Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Obviously, his battles with King Joyse hadn’t been his only losses in life. And it had been when he had begun to lose his sight that he had first started to search for surer ways to rule, safer means of preserving the kingship for himself and his successor. As he had repeated until everyone near him was sick of it, ‘Loss teaches many things.’ Again privately, however – and without any disrespect – Prince Kragen dropped loss and substituted fear. A man who couldn’t see his enemies couldn’t strike at them. For that reason, he had to find new ways to protect himself. Kragen understood his father’s fear and honored it. A lesser man than Margonal would have retreated into terror and violence.

  Old and no longer strong, the Alend Monarch sprawled in the most comfortable of the meeting chairs and turned his head toward the sound of his son’s entrance. Because he was punctilious, he didn’t speak until the Alend Contender had been announced, and had greeted him in the formal manner prescribed by custom. Then he sighed as if he were especially tired. ‘Well, my son. My guards have already been here, whispering lurid reports which they were unable to explain. Perhaps you will tell me something comprehensible.’

  ‘My lord,’ Prince Kragen replied, ‘I fear I can only increase the range of your incomprehension.’ Succinctly, he described Master Quillon’s visit and the destruction of the catapult. When he was done, he told his father what he was thinking.

  ‘The Imager’s actions were strange, unquestionably. But to my mind the great mystery is that King Joyse behaves as if he had not made himself weak – as if we were nothing more than an annoyance to a sovereign in an invulnerable position. And he is able to command men such as Castellan Lebbick and Master Quillon to preserve that illusion.

  ‘Yet we know it is an illusion. Cadwal marches against him. He has a hole in his wall, few men to defend it, and no water for them to drink. Despite his control over the Congery, the Imagers who serve his enemies are more powerful. They are able to strike him at will anywhere in Mordant or Orison, passing through flat glass as if they were immune to madness. In addition, there are Masters on the Congery who would abandon his cause if they could. Men such as Eremis may be loyal to Mordant, but they are no longer committed to their King.

  ‘His lords will not help him. The Armigite is a coward. The Termigan values nothing but his own affairs. And the Perdon resists Cadwal, not for King Joyse, but for his own survival. Of the Cares, only Domne, Tor, and Fayle are truly loyal. Yet the Domne does not fight. The Tor is old, sodden with wine – and here, where he is unable to muster his people. And the Fayle cannot come to Orison’s aid because we stand in his way.

  ‘And still King Joyse treats us as if we lack the means to harm him.’

  The more he thought about it, the more unsure the Prince became. For a moment, he chewed on his moustache while his doubts chewed on him. Then he concluded, ‘In truth, my lord, I cannot decide in my own mind whether his audacity constitutes raving or deep policy.’

  Again, the Alend Monarch sighed. With apparent irrelevance, he murmured, ‘I suffered an uncomfortable night. The loss of sight has sharpened my powers of recollection. Instead of sleeping, I saw every trick and subterfuge he has ever practiced against me. I felt every blow of our battles. Such memories would curdle the blood of a young sovereign with his eyes clear in his head. For me, they are fatal.’

  Facing his son as if he could see, Margonal asked in a husky voice, ‘Can you think of anything – anything at all – that a king such as Joyse might gain by feigning weakness – by allowing Imagers to bring atrocities down on the heads of his people – by permitting us to invest him when his defenses are so poor?’

  ‘No.’ Prince Kragen shook his head for his own benefit. ‘It is madness. It must be madness.’

  ‘And the lady Elega? She is his daughter. Her knowledge of him is greater than yours – greater even than mine. Can she think of anything that he might gain?’

  Again, the Prince said, ‘No.’ He trusted her, didn’t he? He believed what she believed about her father, didn’t he?

  Abruptly, the Alend Monarch raised his voice. ‘Then he is a madman, a madman. He must be rooted out of his stronghold and made to pay for this. Do you hear me? It is unsufferable!’

  As if he didn’t know what they were doing, his fists began to beat on the arms of his chair.

  ‘I understand his desire to take Mordant from us and rule it as his own. He was able to do it – therefore he did it. Who would not? And I understand his desire to gather all the resources of Imagery for himself. Again he was able to do it – therefore he did it. Who would not? And perhaps I understand also his restraint when he had created the Congery, his refusal to use his power for conquest. That is not what Festten would have done. It is not what I would have done. But perhaps in that he was saner than we.

  ‘But this—! To create all he has created, and then abandon it to destruction!’ Now the Alend Monarch was shouting. ‘To forge such a weapon as the Congery, and then make himself vulnerable to attack, neglect responsibility, turn his back on those who serve and trust him, so that his enemies have no choice but to attempt to wrest his weapon from him for their own survival!’ Margonal half rose from his seat, as if he intended to go to demand sense from King Joyse in person. ‘I say it is unsufferable! It must not continue! ’

  As quickly as it had come up, however, his passion subsided. Sinking back, he wiped his hands across his face.

  ‘My son,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘when I received your message asking us to march, a chill went into my heart. I cannot warm it away. I know that man. He has beaten me too often. I fear that he has lured us here to destroy us – that his weakness is a pose to bring us and Cadwal within reach, so we can be crushed at his ease, instead of met in honest battle. You say this cannot be true. The lady Elega says it cannot be true. My own reason says it cannot be true – if only because in fifty years he has never shown any desire to crush us. And yet I fear it.

  ‘He has witched me. We have come here to our doom.’

  Prince Kragen stared at what his father was saying and tried not to shudder. Fear teaches many things, he thought. Have all the rest of us been blind? Why have we never believed that Joyse is malign? Softly, he answered, ‘My lord, say the word, and we will retreat. You are the Alend Monarch. And I trust your wisdom. We will—’

  ‘No!’ Margonal’s refusal sounded more like pain than anger or protest. ‘No,’ he repeated almost at once, in a steadier tone. ‘He has witched me, I say. I am certain of only one thing – I cannot make decisions where he is concerned.

  ‘No, my son, this siege is yours. You are the Alend Contender. I have given our doom into your hands.’ A moment later, he added in warning, ‘If you choose retreat, be very certain that you can answer for your decision to the others who seek my Seat.’

  Mutely, the Prince nodded. He had caught Margonal’s chill much earlier: long before this conversation, the cold of the wind had crept into his vitals. But the Alend Monarch had named his doubt for him – and the name seemed to make the doubt more palpable, more potent. We have come here to our doom. When his father asked, ‘What will you do?’ he chewed his lip and replied, ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Choose soon.’ Now Margonal spoke to him harshly, as he himself had spoken harshly to the lady Elega. ‘Festten will not be patient with your uncertainty.’

  In response, Kragen stiffened his spine. ‘Perhaps not, my lord. Nevertheless our doom will be Cadwal’s as well. Until the issue is proven, I will do my best to teach the High King better uses for his impatience.’

  Slowly, the Alend Monarch relaxed until he was sprawling in his chair once again. Unexpectedly, he smiled. ‘Festten, I have heard, has many sons. I have only one. I am inclined to think, however, that I have already bested him in the matter.’

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, Prince Kragen bowed deeply. Then he withdrew from his father’s presence and went to watch a vague brown shape rise above the walls of Orison and wreck another of his best catapults.

/>   Fortunately, his men escaped without injury this time.

  His face showed nothing but confidence as he went to consult with all his captains.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A DAY OF TROUBLE

  Castellan Lebbick stood with the three Imagers on the ramparts of the northwest wall and watched as the brown shape which Adept Havelock had translated reduced the second Alend catapult to firewood and splinters. At this elevation, behind the defensive parapet built into Orison’s outward face, he had a good view despite the distance.

  Judging by the old scowl cut into the lines of his face, the knot of his jaw muscles, the bleak glare in his eyes, he wasn’t impressed.

  He ought to have been impressed. He had had no idea that this mirror existed – or that a creature with no more definition than dense smoke could be translated and controlled, could be made to carry rocks as heavy as a man anywhere the Adept commanded. And that wasn’t all. In plain fact, he had had no idea that Havelock was still sane enough to cooperate in Orison’s defense – that plans could be designed on the assumption that the Adept would carry out his part in them. In some way, the Castellan’s warrior spirit probably was impressed. Unquestionably he ought to have been.

  He wasn’t conscious of it, however. He certainly didn’t show it. The truth was that only a harsh act of will enabled him to keep his mind on what he was doing, pay any attention to the situation at all.

  ‘Well done,’ Master Quillon breathed as the airborne shape returned to Havelock’s glass, gusting easily across the wind. ‘You surpass yourself, indeed you do.’ And he actually patted the Adept’s shoulder like an old friend – which would have surprised Lebbick under other circumstances, since Havelock’s lunacy had made friendship with him impossible for everyone except King Joyse. Who was himself, the Castellan thought sourly, no longer particularly sane.

  ‘Fornication,’ Adept Havelock replied negligently, as if he normally performed such feats of Imagery standing on his head. ‘Piss on the slut.’ In spite of his tone, however, he was concentrating so hard that his misaimed eyes bulged slightly.

  ‘Of course,’ murmured Master Eremis. ‘My thought exactly.’ He was the only other man near the mirror, although a number of guards and several Apts were clustered a short distance away, watching raptly. ‘Yet it occurs to me that you have been a bit too coy with your talents, Adept Havelock.’

  Nominally, Eremis was here only because the Castellan wasn’t done with him. Too many questions remained to be answered. Nevertheless his interest in what happened was intense: his wedge-shaped head followed everything, studied every movement; his eyes gleamed as if he were having a wonderful time. ‘If the Congery had known of your resources, we might have made different decisions entirely.’

  Master Quillon glanced rapidly at the taller Imager. ‘Is that so? Such as?’

  In response, Master Eremis smiled distinctly at the Castellan. ‘We might have decided to defend Mordant ourselves, rather than waiting politely for our beloved King to fall off the precarious perch of his reason.’

  Lebbick really should have replied to that jibe. Eremis intended to provoke him – and provocation was his bread and meat. It fed the fires of dedication and outrage which kept him going, sustained him so that he could continue to serve his King past the point where his own common sense rebelled and his instinct for fidelity turned against him. In addition, he had work to do where Master Eremis was concerned – issues to resolve, explanations to obtain. But this time the Master’s sarcasm didn’t touch him. His heart was elsewhere, and without it he wasn’t able to think clearly.

  His heart was in the dungeon, where he had left that woman.

  Curse her, anyway, curse her. She was the source of all the trouble, all the harm. He was even starting to think that she was the reason for King Joyse’s weakness, even though the King had been walking that path for years before her first appearance. But now Lebbick would get the truth out of her. He would tear her limbs off if necessary to get the truth out of her. He would take the soft flesh of her body in his hands—

  He would do anything he wanted to her. He had permission.

  Now you’ve done it, woman. You’ve done something so heinous that nobody is going to protect you. That was true. The Tor had tried – and failed. You’ve helped a murderer escape.

  Now you are mine.

  Even though he had been warned.

  Mine.

  If only he could control the way he trembled whenever he thought of her.

  He answered Master Eremis for no reason at all except to mask what was happening to him, disguise the tremors in his muscles.

  But he wasn’t thinking about what he said. He couldn’t. He was too busy remembering the way her arms felt when he ground his fingers into them.

  ‘No,’ he heard her whisper. Her protest was like the horror in her soft brown eyes, like the quivering of her delicately cleft chin. She was afraid of him, deeply afraid. His anger touched a sore place in her – he could see that vividly, even though she had stood up to him in the past, had lied to him, forced him to swallow his passion against her time and again. She feared him as if she deserved to be terrified, as if she already knew that anything he might do to her was justified. ‘No,’ she whispered, but it wasn’t his accusations she denied; it was him, the Castellan himself, his violence and authority.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied through his teeth, smiling at her fiercely as if she made him happy for the last time in his life.

  Holding her as hard as he wished, without regard for her pain – or for the way the Masters and guards looked at him despite the chaos of Nyle’s murder and Geraden’s disappearance – he escorted her to the dungeon himself.

  Along the way, she babbled.

  ‘No, you don’t understand, it’s a trick, Geraden didn’t kill Nyle, please listen to me, listen to me, Eremis did this somehow, it’s a trick.’

  He liked that. He liked her fear. He wanted her prostrate in front of him. At the same time, however, her reaction disturbed him. For some reason, it reminded him of his wife.

  For no good reason, obviously, since his wife hadn’t been a babbler. In fact, she hadn’t been afraid of anything, not since King Joyse had rescued them from the Alend garrison commander who was having her raped so imaginatively. Not since he, Lebbick, had ripped that dogshit Alend apart with his teeth.

  But before that she had been afraid. Yes, he remembered her fear as well. She babbled. Yes. He heard her – watched her – was forced to watch her – and couldn’t do anything about it, anything at all. He heard and saw her do every desperate and terrible thing she could think of to try to make those men stop.

  Castellan Lebbick wasn’t going to stop. Never. Let her babble to her heart’s content, cry out, scream if she wanted to. She was his.

  Yet it disturbed him.

  When he thrust her into her cell so that she nearly sprawled on the cot against the far wall, he had no intention of stopping. But he didn’t start right away. Instead, he closed the iron door behind him without bothering to lock it, folded his arms across his chest to keep them from shaking, and faced her past the light of the single lamp. Its wick needed trimming; the flame guttered wildly, making shadows dance fright over her pale features.

  Still smiling through his teeth, he demanded, ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Babbling. ‘Somehow. To get rid of Geraden. Geraden is the only one who doesn’t trust him.’ Terrified. ‘Eremis and Gilbur are working together. And Vagel. He lied to the Congery.’ Trying to distract him. ‘Eremis brought Nyle to the meeting of the Congery. He said Nyle would prove Geraden is a traitor, but that was a lie. They set this up together. They planned it.’ Trying to create the illusion that she made sense. ‘It’s a fake. They staged it. They must have.’

  Deaf to the illogic of her own defense, she insisted, ‘Nyle is still alive.’

  Watching her, the Castellan wanted to crow for joy. ‘No, woman.’ His jaws throbbed with the effort of not sinking his teeth into her. ‘T
ell me how. How did he escape? How did you help him escape?’

  Finally she caught hold of herself, closed her mouth on her panic. Shadows flickered in and out of her eyes; she looked as desirable as an immolation.

  ‘He’s no Imager,’ Lebbick went on. ‘And there isn’t any way he could have left those rooms except by Imagery. So you did it. You translated him somewhere.

  ‘Where is he, woman? I want him.’

  She stared at him. Her dismay seemed to become a kind of calm; she was less frantic simply because she was so afraid. ‘You’ve gone crazy,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve snapped. It’s been too much for you.’

  ‘I won’t hurt him.’ The Castellan’s face felt like it was being split apart by the stress of restraint. ‘It isn’t really his fault. I know that. You seduced him into it. Until you arrived, he was just another son of the Domne – too clumsy for his own good, but a decent boy. Everybody liked him, even though he couldn’t do anything right. You changed that. You involved him in treachery. When I get my hands on him, I won’t even punish him. I just want him to tell me the truth.’

  Suddenly, like dry brush on a smoldering blaze, Lebbick yelled at her, ‘Where IS he?’

  She flinched, cowered. Just for a second, he believed that she was going to answer. But then something inside her stiffened. She raised her head and faced him squarely.

  ‘Go to hell.’

  At that, he laughed. He couldn’t help himself: he laughed as if his heart were breaking. ‘You little whore,’ he chortled, ‘don’t try to defy me. You aren’t strong enough.’

  At once, he began to speak more precisely, more formally, tapping words into her fear like coffin nails. ‘I’m going to start by taking off your clothes. I might do it gently, just for fun. Women are especially vulnerable when they don’t have any clothes on.

  ‘Then I’ll begin to hurt you.’ He took a step toward her, but didn’t release his arms from his chest. ‘Just a little at first. One breast or the other. Or perhaps a few barbs across your belly. A rough piece of wood between your legs. Just to get your attention.’ He wished she could see what he saw: his wife being stretched out in the dirt by those Alends, her limbs spread-eagled and staked so that she couldn’t move, the delicate things the garrison commander had done to her with small knives. ‘Then I’ll begin to hurt you in earnest.