A Man Rides Through (88 page)

"Are you all right?" Terisa asked Geraden privately.

He shook his head; contradicted himself with a nod; shrugged his shoulders. To the cold wind and the ravine's wall, he said, "I've got another strong feeling."

"Oh, good." She tried to help him by sounding wry rather than troubled. "Somehow, I just know I'm going to love this one."

"I've got the strongest feeling—" The muscles at the corners of his jaw knotted, released. "When the fighting really starts, we'd better be sure we've got somebody with us who handles a sword better than I do."

Terisa assented bleakly. And better than Ribuld, too, she thought to herself, remembering Gart, who had beaten Ribuld and his dead friend Argus simultaneously.

Choose your risks more carefully.
She intended to do that. If she could just figure out how.

Well before noon, she and Geraden, with Master Barsonage, the Congery, and the guards, rejoined Orison's army. When the Tor had assured himself that their news was no worse than the report he had received, he rumbled, "Tomorrow you will have five hundred men with you. Master Eremis may strike at you again. And tomorrow there will be a clear danger of encountering High King Festten's scouts and outriders."

That made Terisa feel neither worse nor better. Caution was sensible. On the other hand, she felt sure that Mordant's fate wouldn't be decided by a chance encounter with scouts or outriders. And she had a distinct sense that Eremis wasn't going to attack again. With his enemies so close to him now, he would wait until they came all the way into his trap, put themselves completely in his power. He wasn't interested in anything as relatively straightforward as victory. He wanted to crush and humiliate, to
annihilate
everyone who opposed him. Whatever he did when his enemies reached Esmerel would be intended to hurt them spiritually as much as physically.

When she thought about Nyle, her insides contracted until she could scarcely breathe.

Throughout the afternoon, across the complex and dangerous terrain, Orison's army and Prince Kragen's marched into the unseasonable cold. Impatient and apprehensive young men demanded a return of spring; grizzled veterans with bunions or arthritis predicted snow. Horses stamped restively, pulled against their reins, shied at nothing. Orison and encouragement seemed painfully far away, despite the magic of mirrors. Mile after mile, the defenders of Mordant shortened the distance to Esmerel.

That evening, the men stopped to make camp on the high ground of a cluster of hilltops, where the wind could get at them with all its ice, and where their lights and cooking fires would be visible in all directions—and where it would be almost impossible for enemy troops to surprise them. Prince Kragen's commanders deployed their soldiers; Castellan Norge organized the guard. Master Barsonage and the Congery unpacked the mirrors.

When the mediator uncovered his glass, the first thing he and everyone else saw in the Image was Artagel sitting atop a particularly high pile of bedrolls and groundsheets.

He still wore Lebbick's clothes, Lebbick's blood. His expression was a strange combination of excitement and boredom.

"What is that idiot doing?" demanded the Prince. "Is he not in danger of translation?"

Then: "What has he done with our supplies?"

Kragen was right: none of the Alend supplies which had been translated to Orison that morning were visible in the Image.

Before anyone else could speak, however, Artagel made his purpose clear. With the air of a man repeating an action he had already performed to the point of tedium, he held up a large sheet of parchment and turned it slowly so that it could be seen from all sides around him.

There was writing on the parchment. Across the hillside where the mirror stood, the sun was setting, and the light wasn't especially good. But Artagel was prepared for that difficulty. Around him, the ballroom blazed with torches.

His message was easily read.

What do you want done with Kragen's supplies?

The Prince stiffened; his hand fingered his sword. He watched narrowly as the Tor called for a piece of parchment and a charcoal stylus.

The old lord wrote:

Prince Kragen treats us honorably. Return his supplies.

He showed his message to Prince Kragen, then handed the parchment to Master Barsonage.

Deftly, Barsonage deposited the message in Artagel's lap.

Artagel read it, glanced around him, shrugged. He looked disappointed; nevertheless he didn't balk. He waved his arms, shouted something; and at once men and women—conscripted villagers, apparently—began running stacks and piles of Alend possessions back into the center of the ballroom.

Noticing the congested look on Prince Kragen's face, Terisa gave a small, silent sigh of relief. He would have had little or no trouble believing that he had been betrayed—and then he would have had no choice but to attack the forces of Orison.

Shortly, everything was ready. Saluting the empty air casually, Artagel left the Image so that the process of translation could begin.

While guards and Alends gathered to distribute utensils and food and drink and bedding around the camp, Master Barsonage and his fellow Imagers went to work.

Geraden joined them, using the curved glass he was accustomed to. Terisa, on the other hand, had no contribution to make. Master Vixix's was the only flat glass of any size which the Congery had brought to supplement the three supply-mirrors. So, after watching the work for a while, she went to the most obviously weary of the three Masters—a frail, nearly antique individual named Harpool, who hadn't borne the attack of the wolves especially well—and offered to take his place so that he could rest.

He accepted gratefully and tottered away at once in the direction of a cup of wine and a nap before supper. When she faced his mirror, however, Terisa found to her chagrin that she could do nothing with it. She gestured and mumbled as Geraden had taught her; she reached toward the special frame of mind, the particular concentration, which had become familiar to her the previous evening and this morning. But now nothing happened.

Geraden, Master Barsonage, and the other Imager were unaware of her problem—they were straining like cart-horses over their own translations—but everyone else in the vicinity noticed her difficulty and stopped to observe.

"She's lost it," a guard muttered. "Scared out of her."

"Give her time," snapped Ribuld loyally.

This was too much—
really
too much. Two hard days on the road. Two bloody attacks on her life, or Geraden's. Hours of mind-draining labor at Master Vixix's mirror. And now her talent disappeared as if it had been switched off inside her.

If King Joyse thought she could bear
this
on top of everything else, he was out of his mind.

For no reason except that she absolutely couldn't endure the shame of turning away, of showing off her failure in front of all those men, she tried to shift the Image.

Almost without effort, the ballroom of Orison became the Fen of Cadwal—not because she chose that scene consciously, but because it happened to be present in her thoughts.

Oh. She stared at it. The Fen of Cadwal. Her talent hadn't disappeared.

Then why—?

She touched the frame of the glass; gestured; mumbled. Like a fool, she brought a second gush of swampwater pouring onto her boots. This time, there were no frogs.

Oh.

Then she understood. She couldn't use a mirror unless she shifted the Image. Her power only functioned with Images she had placed in the glass herself.

No, that didn't make any sense. Why had she been able to use Master Vixix's mirror yesterday without shifting it?

Concentrating fiercely now, ignoring the men carrying supplies away, the men watching her, she let Master Harpool's glass resume its natural Image. Then, with the brightly lit ballroom squarely in focus, she tried again to translate a hogshead of water.

This time, it came through the mirror so promptly that she had to jump aside to avoid being crushed.

Perfect. I love this. Who says Imagery is hard?

Grinding her teeth to stifle a yell, Terisa continued translating supplies out of the ballroom until Castellan Norge announced that the Alends and the guard had everything they needed for the night. At once, she stamped away from the mirror, demanded wine from Ribuld, and drank two cups so quickly that they made her head spin.

Nearly staggering with fatigue, Geraden moved to join her. At the moment, she considered it a blessing that he was too tired to notice her knotted state; too tired even to ask how her translations had gone. But later, after a hot supper had restored him somewhat, and they went to bed together, she forced herself to tell him what had happened. She needed an explanation, if he had one to give her.

Her tone made him open his eyes to look at her sharply. He listened hard until she was finished; then he rolled onto his back and stared up at the cold stars.

"Have you got any ideas?" she asked.

He took a long moment to think before he murmured, "I'm not sure.

"This is all unmapped territory. Havelock is the only Adept the Congery has ever had—and he hasn't contributed much to our general knowledge of Imagery in recent years. We don't really understand people who can use mirrors they didn't make. For most of us, the way it usually works—you already know this—is that there's some kind of interaction between an Imager's talent and his mirror while he's shaping it. So no one can use that mirror except the man who made it.

"As an experiment years ago, the Congery took several men who wanted to be Apts, but who obviously had no talent of any kind, and let them try to make mirrors. It didn't work. Something always went wrong. You have to be an Imager to shape a mirror. And you have to be that particular Imager to shape that particular mirror.

"I'm not sure why you couldn't use Master Harpool's glass, and then you could. But we know he has a special relationship with it. No ordinary Imager could use it at all, except him. My guess is, his hold on it was too recent. You had to replace his talent with yours, impose your power on it, and you couldn't do that without shifting it first.

"If I'm right, the reason you didn't have any trouble with Master Vixix's glass is, he hadn't used it recently. In fact, he may never have done any translations with it at all. His interaction with it wasn't fresh enough to get in your way."

Terisa had no way of knowing whether this explanation made sense or not. Softly, she said, "You make it sound like the glass is actually alive."

Geraden kissed her forehead. "I don't know about that. But talent is certainly alive. The relationship between an Imager and his mirror must be alive in some way."

She thought about that for a long time after he went to sleep.
Choose your risks more carefully.
If she wanted to help fight Master Eremis—if she really intended to kill him—she needed to understand her own limitations.

The next morning, before she and the Masters had finished returning supplies to Orison, the wind brought clouds up out of the south.

The rack was thin at first, dull gray rather than oppressive; it cut off the sunlight without making the air noticeably colder. But as the morning and the march wore on, the clouds thickened, turning the sky dull, bleeding away the colors of the landscape. A solid mass covered the Care from horizon to horizon; it weighed on the morale of the armies, pressing expectation into worry, worry into dread.

At the same time, the wind became a few significant degrees warmer.

Apprehensively, Terisa asked Geraden, "You don't think Eremis has the power to translate
weather
against us, do you?"

Geraden snorted. "If he could do translations on that scale, he wouldn't need to fight us at all. He could just send out tornadoes until we collapsed."

That was a relief—of a sort. Eremis, also, had his limits. "In other words, he's just lucky to get a cold spell like this when he needs it most."