It was too much. Geraden flung Adept Havelock aside. He surged to his feet. With all his strength, he punched Master Barsonage in the chest – a blow which nearly made the massive Imager take a step backward.
Then he faced the mirror and began to howl.
“Eremis! Don’t touch her!”
FORTY-TWO: UNEXPECTED TRANSLATIONS
Eremis was touching her. He was certainly touching her.
She had never been strong enough against him. Her concentration had never been strong enough. While he had approached her in the audience hall, while he had threatened Geraden, while he had fought with the Tor, she had attempted something she didn’t know how to do, something she had never heard of before: wild with anger and desperation, she had tried to reach out to the mirror which had brought him here and change it.
On some level, she knew that was impossible. She was on the wrong side of the glass, the side of the Image, not the side of the Imager. But the knowledge meant nothing to her. If she could feel a translation taking place, surely that gave her a link, a channel? And she didn’t have any other way to fight. Her need was that extreme: she didn’t care that what she was trying was probably insane. Her strange and unmeasured talent was her only weapon. If she could fade, if she could go far enough away to reach his mirror—
His hands made that impossible. They forced her to the surface of herself when she most needed to sink away.
First there was his grip on her arm. He flung her toward the translation point as if it were a wall against which he intended to break her bones. But he didn’t let her go.
Then there was the bottomless instant of translation, the eternal dissolution.
Then there was a completely different kind of light.
It was orange and hot, part furnace, part torches – and full of smoke, rankly scented. Another man was there, someone she hadn’t seen before, a blur as Eremis impelled her past him, kept her spinning. Gilbur and Gart were right behind her, as blurred as everything else.
And Eremis was shouting, “The lights! Put out the lights!”
Before she could get her eyes into focus, see anything clearly, the torches dove into buckets of sand; a clang closed the door of the furnace. Darkness slammed against her like a wave of heat.
“What went wrong?” someone demanded in a rattling voice.
“Geraden,” snapped Master Eremis. “He remains alive. We must not let him see this place.”
“I tried to kill him,” Gilbur snarled. “I hit him hard. But that puppy is stronger than he appears.”
“She must not see it,” continued Eremis. “She is his creation. Who knows what bonds exist between them? Perhaps they are able to share Images in their minds.”
The first voice, the man she didn’t know, made an assenting noise. “Then it is good that we were prepared for this eventuality. If we were in the Image-room—” A moment later, he added, “It would be interesting to learn what he does when he regains consciousness.”
“As long as he cannot find us,” muttered Master Gilbur.
“In the dark?” Master Eremis laughed. “Have no fear of that.” He sounded exultant, almost happy. His grip on Terisa shifted; with one hand, he held both her arms behind her back. “She is mine now – and they are ours. No matter that Geraden still lives, and Kragen. That will only add spice to the sauce. They will do exactly what we wish.”
“And Joyse?” asked the rattling voice.
“You saw,” rasped Gilbur. “He fled when we appeared. No doubt he is cowering in some hidey-hole, hoping for mad Havelock to save him.”
The tone of Eremis’ laughter suggested that he doubted Gilbur’s assessment. He didn’t argue, however. Instead, he said, “It will be safe to renew the lights when the door is closed.”
Firmly, irresistibly, he pushed Terisa ahead of him into the dark.
And all the time, she was still trying to concentrate, still trying to fade.
Now, of course, she wasn’t reaching toward the glass Eremis had used; she was struggling to find Adept Havelock’s supply of mirrors, striving to feel the potential for translation across the distance. She could sense translations as they occurred. She was sensitive to the opening of the gap between places. That must mean something. There must be some way she could use it.
But Eremis’ grasp made everything impossible.
He held her too roughly, so that her arms hurt; he pushed her too far ahead of him into the blind dark. Through a doorway, along a lightless passage, through another door: the visceral fear of running into something kept her from being able to pull her heart and mind away. The way he chuckled between his teeth filled her with rage and despair.
I’m not yours. Never. I’ll find some way to kill you. No matter what happens. I swear it.
It was impossible to fade while she was so full of fury.
And then the way he held her changed.
Through the second doorway and across a rough floor, he suddenly thrust her down. She couldn’t catch herself because he didn’t free her arms: she landed heavily on a pillow, a bed. Deftly, he turned her so that she lay on her back, with her wrists now clamped above her head by one of his hands. Then he clasped something iron around her left wrist; she heard a click, a faint rattle of chain. In spite of the fetter, however, he continued to hold her arms pinned.
He went on chuckling while his other hand undid the hooks of her soft, leather shirt, exposing her breasts, her vulnerable belly.
“I must chain you,” he murmured pleasantly, “a small precaution against your strange talents – and Geraden’s. But it will not prevent me from satisfying my claim on you. You will find that I am not easily satisfied. On the other hand, we have plenty of time.
“If you are compliant, I will keep you bound as little as possible.”
In the dark, she struggled; she wanted to smash his face, wanted to feel his blood on her hands. He pinned her easily, however; he knew how to keep women from getting away from him. When she paused to gather her strength so that she wouldn’t weep, he curled his tongue like a lick of wet fire around each of her nipples, and his hand slipped aside the sash of her trousers.
Gasping on the verge of tears, she tried to twist out of his hold; failed.
Abruptly, she stilled herself, let the resistance sag out of her muscles. She wasn’t accomplishing anything; she was just contributing to her own defeat by making herself wild. She couldn’t concentrate—Let him think her stillness was a form of surrender. If he was that arrogant.
“You will accept my manhood completely,” he murmured. “I will take possession of you in all ways. And I will not be satisfied until you beg me to enter you wherever and whenever I desire.”
His mouth clung to her nipples, teasing them involuntarily erect, caressing and probing them. At the same time, his hand moved down into her open trousers to the place between her legs which only Geraden knew. His fingers stroked her there as if he believed that she was being seduced.
Far away in her mind, she was imagining his death.
When he began to pull her trousers off her hips, however, she returned to defend herself. Her eyes were starting to adjust – and this room wasn’t absolutely lightless. Hints of illumination filtered into the air from what may have been an imperfectly sealed window in the wall above her. Eremis’ head was a shape of deeper blackness poised to make her breasts ache. She couldn’t fight him physically. But she could still fight.
Taking advantage of the fact that he had left her mouth free, she said, “Gilbur thinks King Joyse is a coward, but you don’t agree.” Her tone should have warned him: it wasn’t unsteady enough, frightened enough, to indicate surrender. “Why is that?”
“Because, my sweet lady” – he was too full of victory to refuse to answer her – “you betrayed him to me.”
She could feel him grinning over her in the dark.
“I might have believed that he was a fool, or a coward, or a madman. But you came to me while Lebbick had me in his dungeon, and you opened my eyes. At a time when I might have remained innocent of the knowledge, you showed me that King Joyse understood his own actions – that he did what he did deliberately.”