The Imager didn’t yell at her, however. He didn’t raise his voice. Slowly, he moved to the door of the cell. Perhaps he intended to leave, give up on her: she didn’t know – and didn’t care. But he didn’t do that, either. He waited until she looked up at him, lifted her head defiantly and glared at him through her tears. Then he said quietly, “We didn’t know this was going to happen. We thought he was stronger.”
Just for a second, she almost stopped crying in order to laugh. Imagine it. An aging King and a madman and a minor Imager got together to save the world – and the best plan they could come up with required them to drive the only man in Orison who knew how to fight for them out of his mind. It was funny, really. The only thing she didn’t understand was, what made them think it would work? How could they possibly believe—?
The sound of a door rang down the passage: iron hit stone with such savagery that the echo seemed to carry a hint of snapped hinges.
“Lying slut!” howled the Castellan. “I’ll have you gutted for this!”
His boots started toward her from the guardroom.
Terisa froze in shock. Castellan Lebbick was coming to get her. He was coming to get her, and there was nothing she could do. Master Quillon said something, but she didn’t hear what it was. In her mind, she saw the corridor from the guardroom: one turn; another; then the long line of the cells. The Castellan was coming hard, but he wasn’t running; he might run as he drew closer, but he wasn’t running yet; he was at the first turn – on his way to the next. He would reach her cell in half a minute. Her life had that many seconds left. No more.
“Are you deaf?” Quillon grabbed her wrist and hauled her off the cot. “I said, Come on.”
She didn’t have a chance to think, to choose. He wrenched her through the open door out into the passage. But he was pulling on her too hard, away from the guardroom: she staggered against the far wall and fell; her weight twisted her wrist from his grasp.
As she scrambled to her feet again, she saw Castellan Lebbick come into view past the second turn.
He saw her as well. For an instant, their eyes met across the distance, as if they had become astonishing to each other.
Then he let out a roar of fury – and she skittered in the opposite direction, her boots slipping on the rotten straw.
She could hear him coming after her. That was impossible; her feet and breathing and Master Quillon’s shouts made too much noise. Nevertheless her sense of his overwhelming rage, his ache for destruction, made his pursuit loud in her mind. She could feel his hate reaching out—
And ahead of her the Imager was losing ground. He slowed his flight; took the time to turn and beckon frantically.
A second later, he whipped open the door to another cell, dashed inside.
She followed without thinking. She had no time to think. Deflecting her momentum against the bars, she flung herself into the cell faster than Master Quillon was moving and nearly ran him down when he stopped.
Quickly, he opened a door in the side wall.
It was well hidden: the spring that released it was so cunningly concealed that she would never have found it for herself; and until he hit the spring she couldn’t see the door itself. Then it swung wide, moving smoothly, as if it were counterbalanced on its hinges and controlled by weights. It must have been built in when this cell was first constructed.
That was how Master Quillon had gained access to the dungeon. How he had been able to listen to her conversations with Eremis and Lebbick. Another secret passage. But she didn’t have time to be surprised. As soon as the door opened, Quillon caught at her arm again and thrust her forward, into the unlit passage.
He followed on her heels. Trying to make room for him without advancing into the dark, she found a wall and put her back to it. He was only a silhouette against the dim reflection from the dungeon lamps. At once, he tripped the mechanism that moved the weights to close and seal the door—
—and Castellan Lebbick burst into the cell.
He was too late: he wasn’t going to be able to prevent the door from shutting. And once it was shut he would have to find the spring to open it again.
Nevertheless he was fast, and his sword was already in his hands. Driving wildly to spit Terisa through the closing of the door, he plunged forward, hurled himself headlong toward her.
The door’s weight swept his thrust aside. His swordtip missed her by several inches.
Then his sword was caught in the crack of the door. The iron held, jamming the stone so that it couldn’t seal.
His body thudded against the door; he recoiled, staggering.
A moment later, his voice came, muffled, into the dark. “Guards! Guards!”
“Come on!” hissed Master Quillon. He took Terisa by the wrist once more and tugged her away from the thin slit of illumination. “Curse him! As soon as his men arrive, he will be able to open that door. We must escape now.”
Struggling for balance, she hurried after her rescuer into a blind passage.
Stone seemed to whirl about her head like a swarm of bats, probing for some way to strike at her. There was no light – no light of any kind. Except for his grip, Master Quillon had ceased to exist. Her shoulders kept hitting the walls as if she were reeling. She couldn’t keep up this pace; she had no idea where the passage went, or how it got there. “Slow down!” she panted. “I can’t see.”
“You do not need to see,” Quillon snapped. “You need to hurry.”
Still trying to make him slacken speed, she protested, “How long?”
Without warning, he halted. At the same time, he let go of her. She collided with him, stumbled against the wall again, flung up her arms to protect her head.
“Not long,” he muttered acerbically. “This passage was put in when the dungeons were rebuilt to provide room for the laborium. In other words, it is relatively recent. So it does not connect to the more extensive passage systems.”
Unseen beside her, he tripped another release, and the wall she had just hit opened, letting cold air wash over her. Her torn shirt couldn’t keep the chill out.
The space into which the door gave admittance was dim, almost black; but after a moment her eyes adjusted, and she saw ahead of her a truncated bit of hall leading to a wider corridor. Lanterns out of sight along the corridor in one direction or the other supplied just enough reflected glow to soften the gloom.
When she caught her breath to listen, the sound which came to her was the delicate spatter of dripping water.
Cold and wet. And a side passage too short to be worth lighting with a lantern of its own. A passage that seemed to go nowhere, as long as this door was closed and hidden.
Despite the distractions of fear, exertion, and surprise, her nerves turned to ice as if she had been here before.
“Now, my lady,” whispered Master Quillon, “we must be both quick and quiet. These are the disused passages beneath the foundations of Orison, where twice you were attacked. They are back in use now, housing our increased population, but that is not our chief worry. Those people will be asleep – or too confused to hinder us. No, the difficulty is that these halls are now guarded to keep the peace – regularly patrolled. Somehow, we must avoid the Castellan’s men.”
No, she thought dumbly. That isn’t right. Her brain felt like rock, impermeable to understanding. She had never seen the hall from this side, but it looked the same; the hairs on her forearms lifted as if the hall were the same. When Master Quillon started forward, she managed to reach out and stop him.
“No,” she whispered, almost croaking. “This is the place. I’m sure of it.”
He stood motionless and studied her narrowly. “What place?” The air grew colder on her skin while he stared at her.
“The translation point.” The cold made her shiver. Long tremors seemed to start in her bones and build outward until her voice shook. “Where those insects came through – to get Geraden. And Gart—”
Closing her arms across her chest, she hugged
herself to silence.
“What, here?” the Imager asked in surprise. “Exactly here?”
She nodded as well as she could.
“We did not know that,” he muttered; he appeared to be thinking rapidly. “We knew the general area, of course.” His quick eyes studied the passage. “But the Adept did not observe the actual translations. And we could hardly afford to betray our interest by asking you or Artagel to show us specifically where the attacks took place.”
Terisa ignored what he was saying; it didn’t matter. What mattered was the mirror which brought people who wanted to kill her into Orison. “We can’t go there,” she breathed through her shivers. “I can’t go there. They’ll see us.”
They’ll come after us.
“A good point, my lady.” Master Quillon’s nose twitched as though he were trying to sniff out a way of escape. “If they saw us in the Image – and if they were ready for us—”
A grunting noise, a sound of strain or protest, carried along the passage from the entrance to the dungeons behind them.
The Master and Terisa froze.
“Put your backs into it, shit-lickers.” Castellan Lebbick’s voice was obscured by stone and distance, but unmistakable. “Get that door open before we lose them completely.”
Terisa wanted to groan, but she couldn’t stop shivering.
“Glass and splinters!” Quillon swore under his breath. “This is a tidy predicament.”
An instant later, however, he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to get her attention. “My lady, listen.
“The focus of that glass was shifted. I saw Eremis translated into the dungeon. I saw him depart. He must have used the same mirror which brought your attackers here. Why else was I permitted to eavesdrop on him – to hear him reveal his intentions? Had his allies seen me enter the passage this way, they would have had no difficulty in disposing of me. Therefore they did not see me. Therefore the translation point of that mirror has been shifted.”
“They could shift it back,” she objected.
“They could be watching us right now,” he retorted. “But if that is true, why are we still unharmed?”
The groan of stressed ropes and counterbalances came quietly out of the dark. A man gasped, and Castellan Lebbick barked, “That does it!”
“We must take the risk!” Master Quillon hissed.
Again, Terisa nodded. But she remained still, caught between fears. Gart was there somewhere, the High King’s Monomach. And from that translation point had come four lumbering assailants who had themselves been eaten alive from the inside by the most terrible—
“You must go first!” Urgency made Quillon’s rabbity face slightly ludicrous. “First is safest. Any man will need a moment to react when he sees us.
“Go.”
He shoved her, and she went.
Two stumbling steps toward the main corridor; three; four. For some reason, the strength had gone out of her legs. She felt like a woman in a nightmare, frantic to run, but powerless to do anything except ache with fright while her enemies rushed toward her.
Master Quillon caught up with her and shoved her again to keep her going.
For the second time, she felt a touch of cold as thin as a feather and as sharp as steel slide straight through the center of her abdomen.
Running now, but hardly aware of it, hardly conscious of what she was doing at all, she reached the main passage and the light and turned, whirled around in time to see Master Quillon following her and a black shape with a face full of hate and glee rising behind him, clutching a long dagger to strike him down.
No, Quillon! Quillon!
The shape rose and swept after him while she tried to cry out a warning and couldn’t do it fast enough: black arms rose and then plunged down viciously, driving the dagger into the joining of his shoulders with such fury that blood burst from his mouth and the blade came through his chest and he was crushed to the floor as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer.
“Got you, you insipid rodent!” Master Gilbur barked in guttural triumph. “That is the last time you will interfere with anything we wish to do!”
When he wrenched his blade out of Quillon’s back, blood ran from his hands like water.
Oh, Quillon!
Terisa remembered Master Gilbur’s hands. They looked strong enough to bend iron bars; strong enough to grind bones. Their backs were covered with black hair – hair that contrasted starkly with his white beard. The hunch in his spine only seemed to increase his physical power; the flesh of his face was knotted with murder.
Gloating, he looked up from Quillon’s corpse. “My lady,” he coughed like a curse, “this is fortuitous. I had not expected the pleasure of killing you. That was intended to be Gart’s task, after Eremis had finished with you. But my vigilance has been rewarded. Neither Festten’s dog nor cocksure Eremis were with me when I found you in the Image.”
She watched him as if he were a snake, waited for him to strike.
“It is a delight to rid the world of Quillon at last” – Gilbur licked spittle from his thick lips as he stepped over the body at his feet – “but to twist my knife in your soft flesh will be plain ecstasy.”
Reaching out with his blade and his bloody hands, he started toward her.
She turned and fled.
She ran with all her heart this time, pushed all her strength through her legs. In spite of his crooked back, Master Gilbur was fast. His first blow nearly caught her. The gap she opened between them as she sped was less than a stride; then two; then three and a bit more. Instinctively, she had run to the left; she was taking the same direction she and Geraden had taken when they had fled from the insects.
Black arms rose and then plunged down—
Now she would have been glad – delirious with relief – to encounter a guard. An old codger hunting for the public lavatories. A servant. Anyone to witness what was happening, distract Gilbur. But the corridor was deserted. Master Gilbur spat curses as he pursued her. She was young, and running for her life; slowly, she widened the gap. But the air had already become fire in her lungs, and he didn’t seem to be tiring.
Plunged down—
In one way, she had no idea where she was going. She didn’t know these passages, had never been down here without a guide. The only thought in her mind was to find help. Before she faltered. She could feel her strength ebbing now. In another way, however, her instinctive sense of direction was sure, and she followed it unhesitatingly. To escape the fierce Imager, she tapped resources in herself that she didn’t know she possessed.
She took the route to Adept Havelock’s quarters.
There: the side passage. A thick wooden door, apparently the entrance to a storeroom. Yes, the entrance to a storeroom. A storeroom which hadn’t been appropriated to help house Orison’s increased population. She heaved the door open, pulled it shut behind her. It had a bolt. Didn’t it have a bolt? It had to have a bolt – had to have – but she couldn’t find it, couldn’t see, there was no light in the storeroom, no illumination except thin yellow slivers from the cracks around the door.
Master Gilbur’s bulk blocked even that light—
—and her fingers found the bolt, slapped it home just as he crashed against the door, trying to crush her with the weight of the wood and his own momentum.
The bolt twisted against its staples. But it held.
It wasn’t going to hold for long. Gilbur hit the door again, raging at it and her. She couldn’t see the bolt – but she could hear the metallic screaming noise as iron rusted into wood was forced out. The staples were going to give. It was only a matter of time.
Ignoring her frantic need for air and rest, she groped across the storeroom toward the door hidden at the back – the entrance to Adept Havelock’s secret rooms.
Because she was moving by instinct rather than conscious thought, she didn’t remember the possibility that the hidden door might be bolted until she found it open. Master Quillon had probably left it
that way. He had probably intended to bring her here himself. Weak with relief and need, she opened the door and hurried into the lighted passage which led to Havelock’s domain.
The first room she came to was cluttered with mirrors.
Nothing had changed since her last visit here. The disarray was composed of full-length mirrors so uneven in shape and color that they showed Images she couldn’t begin to interpret; bits of flat glass that would have fit in her pocket; mirrors the right size for a dressing table, but piled on top of each other and scattered as if to keep anyone from seeing what they showed. All of them had been gleaned by King Joyse during his wars and never restored to the Congery; all of them were set in rich or loving frames which belied the neglect of their present circumstances. And all of them were useless. The Imagers who had made them were dead.
They didn’t have anything to do with her. She rushed past them.
The passage took two or three turns, but she didn’t lose her way. In a moment, she reached another door. She thought she could hear Master Gilbur still pounding to get into the storeroom – or perhaps the sound was simply caused by panic beating in her ears – so she pulled the door open and stumbled into the large, square chamber which Adept Havelock used as a study, and which gave him access to Orison’s networks of secret passages.
The air was musty, disused – something had gone wrong with the ventilation. There were too many people in the castle. Smoke from lamps with wicks that needed trimming curled lazily around the pillar which held up the center of the ceiling.
The Adept was there, lurking in his madness like a spider.
Master Quillon had asked Terisa to believe that Havelock had helped King Joyse plan the destruction of Mordant. Quillon had expected her to believe it – expected her to believe that the old Adept’s insanity didn’t prevent him from wisdom or cunning. And perhaps her dead rescuer was right. Perhaps only a madman like Havelock could have conceived a strategy which relied for its sole chance of success on Castellan Lebbick’s stability.
Nevertheless Terisa had nowhere else to turn now. Surely Quillon would have brought her here, if he had lived. The Adept had to help her. He had helped her in the past. He had tried to answer her questions. And Master Gilbur might catch up with her at any moment. He might kill the Adept as well, if he got the opportunity. And the Castellan was still after her.
A Man Rides Through Page 11