Once, a day or more out from the Nadrak coast, they saw a dreadful column of thick black smoke rising far to the south, and a day or so farther on they sailed through a sea littered with charred debris where bodies, pale and bloated, bobbed in the dark waves of the eastern sea. The frightened sailors pulled their oars with all their strength, not even needing the encouragement of whips to row faster.

Then, one murky morning when the sky behind them threatened rain squalls and the air was oppressively heavy with the advancing storm, a low, dark smudge appeared on the horizon ahead of them, and the sailors doubled their efforts, rushing desperately toward the safety of the Mallorean coast ahead.

The beach upon which the small boats from their ship landed them was a sloping shingle of dark, salt-crusted gravel where the waves made a strange, mournful sighing as they receded. Awaiting them some distance up from the water's edge sat a mounted party of Grolims, their black robes belted at the waist with crimson sashes.

"Archpriests," Polgara noted coldly. "We're to be escorted with some ceremony, I take it."

The Grolim who had commanded their escort went quickly up the gravel stand toward the waiting group and prostrated himself before them, speaking with a hushed reverence. One of the Archpriests, an aged man with a deeply lined face and sunken eyes, dismounted rather stiffly and came down to where Ce'Nedra and her friends had just stepped from the small boat.

"My Queen," he said to Polgara, bowing respectfully. "I am Urtag, Archpriest of the district of Camat. I am here with my brethren to escort you to the City of Night."

"I'm disappointed not to find Zedar waiting," the sorceress replied coldly. "I trust he's not indisposed."

Urtag gave her a quick look of irritation. "Do not rail against your foreordained fate, Queen of Angarak," he advised her.

"I have two fates awaiting me, Urtag," she said. "Which one I will follow has not yet been decided."

"I do not have any doubts about the matter," he declared.

"That's probably because you've never dared to look at the alternatives," she replied. "Shall we go, Urtag? A windy beach is hardly the place for philosophical discussion."

The Grolim Archpriests had brought horses with them, and the party was soon mounted and riding away from the sea across a line of low, wooded hills in a generally northeasterly direction. The trees bordering the upper edge of the gravel beach had been dark-boughed spruces, but once they topped the first rise they entered a vast forest of white-barked aspens. To Ce'Nedra's eyes, the stark, white trunks looked almost corpselike, and the entire forest had a gloomy, unhealthy quality about it.

"Mistress Pol," Durnik said in a voice that was scarcely more than a whisper, "shouldn't we be working on some kind of plan?"

"For what, Durnik?" she asked him.

"For our escape, of course."