Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

A hoof had crushed the groom’s head: he lay in the dirt as if he were abasing himself. One of the Fayle’s men clutched at an incapacitating wound in his left shoulder; the other had been hacked to death. Dead and dying horses sprawled everywhere, some of them still quivering. Perhaps ten of the beasts remained alive, but of those at least half showed injuries of one kind or another.

  In the middle of the carnage, Queen Madin’s servant knelt beside his mount, whimpering for his life.

  Swallowing nausea, Terisa whipped herself back to face Torrent. ‘None of us could have saved her,’ she repeated hoarsely.

  ‘Then’ – Torrent’s voice shook wildly, but she drew herself up as if she had become a different woman – ‘we must rescue her.’

  Terisa stared at her, shocked by the strange sensation that she could see King Joyse in Torrent’s eyes.

  ‘How?’ With a visible effort, Geraden forced himself to speak gently, reasonably. ‘We don’t have any weapons – and there aren’t enough of us. By the time we get help from Romish, they’ll be long gone. They’ll have plenty of time to hide their trail.’

  Torrent shook her head. ‘Not Romish.’ She took several deep breaths as if she were hyperventilating, with the result that she was then able to control the wobble in her voice. ‘You must get help from Orison.’

  Both Geraden and Terisa gaped at her.

  ‘They will not hide their trail from me. I will follow and make a new one behind them. I am helpless for everything else, but that I can do. He’ – she indicated the man with the badly cut shoulder – ‘will get support for me from Romish. But you must ride to Orison. You must warn Father.’

  She had lost her mind. There was no question about it.

  Torrent couldn’t entirely stifle her rising hysteria. ‘Do you not understand? It is his only hope!’

  Terisa and Geraden stared at her, gaped, held their breath – and suddenly he gasped, ‘She’s right!’ He grabbed at Terisa’s arm, wheeling toward the horses. ‘Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!’

  Terisa froze: she couldn’t move at all. Get out of here. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? Ride like crazy people halfway across Mordant to Orison, while she goes after those Alends and her mother alone. You’ve done this once before. Don’t you remember? You sent Argus after Prince Kragen, and he got killed. And stopping Nyle didn’t do us any good.

  ‘Terisa,’ he demanded. ‘I tell you, she’s right. It’s his only hope.’

  ‘What—?’ She couldn’t make her throat work. An avalanche had come this close to falling on her. Like the collapse of the Congery’s meeting hall. ‘What’re you talking about?’

  In response, Geraden made one of his supreme and unselfish efforts to control himself for her sake. Intensely, he said, ‘His only hope is if he finds out what happened to her before the people who took her know he knows. Before they can tell him. Before they start trying to use her against him. During that gap – if we can give him a gap – between when he knows and when they know he knows – he can still act. He can do something to save her. Or himself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Torrent breathed. ‘It is the only thing I can do.’

  Abruptly, she climbed out of the ruin of the porch, heading toward the horses. Her knife was still gripped in her fist.

  As if she were her mother, she commanded the injured man, ‘Take a horse, ride to Romish. You’ll be tended there. Tell them what happened. Tell them I require help. I’ll leave a trail for them.’ Then her tone softened. ‘You’re badly hurt, I know. There’s nothing I can do for you. I must attempt to save the Queen – and my father’s realm.’

  As if she were accustomed to extreme decisions – not to mention horses – she chose a horse, untethered it, and swung up into the saddle.

  Terisa would have tried to stop her, but Geraden’s acquiescence held her. ‘Geraden—’ she murmured, pleading with him. ‘Geraden—’

  ‘Terisa,’ he replied, so full of certainty that she couldn’t argue with him, ‘she’s right. I’ve got the strongest feeling she’s right.’

  ‘Farewell, Geraden,’ Torrent broke in. ‘Farewell, my lady Terisa. Save the King.

  ‘Do that, and together we will rescue Queen Madin.’

  Geraden turned to give the King’s daughter a formal bow. ‘Farewell also, my lady Torrent. This story will fill King Joyse with pride, whatever comes of it.’ A moment later, he added, ‘And both Myste and Elega are going to be impressed.’

  That almost made Torrent smile.

  Alone, she rode out of the hollow on the trail of Queen Madin’s abductors.

  Terisa put the best tourniquet she could manage on the wounded man’s shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Geraden slapped a measure of sense into the Queen’s whimpering servant, then instructed him to make sure the Fayle’s man reached Romish.

  After that, they selected the two best horses, packed a third to carry their supplies, and started toward the Demesne and Orison.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  POISED FOR VICTORY

  The Alend army didn’t move.

  It hadn’t moved for days.

  Oh, Prince Kragen kept his men busy enough: he was determined to be ready for anything. But he didn’t waste another catapult; didn’t risk any kind of sortie, much less a massed assault; didn’t make anything more than covert efforts to spy on the castle. In fact, the only thing he apparently did to advance his siege was to completely prevent anyone from getting into or out of Orison: he cut King Joyse off from any conceivable source of news. Other than that, he and his forces might as well have been engaged in training exercises.

  He was busy in other ways, of course. For instance, he had quite a number of men out at all times, furtively searching for some sign of the Congery’s champion. Knowing what the champion had done to Orison, Prince Kragen felt a positive dislike for the prospect of being attacked from behind by that lone fighter. In addition, he spent quite a bit of time, both alone and with his father, trying to fathom King Joyse’s daughters.

  But King Joyse’s warnings haunted him – and Master Quillon’s. He took no direct action to hasten the fall of Orison.

  That changed during the night which Terisa and Geraden had spent with Queen Madin.

  Naturally, Prince Kragen had no way of knowing where Terisa and Geraden were. He couldn’t know that they had ever left Orison – or that Mordant’s need was coming to a crisis around him.

  On the other hand, he was alert to every outward sign of what was happening in the castle.

  When the men who had the duty of watching the ramparts more closely after dark reported to him that they heard shouts and turmoil, saw lights in the vicinity of the curtain-wall, he didn’t hesitate: he sent half a dozen hand-picked scouts to creep as near to the wall as possible, climb it if necessary, and find out what was going on.

  The news they brought back tightened excitement or dread around his heart.

  There was a riot taking place on the other side of the curtain-wall.

  Apparently, the overcrowded and raw-nerved populace of Orison was breaking into active rebellion against Castellan Lebbick.

  After a while, the noise receded, as if the riot were moving into the main body of the castle. But light continued to show at the rim of the wall, blazing up in gusts like a fire out of control. And when dawn came the Prince saw dirty plumes of smoke curling upward from the wound in Orison’s side, giving the castle a look of death it hadn’t had since the day the champion had first injured it.

  Again, Prince Kragen didn’t hesitate: he had spent the night preparing his response. At his signal, fifty men carrying a battering ram in a protective frame ran forward to try the gates. The walls and roof which received the arrows of the defenders made the ram look as unwieldy as a shed; but the use of the frame could be an effective tactic, as long as the gate failed before the defenders had time to ready a counterattack – or as long as they were distracted by trouble elsewhere.

  As a distraction, Prince Kragen sent several hundred soldiers with storming
ladders and grappling hooks to assail the curtain-wall.

  Unfortunately, Orison’s guards proved equal to the occasion. A tub of lamp oil and a burning fagot turned the ram’s protective frame into a charnal. And the Castellan – or whoever had taken command after the riot – had obviously expected the attack on the curtain-wall; so the defense there had been reinforced.

  When Prince Kragen saw that his men were taking more than their share of losses and getting nowhere, he chewed his moustache, swore, and shook his fists at the sky – all inwardly, in the privacy of his thoughts, so that no one witnessed his frustration. Then he ordered a withdrawal.

  Rather tentatively, as if sensing the Prince’s state, one of his captains commented, ‘Well, they have to run out of oil sometime.’

  Prince Kragen swore again – out loud, this time. Then he instructed the captain to begin raiding the surrounding villages and trees for wood: he wanted more battering rams, more protective frames. And while that raid was underway, he set about using up the rams and frames he already had.

  If the defenders had left any of the battering rams he now sent against them alone, they would have soon learned that none of the rams had enough men with it to actually threaten the gates. This time, however – for once! – his tactics succeeded. The defenders faithfully burned every ram and frame to charcoal.

  The Prince grinned grimly under his moustache. Apparently, Castellan Lebbick – or whoever had replaced him after the riot – was still human enough to be outwitted once in a while.

  The riot which had taken place in Orison that night was an ugly one.

  It had a number of excuses. The castle was indeed overcrowded, badly so – detail which became increasingly onerous for everyone as the siege wore on. And of course the siege had come at the end of a hard winter, before spring could do anybody any good; so supplies were relatively short, and everything from food and water to blankets and space was strictly – a swelling number of people said harshly – rationed. By Castellan Lebbick, naturally. Despite Master Eremis’ heroic replenishment of the reservoir.

  And Orison’s surplus population had nothing to do. Nobody really had anything to do. As long as the Alend army just sat there with all their heads crammed up the Prince’s ass – as one tired old guard put it – nobody had any outlet for long days of pent-up fear.

  Why didn’t Prince Kragen do something?

  Where was High King Festten?

  For that matter, where was the Perdon?

  How much longer was this going to go on?

  Tempers grew ragged; hostility fed on frustration and uselessness; grievances multiplied in all directions. Orison’s sewers kept backing up because the drainfields weren’t adequate to the population. And the leaders of Orison, the men in command – King Joyse, Castellan Lebbick, Master Barsonage – did nothing to ease the pressure. They all went about their lives in isolation, as if the burgeoning misery sealed within these walls were immaterial to them. Even the castle’s most comfortable inhabitants – men of position, women of privilege – were in an ugly mood; and the ugliness was spreading.

  But even ugliness couldn’t function in a vacuum: it needed a focus, a target.

  It needed the Castellan.

  He would have been a likely candidate in any case. After all, the responsibility for deciding and implementing Orison’s distress was on his shoulders. Merchants and farmers had time to become bitter about the confiscation of their goods. Mothers with sick children had cause to complain about the rationing of medicines. People with a normal need for activity – and privacy – didn’t have anyone else to blame for the lack of those necessities.

  The guards, however, were loyal to their commander. Most of them had had years to become familiar with his loyalties – to them as well as to King Joyse. And they were accustomed to taking his orders. One way or another, they worked to control the pressure building against the Castellan.

  As a result, there was no riot – no outbreak of resentment – until someone threw a spark into the tinder of Orison’s mood.

  That someone was Saddith.

  She was on her feet now, able to get around. Despite the loss of a few teeth, and the rather dramatic damage done to the rest of her face, she was able to talk. And that was what she had been doing ever since she had healed enough to climb out of her sickbed: getting around; talking.

  She had started with every man in Orison who had ever visited between her legs – or had let her know he’d like to visit. She had told those men what the Castellan had done to her, and why: she had gone to his bed out of simple pity for his loneliness, out of compassion for the pressure he was under; and he had hurt her here, and here, and here. But as her strength returned she broadened her range. She carried her injuries everywhere in public: her left hand broken and useless, the right nearly so; her face so badly battered that it would never regain its shape, one cheek crushed, one eye unable to close properly, scars in all directions. If anything, she wore her blouses unbuttoned farther than before, enabling the world to see what Lebbick had done to her there.

  And everywhere she went, her message was the same.

  You sods were quick enough for fornication when I had my beauty. If you were men now, you’d hoist Castellan Lebbick’s balls on a stick.

  His violence had no reason and no justification: it was as senseless as it was brutal. As senseless as all the other little brutalities he committed throughout the castle.

  How long would it be before some other helpless woman received the same treatment? How long would it be before brutality became the governing principle in Orison?

  How much longer will you sods and sheepfuckers permit this to go on?

  Of course, when she spoke to women – which she did often, more every day – her words were different. Her message, however, remained the same.

  Her disfigurement, as well as her intensity, made her impossible to look away from. She compelled stares and pity; nausea and indignation. It was impossible to look at her and not feel fear.

  Because of the way she talked, and the way the men who had once reveled in her talked, and the way the women who were terrified of the same fate talked, this fear took the form of a call for justice, a thinly concealed demand for retribution. With Alend just outside, rape and murder were on everybody’s mind.

  At the time, few people had any notion of how this demand came to be translated into action. One day, people were growling to each other, muttering vague threats which they had no actual intention of acting on: the next, rumors seemed to filter everywhere that voices would be raised, justice insisted upon; action taken. Come to the disused ballroom this evening, the great hall where King Joyse and Queen Madin were married, and where the peace of Mordant had been celebrated.

  Oh, yes? Whose idea was this?

  No one knew.

  We’re besieged. Is it really a good idea to challenge the Castellan at a time like this?

  Perhaps not. But it’s gone too far to be stopped. Better to support it, make sure it succeeds, than take the chance he’ll be able to crush it – the chance he’ll be left alone to do something worse the next time.

  Yes. All right.

  So that evening the crowd began to gather in the high, vast, dusty ballroom. At first, it was plainly a crowd rather than a mob, despite the fact that its numbers quickly swelled to several hundred: the fear threatening to become violence was counterbalanced by uncertainty; by habits of mind learned during many years of King Joyse’s peaceful rule; by the perfectly reasonable idea that it was dangerous to weaken Orison during a siege; by the manifest presence of Castellan Lebbick’s guards all around the hall. Nevertheless, as darkness deepened outside the windows, the only light came from torches which someone had thought to provide, and the erratic illumination of the flames had a disturbing effect on faces and rationality. People began to look garish to each other, wild and strange; the air was full of grotesque shadows; the atmosphere seemed to flicker. And through the shadows and the orange-yellow light Saddith a
ppeared, around and around in the ballroom, displaying her wounds, speaking of outrage. The seething murmur of several hundred voices took shape in fits and bursts as more and more people found occasion to say the name Lebbick.

  Lebbick.

  And the guard captain who had been detailed to preserve order made a mistake.

  He was a tough old fighter with bottomless determination and not much intelligence; and during one of King Joyse’s battles the Castellan had saved his entire family from being cut down when they were caught in the path of an Alend raid. He heard all these whimpering shitholes – they were practically puking with self-pity – start to mutter Lebbick, Lebbick, as if they had the right, and he decided that the crowd had to be dispersed.

  Even though the odds were against him, he might have succeeded if he had been able to drive people out of the ballroom back into the public halls and passages. Unfortunately, he failed to do that. Someone with more presence of mind – or maybe just a nastier sense of humor – than the rest of the mob went to the entryway which led to the laborium and called everyone else to follow.

  Fear of the Castellan and fear of Imagers formed a powerful combination. Several hundred people surged in that direction as if they had lost the capacity to think.

  Somehow, they forced the guards back. Somehow, they were swept into the laborium, where the great majority of them had never set foot in their lives. Somehow, they found themselves packed into the ruined hall where the Congery had held meetings until the champion had blasted one wall open to the world.

  Men closed the doors against the guards, shot the bolts. Torches ringed the stumps of pillars which used to hold up the ceiling. Because the curtain-wall didn’t completely seal the hole in Orison’s side, the hall was theoretically exposed to the guards defending the wall. The wall, however, had been built to protect against siege rather than against riot: its defensive positions faced outward rather than back down into the hall below. Only the archers could have taken any action. And even Lebbick’s staunchest supporters knew better than to begin slaughtering Orison’s inhabitants.