Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Then: ‘What has he done with our supplies?’

  Kragen was right: none of the Alend supplies which had been translated to Orison that morning were visible in the Image.

  Before anyone else could speak, however, Artagel made his purpose clear. With the air of a man repeating an action he had already performed to the point of tedium, he held up a large sheet of parchment and turned it slowly so that it could be seen from all sides around him.

  There was writing on the parchment. Across the hillside where the mirror stood, the sun was setting, and the light wasn’t especially good. But Artagel was prepared for that difficulty. Around him, the ballroom blazed with torches.

  His message was easily read.

  What do you want done with Kragen’s supplies?

  The Prince stiffened; his hand fingered his sword. He watched narrowly as the Tor called for a piece of parchment and a charcoal stylus.

  The old lord wrote:

  Prince Kragen treats us honorably. Return his supplies.

  He showed his message to Prince Kragen, then handed the parchment to Master Barsonage.

  Deftly, Barsonage deposited the message in Artagel’s lap.

  Artagel read it, glanced around him, shrugged. He looked disappointed; nevertheless he didn’t balk. He waved his arms, shouted something; and at once men and women – conscripted villagers, apparently – began running stacks and piles of Alend possessions back into the center of the ballroom.

  Noticing the congested look on Prince Kragen’s face, Terisa gave a small, silent sigh of relief. He would have had little or no trouble believing that he had been betrayed – and then he would have had no choice but to attack the forces of Orison.

  Shortly, everything was ready. Saluting the empty air casually, Artagel left the Image so that the process of translation could begin.

  While guards and Alends gathered to distribute utensils and food and drink and bedding around the camp, Master Barsonage and his fellow Imagers went to work.

  Geraden joined them, using the curved glass he was accustomed to. Terisa, on the other hand, had no contribution to make. Master Vixix’s was the only flat glass of any size which the Congery had brought to supplement the three supply-mirrors. So, after watching the work for a while, she went to the most obviously weary of the three Masters – a frail, nearly antique individual named Harpool, who hadn’t borne the attack of the wolves especially well – and offered to take his place so that he could rest.

  He accepted gratefully and tottered away at once in the direction of a cup of wine and a nap before supper. When she faced his mirror, however, Terisa found to her chagrin that she could do nothing with it. She gestured and mumbled as Geraden had taught her; she reached toward the special frame of mind, the particular concentration, which had become familiar to her the previous evening and this morning. But now nothing happened.

  Geraden, Master Barsonage, and the other Imager were unaware of her problem – they were straining like cart-horses over their own translations – but everyone else in the vicinity noticed her difficulty and stopped to observe.

  ‘She’s lost it,’ a guard muttered. ‘Scared out of her.’

  ‘Give her time,’ snapped Ribuld loyally.

  This was too much – really too much. Two hard days on the road. Two bloody attacks on her life, or Geraden’s. Hours of mind-draining labor at Master Vixix’s mirror. And now her talent disappeared as if it had been switched off inside her.

  If King Joyse thought she could bear this on top of everything else, he was out of his mind.

  For no reason except that she absolutely couldn’t endure the shame of turning away, of showing off her failure in front of all those men, she tried to shift the Image.

  Almost without effort, the ballroom of Orison became the Fen of Cadwal – not because she chose that scene consciously, but because it happened to be present in her thoughts.

  Oh. She stared at it. The Fen of Cadwal. Her talent hadn’t disappeared.

  Then why—?

  She touched the frame of the glass; gestured; mumbled. Like a fool, she brought a second gush of swampwater pouring onto her boots. This time, there were no frogs.

  Oh.

  Then she understood. She couldn’t use a mirror unless she shifted the Image. Her power only functioned with Images she had placed in the glass herself.

  No, that didn’t make any sense. Why had she been able to use Master Vixix’s mirror yesterday without shifting it?

  Concentrating fiercely now, ignoring the men carrying supplies away, the men watching her, she let Master Harpool’s glass resume its natural Image. Then, with the brightly lit ballroom squarely in focus, she tried again to translate a hogshead of water.

  This time, it came through the mirror so promptly that she had to jump aside to avoid being crushed.

  Perfect. I love this. Who says Imagery is hard?

  Grinding her teeth to stifle a yell, Terisa continued translating supplies out of the ballroom until Castellan Norge announced that the Alends and the guard had everything they needed for the night. At once, she stamped away from the mirror, demanded wine from Ribuld, and drank two cups so quickly that they made her head spin.

  Nearly staggering with fatigue, Geraden moved to join her. At the moment, she considered it a blessing that he was too tired to notice her knotted state; too tired even to ask how her translations had gone. But later, after a hot supper had restored him somewhat, and they went to bed together, she forced herself to tell him what had happened. She needed an explanation, if he had one to give her.

  Her tone made him open his eyes to look at her sharply. He listened hard until she was finished; then he rolled onto his back and stared up at the cold stars.

  ‘Have you got any ideas?’ she asked.

  He took a long moment to think before he murmured, ‘I’m not sure.

  ‘This is all unmapped territory. Havelock is the only Adept the Congery has ever had – and he hasn’t contributed much to our general knowledge of Imagery in recent years. We don’t really understand people who can use mirrors they didn’t make. For most of us, the way it usually works – you already know this – is that there’s some kind of interaction between an Imager’s talent and his mirror while he’s shaping it. So no one can use that mirror except the man who made it.

  ‘As an experiment years ago, the Congery took several men who wanted to be Apts, but who obviously had no talent of any kind, and let them try to make mirrors. It didn’t work. Something always went wrong. You have to be an Imager to shape a mirror. And you have to be that particular Imager to shape that particular mirror.

  ‘I’m not sure why you couldn’t use Master Harpool’s glass, and then you could. But we know he has a special relationship with it. No ordinary Imager could use it at all, except him. My guess is, his hold on it was too recent. You had to replace his talent with yours, impose your power on it, and you couldn’t do that without shifting it first.

  ‘If I’m right, the reason you didn’t have any trouble with Master Vixix’s glass is, he hadn’t used it recently. In fact, he may never have done any translations with it at all. His interaction with it wasn’t fresh enough to get in your way.’

  Terisa had no way of knowing whether this explanation made sense or not. Softly, she said, ‘You make it sound like the glass is actually alive.’

  Geraden kissed her forehead. ‘I don’t know about that. But talent is certainly alive. The relationship between an Imager and his mirror must be alive in some way.’

  She thought about that for a long time after he went to sleep. Choose your risks more carefully. If she wanted to help fight Master Eremis – if she really intended to kill him – she needed to understand her own limitations.

  The next morning, before she and the Masters had finished returning supplies to Orison, the wind brought clouds up out of the south.

  The rack was thin at first, dull gray rather than oppressive; it cut off the sunlight without making the air noticeably colder. But as
the morning and the march wore on, the clouds thickened, turning the sky dull, bleeding away the colors of the landscape. A solid mass covered the Care from horizon to horizon; it weighed on the morale of the armies, pressing expectation into worry, worry into dread.

  At the same time, the wind became a few significant degrees warmer.

  Apprehensively, Terisa asked Geraden, ‘You don’t think Eremis has the power to translate weather against us, do you?’

  Geraden snorted. ‘If he could do translations on that scale, he wouldn’t need to fight us at all. He could just send out tornadoes until we collapsed.’

  That was a relief – of a sort. Eremis, also, had his limits. ‘In other words, he’s just lucky to get a cold spell like this when he needs it most.’

  ‘Or we are.’ Geraden looked at her, grinning with his teeth. ‘The worse things get, the more we know we’re doing what King Joyse wants. At the moment when Eremis looks most unbeatable, that’s when he’s most vulnerable.’

  Now it was her turn to snort. ‘Aren’t you the one who accused me of having a morbid imagination?’

  Geraden laughed, but he didn’t sound especially amused.

  Shortly after noon, the armies of Orison and Alend began to meet blood on the ground.

  Old bloodstains: weatherworn, gone black; some across broad swaths of hard dirt; some in sheltered crannies; some clinging like lichen to rough rocks. They mottled stones and soil like the marks of a disease – infrequent at first; but soon more common, showing in open ravines or accessible hillsides all over the complex terrain, in pieces of earth where men could have fought for their lives.

  ‘The Perdon,’ Prince Kragen pronounced grimly. ‘His men fought alone here against High King Festten. They were trapped here, hunted down in this’ – he swallowed an obscenity – ‘this maze, and massacred.

  ‘They could have saved themselves. They could have fled to Orison. If we understand the High King rightly, he never intended to bring his force anywhere but here. But the Perdon did not know that. He knew only that he must fight for Mordant – and that he could not trust his King. So he led Cadwal here, where High King Festten most wished to go.

  ‘He was a valiant man,’ the Prince rasped, ‘badly betrayed. I hope that he did not learn the truth before he died. It would have been unutterably bitter.’

  But there were no bodies.

  No remnants of weapons and gear.

  No bones.

  The entire region had been cleaned.

  Carrion eaters might have emptied the mail, picked the iron clean; some of them might have dragged bones away to gnaw. Nevertheless the dead should have left more behind than just their blood.

  Scouts brought back no word of Cadwal. Everywhere the men rode, they met old blood. In gullies protected from wind or rain, they found the marks of boots and hooves, running in all directions, trampled everywhere. But none of them encountered any evidence of High King Festten’s army anywhere.

  The Tor voiced the opinion that this was impossible. Castellan Norge and Prince Kragen sent out more scouts, doubled and tripled the number of men scouring the hillsides, the dry waterbeds, the stands of stubborn thicket. Yet the scouts discovered nothing, learned nothing.

  And an hour or two before evening the vanguard of Orison’s army and Alend’s arrived in sight of Esmerel.

  Master Eremis’ ‘ancestral seat’ sat at the head of a wedge-shaped valley, almost directly against the sheer defile which brought a brook running into the valley. A bowman on the roof of the manor could have hit the valleysides in three directions. From the defile, however, the valley spread wide until it was more than broad enough to accommodate the armies approaching it. Its brook, and the expanse of its floor, gave the impression that it must be one of the most pleasant places in the Care of Tor.

  Its walls, on the other hand, were high and rugged; impassable more than not. Blunt outcroppings of rock supported them like ramparts. And they didn’t decline as the wedge spread wider. Instead, they reared their black stones against the sky until they ended abruptly, hooking inward before they stopped as if to constrict the wide foot of the valley.

  There was no blood here. Nearly a mile outside the valley, all evidence of the Perdon’s life and death disappeared.

  The valley itself was empty.

  Esmerel was a low building, for reasons which were obvious to the eye: even in this dull, cloud-locked light, the manor’s flat-roofed, rambling profile suited its surroundings, providing enough contrast to be distinctive, enough self-effacement to be harmonious. Terisa had heard from Geraden that much of the house was belowground, anchored in the rock of the valley. Instinctively, she believed that – although she couldn’t forget the sealed window and the faint light in the room where Eremis had chained her. Maybe Nyle’s cell was on the aboveground level. Certainly the window was. It shouldn’t be hard to locate.

  With Prince Kragen and his captains, the Tor and Castellan Norge, Geraden and Master Barsonage, she studied Esmerel’s front up the length of the valley. From this distance, she couldn’t make out what gave the walls their texture; but she could see the portico clearly, supported over the main entrance by sturdy pillars.

  The door was closed. All the windows were shuttered and dark. No one moved around the building, or in the neat horseyard on one side of the house, or along the brook. Under the dark clouds, the whole place had an air of desertion, as if it had been forgotten a long time ago.

  The ground, however, still held the scars of hundreds of horses, hundreds of men.

  After a while, Prince Kragen asked, ‘What do you think, my lord Tor?’

  ‘I think,’ the Tor muttered as if his confidence were ebbing, ‘we must look inside.’

  ‘It’s a trap, my lord,’ commented Norge.

  ‘Of course,’ the Tor sighed. ‘Is that not why we have come, Geraden, my lady Terisa?’ He glanced at them morosely. ‘To place our heads in the trap?’

  For some reason, Geraden’s mount distrusted the valley and tried to shy away. Reining his horse uncomfortably, he said, ‘The only way we can find out what we’re up against is to go look at it, my lord.’

  Terisa couldn’t take her eyes off Esmerel. It held her as Master Eremis himself did, full of promises and destruction. She had been a prisoner there. Had met Vagel; seen Nyle. Eremis had almost had his way with her—

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said without meaning to speak aloud. ‘Let’s go look at it.’

  Castellan Norge shrugged. The Tor blew his nose on the hem of his cloak.

  Prince Kragen gave Terisa a bow which suggested either mockery or respect.

  As if no one had actually given any commands, orders began to sift back to the main body of the armies. While the vanguard advanced on Esmerel, the Alend soldiers and the guard followed until they were well within the relative shelter of the valley, nearly halfway to the defile; then, with a company of five hundred horsemen, the vanguard pulled ahead, and the two armies – Alend on one side of the brook, Orison on the other – began to ready themselves for camp or battle. The men closest to the foot of the valley started throwing up a precautionary earthen breastwork from wall to wall.

  In silence, the vanguard approached Esmerel.

  ‘Do you know?’ Master Barsonage said to no one in particular, talking simply to steady himself, ‘I had never seen this manor until Geraden made an Image of it in Adept Havelock’s glass. I am astonished now to observe how accurately he was able to envision it.’

  No one in particular listened to the mediator.

  The riders continued to advance. Now Terisa could tell that the pillars of the portico were redwood; that the sides of the manor were built of waxed boards supported by stone ribs and columns. A beautiful design – but the place was still vacant. Esmerel’s air of abandonment grew deeper as the riders moved farther into the gloom of the valley walls.

  All the horses became restive: prancing; stamping; sawing against their reins.

  Prince Kragen’s standard-bearer winded a ca
ll on his battle-horn, a fierce run of notes which nevertheless sounded forlorn and maybe doomed as it echoed back from the ramparts. Nothing shifted in Esmerel. None of the windows winked or opened. Under its portico, the door looked heavy enough to withstand anybody.

  Abruptly, Geraden winced; Prince Kragen spat a curse; and all at once Terisa could smell what was disturbing the horses.

  The sweet, rank, nauseating reek of blood and old rot, neglected death, flesh gone to carrion.

  ‘What’s in there?’ one of the captains asked as if he had forgotten that everyone could hear him.

  ‘Lucky you,’ Ribuld muttered in response. ‘Lucky us. We’re going to find out.’

  As soon as she recognized the stench, however, Terisa lost her fear. She had been expecting something like this. A spiritual attack as much as physical. Adrenaline pumped through her; energy filled her muscles. This was Master Eremis’ domain: he was in his element here. Everything that happened now would happen because he intended it.

  First she said, ‘It wasn’t like this four days ago. I couldn’t smell any of this.’ Then she said, ‘This is where I saw Nyle. Inside.’

  His face twisting, Geraden surged toward the door.

  ‘Geraden!’

  The Tor’s shout snapped like a whip, jerked Geraden back. Fierce and pale, he wheeled to face the old lord.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve got to find him.’

  The Tor didn’t drop Geraden’s gaze. ‘Castellan Norge,’ he coughed, ‘open that door. Secure the rooms inside. We will enter when you signal for us.’

  Norge saluted. At least three hundred guards rode away to form a protective perimeter around the manor and the vanguard. Some men dismounted to tend the horses. The rest followed Castellan Norge on foot.

  In combat formation, swords ready, they approached the door.

  It wasn’t bolted. When Norge lifted the latch, the door swung inward, opening on darkness.

  He and his men entered the house.

  Terisa scanned the harsh rims of the valley. For no clear reason, she expected to see men there: Cadwals clutching their weapons; an army moving to surround the forces of Orison and Alend. Esmerel was a trap. But that didn’t make any sense. She had been a prisoner here just a few days ago. Master Eremis had his own laborium here, his furnaces and glassworks. He had spoken to High King Festten here. It was inconceivable that he would surrender the Seat of his power to his enemies.