In a last effort, she flung the whole force of her mind against the barrier he had erected. Like some great rock, however, the old man remained firm. Finally her shoulders slumped, and she turned, knelt beside Durnik's body, and began to weep again.

"I'm sorry, Pol," he said gently. "I never wanted to have to do that. Are you all right?"

"How can you ask that?" she demanded brokenly, wringing her hands over Durnik's silent body.

"That's not what I meant."

She turned her back on him and buried her face in her hands.

"I don't think you could have reached him anyway, Pol," the old man told her. "You know as well as I that what one of us does, another cannot undo."

Silk, his ferretlike face shocked, spoke in a hushed voice. "What did you do to him?"

"I took him down until we came to solid rock. And then I sealed him up in it."

"Can't he just come up out of the earth the way you did?"

"No. That's impossible for him now. Sorcery is thought, and no man can exactly duplicate the thought of another. Zedar's imprisoned inside the rock forever - or until I choose to free him." The old man looked mournfully at Durnik's body. "And I don't think I'll choose to do that."

"He'll die, won't he?" Silk asked.

Belgarath shook his head. "No. That was part of what I did to him. He'll lie inside the rock until the end of days."

"That's monstrous, Belgarath," Silk said in a sick voice.

"So was that," Belgarath replied grimly, pointing at Durnik.

Garion could hear what they were saying and could see them all quite clearly, but it seemed somehow that they were actually someplace else. The others in the underground crypt seemed to be on the periphery of his attention. For him there was only one other in the vaulted chamber, and that other was Kal Torak, his enemy.