A Man Rides Through (112 page)

Eremis thought he saw the Image of the valley begin to waver around the edges, thought he saw the rampart walls and the last catapult start to melt—

That also was impossible. He wasn't sure of what he was seeing.

He didn't delay to be sure. Swinging at once, he backhanded her across the side of the head so hard that she fell like a broken doll. She lay on one side in the warm sunshine, huddling around herself, with her hair spread out on the stone, and one hand cupped weakly over the place where she had been hit; she may have been weeping.

"If you try that again," he spat, "if you touch that glass with one more hint of your talent, I swear I will call Gilbur here and let him rape you with that dagger of his."

Perhaps she wasn't weeping: she didn't make a sound. After a moment, however, she nodded her head—one small, frail jerk, like a twitch of defeat.

Despite his monster's unexpected demise, Master Eremis recovered his grin.

Artagel, too, was grinning, but for an entirely different reason.

Despite the blood which streamed from his cut shoulder, he beat back the hot, steel lightning and force of Gart's next attack. That defense cost him an exertion which seemed to shred his wounded side. Twice he only saved himself because the corridor was too narrow for perfect swordwork, and he was able to block Gart's blade away against the stone. But at last he managed to disengage.

Before the High King's Monomach could come at him again, he retreated several quick strides, then relaxed his stance and dropped the point of his sword.

Gart paused to scrutinize him curiously.

Trying not to breathe in whooping gasps that would betray his weakness, Artagel asked, "Why do you do it?"

Gart cocked an eyebrow; he advanced a step.

Artagel put up a hand to ward off the Monomach. "You're going to kill me anyway. You know that. You can afford to send me to my grave with my ignorance satisfied. Why do you do it?"

Swayed, perhaps, by the admission of defeat, Gart paused again. "Why do I do what?"

With an effort which felt desperately heroic, Artagel tried to laugh. He failed, of course. Nevertheless he did contrive to sound cheerful as he said, "Serve."

The tip of Gart's blade watched Artagel warily as the Monomach waited.

"You're the best," Artagel panted, "the best. You lead and train a cadre of Apts who all want to be as good as you, and some of them may even have almost that much talent. You could be a power in the world. I'll wager you could unseat Festten anytime you want. You could be the one who decides, instead of the one who serves. Why do you do it?"

Gart considered the question for a moment. "That is who I am," he pronounced finally.

"But why?" demanded Artagel, fighting for a chance to regain his breath, his strength. "What does Festten give you that you can't get anywhere else? What does being the High King's Monomach get you that isn't already yours by right? You could
choose
who you're going to kill. If I were you, I'd be embarrassed by the amount of time you've spent recently trying to kill a woman. Whose decision was that? Why did you have to demean yourself like that?"

A snarl pulled tighter across Gart's teeth.

"I tell you, you could be a
power.
Don't you have any self-respect?"

The Monomach came at him like a gale in the constricted passage, suddenly, without warning; and the only thing that saved him was that he wasn't surprised. He got his longsword up, parried hard, tried to riposte. Gart slipped the blow aside and swung again. Artagel felt steel ruffle his hair as he ducked; Gart's blade rang off the wall; Artagel hacked at the Monomach's legs fast enough to make him jump.

Somehow not stumbling, not clutching at his torn side, Artagel disengaged again, retreated down the corridor.

"That," said Gart as if he had never been out of breath in his life, "is who I am."

"But the point is, you
serve,"
protested Artagel. "You're nothing more than a servant, a
weapon."

"Listen to me," Gart articulated dangerously. "I will not say it again.
That is who I
am."

"With
your
abilities?" Artagel's voice nearly rose to a cry. "I don't believe it. You're content to be a
servant?
You're content to be
used
like a thing with no mind, no pride? Aren't you a man? Don't you dream? Haven't you got ambitions?"

It was probably madness to goad the Monomach like this; but Artagel didn't care. For the first time since their contest began, he was having fun.

"No wonder you're so hard to kill. Inside, where it counts, you're already dead."

In response, Gart whirled his blade with such speed that the steel blurred into streaks of lantern-light. "Oh, I have dreams, you fool," he rasped. "I have dreams.

"I dream of
blood."

So fiercely that nothing could stop him, he hurled himself at Artagel.

Now Gart was the mad one, the frenzied attacker, swinging as if he were out of control; Artagel was the one who couldn't do anything except parry and block—and try to keep his balance.

Unfortunately, the Monomach's fury only made their struggle more uneven.
He
wasn't wounded;
he
hadn't been weakened by a long convalescence. And at his worst he never forgot his skill.

As if by translation, cuts appeared on Artagel's mail, his leggings. A lick along his forehead sent blood dripping into his eyes. Reeling, almost falling, he slammed into the corner where the corridor turned, hit so hard that the last air was knocked out of his lungs.

He barely saved himself,
barely,
by diving out of the corner, rolling to his feet and running, his lungs on fire, his eyes full of sweat and blood, no life in his limbs, running until he gained enough ground to turn and plant his feet and stand there wobbling and face Gart for the last time.

The fun part of the fight was over.

Moved by instincts he didn't know he had, Geraden went down as if he had been clubbed.

The first vicious black shape missed him; its own momentum carried
it
beyond him, momentarily out of reach. And the second—

But Master Gilbur was bringing a whole stream of the beasts into the Image-room, translating them at Geraden as fast as they could leap. The Master's teeth gnashed the air, and his face burned, as if he were on his way to ecstasy.

A whole world of creatures like that. Of course. Ravening as if they had already eaten their way through all their natural prey. Terisa had shattered a mirror to end an attack like this; but that mirror wasn't this one. No, she had broken the flat glass which showed the intersection outside Orison. The original mirror, the source of the creatures, remained intact.

Obviously.

Flipping to the side, scrambling his legs under him, stumbling as if he would never regain his balance, Geraden struggled out of the direct spring of the creatures.

Three, five, nine of them, he lost count. Sliding in his boots as if the sunlit stone were ice, he rounded the edge of a mirror, wheeled behind it.

He was too frantic to think. And he had no chance against Master Gilbur anyway. All he knew was that he had to hurt the King's enemies as much as he could before he died. Gilbur clearly believed the gnarled shapes would get him before he did much harm. No doubt the Master was right. But every bit of damage might help. Any mirror Geraden could break might be the crucial one, the one that made sense of the Congery's augury—the one that gave King Joyse a chance against his doom.

The slug-beast had been killed. Surely anything was possible—

From behind, without knowing or caring what its Image was, Geraden took hold of the mirror and wrenched it onto its back.

And caught it before it hit the floor.

Inspiration: unexpected insight. As if the mere touch of the mirror's frame had shocked him, everything inside his head seemed to take fire and become new.

Not damage. If damage was all he tried to do, Gilbur had no reason to fear him. He would be dead in moments.

Imagery,
on the other hand—

The first black shapes were already scrabbling over the stone to fling themselves on him. And more came furiously, avid for flesh. Master Gilbur turned his mirror in order to translate the creatures straight at Geraden.

Burning with inspiration, Geraden heaved the mirror upright again and opened it just as the nearest creature hit the glass.

Gone. As if the shape had never existed. Translated somewhere, he had no idea where, he still hadn't had a chance to so much as glance at the scene in the mirror.

Another and another, in rapid succession: gone. The gnarled creatures seemed to have no minds—or at least no sense of danger. Their hunger overwhelmed all other instincts; maybe they were starving to death in their own world. They hurled themselves into the glass as if it were Geraden's flesh.

The fire blazing up inside him felt like joy and triumph.

Four five six—

Master Gilbur bellowed something savage and sprang to a different mirror.

The last few shapes came at Geraden madly, their jaws stretched open, and Master Gilbur brought wolves rushing into the Image-room, wolves with spines along their curved backs and malign purpose in their eyes, wolves that were too big for Geraden's shield and would be forced by their sheer size to attack him over or around the mirror; and at that moment Geraden made the mistake of realizing what he was doing.

He was doing something worse than the translation of alien evils into his own world: he was translating them somewhere else, into a place completely unready for them, completely innocent. Whatever lived and moved in the Image he held was now being assaulted by vicious and entirely unexpected creatures for no good reason except to save his life.

No, this was wrong, it was
wrong,
he had no right to do it. These creatures, and the wolves, and anything else Gilbur might produce were only malignant because they had been translated, only because they were out of place. In their own worlds, they didn't deserve to be slaughtered. And no one else deserved to be slaughtered simply because Geraden was desperate.

Shoving the mirror away, he dove to the side.

The last black shapes struck the glass hard and slammed it onto its back. As they bounded up from the splinters to continue their attack, they left behind a shattered Image of their fellow creatures dying horribly in the acid of bitten ghouls.

A hunting snarl throbbed through the air; jaws slavered. Geraden scrambled across the ring of mirrors, trying to stay ahead of the gnarled shapes and the wolves.

Strange things were happening in the Image of Esmerel's valley. The slug-beast was definitely dead, no mistake about that. And its death altered the terms of the conflict. High King Festten committed all his forces to a killing charge. In two thrusts, seven or eight thousand men on each side of the supine monster, he sent his army to catch King Joyse while there was no escape, while the confused and lesser strength of Alend and Mordant was trapped between the defile at one end of the valley and the tremendous corpse blocking the other.

King Joyse should already have been crushed under the weight of the callat. He was still up and fighting, however. Prince Kragen was with him, and the Termigan, and Castellan Norge; but they weren't enough to keep him alive. No, he endured because the monster's death had galvanized his army: that impossible rescue from certain destruction had transformed panic into hope and fury. As fast as their horses or their legs could move them, his men came to support their King; the first several hundred of them had already charged in among the callat.