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Silk shrugged. "The Grolims will follow him."
"We'd have to take steps at that point, wouldn't we?" Silk nodded with a wicked
little smirk.
"We could call him, I suppose," Barak suggested, loosening his sword in its
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sheath.
"The same thought had just occurred to me."
Durnik came back up the slope, his feet crunching in the gravel.
"Wolf says to keep an eye on them," he reported, "but he says not to do anything
unless they actually start into the gully."
"What a shame!" Silk sighed regretfully.
The running Thull was clearly visible now. He was a thick-bodied man in a rough
tunic, belted at the waist. His hair was shaggy and mudcolored, and his face was
contorted into an expression of brutish panic. He passed the place where they
hid, perhaps thirty paces out on the flats, and Garion could clearly hear his
breath whistling in his throat as he pounded past. He was whimpering as he ran -
an animal-like sound of absolute despair.
"They almost never try to hide," Silk said in a soft voice tinged with pity.
"All they do is run." He shook his head.
"They'll overtake him soon," Mandorallen observed. The pursuing Grolims wore
black, hooded robes and polished steel masks.
"We'd better get down," Barak advised.
They all ducked below the gully rim. A few moments later, the three horses
galloped by, their hooves thudding on the hard earth.
"They'll catch him in a few more minutes," Garion said. "He's running right for
the edge. He'll be trapped."
"I don't think so," Silk replied somberly.
A moment later they heard a long, despairing shriek, fading horribly into the
gulf below.
"I more or less expected that," Silk said.
Garion's stomach wrenched at the thought of the dreadful height of the
escarpment.
"They're coming back," Barak warned. "Get down."
The three Grolims rode back along the edge of the gully. One of them said
something Garion could not quite hear, and the other two laughed.
"The world might be a brighter place with three less Grolims in it," Mandorallen
suggested in a grim whisper.
"Attractive thought," Silk agreed, "but Belgarath would probably disapprove. I
suppose it's better to let them go. We wouldn't want anybody looking for them."
Barak looked longingly after the three Grolims, then sighed with deep regret.
"Let's go back down," Silk said.
They all turned and crawled back down into the brushy gully. Belgarath looked up
as they returned. "Are they gone?"
"They're riding off," Silk told him.
"What was that cry?" Relg asked.
"Three Grolims chased a Thull off the edge of the escarpment," Silk replied.
"Why?"
"He'd been selected for a certain religious observance, and he didn't want to
participate."
"He refused?" Relg sounded shocked. "He deserved his fate then."
"I don't think you appreciate the nature of Grolim ceremonies, Relg," Silk said.
"One must submit to the will of one's God," Relg insisted. There was a
sanctimonious note to his voice. "Religious obligations are absolute."
Silk's eyes glittered as he looked at the Ulgo fanatic. "How much do you know
about the Angarak religion, Relg?" he asked.
"I concern myself only with the religion of Ulgo."
"A man ought to know what he's talking about before he makes judgments."
"Let it lie, Silk," Aunt Pol told him.
"I don't think so, Polgara. Not this time. A few facts might be good for our
devout friend here. He seems to lack perspective." Silk turned back to Relg.
"The core of the Angarak religion is a ritual most men find repugnant. Thulls
devote their entire lives to avoiding it. That's the central reality of Thullish
life."
"An abominable people." Relg's denunciation was harsh.
"No. Thulls are stupid - even brutish - but they're hardly abominable. You see,
Relg, the ritual we're talking about involves human sacrifice."
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Relg pulled the veil from his eyes to stare incredulously at the ratfaced little
man.
"Each year two thousand Thulls are sacrificed to Torak," Silk went on, his eyes
boring into Relg's stunned face. "The Grolims permit the substitution of slaves,
so a Thull spends his whole life working in order to get enough money to buy a
slave to take his place on the altar if he's unlucky enough to be chosen. But
slaves die sometimes - or they escape. If a Thull without a slave is chosen, he
usually tries to run. Then the Grolims chase him - they've had a lot of
practice, so they're very good at it. I've never heard of a Thull actually
getting away."
"It's their duty to submit," Relg maintained stubbornly, though he seemed a bit
less sure of himself.
"How are they sacrificed?" Durnik asked in a subdued voice. The Thull's
willingness to hurl himself off the escarpment had obviously shaken him.
"It's a simple procedure," Silk replied, watching Relg closely. "Two Grolims
bend the Thull backward over the altar, and a third cuts his heart out. Then
they burn the heart in a little fire. Torak isn't interested in the whole Thull.
He only wants the heart."
Relg flinched at that.
"They sacrifice women, too," Silk pressed. "But women have a simpler means of
escape. The Grolims won't sacrifice a pregnant woman - it confuses their count -
so Thulllish women try to stay pregnant constantly. That explains why there are
so many Thulls and why Thullish women are notorious for their indiscriminate
appetite."
"Monstrous." Relg gasped. "Death would be better than such vile corruption."
"Death lasts for a long time, Relg," Silk said with a cold little smile. "A
little corruption can be forgotten rather quickly if you put your mind to it.
That's particularly true if your life depends on it."
Relg's face was troubled as he struggled with the blunt description of the
horror of Thullish life. "You're a wicked man," he accused Silk, though his
voice lacked conviction.
"I know," Silk admitted.
Relg appealed to Belgarath. "Is what he says true?"
The sorcerer scratched thoughtfully at his beard. "He doesn't seem to have left
out very much," he replied. "The word religion means different things to
different people, Relg. It depends on the nature of one's God. You ought to try
to get that sorted out in your mind. It might make some of the things you'll
have to do a bit easier."
"I think we've just about exhausted the possibilities of this conversation,
father," Aunt Pol suggested, "and we have a long way to go."
"Right," he agreed, getting to his feet.
They rode down through the arid jumble of rock and scrubby bushes that spread
across the western frontier of the land of the Thulls. The continual wind that
swept up across the escarpment was bitterly cold, though there were only a few
patches of thin snow lying beneath the somber gray sky.
Relg's eyes adjusted to the subdued light, and the clouds appeared to quiet the
panic the open sky had caused him. But this was obviously a difficult time for
him. The world here above ground was alien, and everything he encountered seemed
to shatter his preconceptions. It was also a time of personal religious turmoil,
and the crisis goaded him into peculiar fluctuations of speech and action. At
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