Free Belgarath the Sorcerer by David Eddings

learned to watch for them. I found out early on that anyplace you see a vulture, there’s probably something to eat. You get used to the smell after a while.’
    â€˜You’re an animal!’ I exclaimed.
    â€˜We’re all animals, Belgarath.’ It was the first time he’d used my name. ‘I’m better at it than most, because I’ve had more practice. Now, do you suppose we could talk about something else?’

Chapter 4
    And now we were seven, and I think we all knew that for the time being there wouldn’t be any more of us. The others came later. We were an oddly assorted group, I’ll grant you, but the fact that we lived in separate towers helped to keep down the frictions to some degree.
    The addition of Beldin to our fellowship was not as disruptive as I’d first imagined it might be. This is not to say that our ugly little brother mellowed very much, but rather that we grew accustomed to his irascible nature as the years rolled by. I invited him to stay in my tower with me during what I suppose you could call his novitiate - that period when he was Aldur’s pupil before he achieved full status. I discovered during those years that there was a mind lurking behind those bestial features, and what a mind it was! With the possible exception of Belmakor, Beldin was clearly the most intelligent of us all. The two of them argued for years about points of logic and philosophy so obscure that the rest of us hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were talking about, and they both enjoyed those arguments enormously.
    It took me a while, but I finally managed to persuade Beldin that an occasional bath probably wouldn’t be harmful to his health, and that if he bathed, the fastidious Belmakor might be willing to come close enough to him that they wouldn’t have to shout during their discussions. As my daughter’s so fond of pointing out, I’m not an absolute fanatic about bathing, but Beldin sometimes carries his indifference to extremes.
    During the years that we lived and studied together, I came to know Beldin and eventually at least to partiallyunderstand him. Mankind was still in its infancy in that age, and the virtue of compassion hadn’t really caught on as yet. Humor, if you want to call it that, was still quite primitive and brutal. People found any sort of anomaly funny, and Beldin was about as anomalous as you can get. Rural folk would greet his entry into their villages with howls of laughter, and after they’d laughed their fill, they would normally stone him out of town. It’s not really very hard to understand his foul temper, is it? His own people tried to kill him the moment he was born, and he’d spent his whole life being chased out of every community he tried to enter. I’m really rather surprised that he didn’t turn homicidal. I probably would have.
    He’d lived with me for a couple hundred years, and then on one rainy spring day, he raised a subject I probably should have known would come up eventually. He was staring moodily out the window at the slashing rain, and he finally growled, ‘I think I’ll build my own tower.’
    â€˜Oh?’ I replied, laying aside my book. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’
    â€˜I need more room, and we’re starting to get on each other’s nerves.’
    â€˜I hadn’t noticed that.’
    â€˜Belgarath, you don’t even notice the seasons. When you’re face-down in one of your books, I could probably set fire to your toes, and you wouldn’t notice. Besides, you snore.’
    â€˜ I snore? You sound like a passing thunderstorm every night, all night.’
    â€˜It keeps you from getting lonesome.’ He looked pensively out the window again. ‘There’s another reason, too, of course.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    He looked directly at me, his eyes strangely wistful. ‘In my whole life, I’ve never really had a place