Chapter Nine
THE STORM BLEW itself out the next morning, but they stayed in the cave for another day after the wind had died down to allow the mare to recover and the newborn colt to gain a bit more strength. Garion found the attention of the little animal disturbing. It seemed that no matter where he went in the cave, those soft eyes followed him, and the colt was continually nuzzling at him. The other horses also watched him with a kind of mute respect. All in all it was a bit embarrassing.
On the morning of their departure, they carefully removed all traces of their stay from the cave. The cleaning was spontaneous, neither the result of some suggestion or of any discussion, but rather was something in which they all joined without comment.
"The fire's still burning," Durnik fretted, looking back into the glowing dome from the doorway as they prepared to leave.
"It will go out by itself after we leave," Wolf told him. "I don't think you could put it out anyway - no matter how hard you tried."
Durnik nodded soberly. "You're probably right," he agreed.
"Close the door, Garion," Aunt Pol said after they had led their horses out onto the ledge outside the cave.
Somewhat self consciously, Garion took hold of the edge of the huge iron door and pulled it. Although Barak with all his great strength had tried without success to budge the door, it moved easily as soon as Garion's hand touched it. A single tug was enough to set it swinging gently closed. The two solid edges came together with a great, hollow boom, leaving only a thin, nearly invisible line where they met.
Mister Wolf put his hand lightly on the pitted iron, his eyes far away. Then he sighed once, turned, and led them back along the ledge the way they had come two days before.
Once they had rounded the shoulder of the mountain, they remounted and rode on down through the tumbled boulders and patches of rotten ice to the first low bushes and stunted trees a few miles below the pass. Although the wind was still brisk, the sky overhead was blue, and only a few fleecy clouds raced by, appearing strangely close.
Garion rode up to Mister Wolf and fell in beside him. His mind was filled with confusion by what had happened in the cave, and he desperately needed to get things straightened out. "Grandfather," he said.
"Yes, Garion?" the old man answered, rousing himself from his half doze.
"Why did Aunt Pol try to stop me? With the colt, I mean?"
"Because it was dangerous," the old man replied. "Very dangerous."
"Why dangerous?"
"When you try to do something that's impossible, you can pour too much energy into it; and if you keep trying, it can be fatal."
"Fatal?"
Wolf nodded. "You drain yourself out completely, and you don't have enough strength left to keep your own heart beating."
"I didn't know that." Garion was shocked.
Wolf ducked as he rode under a low branch. "Obviously."
"Don't you keep saying that nothing is impossible?"
"Within reason, Garion. Within reason."
They rode on quietly for a few minutes, the sound of their horses' hooves muffled by the thick moss covering the ground under the trees. "Maybe I'd better find out more about all this," Garion said finally.
"That's not a bad idea. What was it you wanted to know?"
"Everything, I guess."
Mister Wolf laughed. "That would take a very long time, I'm afraid."
Garion's heart sank. "Is it that complicated?"
"No. Actually it's very simple, but simple things are always the hardest to explain."
"That doesn't make any sense," Garion retorted, a bit irritably.
"Oh?" Wolf looked at him with amusement. "Let me ask you a simple question, then. What's two and two?"
"Four," Garion replied promptly.
"Why?"
Garion floundered for a moment. "It just is," he answered lamely.
"But why?"
"There isn't any why to it. It just is."
"There's a why to everything, Garion."
"All right, why is two and two four then?"
"I don't know," Wolf admitted. "I thought maybe you might." They passed a dead snag standing twisted and starkly white against the deep blue sky.
"Are we getting anywhere?" Garion asked, even more confused now.
"Actually, I think we've come a very long way," Wolf replied. "Precisely what was it you wanted to know?"
Garion put it as directly as he knew how. "What is sorcery?"
"I told you that once already. The Will and the Word."
"That doesn't really mean anything, you know."
"All right, try it this way. Sorcery is doing things with your mind instead of your hands. Most people don't use it because at first it's much easier to do things the other way."
Garion frowned. "It doesn't seem hard."
"That's because the things you've been doing have come out of impulse. You've never sat down and thought your way through something - you just do it."
"Isn't it easier that way? What I mean is, why not just do it and not think about it?"
"Because spontaneous sorcery is just third-rate magic - completely uncontrolled. Anything can happen if you simply turn the power of your mind loose. It has no morality of its own. The good or the bad of it comes out of you, not out of the sorcery."
"You mean that when I burned Asharak, it was me and not the sorcery?" Garion asked, feeling a bit sick at the thought.
Mister Wolf nodded gravely. "It might help if you remember that you were also the one who gave life to the colt. The two things sort of balance out."
Garion glanced back over his shoulder at the colt, who was frisking along behind him like a puppy. "What you're saying is that it can be either good or bad."
"No," Wolf corrected. "By itself it has nothing to do with good or bad. And it won't help you in any way to make up your mind how to use it. You can do anything you want to with it - almost anything, that is. You can bite the tops off all the mountains or stick the trees in the ground upside down or turn all the clouds green, if you feel like it. What you have to decide is whether you should do something, not whether you can do it."
"You said almost anything," Garion noted quickly.
"I'm getting to that," Wolf said. He looked thoughtfully at a low-flying cloud - an ordinary-looking old man in a rusty tunic and gray hood looking at the sky. "There's one thing that's absolutely forbidden. You can never destroy anything - not ever."
Garion was baffled by that. "I destroyed Asharak, didn't I?"
"No. You killed him. There's a difference. You set fire to him, and he burned to death. To destroy something is to try to uncreate it. That's what's forbidden."
"What would happen if I did try?"
"Your power would turn inward on you, and you'd be obliterated in an instant."
Garion blinked and then suddenly went cold at the thought of how close he had come to crossing that forbidden line in his encounter with Asharak. "How do I tell the difference?" he asked in a hushed voice. "I mean, how do I go about explaining that I only meant to kill somebody and not destroy him?"
"It's not a good area for experimentation," Wolf told him. "If you really want to kill somebody, stick your sword in him. Hopefully you won't have occasion to do that sort of thing too often."
They stopped at a small brook trickling out of some mossy stones to allow their horses to drink.
"You see, Garion," Wolf explained, "the ultimate purpose of the universe is to create things. It will not permit you to come along behind it uncreating all the things it went to so much trouble to create in the first place. When you kill somebody, all you've really done is alter him a bit. You've changed him from being alive to being dead. He's still there. To uncreate him, you have to will him out of existence entirely. When you feel yourself on the verge of telling something to 'vanish' or 'go away' or 'be not,' you're getting very close to the point of self destruction. That's the main reason we have to keep our emotions under control all the time."
"I didn't know that," Garion admitted.
"You do now. Don't even try to unmake a single pebble."
"A pebble?"