"It fits the same pattern, Old Wolf," Poledra said somberly. "Our side fights with normal weapons. Garion's sword might be a little abnormal, but it's still just a sword."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd been at Cthol Mishrak," her husband told her.

"I was there, Belgarath," she replied.

"You were?"

"Of course. I was hiding in the ruins watching. Anyway, the Child of Dark doesn't attack the body; it attacks the mind. That’s how it manages to keep everything so perfectly balanced."

"Nightmares, hallucinations, and ultimately madness," Polgara mused. "That's a formidable array of things to throw against us. It might even have worked if Zandramas hadn't been so clumsy."

"I don't quite follow that, Pol," Durnik said.

"She blundered." Polgara shrugged. "If only one person has a nightmare, he'll probably try to shrug it off and he certainly won't mention it on the morning of the meeting. Zandramas sent nightmares to all of us, though. This conversation probably wouldn't have taken place if she hadn't."

"It's nice to know that she can stumble, too," Belgarath said. "All right then, we know that she's been tampering with us. The best way to defeat that tactic is to put those nightmares out of our minds."

"And to be particularly wary if we start seeing things that shouldn't be there," Polgara added.

Silk and the wolf came back down the stairs to the cabin. "We’ve got absolutely beautiful weather this morning," he reported happily, bending slightly to scratch the pup's ears.

"Wonderful," Sadi murmured dryly. Sadi was carefully anointing his small dagger with a fresh coating of poison. He was wearing a stout leather jerkin and leather boots that reached to midthigh. Back in Sthiss Tor, Sadi had appeared, despite his slender frame, to be soft, even in some peculiar way flabby. Now, however, he looked lean and tough. A year or more without drugs and with an enforced regimen of hard exercise had changed him a great deal.

"It's perfect," Silk told him. "We have fog this morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "a nice, wet, gray fog almost thick enough to walk on. That fog would be a burglar's delight.”

"Trust Silk to think of that." Durnik smiled. The smith wore his usual clothing, but he had given Toth his axe, while he himself carried the dreadful sledge with which he had driven off the demon Nahaz.

"The prophecies are leading us around by the noses again," Beldin said irritably, “but at least it appears that we made the right decision last night. A good thick fog makes sneaking almost inevitable." Beldin looked the same as always, tattered, dirty, and very ugly.