Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Riders were coming in through that gap, driving their horses hard. And Prince Kragen was there. From this distance, he appeared to be doing everything at once: rallying his men; finishing off the incursion of Cadwals; searching over the new jumble of rocks for survivors. To her eyes, each of his actions seemed as quick as a thrust, as decisive as a sword; the precision with which he used his men made Norge look like a blundering lout by comparison.

  He was worthy – oh, he was worthy! Surely King Joyse could see that. Surely her father in this new manifestation could see and appreciate the qualities which made the Alend Contender precious to her. Prince Kragen deserved—

  He deserved to be right.

  Almost as an act of self-mortification, to humble herself so that she wouldn’t hope so hard, fear so much, Elega forced her eyes to stay on the right side of the valley foot, not the left.

  The question of what to feel was more difficult. She couldn’t resolve it by an act of will.

  Pride and panic: vindication and alarm. Suddenly, as much ‘out of nowhere’ as if translation were involved, the King had proved himself. He had made real the interpretations of himself which until now had been only ideas – concepts put forward by people like Terisa and Geraden for reasons of their own. He had shown that he merited the risks she had taken in his name, arguing for him against reason, common sense; he had justified the forbearance she had won from Prince Kragen and the Alend Monarch. In the privacy of her own thoughts, she understood why he had found it necessary to use her like a hop-board piece in his plans, rather than to hazard the truth with her. She was proud of him, there beside his standard, blue eyes blazing; as ready as a hawk to strike or defend.

  She was proud of him – and afraid that she had failed him.

  In a sense, she was playing his own game against him. At her urging, Prince Kragen and the Alend Monarch had made decisions concerning this war on the basis of knowledge and speculation which they hadn’t shared with any representative of Orison.

  Her purpose – as distinct from Kragen’s or Margonal’s – had been twofold: to make the forces of Alend wait, withhold their siege, long enough for King Joyse’s plans to ripen; and to put pressure on the King, pressure which would force him to accept an alliance with Alend. By keeping secrets from her father, she reinforced Prince Kragen’s position.

  Now, today, here, what she had done came to the test. She would be right, as the Prince deserved – if for no other reason than because he had trusted her. Or she would be wrong.

  Mordant itself might stand or fall on the outcome.

  She could choose to keep her eyes away from Prince Kragen, away from the riders boiling into the valley on the left; but she couldn’t choose to ignore her fear. The more pride she felt in King Joyse and the Prince, the more she dreaded the possibility that she had helped bring them both to ruin.

  Maybe that was why she looked her worst in sunlight. The sun couldn’t expose her secrets, of course; but it seemed to lay bare the fact that she had them.

  Under the circumstances, she considered it fortunate that no one was paying much attention to her.

  Unconscious of himself, Geraden muttered, ‘Get up. Get up.’ Everyone had seen the Tor go down; no one had seen, the old lord regain his feet. For that matter, no one had seen any of the Masters emerge from the rocks. ‘Get up. We need you.’

  Terisa held his arm with both hands, clung to him. Nevertheless she kept her eyes averted as if she couldn’t bear to watch what he was seeing. Facing to the left of the valley’s foot, she asked softly, ‘Who is that?’

  Geraden apparently had no idea what she meant. And Elega was determined not to look. She needed a way to live with her fear, a way to endure her failure when it came.

  Abruptly, it became obvious that Castellan Norge was done with the Cadwals attacking the Masters. Shouts were raised, and some of the men relaxed. Bowmen hurried out of the rocks to retrieve their shafts; riders sped away, some to deliver messages, others to help the Prince. Master Barsonage appeared, holding a glass nearly as tall as himself. Behind him came Master Harpool, doddering painfully. Two guards carried the old Imager’s mirror for him.

  Together, five or six men picked up the Tor’s corpse; as gently as they could, they set it in a rude litter. Then they lifted the litter to other men on horseback. Ribuld’s body also was put in a litter to accompany the Tor’s. Castellan Norge mounted his horse, placed himself at the head of his riders.

  In procession, like a cortege, the Castellan and his men came up the valley toward King Joyse.

  ‘My lord,’ Geraden sighed – an exhalation with his teeth clenched down on it hard enough to draw blood. ‘My poor lord.’

  Terisa shook his arm; maybe she was trying to distract him. ‘Geraden, look. Who is that?’

  Involuntarily, the lady Elega turned.

  At once, she saw that the horsemen attempting to enter the valley were fighting for their lives—

  —fighting for their lives against the forces of Cadwal outside. She had assumed that they, too, were Cadwals; but she was wrong. High King Festten opposed them bitterly: seen through the breaches in the piled ridge, it appeared that he had sent his entire mounted strength to destroy them.

  She saw Prince Kragen spur his charger into a gallop, leading several hundred Alends to the defense of the riders; headlong against thousands of Cadwals.

  At the same time, King Joyse shouted to the nearest captain, ‘Get archers down there! I want bows up in those rockpiles! I want an ambush in each of those gaps! We cannot keep Cadwal out, but we can make the High King cautious. We must not allow him to mass his men inside those piles!’

  Cupping his hands on either side of his mouth to make his voice ring, he added, ‘Support the Prince!’

  With her jaw hanging down like a madwoman’s, Elega saw that one of the riders Prince Kragen was risking himself to help bore the dull grape-on-wheat colors of the Termigan.

  The Termigan?

  What in the name of all sanity was he doing here?

  ‘The Termigan!’ Geraden breathed to Terisa. ‘I don’t believe it. He came after all.’

  Elega was too surprised to notice that the catapults were ready to throw again. And she certainly didn’t notice that one of them behind her had been reaimed toward King Joyse’s pennon. She hardly heard the flat thudding of the arms, or the thin, high scream of scattershot through the air. At the moment, her only concern was that none of the engines could strike at Prince Kragen or the Termigan.

  She didn’t know how lucky she was when the catapult behind her failed to throw.

  Instead of attacking, it leaned forward and toppled crookedly off the rampart, tearing itself to scrap on the rocks as it fell. From the valley rim, a group of Prince Kragen’s climbers raised an inaudible cheer, then turned to defend themselves from Cadwals arriving too late to save the engine.

  King Joyse, however, seemed to notice that as he noticed everything else. With a glance upward, he said to himself, ‘Six left. Progress is made, friend Festten. Be warned.’

  Unfortunately, the siege engines had already cost him hundreds of men, dead or hurt.

  Elega held her breath, watching Prince Kragen hurl himself against High King Festten’s horsemen. Hadn’t Geraden said that the Termigan refused to come? She gnawed the inside of her cheek. Yes, that was what Geraden had said. Yet he was here. She felt a chill, despite the air’s relative warmth. What new disaster had he come to report?

  Who were those people in the center of his formation, those cloaked figures that didn’t fight, that didn’t do anything except ride where the Termigan’s men took them? One of them seemed ordinary enough. The other was huge—

  Echoes brought the sounds of battle to her, the strife of swords and shields. Piled rock hid most of the fighting: Prince Kragen had ventured through the gap and was out of sight behind the debris of the avalanche. He didn’t have enough men to oppose that many Cadwals, not nearly enough. Only the speed of his charge could save him, its unexpected
ness. But a mixed group of guards and soldiers was almost in position to help him, two hundred horse in the lead, half a thousand foot pelting furiously behind. And when the Termigan had brought all his people into the valley, he wheeled his mount, called most of his strength after him, and returned to aid the Prince.

  Together, nearly side-by-side, Prince Kragen and the man who had declared flatly, I trust no Alend, fought their way back toward the bulk of King Joyse’s army.

  The rough mounds close on either side saved them: all that broken stone constricted the Cadwal countercharge; an abundance of scattered rubble where the chasm used to be prevented riders from moving in tight ranks. And when the High King’s forces tried to enter the valley again, archers began loosing their shafts from high up among the rocks.

  Prince Kragen and the Termigan brought each other to safety as if they had never been anything except comrades.

  ‘Who’re those people with him,’ asked Terisa, ‘the ones in the cloaks – the ones who didn’t fight?’

  Elega’s heart began to soar. Who dared to speak of failure, where King Joyse and his daughters were at work?

  The men bearing the Tor’s body, and Ribuld’s, arrived at King Joyse’s pennon before the Termigan did; and King Joyse met them as if he weren’t in the midst of a war, with catapults and unexplained arrivals to worry about; met them as if for that moment at least nothing was more important to him than the burden they carried, his old friend’s corpse.

  ‘He saved us,’ said Master Barsonage. The Imager seemed too weary to dismount; he looked too haggard to say, my lord King. ‘He and Ribuld—’ The mediator’s voice lapsed into grief.

  ‘That’s true, my lord King,’ Castellan Norge reported without his usual ease. ‘They were just two, but they hit at the right time. They did just enough damage, caused just enough confusion—’ Like Barsonage, Norge seemed to be losing his voice. ‘Without them, we wouldn’t have saved the mediator. Or Master Harpool, either.’

  Dully, as if he had said the same thing a dozen times, Master Harpool murmured, ‘My wife promised to curse me if I don’t return. She was that angry—’ His nose was running; but he didn’t have anything to wipe it with, so he snuffled loudly.

  King Joyse looked at the Tor’s body; he started to speak. Nevertheless he couldn’t: he was breathing too hard. As if the sight of his friend’s crushed head hit him harder than he was expecting, dealt him a blow for which he had thought he was braced and now found he wasn’t, not braced at all despite the fact that he must have seen this moment coming, his chest began to heave, and he fought for air urgently, in great gasps. To stifle the sound, he clamped his hands over his mouth, against the sides of his nose; but he couldn’t restrain his harsh respiration, his labor against grief.

  After all, he wasn’t young anymore. He had been alone for a long time; comforted – or at least understood – by only mad Havelock and lost Quillon. And the cost of his efforts to save Mordant kept growing. Without the Tor, there would have been no Mordant, no kingdom to defend; no King to be so profligate with the blood of those who loved him.

  Fiercely, he pulled his hands down from his face, gripped the side of the Tor’s litter. He seemed to want to lift his old friend in his arms, pick the Tor’s body up out of death. But of course the corpse was too heavy. Four men were needed simply to support its slack weight.

  Involuntarily, King Joyse sank to his knees in the trampled slush.

  Terisa and Geraden started toward him without thinking; their desire to console him somehow was obvious in their faces. The lady Elega stopped them, however. She put a finger to her lips. Then, smiling despite the Tor’s end and her father’s sorrow, she pointed toward the riders approaching the pennon.

  Prince Kragen. The Termigan. And the two cloaked figures, with everything about them except their size wrapped and hidden, kept secret.

  Prince Kragen had a few battlemarks on him: some blood, plainly not his own; lines like galls across his mail. He looked worthy to Elega, worthy beyond question, like a man who had met the consequences of his most hazardous decisions and deserved his victory. The Termigan was in worse condition, gaunt from hard travel, strained and bitter around his eyes. Yet he, too, had an air of worth, almost of triumph, as if he knew now that he had done the right thing. His hard, flinty face held no reproach.

  ‘My lord King,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to help you. I’ve only got two hundred men – all I could spare. But they’re enough.’

  ‘Enough and more,’ put in Prince Kragen, kinder toward the King’s grief. ‘Is it not true that Mordant itself began with only two hundred men?’

  ‘Father.’ Myste pushed her hood back from her face, raised her strong gaze and her scarred cheek into the sunlight reaching past the valley rim.

  ‘Myste.’

  Terisa was at once so surprised and so thrilled that she nearly shouted; her whole body seemed tight with pleasure.

  ‘You’re all right.’

  Geraden nearly burst out laughing in delight. Men all around the King’s pennon whispered Myste’s name as if it were powerful and dangerous.

  ‘With the Termigan’s aid,’ she said, ‘I have brought your champion.’

  While the reaction to her appearance spread, the huge figure beside her dropped his cloak, revealing bright, blank armor scorched black in several places, burned open twice, with a flat, impenetrable plate over his face. Strange guns hung on his hips; the rifle with which he had blasted his way out of Orison was strapped to his back.

  The circle of guards and soldiers stared. A number of them grabbed at their swords; a few unslung bows.

  But the champion didn’t make any threatening moves. Slowly, he reached one hand to his head, touched a stud in the side of his helmet. Without a sound, his visor slid up and away, exposing his face.

  It was a man’s face, ordinary in its details: pale eyes; a large nose, crooked as if it had been broken more than once; tight lips above an assertive jaw. Only the strange way he moved his mouth when he spoke betrayed his origins.

  ‘My lord King,’ he said in an alien voice, a tone with an incongruous resemblance to birdsong, ‘I’m lost on this God-rotting planet. Myste says it’s not your fault I’m here. Says the only people who might be able to help me are your Imagers. But you can’t help me while you’re stuck in this mess.

  ‘I’m willing to do what I can. For her. On the off-chance your Imagers can help me.’

  ‘So that’s what it meant,’ Terisa breathed, her tone hushed with relief and wonder. But at the moment even Geraden didn’t have any attention to spare for her.

  Kneeling beside the Tor, King Joyse had jerked his head up at the sound of Myste’s voice, had stared at her and the champion with joy dawning in his blue eyes. Now he rose to his feet as if all his courage had come back. At first, however, he didn’t speak to her, or to Prince Kragen and the Termigan, or even to the champion. Instead, he addressed Norge briskly.

  ‘Several things, Castellan. Provide for my lord Termigan’s men. Get those that need care to the physicians. Those that do not, assign among our horsemen. If I judge rightly’ – he glanced toward the foot of the valley – ‘High King Festten is regrouping. He will attack again shortly. We need riders desperately.

  ‘My dear friend the Tor,’ he continued without pausing, ‘must be given an honorable grave outside Esmerel. Command as many men as necessary, bury him well. And the Perdon beside him – two faithful and valorous lords who spent their lives so that we will have a chance to save our world. If we succeed, their names will be praised before any other.’

  Then, in a rush, he left the Tor’s litter, pulled Myste off her mount, and hugged her to his heart.

  At once, the champion, Darsint, dismounted; he seemed to think Myste might need his protection. When he had pushed the horses out of his way, however, he stopped, apparently content to leave Myste and the King alone.

  Watching her sister and her father, Elega’s only regret was that she had never been able to smile the way they
did, with that clarity, as if they were able to go through life with their innocence intact.

  ‘Dear child,’ King Joyse murmured thickly, ‘my Myste, I’m so glad – Havelock told me to trust you, but I couldn’t help being afraid. My little girl, in such danger – I wanted you to be safe. And yet I needed you to do what you did.’ He tightened his embrace momentarily, then released it and stepped back. ‘Your mother would break my pate if she knew how I risked you.’

  ‘Father,’ Myste replied like the sun, ‘all children must be risked. Mother knows that. How else are we to discover ourselves?’

  If anything, her smile became warmer, cleaner, as she turned toward Elega.

  Elega wanted to say, You have saved us – meant to say, Oh, Myste, you have saved us – but her throat closed suddenly, and her vision ran with tears. Myste’s smile still had the power to make everything worthwhile.

  Myste came to stand close to her. They didn’t embrace: the way they felt was too private for the occasion. Nevertheless Myste said softly, ‘You did it. Everything I wanted – everything I couldn’t say. I’m so proud of you.’

  Elega looked up at Prince Kragen, still on his horse, and held his gaze happily while Myste went to hug both Terisa and Geraden, then moved back to King Joyse.

  ‘Now that the truth is revealed, my lord King,’ the Prince said, speaking dryly to cover his pleasure, ‘I suppose I must admit that the Alend Monarch’s motives – and my own – have not been entirely disinterested recently. We withheld the siege of Orison to give you time in which to mature your plans. We kept open the possibility of an alliance, even when we had refused it, so that we might be able to aid you at need. But we also did those things’ – he grinned under his moustache – ‘because the lady Myste threatened to bring the champion’s fire down on us otherwise.’