Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Holding her gaze, he began to ease himself up from the floor. Every moment was obviously painful to him, but the pain only accentuated the appeal in his eyes.

  ‘I think you want me,’ he murmured. ‘I certainly want you.’

  There was something of Master Eremis in the way he looked at her, an intensity of interest which hypnotized. And he had distinct advantages over the Master. He wouldn’t demean her. He wouldn’t do anything cruel.

  ‘I started wanting you as soon as I saw you,’ he said as he got his feet under him. ‘Your lips cry out for kisses. Breasts like yours should be fondled until they give you bliss. The place of passion between your legs aches to be pierced. Terisa, I want you. I want to revel in you until your joy is as great as mine.’

  Upright despite the way his ribs and collarbone hurt, he moved gently toward her.

  He had some of Master Eremis’ magnetism. And his desire was less threatening than the Master’s.

  At the same time, he forced her to think of Geraden.

  If you thought of him as a man—

  She dropped the blankets. Stead’s eyes grew bright, and he reached toward her, but she ignored him. Fending his arms away, she left the bed and crossed the room to her clothes.

  ‘Terisa?’

  The shirt and skirt Quiss had given her weren’t warm enough to hold out the chill. They were warm enough for the time being, however; she didn’t want to spend time looking for an alternative. And the boots helped.

  Stead came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Terisa?’

  She turned to face him. ‘Take me to Geraden’s room.’

  He frowned in puzzlement. ‘Geraden’s room? Why do you want to go there? He doesn’t want you. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t really. If he did, he would be here already.’

  Terisa shook her head; she knew Geraden better than that. ‘Stead,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m not going to threaten you. I’m not going to kick you – or set you on fire. I just don’t want you.

  ‘Take me to Geraden’s room.’

  Stead blinked at her. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  Taking care not to hurt him, she moved around him toward the door. Outside, the lamps had been extinguished. She returned to the table at the head of the bed and took the lamp. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said. ‘You might as well sleep here. I won’t be back.’

  She was out the door and had started to close it before she heard him pant, ‘Terisa, wait,’ and come shuffling after her.

  His injuries prevented him from walking quickly; he took a moment to catch up with her. Then he braced himself against the door and paused to rest. His expression didn’t make sense to her. Behind the strain of movement, he seemed sadder than she’d expected – and happier.

  ‘Quiss always refuses me,’ he said, breathing carefully. ‘I don’t understand that. I’ve tried to tell her how much I want her. That’s all that matters. But she always refuses.

  ‘I have to admit, though’ – by degrees, his happiness took over his face – ‘she certainly makes me think well of Tholden.

  ‘Geraden’s room is that way.’ Grinning, he pointed down the hall.

  Now she found it easy to smile back at him. To help him walk, she slipped her arm through his. That appeared to confuse him – but of course he had no way of knowing how much he was improved by the comparison to Master Eremis. In any case, he let her assist him, and they went down the hall like old friends.

  Past two corners and down a long passage, Stead stopped in front of another door. ‘Here,’ he murmured softly. Then he put his arm around her waist and hugged her. Touching his mouth to her ear, he whispered, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come with me? No matter how much he worships you, he can’t want you more than I do.’

  Gently, she disentangled herself. ‘Go away,’ she replied as kindly as she could. ‘This is too important.’

  He sighed; nodded; shook his head in bafflement. But he didn’t argue. A bit morosely, he turned and began to shamble down the hall, holding his arms protectively across his ribs.

  She waited until he was out of sight around the corner. Then, before she had a chance to lose her nerve, she lifted the doorlatch and let herself into the room.

  By the light of her lamp, she saw that Stead had brought her to the right place. In the wide bed against the far wall, Geraden sprawled among his blankets. Judging by appearances, he had lost a fierce struggle with his covers; now he lay outstretched in defeat, snoring slightly on the battlefield.

  Asleep, his face gave up its bitter hardness, the iron of despair. He looked young and vulnerable, and inexpressibly dear. She wanted to go to him immediately and put her arms around him, hold him close to her heart, comfort away everything that hurt him. At the same time, she wanted to let him sleep – let him rest and dream until all his distress was healed. She shut the door behind her gently, so that he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  But the lamp woke him. He didn’t flinch, or jerk himself out of bed; he simply opened his eyes, and yellow light reflected back at her. Without transition, he no longer looked young or vulnerable. He looked poised and deadly, like a wounded predator.

  Master Eremis had understood from the beginning how dangerous Geraden was. All at once, the Master’s policy toward him made sense to her.

  ‘Geraden,’ she murmured in sudden confusion, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. Or I guess I did. I don’t know why I came. I couldn’t stay away.’

  Then, mercifully, he sat up, and the change in his position changed the way the light caught his eyes. He relapsed to the Geraden she knew: hard and hurt, closed like a fist around the sources of his pain; but nonetheless human, precious to her.

  She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘There’s so much we need to talk about.’

  Like Stead, he was dressed only in a pair of sleeping trousers; apparently, he didn’t feel the cold as much as she did. He didn’t get up from the bed or reach out to her. Yet when he spoke his voice sounded like the voice she remembered: capable of kindness; accessible to pain or hope.

  ‘After supper – after you left – I went to see Minick. I wanted to apologize for yelling at him. People shouldn’t yell at him, even though he never gets angry about it.

  ‘Do you know what he said? He said, “I spent the afternoon with your Terisa. She’s nice. If you make her unhappy, you won’t be welcome in my house anymore.” Minick said that, my mild brother who never gets angry.’

  Geraden shrugged. ‘I didn’t tell him that I’ve already made you unhappy.’

  ‘No,’ she replied at once, ‘that’s not true,’ reacting too quickly for thought. ‘How can you say that?’

  He watched her impassively. ‘I look at you, Terisa. I see the way you look at me.’

  ‘And what do you see?’

  He held her eyes, but he didn’t answer.

  ‘I like your family,’ she protested. ‘I feel comfortable in Houseldon. Ever since you talked me into leaving my old life, you’ve done more to make me happy than anyone else I’ve ever known. How can you—?’

  She stopped. It would have been nice if he’d had a fire in his room: she needed an external source of warmth. The darkness beyond the lamplight seemed full of sorrow. Making a special effort to speak calmly, she continued, ‘Geraden, I think I probably could have made that mirror translate me anywhere. Anywhere I could visualize – anywhere vivid enough in my mind.’ And I just came from Stead. He touched my breasts. He wanted to make love to me. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’

  His eyes didn’t waver. ‘You’re here because you think I’m wrong. You think I should have stayed in Orison to fight. You think there are still things I can do against Eremis.’

  As he said that, she suddenly knew she had to be very careful with him. Maybe it was true that he had become iron. But iron was brittle; he might break. He was blaming himself – She wanted to cry out, Oh, Geraden, are you blaming yourself? For Eremis and Gilbur? For the Castellan? For Nyle and Quillo
n? Are you blaming yourself because some of the best minds around you worked so hard to keep you from understanding your talent? But she couldn’t say that to him. He would just turn away. More than ever, she couldn’t bear the idea that he would turn away.

  Softly, she asked, ‘Why do you believe I think you’re wrong?’

  ‘I told you.’ The kindness was gone from his voice. ‘I can see it in your eyes.’

  ‘What do you see?’ she insisted. ‘What do you see in my eyes?’

  For a long moment, he hesitated. Then he said roughly, ‘Pain.’

  She thought she might feel better if she hit him. She might feel even better if she put her arms around him. Yet she stayed where she was, with her back to the door, holding the only light in the room.

  ‘That’s how I know I’m real. Master Eremis says I was created by your mirror, but that can’t be true. If I didn’t exist, I couldn’t be hurt.’

  ‘Terisa.’ He swallowed hard. She had touched him: she thought she could see grief shifting behind the rigid lines of his face. ‘Nobody says you don’t exist. Not even Master Eremis. You’re here. You’re real. Everything you do has consequences. The question is, were you real before I translated you?’

  Automatically, she wanted to ask, Have you changed your mind? Do you still think I was real – back where you found me? But she pushed that question down.

  ‘I must have been,’ she said. King Joyse had told her to reason. ‘If the place I came from was only created by the mirror you saw me in, then that must be true of every mirror, every Image. So when you look in a flat glass, you don’t actually see a real place. You see a created copy of a real place. So when I translated myself into the Image of the Closed Fist, I shouldn’t have arrived in a real place. I should have arrived in the copy – a different copy than the one you went to. I should have stopped being real myself until somebody translated me back out again.

  ‘Isn’t that right?’

  The light of the lamp was imprecise, but she seemed to see a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. The shadows there deepened as he listened to her. The sight caused her heart to accelerate a bit.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d come up with that argument myself. But I don’t think it’s enough. Eremis will just say, That’s why translations through flat glass produce madness. The only translation that can be done safely is one between the real world and a created Image. Reality is too powerful to tolerate the manipulations of Imagery.’ In spite of his clenched condition, he began to sound more like his old self as he talked – more like he was interested in the discussion for its own sake. ‘So the closer a created Image gets to reality, the more dangerous it becomes. And when the Image actually copies reality, reality takes precedence. It rips the translation away from the Image, and the force of that distortion is what causes madness.’

  She hung on the change in his tone, hoped for it to continue. Almost at once, however, he closed himself again. ‘Terisa, you didn’t come here in the middle of the night to debate the ethics of Imagery.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Pained to feel the side of him she wanted to nurture slipping away, she made a mistake. ‘To you it’s just a debate. To me it’s my life. I can’t make sense out of who I am unless I know the truth.’

  Right away, she knew she’d gone wrong: his gaze dropped from hers; his eyes filled up with shadows. He didn’t need to be reminded that other people were suffering: he was already too sensitive to that; he already believed he had made her unhappy. But she refused to back down. She had come too far to retreat. Instead, she changed tactics.

  ‘If I wasn’t real until you brought me out of that mirror of yours, how did I become an arch-Imager?’

  He didn’t lift his head. In a muffled voice, he said, ‘You know I don’t believe that. That’s Eremis, not me.’

  Unexpectedly angry, she retorted, ‘Wake up. What do you think we’re talking about here?’ She put the lamp down on a nearby table to free her hands, as if she were getting ready to wrestle with him. ‘Why do you think who I am and where I come from matters? What he believes is going to affect everything he does to both of us.

  ‘Tell me how I became an arch-Imager.’

  Now Geraden raised his eyes. Studying her closely – and holding himself completely still, as though he feared what she might do if he moved – he replied, ‘I created you. When I shaped my glass, I made you.’ Almost silently, he caught his breath in surprise and recognition; the implications took him aback. ‘I have the capacity to create arch-Imagers.’

  ‘Not just arch-Imagers,’ she amended for him. ‘Arch-Imagers who can shift glass the way you do, arch-Imagers who can work translations that are irrelevant to what you see in the Image.’

  ‘I could create a whole army of them. A whole army of Imagers as powerful as Vagel. He wouldn’t stand a chance.’ Staring at her – at the ideas she proposed – Geraden murmured, ‘No wonder he wants me dead.’

  ‘And that’s not all.’ Gripping her courage, Terisa took the risk. ‘How does he know you don’t have glass here?’

  Geraden jerked his head back, glowered at her in astonishment or dismay. ‘What—?’

  ‘How does he know’ – she forced herself to complete the thought, even though Geraden’s expression made her feel that she was accomplishing the opposite of what she wanted – ‘you aren’t busy creating an army of arch-Imagers right now?’

  She horrified him. What a pleasure. All she wanted was to help him – to comfort or encourage the Geraden who had gotten lost and become iron – and what did she achieve? Horror. For a moment, he was so shocked that the lamplight made him look as pale as bone. Then he sprang off the bed, rushed to her and caught her by the shoulders, groaned through his teeth as if he were stifling a wail, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

  She stared at him dumbly.

  ‘He’ll send everything he’s got after me. If he catches me here, he’ll reduce Houseldon to rubble to get at me.’

  It had to be said. She had gone too far to turn back. And this was the point, wasn’t it? The reason she had brought the subject up in the first place? Distinctly, she remarked, ‘He has to try that no matter what you do.’

  He stared at her in dismay.

  ‘He knows you’re here,’ she said. ‘But he won’t know it when you leave. Unless he has a mirror that lets him see you here. If you run, he won’t know it until he’s destroyed Houseldon looking for you.

  ‘I did that.’ For a moment, her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back fiercely. ‘It’s my doing. When I told him about seeing the Closed Fist in your mirror, I set you up.

  ‘You didn’t know you were coming here. I told him, but I didn’t tell you. You were just trying to escape – and hoping you wouldn’t end up somewhere you couldn’t get back from. He has to destroy Houseldon so that he can stop you, and I set you up for it.’

  Geraden, it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.

  His face was thrust close to hers, his fingers ground into her arms; but she couldn’t seem to read his face. His passion was part of his skull, definitive under his features; yet the flesh over it was so tight and strict that she couldn’t distinguish between them.

  When he spoke, however, his voice shook her as hard as if he had shoved her against the wall. It was strong, compulsory; it had the power to command her.

  ‘Terisa, people I have known and loved all my life are going to die because I came here.’

  I swore I was never going to let anybody I loved die ever again.

  But there was nothing he could do. Houseldon was already as well prepared to defend itself as possible. He was helpless to save anything or anybody. Because he needed so much from her, she didn’t cry or apologize or defend herself or get angry. She faced him squarely and said, ‘I think I would probably feel better if you hit me.’

  He looked like he might hit her: he was angry or desperate enough to hit something.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

 
; Slowly, she shook her head. At least he wasn’t closed anymore. She had achieved that much. And even fury was preferable to his rigid isolation, his mute hurt. ‘That’s not the point,’ she countered. ‘It doesn’t matter. I just made a mistake, that’s all. I didn’t know how important all this is.’ And later on she had been so embarrassed by her submission to Master Eremis that she found it impossible to speak.

  ‘The point is, I had a choice.’ It seemed loony to speak so calmly when he was in such distress. It seemed loony to prefer anyone’s anger. ‘I could have gone anywhere.’ At the same time, her own misery inexplicably began to become something else, something that bore a crazy and astounding resemblance to joy. She could reach him – she could make him furious. Because of that, everything else was possible. ‘I chose to come here.

  ‘Geraden, listen to me. Why do you suppose I chose to come here?’

  He was so angry, so frightened for his home and family and friends, that he could hardly refrain from raging. Involuntarily, he bared his teeth. Yet he was still Geraden, still the man who had always done everything he could imagine for her. Panting at the effort he made to restrain himself, he said, ‘You tell me. Why?’

  ‘No.’ Again she shook her head. ‘Come on, think about it. Why did I come here?’

  Through his passion, he rasped, ‘You didn’t know where else to go. To escape.’

  ‘No. Come on, think. I could have gone anywhere. Prince Kragen would have been glad to have me. All I had to do was translate myself out of Orison. Anywhere outside the gates.’

  Now she had him. It was strange how much power she had with him. Her mistakes might result in the complete destruction of his home and family: his reasons for outrage were that good. And yet he felt compelled to try to understand her.

  He didn’t let go of her, but his fingers stopped grinding into her arms. With less fury, he said, ‘You wanted to warn me.’

  ‘Yes.’ She didn’t smile; yet the inexplicable joy in her started to sing. ‘I wanted to warn you.

  ‘Why do you suppose I bothered? Why do you suppose I care what happens here? I didn’t know your family. I’d never been here before. Why do you suppose I was willing to come here and face you when I knew it was my fault you were in danger – when I knew you had every reason in the world to be angry at me or even hate me and there was nothing I could do to change any of it?’