Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Sure. Of course. So where was he?

  Where had she gone wrong?

  Abruptly, the Castellan reappeared.

  The gloom – and the fact that he was a few dozen yards away – confused Terisa’s sight. She had the distinct impression that he had gone white. He held his arms stiffly at his sides; he moved as if he carried something breakable in his chest.

  ‘My lord Tor—’ His voice caught.

  Peering at the portico and the door and Norge, the Tor asked, ‘Is it safe?’

  Norge shook his head, nodded. His throat worked. ‘You need to see this. They’re all here.’

  No, Terisa thought blindly, don’t go in there, don’t go, it’s too dangerous. But Geraden had already flung himself off his mount, was already running—

  The Castellan stopped him, made him wait.

  The Tor glanced wearily up at the sky. ‘The truth is,’ he rumbled, ‘that three days in the saddle have done little to heal my belly.’ The stubborn resolution which had brought him here appeared to be eroding. ‘I fear that once I dismount I will never get up onto my horse again.’

  Prince Kragen’s gaze shone darkly. ‘I will go, my lord Tor.’

  The Tor passed a hand over his face. The skin of his cheeks seemed to pull away from the bones, giving him a skeletal aspect for a moment despite his fat.

  ‘We will all go, my lord Prince,’ he sighed.

  No, Terisa thought as if she were panicking, it’s a trap, Eremis is in there, he’s already killed all Norge’s men. Yet what she felt wasn’t panic. Instead of crying out against Norge’s pallor, Norge’s distress, she swung off her nag and went after Geraden.

  ‘Nyle,’ he muttered urgently when she joined him – the only explanation she needed.

  Heaving against his mortal weight, the Tor got his leg over the saddle, stumbled to the ground. For a moment, he sagged there as if his capacity to support himself were crumbling. But then he called up his fading strength and lumbered into motion.

  With Prince Kragen, half a dozen Alend soldiers, Master Barsonage, and Ribuld, the Tor approached Esmerel on foot.

  Terisa was right about Norge: his face had turned the color of old ash. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to account for himself. When the Tor and Prince Kragen neared him, he pivoted harshly and stalked back into the manor.

  They’re all here.

  Holding Geraden’s hand to steady herself – and to restrain him from anything wild – Terisa entered Esmerel behind the old lord and the Prince.

  Inside, the smell of blood and rot grew worse. Much worse.

  Instead of fainting, Terisa tightened her grip on herself and went ahead.

  The forehall was empty except for Castellan Norge and his men. They lined the walls, pale and grim, mirroring his distress. No one else was there – no one to account for the damage which nailed boots and mud had done to the once-fine floor. Some of the marks in the woodwork looked like swordcuts.

  Full of misery, the Tor started for the nearest doorway off the forehall.

  ‘Empty,’ Norge croaked to stop him. ‘Damage like this.’ He gestured at the floor. ‘And blood. There was a fight here. But there’s nobody left.’

  ‘It was like this,’ Geraden breathed. ‘In the Image I made.’

  Master Barsonage nodded confirmation. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘What do you want me to see?’ the Tor demanded of Norge.

  The Castellan pointed toward a wide staircase sweeping downward. His arm shook until he snatched it back to his side.

  ‘The cellars!’ Geraden spat.

  Norge and the Tor, Prince Kragen and Master Barsonage, Terisa and Geraden followed a line of guards to the stairs.

  The staircase blazed with light: the Castellan’s men had lit lamps down the walls. From the head of the stairs, the whole descent was visible until it reached bottom and spread out into the complex underground levels of Esmerel.

  The stairs were like the floors: marked, stained, scarred. From below rose the reek of death, as palpable as a fist.

  On both sides of the passage at the foot of the descent, corpses had been stacked like cordwood.

  Under the dried blood, among the stiff, gaping wounds, the bodies wore the armor and insignia of the Perdon’s men.

  Forgetting caution – forgetting sanity – Geraden sprang down the stairs three at a time. Headlong into a storehouse of the dead, he rushed to find his brother.

  Terisa and Ribuld went after him, with Prince Kragen close behind them.

  Norge’s men were already in the cellars, lighting more lamps, opening new rooms to look for signs of life. Most of them fought grimly against nausea; quite a few had already succumbed, adding a patina of bile to the general stench. Rats ran everywhere, so busy feasting that they hardly noticed the intrusion of light and boots. As soon as she reached the foot of the stairs, Terisa noticed one stack of bodies that obviously hadn’t been soldiers. They looked more like servants – the men, women, and children who belonged to Esmerel.

  Trying to keep up with Geraden, she hurried on.

  Corpses were piled everywhere, neatly, deliberately. High King Festten had annihilated the Perdon. And he had brought the Perdon’s dead here. Stacked them here, left them to rot. Where the defenders of Mordant might find them.

  ‘Nyle!’

  Geraden’s yell died without echo in the halls, absorbed by flesh and maggots and rot.

  The belowground rooms were much larger than she would have guessed. One had obviously been a library – but all the books were gone. One might have been intended to display artwork – but all the paintings or sculptures were gone. There were workshops without tools, kitchens gutted of equipment. The people who had broken into Esmerel and slaughtered the manor’s retainers had stripped it of everything valuable.

  Ahead of her, Geraden faced a closed door. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Wine cellar,’ a guard answered as if he had just finished puking. ‘Doesn’t have any lamps, so we left it. Looks empty.’

  No lamps, Terisa thought. That made sense. Wine needed to be kept cool. Lamps put out heat.

  Geraden hauled the heavy door open.

  Striding hard behind Terisa, Prince Kragen snapped, ‘Bring light!’

  With her and Ribuld, he followed Geraden into the cellar.

  The air was colder here – much colder – therefore less foul. In this unseasonable chill, with no one to care what happened, the temperature had dropped below freezing. She was bitterly sure that Eremis hadn’t left any wine behind to be ruined.

  Using the reflected illumination from the doorway, Geraden moved among the wineracks.

  Guards arrived carrying lamps; they entered the cellar.

  When she saw what Eremis had left behind here, Terisa stopped to consider the advantages of passing out.

  Preserved by the cold, more bodies had been stacked on the wineracks. Judging by the sigils on their mail, they were the Perdon’s captains. Here, however, they hadn’t been simply piled up like lumber. Instead, the bodies had been arranged in grotesque and degrading postures, as if death had caught them in a devils’ dance, abusing themselves, copulating with each other, performing intricate atrocities. The shadows cast by the motion of the lamps gave the impression that the men were still alive, yearning toward a last taste of pleasure or pain.

  On the corkage table in the middle of the cellar lay the Perdon himself.

  Terisa recognized his bald pate, his red, thick eyebrows, his stained and shaggy moustache, his hairy ears; she recognized the passion in his glazed, staring eyes. It would have been impossible for her to mistake the man who had once helped Prince Kragen and Artagel save her from Gart.

  The way he had died sickened her to the bottom of her heart.

  His limbs and torso were cross-hatched with cuts, but none of them had caused his death. No, an honest end in battle apparently wasn’t satisfactory for an enemy of Cadwal, a man who had pitted himself against High King Festten all his life. The Perdon had been killed by
a corkscrew driven between his teeth through the back of his throat into the wooden table, so that he lay pinned there until he drowned on his own blood.

  Passing out had advantages, no question about it. Oblivion might give Terisa the comfort she craved, if she could fade into it and never come back.

  At the same time, she was so angry that when she bit down her lip to keep herself quiet she drew blood.

  White with strain and horror, Geraden wheeled on the nearest guard. ‘Where’s Nyle?’

  ‘Not here,’ the guard answered thickly. ‘Unless he’s one of the bodies. No one’s here.’ A moment later, he added, ‘None of the rooms down here was used for a cell.’

  Then someone bumped Terisa so hard that she stumbled. The Tor brushed past without noticing her, shouldered Prince Kragen aside to approach the corkage table.

  For a long moment while everyone watched him, he slumped against the edge of the table; the courage and determination seemed to leak out of him, as if he were sinking in on himself like a deflated bladder.

  ‘Oh, my old friend. My old friend.’

  In a constricted voice, Geraden muttered, ‘He was never here. You were never here.’ Apparently, he was talking to Terisa. ‘We all made the same assumption, but we were wrong. When High King Festten came here, he had to kill Esmerel’s servants and maybe even Eremis’ relatives to get into the house. Eremis hasn’t used this place for years.’

  Abruptly, the Tor raised his head and brought up a wail like the cry of his damaged guts. Terisa was behind him: she couldn’t see what he was doing. She didn’t realize what he had done until a terrible convulsion shook him from head to foot and then his right fist sprang into the air, brandishing the corkscrew which had killed the Perdon.

  As if he had no idea what was going on around him, Geraden muttered, ‘We’ve come to the wrong place. This is just a trap. It doesn’t even give us a chance to strike back.’

  With a tearing groan, the Tor lifted the Perdon’s rigid corpse. When he turned, Terisa saw that his face was streaked with tears. In the lamplight, he looked as pallid as the dead.

  ‘And you wanted to make an alliance with that monster,’ he cried to his friend’s body. But he didn’t expect an answer. Jerking his head at the ceiling, he shouted suddenly, ‘Are you laughing at him now, Eremis? Does it amuse you to do this to a man who believed you?’

  Oh, Eremis was laughing, all right. Terisa was sure of it.

  Dumbly, she went to the Tor’s side and helped support his quivering arms until Ribuld and some of the other guards came to take the Perdon away.

  When she and Geraden went back outside, they found that the weather had turned to snow.

  The air was as dark as evening, prematurely dim: the snow fell so thickly that it swallowed the light. Swirling inside the walls of the valley, it blanketed the atmosphere until she couldn’t see five feet past the edge of the portico – a snowfall as heavy and thorough as a torrent, and yet composed of delicate, dry flakes, bits of powder so fine they stung the skin. The guards at the door had lit torches which the snow smothered as soon as they left the shelter of the portico. Everyone else in the valley, twelve thousand fighting men, had been erased from sight. Already the white cold accumulating on the ground was two or three inches thick.

  Terisa shivered with a chill that felt almost metaphysical. She had dreamed once of snow; and because of that dream she had accepted Geraden’s invitation to leave her old life behind.

  With Castellan Norge and Master Barsonage, Prince Kragen came out of the house, gusting curses. ‘By the stars,’ he growled, ‘if this snow does not blind our enemies as it does us, we are dead men. As matters stand, we will be hard pressed to locate our own encampment.’

  Norge struggled to recover his essential equanimity. ‘I think we should do that right away, my lord Prince. If we don’t, we might get stuck here for the night. The armies need us. And I can’t ask my guards to stay with that many corpses.’

  The Prince nodded. ‘I will instruct men to string lines to keep the horses together.’ Followed by his soldiers, he strode away into the snowfall and disappeared as if the flakes swept his reality away.

  Rather aimlessly, Norge commented, ‘The Tor is resting. I’ll go get him. But I don’t think he’ll be able to ride.’

  No one answered. Scowling uncharacteristically, the Castellan went back into the manor.

  Master Barsonage cleared his throat. ‘It was a natural mistake, Geraden. We all made it. What do we know of Master Eremis, but that Esmerel is his ancestral home? What is more reasonable than the assumption that he built his power here – held his prisoners here?’

  ‘Yes, it was reasonable,’ Geraden said in a bleak tone.

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Terisa hadn’t intended to speak; she didn’t know what she was going to say until she said it. ‘King Joyse told me to think.’ Her mind was full of the Perdon and the Tor, and the implications of snow. ‘Esmerel was too obvious.

  ‘We had to come here. We didn’t know where else to go. But we should have known he wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘And now we’re stuck,’ Geraden finished.

  No one argued with him.

  Guards brought horses up to the portico. The mounts already had snow caked in their manes, on their withers; the flakes were so thick and cold that the horses’ heat turned it to ice as it melted. But the wind kept the hoods and shoulders of the guards clear.

  Men began to file out of the house. After a while, Castellan Norge and Ribuld brought the Tor to the portico. Physically, the old lord had never looked worse. His limbs were as frail as a child’s; his hands shook as if the chill had already reached his bones; his skin was the color of moldy potatoes.

  Nevertheless the glare in his eyes was unquenchable. His outrage at what had been done to the Perdon sustained him when his body and his ordinary courage failed.

  As long as she ignored the rest of him and watched only his eyes, Terisa was able to keep her grasp on hope.

  Norge was right: the Tor couldn’t bear to be mounted again. But Ribuld stayed with him, and the Castellan assigned other guards to his side; shuffling heavily, he moved away into the snow. Like Prince Kragen, he seemed to vanish from the world almost immediately.

  At a word from Norge, Terisa, Geraden, and Master Barsonage climbed onto their beasts. Led by guards who were connected with lines to other guards, invisible in the impenetrable snowfall, they rode away from Esmerel to search for their encampment.

  Swirling snowflakes burned her eyes. They prickled on her cheeks like bits of premonition; hints sharp enough to cut, cold enough to numb the damage they did.

  Despite the caution of the riders, they reached their part of the camp sooner than she would have believed possible. The men of Orison and the Alend soldiers had laid out a protected position for their commanders near Esmerel and the head of the valley, away from the exposed foot of the wedge; so Terisa and Geraden, Master Barsonage and Castellan Norge didn’t have as far to go as the rest of the guards. And tents had already been set up for them: Master Harpool and his companion had apparently been at work with their mirrors for some time, translating equipment and supplies from Orison.

  Master Barsonage and Geraden hurried to join them.

  From horseback, Terisa saw bonfires and torches around her, some of them as much as twenty or thirty feet away. Maybe the snowfall was thinning. Even so, it was at least four or five inches deep. And – unless her sense of time had failed completely – sunset was still an hour or so away. Even if the snowfall was thinning, there might be a foot or more on the ground before night.

  A guard urged her to dismount and enter a large tent which had been raised for the Tor and Castellan Norge; but she stayed where she was, trying to read the suggestions in the snow, until the Tor himself reached the camp. Then she got down and went with him into shelter.

  A servant took his cloak, then brought food and wine, which the old lord rejected with a grimace. Supported by Ribuld and another guard, he lowered himsel
f into a camp chair. He had snow in his eyebrows, snow on his head. His cheeks were the color of worn out ice. Ribuld knelt in front of him, offered to pull off his boots; he declined that comfort as well. ‘I must go out again soon,’ he murmured. ‘There is no escaping it.’

  ‘My lord Tor,’ Ribuld said in a tone Terisa hadn’t heard him use since Argus’ death, ‘you don’t need to go out. Prince Kragen and Castellan Norge will come to you.’

  ‘Ah, true,’ sighed the Tor. ‘But if I remain here, who will give the King’s guard my blessing? I must visit every campfire tonight, every squadron, so that every man will know his bravery is valued and his loyalty, precious.

  ‘No, Ribuld, I will wear my boots. I do not mean to take them off again.’

  Ribuld bowed and withdrew to stand with Terisa. Around his scar, the veteran’s face was tight with unexpected grief.

  ‘Ribuld—?’ she tried to ask; but she couldn’t find the words she wanted. All she knew about him was that he had been Argus’ friend; he liked and served Artagel; he seemed to enjoy suggestive conversation. And he had killed Saddith to save Lebbick. He would have saved Lebbick from Gart, if he could.

  ‘My lady,’ he said, almost snarling to control himself, ‘my home’s in the Care of Tor. Not far from Marshalt. I fought for the Tor – that’s how he knows my name – and for the Perdon, too, before I joined the King’s guard.’ He looked at her as if, like her, he couldn’t find the right words.

  Maybe she understood. ‘Take good care of him,’ she replied softly. ‘He needs you more than Geraden and I do.’

  The twist of Ribuld’s expression could have meant anything.

  Terisa left the tent and went to see if Master Harpool required help.

  As she and the Masters finished translating the last of the tents and bedrolls, the snowfall abruptly lessened. She felt cold to the bone; her face was wet and numb; her fingertips left trails of moisture down the frame of Master Harpool’s glass. Nevertheless the easing of the snow caught at her attention like a call of horns—