Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Geraden stumbled into her range of vision. His eyes were raw, and the difficulty of breathing showed in his face. Nevertheless he was on his feet. As soon as he saw that she, too, would survive, he groaned, ‘Artagel,’ and pushed himself into a coughing run toward his brother.

  ‘Artagel?’ Although one of Havelock’s eyes leered, the other was sane and serious. His nose, as fierce and ascetic as a hawk’s beak, made every word he uttered count. ‘Was he caught in this trap as well?’

  ‘Back there.’ A spasm of retching wracked Terisa. After that, however, the pain in her lungs eased, and she was able to breathe more normally. With an effort, she climbed to her hands and knees, then to her feet. ‘He tried to save us. That vapor got him.’

  ‘Balls of a goat!’ the Adept snapped. At once, he strode away.

  Struggling not to be left behind, she reeled after him.

  Slowly her balance improved as the effects of the vapor faded. She was nearly steady as she and Adept Havelock reached Geraden.

  He didn’t notice them. He sat on the floor, cradling Artagel’s head in his arms.

  Artagel’s face was mottled with exertion and pain, and his eyes gaped at the ceiling as though he had gone blind. But he was breathing.

  Her relief was so acute that her eyes spilled tears.

  Stooping to Geraden, Adept Havelock tapped him crisply on the shoulder. ‘Come along, Geraden. Carry him if you have to. I don’t like staying this close to that translation point. Who knows how many more surprises Vagel has for us? I’ll take you somewhere safe.’

  Geraden hugged his brother harder and didn’t move. Terisa couldn’t tell whether he had heard the Adept.

  As if he were making a concession, the old Imager said, ‘I have some wine. I think it’ll help him.’ Then he lost patience. ‘Horror and ballocks, boy! If you’re attacked again, I might not be able to save you!’

  Still Geraden didn’t move. But Artagel jerked his head in a nod as if he understood. When Terisa took hold of his arm and tried to pull him upright, he made a feeble effort to assist her.

  Roughly, Geraden rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he helped Terisa lift his brother off the stone.

  ‘Come along,’ repeated Havelock. With a brisk stride, he moved away.

  Supporting Artagel between them, Terisa and Geraden followed. Artagel was unable to keep his feet under him, but she heard an improvement in his breathing. He was beginning to sound like he would live.

  She found that she was completely disoriented: she had no idea where Adept Havelock was taking them. After a short distance, he entered a side passage which led at once to a sturdy wooden door that looked like the entrance to a storeroom. In fact, it was the entrance to a storeroom. The storeroom, however, appeared to be full of nothing but empty crates in various stages of disrepair. Adept Havelock ignored them as he picked his way to another door hidden in a niche at the back of the room.

  This door looked ordinary enough from the outside, but inside it held enough bars and bolts to seal a dungeon. Havelock shut it behind Terisa, Geraden, and Artagel, then led them down a passage that opened almost immediately into a room crowded with a disarray of mirrors.

  ‘King Joyse confiscated most of these during his wars,’ the Adept explained offhandedly as he crossed the room to another corridor. ‘After he created the Congery, he restored quite a few mirrors to the Masters. But he kept more than he gave up.

  ‘I wish they did me some good.’

  The sight astonished Geraden out of his distress, at least for a moment. Adept Havelock had the only light, however, and he left the room promptly. Terisa and Geraden followed with Artagel.

  After two or three turns, as many short hallways, and another door, they suddenly found themselves in the large, square room where Terisa had listened to Master Quillon explain the history of Mordant’s need.

  The place appeared unchanged: it was still furnished and cluttered like the study of a man whose mind had gone. Lamps set into the walls and the central pillar shed plenty of light toward the doors that lined the walls, giving admittance to Orison’s secret passages.

  Perhaps because she was suffering from reaction, Terisa was struck by the odd thought that Adept Havelock resembled a spider. This room was the center of his web; the secret passages were the strands. Now she and Geraden and Artagel had been caught.

  She wondered what the Adept was plotting.

  He bustled away behind the pillar. While he was out of sight, Terisa and Geraden helped Artagel to one of the chairs at the checker table. Artagel’s breathing still had a thick tubercular wheeze that was painful to hear, but he was strong enough to take notice of his surroundings. With an effort, he choked out, ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ replied Terisa vaguely. She still wasn’t ready to tell anyone that she had been here before.

  ‘I wish I knew what he was doing with all those mirrors,’ Geraden muttered. Fear and strain and bafflement gave him a feverish look.

  Carrying a large flagon, Adept Havelock returned.

  At last she had an opportunity to observe him more closely. He conveyed an impression of suppressed haste, as though he were trying to resist the acceleration of some internal process. His movements were deliberate, tightly controlled; but his eyes flicked from side to side with a discernible rhythm, like a heartbeat being gradually goaded faster by adrenaline.

  He handed the flagon directly to Artagel. ‘Drink it all. It’s going to taste terrible. I put some balm in it to heal your throat.’ Brusquely, he addressed Geraden. ‘Make sure he drinks it all. If he recovers, make him play hop-board with you.’ He indicated his empty checkerboard table. ‘You need the practice. I want to talk to the lady.’

  Without waiting for a reaction, he took Terisa’s arm and drew her away, around the pillar until she could no longer see Geraden and Artagel.

  When he stopped, however, he didn’t speak. His eyes took turns flicking toward her and off again, flicking – Their rhythm and the aftertaste of black vapor made her stomach queasy. A grimace clenched his sybaritic mouth, as if he had taken a vow not to let himself grin at her. Slowly, he raised his scrawny old arms and folded them across his chest.

  From beyond the pillar came harsh gagging noises. The wine must have been worse than terrible. Fortunately, the noises soon ceased.

  Facing the Adept alone, Terisa felt a strong desire to become hysterical. That would solve a number of problems. It would give her an escape from his loony gaze. It would provide a much-needed rest. It would free her from the responsibility of trying to figure out what was going on. But he had saved her life. He had saved Geraden. And he clearly had some kind of purpose for bringing her here. In return, she had to make some kind of effort to rise to the occasion.

  Swallowing hard to clear her throat, she said, ‘You’re not really as crazy as people think.’

  In response, he let out a bark of laughter. ‘Oh, yes I am. This is just one of my lucid moments. Quillon told you I have lucid moments. This is one of them.’

  Abruptly, he unfolded one age-spotted hand from his chest to stab his index finger in her direction. ‘The important thing,’ he whispered intensely, ‘is, don’t ask me any questions. Don’t. I’m having a hard enough time as it is.’

  At once, he resumed his stance and went on flicking his eyes at her, back and forth in turn, their rhythm eloquent of mounting pressure, perhaps even of violence.

  She felt her mouth hanging open, so she closed it. Apparently, he needed her to help him in some way. But without asking any questions. Did he want her to guess at something? Or did it matter what she said?

  Maybe it didn’t matter. Cautiously, she ventured, ‘I haven’t thanked you for saving us. I don’t know how the arch-Imager or whoever it was managed to spring that trap on us. I can’t think of any way for him to know what we were going to do. But if you hadn’t come along, we—’ She shuddered, unable to complete the thought.

  Without warning, he snapped, ‘Vagel!’ He
sounded grimly angry, yet his expression conveyed gratitude. ‘If I could get just one hand on him, I would tear his heart out. But it isn’t good for me to lose my temper.’ Whatever emotions appeared on his face or in his voice had no effect on his posture or the movement of his eyes. ‘That was just coincidence. The first piece of good luck we’ve had in a long time. I’ve seen those creatures before – just once, when I was in a cabal of Imagers High King Festten built around Vagel in Carmag. I saw what they do. But I’ve never actually seen the glass.

  ‘We were told they’re like hunting dogs. If you translate something with the scent of the man you want hunted on it into their world, those insects go wild. But apparently they can’t be translated directly. They forget the scent and just attack the first thing they find. So you have to give them living bodies to serve as hosts.’

  As he spoke, the edges of her vision went dim as if she were about to faint.

  ‘They eat their way into those bodies and breed, and then they can be translated without losing the scent.’

  ‘That’s what they would have done to Geraden,’ she murmured weakly. Then she raised a hand to her mouth, fighting to keep her nausea at bay.

  ‘And anybody else who got in their way,’ added the Adept. He seemed to be growing calmer. ‘That’s why I say we were lucky. If he hadn’t happened to be near the translation point when those creatures came through, they would have had to go looking for him. We would have had to fight them in the public halls of Orison. Who knows how many people would have been killed.’

  Struggling to get her mind off the idea of Geraden as a host for the monstrous insects, Terisa started to ask a question. Fortunately, she caught it in time to rephrase it.

  ‘It’s a good thing you were there to rescue us.’ She felt an unexpected, poignant desire to say, I saw the riders of my dream in the augury. Geraden thinks I’m an Imager.

  ‘I said I’m crazy,’ the Adept replied with some asperity. ‘I didn’t say I’m stupid.’ Then, to her surprise, he smiled, baring his crooked yellow teeth. ‘It’s obvious that Vagel has plans for that translation point. After going to all the trouble to create it, he isn’t likely to leave it unused. I’ve been watching it, more or less ever since you told Quillon about it – the day after Gart came through and almost killed you.’

  She couldn’t help herself: she blurted out, ‘Gart? The High King’s Mono—?’

  At once, a spasm of fury twisted his face. He squeezed his eyes shut. As if they weren’t under his control, his hands rose into fists and began punching at his temples. She saw that he was holding his breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered fervently, frightened without knowing why. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just didn’t know it was Gart—’ She faltered and fell silent.

  Fiercely, he sucked a deep breath in through his nose and opened his eyes. ‘Of course it was Gart.’ One muscle at a time, as if by a supreme act of will, he resumed his stance. His mouth grimaced again. He appeared to be in command of himself. ‘The alliance between Vagel and Festten still holds. Cadwal wants you dead even more than Alend and that treacherous Prince do.’ The rhythm of his eyes was faster, however, flicking to her and away like the stalking beat of his madness.

  He tried to smile again – this time unsuccessfully. Without transition, he said, ‘You’re probably wondering why I brought you here. Well, I can’t tell you that. If I knew the answer myself, it probably wouldn’t make sense. But I want to tell you a little bit about King Joyse.’

  Terisa swallowed the change of subject as well as she could and waited for him to go on.

  ‘You know, the relationship between Imagery, augury, and fate is an interesting philosophical question.’ His tone was peaceful now, but his eyes contradicted it. His manner brought back the idea of a lurking spider. ‘Before Joyse was born, I was what some people called the “pet Imager” of the Cadwal prince who ruled Orison and the Demesne. He was a petty tyrant, but imaginative in his cruelties, and I was growing desperate for hope. So I tried to arrange an augury for the coming birth.

  ‘Unfortunately, I was unable to shape a flat glass to show the room where he would be born. The best I could create was an Image of a hill just outside Orison – a hill,’ he added by the way, ‘which is now in the castle. In fact, it forms the foundation for the tower where he has his rooms.

  ‘But at the time,’ he resumed, ‘the focus of my mirror refused to be adjusted any farther than the stables where our prince allowed us to keep our mangy horses.

  ‘Of course, I could have waited until the child was born and grew up enough to go to the stables on his own. But as I say I was growing desperate. So one black night soon after he was born, I stole little Joyse from his cradle and took him down to the stables and risked leaving him there alone in a pile of straw while I raced back to my small laborium to work the augury.

  ‘He took cold and nearly died – but I got what I wanted.’

  From where he stood, he couldn’t see Geraden and Artagel as they crept past the edge of the pillar. Terisa glanced at them to reassure herself about Artagel’s condition – and to try to warn them not to interfere. Then she returned her attention to the Adept.

  ‘It was a remarkable augury, unusually distinct in some ways, maddeningly vague in others. On the one hand, it clearly showed Joyse making himself a king. On the other, it proved to have almost nothing to do with the process by which he actually did become King. It didn’t show the battles he actually fought, the victories he actually won, the decisions he actually made. So it was no help at all to us along the way. The best it gave us was an occasional bit of confirmation, when the results of something he did – like the creation of the Congery – unexpectedly matched the Images in the augury.

  ‘Let me give you an example,’ he said blandly while the pace of his gaze increased. ‘According to my augury, he became King as an old man. Sometime after a large, unexplained hole was torn in the side of Orison.’

  While Terisa stared – and Geraden and Artagel fought to muffle their surprise – Havelock permitted himself a stiff shrug. She felt sure he was trying to tell her something urgent, something she couldn’t possibly understand. ‘At the time, the idea that I would have to wait until he was old was so depressing – I almost didn’t bother to go rescue him from the stables. But since then I’ve had a lot of time to ask myself what went wrong. Did I falsify my augury by not allowing the conditions for it to happen naturally? Does the very act of casting an augury change events? Or are there other possibilities? Has King Joyse changed his own fate by being stronger – or weaker – than he would have been if he hadn’t taken cold that night and nearly died?

  ‘We would be better off if we could answer questions like these.’

  As if he were pausing to briefly become a completely different person, he relaxed his rigid posture and scratched himself unceremoniously. Whatever dignity and command he possessed vanished at once. His surcoat looked old and grimy enough to carry lice: perhaps the itching was unbearable. Then he drew back into his clenched stance.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else that was in my augury. If you promise never to tell anybody. Never never never.’ He spoke to the rhythm of his eyes. ‘Never never never.’ The strain of holding on to his lucidity brought sweat to his forehead, despite the cool of the room, ‘His daughters were in it.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t know they were his daughters then. But now it’s obvious.’

  A crafty look broke over his features. ‘You’ll never guess what I saw Myste doing.’

  Terisa had to gouge her nails into her palms to keep herself quiet. At the edge of her attention, she was aware of Geraden’s agitation, but she had no time to spare for him.

  With a visible effort, Adept Havelock wrestled his expression back to sternness. ‘Of course you’ll never guess,’ he snapped as if she had just said something insulting. ‘How could you? That’s why I’m going to tell you.

  ‘I saw her,’ he said sarcastically, ‘with a figure who bo
re an astonishing resemblance to Gilbur’s champion. She looked like she was begging him not to kill her.’

  Terisa must have been stronger, more resilient, than she realized. How else was it possible for her to feel such panic, after everything she had already been through? Havelock knew where Myste had gone. Perhaps King Joyse also knew. Perhaps he had known all along. Begging him not to kill her. Myste!

  Numb with fright, she asked, ‘Did he kill her? Did she go through all that just to get herself killed?’

  But it was likely that Adept Havelock didn’t hear her. While she breathed her question, Geraden surged forward, demanding, ‘Myste is with that champion? Is that why no one’s seen her recently? Does King Joyse know about this?’

  Rage on his face, Havelock whirled as if he intended to strike Geraden down. Instantly, however, his turn changed into a pirouette, and he spun circles, flapping his arms like an old crow. When he stopped, he looked like he wanted to storm at Geraden, yet he was giggling, and his voice was thick with mirth.

  ‘Do you know what the difference is between an Apt and an Adept?’

  Frozen with chagrin, Geraden gaped at the mad Imager.

  Lugubriously solemn, Adept Havelock raised his fingers to his fat lips and flapped them, making a de-de-de-de sound. Then he cackled appreciation for his own humor and turned to Terisa. ‘Do you get it? De-de-de-de. D-e. A-de-p-t.’ But he quit laughing as soon as he saw the dismay on her face. ‘Women!’ he snorted. ‘Whoever invented women gave them teats instead of brains. By the hoary goat of the arch-Imager! No wonder Mordant is in such a mess.’

  Suddenly, her throat filled with pain. He was so valuable – and so lost. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘You poor man. I’m so sorry.’

  But no amount of regret could bring his mind back. He leered at her, smacked his lips, and pronounced in a tone of finality:

  ‘Sheepdung.’

  When Artagel had recovered sufficiently, he and his companions found their way back up to the public halls of Orison. ‘You’d better tell Castellan Lebbick about the attack,’ said Geraden glumly as they walked. ‘He needs to guard that translation point.’