‘Toth!’ Durnik shouted. ‘Get out of there! She’s going to strike!’

But it was not the fanged mouth that struck. Dimly, within the bleeding body of the dragon, Garion saw the indistinct shape of Mordja desperately raise Cthrek Goru, the sword of shadows. Then the Demon Lord thrust out with the sword. The blade, as if insubstantial, emerged from the dragon’s chest and, as smoothly, plunged into Toth to emerge from his back. The mute stiffened, then slid limply off the sword, unable even in death to cry out.

‘No!’ Durnik roared in a voice filled with indescribable loss.

Garion’s mind went absolutely cold. ‘Keep her teeth off me,’ he told Zakath in a flat, unemotional tone. Then he dashed forward, reversing his sword once again in preparation for a thrust such as he had never delivered before. He aimed that thrust not at the wound Toth had opened but at the dragon’s broad chest instead.

Cthrek Goru flickered out to ward him off, but Garion parried that desperate defensive stroke, then set his shoulder against the massive crosspiece of his sword’s hilt. He fixed the now-shrinking demon with a look of pure hatred and then he drove his sword into the dragon’s chest with all his strength, and the great surge as the Orb unleashed its power almost staggered him.

The sword of the Rivan King slid smoothly into the dragon’s heart, like a stick into water.

The awful bellowing from both the dragon and the Demon Lord broke off suddenly in a kind of gurgling sigh.

Grimly, Garion wrenched his sword free and stepped clear of the convulsing beast. Then, like a burning house collapsing in on itself, the dragon crumpled to the ground, twitched a few times, and was still.

Garion wearily turned.

Toth’s face was calm, but blind Cyradis knelt on one side of his body and Durnik on the other. They were both weeping openly.

High overhead, the albatross cried out once, a cry of pain and loss.

Cyradis was weeping, her blindfold wet with her tears.

The smoky-looking orange sky roiled and tumbled overhead, and inky black patches lay in the folds of the clouds, shifting, coiling, and undulating as the clouds, still stained on their undersides by the new-risen sun, writhed in the sky above and flinched and shuddered as they begot drunken-appearing lightning that staggered down through the murky air to strike savagely at the altar of the One-eyed God on the pinnacle above.

Cyradis was weeping.

The sharply regular stones that floored the amphitheater were still darkly wet from the clinging fog that had enveloped the reef before dawn and the downpour of yesterday. The white speckles in that iron-hard stone glittered like stars under their sheen of moisture.

Cyradis was weeping.

Garion drew in a deep breath and looked around the amphitheater. It was not as large perhaps as he had first imagined – certainly not large enough to contain what had happened here – but then, all the world would probably not have been large enough to contain that. The faces of his companions, bathed in the fiery light from the sky and periodically glowing dead white in the intense flashes of the stuttering lightning, seemed awed by the enormity of what had just happened. The amphitheater was littered with dead Grolims, shrunken black patches lying on the stones or sprawled in boneless-looking clumps on the stairs. Garion heard a peculiar, voiceless rumble that died off into something almost like a sigh. He looked incuriously at the dragon. Its tongue protruded from its gaping mouth, and its reptilian eye stared blankly at him. The sound he had heard had come from that vast carcass. The beast’s entrails, still unaware that they, like the rest of the dragon were dead, continued their methodical work of digestion. Zandramas stood frozen in shock. The beast she had raised and the demon she had sent to possess it were both dead, and her desperate effort to evade the necessity of standing powerless and defenseless in the place of the Choice had crumbled and fallen as a child’s castle of sand crumbles before the encroaching waves. Garion’s son looked upon his father with unquestioning trust and pride, and Garion took a certain comfort in that clear-eyed gaze.

Cyradis was weeping. All else in Garion’s mind was drawn from reflection and random impressions. The one incontrovertable fact, however, was that the Seeress of Kell was crushed by her grief. At this particular time she was the most important person in the universe, and perhaps it had always been so. It might very well be, Garion thought, that the world had been created for the one express purpose of bringing this frail girl to this place at this time to make this single Choice. But could she do that now? Might it not be that the death of her guide and protector – the one person in all the world she had truly loved – had rendered her incapable of making the Choice?

Cyradis was weeping, and so long as she wept, the minutes ticked by. Garion saw now as clearly as if he were reading in that book of the heavens which guided the seers that the time of the meeting and of the Choice was not only this particular day, but would come in a specific instant of this day, and if Cyradis, bowed down by her unbearable grief, were unable to choose in that instant, all that had been all that was, and all that was yet to be would shimmer and vanish like an ephemeral dream. Her weeping must cease, or all would be forever lost.

It began with a clear-toned single voice, a voice that rose and rose in elegiac sadness that contained within it the sum of human woe. Then other voices emerging singly or in trios or in octets to join that aching song. The chorus of the group mind of the seers plumbed the depths of the grief of the Seeress of Kell and then sank in an unbearable diminuendo of blackest despair and faded off into a silence more profound than the silence of the grave.

Cyradis was weeping, but she did not weep alone. Her entire race wept with her.

That lone voice began again, and the melody was similar to the one which had just died away. To Garion’s untrained ear, it seemed almost the same, but a subtle chord-change had somehow taken place, and as the other voices joined in, more chords insinuated themselves into the song, and the grief and unutterable despair were questioned in the final notes.

Yet once again the song began, not this time with a single voice but with a mighty chord that seemed to shake the very roots of heaven with its triumphant affirmation. The melody remained basically the same, but what had begun as a dirge was now an exultation.

Cyradis gently laid Toth’s hand on his motionless chest, smoothed his hair, and groped across his body to touch Durnik’s tear-wet face consolingly.

She rose, no longer weeping, and Garion’s fears dissolved and faded as the morning fog which had obscured the reef had faded beneath the onslaught of the sun. ‘Go,’ she said in a resolute voice, pointing at the now-unguarded portal. ‘The time approaches. Go thou, Child of Light, and thou, Child of Dark, even into the grot, for we have choices to make which, once made, may never be unmade. Come ye with me, therefore, into the Place Which Is No More, there to decide the fate of all men.’ And with firm and unfaltering step, the Seeress of Kell led the way toward that portal surmounted by the stony image of the face of Torak.