"We're not here to have fun, uncle. Lead on."

The buffeting was sudden, and it took Garion by surprise. A violent downdraft hurled him toward a rocky slope, and it was only at the last instant that he was able to veer away from certain disaster. The downdraft pushed him this way and that, wrenching at his wings, and it was suddenly accompanied by a pelting rainstorm, huge, icy drops that pounded at him like large wet hammers.

"It isn't natural, Garion!" Aunt Pol's voice came to him sharply. He looked around desperately, but he could not see her.

"Where are you?" he called out.

"Never mind that! Use the Orb! The Dals are trying to keep us away!"

Garion was not entirely positive that the Orb could hear him in that strange place to which it went when he changed form, but he had no choice but to try. The driving rain and howling wind currents made settling to earth and resuming his own shape unthinkable. "Make it stop!" he called out to the stone, "the wind, the rain, all of it!"

The surge he felt when the Orb unleashed its power sent him staggering through the air, flapping his wings desperately to hold his balance. The air around him seemed suddenly bright blue. And then the turbulence and the rain that had accompanied it were gone, and the column of warm air was back, rising undisturbed into the summer air.

He had lost at least a thousand feet in the downdraft, and he saw Aunt Pol and Beldin, each over a mile away in opposite directions. As he began again to spiral upward, he saw that they also were rising and veering through the air toward him.

"Stay on your guard," Aunt Pol's voice told him. "Use the Orb to muffle anything else they try to throw at us."

It took them only a few minutes to regain the height they had lost, and they continued upward over forests and rockslides until they reached that region on the flanks of the mountain above the tree line and below the eternal snows. It was an area of steep meadows with grass and wildflowers nodding in the mountain breeze.

"There!" Beldin's voice seemed to crackle. "It's a trail."

"Are you sure it's not just a game trail, uncle?" Polgara asked him.

"It's too straight, Pol. A deer couldn't walk in a straight line if his life depended on it. That trail is man-made. Let's see where it goes." He tilted on one wing and swooped down toward the well-traveled track stretching up one of the meadows toward a gap in a rocky ridge. At the upper end of the meadow, he flared his wings. "Let's go down," he told them. "It might be better if we follow the rest of the way on foot.''