A Man Rides Through

  “What Eremis is doing to you is worse than anything King Joyse ever did.”

  “Is it?” Vagel’s voice purred like a fall of small stones. “How strangely you think. Your defeat becomes less and less surprising, despite all the nearly unguessable implications of your talent.

  “Eremis’ manner is demeaning, but the rewards he offers are not. Do you believe that either Joyse or Havelock proved themselves better men than I am – more able or deserving, more powerful? No. They only proved that they were more treacherous. And you have seen in the decline of Mordant and the collapse of Orison that there exists nothing so desirable, worthy, or powerful that it cannot be betrayed. I was beaten, not by a good Imager or a good king, but by a good spy.”

  She expected the arch-Imager to advance, but he didn’t. “Do not despise revenge. Unless I am much mistaken” – he was sneering at her – “you yourself have no other passion.

  “In your case, however, revenge must fail. You do not serve any man who can make glass from the blood-soaked sand of your desires. Eremis will have his way with you, and then the truth of you will be proven absolutely.”

  “It’s the same for you,” she retorted, fighting back so that what he said wouldn’t crush her. “He’s using you – having his way with you. And when he’s done, he’ll just discard you. You won’t get your revenge after all. He wants all the fun for himself.”

  Vagel made a sharp, hissing noise. After that, there was a long silence. Terisa tightened her grip on the chain, although the vague figure hadn’t moved.

  “No,” he said at last, as if she had provoked him to candor. “All his allies must fear the same thing – but he will not discard me. Festten trusts me. Eremis’ plotting would have come to nothing, if I had not stood with him before the High King. He needs Cadwal too much to risk that alliance by discarding me.

  “And without me all the force of Imagery at his disposal will become a blunt instrument – able to strike hard, but unable to strike at will. Useless. I am the arch-Imager, as you have observed. The procedures by which we shape mirrors that show the Images we desire are mine. Did you believe that our successes could have been achieved randomly? That Gilbur for all his speed could have made the glass we need simply by mixing accidental combinations of tinct and oxidate, sand and surface? I tell you, he could have sweated until his heart burst without ever producing a mirror which gave us access to Vale House – or one which showed the audience hall of Orison. That victory is mine.

  “Alone, I have overturned the tenets of Imagery, and no one among Joyse’s foolish Congery can compare with me.”

  Vagel’s voice intensified. “Eremis cannot do without me. His need for glass which only I can provide will never end. And because of that” – he seemed to be controlling an impulse to shout – “before I am done I will roast Joyse’s guts over a slow fire. I will hear him howl until his mind goes, or by the stars! I will take my satisfaction from Eremis himself.”

  A visceral tremor started up in Terisa’s guts, so hard that she couldn’t speak.

  Abruptly, the arch-Imager turned to leave. “Remember that,” he snapped while his voice faded. “Perhaps it will inspire you to surrender to him prematurely, and then his pleasure in you will be made that much less.”

  He left her with the chain wrapped around her fist and no one to strike.

  She didn’t trust his departure. Her senses strained into the dark, searching for evidence that she wasn’t alone. But she heard nothing, felt nothing. As for sight—She could discern a hint of the doorway, but the corners of the room were as obscure as pits. When she turned her eyes to the wall behind the bed, however, she was able to make out the source of the scant illumination. Her first guess had been right: the light came from a window not quite perfectly sealed.

  Dropping the chain to increase her range of motion, she climbed onto the bed and reached for the window. From that position, she could get her hands on the boards nailed over the frame. Unfortunately, her fingers found no purchase, either at the edges or in the cracks. She tried until her fingertips tore and her self-control threatened to crumble; then, so that she wouldn’t start sobbing, she got down from the bed.

  Calm. It was essential to remain calm. To preserve a semblance of calm until it became the real thing. So that she could concentrate although of course it was impossible to translate herself out of here with a chain on her wrist, no, don’t think about things like that, do not. Be calm. Concentrate.

  Fade.

  Pressing her hands over her face, she sat on the edge of the bed and tried to fade.

  She couldn’t do it: she was too angry and scared, deprived of hope. She had the shakes so badly that her heart itself quivered. She had betrayed King Joyse, and Vagel was going to make him howl—Geraden had no way to find her, rescue her. Too many people might still be watching her, concealed behind spyholes, hidden in the corners—

  Eremis would come back as soon as he finished with High King Festten.

  She needed time to pull herself together.

  Searching for calm, she decided to explore the room as far as the chain allowed. What else could she do? Maybe if she failed to find anything she would recover some self-possession.

  Shaking badly, and too angry to care whether she looked foolish to a spectator, she moved to the staple holding her chain and from there started to grope her way toward the corner, searching the cold, crude stone with her fingers.

  When her hand touched iron in the wall, she nearly flinched.

  Iron: another staple.

  A short chain fixed to the staple. A manacle.

  A wrist in the fetter.

  That did make her flinch. She recoiled to the bed, sat down facing the dark. Her breath came in hard gasps.

  She had felt a wrist. Skin. A hand that flexed away from her touch.

  Another prisoner. Someone was chained in the corner.

  Eremis had intended to rape her before witnesses.

  Who are you? she panted. For a moment, the words refused to come out of her throat. Almost gagging, she forced them.

  “Who are you?”

  No answer. Maybe because she was breathing so hard herself, she couldn’t hear any sigh or rustle of life.

  “Are you hurt?” That was another possibility. Who could tell what Eremis or Vagel or Gilbur – or Gart – might do to their enemies? If she hadn’t felt skin and movement, she would have been tempted to imagine a skeleton. Or a corpse.

  “Can you hear me?” She got off the bed and started along the wall again, slowly, slowly, trying to control her alarm with caution. “Are you all right?”

  She found the staple, the short chain. The hand in the manacle tried to avoid her touch. Nevertheless she shifted from the fettered wrist to an arm. It was draped with loose cloth – the sleeve of a cloak? The fabric was rough and warm; worsted, perhaps.

  She found a covered shoulder, a bare neck. The shoulder and neck twisted hard, but they couldn’t get away; the other arm must be chained as well. Curse this dark. The prisoner was only a little taller than she was. Although she was near the limit of her own chain, she had no difficulty touching an unshaven face that strained away from her; terrified of her.

  “Are you hurt?” she whispered. “Who are you?”

  Roughly, he wrenched his head up and sucked a strangled breath through his teeth.

  “All right. You’ve found me. They told me not to make a sound, not to let you know I’m here, but this isn’t my fault.”

  His voice was familiar to her. His bitterness was familiar.

  Nyle. Geraden’s “murdered” brother.

  For a moment, she was so glad to find him alive that she could hardly stand. So it was Underwell who had been killed, disfigured; Eremis’ plotting was just as vile as she had believed it must be.

  And Nyle was here; had been kept prisoner for how long now? – held in case he were ever needed again against his brother.

  “Oh, Nyle,” she whispered in relief and quick nausea, “I’m so sorry.
What have they done to you?”

  “Same thing they’re going to do to you.” His bitterness was worse than anger; he had gone too far beyond hope. “A kind of rape. I’m just lucky Eremis still wants me alive. Gilbur likes what they call ‘male meat,’ but he has a tendency to kill his toys, so Eremis makes him leave me alone. Most of the time.

  “They need me to make sure Geraden doesn’t do something unpredictable. Or King Joyse either, for that matter.”

  Oh, Nyle.

  She couldn’t stay on her feet. Nausea crowded all the relief out of her. Without thinking, she retreated to the bed, sat down again. For some reason, she wasn’t trembling anymore. But she was going to be so sick—If she let go, she was going to puke her heart out.

  “It’s the same reason they’ve got you.” Now that Nyle had begun to talk, he seemed intent on continuing. “Only the details are different. We’re hostages. And bait. We’re here to make sure Geraden and King Joyse do what Eremis wants.

  “I actually thought somebody would try to rescue me.” His tone made her want to throw up. Gilbur liked male meat. “But I was wrong. Maybe they’ll forget about you, too. That’s your only hope now – that Eremis made a mistake bringing you here.”

  Fighting down bile, she forced herself to say, “Nobody in Orison knew you needed rescuing. Don’t you know what they did? They killed that physician, Underwell. They let monsters eat his face” – don’t think about it, don’t think about it – “they dressed him up to look like you. Everybody thought you were dead.” Because it had to be said, she concluded, “They thought Geraden killed you. You accomplished that, anyway.”

  “I know all that.” Nyle coughed thinly, as if he were too weak and beaten to curse. “They sent Gart and a couple of his Apts into the room to knock the guards and Underwell out. So there wouldn’t be any noise. They translated me here. Then they sent some of their creatures to feed on the bodies. They told me all about it.

  “Do you think that’s what I wanted? Do you think I had a choice?”

  No, it was cruel to accuse him, cruel, he had been Eremis’ prisoner and Gilbur’s for a long time now, and the decisions he had made which had put him here had all been based on King Joyse’s policy of foolish passivity, it wasn’t fair to include him in her anger. Nevertheless she said, “Everybody has a choice.”

  She had a choice, didn’t she? She was chained to the wall in the dark, and Eremis intended to use her for his pleasure until her spirit broke, and there was no way she could possibly be rescued, and she still had a choice. Only dead people didn’t make choices.

  He coughed again, like a man whose lungs were full of dry rot. She could picture him in his fetters, with his mouth hanging open in his dirty beard and no strength. “You’re wrong,” he murmured when he was finished coughing. “You’re like Elega. You don’t know. I haven’t had a choice about anything since Geraden hit me with that club.”

  Oh, great. Terisa barely swallowed a snarl. Now he was going to start blaming Geraden. Her stomach tried to come up; she had to force it down. She had already been harsher than she wanted to be. Instead of pursuing what Nyle said, she asked thickly, “Do you know where we are? Do you know this place?”

  “All I wanted to do was save Orison and Mordant.” Maybe he hadn’t heard her. “You can’t say I deserve this. You can think I was wrong, but you can’t say I was being malicious. I wasn’t going to get anything out of it for myself. Not even Elega—Even if I was right, my family was still going to hate me. I was never going to be able to go home again. They all believed in King Joyse personally, not in the ideas that made him a good king – not in the Congery and Orison and Mordant. They were never going to forgive me for betraying their hero, even if everything I did turned out right.

  “I didn’t do it for myself.”

  “Oh, Nyle,” she breathed softly. “You don’t understand. Of course they’ll forgive you. They’ve already forgiven you.”

  But maybe he wasn’t able to hear her. Maybe he had spent too much time helpless, caught in an everlasting reiteration of what he had done and why – and what it had cost – without any way to break out. Instead of reacting to what she said, he continued explaining himself.

  Trying to justify himself against the dark.

  “But Geraden destroyed me. I know that wasn’t what he wanted, but he set me up for all this. When he came after me, instead of concentrating on Prince Kragen—If he weren’t so determined to have accidents—

  “He got me locked up. Like an assassin. Like I was dangerous to all the decent people around me. If I were a farmer who went berserk and started slaughtering his friends and family with an axe, I would have been locked up, but I wouldn’t have been sneered at. I wouldn’t have been despised.

  “Don’t you understand? I love King Joyse, too. I always loved him, even though he didn’t let me serve him – even though he didn’t want me around. But some loves are more important than others. He wasn’t interested in my loyalty – and that hurt, because he was so obviously interested in my brothers. Artagel. Geraden. But I could still love his victories, his ideals, his beliefs.

  “What do you think I should have done?” For a moment, Nyle’s voice brought a touch of passion into the dark. “Abandon everything that made Mordant valuable for the sake of a failing old man who didn’t care whether I lived or died?

  “Then Geraden stopped me, and they threw me in the dungeon. Do you know what that means?” A coughing fit came over him, draining him of intensity. “You should.

  “It means I couldn’t get away.

  “Artagel came and flaunted his wounds at me. I couldn’t get away. Castellan Lebbick practiced his obscenities on me for quite a while. I couldn’t get away.

  “And then Master Eremis came—”

  “Nyle, stop.” Terisa didn’t want to hear it. She knew what was coming, and she didn’t want to hear it. “This doesn’t help. You’re just tormenting yourself” All she wanted was some way to contain the horror surging at the back of her throat so that she could concentrate, bring her fury and her dread and her ache for blood into focus. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Just like that,” Nyle went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “He just walked into the dungeon. He just unlocked my cell and took me out. I couldn’t get away.” His tone frayed at the edges, worn ragged by bitterness and fatigue and coughing, by anger that didn’t have anywhere else to go. “He took me down the passage a little way. Then he made some kind of gesture, and we were translated here. Into his personal laborium. I couldn’t get away from him.

  “Do you know what he did to me?”

  “Yes!” Fighting for a defense against pain, Terisa jumped to her feet. “I know.” When she moved, her chain rang lightly against the wall. Quickly, she caught the chain in her fist and swung it harder, made the stone clang. “I know what he did to you.”

  Of course, she didn’t truly know: she hadn’t suffered the same experience. But she knew enough – more than she could stomach. Fiercely, she rushed on.

  “He showed you a mirror with Houseldon in the Image.” She swung the chain. “And he showed you other mirrors.” The iron links chimed on the wall. “Mirrors with firecats. Mirrors with corrupt wolves. Mirrors with avalanches – mirrors with ghouls.” Each time, she swung the chain harder. “And he made you believe he could bring them all down on your home and family without any warning of any kind if you didn’t do what he wanted. If you didn’t help him turn the Congery against Geraden.”

  Panting, gasping, she stood still.

  Nyle’s silence was all the acknowledgment she needed.

  “So you agreed because you thought you were saving most of the people you loved. And you figured somebody was bound to notice eventually that you weren’t actually dead – which would save Geraden and recoil on Eremis. And somehow you managed to avoid the simple deduction that Eremis knew as much about the flaws in his plans as you did.

  “Nyle, you made a choice. Geraden didn’t do this to you. You did it to yo
urself “

  There. Now she had begun attacking people who were manacled to walls, accusing them of bad logic as well as weak moral fiber. As if they had caused the things their enemies did to them. What was she going to do next? Start beating up cripples?

  And yet in her own case she had no one to blame but herself for the fact that she had been so slow to distrust Master Eremis, so poor at opposing him.

  Out of the dark, Nyle asked in old pain, “What choice did I have? What could I have done?”

  Oh, shit. She forced her fingers to release the chain. “You could have refused.”

  “Weren’t you listening to yourself?” He had some anger left in him after all. “If I did that, he would have destroyed Houseldon. He would have killed my whole family – everybody I grew up with – my home, all of it.”

  “No, Nyle,” she sighed. By degrees, she wrestled down her nausea, her racing pulse, her desire to hurt something. He was going to be hurt badly enough already. She didn’t need to increase the force of the blow. “You’re the one who isn’t listening. He destroyed Houseldon anyway. He burned it to the ground while Geraden and I were there, trying to kill us. Your cooperation didn’t make any difference. You gave yourself away for nothing.”

  There. It was said.

  Far away from her, Nyle groaned softly, as if she had just slipped a knife between his ribs – as if she had just cut down the defenses, the self-justifications, which kept him alive in his fetters.

  She went to him, feeling at once as brutal as a child molester and as vulnerable as a molested child. “Nyle, I’m sorry.” Trying to comfort him, she stroked his face. Her hand came back wet with tears. “We’ll get out of here somehow. Sometime. I’ve talked to your whole family. I know they understand. They know you. They know you wouldn’t betray Geraden unless you were trying to protect them. And it would have worked, if he hadn’t escaped – if he and I hadn’t gone to Houseldon.”