A Man Rides Through (16 page)

—
and Castellan Lebbick burst into the cell.

He was too late: he wasn't going to be able to prevent the door from shutting. And once it was shut he would have to find the spring to open it again.

Nevertheless he was fast, and his sword was already in his hands. Driving wildly to spit Terisa through the closing of the door, he plunged forward, hurled himself headlong toward her.

The door's weight swept his thrust aside. His swordtip missed her by several inches.

Then his sword was caught in the crack of the door. The iron held, jamming the stone so that it couldn't seal.

His body thudded against the door; he recoiled, staggering.

A moment later, his voice came, muffled, into the dark. "Guards!
Guards!"

"Come on!" hissed Master Quillon. He took Terisa by the wrist once more and tugged her away from the thin slit of illumination. "Curse him! As soon as his men arrive, he will be able to open that door. We must escape
now."

Struggling for balance, she hurried after her rescuer into a blind passage.

Stone seemed to whirl about her head like a swarm of bats, probing for some way to strike at her. There was no light—no light of any kind. Except for his grip, Master Quillon had ceased to exist. Her shoulders kept hitting the walls as if she were reeling. She couldn't keep up this pace; she had no idea where the passage went, or how it got there. "Slow down!" she panted. "I can't see."

"You do not need to see," Quillon snapped. "You need to hurry."

Still trying to make him slacken speed, she protested, "How long?"

Without warning, he halted. At the same time, he let go of her. She collided with him, stumbled against the wall again, flung up her arms to protect her head.

"Not long," he muttered acerbically. "This passage was put in when the dungeons were rebuilt to provide room for the laborium. In other words, it is relatively recent. So it does not connect to the more extensive passage systems."

Unseen beside her, he tripped another release, and the wall she had just hit opened, letting cold air wash over her. Her torn shirt couldn't keep the chill out.

The space into which the door gave admittance was dim, almost black; but after a moment her eyes adjusted, and she saw ahead of her a truncated bit of hall leading to a wider corridor. Lanterns out of sight along the corridor in one direction or the other supplied just enough reflected glow to soften the gloom.

When she caught her breath to listen, the sound which came to her was the delicate spatter of dripping water.

Cold and wet. And a side passage too short to be worth lighting with a lantern of its own. A passage that seemed to go nowhere, as long as this door was closed and hidden.

Despite the distractions of fear, exertion, and surprise, her nerves turned to ice as if she had been here before.

"Now, my lady," whispered Master Quillon, "we must be both quick and quiet. These are the disused passages beneath the foundations of Orison, where twice you were attacked. They are back in use now, housing our increased population, but that is not our chief worry. Those people will be asleep—or too confused to hinder us. No, the difficulty is that these halls are now guarded to keep the peace—regularly patrolled. Somehow, we must avoid the Castellan's men."

No, she thought dumbly. That isn't right. Her brain felt like rock, impermeable to understanding. She had never seen the hall from this side, but it looked the same; the hairs on her forearms lifted as if the hall were the same. When Master Quillon started forward, she managed to reach out and stop him.

"No," she whispered, almost croaking. "This is the place. I'm sure of it."

He stood motionless and studied her narrowly. "What place?" The air grew colder on her skin while he stared at her.

"The translation point." The cold made her shiver. Long tremors seemed to start in her bones and build outward until her voice shook. "Where those insects came through to get Geraden. And Gart—"

Closing her arms across her chest, she hugged herself to silence.

"What, here?" the Imager asked in surprise. "Exactly here?"

She nodded as well as she could.

"We did not know that," he muttered; he appeared to be thinking rapidly. "We knew the general area, of course." His quick eyes studied the passage. "But the Adept did not observe the actual translations. And we could hardly afford to betray our interest by asking you or Artagel to show us specifically where the attacks took place."

Terisa ignored what he was saying; it didn't matter. What mattered was the mirror which brought people who wanted to kill her into Orison. "We can't go there," she breathed through her shivers. "I can't go there. They'll see us."

They'll come after us.

"A good point, my lady." Master Quillon's nose twitched as though he were trying to sniff out a way of escape. "If they saw us in the Image—and if they were ready for us—"

A grunting noise, a sound of strain or protest, carried along the passage from the entrance to the dungeons behind them.

The Master and Terisa froze.

"Put your backs into it, shit-lickers." Castellan Lebbick's voice was obscured by stone and distance, but unmistakable. "Get that door open before we lose them completely."

Terisa wanted to groan, but she couldn't stop shivering.

"Glass and splinters!" Quillon swore under his breath. "This is a tidy predicament."

An instant later, however, he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to get her attention. "My lady, listen.

"The focus of that glass was shifted. I saw Eremis translated into the dungeon. I saw him depart. He must have used the same mirror which brought your attackers here. Why else was I permitted to eavesdrop on him—to hear him reveal his intentions? Had his allies seen me enter the passage this way, they would have had no difficulty in disposing of me. Therefore they did not see me. Therefore the translation point of that mirror has been shifted."

"They could shift it back," she objected.

"They could be watching us right now," he retorted. "But if that is true, why are we still unharmed?"

The groan of stressed ropes and counterbalances came quietly out of the dark. A man gasped, and Castellan Lebbick barked, "That does it!"

"We must take the risk!" Master Quillon hissed.

Again, Terisa nodded. But she remained still, caught between fears. Gart was there somewhere, the High King's Monomach. And from that translation point had come four lumbering assailants who had themselves been eaten alive from the inside by the most terrible—

"You must go first!" Urgency made Quillon's rabbity face slightly ludicrous. "First is safest. Any man will need a moment to react when he sees us.

"Go."

He shoved her, and she went.

Two stumbling steps toward the main corridor; three; four. For some reason, the strength had gone out of her legs. She felt like a woman in a nightmare, frantic to run, but powerless to do anything except ache with fright while her enemies rushed toward her.

Master Quillon caught up with her and shoved her again to keep her going.

For the second time, she felt
a touch of cold as thin as a feather and as sharp as steel slide straight through the center of her abdomen.

Running now, but hardly aware of it, hardly conscious of what she was doing at all, she reached the main passage and the light and turned, whirled around in time to see Master Quillon following her and a black shape with a face full of hate and glee rising behind him, clutching a long dagger to strike him down.

No, Quillon!
Quillon!

The shape rose and swept after him while she tried to cry out a warning and couldn't do it fast enough: black arms rose and then plunged down viciously, driving the dagger into the joining of his shoulders with such fury that blood burst from his mouth and the blade came through his chest and he was crushed to the floor as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer.

"Got
you, you insipid rodent!" Master Gilbur barked in guttural triumph. "That is the
last
time you will interfere with anything we wish to do!"

When he wrenched his blade out of Quillon's back, blood ran from his hands like water.

Oh, Quillon!

Terisa remembered Master Gilbur's hands. They looked strong enough to bend iron bars; strong enough to grind bones. Their backs were covered with black hair—hair that contrasted starkly with his white beard. The hunch in his spine only seemed to increase his physical power; the flesh of his face was knotted with murder.

Gloating, he looked up from Quillon's corpse. "My lady," he coughed like a curse, "this is fortuitous. I had not expected the pleasure of killing you. That was intended to be Gart's task, after Eremis had finished with you. But my vigilance has been rewarded. Neither Festten's dog nor cocksure Eremis were with me when I found you in the Image."

She watched him as if he were a snake, waited for him to strike.

"It is a delight to rid the world of Quillon at last"—Gilbur licked spittle from his thick lips as he stepped over the body at his feet— "but to twist my knife in your soft flesh will be plain ecstasy."

Reaching out with his blade and his bloody hands, he started toward her.

She turned and fled.

She ran with all her heart this time, pushed all her strength through her legs. In spite of his crooked back, Master Gilbur was fast. His first blow nearly caught her. The gap she opened between them as she sped was less than a stride; then two; then three and a bit more. Instinctively, she had run to the left; she was taking the same direction she and Geraden had taken when they had fled from the insects.

Black arms rose and then plunged down
—

Now she would have been glad—delirious with relief—to encounter a guard. An old codger hunting for the public lavatories. A servant. Anyone to witness what was happening, distract Gilbur. But the corridor was deserted. Master Gilbur spat curses as he pursued her. She was young, and running for her life; slowly, she widened the gap. But the air had already become fire in her lungs, and he didn't seem to be tiring.

Plunged down
—

In one way, she had no idea where she was going. She didn't know these passages, had never been down here without a guide. The only thought in her mind was to find help. Before she faltered. She could feel her strength ebbing now. In another way, however, her instinctive sense of direction was sure, and she followed it unhesitatingly. To escape the fierce Imager, she tapped resources in herself that she didn't know she possessed.

She took the route to Adept Havelock's quarters.

There: the side passage. A thick wooden door, apparently the entrance to a storeroom. Yes, the entrance to a storeroom. A storeroom which hadn't been appropriated to help house Orison's increased population. She heaved the door open, pulled it shut behind her. It had a bolt. Didn't it have a bolt? It had to have a bolt—
had
to have—but she couldn't find it, couldn't see, there was no light in the storeroom, no illumination except thin yellow slivers from the cracks around the door.

Master Gilbur's bulk blocked even that light—

—
and her fingers found the bolt, slapped it home just as he crashed against the door, trying to crush her with the weight of the wood and his own momentum.

The bolt twisted against its staples. But it held.

It wasn't going to hold for long. Gilbur hit the door again, raging at it and her. She couldn't see the bolt—but she could hear the metallic screaming noise as iron rusted into wood was forced out. The staples were going to give. It was only a matter of time.

Ignoring her frantic need for air and rest, she groped across the storeroom toward the door hidden at the back—the entrance to Adept Havelock's secret rooms.