Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  All Geraden needed was a mirror.

  He could do it, if he could get to his glass – the one which had brought her here.

  Sure.

  When they made camp, she helped him build the biggest fire they could. She hunted as far as she dared, collecting firewood. Then, while they ate supper, she commented morosely, ‘I don’t know what made me say that.’

  Geraden looked at her across the stewpot out of which he was eating.

  ‘You said they were the ones who didn’t get away. I said they were the ones who did. I don’t know why I said that.’

  He tried without much success to smile. ‘Let’s hope you just have a morbid imagination.’ The firelight on his face reminded her of the Termigan.

  She couldn’t smile, either. ‘Why is it,’ she went on, trying to exorcise images which haunted her, ‘everything that comes here by translation is so destructive? Why is it so easy to find terrible things in mirrors? Is the universe really so malign?’

  ‘I certainly hope not.’ In a transparent effort to reassure her, Geraden grimaced lugubriously. Then he set himself to give her an answer.

  ‘It’s probably true that every world has predators. But even if a world didn’t contain any violence at all, its creatures or powers might still be destructive if they were translated – if they were taken out of their natural place. There’s nothing immoral about a pit of fire – as long as you leave it where it belongs. What’s really destructive is the man who translates it somewhere else.

  ‘Would you call a fox destructive? After all, it hunts chickens. And people need those chickens. Even so, there’s nothing wrong with the fox.

  ‘For all we know, the firecat that burned Houseldon might be the same thing as a fox in its own world. It might be anything. It might even be an administer of charity.’

  An administer of charity. Just for a moment, she took the idea seriously. Someone who ran a mission, for example. Then, however, she was struck by the thought of Reverend Thatcher going around setting towns on fire. On his own terms, that would please him. But literally setting towns on fire—

  Involuntarily, she grinned. When Geraden rolled his eyes at her, she started laughing.

  She felt like a fool – like she was losing her mind. But she went on laughing, and after a while she felt better.

  Nevertheless she didn’t sleep very well that night. She kept expecting the horses to snort and shy – kept expecting to smell something cold and slightly rotten in the dark. And for some reason Geraden spent most of the night snoring like a bandsaw. When she nudged him awake in the early gray of dawn, so that they could be on their way, she felt cold herself and vaguely stupid, as if the matter inside her skull had begun to turn rancid.

  The day began well. The air was clear and crisp, and the horses moved easily along the increasingly traveled paths. And before noon she and Geraden came upon a village that had nothing wrong with it.

  Nothing, that is, except anxiety. When the people of the village heard what Terisa and Geraden had found in Aperyte, they muttered nervously and scanned the woods around their homes and began to talk about leaving.

  ‘Ghouls,’ a woman pronounced, confirming Terisa’s guess. ‘Don’t know what else to call them. Never seen one – but the lord sent men to warn us. Attack at dusk or dawn. Little critters, almost like children. Green and smelly.

  ‘Eat every kind of flesh. Don’t even leave the grease and bones. That’s what the lord’s men said.’

  Geraden scowled as if he were in pain. ‘That’s why the gate was closed,’ he muttered. ‘The horses never got out. They were eaten right there in the corral.’

  Terisa was thinking, They’re the ones who did. They escaped into their huts and somehow sealed the doors. And then they were incinerated in their own homes.

  Eremis.

  She was beginning to understand why King Joyse had fought for twenty years to strip Alend and Cadwal of Imagers and create the Congery. He wanted to prevent creatures like ghouls from being translated into the world.

  Through a haze of nausea and anger, she asked one of the villagers, ‘What’re you going to do?’

  ‘What the lord’s men told us,’ came the reply. ‘If we heard any rumor of ghouls around here, saw any sign. Get to Romish as fast as we can.’

  ‘Good,’ said Geraden fiercely.

  He and Terisa rode on.

  She still felt like the meat of her brain was going bad. Even though those villagers were safe, she couldn’t rid herself of the impression that the day was getting worse. How many ghouls had Eremis already translated into the Care of Fayle? How much of the Fayle’s strength had already been eaten away?

  How could he help King Joyse and defend his own people at the same time?

  She practiced saying oh, shit to herself until it began to feel more natural.

  ‘Here’s some more good news,’ Geraden remarked the next time he studied the map. ‘At the rate we’re going, we’re due to reach another village just about sunset. A place called Naybel.’

  Oh, shit.

  Grimly, she made an effort to think. ‘Maybe we should stay away from it. Maybe those things are following us.’

  He glared at her. ‘You do have a morbid imagination.’ After a moment, he added, ‘If we’re being followed, we’ve got to warn the village. We can’t lead ghouls past Naybel and expect them to leave it alone.’

  The day was definitely going downhill.

  The afternoon wore on, as miserable and prolonged as a toothache. Eventually, Terisa concluded that there were after all worse things than spending so much of the day on horseback. She couldn’t get that smell out of her mind—

  Without making an explicit decision to hurry, she and Geraden began to urge their horses faster. They wanted to reach Naybel before dusk.

  Mishap continued to dog them. Because they were hurrying, they rode into the village precisely as the sun began to dip into the horizon. At a slower pace, they wouldn’t have arrived until full dark.

  The decision to ride straight into the village was also one which they hadn’t made explicitly: they did it simply because the need to warn Naybel’s people blanketed other considerations. As a result, they were already among the huts, on their way in toward the center of the village, when they realized that Naybel was as empty as Aperyte.

  Geraden slowed the gray’s canter. The beast’s head went up and down like a hammer, fighting the reins. Terisa’s gelding had its ears back. Where the sunlight came through the trees, the shadows of the huts were as sharp as blades.

  ‘Geraden,’ she whispered, ‘we’re too late. Let’s get out of here.’ Geraden hesitated, turned his head to fling a look around him – and lost control of his mount. The gray caught its bit between its teeth and bolted.

  Terisa couldn’t stop her roan from following.

  Almost at once, she heard the squeal of a pig. Geraden nearly lost his seat as the gray wrenched itself aside to avoid collision with a fat porker. Immediately, his horse blundered into a squall of chickens. Terisa followed him through feathers and shadows.

  Into the center of the village.

  Like Aperyte, Naybel had an open-sided meeting hall among its houses. In the hall stood a group of men – six or eight of them. They wore heavy boots and battle-leathers; they were armed with swords, pikes, longbows.

  As soon as they saw Geraden and Terisa, they began to yell, waving their arms wildly.

  ‘Fools!’

  ‘Fornication!’

  ‘Get away!’

  ‘Stop!’

  Several of them apparently wanted to chase the horses off. Fortunately, one man had a different idea. Or he realized that the gray was a runaway. With the practiced ease of someone who had worked with horses all his life, he jumped at the gray’s head and caught the reins. The gray wheeled to a halt so hard that Geraden was nearly snapped out of the saddle.

  More to avoid hitting the gray than because of anything Terisa did, the gelding also blundered to a stop.

  �
�Fools!’ a man shouted. ‘You’re going to be killed!’

  Terisa tried to hold herself still, but the whole village seemed to be spinning. A shadow as distinct as a cut lay across the roan’s head. The men from the meeting hall shifted in and out of shadows; their weapons disappeared, caught the sun, disappeared again. Geraden had nearly run into a pig. And chickens. Naybel wasn’t empty, not like Aperyte.

  Then what—?

  It was true: she could smell something cold, something that had begun to rot; something like the exhalation from a neglected tomb.

  Out of a hut beyond the meeting hall came a little boy. She thought he was a little boy, oddly naked. A grin split his face, leaving a wide, empty place. He didn’t leave the shadows; because of the dim illumination, a moment passed before she noticed that he had a chicken in his hands.

  The chicken was melting. It slumped over his fingers like heated wax. But none of it dripped to the ground. Instead, as it oozed it was absorbed into his flesh.

  Now she realized that his whole body was covered with slime. Maybe the shadows were playing tricks on her eyes. The boy looked green—

  A hoarse cry broke from the men. Two of them already had their longbows up, arrows nocked. Bows like that could have flung their yards straight through the walls of one of these huts. The two arrows that hit the little boy spiked him to the dirt.

  Terisa distinctly heard a popping noise, a sound of rupture; she heard a brief wail claw the air.

  Instantly, three more green children appeared in the shadow beside the little boy. They grinned as they began to feed.

  Somewhere out of sight, the pig squealed – a shriek of porcine agony. The gelding took this occasion to pitch Terisa off its back. With a whinny like a scream, it rushed out of the village.

  Terisa landed heavily, knocking the air out of her chest. In the distance, Geraden yelled her name, but she couldn’t react to it. The jolt of impact stunned her. A streak of sunlight fell over her face: she looked up and saw one of the ghouls standing in shadow no more than four or five feet away. She could smell the child—

  In fact, the odor wasn’t particularly strong. It was insidious, however, and its subtlety seemed to make it more nauseating, more corrosive, than a stronger stench would have been. Smelling it, staring at the small girl who grinned at her as if she were an especially tasty snack, Terisa decided that the slime on the ghoul’s skin was acid. It rendered flesh down to a tallow the creature could take in through its pores. And when someone tried to escape by barring the door of a hut, the acid probably set the wood on fire.

  The ghoul was so hungry that she started out of the shadow into the light that covered Terisa’s face.

  Geraden leaped over her and swept the girl’s head off with a long swing of his sword.

  The popping noise, the sound of rupture; a high, thin cry.

  Two, three, no, at least six more ghouls came at once to feed on their fallen sister.

  Around the meeting hall, a weird battle raged. Superficially, it was an uneven struggle: the men slaughtered the ghouls with relative ease. Swords, pikes, arrows, even stones thrown hard – everything worked. Panting, raging, the men hacked down, sliced up, or spitted the ghouls as fast as possible. They were only children, as simple to kill as children.

  But they were so many—

  No, they weren’t as many as all that. The truth was more complex. As soon as one of them got enough to eat, the creature split apart, became two. And whenever one of them died, the body provided enough food for three or four other ghouls to multiply.

  And with every death wail, more creatures swarmed out of the shadows.

  In addition, the weapons of the men didn’t last long. Every arrow that struck home caught fire; every blade that cut came back pitted and weakened, streaked with ruin; every pike that pierced a ghoul lost its head.

  Geraden tried to wrestle Terisa toward the meeting hall, into the relative center of the battle, where the men watched each other’s backs. She thought she ought to help him, but she couldn’t get her legs under her; the fall from her horse seemed to have broken the connection between what her brain suggested and what her muscles did. She wanted to say, Water. Try water. Maybe the acid could be washed away. Or diluted. Unfortunately, all that came between her lips was a hoarse gasp for air.

  And the air was full of wails and death; the stench of rot; men cursing for their lives; sunset.

  Then, so suddenly that the sound of it almost relaxed her chest enough to let her breathe, she heard a trumpet.

  That high penetrating call seemed to change everything.

  At its signal, twenty or thirty men charged through the village on horseback.

  They knew what they were doing: they didn’t risk any of their mounts in an attempt to trample the ghouls. Instead, they carried lights of every description – torches, lanterns, blazing fagots, even oil lamps. Shining like a host of glory, the riders swept into Naybel at dusk.

  Obliquely, Terisa noticed that one of them was the Fayle himself. She recognized him by his age, his leanness, his long, heavy jaw.

  She didn’t have the strength to wonder what he was doing here. She was too busy watching.

  The light seemed to hurt the ghouls worse than death did: it paralyzed them. They lost their grins, their hunger, the power of movement. And when they couldn’t move, they couldn’t feed on each other; they couldn’t multiply.

  Clearly, the Fayle’s men knew this would happen. At once, they took advantage of it.

  In grim concentration, as if they had never been able to reconcile themselves to killing creatures that looked like children, they began hacking the ghouls apart and setting the pieces to the torch.

  They used cast-iron tongs and shovels to pile the dismembered corpses together so that the flames fed on each other. Before long, the bonfire beside the meeting hall of Naybel grew so large that its flames seemed to reach the darkening heavens. After the last of the sun went down, there was no other light in the village except fire.

  Hot fire and acrid smoke slowly took the cold, rotting odor out of the air. A gust of wind carried smoke into Terisa’s eyes; tears ran down her cheeks as if she were weeping. But she was able to breathe again, able to get air all the way down into the bottom of her lungs, able to move her shoulder. So that was why, she thought deliberately, distracting herself from the slaughter she had just witnessed so it wouldn’t overwhelm her, that was why the bodies in those burned huts in Aperyte hadn’t been consumed, when every other form of flesh in the village was gone. Once the acid had set fire to the wood, the flames had cast enough light to keep the ghouls away.

  After a minute or two, she became aware that Geraden still had his arms around her. Like her, he had taken a faceful of smoke; like her, he appeared to be weeping. The light of burning children reflected in his eyes.

  She hugged him, held him; clung to him. She didn’t know how much more she could bear.

  Trying to recover his composure, he muttered, ‘I’m never going to tell Quiss about this. Never as long as I live.’

  Terisa coughed at the smoke, cleared her throat. Remembering the way he had kept her sane when the Congery’s champion had brought the ceiling of the hall down on her, she made an effort to return the favor. ‘That’s probably a good idea. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t want you to tell me about it.’

  In the same tone, as if he were talking about the same thing, he said, ‘If I ever get my hands on Master Eremis, I swear I’m going to kill him.’

  Distinctly, so that there would be no mistake about it, she replied, ‘You’ll have to get to him before I do.’

  Geraden studied her through the dusk and firelight. Then, just for a moment, he grinned. ‘If he knew we’re this angry at him, he would break into a sweat.’

  He made it possible for her to smile as well. ‘You know,’ she murmured close to his ear, ‘until I met you, it never once occurred to me that someday I would be able to make my enemies sweat.’

  ‘Your enemies, m
y lady?’ Geraden gave her an extra hug. ‘You make me sweat.’

  When she saw the Fayle riding toward her, she realized that she felt able to face him now.

  He dismounted carefully and gave her an old man’s brittle bow. ‘My lady Terisa,’ he said in a voice like dry leaves, ‘you astonish me. When last we met, I believed that Master Eremis was the source of my surprise, but now I can see that I was mistaken. The surprise is in you.

  ‘This trap was set for ghouls, my lady. It was never my intention to ensnare you – to endanger you.’

  ‘Of course not, my lord Fayle.’ She didn’t know what kind of bow to give him. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to expect one. ‘We were just—’ She caught herself, made an effort to take one thing at a time. ‘My lord, this is Geraden.’

  The Fayle looked at Geraden. ‘Son of the Domne,’ he murmured. ‘Translator of the lady Terisa of Morgan. A prominent figure in the Congery’s augury of Mordant’s need.’ Again, he bowed. ‘You are welcome in the Care of Fayle.’

  Geraden returned the bow. Terisa wondered whether he – whether she herself – would still be welcome if the lord knew of their talents; but she wasn’t given a chance to explore the issue. Without pausing, the Fayle went on, ‘I must get out of this smoke. Our camp is a mile from here. There we can offer you hot food and a safe bed. If you will consent to accompany me, we will hear your story in better comfort.

  ‘In the morning, the villagers will return to cleanse their homes, and we will ride to attempt this tactic again elsewhere. You will be welcome to accompany us then, also, if you wish.’

  ‘Thanks, my lord,’ Geraden answered promptly. ‘We’ll be glad to go with you – at least for tonight. We’ve got a lot to tell you.’

  ‘I am sure you do,’ said the Fayle. ‘Perhaps you will be able tell me whether Master Eremis is honest – whether I was wrong to betray his intentions to Castellan Lebbick.