Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  They struggled to their feet. Uncomfortably, they tried to explain the situation. As a personal favor, Apt Geraden had asked them to keep an eye on the lady Terisa of Morgan, in case she got in trouble. He said he didn’t know what kind of trouble. But they were off duty, so they decided to do what he asked. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the man in black appeared in the corridor. He walked up to them and told them to let him in, he had business with the lady Terisa. When they asked him what his business was, he snatched out his sword, broke the door open, and tried to kill her. After that, he gave up and ran away.

  Listening to them, Terisa realized that neither Argus nor Ribuld knew she had been out of her rooms. In fact, neither of them had seen Adept Havelock. Because of this, they weren’t able to account for her attacker’s flight. Glancing toward Terisa as if he believed she were responsible, Argus mumbled something about a light, then winced at the way Castellan Lebbick looked at him.

  Ignoring her, the Castellan sent the six guards out of the room at a run to rouse the rest of the watch and begin a search for the man in black – ‘Although,’ he muttered as they left, ‘he’s probably halfway to oblivion by now.’ Then he returned his attention to Ribuld and Argus.

  ‘Let me get this straight. He fought the two of you away from the door long enough to break it open. He got as far as the doorway to the bedroom. He knocked one of you out and disabled the other. Then he panicked and ran away. Doubtless he was terrified by how easily you were overcome. Maybe everybody who serves the King is like you. I’m surprised he didn’t die of fright.’

  Ribuld and Argus hung their heads.

  ‘My lady?’ Lebbick asked grimly.

  Terisa didn’t answer. Now she understood why she had closed the wardrobe. Havelock had taken the risk of angering both the King and the Congery by providing her with some of Mordant’s history, and she didn’t mean to betray what he had done for her.

  ‘Very well,’ the Castellan growled. ‘Let that pass for the moment. Explain this, you ox-headed louts,’ he demanded of Argus and Ribuld. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone what you were doing here? By the stars, I’ve spent my life training lumps of dead meat to understand the importance of communications and access to reinforcements. If you believed Geraden enough to think the lady might be in danger, why didn’t you take the simple precaution of arranging to be able to call for help?’

  The bruise on his forehead gave Ribuld an excuse to raise his hand in front of his face. ‘We didn’t believe Geraden. You know him. We were just doing him a favor. For Artagel’s sake.’

  ‘Pigswallow,’ retorted Castellan Lebbick. ‘I’ll tell you why you didn’t tell anyone. If you reported what you were doing to your captain in order to arrange reinforcements, he would report it to me – and I would report it to the King. Since the King didn’t see fit to command guards for the lady himself, he might have been moved to wonder’ – the Castellan’s voice sounded capable of drawing blood – ‘what business it is of yours to meddle in his decisions.’

  ‘We didn’t mean any offense,’ Argus protested. ‘We were just—’

  ‘I know. Spare me your excuses. I’ll take care of Geraden. You report to your captain. Tell him about this – and count yourselves lucky I don’t have you clapped in irons. Go on.’

  Argus and Ribuld obeyed, hardly daring to groan. Neither of them looked at Terisa. Carefully – but promptly under the Castellan’s glare – they retrieved their swords and hobbled out of the room.

  ‘Now, my lady.’ Lebbick rounded on her. ‘Maybe we can discuss this matter a bit more openly. I’m sure King Joyse will be relieved to hear you were able to drive off your attacker – alone and unaided – after two of my guards failed. But he might like to know how you did it. And I’m sure he’ll want to know what it is about you that brings on that kind of attack in the middle of the night.’

  He moved a step closer to her, his chin jutting. ‘Who are you, my lady? Oh, I know the story – Orison doesn’t keep things like that secret. Apt Geraden brought you here by an accidental translation. But who are you?’ His eyes held hers, as piercing as awls. ‘What game are you trying to play with my King?’

  He sounded so angry that she started to tremble.

  Another step brought him close to her. If he extended his right fist, pointed his heavy index finger at her, she knew exactly what would happen next. She would begin to babble:

  I’m sorry I didn’t mean it I won’t do it again I promise please don’t punish me I don’t know what I did wrong.

  Fortuitously, another guard sprinted into the room at that moment and jerked himself to a halt. He was a young man, and his fear of Castellan Lebbick’s temper showed all over him.

  ‘Excuse me, Castellan, sir,’ he said in a tumble. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt. I have a message from the King.’

  Lebbick took a deep breath and closed his eyes as if he were controlling himself with great difficulty. Then he turned his back on Terisa.

  The guard swallowed heavily and stared back at the Castellan like a bird caught by a snake.

  ‘A message from the King,’ Lebbick rasped venomously. ‘You said you had one. Try to remember.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Castellan, sir. A message from the King. He has stopped the search.’

  ‘What?’ A flick of the whip.

  ‘The King has stopped the search, sir.’

  ‘Well, that makes sense. In times like these, a potential assassin in the castle is a trivial problem. Did he give a reason for stopping the search?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The guard’s skin was chalky. ‘He said he doesn’t like all this running around in the middle of the night.’

  For a moment, Castellan Lebbick’s shoulders bunched with outrage. Yet he spoke softly. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No, sir. He also said’ – the guard looked like he would have been happier if he could have fainted – ‘he wants you to leave his guests alone.’ And winced involuntarily, as if he expected to be struck.

  The Castellan swung his arm, but not to strike the guard. He slapped himself, hard, on the thigh. He growled far back in his throat. He made a loud, spitting noise.

  Abruptly, he faced Terisa again.

  Like the guard, she winced.

  ‘My lady, be warned,’ he said. ‘I’m the Castellan of Orison. I’m responsible for many things, but above everything else for the King’s safety. He suffers from an unnatural faith in his own immortality. I’m not similarly afflicted.’ His jaws chewed the words like gristle. ‘I’ll obey him as much as I can. Then I’ll take matters into my own hands.’

  Turning on his heel, he stamped away.

  As he passed the guard, he paused long enough to say, ‘I want the lady guarded. This time, do it right.’ And at the door he stopped again. ‘Keep this closed tonight. I’ll have the bolt repaired in the morning.’

  Then he was gone.

  The guard gave Terisa a sheepish shrug – half chagrin at his own timidity, half apology for the Castellan’s brusqueness – and followed his commander, pulling the door shut behind him.

  As he left, he seemed to take all the courage out of the room with him.

  Without warning, everything changed to alarm. Gripping her robe tightly closed, she hurried to the door to listen. She clearly heard the voices of several men outside her room: they were issuing the orders and making the arrangements to have her guarded. Still she felt vulnerable, helpless. A total stranger had tried to kill her. Urgently, she moved a chair to prop it against the door. Then she placed another chair inside her wardrobe to block Havelock’s passage.

  After that, she didn’t know what to do.

  For a long time, she couldn’t relax or concentrate. High King Festten had had his Monomach executed for failure when Adept Havelock betrayed the arch-Imager’s followers. Havelock had lost his mind when he tried to chase Vagel into a flat glass. Master Quillon was willing to tell her stories like these, even though both King Joyse and the Congery prohibited it. For some reason, Castellan Lebbick didn�
�t trust her.

  How could all this be happening to her?

  But later, unexpectedly, she felt an odd upswelling of joy. Apparently, Geraden had brought her to a place where she mattered. The fact that she was here made a difference. Castellan Lebbick took her seriously enough to get angry at her. Master Eremis had looked at her. It was even conceivable that he thought she was lovely.

  That had never happened to her before.

  Eventually, she was able to sleep.

  Sunlight from her windows awakened her the next morning. At first, she doubted everything. Wasn’t this the bed in her apartment, the place where she belonged? But the light made the rugs on the floors bright, the peacock ornaments of the rooms, the feathers scattered by the man in black. That much of what she remembered was real, at any rate.

  The indirect sunshine had the pale color of cold. And the air outside her blankets was chill. She hadn’t thought to build up her fires before she went to bed, and they had died down during the night. Holding her breath, she eased out of the warm bedclothes and hurried into the thick velvet robe she had worn the previous night. The stone felt like ice under her bare feet: with a small gasp, she hopped to the nearest rug.

  When she looked toward the windows, she hesitated. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to see what lay outside. The view might confirm or deny the entire situation.

  On the other hand, she felt vaguely foolish for having postponed the question this long. Anybody with a grain of normal human curiosity would have looked outside almost immediately. What was she afraid of?

  Unable to define what she was afraid of, she moved to the windows of the bedroom.

  The diamond-shaped panes of thick glass – each about the size of her hand – were leaded into their frames. A touch of frost edged the glass wherever the lead seals were imperfect, outlining several of the diamonds. But the glass itself was clear, and it showed her a world full of winter.

  From her elevation, she was able to see a considerable distance. Under the colorless sky and the thin sunlight, hills covered with snow rumpled the terrain to the horizon. The snow looked thick – so thick that it seemed to bow the trees, bending them toward the blanketed slumber of the hills. Where the trunks and limbs of the trees showed through the snow, they were black and stark, but so small against the wide white background that they served only as punctuation, making the winter and the cold more articulate.

  When she realized how high up she was, however, her view contracted to her more immediate surroundings.

  She was indeed in a tower – and near the top of it, judging by her position relative to the other towers she could see. There were four including hers, one arising from each corner of the huge, erratic structure of Orison; and they contrasted with the rest of the castle, as if they had been built at a different time, planned by a different mind. They were all square, all the same height, all rimmed with crenellated parapets – as assertive as fists raised against the sky.

  Their blunt regularity made the great bulk of Orison appear haphazard: disorganized, self-absorbed, and unreliable, beset with snares.

  In fact, the general shape of the castle was quite regular in its outlines. Orison was rectangular, constructed around an enormous open courtyard. Terisa could see it clearly because her windows faced out over one of the long arms of the rectangle. One end of the courtyard – the end away from her tower – was occupied by what she could only think of as a bazaar: a large conglomeration of shops and sheds, stalls and tents, wagons carrying fodder – all thoroughly chaotic, all shrouded by the smoke of dozens of cookfires.

  The other end of the courtyard looked big enough to serve as a parade ground – as long as the parade didn’t get out of hand. There men on horseback, children playing, and clusters of people on their way to or from the bazaar churned the mud and snow.

  Large as the courtyard was, however, the structure of Orison was high enough to keep it all in shadow at this hour of the morning. The open air must have been bitterly cold: Terisa noticed that even the children didn’t stay outside very long.

  The other regular feature of the castle was its outward face. Since her window looked over the courtyard, she couldn’t see the details of the walls, but she could see that Orison had no outer defenses: it was its own fortification. The whole edifice was built of blunt gray stone, presenting a hard and unadorned face to the external world on all sides.

  Within its outlines, however, the castle looked as though it had been designed more for the convenience of its secrets than for the accommodation of its inhabitants. Mismatched slate roofs canted at all angles, pitching their runoff into the courtyard. Dozens of chimneys bearing no resemblance to each other gusted smoke along the breeze. Some sections of the structure were tall and square; others, squat and lumpish. Some parts had balconies instead of windows; others sported poles from which clotheslines hung. She couldn’t resist the conclusion that King Joyse had attached the four towers to his ancestral seat, decreed the shape in which Orison was to grow, and then forgotten about it, letting a number of disagreeable builders express themselves willy-nilly.

  Now, at least, she understood why she had found Geraden’s and Saddith’s routes through the castle so confusing. Truncated passages and sudden intersections, unpremeditated stairs and necessary detours were part of Orison’s basic construction.

  As far as she could make out, the only way into the courtyard from outside was along a road which led through a massive set of gates in the long arm of the rectangle below her. These gates were apparently open, admitting wains pulled by oxen to the courtyard. But her angle of vision didn’t let her see whether the gates were guarded.

  As she studied the scene, her breath misted the glass. She wiped it clear again with the sleeve of her robe. Then she touched her fingers to one of the panes. The cold spread a little halo of condensed vapor over the glass around each fingertip; a sharp, delicate chill seeped into her skin. That, more than the immense weight of Orison’s piled stone, made everything she saw seem tangible, convincing. She was truly in this place, wherever it was – and whatever it might mean. She was here.

  Shortly, her musing was interrupted by a knock at her sitting room door. Because she didn’t want to stand where she was indefinitely, thinking the same thoughts over and over again, she went to answer the knock. On her way to the door, however, she hesitated again. Did she really mean to open that door and admit everything that might be waiting for her? Someone was trying to kill her. He might be outside.

  But what choice did she have? None, if she wanted to learn anything more about what was happening to her. Or if she wanted breakfast.

  Her heart began to beat more the way it should – more like the heart of a woman whose life was at risk – as she pulled the chair away from the door and opened it.

  Two guards she hadn’t seen before saluted her.

  Saddith was with them, holding a tray with one edge propped on her hip.

  A gleam in her eye and a saucy tilt to her head indicated the spirit in which she had been conversing with the guards; her blouse was buttoned to a still lower level, giving out hints of pleasure whenever she moved her shoulders. But as soon as she saw Terisa her expression became contrite and solicitous.

  ‘My lady, are you all right? They said you were, but I did not know whether to believe them. That woman and I traded duties for the night. I did not know that you would be attacked – or that she would be such a goose. She should have stayed with you. I brought your breakfast. I know you are upset, but you ought to eat. Do you think you could try?’

  Terisa met the maid’s rush of words and blinked. She was relieved to see Saddith again. Saddith was safe; she was real. ‘Yes,’ Terisa said when Saddith paused for an answer. ‘I am hungry. And I’m afraid I’ve let the fires go out. Please come in.’

  With a nod and a wink for the guards, Saddith shifted her tray in front of her and entered the sitting room.

  As Terisa closed the door, she heard the guards chuckling together.
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  Saddith heard the sound as well. ‘Those two,’ she said in good-natured derision while she pushed aside the supper dishes to clear room for breakfast. ‘They doubted me when I told them that the sight of you would make their knees melt – whatever it did to the rest of them. Now they know I told the truth.’

  Then she indicated a chair beside the table where she had set her tray. ‘Please sit down and eat, my lady. The porridge will warm you while I build up the fires again. Then I think we must find you something better to wear.’

  Terisa accepted the chair. Neatly arranged for her delectation, she found grapes, brown bread, a wedge of deep yellow cheese, and a steaming bowl that appeared to contain a cracked-wheat cereal. Remembering the previous night’s meal, she began to eat quickly, pausing now and then to relish the combination of the tart cheese and the sweet grapes.

  But Saddith didn’t stop talking as she worked at the nearest hearth. ‘What was he like,’ she asked, ‘this man in black who attacked you?’ She seemed to be excited and pleased about something. ‘Orison is full of rumors already. He was taller than Ribuld, and so strong of chest that my arms might not reach around him. He had a hunter’s face, and a hunter’s glee, with enough power in his hands and thighs to batter Ribuld and Argus as if they were boys.’ For a moment, she hugged her breasts. Then she sighed wistfully. ‘So the rumor goes. What was he really like, my lady?’

  Slowly, unsure of what she was going to say until she said it, Terisa replied, ‘He was terrifying.’

  ‘Perhaps if I had not traded duties I might have chanced to see him.’ Saddith thought about that for a moment with a quizzical expression on her face. Then she laughed. ‘No. I was better where I was.’

  Terisa had spent enough time listening to Reverend Thatcher to know a hint when she heard one, so she asked politely, ‘Where were you?’

  Gaiety sparkled in Saddith’s eyes. ‘Oh, I should not tell you that.’ At once, she strode energetically into the bedroom to rebuild the fire there.

  But almost at once she stuck her head past the doorway to ask, ‘Do you remember what I said last night, my lady? “Any Master will tell me whatever I wish – if I conceive a wish for something he knows.” Perhaps you thought I was boasting.’ She disappeared again. For a minute, Terisa heard her working over the fire. Then she came back into the sitting room. ‘I will be truthful with you, my lady. I did not trade duties with anyone. I asked that woman you saw to care for you, so that I might have the night to myself – without interruption.