A Man Rides Through (71 page)

"Then I will release Nyle. I am not as harsh as you think me— I do not torment him gratuitously. He will witness what becomes of you while we await your rescuers." The raw-edged pleasure in his voice went through her like a chill. "And when I am ready, I will send him out to tell them what I have done to you.

"Then Geraden will begin to understand what a burden he has undertaken by opposing me."

No. Never. Never.

Concentration. Focus.

"You bastard."

He was near enough to touch her now. He could have hit her. She felt his presence, the pressure he emanated; she thought she could smell his lust. Yet he didn't hit her. "Come, my lady," he said as if he were sure of her. "Is that how you speak to the man who will master you?" His hand reached out; one finger stroked the line of her cheek. When she didn't flinch, he cupped his hand around the base of her neck inside her shirt. Slowly, his grip tightened. "Must I use force to teach you humility?"

A blank space; a gap between them. She was vanishing into the darkness, groping farther and farther away from him; groping— Her mind was full of Images, all of them insubstantial; wishful thinking.

"No," she said from so far away that he would never be able to possess her. "Take my chain off. Let me show you what I've learned from Geraden."

She made no effort to sound seductive or helpless, to conceal her distance from him.

The trap she set for him was like the one he had prepared for his enemies. Obvious. And irresistible. How could he doubt that he was more than a match for her? that he could control her, coerce her, defeat her whenever he chose? Resistance would only make her final submission the more appalling to her.

Chuckling, he took hold of her arm and clicked the fetter off her wrist.

Because she was so far away, she did nothing to betray herself. And because she was so full of anger, she didn't hesitate.

Before he could secure his grip, she swung her leg with all her strength and kicked him in the crotch.

He gasped as much in surprise as in pain; recoiled violently from her.

Almost at once, he caught his balance, recovered from the shock and hurt. She wanted to hear him cursing in agony, frothing at the mouth; but he didn't oblige her. The oath he spat at her was simply vindictive, a promise that she had pushed him too far and was going to suffer for what she did.

Quickly, he jumped forward to capture her, punish her.

But not quickly enough. While he was still on his way toward her, she touched a moment of eternity.

It was hardly longer than the space between one frightened heartbeat and another—yet it was enough. Images coalesced, took on light and shape: dozens of them; chaos and fragments everywhere. She only needed one, however, the sharpest Image, the one with details so precise and unalienable that they might have been acid-cut on her mind.

A sand dune poised in the timeless gap between high winds and nonexistence.

She had no idea where she might have seen that Image before. She didn't care. As soon as she saw it, she knew it was hers—

—
and a touch of cold as thin as a feather and as sharp as steel slid straight through the center of her abdomen.

Eremis was grappling for her, trying to catch her by the shoulders and strike her at the same time. Only an intuitive reflexive leap enabled him to pull himself out of danger as she faded from him and fell backward into the wall.

Into the light of lamps; onto the floor so heavily that she knocked the breath out of herself.

For a long moment, she couldn't speak. She couldn't do anything except gape back up at Adept Havelock, Master Barsonage, and Geraden, who were staring at her as if she had tumbled out of a coffin.

FORTY-THREE: THE ONLY REASONABLE THING TO DO

The light was extraordinary, as life-giving as sunshine. While she waited to breathe, she was content to simply lie where she was and accept the glow of her escape.

Then Geraden let out a whoop and seemed to pounce on her. Oblivious to the fact that she couldn't inhale, he swept her up into his arms and began to whirl her, crying and laughing, "Terisa!
Terisa!"
spinning her into a dance of wild joy. His happiness burned so brightly that she clung to his neck and didn't care whether she was able to breathe or not. If Master Barsonage hadn't immediately clamped a massive hug around both of them, forced Geraden to stop, he would have carried her careening into the mirrors, shattering glass in all directions.

"Stop," the mediator panted. "Are you mad? Stop." He sounded half-delirious himself.

For a moment, her relief and exaltation turned into a convulsive retch for air.

At once, Geraden halted, put her down, held her tightly. "Are you all right? Terisa, are you all right? I couldn't find you. I couldn't reach you. I changed a mirror to go looking for you, but I couldn't find you. I was afraid he had you for good. Oh, love, are you all right?"

She did her best to nod while the knot in her chest loosened enough to let air leak past it. Then she returned his hug, gasping in his ear, clasping him almost savagely because she was still full of impossible translations and promises of murder. After her encounter with Master Eremis, Geraden was so dear to her that she held him as if her heart depended on it.

Geraden. Help me.

He was going to rape me. Just for the fun of it. And to hurt you.

Geraden.

I'm going to kill him.

"My lady," Adept Havelock said judiciously, as if he had become a completely different person, "that was a very pretty trick. If you can truly do such things, then every action he has taken against you is plainly justified. In his place, I would have done the same."

"Proof," murmured Master Barsonage now that he no longer had to protect the Adept's mirrors. "I would not have believed it.
Proof."
He seemed lost in the wonder of his thoughts. "Images
are
real, independent of their mirrors—independent of Imagery itself. King Joyse has been right all along."

"Fornicate that uxorious bastard," replied Havelock, relapsing to normalcy. "A fine time to go kiting off. He should have seen this."

I'm going to—

Nyle!

"Geraden." Terisa jerked back, pulled away far enough to meet Geraden's gaze. He moved to kiss her; the look on her face stopped him. Quickly, so that he would understand, she said, "He's got Nyle."

He frowned, instantly sympathetic to her urgency. "We knew that," he muttered. "Or we guessed it—"

"I've
seen
him." Well, not
seen,
exactly; but she was in too much of a hurry to explain. "I've talked to him. Eremis has him prisoner. The same place he took me. In Esmerel." Eremis wanted him to watch what he did to me. So you would be hurt as much as possible. "We've got to get him out of there. He's—"

She almost said, He's being destroyed. Eremis is breaking his spirit.

"She changed the Image," Master Barsonage went on, caught in a kind of rapture. "Across that distance, she took a glass with an Image which did not contain her, and she shifted it until the Image
did
contain her. Geraden could not have done it. Flat mirrors are not his talent. And she could not have done such a thing if she were not independently real. It is inconceivable that a woman created in a mirror could have power greater than the mirror—and the Image— that created her."

"Who cares?" retorted the Adept happily. "She's female. That's the point. We can't trust her. We can't trust
him."
He sounded like a doting uncle. "Look at him. He's as bad as Joyse. He's ready to die for her. If things get dangerous, he'll save her instead of us."

She and Geraden weren't listening. As she caught herself, they both turned automatically to look at the mirror which had brought her back to Adept Havelock's rooms.

Its Image was dark, almost impenetrably black. Maybe she could have discerned a shape or two—the bed? the doorway?—if she had been given time; but before she could study the Image it began to melt away. Light bled into the darkness; the potential for obscure shapes became mounded sand. In a moment, the glass had resumed its natural scene, the desertscape for which it had been formed. A breeze was starting to blow, lifting delicate curls of sand from the rim of the dune.

"Nyle!" A new pain shot through her, a loss she hadn't anticipated. "He was there. In that room. We could have reached him— rescued him—"

Holding himself steady, Geraden murmured, "It takes effort to make that shift. As soon as you relaxed, as soon as you let go, the fundamental Image came back.

"That must have been what happened the second day you were here, when you saw the Closed Fist in a flat glass." It was obvious now that he was talking simply to help her, give her something to think about until she grew calmer. "You were so surprised to find the Closed Fist in my glass that you instinctively recreated the Image in the nearest flat mirror. But as soon as Eremis and I distracted you, you let go, and the fundamental Image came back."

Came back. She remembered, in spite of her distress. That Image had come back in time to let her see the Perdon's men being attacked by rapacious black spots which chewed their hearts out.

And Vagel had said that so far High King Festten's
only satisfaction has been the annihilation of the Perdon.

Curse them all. Damn every one of them.

"A simple matter," commented Havelock. He sounded as lunatic as ever, but somehow he clung to a pragmatic grasp on the situation. "Restore the change. You've been in that room. Bring the Image back, and we'll rescue Nyle."

He's chained, Terisa protested inwardly. They aren't going to just stand there and let us cut him loose.

Nevertheless she faced the flat glass at once, tried to push panic and doubt and urgency out of her mind, tried to recapture the particular dark where Eremis had held her prisoner—

She couldn't do it. She was too frantic; her concentration was too badly frayed. She couldn't so much as remember what the bed was like, how far away the doorway was, where the staples which had held her chain and Nyle's were in relation to each other. And without a precise Image in her mind—

Geraden put an arm around her. "It isn't your fault. It's just impossible." His tone was soft, soothing; it had an undercurrent of misery and yearning, which he suppressed. He must have been through horror of his own while she was away—he must be frantic to rescue Nyle—but he put himself aside for her sake. "That's why he keeps the important parts of Esmerel dark. That's why I wasn't able to come after you. If you shift the mirror now, you won't know if you've got exactly the right piece of darkness. And if you're wrong we might all be killed. You might produce an Image that's actually inside a mountain somewhere, and as soon as you do any kind of translation we'll have a few million tons of rock to deal with. You need light."

Hugging her, he repeated, "It isn't your fault. We'll get him out some other way."

There was no authority in his voice, no unexpected strength. All he was trying to do at the moment was comfort her. And yet she found that she believed him.
We'll get him out some other way,
He meant it, the same way she meant, I'm going to kill him.

Slowly, the panic in her muscles receded, and she slumped against him, mutely asking him to hold her until she had time to recover.

"Geraden is right, I think." Apparently, Master Barsonage had returned from his exaltation. "Master Eremis is cunning. Darkness is a ploy to which no Imager has ever found an answer. Even the crudest translations require light. Do not blame yourself, my lady. Already your achievements seem quite miraculous."

All right. All right. She could never fight if she let herself collapse like this. She couldn't reach Nyle: all right. She could still think. Eremis had violated her with his hands.
Think.
He had come close to doing much worse things—but she got away. It was possible to think; choose; act. Just start somewhere. Geraden still held her. The way his arms supported her was more miraculous than any translation. He had no more intention of abandoning Nyle than she did. All right.