?’

‘First you become his pupil,’ I replied, ‘and that’s not easy.’

‘What must I do to become his pupil?’

‘You must become his servant.’ I said it a bit smugly, I’ll admit. A few years with an axe and a broom would probably do this pompous ass some good.

‘And then his pupil?’ he pressed.

‘In time,’ I replied, ‘if he so wills.’ It wasn’t up to me to reveal the secret of the Will and the Word to him. He’d have to find that out for himself – the same as I had.

‘And when may I meet the God?’

I was getting tired of him anyway, so I took him to the tower.

‘Will the God Aldur wish to know my name?’ he asked as we started across the meadow.

I shrugged. ‘Not particularly. If you’re lucky enough to prove worthy, he’ll give you a name of his own choosing.’ When we reached the tower, I commanded the grey stone in the wall to open, and we went inside and on up the stairs.

My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me. ‘Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?’ he asked me.

‘He besought me, Master,’ I replied. ‘I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay.’ I could mangle language as well as Zedar could, I guess. ‘Thy will must decide such things,’ I continued. ‘If it turns out that he doesn’t please thee, I’ll take him outside and turn him into a carrot, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘That was unkindly said, Belgarath,’ Aldur chided.

‘Forgive me, Master,’ I said humbly.

‘Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath. Should it come to pass that he be apt, inform me.’

I groaned inwardly, cursing my careless tongue. My casual offer to vegetabilize the stranger had saddled me with him. But Aldur was my Lord, so I said, ‘I will, Master.’

‘What is thy current study, my son?’

‘I examine the reason for mountains, Master.’

‘Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that the study shall make thee more kindly disposed toward thy fellow-creatures.’

I knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn’t argue. I sighed. ‘As my Master commands,’ I submitted regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I didn’t want it to escape me. But then I remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the Vale, so I swallowed my resentment – at least right there in front of him.

I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though. I put that poor man through absolute hell, I’m ashamed to admit. I degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he’d run away.

But he didn’t. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that sometimes made me want to scream. Didn’t the man have any spirit at all? To make matters even worse – to my profoundest mortification – he learned the secret of the Will and the Word within six months. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.

In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language, he wasn’t such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really wasn’t.

The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.

And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day – and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had the same thoughts at the same time and even finished each other’s sentences. Despite the fact that they’re Alorns, Belkira and Beltira are the gentlest men I’ve ever known. I’m quite fond of them, actually.

Makor was the next to arrive, and he came to us from so far away that I couldn’t understand how he had ever heard of my Master. Unlike the rest of us, who’d been fairly shabby when we’d arrived, Makor came strolling down the Vale dressed in a silk mantle, somewhat like the garb currently in fashion in Tol Honeth. He was a witty, urbane, well-educated man, and I took to him immediately.

Our Master questioned him briefly and decided that he was acceptable – with all the usual provisos.

‘But, Master,’ Belzedar objected vehemently, ‘he cannot become one of our fellowship. He is a Dal – one of the Godless ones.’

‘Melcene, actually, old boy,’ Makor corrected him in that ultra-civilized manner of his that always drove Belzedar absolutely wild. Now do you see why I was so fond of Makor?

‘What’s the difference?’ Belzedar demanded bluntly.

‘All the difference in the world, old chap,’ Makor replied, examining his fingernails. ‘We Melcenes separated from the Dals so long ago that we’re no more like them than Alorns are like Marags. It’s not really up to you, however. I was summoned, the same as the rest of you were, and that’s an end on it.’

I remembered the odd compulsion that had dragged me out of Gara, and I looked sharply at my Master. Would you believe that he actually managed to look slightly embarrassed?

Belzedar spluttered for a while, but, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he muffled his objections.

The next to join us was Sambar, an Angarak. Sambar – or Belsambar as he later became – was not his real name, of course. Angarak names are so universally ugly that my Master did him a favor when he renamed him. I felt a great deal of sympathy for the boy – he was only about fifteen when he joined us. I’ve never seen anyone so abject. He simply came to the tower, seated himself on the earth, and waited for either acceptance or death. Beltira and Belkira fed him, of course. They were shepherds, after all, and shepherds won’t let anything go hungry. After a week or so, when it became obvious that he absolutely would not enter the tower, our Master went down to him. Now that was something I’d never seen Aldur do before. He spoke with the lad at some length in a hideous language – old Angarak, I’ve since discovered – and turned him over to Beltira and Belkira for tutelage. If anyone ever needed gentle handling, it was Belsambar.

In time, the twins taught him to speak a normal language that didn’t involve so much spitting and snarling, and we learned his history. My distaste for Torak dates from that point in time. It may not have been entirely Torak’s fault, however. I’ve learned over the years that the views of any priesthood are not necessarily the views of the Gods they serve. I’ll give Torak the benefit of the doubt in this case – the practice of human sacrifice might have been no more than a perversion of his Grolim priests. But he did nothing to put a stop to it, and that’s unforgivable.

To cut all this windy moralizing short, Belsambar’s parents – both of them – had been sacrificed, and Belsambar had been required to watch as a demonstration of his faith. It didn’t really work out that way, though. Grolims can be so stupid sometimes. Anyway, at the tender age of nine, Belsambar became an atheist, rejecting not only Torak and his stinking Grolims, but all Gods.

That was when our Master summoned him. In his particular case, the summoning must have been a bit more spectacular than the vague urge that turned my face toward the Vale. Belsambar was clearly in a state of religious ecstasy when he reached us. Of course he was an Angarak, and they’re always a little strange in matters of religion.

It was Belmakor who first raised the notion of building our own towers. He was a Melcene, after all, and they’re obsessed with building things. I’ll admit that our Master’s tower was starting to get a bit crowded, though.

The construction of those towers took us several decades, as I recall. It was actually more in the nature of a hobby than it was a matter of any urgency. We did use what you might call our advantages in the construction, of course, but squaring off rocks is a tedious business, even if you don’t have to use a chisel. We did manage to clear away a lot of rock, though, and building material got progressively scarcer as the years rolled by.

I think it was late summer one year when I decided that it was time to finish up my tower so that I wouldn’t have it hanging over my head nagging at me. Besides, Belmakor’s tower was almost finished, and I was first disciple, after all. I didn’t think it would really be proper for me to let him outstrip me. We sometimes do things for the most childish of reasons, don’t we?

Since my brothers and I had virtually denuded the Vale of rocks, I went up to the edge of the forest lying to the north in search of building materials. I was poking around among the trees looking for a stream-bed or an outcropping of stone when I suddenly felt a baleful stare boring into the back of my neck. That’s an uncomfortable feeling that’s always irritated me for some reason. ‘You might as well come out,’ I said. ‘I know you’re there.’

‘Don’t try anything,’ an awful voice growled at me from a nearby thicket. ‘I’ll rip you to pieces if you do.’

Now that’s what I call an unpromising start. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I replied. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

That evoked the ugliest laugh I’ve ever heard. ‘You?’ the voice said scornfully, ‘You? Hurt me?’ And then the bushes parted and the most hideous creature I’ve ever seen emerged. He was grotesquely deformed with a huge hump on his back, gnarled, dwarfed legs, and long, twisted arms. This combination made it possible – even convenient – for him to go on all fours like a gorilla. His face was monumentally ugly, his hair and beard were matted, he was unbelievably filthy, and he was partially dressed in a ratty-looking fur of some kind. ‘Enjoying the view?’ he demanded harshly. ‘You’re not so pretty yourself, you know.’

‘You startled me, that’s all,’ I replied, trying to be civil.

‘Have you seen an old man in a rickety, broken-down cart around here anywhere?’ the creature demanded. ‘He told me he’d meet me here.’

I stared at him in absolute astonishment.

‘You’d better close your mouth,’ he advised me in that raspy growl. ‘You’ll catch flies if you don’t.’

All sorts of things clicked into place. ‘This old man you’re looking for,’ I said. ‘Did he have a humorous way of talking?’

‘That’s him,’ the dwarf said. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied with a broad grin. ‘I’ve known him for longer than you could possibly imagine. Come along, my ugly little friend. I’ll take you to him.’

‘Don’t be too quick to throw the word “friend” around,’ he growled. ‘I don’t have any friends, and I like it that way.’

‘You’ll get over that in a few hundred years,’ I replied, still grinning at the little monster.

‘You don’t sound quite right in the head to me.’

‘You’ll get used to that, too. Come along. I’ll introduce you to your Master.’

‘I don’t have a master.’

‘I wouldn’t make any large wagers on that.’

And that was our introduction to Din. My brothers thought at first that I’d come across a tame ape. Din rather quickly disabused them of that notion. He had by far the foulest mouth I’ve ever come across, even when he was not trying to be insulting, and I honestly believe he could swear for a day and a half without once repeating himself. He was even ungracious to our Master. His very first words to him were, ‘What did you do with that stupid cart of yours? I tried to follow the tracks, but they just disappeared on me.’

Aldur, with that inhuman patience of his, simply smiled. Would you believe that he actually liked the foul-mouthed little monster? ‘Is that what took thee so long?’ he asked mildly.

‘Of course that’s what took me so long!’ Din exploded. ‘You didn’t leave me a trail to follow! I had to reason out your location!’ Din had turned losing his temper into an art-form. The slightest thing could set him off. ‘Well?’ he said then, ‘now what?’

‘We must see to thine education.’

‘What does somebody like me need with an education? I already know what I need to know.’

Aldur gave him a long, steady look, and even Din couldn’t face that for long. Then our Master looked around at the rest of us. He obviously dismissed Beltira and Belkira out of hand. They hadn’t the proper temperament to deal with our newest recruit. Belzedar was in a state verging on inarticulate rage. Belzedar may have had his faults, but he wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect for our Master. Belmakor was too fastidious. Din was filthy, and he smelled like an open sewer. Belsambar, for obvious reasons, was totally out of the question. Guess who that left.

I wearily raised my hand. ‘Don’t trouble thyself, Master,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘Why, Belgarath,’ he said, ‘how gracious of thee to volunteer thy service.’

I chose not to answer that.

‘Ah, Belgarath?’ Belmakor said tentatively.

‘What?’

‘Could you possibly wash him off before you bring him inside again?’

Despite my show of reluctance, I wasn’t quite as displeased with the arrangement as I pretended to be. I still wanted to finish my tower, and this powerful dwarf seemed well-suited to the task of carrying rocks. If things worked out the way I thought they might, I wouldn’t have to strain my creativity in the slightest to find things for my ugly little servant to do.

I took him outside and showed him my half-finished tower. ‘You understand the situation here?’ I asked him.

‘I’m supposed to do what you tell me to do.’

‘Exactly.’ This was going to work out just fine. ‘Now, let’s go back to the edge of the woods. I’ve got a little chore for you.’

It took us quite some time to return to the woods. When we got there, I pointed at a dry stream-bed filled with nice round rocks of a suitable size. ‘See those rocks?’ I asked him.

‘Naturally I can see them, you dolt! I’m not blind!’

‘I’m so happy for you. I’d like for you to pile them all beside my tower – neatly, of course.’ I sat down under a shady tree. ‘Be a good fellow and see to it, would you?’ I was actually enjoying this.

He glowered at me for a moment and then turned to glare at the rocky stream-bed.

Then, one by one, the rocks began to vanish! I could actually feel him doing it! Would you believe it? Din already knew the secret! It was the first case of spontaneous sorcery I’d ever seen. ‘Now what?’ he demanded.

‘How did you learn to do that?’ I demanded incredulously.

He shrugged. ‘Picked it up somewhere,’ he replied. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you can’t?’

‘Of course I can, but – ’ I got hold of myself at that point. ‘Are you sure you translocated them to the right spot?’

‘You wanted them piled up beside your tower, didn’t you? Go look, if you want. I know where they are. Was there anything else you wanted me to do here?’

‘Let’s go back,’ I told him shortly.

It took me a while to regain my composure. We were about half-way back before I could trust myself to start asking questions. ‘Where are you from?’ It was banal, but it was a place to start.

‘Originally, you mean? That’s sort of hard to say. I move around a lot. I’m not very welcome in most places. I’m used to it, though. It’s been going on since the day I was born.’

‘Oh?’

‘I gather that my mother’s people had a fairly simple way to rid themselves of defectives. As soon as they laid eyes on me, they took me out in the woods and left me there to starve – or to provide some wolf with a light snack. My mother was a sentimentalist, though, so she used to sneak out of the village to feed me.’

And I thought my childhood had been hard.

‘She stopped coming a year or so after I’d learned to walk, though,’ he added in a deliberately harsh tone. ‘Died, I suppose – or they caught her sneaking out and killed her. I was on my own after that.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘Does it really matter?’ There was a distant pain in his eyes, however. ‘There are all sorts of things to eat in a forest – if you’re not too particular. Vultures and ravens manage fairly well. I learned to watch for them. I found out early on that anyplace you see a vulture, there’s probably something to eat. You get used to the smell after a while.’

‘You’re an animal!’ I exclaimed.

‘We’re all animals, Belgarath.’ It was the first time he’d used my name. ‘I’m better at it than most, because I’ve had more practice. Now, do you suppose we could talk about something else?’

Chapter 4

And now we were seven, and I think we all knew that for the time being there wouldn’t be any more of us. The others came later. We were an oddly assorted group, I’ll grant you, but the fact that we lived in separate towers helped to keep down the frictions to some degree.

The addition of Beldin to our fellowship was not as disruptive as I’d first imagined it might be. This is not to say that our ugly little brother mellowed very much, but rather that we grew accustomed to his irascible nature as the years rolled by. I invited him to stay in my tower with me during what I suppose you could call his novitiate – that period when he was Aldur’s pupil before he achieved full status. I discovered during those years that there was a mind lurking behind those bestial features, and what a mind it was! With the possible exception of Belmakor, Beldin was clearly the most intelligent of us all. The two of them argued for years about points of logic and philosophy so obscure that the rest of us hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were talking about, and they both enjoyed those arguments enormously.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to persuade Beldin that an occasional bath probably wouldn’t be harmful to his health, and that if he bathed, the fastidious Belmakor might be willing to come close enough to him that they wouldn’t have to shout during their discussions. As my daughter’s so fond of pointing out, I’m not an absolute fanatic about bathing, but Beldin sometimes carries his indifference to extremes.

During the years that we lived and studied together, I came to know Beldin and eventually at least to partially understand him. Mankind was still in its infancy in that age, and the virtue of compassion hadn’t really caught on as yet. Humor, if you want to call it that, was still quite primitive and brutal. People found any sort of anomaly funny, and Beldin was about as anomalous as you can get. Rural folk would greet his entry into their villages with howls of laughter, and after they’d laughed their fill, they would normally stone him out of town. It’s not really very hard to understand his foul temper, is it? His own people tried to kill him the moment he was born, and he’d spent his whole life being chased out of every community he tried to enter. I’m really rather surprised that he didn’t turn homicidal. I probably would have.

He’d lived with me for a couple hundred years, and then on one rainy spring day, he raised a subject I probably should have known would come up eventually. He was staring moodily out the window at the slashing rain, and he finally growled, ‘I think I’ll build my own tower.’

‘Oh?’ I replied, laying aside my book. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’

‘I need more room, and we’re starting to get on each other’s nerves.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that.’

‘Belgarath, you don’t even notice the seasons. When you’re face-down in one of your books, I could probably set fire to your toes, and you wouldn’t notice. Besides, you snore.’

‘I snore? You sound like a passing thunderstorm every night, all night.’

‘It keeps you from getting lonesome.’ He looked pensively out the window again. ‘There’s another reason, too, of course.’

‘Oh?’

He looked directly at me, his eyes strangely wistful. ‘In my whole life, I’ve never really had a place of my own. I’ve slept in the woods, in ditches, and under haystacks, and the warm, friendly nature of my fellow-man has kept me pretty much constantly on the move. I think that just once, I’d like to have a place that nobody can throw me out of.’

What could I possibly say to that? ‘You want some help?’ I offered.

‘Not if my tower’s going to turn into something that looks like this one,’ he growled.

‘What’s wrong with this tower?’

‘Belgarath, be honest. This tower of yours looks like an ossified tree-stump. You have absolutely no sense of beauty whatsoever.’

This? Coming from Beldin?

‘I think I’ll go talk with Belmakor. He’s a Melcene, and they’re natural builders. Have you ever seen one of their cities?’

‘I’ve never had occasion to go into the east.’

‘Naturally not. You can’t pull yourself out of your books long enough to go anyplace. Well? Are you coming along, or not?’

How could I turn down so gracious an invitation? I pulled on my cloak, and we went out into the rain. Beldin, of course, didn’t bother with cloaks. He was absolutely indifferent to the weather.

When we reached Belmakor’s somewhat overly ornate tower, my stumpy little friend bellowed up, ‘Belmakor! I need to talk with you!’

Our civilized brother came to the window. ‘What is it, old boy?’ he called down to us.

‘I’ve decided to build my own tower. I want you to design it for me. Open your stupid door.’

‘Have you bathed lately?’

‘Just last month. Don’t worry, I won’t stink up your tower.’

Belmakor sighed. ‘Oh, very well,’ he gave in. His eyes went slightly distant, and the latch on his heavy iron-bound door clicked. The rest of us had taken our cue from our Master and used rocks to close the entrances to our towers, but Belmakor felt the need for a proper door. Beldin and I went in and mounted the stairs.

‘Have you and Belgarath had a falling out?’ Belmakor asked curiously.

‘Is that any business of yours?’ Beldin snapped.

‘Not really. Just wondering.’

‘He wants a place of his own,’ I explained. ‘We’re starting to get under each other’s feet.’

Belmakor was very shrewd. He got my point immediately. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asked the dwarf.

‘Beauty,’ Beldin said bluntly. ‘I may not be able to share it, but at least I’ll be able to look at it.’

Belmakor’s eyes filled with sudden tears. He always was the most emotional of us.

‘Oh, stop that!’ Beldin told him. ‘Sometimes you’re so gushy you make me want to spew. I want grace. I want proportion, I want something that soars. I’m tired of living in the mud.’

‘Can you manage that?’ I asked our brother.

Belmakor went to his writing desk, gathered his papers, and inserted them in the book he’d been studying. Then he put the book upon a top shelf, spun a large sheet of paper and one of those inexhaustible quill pens he was so fond of out of air itself, and sat down. ‘How big?’ he asked Beldin.

‘I think we’d better keep it a little lower than the Master’s, don’t you?’

‘Wise move. Let’s not get above ourselves.’ Belmakor quickly sketched in a fairy castle that took my breath away – all light and delicacy with flying buttresses that soared out like wings, and towers as slender as toothpicks.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Beldin accused. ‘You couldn’t house butterflies in that piece of gingerbread.’

‘Just a start, brother mine,’ Belmakor said gaily. ‘We’ll modify it down to reality as we go along. You have to do that with dreams.’

And that started an argument that lasted for about six months and ultimately drew us all into it. Our own towers were, for the most part, strictly utilitarian. Although it pains me to admit it, Beldin’s description of my tower was probably fairly accurate. It did look somewhat like a petrified tree-stump when I stepped back to look at it. It kept me out of the weather, though, and it got me up high enough so that I could see the horizon and look at the stars. What else is a tower supposed to do?

It was at that point that we discovered that Belsambar had the soul of an artist. The last place in the world you would look for beauty would be in the mind of an Angarak. With surprising heat, given his retiring nature, he argued with Belmakor long and loud, insisting on his variations as opposed to the somewhat pedestrian notions of the Melcenes. Melcenes are builders, and they think in terms of stone and mortar and what your material will actually let you get away with. Angaraks think of the impossible, and then try to come up with ways to make it work.

‘Why are you doing this, Belsambar?’ Beldin once asked our normally self-effacing brother. ‘It’s only a buttress, and you’ve been arguing about it for weeks now.’

‘It’s the curve of it, Beldin,’ Belsambar explained, more fervently than I’d ever heard him say anything else. ‘It’s like this.’ And he created the illusion of the two opposing towers in the air in front of them for comparison. I’ve never known anyone else who could so fully build illusions as Belsambar. I think it’s an Angarak trait; their whole world is built on an illusion.

Belmakor took one look and threw his hands in the air. ‘I bow to superior talent,’ he surrendered. ‘It’s beautiful, Belsambar. Now, how do we make it work? There’s not enough support.’

‘I’ll support it, if necessary.’ It was Belzedar, of all people! ‘I’ll hold up our brother’s tower until the end of days, if need be.’ What a soul that man had!

‘You still didn’t answer my question – any of you!’ Beldin rasped. ‘Why are you all taking so much trouble with all of this?’

‘It is because thy brothers love thee, my son,’ Aldur, who had been standing in the shadows unobserved, told him gently. ‘Canst thou not accept their love?’

Beldin’s ugly face suddenly contorted grotesquely, and he broke down and wept.

‘And that is thy first lesson, my son,’ Aldur told him. ‘Thou wilt warily give love, all concealed beneath this gruff exterior of thine, but thou must also learn to accept love.’

It all got a bit sentimental after that.

And so we all joined together in the building of Beldin’s tower. It didn’t really take us all that long. I hope Durnik takes note of that. It’s not really immoral to use our gift on mundane things, Sendarian ethics notwithstanding.

I missed having my grotesque little friend around in my own tower, but I’ll admit that I slept better. I wasn’t exaggerating in the least in my description of his snoring.

Life settled down in the Vale after that. We continued our studies of the world around us and expanded our applications of our peculiar talent. I think it was one of the twins who discovered that it was possible for us to communicate with each other by thought alone. It would have been one – or both – of the twins, since they’d been sharing their thoughts since the day they were born. I do know that it was Beldin who discovered the trick of assuming the forms of other creatures. The main reason I can be so certain is that he startled several years’ growth out of me the first time he did it. A large hawk with a bright band of blue feathers across its tail came soaring in, settled on my window ledge, and blurred into Beldin. ‘How about that?’ he demanded. ‘It works after all.’