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drawstring tight and then tied the pouch to the bit of rope the boy wore as a belt. "There we are, Errand. All safe and secure now."
    Errand examined the pouch carefully, tugging at it a few times as if to be sure it was tightly tied. Then he gave a happy little laugh, put his arms about Durnik's neck and kissed his cheek.
    "He's a good lad," Durnik said, looking a trifle embarrassed.
    "He's totally innocent," Aunt Pol told him from where she was examining the sleeping Belgarath. "He has no idea of the difference between good and evil, so everything in the world seems good to him."
    "I wonder what it's like to see the world that way," Taiba mused, gently touching the child's smiling face. "No sorrow; no fear; no pain - just to love everything you see because you believe that everything is good."
    Relg, however, had looked up sharply. The troubled expression that had hovered on his face since he had rescued the trapped slave woman fell away to be replaced by that look of fanatic zeal that it had always worn before. "Monstrous!" he gasped.
    Taiba turned on him, her eyes hardening. "What's so monstrous about happiness?" she demanded, putting her arm about the boy.
    "We aren't here to be happy," he replied, carefully avoiding her eyes.
    "Why are we here then?" she challenged.
    "To serve our God and to avoid sin." He still refused to look at her, and his tone seemed a trifle less certain.
    "Well, I don't have a God," she retorted, "and the child probably doesn't either, so if it's all the same to you, he and I will just concentrate on trying to be happy - and if a bit of sin gets involved in it, so what?"
    "Have you no shame?" His voice was choked.
    "I am what I am," she replied, "and I won't apologize, since I didn't have very much to say about it."
    "Boy," Relg snapped at the child, "come away from her at once."
    Taiba straightened, her face hardening even more, and she faced him defiantly. "What do you think you're going to do?" she demanded.
    "I will fight sin wherever I find it," he declared.
    "Sin, sin, sin!" she flared. "Is that all you ever think about?"
    "It's my constant care. I guard against it every moment."
    She laughed. "How tedious. Can't you think of anything better to do? Oh, I forgot," she added mockingly. "There's all that praying too, isn't there? All that bawling at your God about how vile you are. I think you must bore this UL of yours tremendously sometimes, do you know that?"
    Enraged, Relg raised his fist. "Don't ever speak UL's name again!"
    "Will you hit me if I do? It doesn't matter that much. People have been hitting me all my life. Go ahead, Relg. Why don't you hit me?" She lifted her smudged face to him.
    Relg's hand fell.
    Sensing her advantage, Taiba put her hands to the throat of the rough gray dress Polgara had given her. "I can stop you, Relg," she told him.
    She began unfastening the dress. "Watch me. You look at me all the time anyway - I've seen you with your hot eyes on me. You call me names and say that I'm wicked, but still you watch. Look then. Don't try to hide it." She continued to unfasten the front of the dress. "If you're free of sin, my body shouldn't bother you at all."
    Relg's eyes were bulging now.
    "My body doesn't bother me, but it bothers you very much, doesn't it? But is the wickedness in my mind or yours? I can sink you in sin any time I want to. All I have to do is this." And she pulled open the front of her dress.
    Relg spun about, making strangled noises.
    "Don't you want to look, Relg?" she mocked him as he fled.
    "You have a formidable weapon there, Taiba," Silk congratulated her.
    "It was the only weapon I had in the slave pens," she told him. "I learned to use it when I had to." She carefully rebuttoned her dress and turned back to Errand as if nothing had happened.
    "What's all the shouting?" Belgarath mumbled, rousing slightly, and they all turned quickly to him.
    "Relg and Taiba were having a little theological discussion," Silk replied lightly. "The finer points