Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Then, because he wanted to see how far he could goad the Imager, he asked, ‘Where’s Gart?’

  Master Gilbur’s eyebrows knotted involuntarily. ‘Do not look behind you, pigshit boy. He may be there already. He has gone to fetch your dear brother Nyle – who, I may say, has given me considerable pleasure during his visit here.’

  The flat mirror’s Image showed the great monster writhing in a paroxysm of rage and hunger.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Geraden repeated. Nyle. He wanted to laugh so that he wouldn’t do anything foolish, wouldn’t go mad and try to attack the Imager; but he could barely keep himself from snarling. ‘Terisa and I already rescued Nyle. We did that first. If Gart isn’t here, the men we brought with us must have got him.’ If Gart isn’t here, Artagel must still be alive, still be fighting. ‘Or else High King Festten has plans he hasn’t told you about. You must have noticed that his reputation for treachery is older than you are.’

  Unfortunately, Master Gilbur was able to laugh. ‘Pure vapor,’ he rasped with a guttural chuckle. ‘Mist and moonshine.’ He took a couple of nonthreatening steps, not toward Geraden, but to the side, away from the flat glass and the cockroaches. ‘You have not rescued Nyle – you do not know where he is. The room where I have enjoyed him is kept dark. You have never seen it. Therefore you could not find it, or translate him away.

  ‘Gart will join us soon.’

  ‘Believe that if you can,’ retorted Geraden. He believed it; and the thought made all his muscles feel as weak as water. Yet he kept his gaze and his voice steady. ‘Just tell me one thing. Those redfurred creatures.’ They continued pouring around King Joyse and the Prince, hacking savagely. The Termigan’s men and Norge’s appeared vastly outnumbered. And the slug-beast– ‘You didn’t just translate them this morning, did you? How did you get them mounted? How did you get them to serve you?’

  The slug-beast had reared up as if it strove to stand on its tail.

  ‘No, we did not,’ conceded Master Gilbur maliciously. ‘In that, at least, you are right. Those things – they call themselves callat. Eremis has worked with them at some length. They have become what you might consider his “personal guard.” A complex and difficult negotiation was required before he agreed to commit his callat to Festten’s support.’

  Too late, Geraden realized what the Imager was doing.

  In the flat mirror, the rearing monster came down like a tower, crashed straight and limp to the ground. Its maw seemed to miss King Joyse and Prince Kragen; some of the callat were caught by its weight and crushed. But through the glass the reverberation of impact had no sound. And the beast made no effort to surge forward, devour more prey. It lay still with a strange curl of smoke rising between its teeth.

  Master Gilbur reached one of the other mirrors in the ring.

  He grasped its frame with his free hand, began snarling nonsense.

  Out of the glass, like shot from a catapult, came hurtling a gnarled, black shape, no larger than a small dog, with claws like hooks at the ends of its four limbs and terrible jaws which filled half its body.

  Master Eremis did like surprises. In a sense, he even liked unpleasant surprises. They raised the stakes, increased the challenge: they made him show what he could do. But there was nothing unpleasant about Terisa’s unexpected arrival – or Geraden’s either, for that matter. Master Gilbur could handle Geraden. And Terisa was beaten. He had seen her defeat in her eyes, had seen the light of intelligence and determination start to fade. She was his at last, his, and every spark of resistance left to her would only increase the fun of possessing her.

  As he directed her toward his private quarters, watching from behind the way her hips moved inside her uncomplimentary garments, remembering the sweet shape and curve of her breasts, and the particular silken sensation between her legs, he thought that she would be more satisfying than any woman he had ever destroyed.

  Saddith’s death had been satisfying, of course: deft, inescapable, and almost infinitely clever. Nevertheless it had lacked the personal touch. He hadn’t destroyed her himself; he had only arranged events so that she would suffer and die. On the unfortunately frequent occasions when he had found it necessary to make love to her, the exigencies of his plans had required him to treat her gently, almost kindly, so that she would believe he might help further her social ambitions. He was man enough, however, to meet even her boring tastes in fornication. And with Terisa there would be no limits— Nothing would inhibit the extravagant flavors of pain and debasement he meant to elicit from her.

  He felt so primed and poised that he could hardly refrain from dancing as he followed her toward his rooms.

  Obedient to his will, she entered his quarters and stopped in the center of the one, big chamber where he had his bed, his instruments of enjoyment, and his copy of the flat mirror which showed how matters progressed in the valley of Esmerel.

  There King Joyse and Prince Kragen were about to go down under a tide of callat. Or they would be driven within reach of the monster rearing impressively over them.

  Good. In fact, perfect. Eremis would like watching his enemies die while Terisa wept and wailed.

  ‘Remove your clothes,’ he told her, enjoying the harshness of his tone. ‘You have evaded me too long, and the recompense I demand has grown correspondingly large.’ If he took off his own clothes, she would see just how large it was. ‘Nakedness is the very least of the gifts your fine body will give me today.’

  Sunlight came from a series of windows along one wall, where he occasionally let men stand to observe his exercises. Today, of course, everyone was busy with battle or guard duty; but he was glad to have his victory to himself. Outside was only a rugged hillside, a freedom Terisa would never reach. The whole stronghold was austere, and he hadn’t had time to procure rugs. But the sun warmed the chill of the stone floors, shedding brightness over his victim and the mirror.

  She didn’t obey. And she didn’t pay any attention to the windows; as far as he could tell, she didn’t notice them at all. Instead, she turned to the glass, as if it had more power over her than anything else did.

  For the first time since they had left the Image-room, he saw her face.

  Perhaps she wasn’t beaten after all. Something in her conveyed a definite sense of evaporation, as if she were on the borderline of disappearing. Her expression was slack; her eyes, vaguely focused. And yet he also seemed to see something else, something secretive and wonderfully enticing. It may have been a covert hope: the hope, perhaps, that she could shift the Image in the mirror (but of course that wouldn’t do anything to help either her or King Joyse); or the hope that Eremis would foolishly give her the chance to translate him away (but to do that she would have to physically thrust him toward the glass, and he was stronger than she was, much stronger); or the hope that she could use the mirror to escape herself (but he had no intention of giving her the opportunity).

  Or maybe she was nourishing a hidden and hopeless desire to do him harm.

  Whatever she concealed, it was exactly the spice he coveted. For a moment, he let her disobey him simply because he couldn’t decide whether to kiss her gently or tear her clothes apart.

  Studying the mirror, she asked in a thin, disinterested tone, ‘Where did you get those creatures? The ones that attacked Geraden and me. How did you get them to serve you?’

  Master Eremis was happy to answer her. ‘The callat. They were a fortuitous discovery – as all things are fortuitous for men who can master life. They were first discovered among Vagel’s Imagers in Cadwal, but no use was made of them. Apparently, every faction in Carmag feared that they might prove to be a decisive force – for someone else. However, after I had redeemed Vagel from his tenuous exile among the Alend Lieges, he remembered the formula and shaped a new mirror.

  ‘The callat are indeed a powerful force, as you can see’ – Eremis enjoyed a glance at the glass himself, although most of his mind was fixed on Terisa – ‘but not as powerful as the Cadwals feared
. Their numbers are not great enough to make an army.

  ‘They are renegades in their own world. Actually, they are in danger of extermination by what I can only describe as a race of groundhogs. Very large groundhogs. And the callat are too bloody-minded to make peace. They can only fight or die.

  ‘Witnessing their danger, I translated one or two of them and began bargaining. In exchange for escape from their enemies’ – Eremis shrugged aside the fact that he had never intended to let the callat live, had meant from the start to use them in a way which would destroy them – ‘they agreed to serve me.’

  Slowly, Terisa nodded. He wondered if she understood: she seemed to be thinking about something else.

  ‘They come from a completely different world,’ she said. ‘They have a history of their own, motives of their own. Do you still claim they didn’t exist until Vagel shaped the mirror?’

  Her question drew a chortle from the Master. He made no effort to conceal that he was inexpressibly pleased with himself. ‘My lady, did you ever truly credit that piece of sophism?’

  She regarded him gravely, as if she wanted to hear what he would say – and didn’t care what it was.

  Still chuckling, he continued, ‘No man of any intelligence – of whom there are only a few, I admit – has ever thought that the Images we see in mirrors do not exist. That position, with all the arguments supporting it, was forced on us by King Joyse, by his demand that the Congery should define a “right” use of Imagery. Because he took it as proven that if Images were real in themselves then they must be treated with respect, forbearance – in effect, must be left alone – he allowed those who disagreed with him no ground on which to stand except that those Images have no independent existence.

  ‘But of course his central tenet is so foolish that it is also unanswerable. He might as well claim that we must not breathe because we should not interfere with the air, or that we must not eat because we should not interfere with plants and cattle. The truth is that we have the right to interfere with Images because we have the power to interfere. It is necessary to interfere. Otherwise the power has no use, and it dies, and Imagery is lost.

  ‘That is the law of life. Like every other thing which breathes and desires and chooses, we must do what we can.’

  Eremis licked his lips. ‘Terisa, I have sampled your breasts, and they are delectable. You must have an exceptionally vacuous mind, if you ever believed that you do not exist. I told you you were unreal only to make it as difficult as possible for you to discover your talent.’

  As he spoke, he studied her, looking for her secret reaction, the truth she wished to conceal. Her eyes were too dark, too lost: they didn’t betray anything. As far as they were concerned, she was already gone.

  But her pretty, cleft chin tightened as if she were clenching her teeth.

  Delighted by this evidence of anger, he reached out and bunched his fists in her unflattering leather shirt. He regretted, really, that she hadn’t had a chance to wash her hair; but everything else about her was perfect. He was going to tear the shirt away. Then, before he began to hurt her, he would do things to her breasts which would make her ache for him in spite of her secrets. He would surprise her with the pain, as she had surprised him.

  For some reason, however, she had turned her face away. She wasn’t even afraid enough of him to watch what he was doing. Instead, she gazed darkly at the mirror.

  Unintentionally, he glanced there in time to see the slug-beast come down from its full height, collapse like soundless thunder in the valley and lie still. Involuntarily, he held his breath, waiting to see the monster move again, waiting to see it pounce forward and devour King Joyse and the arrogant Alend Contender. But the beast remained as limp as a carcass. Odd smoke curled briefly out of its maw and drifted away along the breeze.

  ‘Excrement of a pig!’ Eremis breathed. Forgetting Terisa, he turned to the mirror, gripped the frame with both hands, studied the Image intently. ‘That is impossible. You doddering old fool, that is impossible.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Terisa remarked as if she had never been less interested in her life. ‘Maybe “all things” aren’t as “fortuitous” as you think.’

  Eremis thought he saw the Image of the valley begin to waver around the edges, thought he saw the rampart walls and the last catapult start to melt—

  That also was impossible. He wasn’t sure of what he was seeing.

  He didn’t delay to be sure. Swinging at once, he backhanded her across the side of the head so hard that she fell like a broken doll. She lay on one side in the warm sunshine, huddling around herself, with her hair spread out on the stone, and one hand cupped weakly over the place where she had been hit; she may have been weeping.

  ‘If you try that again,’ he spat, ‘if you touch that glass with one more hint of your talent, I swear I will call Gilbur here and let him rape you with that dagger of his.’

  Perhaps she wasn’t weeping: she didn’t make a sound. After a moment, however, she nodded her head – one small, frail jerk, like a twitch of defeat.

  Despite his monster’s unexpected demise, Master Eremis recovered his grin.

  Artagel, too, was grinning, but for an entirely different reason.

  Despite the blood which streamed from his cut shoulder, he beat back the hot, steel lightning and force of Gart’s next attack. That defense cost him an exertion which seemed to shred his wounded side. Twice he only saved himself because the corridor was too narrow for perfect swordwork, and he was ableto block Gart’s blade away against the stone. But at last he managed to disengage.

  Before the High King’s Monomach could come at him again, he retreated several quick strides, then relaxed his stance and dropped the point of his sword.

  Gart paused to scrutinize him curiously.

  Trying not to breathe in whooping gasps that would betray his weakness, Artagel asked, ‘Why do you do it?’

  Gart cocked an eyebrow; he advanced a step.

  Artagel put up a hand to ward off the Monomach. ‘You’re going to kill me anyway. You know that. You can afford to send me to my grave with my ignorance satisfied. Why do you do it?’

  Swayed, perhaps, by the admission of defeat, Gart paused again. ‘Why do I do what?’

  With an effort which felt desperately heroic, Artagel tried to laugh. He failed, of course. Nevertheless he did contrive to sound cheerful as he said, ‘Serve.’

  The tip of Gart’s blade watched Artagel warily as the Monomach waited.

  ‘You’re the best,’ Artagel panted, ‘the best. You lead and train a cadre of Apts who all want to be as good as you, and some of them may even have almost that much talent. You could be a power in the world. I’ll wager you could unseat Festten anytime you want. You could be the one who decides, instead of the one who serves. Why do you do it?’

  Gart considered the question for a moment. ‘That is who I am,’ he pronounced finally.

  ‘But why?’ demanded Artagel, fighting for a chance to regain his breath, his strength. ‘What does Festten give you that you can’t get anywhere else? What does being the High King’s Monomach get you that isn’t already yours by right? You could choose who you’re going to kill. If I were you, I’d be embarrassed by the amount of time you’ve spent recently trying to kill a woman. Whose decision was that? Why did you have to demean yourself like that?’

  A snarl pulled tighter across Gart’s teeth.

  ‘I tell you, you could be a power. Don’t you have any self-respect?’

  The Monomach came at him like a gale in the constricted passage, suddenly, without warning; and the only thing that saved him was that he wasn’t surprised. He got his longsword up, parried hard, tried to riposte. Gart slipped the blow aside and swung again. Artagel felt steel ruffle his hair as he ducked; Gart’s blade rang off the wall; Artagel hacked at the Monomach’s legs fast enough to make him jump.

  Somehow not stumbling, not clutching at his torn side, Artagel disengaged again, retreated down the corridor.
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br />   ‘That,’ said Gart as if he had never been out of breath in his life, ‘is who I am.’

  ‘But the point is, you serve,’ protested Artagel. ‘You’re nothing more than a servant, a weapon.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Gart articulated dangerously. ‘I will not say it again. That is who I am.’

  ‘With your abilities?’ Artagel’s voice nearly rose to a cry. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re content to be a servant? You’re content to be used like a thing with no mind, no pride? Aren’t you a man? Don’t you dream? Haven’t you got ambitions?’

  It was probably madness to goad the Monomach like this; but Artagel didn’t care. For the first time since their contest began, he was having fun.

  ‘No wonder you’re so hard to kill. Inside, where it counts, you’re already dead.’

  In response, Gart whirled his blade with such speed that the steel blurred into streaks of lanternlight. ‘Oh, I have dreams, you fool,’ he rasped. ‘I have dreams.

  ‘I dream of blood.’

  So fiercely that nothing could stop him, he hurled himself at Artagel.

  Now Gart was the mad one, the frenzied attacker, swinging as if he were out of control; Artagel was the one who couldn’t do anything except parry and block – and try to keep his balance.

  Unfortunately, the Monomach’s fury only made their struggle more uneven. He wasn’t wounded; he hadn’t been weakened by a long convalescence. And at his worst he never forgot his skill.

  As if by translation, cuts appeared on Artagel’s mail, his leggings. A lick along his forehead sent blood dripping into his eyes. Reeling, almost falling, he slammed into the corner where the corridor turned, hit so hard that the last air was knocked out of his lungs.

  He barely saved himself, barely, by diving out of the corner, rolling to his feet and running, his lungs on fire, his eyes full of sweat and blood, no life in his limbs, running until he gained enough ground to turn and plant his feet and stand there wobbling and face Gart for the last time.