A Man Rides Through

  She wasn’t talking to the King, but he heard her anyway. “You will not, my lady,” he said at once. “If you fail, you will be the first victim. That risk is too great, even for me.”

  Geraden put his arm around her. He may have been trying to reassure her. Or maybe he was making sure she didn’t sneak away.

  Anticipation and dread knotted the atmosphere. King Joyse had said, They will attempt something extravagant—Everyone who had ever heard stories of the old wars knew that Imagers were capable of atrocities which could freeze blood in the heart.

  Nevertheless when the next attack came no one was ready for it.

  Because she was expecting something, concentrating hard, Terisa felt just a suggestion of the visceral cold of translation. Eremis’ mirror was focused too far away to touch her strongly. She tightened her grip on Geraden.

  In the clear space between the sides of the Cadwal army, a monster appeared.

  She had seen it before. Every member of the Congery was familiar with it.

  Huge eyes, insatiable and raging. Teeth dripping poison in a maw big enough to swallow houses. A vast, slug-like body. Slime-streaked sides.

  Once, during the old wars, that beast had destroyed an entire village, eaten it hut by hut. The worm was too big to be killed, too big even to be hurt. Given time, it could have consumed anything. But King Joyse had captured the mirror from which the monster came, and Adept Havelock had translated the beast back to its cave in the Image.

  Now Master Eremis had the mirror, and the beast was furious.

  The creature gave a roar of hideous outrage, howling so fiercely that the walls of the valley rang. Then it slithered forward and began devouring the rubble that blocked High King Festten’s approach, attacking the mounds as if piled rock offended it.

  In spite of training and experience, determination and courage, the King’s army broke into panic.

  The monster’s teeth among the rubble were as loud as detonations, inescapably destructive. Already the archers hidden in the mounds had to leap and run, risk snapping their legs or backs to get away. And when the rock was gone, the creature would enter the valley—

  It would consume the entire army itself. Or it would drive guards and soldiers to the walls, where High King Festten’s men could crush them at leisure. Or it would force them out of the valley, where the Cadwal army could fall on them from both sides. Something extravagant— This was extravagant, all right. But it wasn’t desperate. It was a masterstroke, completely unanswerable; defeat as stark and terrible as the creature’s teeth.

  Helpless to save themselves, the Alend and Mordant ranks came apart like water and began spilling in all directions. Their cries were everywhere; hoarse and frantic; doomed.

  The sight set King Joyse afire. “Death’s hatchetman, Eremis!” he roared in a voice that seemed to match the monster’s, “this is foul!”

  But he didn’t waste time on indignation. Wheeling to Norge, he barked like a trumpet, “Find Kragen! Rally the men! Retreat! That beast is no danger yet! We must stop this panic!

  “Bring my horse!”

  Galvanized by the King’s shout, Norge raced for his own mount while two dumbstruck guards hauled Joyse’s suddenly frightened charger forward.

  In a moment, both men were gone, spurring their horses into the face of an army transformed to tumult and chaos. King Joyse didn’t rage at his enemies; he didn’t shout at his men. He simply rode hard, rode conspicuously, straight for the foot of the valley, with his sword bright in his hands, so that as many soldiers and guards as possible would see him and think he wasn’t beaten.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” Geraden repeated, fretting at his helplessness like a boy.

  Terisa chewed her lip. “I said that already.” She hardly heard him, however. She was listening to the sound of the monster’s teeth in the rubble – a savage, crushing noise which seemed somehow louder than the army’s panic – and trying to think about several different things at the same time.

  Choose your risks more carefully.

  I want you to defeat Master Eremis.

  Problems should be solved by those who see them.

  I’ve got the strongest feeling—

  And something else; something that refused to come clear. There was too much noise, too many people were shouting around her, too many people were going to die—

  Something so stupidly obvious that she was going to kick herself as soon as she figured it out.

  Master Barsonage was at Geraden’s side. His eyes had a wild and aimless stare; he looked like a man who had wandered here after having his brains baked out in the desert. “Now I understand,” he said, not – apparently – because anyone was listening to him, but because he had to say something, needed to hear a reasonable voice. “When we rescued you from the ruin of our meeting hall, Eremis used that glass to help clear away the stone. I thought his choice was odd, but now I understand. He was making his beast mad, teaching it to hate stone.”

  Something—

  “Why did none of us realize that he must be the maker of that glass? Or an Adept?”

  In spite of herself, she stopped to absorb what the Master said. He was right: Eremis must be an Adept. Or he had been working against King Joyse longer than anyone realized; had conceived his ambitions at a younger age. Unexpected abilities—

  “But how did he get possession of the mirror?” asked the mediator. “I thought it was among those broken when he shattered Geraden’s glass. He must have captured it then. That must have been one of the reasons for his attack on the laborium.

  “Why did none of us think to see whether all the mirrors we lost were among those broken?”

  It was unexpected: that’s why. What Eremis did was unexpected. His abilities were unexpected. No one could expect the unexpected. By definition.

  Then she had it, had it so suddenly that she seemed to reach her conclusion without taking any of the steps which led to it.

  Yes.

  Oh, yes.

  “Geraden.” She grabbed his arm, pulled him around to face her. “We’ve got to get back to Orison.”

  Geraden stared at her in shock; his jaw dropped. For one moment that felt sickening, like a fall from a bad height, she thought he was going to protest, Do you want to run away? Then that danger passed, and as quick as it was gone another took its place; she could see it in his face: What are you talking about?

  Oh, Geraden, don’t ask, we haven’t got time!

  But he was Geraden, the man she loved; instinctively, he had always put her needs ahead of his confusion. Instead of making protests or demanding explanations, he said, “We don’t have a mirror.”

  “Master Barsonage does.” With the ballroom of Orison in the Image.

  “Flat glass. You can use it. I’ll go mad.”

  That was right. Oh, shit. “Are you sure there aren’t any others? Didn’t the Congery bring any other normal mirrors?”

  Hurry. Please. The creature was going to come through the rubble at any moment. And both King Joyse and Prince Kragen were down at the foot of the valley, vulnerable to those teeth—

  As if the fact that he didn’t know what was going on only made him more resolute, Geraden wheeled toward the mediator.

  “Master Barsonage. Do you have another mirror? Did the Congery bring any other mirrors?”

  Barsonage blinked some of the wildness out of his eyes. “Why?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Why do you want it?”

  Terisa pushed herself beside Geraden, tried to make the mediator notice her. “We’ve got to get back to Orison.”

  She was putting too much pressure on him; her demand seemed to increase his air of being lost. In a hoarse, dry tone, he asked, “Will you abandon King Joyse to his doom?”

  Geraden clenched his fists, breathed, “No,” as if he were defending her.

  Unfortunately, that just put more pressure on Master Barsonage. Terisa shook herself, forced down her fear, tried to give th
e mediator a better answer.

  “I need to use Havelock’s mirrors.”

  She had other reasons as well, but she couldn’t take the time to think about them, much less explain them.

  At least now she had the Master’s attention. The effort to think clarified his expression, made his expression at once sharper and more human.

  “What will you do?”

  Hurrying past illogic, impossibility, uselessness, she replied, “Find Master Eremis’ stronghold. Stop him.”

  Now Geraden stared at her the same way Master Barsonage did. At the same moment, they both asked, “How?”

  “Unexpected abilities—” she began, fumbling for words, “unexpected actions—He can’t expect the unexpected. You said so yourself.”

  Strictly literal, Master Barsonage returned, “I said nothing of the kind.”

  No. Listen. Let me think. “I mean me.” Why couldn’t she think? The monster devouring the rubble might have been eating her mind away. “I’ve done something unexpected. Twice.”

  Abruptly, with the beast already halfway through the piled stone, and the valley in panic, and Geraden and Master Barsonage staring at her as if she were demented, her sense of urgency and horror became too great for confusion. She knew how to think; she knew how to survive. She knew how to fight.

  As if she were calm, she said, “When I got away from Master Gilbur, that wasn’t really unexpected. By then we knew I had some kind of ability. But when I changed the Image in the flat glass in the laborium – the first day after I came to Orison – that was unexpected. And when I changed another Image to escape from Master Eremis, changed it across all these miles – that was unexpected. We’ve never even tried to explain it.”

  “Talent—” suggested Master Barsonage thinly.

  She shook her head. “I don’t mean that. I’m talking about something else.” She faced Geraden squarely. “When you tried to translate me home, I ended up near the Closed Fist. That was your doing. You’re the one who works with curved glass. But it was the Closed Fist in spring. It was augury. You changed the Image across time as well as distance.

  “But when I changed the flat mirror,” in shock, by reflex rather than conscious choice, “my Image showed the Closed Fist the way it really was at the time. In winter. How did I do that? How did I know what it looked like in winter?”

  Geraden watched her as if she had staggered him and he was struggling to keep his balance. “I never thought of that.”

  “And when I escaped from Eremis—” Now she addressed Master Barsonage as well. “I used the same mirror that got me away from Gilbur. That makes sense. I was familiar with the Image. But the Image itself had changed in the meantime. The only time I actually saw it, when I used it to get away from Gilbur, it was full of wind. But when I used it to get away from Eremis, there was no wind. The Image was different. How could I change the Image in that mirror when I didn’t even know what that Image looked like – when the Image I remembered was gone?”

  Master Barsonage gaped. He would have looked foolish if the situation weren’t so desperate.

  “You mean,” Geraden murmured softly, eagerly, on the verge of a revelation, “that’s part of your talent. You don’t need exact knowledge to change Images exactly. Something in you compensates for the things you don’t know.”

  Right. Now she was focused entirely on the mediator, urging him to believe her, urging him to act. “I’m familiar with at least one of Havelock’s mirrors. And I can’t concentrate here, with that thing coming to get us.” And she had at least one other reason. “I need to get back to Orison. So I can make an Image – an approximate Image – that might take us to Master Eremis’ stronghold. It was dark, I couldn’t see. But I remember a lot of details anyway. Maybe they’ll be enough.”

  For a moment, Master Barsonage went on staring at her as if her ideas were inconceivable, imponderable. He had the soul of a fence-sitter: he didn’t like hazardous decisions. Just when she was about to start yelling at him, however, he lifted his head and smiled, and all the wildness fell away from him.

  “Why did you not say that from the first?”

  Turning, he headed toward one of the Congery’s wagons, shouting for other Masters to join him as he ran.

  Terisa was about to follow when Geraden snatched her exuberantly into his arms, whirled her in a circle with her feet off the ground and her breath gasping. “I knew it!” he shouted to the blue sky and the chaos and the slug-beast. “I knew we weren’t supposed to be here!”

  Even though she couldn’t resist kissing him, she was thinking, Put me down you idiot we’ve got to go.

  He put her down. Together, they raced to the wagon.

  The Masters were unpacking a mirror which showed a limitless sea glittering under hot sunlight.

  “I brought it on a whim, really,” Master Barsonage explained as the other Imagers set the glass as securely as possible in the wet snow. “It served us so well when we rescued you from the champion’s destruction of our meeting hall, I thought perhaps it could serve us again. When you demanded a mirror, I was reluctant to risk it. I was trying to imagine how it might be used to drown that monster.”

  “I won’t break it,” Geraden promised. He was already beside the mirror, already stroking his fingertips along its beautiful woodwork. Despite the running and cries of the men, the desperate commands of the officers, the loud ruin of the monster’s teeth, he seemed to have no difficulty concentrating. To Terisa’s eyes, he shone with confidence and strength which made everything possible.

  Nothing happened to the Image of the sea. Waves went on rolling their long, slow unrest from edge to edge of the frame; the heavens remained an immaculate blue unmatched by any color in the world except the sky’s hue above the valley.

  “Ready?” he asked Terisa over his shoulder. Without looking away from the glass, he extended his hand to her.

  Where were Havelock’s rooms, Havelock’s mirrors? What had happened to Geraden’s talent?

  No, she told herself, he can do it this way, everything’s all right. He had the ability to use mirrors for translations which had nothing to do with their Images. That was how he had come to her in the first place, how he had showed her the Closed Fist, how he had rescued himself from Orison. All she had to do was trust him.

  Choose your risks—

  She took his hand, started moving at once toward the glass so that she wouldn’t falter.

  But she was holding her breath as the Image opened to embrace her like the sea.

  Of course she didn’t fall into the sea: Geraden had too much control over his talent; he was in no danger of going that far wrong. Instead, she faded as if she had winked out of existence.

  Holding his hand with all her strength, pulling him after her, she evaporated through the transition of mirrors, the instant, eternal plummet and soar between places of being; the vast redemptive and ruinous dark which her parents had taught her to know and fear and love by locking her in the closet.

  When she came out of the translation, she lost her balance and collapsed in a heap, drawing Geraden helplessly after her – breaking his brief hold on the mirror’s frame, his only attachment to the world of the valley.

  For some strange reason, she landed on a thick carpet.

  A synthetic carpet, running from wall to wall on both sides of her.

  Adept Havelock didn’t have a carpet like this in his rooms. No one had a carpet like this anywhere in Orison.

  Across the deep, woven pile, she saw that she was surrounded by people: women in gowns; men in tuxedos. Some of them had yelled recently, dropped glasses full of ice and alcohol onto the carpet. They were all still now, however, motionless, staring frozen at Geraden and her with shock on their polished faces.

  Until she recognized the angle of the hall leading to the bedrooms, and the shape of the entryway to the dining room and kitchen, she didn’t realize that she was back in her old apartment.

  Back in her old world.

  FIFTY
: CAREFUL RISKS

  Geraden was sprawled halfway across her; his weight held her down. Instinctively, she arched her back, tried to shift him so that she could get her legs under her. He didn’t move. Staring at the strange carpet, the chrome-and-wicker furniture, the astonished men and women in their inexplicable clothes, he murmured, “Glass and splinters. What have I done?”

  She thought the answer was obvious.

  He had brought her back to her old condominium. And during her absence time had passed; months had passed. Never one to cling to a useless investment, her father must have sold her apartment as soon as he felt sure she wasn’t coming back. And the new owners had redecorated it, of course—

  All her mirrors were gone – every conceivable link to Mordant, every way back—

  On the other hand, what imaginable reason could Geraden have for bringing her back here? for bringing her back here now? This wasn’t just an accident: it was an absolute disaster.

  There was no way back.

  “Get up,” she urged as if his weight were suffocating her. “Oh, God. Oh, shit. Get up.”

  “Call the police,” a frightened woman pleaded.

  “Call security,” suggested someone else.

  “Who are they?”

  Geraden got up.

  As he rose to his feet, the people in the gowns and tuxedos flinched; some of them retreated farther. A shoe kicked a glass, sent it rolling across the tile on the kitchen floor. Terisa could hear ice being crunched underfoot, as if that noise were louder than the voices.

  “Call security, I said.”

  “How did they get in here?”

  “I don’t know. They just appeared, that’s all.”

  “What have we been drinking?”

  Her heart beat so hard that she had trouble finding her balance, trouble making her legs lift her upright.

  “What have I done?” Geraden repeated softly; he was appalled to the bone.

  “Miss Morgan?”

  No, she was wrong again, she had jumped once again to the wrong conclusions. The ice wasn’t louder than the voices: she had no difficulty at all hearing Reverend Thatcher.