Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  In fact, she felt too weak to eat at all, to take care of herself in any way. As soon as Castellan Lebbick spoke to her, she would tell him anything he wanted. But that wouldn’t stop him. She could see his face in her mind, and she knew the truth. He didn’t want to stop. Now that he had King Joyse’s permission, nothing would stop him.

  Where were the people who had shown her courtesy or kindness, the people who might be supposed to have some interest in her? Elega had gone with Prince Kragen. Myste had left Orison on a crazy quest to help the Congery’s lost and rampaging champion. Adept Havelock was mad. Master Quillon had become mediator of the Congery because that was what King Joyse wanted – and King Joyse had given the Castellan permission to do whatever he wished to her. Saddith? She was only a maid, in spite of her ambitions. Maybe she had inadvertently betrayed Terisa to Eremis. That didn’t mean there was anything she could do to correct the situation. Ribuld, the coarse veteran who had fought for Terisa more than once? He was only a guard – not even a captain.

  She couldn’t lift the whole weight of Mordant’s need by herself. She was hardly able to lift her head off the lumpy pallet which served as her mattress. The Tor had seen Nyle’s body. Geraden’s brother was unquestionably dead.

  Why should she bother to eat? What was the point?

  Maybe if she got hungry enough, she would regain the ability to let go of her own existence.

  She tried to sleep – tried to relax so that the tension and reality would flow out of her muscles – but another set of boots stumbled toward her down the corridor. Just one: someone was coming in her direction alone. A slow, limping stride, hesitant or frail. Deliberately, she closed her eyes again. She didn’t want to know who it was. She didn’t want to be distracted.

  For the first time, he called her by her name.

  ‘Terisa.’

  It wasn’t a good omen.

  Startled, she raised her head and saw Geraden’s brother at the door of her cell.

  ‘Artagel?’

  He wore a nightshirt and breeches – clothes which seemed to increase his family resemblance to Geraden and Nyle because they weren’t right for a swordsman. His dress and his way of standing as if someone had just stuck a knife in his side made it clear that he was still supposed to be in bed. He had been too weak yesterday – was it really only yesterday? – to support Geraden in front of the Congery. Obviously, he was too weak to walk around in the dungeon alone today.

  Yet he was here.

  It was definitely not a good omen that he had called her Terisa.

  Forgetting her own lack of strength, she swung her legs off the cot and went toward him. ‘Oh, Artagel, I’m so glad to see you, I’m in so much trouble, I need you, I need a friend, Artagel, they think Geraden killed Nyle, they—’

  His pallor stopped her. The sweat of strain on his forehead and the tremor of pain in his mouth stopped her. His eyes were glazed, as if he were about to lose consciousness. Gart, the High King’s Monomach, had wounded him severely, and he drove himself into relapses by struggling out of bed when he should have been resting. The fact that Gart had beaten him; Nyle’s treasonous alliance with Prince Kragen and the lady Elega; the accusations against Geraden: things like that tormented the Domne’s most famous son, goading him to fight his weakness – and his recovery.

  ‘Artagel,’ she groaned, ‘you shouldn’t be here. You should be in bed. You’re making yourself sick again.’

  ‘No.’ The word came out like a gurgle. With one arm, he clamped his other hand against his side. ‘No.’ Because he was too sick to remain standing without help, he leaned on the door, pressing his forehead against the bars. The dullness in his eyes made him look like he was going blind. ‘This is your doing.’

  She halted: pain went through her like a burn. ‘Artagel?’ There were, after all, more kinds of pain in the world than she would ever have guessed. Except for Geraden, Artagel was the best friend she had. She would have trusted him without question. ‘You don’t mean that.’ He thought she was responsible? ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to say it.’ He was having trouble with his respiration. His breath seemed to struggle past an obstruction in his chest. ‘That isn’t why I’m here. Lebbick is going to take care of you. I just want to know where Geraden is.

  ‘I’m going to hunt him down and cut his heart out.’

  Suddenly, she was filled with a desire to wail or weep. It would have done her good to cry out. But this was too important. Somehow, she kept her cry down. Panting because the cell was too small and if she didn’t get more air soon she was going to fail, she protested, ‘No. Eremis did this. It’s a trick. I tell you, it’s a trick. The Tor says he’s seen the body and Nyle is really dead, but I don’t believe it. Geraden didn’t have anything to do with this.’

  ‘Ah!’ Artagel gasped as if he were hurt and furious. ‘Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to me anymore.’ Now his eyes were clear and hot, bright with passion or fever. ‘I’ve seen the body myself.’

  And while she reeled inside herself he continued, ‘After Geraden stabbed him, he was still alive. That much is true. Eremis rushed him to his own rooms and got a physician for him. That was his only chance to stay alive. Eremis got him that chance. Then Eremis put guards on him – inside the room and outside the door. In case Geraden tried again.

  ‘It didn’t work.’ Artagel’s forehead seemed to bulge between the bars; he might have been trying to break his skull. ‘Lebbick found them. The guards were killed. Some kind of beast fed off them. Geraden must have translated something into the room – something they couldn’t fight.

  ‘Nyle was killed. It chewed his face off.’

  Just for a second, that image struck her so horribly that she quailed. Oh, Nyle! Oh, my God. Visceral revulsion churned inside her, and her hands leaped to cover her mouth. Geraden, no!

  She should have gone with him. To prevent all this.

  But then she saw iron and anguish, and Geraden came back to her. She knew him. And she loved him. Terisa, I did not kill my brother. Without warning, she was angry. Years of outrage which she had stored away in the secret places of her heart abruptly sprang out, touching her with fire.

  ‘Say that again,’ she breathed, panted. ‘Go on. Say it.’

  Artagel was beyond the reach of surprise. Baring his teeth in a snarl, he repeated, ‘Nyle was killed. The beast chewed his face off.’

  ‘And you believe Geraden did that?’ She lashed her protest at him. ‘Are you out of your mind? Has everybody in this whole place gone crazy?’

  He blinked dumbly; for one brief moment, he seemed to regard her in a different light. Almost at once, however, his own horror returned. His legs were failing. Slowly, he began to slip down the bars.

  ‘I saw his body. I held it. I’ve still got his blood on my clothes.’

  That was true. Her lamp was bright enough to reveal the dried stains on his nightshirt.

  ‘I don’t care.’ She was too angry to imagine what the experience had been like for him – to hold his own brother’s outraged corpse in his arms and have no way to bring the body back to life. ‘Geraden is your brother. You’ve known him all his life. You know him better than that.’

  Artagel continued slipping. His side hurt too much: apparently, he couldn’t use his hands. She reached through the bars and grabbed his nightshirt to support him somehow; but he was too heavy for her. Finally he bent his legs and caught his weight on his knees. ‘I tell you I’ve seen his body.’

  He pulled her down with him until she was on her knees as well. Raging into his face, she gasped, ‘I don’t care. Geraden didn’t do it.’

  ‘And I tell you I’ve seen his body.’ In spite of weakness and fever, Artagel met her with the unflinching passion which had twice led him to hurl himself against the High King’s Monomach. ‘You deny it, but it isn’t going to go away. An Imager did it. Translation is the only way a beast could get into that room and out again. But it wasn’t Eremis. He was with Lebbick the whole time.
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  ‘Right now, he’s up in the reservoir translating a new water supply. He’s the only reason we’ve got any hope at all. I took Geraden’s side against him’ – Artagel’s voice seemed to be thick with blood – ‘and I was wrong. He’s saving us.

  ‘Geraden killed Nyle. I’m going to track him down whether you tell me where he is or not. The only difference it’s going to make is time.’

  ‘And then you’re going to cut his heart out.’ Terisa couldn’t bear any more. He made her want to shriek. With an effort of will, she let go of his shirt, drew back from him. ‘Get out of here,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t want to hear this.’ The image of what had happened to Nyle sucked at her concentration. She thrust it away with both hands. ‘Just get out of here.’

  Then the sight of him – fierce and in pain on his knees against her bars – touched her, and she relented a little. ‘You really ought to be in bed. You aren’t going to be hunting anybody for a while. If the Castellan doesn’t tear it out of me – and if he lets me live – I promise I’ll tell you everything I can when you’re well enough to do something about it.’

  He didn’t raise his head for a long time. When he finally looked up, the light had gone out of his gaze.

  Tortuously, like an old man whose joints had begun to betray him, he pulled himself up the bars, regained his feet. ‘I always trusted him,’ he murmured as if he were alone, deaf and blind to her presence. ‘More than Nyle or any of the others. He was so clumsy and decent. And smarter than I am. I can’t figure it out.

  ‘You came along, and I thought that was good because it gave him something to fight for. It gave him a reason to stop letting those Masters humiliate him. So then he kills Nyle, kills’ – Artagel shuddered, his eyes focused on nothing – ‘and you’re the only explanation I can think of, you must be evil in some terrible way I don’t understand, but you want me to go on trusting him. I can’t figure it out.

  ‘I saw his body.’ Like an old man, he turned from the door and began shuffling down the corridor. ‘I picked it up and held it.’ Brushing at the dried stains on his nightshirt, he passed beyond Terisa’s range of vision. His boots scuffed along the floor until she couldn’t hear them anymore.

  She stood rigidly and watched the empty passage for a while, as erect as a witness testifying to what she believed. Like the Tor, he said that Nyle was dead. And he could hardly be wrong. He ought to be able to identify his own brother’s body. And yet she didn’t recant. Unexpectedly, she found that she was supported by a lifetime’s anger. A childhood of punishment and neglect had taught her many things – and she was only now starting to realize what some of those things were.

  Her hands shook. She steadied them as well as she could and began to eat the bread and stew she had been brought, pacing back and forth across the cell as she ate. She needed strength, needed to pull all her resources together. King Joyse had told her to think, to reason. Now more than at any other time in her life, she needed the stamina and determination to think clearly.

  To the extent that it was possible for anyone to do so, she intended to defy the Castellan.

  When he came at last – several hours and another meal later – she was almost glad to see him. Waiting was no doubt much easier to bear than rape or torture, but it was harder than defiance. Solitude eroded courage. Half a dozen times during those hours, she quailed, and her resolution ran out of her. Once she panicked so badly that afterward she found herself on the floor in the corner with her knees hugged against her chest and no idea how she got there.

  But she was brought back from failure of nerve by the fact that she knew how to survive waiting alone in a cold, ill-lit cell. She had recovered her ability to blank out the dark and the fear. Paradoxically, the decision to meet her danger head-on restored her capacity for escape. And when she surrendered to fading, she rediscovered the safety hidden in it and felt better.

  For this she didn’t need a mirror. Mirrors helped her fight the erosion of her existence; they weren’t necessary if she wanted to let go. And it was letting go, not desperate clinging, which had kept her sane when her parents had locked her in the closet.

  Nevertheless the time and the waiting, the cold and the inadequate food exacted their toll. There were limits to how far she could stretch her determination. She was almost glad to see him when the stamp of boots announced his coming and Castellan Lebbick appeared past the stone edge of her cell.

  Now he would hurt her as much as he could. And she would find out what she was good for.

  But the sight of him shocked her: it wasn’t what she had expected. She was braced for rage and violence, for the intensity like hate in his glare and his knotted jaws, for the potential murder tightly coiled in all his muscles. She wasn’t ready for the distracted man, noticeably shorter than she was, who entered her cell with no swagger in his shoulders and no authority on his face.

  The Castellan looked like someone who had suffered an essential defeat.

  Dully, he let himself into the cell. Again, he didn’t bother to lock the door behind him. He was enough of a bar to her escape. And if she got past him and out of her cell, where could she go? She could run the corridors like a trapped rat, but she couldn’t get out of the dungeon without passing through the guardroom. Castellan Lebbick didn’t need to lock the door.

  For a moment, he didn’t meet her gaze; he glanced around the cell, glanced up and down her body without quite looking at her face. Then he murmured as if he were speaking primarily to himself, ‘You’re better. The last time I saw you, you were about to fall apart. Now you look like you want to fight.’ Without sarcasm, he commented, ‘I had no idea being thrown in the dungeon was going to be good for you.’

  Terisa shrugged, studying him hard. ‘I’ve had time to think.’

  At last, he raised his eyes to hers. The smolder she was accustomed to seeing in them had been extinguished – or tamped down, at any rate. He seemed almost calm, almost stable – almost lost. ‘Does that mean,’ he asked quietly, ‘you’re going to tell me where he is?’

  She shook her head.

  In the same tone, the Castellan continued, ‘Are you going to tell me what you’ve been plotting? Are you going to tell me why he did it?’

  Once more, she shook her head. For some reason, her throat had gone dry. Lebbick’s uncharacteristic demeanor began to frighten her.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ He seemed to have no sarcasm left. Turning away, he started to walk back and forth in front of the bars. His manner was almost casual; he might have been out for a stroll. ‘King Joyse told me to push you. He wants you to declare yourself. Does that surprise you?’ The question was rhetorical. ‘It should. It isn’t like him. He was always able to get what he wanted without beating up women.

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to it all day.

  ‘But now—’ He spread his hands in a way that almost gave the impression he was asking her for help. ‘Everything is inside out. Clumsy, decent, loyal Geraden has turned rotten. Crazy Adept Havelock spent most of the day protecting us from catapults. Master Eremis is busy refilling the reservoir.’ Apparently, he didn’t know that she had been visited by both the Tor and Artagel, that she was already aware of the things he told her. ‘And King Joyse wants me to hurt you. He wants me to find out who you are – what you are.’

  A suggestion of yearning came into Lebbick’s voice, a hint of wistfulness. ‘Sometimes – a long time ago – he used to let me get even with his enemies. Sometimes, Men like that garrison commander— But he’s never given me permission to hurt someone like you.’

  Then the Castellan faced her – and still he seemed almost casual, almost lost. ‘He must be afraid of you. He must be more afraid of you than he’s ever been of Margonal or Festten or Gart or even Vagel.

  ‘Why is that? What are you?’

  Meeting his extinguished, unreadable gaze, Terisa swallowed roughly. She didn’t understand what had happened to him, what had taken the fire out of him or stifled his hate; but this was
the best chance she would ever get to distract him, deflect his intentions against her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said as steadily as she could. ‘You’re asking the wrong questions.’

  ‘The wrong questions?’

  ‘I can’t tell you why King Joyse is afraid of me. If he’s afraid of me. And I won’t tell you where Geraden is. Because he didn’t do it. I’m not going to give him away.

  ‘But I’ll tell you anything else.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Castellan Lebbick sounded no more than mildly interested in the idea. ‘Like what?’

  His manner gave her a moment of panic. She was afraid that he had become unreachable – that whatever was happening to him had taken him beyond the point where anybody could talk to him, argue with him, guess what he would do next. Breathing deeply to shore up her courage, she replied, ‘Like how did I survive when Gart tried to kill me the first night I was here. Like what was I using that secret passage in my rooms for. Like what really happened the night Eremis had his meeting with the lords and Prince Kragen. Like what happened the first time Geraden was attacked.’ Her own passion mounted against the Castellan’s blankness. ‘Like how I can be sure Eremis is lying.’

  At that, something like a spark showed in Lebbick’s eyes. His posture didn’t shift, but his whole body seemed to become unnaturally still. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It all fits together,’ she answered. King Joyse had told her to reason, and reason was the only weapon she had. ‘I can even tell you why they’re afraid of Geraden – Vagel and Eremis and Gilbur – why they’re trying so hard to get him out of their way.’

  Lebbick didn’t blink. ‘Tell me,’ he repeated.

  So she told him. As clearly as she could, she told him how Adept Havelock had saved her from the High King’s Monomach. She described how Havelock and Master Quillon had used the passage hidden behind her wardrobe. She related every detail she could remember about Eremis’ clandestine meeting with the lords of the Cares, including Artagel’s role in saving her. And then she told the Castellan what conclusions she drew.