Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  The mediator was listening intently; he seemed to soak up Eremis’ words through his pores. Softly, as if he were astonished, he breathed, ‘It is conceivable.’

  ‘Of course,’ Master Eremis continued, simply marking time while he watched the mediator’s reaction, ‘the difficulty is that if the Imager stepped through himself he would not be able to step back. And to send and then retrieve someone else by such a method, he would need to be able to perform both translations simultaneously. We have no way of knowing whether such a thing is possible.’ Like most of his lies, this one bore an insidious resemblance to the truth. ‘There Vagel is ahead of us. He may have spent fifteen years perfecting simultaneous translations.

  ‘But surely we can attempt it? We can learn for ourselves whether this idea is indeed possible as well as conceivable?’

  ‘Yes.’ Master Barsonage had lost his air of studied mildness, of deliberate simplicity. His eyes shone. ‘We can.’

  Abruptly, he surged to his feet like a breaker off the sea. ‘We can and we will. Today. Give me an hour to gather the Masters. Come to the laborium. We will begin experimenting.’ Almost in the same breath, he added, ‘It is a brilliant idea. Two mirrors – simultaneous translations. Even if it fails, it remains brilliant. Brilliant.’

  Having hooked his fish, Master Eremis proceeded to act as if he were letting the mediator go. He agreed to everything, stood up, started to leave, then paused at the door. As if he were innocent of all malice, he said, ‘Oh, Master Barsonage, one other matter – in case I forget it later. There is a rumor that some of our mirrors have been broken. Can that be true?’

  Master Barsonage turned immediately grim: apparently, he was shocked by what had happened. ‘During the riot against Castellan Lebbick,’ he admitted. ‘Five mirrors.’ He shook his head. ‘It is plain that someone hates us. But why only five? Why those five? If you were insane enough to deprive us of the means to defend Orison and ourselves, would you not break every glass you found?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Master Eremis made a sincere effort to look shocked himself. ‘Unfortunately, insane actions are by their very nature insane. Which mirrors were broken?’

  The mediator replied promptly: once again, he was prepared. ‘The glass with which you refilled the reservoir. That was an attack on Orison. And Geraden’s mirror, the one that brought the lady Terisa here. Either he or she is stranded now, wherever they are – as is our lost champion. That was an attack on one of the three of them. But the third was a flat mirror of Quillon’s, showing a field of Termigan grapes. The fourth was the one with the Image of the starless sky. The fifth, the one where that gigantic slug-beast can be seen – one of the mirrors King Joyse captured in his wars. An attack on wine? On the heavens? An attack on monsters? It makes no sense.

  ‘Geraden and the lady Terisa and our champion – if he still lives – may have been stranded entirely at random, by someone who had no idea what he did.’

  Trying to sound disturbed, perhaps even grim, Eremis said, ‘My glass. Then we must depend on the weather for water. I cannot save us again.’

  ‘That is true,’ replied Barsonage. ‘Prince Kragen’s position is now much stronger. We must hope he does not know it.’

  Master Eremis swallowed a final smile and made his way out of the mediator’s quarters. He wanted to reach his own rooms quickly, where he could afford to laugh out loud.

  He realized, of course, that he was in a tricky situation. But it was a situation of his own devising. Thanks to the seeds he had just planted, Barsonage and the other Masters might spend the rest of their time until they died trying to work a simultaneous translation because they didn’t know it was impossible. Or, rather, it was trivial. The trick was not in the translation, but in the glass.

  For all practical purposes, he had neutralized the Congery – the only force in Orison still capable of fighting him.

  On the other hand, he would have to be very careful. Lebbick had said something to Artagel, who had told it to Barsonage. Not something about Terisa: something about Eremis himself. The mediator had lied to him.

  For him, the trick would be to determine exactly what that lie was.

  Thinking about things like this made him look like he was about to burst with good humor.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  CONFLICT AT THE GATES

  ‘The trick,’ Geraden said the first time they rested the horses, ‘is not to get stopped.’

  They had ridden hard for most of the morning: the road from Romish was easy going, and he was in a hurry. But the horses couldn’t sustain a pace like that indefinitely.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Terisa didn’t realize how sourly she spoke. She was still thinking about Torrent: the idea of the King’s shy daughter riding away alone in a foolish and dangerous effort to rescue Queen Madin clung to her mind like a splash of acid. ‘We’re going back to Orison. Where Master Eremis wants us. Why would anybody try to stop us?’

  Geraden looked at her sharply; for a moment, he seemed unsure how to respond. As if he had missed the point, he said, ‘We’ve been riding so long – and it feels so good to be with you – I keep thinking you know Mordant better than you do. Would you like to look at the map again?’

  She shook her head. She didn’t care about the map. She didn’t care about being stopped. At the moment, she didn’t even care about having to face Eremis again.

  Geraden, that’s how Argus got killed.

  ‘Well,’ he explained, still missing the point, ‘there’s really only one fast way to get from Romish to Orison, and that’s along this road – the main road through Armigite. Which just happens to be the route Prince Kragen used. It’s his link to Alend – his supply line, his line of retreat. It’ll be crawling with his men.

  ‘On top of that, even the Armigite can’t be as stupid as people think. He’s got to have scouts and spies everywhere, especially along the road. He needs to know what’s happening. And right now he probably wants an Imager or two more than anything in the world. If his men get their hands on us, they aren’t going to let us go just because we smile and say please.’

  Terisa stared into the trees without saying anything.

  ‘And on top of that’ – Geraden’s tone became slowly harsher – ‘I assume Orison is still under siege. I assume it hasn’t already fallen, or there wouldn’t be any reason to kidnap Queen Madin. If we’re going to get in to see King Joyse, we’ll have to get past the whole Alend army.

  ‘The men who took the Queen were Alends. It looks like this is some plot of Prince Kragen’s. So he’s the one we have to worry about. And he won’t let us in to Orison until he’s ready – until his trap is ready.’

  He surprised her, and she winced. ‘Do you really think that’s true? Do you really think Prince Kragen is responsible for kidnapping the Queen?’

  ‘Don’t you? You said those men were Alends. They took her toward Alend.’

  The acid in her mind was turning to nausea. ‘But if he’s responsible—’ Until now, she hadn’t considered the question closely. ‘That means he’s working with Master Eremis. Where else would he get an Imager who could translate an avalanche?’

  Geraden watched her and waited.

  ‘But if that’s true, why did Eremis refill the reservoir? Why didn’t he just let Prince Kragen into Orison?’

  ‘An interesting question,’ Geraden murmured past his teeth.

  She tried to imagine an explanation; but almost at once another aspect of the situation struck her. ‘If the Prince did it, he must have done it behind Elega’s back. She’d never approve of something like that.’

  Geraden nodded once, roughly.

  The implications brought Terisa to a halt. ‘Elega’s being betrayed herself.’ She faced Geraden squarely, showed him her distress. ‘What’re we going to do?’

  The way he met her gaze gave the impression that he had accomplished his goal: he had shifted the direction of her thoughts. ‘We’ll stay on the road until we get close to Batten,’ he replied. ‘That’s whe
re the Alends will pick it up. And it turns south there to meet the road from Sternwall. We can go straight southeast toward Orison. We’ll save some miles – and maybe we won’t lose much time.

  ‘When we reach the siege, we’ll try to get to Elega before the Prince realizes what we’re doing.’ Abruptly, he grinned – a sharp smile with no humor in it. ‘If she knows what happened to her mother – if she allowed it to happen, if she approves of it – I’m going to be very disappointed in her.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t know,’ Terisa completed for him, trying to reassure herself, ‘she might be willing to help us.’

  He nodded again.

  After a while, they mounted their horses and went on.

  They rode out of the last hills of Fayle onto one of Armigite’s many fertile flatlands at what felt like a breakneck pace. Leaving the woods behind increased Terisa’s anxiety: Armigite appeared to be almost unnaturally open, as if everything that moved through it were somehow exposed. Perhaps that was why the Armigite had become what he was: perhaps his personality had been distorted by the pressure of being so exposed. But actually there were quite a few trees around, even in lowlands which had obviously been under cultivation before Prince Kragen and his army crossed the Pestil. Concealment was scarce, but shade was available. Partly for that reason, and partly because of the soil’s richness, the flats of Armigite bore no resemblance to the arid spaces of Termigan.

  Terisa and Geraden made good progress, despite the lack of fresh mounts. He studied the map repeatedly – they were still crossing a part of Mordant where he had never been before – and assured her that their progress was good. He may have been trying to shore up her spirits. For some reason, his own didn’t appear to need support: his keenness suggested that he liked this rush across the landscape, this clear and urgent sense of purpose; that he was eager to return to Orison. By the time nightfall forced them to halt and make camp, they were well on their way toward making the journey to Orison as Queen Madin had intended it, in three days.

  The more he looked ahead, however, the more her attention turned backward. Torrent had touched her unexpectedly, made her aware of her own inadequacies. In their separate ways, each of the King’s daughters had daunted her. They had inherited more courage than she seemed to possess. Her determination to oppose Master Eremis was little more than a pretense, after all – a pretense that she could somehow transcend her past.

  As she gazed across the campfire into the open dark of Armigite, she murmured, ‘Geraden, there’s something I don’t understand.’

  ‘Just “something”?’ he returned, making a transparent effort to jolly her out of her mood. ‘Then you are marvelous to me, my lady. My lack of understanding doesn’t stop at “something.” It’s as vast as the world.’

  She looked over at him. His face was as dear as ever. And if anything he had become more handsome; the excitement he had felt since Torrent left brought out the best in his eyes, in the lines of his features. He didn’t deserve her gloom. For his sake, she made an effort to smile.

  ‘That’s probably true. But I’ll bet you know the answer to this one.’

  He met her eyes and smiled back. ‘Try me.’ The dancing light of the campfire created the impression that his smile went all the way to the bone.

  Almost at once, she found that the weight pushing down on her spirit wasn’t quite as heavy as she had thought.

  ‘I think I will,’ she said. ‘But first I want you to explain something.’

  The gleam in his eyes grew brighter as he waited for her to continue.

  ‘That avalanche,’ she said. ‘They must have used two mirrors. Isn’t that right? One to translate it away from wherever they found it. One to translate it to Vale House.’

  ‘Yes,’ Geraden replied at once. ‘But that’s been true of everything we’ve seen. Those pits of fire outside Sternwall. The ghouls in Fayle. Even the creatures that attacked Houseldon.’ A shadow which might have been grief or rage darkened his gaze briefly. ‘They all needed two mirrors. That must be Eremis’ secret. It must be how he’s able to attack so many different places in Mordant without actually going to them. And it must be how he’s able to move people in and out of Orison without costing them their minds.

  ‘We’ve talked about that before,’ he added.

  ‘I remember. It’s the only explanation I’ve heard that seems to make sense. Two mirrors. One shows a scene with a lot of landslides. The other is a flat glass with Vale House in the Image. That means’ – her heart tightened as she came to the point – ‘Eremis could have seen us in the Image. He must have seen us. I know I was in the Image. Otherwise I wouldn’t have felt the translation.

  ‘That means he knows where we are.

  ‘And it means we’re responsible for what happened to Queen Madin. She was taken because of us.’

  ‘No.’ Geraden rejected the idea without hesitation. ‘That can’t be true. It wasn’t because of us.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s too complicated. He had men ready for that attack. They must have been on their way before we ever got near Fayle. If we had anything to do with it, he must have known we were going there – and not to Romish – long before we did. And his men wouldn’t have ignored us. He would have been glad for a chance to capture us.

  ‘That attack was aimed at the Queen herself. Even the timing was just a coincidence. Eremis couldn’t control the avalanches in his mirror. He had to be ready to act whenever the opportunity came along.’

  Involuntarily, Terisa shook her head. She didn’t like what she was thinking. ‘No. He probably can control the avalanches. I mean he can cause one whenever he wants. All he has to do is focus his mirror on the right kind of mountainside. Then, when he wants a landslide, all he has to do is translate away the rock supporting the mountainside.’

  Geraden stared at her, his eyes glittering flames. ‘You’re right. I never thought of that.’

  ‘The attack wasn’t aimed at us,’ she assented. ‘But he knows we were there. He could have seen that we survived. He could have seen us ride away. He could guess where we’re going.

  ‘That means we can’t warn King Joyse. It won’t do any good. There won’t be any gap between when he knows what happened to the Queen and when Eremis knows he knows. He won’t have a chance to act. What we’re trying to do doesn’t make any sense.’

  She stopped and watched Geraden’s face, holding her breath as if she feared his reaction.

  She was relieved to see that he wasn’t discouraged. His expression became intently thoughtful, but he didn’t look especially alarmed; he certainly didn’t look horrified. Softly, he commented, ‘I’ve said it before. You have a morbid imagination. No wonder you’ve been so depressed all day.

  ‘This time,’ he said after a moment, ‘I think you’re wrong.’

  Quietly, she let the air sigh out of her lungs.

  ‘If Eremis saw us,’ he asked by way of explanation, ‘where’s Gart?’

  Terisa’s mouth fell open. She wasn’t the only one with a morbid imagination.

  ‘While we were talking with Torrent,’ Geraden continued, ‘while we were trying to help the Fayle’s man, while we were packing our horses – that was the best chance Gart’s ever had to kill us both. We were defenseless. Why didn’t Eremis get rid of us while he had the chance?

  ‘I don’t think he saw us.

  ‘He could have seen us, of course. We found that out outside Sternwall. But this time I don’t think he did.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t before the avalanche. We were on the porch, under the roof, and his mirror was focused in the air over the house. After all, he didn’t want to kill Queen Madin. She wouldn’t have done him any good dead. But that’s not really the point. The point is, if you’re translating several hundred tons of rock out of one glass into another, what do you do with it while it’s between translations? If you make even the tiniest mistake, all that rock will shatter the second mirror, and you’ll have the entire avalanche in your lap
.’

  In spite of herself, Terisa let out a slightly hysterical giggle. That would have been perfect justice, if the landslide Eremis had planned for Vale House had come down on his own head.

  Geraden flashed her a grin. ‘The solution,’ he said, ‘is the one we talked about – a hundred years ago or so in Orison, when we didn’t know we were two of the most powerful people alive. Translate the second glass into the first. In effect, the rock goes straight into the flat mirror.

  ‘But.’ He held up a hand to forestall interruption. ‘This is what saved us. When you do a translation like that – when you put the second mirror into the first before you start – what can you see? You can see the mountainside. You can see the rock. But you can’t see the Image in the second mirror. The back of the flat mirror faces you, so the front can translate the rock.

  ‘And once you start a process like that you have to keep it going until the dust clears and you’re sure you’re safe. If you stop while there’s any chance one or two boulders are still hopping down the mountainside, the flat glass could be crushed, and the boulders could end up in your face. So you can’t be in a hurry to translate the second mirror back out of the first and turn it around and refocus it.

  ‘That’s why we had time to get away.’

  Listening to him, Terisa felt a knot inside her loosen at last. He was right. It was possible that Eremis hadn’t seen them. If he had, surely he would have sent an attack after them – wolves or a firecat, if not Gart himself. There was still hope for the wild scheme Torrent and Geraden had conceived.

  That night, she experienced some of the benefits of Geraden’s keenness. She began to feel a bit keener herself.

  At about the same time, when the embers had died down, and clouds covered the moon, Prince Kragen sent men to clear the charred remains of his battering rams and their protective shells away from Orison’s gates. He wanted the new rams and shells being hammered together to have an unimpeded approach.