"That sword of yours is a trifle obvious," the old man told him. "Unless we want to spend the whole trip answering questions, we're going to have to do something about it."

"Are you going to make it invisible?" Silk asked hopefully.

"In a manner of speaking," Belgarath answered. "Open your mind to the Orb, Garion. Just let it talk to you."

Garion frowned. "I don't understand."

"Just relax. The Orb will do the rest. It's very excited about you, so don't pay too much attention to it if it starts making suggestions. It has a severely limited understanding of the real world. Just relax and let your mind sort of drift. I've got to talk to it, and I can only do that through you. It won't listen to anybody else."

Garion leaned back against a tree; in a moment he found his mind filled with all manner of peculiar images. The world he perceived in that imagining was tinged over with a faint blue haze, and everything seemed angular, as if constructed out of the flat planes and sharp edges of a crystal. He caught a vivid picture of himself, flaming sword in hand, riding at great speed with whole hordes of faceless men fleeing out of his path. Belgarath's voice sounded sharply in his mind then. "Stop that." The words, he realized, were not directed at him, but instead at the Orb itself. Then the old man's voice dropped to a murmur, instructing, explaining something. The responses of that other, crystalline awareness seemed a trifle petulant; but eventually there seemed to be an agreement of some kind, and then Garion's mind cleared.

Belgarath was shaking his head with a rueful expression. "It's almost like talking to a child sometimes," he said. "It has no conception of numbers, and it can't even begin to comprehend the meaning of the word danger."

"It's still there," Silk noted, sounding a bit disappointed. "I can still see the sword."

"That's because you know it's there," Belgarath told him. "Other people will overlook it."

"How can you overlook something that big?" Silk objected.

"It's very complicated," Belgarath replied. "The Orb is simply going to encourage people not to see it - or the sword. If they look very closely, they might realize that Garion's carrying something on his back, but they won't be curious enough about it to try to find out what it is. As a matter of fact, quite a few people won't even notice Garion himself."

"Are you trying to say that Garion's invisible?"

"No. He's just sort of unremarkable for the time being. Let's move on. Night comes on quickly up in these mountains."