Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  It sounded ridiculous. But—

  He took hold of himself, did his best to steady his heart.

  But they knew his talent better than he did. Why else had they gone to such lengths to distract him, confuse him, demean him, kill him? Master Gilbur had guided – and studied – every moment of his mirror-making.

  They knew his talent better than he did.

  They feared it for reasons he didn’t yet understand.

  The same kind of argument had helped move him into action while Houseldon burned – and yet he had made no progress toward understanding it. Why had Eremis needed to attack Houseldon? Or Sternwall, for that matter? Why wasn’t the destruction of Geraden’s only mirror enough?

  Suddenly – so suddenly that he couldn’t pretend he had been listening to the mediator – Geraden said, ‘Havelock.’

  Master Barsonage blinked. ‘Havelock?’

  ‘He’s got all those mirrors.’ Geraden was already on his way toward the door. ‘Come on.’

  Mirrors which had helped Terisa escape from Gilbur. Mirrors which didn’t belong to any Imager except the Adept – mirrors Geraden could take chances with.

  Outside the mediator’s quarters, he began to hurry; in a moment, he was almost running. Nevertheless Master Barsonage caught him, got a heavy hand on his arm and slowed him to a fast walk.

  ‘What do you hope to accomplish with the Adept’s mirrors? Will he permit you to touch them?’

  A manic laugh burst from Geraden. ‘Oh, he’ll let me touch them. He is certainly going to let me touch them.’

  Moving as rapidly as he could with Master Barsonage clasped on his arm, and refusing to answer the mediator’s first question, refusing even to think about it for fear that the possibilities would evaporate if he did, he headed toward the lower levels of Orison, down toward the only entrance he knew of to Adept Havelock’s personal domain.

  During his one previous visit there, the circumstances had been very different. For one thing, Orison’s extra inhabitants hadn’t arrived yet; the depths of the castle had been deserted. And for another, he hadn’t been paying particularly close attention: most of his mind had been focused on Artagel, suffering from a chestful of corrosive black vapor. As a result, he was momentarily flustered by the realization that he now didn’t know how to get where he was going.

  Fortunately, Master Barsonage knew.

  At least some of the Adept’s secrets had been exposed when Castellan Lebbick had followed Master Gilbur and Terisa into the room where Havelock kept his mirrors. As a matter of course, the Castellan’s discovery had eventually been reported to the mediator of the Congery. And Master Barsonage had gone so far as to visit that room full of mirrors himself, in part to see it with his own eyes, in part to make one more painful and ultimately futile effort to communicate with the Adept – specifically, to persuade Havelock that the Congery as a whole should be given access to these mirrors.

  The memory caused Master Barsonage to shudder whenever he thought of it. Adept Havelock had responded with a gracious bow, had taken his hand as if to congratulate him, had kissed each of his fingers like a lover – and while Barsonage was distracted by this odd performance, Havelock had urinated on his feet.

  Occasionally, Master Barsonage dreamed of beating the Adept senseless. Although he would never have admitted having them, he enjoyed those dreams.

  Nevertheless he didn’t hesitate to take Geraden to the Adept’s quarters.

  He and Geraden approached through the storeroom full of empty crates – crates, apparently, in which Havelock’s mirrors had been brought to Orison. A door in a niche at the back of the room let them into a short passage. Unexpectedly, Geraden stopped.

  Pointing at the impressive array of bolts and bars inside the door, he asked, ‘Doesn’t he ever lock this place? Does he let people just walk in whenever they want?’

  Master Barsonage sniffed in distaste. ‘I cannot say. I have come here three times. Twice the door was sealed, and he would not open it to me. Perhaps he did not hear me. The third time, the door was open. I found him snoring in his bed. And when I roused him, he was’ – Barsonage grimaced – ‘unpleasant.’

  After a moment, he added, ‘For my own peace of mind, however, I have insisted on guards in the outer hall. Men dressed as ordinary merchants and farmers marked us before we entered the storeroom. If you had not been in my company – or if you had not been recognized – you would have been halted.’

  Geraden was scowling. ‘Does Havelock know anything about that?’

  ‘Perhaps. Who can say what the Adept knows? Perhaps he neither knows nor cares.’

  Geraden was thinking about Terisa. Maybe she could have been saved – maybe everything would have been different – if guards had been placed outside the storeroom earlier. If Adept Havelock had had any idea what he was doing.

  Snarling to himself, Geraden headed down the passage.

  Almost immediately, he and Barsonage reached the room where Havelock’s mirrors were kept.

  It had been dramatically changed.

  The difference was unmistakable: the room was tidy. Someone had dusted the tables and floor, the mirrors; swept the broken glass from the stone; arranged the full-length mirrors around the walls, displaying them as well as possible in the relatively constricted space. Someone had set up the small and medium-sized mirrors on the tables and adjusted them so that they caught the light of the few lamps and gleamed like promises.

  That someone must have been Adept Havelock. Geraden and the mediator spotted him as soon as they entered the room: he was in one corner with a featherduster, crooning over a glass which had been restored to pristine clarity after decades of neglect.

  He had made the chamber into a shrine. Or a mausoleum.

  Just for a moment while Geraden and Master Barsonage stared at him, he failed to acknowledge their arrival. Then, however, he wheeled to give them a bow, flourishing his duster as though it were a scepter. His eyes gaped in different directions; his fat lips leered. ‘Barsonage!’ he cackled. ‘You honor me. What a thrill. Who’s the puppy with you?’

  Simply because he couldn’t resist staring, Geraden noticed a detail which might have escaped him otherwise: Havelock’s surcoat was clean. In fact, it had been scrubbed spotless. Havelock wore it as if he were dressed for a celebration.

  Master Barsonage kept his distance. ‘Adept Havelock,’ he said with formal distaste, ‘I am certain that you remember Apt Geraden. He is an Imager now, and has an urgent interest in your mirrors.’

  As if to tease the mediator, Havelock advanced toward him, smiling maliciously. ‘What, “Apt Geraden”?’ he cried in mock protest. ‘This boy? How has that figure of augury and power been reduced to such doggishness? No, you’re mistaken, it’s impossible.’

  Swooping suddenly away from Barsonage, he pounced on Geraden. With his hands clapped to Geraden’s cheeks, he shook Geraden’s head from side to side.

  ‘Impossible, I tell you. Look, Barsonage. He’s alive. He came back alive. Without her. She risked everything for him, and he came back without her.’ Bitterly, the Adept began to laugh. ‘Oh, no, Barsonage, you can’t fool me. Geraden would never have done such a thing.’

  Geraden seemed to hear the Adept through an abrupt roaring in his ears, a tumult of anger and distress. The suggestion that he might have come back without Terisa by choice, that he had turned his back on her in some way, was more than he could bear.

  Harshly, struggling to control his passion, he demanded, ‘Let me go, Havelock. I need your mirrors.’

  As if he had been stung, the Adept let out a wail.

  He dropped his hands, plunged himself to the floor; before Geraden could react, he kissed the toes of Geraden’s boots. Then he scuttled backward. When he hit the leg of a table, he bounded to his feet.

  Crouching in the intense stance of a man about to do battle, he commented casually, almost playfully, ‘If you ever talk to Joyse like that, he’ll cut your heart out. Or force you to marry all his daug
hters. With him it’s hard to tell the difference.’

  Shocked and disconcerted, Geraden turned a plea for help toward Master Barsonage.

  Grimly, the mediator nodded. Swallowing to hold down a bellyful of uneasiness, he stepped forward, edged his bulk a bit between the Adept and Geraden.

  Geraden took that opportunity to turn his back on both of them.

  Deliberately, he placed himself before the first full-length flat mirror he could find.

  It was an especially elegant piece of work: he noticed its beauty in spite of his concentration on other things, because he loved mirrors. Its rosewood frame was nearly as tall as he was, and the wood had a deep, burnished glow which only long hours of care and polish could produce. The surface of the glass was meticulous, both in its flatness and in its craftsmanship. The glass itself held an evanescent suggestion of pink – a color which now appeared to complement the frame, although of course the frame had actually been chosen to suit the glass.

  And the Image—

  Bare sand. Nothing else.

  Wind had whipped the sand into a dune with a keen, curled edge, like a breaker frozen in motion; but there was no wind now. The color of the sky was a dry, dusty blue that he associated almost automatically with Cadwal.

  In some ways, this landscape was the purest he had ever seen, too clean even for bleached bones. No one and nothing alive had ever set foot on that dune.

  Only urgency kept him from studying every inch of the mirror, simply to understand the Image – and to appreciate the workmanship.

  He had no idea how Terisa worked with flat glass. And he had no particular reason to believe he could do the same thing. In fact, he hardly knew how he had contrived to translate himself from the laborium to the Closed Fist. He certainly hadn’t done anything to prove himself an arch-Imager.

  Nevertheless he didn’t hesitate.

  He came back alive. Without her. Geraden would never have done such a thing.

  Facing the glass, he closed his eyes; he swept his thoughts clear. Master Barsonage and Adept Havelock were watching him, and Terisa was lost, and he had never tried anything like this before. Yet he had the strongest feeling— He pulled his concentration together, firmly wiped panic and confusion and anguish out of his heart.

  In the mirror of his mind, he began to construct an Image of Esmerel.

  Still trying to intervene between Geraden and Havelock, the mediator asked the Adept carefully, ‘You mentioned King Joyse. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘He has flown,’ spat back Havelock, his mouth full of vitriol. ‘Like a bird, ha-ha. You think he has abandoned you, but it is a lie, a lie, a lie. When everything else is lost, he breaks my heart and gives me nothing.’

  Geraden ignored both of them.

  He found it easy to ignore distractions now. Something luminous was taking place. He had no training in Image-building; no Imager practiced that skill. He was working with an entirely new concept: that the Image of a mirror could be chosen; that translations could be done which ignored the apparent Image of a mirror. As new to the world as Terisa herself. And yet the process of creating the Image he wanted in his mind excited him; it enabled him to close his attention to anything which interfered.

  Line by line, feature by feature, he put together a picture of Eremis’ ‘ancestral Seat.’

  He had only seen it once, of course – and only from the outside. He had no notion what it looked like inside. But that didn’t worry him. He believed that the scenes and landscapes in mirrors were real, that Images were reflections rather than inventions. So if he could induce the glass to show Esmerel from the outside, the manor’s true interior would be included automatically.

  ‘What do you mean,’ asked Master Barsonage, ‘“flown”?’ He didn’t seem to expect an answer, however. He may not have been listening to himself at all.

  Esmerel was a relatively low building in a deep, wedge-shaped valley with a brook bubbling picturesquely over its stones and outcroppings of rock like ramparts all along the walls – not low because of any lack of sweep or grace in its design, but because it was constructed on only one rambling, aboveground level. According to rumor, some of the best features of the house were belowground, dug down into the rock of the valley: an enviable wine cellar; a gallery for weavings, paintings, and small sculptures; a vast library; several research halls. But naturally Geraden knew nothing about those things. He knew, however, that a portico defined the entrance – a portico with massive redwood pillars for columns. The entrance, as he remembered it, was plain, only one lamp in a leaded glass frame on either side, no carving on the panels of the doors. The house’s walls were layered planks – waxed rather than painted against Tor’s weather – but all the corners and intersections were stone, with the result that Esmerel’s face had a pleasingly varied texture.

  Unless something had happened since he had seen it – or unless his memory or his imagination had gone wrong – Master Eremis’ home looked precisely like that.

  Master Barsonage let out a stifled gasp. His respiration was labored, as if he had stuffed his fist into his mouth and was trying to breathe around it.

  To commemorate the occasion, Adept Havelock began whistling thinly through his teeth.

  Geraden opened his eyes.

  The mirror in front of him showed a sand dune under a calm sky, almost certainly somewhere in Cadwal.

  The pang of his disappointment was so acute that he nearly groaned aloud.

  ‘I would not have believed it,’ whispered Barsonage. ‘When I was first told that such things could happen, I did not believe it.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ inquired the Adept politely. ‘That’s how I know this isn’t Apt Geraden. Even if he did talk to me that way. A man who can do this wouldn’t have to come back without her.’

  Geraden blinked hard, shook his head. No, he wasn’t going blind. The Image he was staring at hadn’t changed at all.

  Distressed and baffled, he turned toward Master Barsonage—

  —and saw Esmerel, as clear as sunlight, exactly as he had envisioned it, in the curved mirror standing beside the flat glass he had chosen to work with.

  ‘By the pure sand of dreams,’ he murmured, ‘that’s incredible.’ A curved mirror, a curved mirror. Excitement leaped up in him; he could hardly restrain a yell. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it myself.’ A curved mirror, of course! Flat glass was Terisa’s talent, not his. If he had tried to translate himself through a flat glass, he would have gone mad. Like Havelock.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Havelock advised sententiously. ‘If you think I’m going to kiss your boots again, just because you can do a little trick like that, you’re full of shit.’

  But curved glass—! Like the only mirror he had ever been able to make for himself, the mirror which had reached Terisa behind the Image of the champion. He could shift the Images in curved mirrors.

  Quickly, before he had time to be overwhelmed by his discovery, he approached the glass and began to adjust the focus.

  ‘Now I’ll find her.’ The pressure of hope and need cramped his lungs. ‘I’ll get her away from you, you bastard. If I find you, I’ll even get you. Just try to stop me. Just try.’

  Fighting the tremors in his hands, the long shivers which made his fingers twitch, he tipped the mirror’s frame to bring the Image of Esmerel closer.

  Distance was the problem, distance. He knew that – and tried to keep it out of his mind, tried not to let it terrify him. If the focus of the Image was too far from the place where Terisa was being held, he wouldn’t be able to adjust the mirror enough to reach her. Every glass had a limited range: it couldn’t be focused more than a certain distance from its natural Image. If he couldn’t reach Terisa, he would have to start over again from the beginning: based on what he learned now, he would have to build the Image of Esmerel again, recreate it in his mind – but closer this time, closer.

  In his present turmoil, that kind of concentration might be impossible.

>   No, don’t fail, he exhorted the glass, don’t fail now, you’ve never done anything right in your life except love her, she’s all there is for you and Orison and Mordant and even Alend, don’t fail now.

  With a jerk because his hand was unsteady, the Image moved to a near view of the entrance under the portico.

  Another jerk.

  The Image moved into the forehall of the manor.

  Geraden stopped breathing.

  Like the exterior walls, the floor was formed of fitted planks anchored with stone. Years of use and wax made the boards gleam, but couldn’t conceal the fact that men who didn’t care what damage they did had been there in nailed boots – had been there recently. Mud, footprints, gouged spots, splinters: they were all distinct in the Image.

  Nevertheless the forehall was empty.

  Sweat streamed into Geraden’s eyes. He scrubbed at it with the back of his hand. Dimly, he was aware that both Master Barsonage and Adept Havelock were standing over him, watching his search; but he had no attention to spare for them.

  More smoothly, he moved the Image into the first room which opened off the forehall.

  A large sitting room: the kind of room in which formal guests sipped sweet wines before dinner. Tracked with mud and bootmarks.

  Bloodstains.

  Deserted.

  ‘Why is no one there?’ asked the mediator softly. ‘Where is Master Eremis? Where are his mirrors – his power?’

  Geraden’s heart constricted. Nausea rose in his throat as he moved the Image through the house.

  A cavernous dining room. More mud and bootmarks, more bloodstains. The edges of the table were ragged with swordcuts.

  Deserted.

  Oh, Terisa, please, where are you?

  Geraden scanned two more fouled rooms, both empty, then located a wide staircase sweeping downward.

  ‘The cellars,’ murmured Master Barsonage. ‘That is where they would imprison her.’

  Of course. The cellars. Esmerel’s equivalent of a dungeon. Eremis wouldn’t keep his mirrors or his apparatus or any of his secrets where passersby or even tradesmen might catch sight of them. Everything would be belowground.