Simply because he couldn’t resist staring, Geraden noticed a detail which might have escaped him otherwise: Havelock’s surcoat was clean. In fact, it had been scrubbed spotless. Havelock wore it as if he were dressed for a celebration.
Master Barsonage kept his distance. “Adept Havelock,” he said with formal distaste, “I am certain that you remember Apt Geraden. He is an Imager now, and has an urgent interest in your mirrors.”
As if to tease the mediator, Havelock advanced toward him, smiling maliciously. “What, ‘Apt Geraden’?” he cried in mock protest. “This boy? How has that figure of augury and power been reduced to such doggishness? No, you’re mistaken, it’s impossible.”
Swooping suddenly away from Barsonage, he pounced on Geraden. With his hands clapped to Geraden’s cheeks, he shook Geraden’s head from side to side.
“Impossible, I tell you. Look, Barsonage. He’s alive. He came back alive. Without her. She risked everything for him, and he came back without her.” Bitterly, the Adept began to laugh. “Oh, no, Barsonage, you can’t fool me. Geraden would never have done such a thing.”
Geraden seemed to hear the Adept through an abrupt roaring in his ears, a tumult of anger and distress. The suggestion that he might have come back without Terisa by choice, that he had turned his back on her in some way, was more than he could bear.
Harshly, struggling to control his passion, he demanded, “Let me go, Havelock. I need your mirrors.”
As if he had been stung, the Adept let out a wail.
He dropped his hands, plunged himself to the floor; before Geraden could react, he kissed the toes of Geraden’s boots. Then he scuttled backward. When he hit the leg of a table, he bounded to his feet.
Crouching in the intense stance of a man about to do battle, he commented casually, almost playfully, “If you ever talk to Joyse like that, he’ll cut your heart out. Or force you to marry all his daughters. With him it’s hard to tell the difference.”
Shocked and disconcerted, Geraden turned a plea for help toward Master Barsonage.
Grimly, the mediator nodded. Swallowing to hold down a bellyful of uneasiness, he stepped forward, edged his bulk a bit between the Adept and Geraden.
Geraden took that opportunity to turn his back on both of them.
Deliberately, he placed himself before the first full-length flat mirror he could find.
It was an especially elegant piece of work: he noticed its beauty in spite of his concentration on other things, because he loved mirrors. Its rosewood frame was nearly as tall as he was, and the wood had a deep, burnished glow which only long hours of care and polish could produce. The surface of the glass was meticulous, both in its flatness and in its craftsmanship. The glass itself held an evanescent suggestion of pink – a color which now appeared to complement the frame, although of course the frame had actually been chosen to suit the glass.
And the Image—
Bare sand. Nothing else.
Wind had whipped the sand into a dune with a keen, curled edge, like a breaker frozen in motion; but there was no wind now. The color of the sky was a dry, dusty blue that he associated almost automatically with Cadwal.
In some ways, this landscape was the purest he had ever seen, too clean even for bleached bones. No one and nothing alive had ever set foot on that dune.
Only urgency kept him from studying every inch of the mirror, simply to understand the Image – and to appreciate the workmanship.
He had no idea how Terisa worked with flat glass. And he had no particular reason to believe he could do the same thing. In fact, he hardly knew how he had contrived to translate himself from the laborium to the Closed Fist. He certainly hadn’t done anything to prove himself an arch-Imager.
Nevertheless he didn’t hesitate.
He came back alive. Without her. Geraden would never have done such a thing.
Facing the glass, he closed his eyes; he swept his thoughts clear. Master Barsonage and Adept Havelock were watching him, and Terisa was lost, and he had never tried anything like this before. Yet he had the strongest feeling—He pulled his concentration together, firmly wiped panic and confusion and anguish out of his heart.
In the mirror of his mind, he began to construct an Image of Esmerel.
Still trying to intervene between Geraden and Havelock, the mediator asked the Adept carefully, “You mentioned King Joyse. Do you know where he is?”
“He has flown,” spat back Havelock, his mouth full of vitriol. “Like a bird, ha-ha. You think he has abandoned you, but it is a lie, a lie, a lie. When everything else is lost, he breaks my heart and gives me nothing.”
Geraden ignored both of them.
He found it easy to ignore distractions now. Something luminous was taking place. He had no training in Image-building; no Imager practiced that skill. He was working with an entirely new concept: that the Image of a mirror could be chosen; that translations could be done which ignored the apparent Image of a mirror. As new to the world as Terisa herself. And yet the process of creating the Image he wanted in his mind excited him; it enabled him to close his attention to anything which interfered.
Line by line, feature by feature, he put together a picture of Eremis’ “ancestral Seat.”
He had only seen it once, of course – and only from the outside. He had no notion what it looked like inside. But that didn’t worry him. He believed that the scenes and landscapes in mirrors were real, that Images were reflections rather than inventions. So if he could induce the glass to show Esmerel from the outside, the manor’s true interior would be included automatically.
“What do you mean,” asked Master Barsonage, “ ‘flown’?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer, however. He may not have been listening to himself at all.
Esmerel was a relatively low building in a deep, wedge-shaped valley with a brook bubbling picturesquely over its stones and outcroppings of rock like ramparts all along the walls – not low because of any lack of sweep or grace in its design, but because it was constructed on only one rambling, aboveground level. According to rumor, some of the best features of the house were belowground, dug down into the rock of the valley: an enviable wine cellar; a gallery for weavings, paintings, and small sculptures; a vast library; several research halls. But naturally Geraden knew nothing about those things. He knew, however, that a portico defined the entrance – a portico with massive redwood pillars for columns. The entrance, as he remembered it, was plain, only one lamp in a leaded glass frame on either side, no carving on the panels of the doors. The house’s walls were layered planks – waxed rather than painted against Tor’s weather – but all the corners and intersections were stone, with the result that Esmerel’s face had a pleasingly varied texture.
Unless something had happened since he had seen it – or unless his memory or his imagination had gone wrong – Master Eremis’ home looked precisely like that.
Master Barsonage let out a stifled gasp. His respiration was labored, as if he had stuffed his fist into his mouth and was trying to breathe around it.
To commemorate the occasion, Adept Havelock began whistling thinly through his teeth.
Geraden opened his eyes.
The mirror in front of him showed a sand dune under a calm sky, almost certainly somewhere in Cadwal.
The pang of his disappointment was so acute that he nearly groaned aloud.
“I would not have believed it,” whispered Barsonage. “When I was first told that such things could happen, I did not believe it.”
“Are you out of your mind?” inquired the Adept politely. “That’s how I know this isn’t Apt Geraden. Even if he did talk to me that way. A man who can do this wouldn’t have to come back without her.”