Demon Lord Of Karanda by David Eddings Read Free Book Online Page B

done.’
    ‘That’s up to you, I guess.’
    ‘How much do you know about Mallorea, Belgarion?’
    ‘I get reports—a little disjointed sometimes, but fairly current.’
    ‘No. I mean our past.’
    ‘Not too much, I’m afraid. Western historians tried very hard to ignore the fact that Mallorea was even there.’
    Zakath smiled wryly. ‘The University of Melcene has the same short-sightedness regarding the West,’ he noted. ‘Anyway, over the past several centuries—since the disaster at Vo Mimbre—Mallorean society has become almost completely secular. Torak was bound in sleep, Ctuchik was practicing his perversions here in Cthol Murgos, and Zedar was wandering around the world like a rootless vagabond—what ever happened to him, by the way? I thought he was at Cthol Mishrak.’
    ‘He was.’
    ‘We didn’t find his body.’
    ‘He isn’t dead.’
    ‘He’s not?’ Zakath looked stunned. ‘Where is he, then?’
    ‘Beneath the city. Belgarath opened the earth and sealed him up in solid rock under the ruin.’
    ‘ Alive? Zakath’s exclamation came out in a choked gasp.
    ‘There was a certain amount of justification for it. Go on with your story.’
    Zakath shuddered and then recovered. ‘With the rest of them out of the way, the only religious figure left in Mallorea was Urvon, and he devoted himself almost exclusively to trying to make his palace at Mal Yaska more opulent than the imperial one at Mal Zeth. Every so often he’d preach a sermon filled with mumbo-jumbo and nonsense, but most of the time he seemed to have forgotten Torak entirely. With the Dragon God and his disciples no longer around, the real power of the Grolim Church was gone—oh, the priests babbled about the return of Torak, and they all paid lip service to the notion that one day the sleeping God would awaken, but the memory of him grew dimmer and dimmer. The power of the Church grew less and less, while that of the army—which is to say the imperial throne—grew more and more.’
    ‘Mallorean politics seem to be very murky,’ Garion observed.
    Zakath nodded. ‘It’s part of our nature, I suppose. At any rate, our society was functioning and moving out of the dark ages—slowly, perhaps, but moving. Then you suddenly appeared out of nowhere and awakened Torak—and just as suddenly put him permanently back to sleep again. That’s when all our problems started.’
    ‘Shouldn’t it have ended them? That’s sort of what I had in mind.’
    ‘I don’t think you grasp the nature of the religious mind, Belgarion. So long as Torak was there—even though he slept—the Grolims and the other hysterics in the empire were fairly placid, secure and comfortable in the belief that one day he would awaken, punish all their enemies and reassert the absolute authority of the unwashed and stinking priesthood. But when you killed Torak, you destroyed their comfortable sense of security. They were forced to face the fact that without Torak they were nothing. Some of them were so chagrined that they went mad. Others fell into absolute despair. A few, however, began to hammer together a new mythology—something to replace what you had destroyed with a single stroke of that sword over there.’
    ‘It wasn’t entirely my idea,’ Garion told him.
    ‘It’s results that matter, Belgarion, not intentions. Anyway, Urvon was forced to tear himself away from his quest for opulence and his wallowing in the adoration of the sycophants who surrounded him and get back to business. For a time he was in an absolute frenzy of activity. He resurrected all the moth-eaten old prophecies and twisted and wrenched at them until they seemed to say what he wanted them to say.’
    ‘And what was that?’
    ‘He’s trying to convince people that a new God will come to rule over Angarak—either a resurrection of Torak himself or some new deity infused with Torak’s spirit. He’s even got a candidate in mind for this new God of Angarak.’
    ‘Oh? Who’s