“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.”
“Or we are.” Geraden looked at her, grinning with his teeth. “The worse things get, the more we know we’re doing what King Joyse wants. At the moment when Eremis looks most unbeatable, that’s when he’s most vulnerable.”
Now it was her turn to snort. “Aren’t you the one who accused me of having a morbid imagination?”
Geraden laughed, but he didn’t sound especially amused.
Shortly after noon, the armies of Orison and Alend began to meet blood on the ground.
Old bloodstains: weatherworn, gone black; some across broad swaths of hard dirt; some in sheltered crannies; some clinging like lichen to rough rocks. They mottled stones and soil like the marks of a disease – infrequent at first; but soon more common, showing in open ravines or accessible hillsides all over the complex terrain, in pieces of earth where men could have fought for their lives.
“The Perdon,” Prince Kragen pronounced grimly. “His men fought alone here against High King Festten. They were trapped here, hunted down in this” – he swallowed an obscenity – “this maze, and massacred.
“They could have saved themselves. They could have fled to Orison. If we understand the High King rightly, he never intended to bring his force anywhere but here. But the Perdon did not know that. He knew only that he must fight for Mordant – and that he could not trust his King. So he led Cadwal here, where High King Festten most wished to go.
“He was a valiant man,” the Prince rasped, “badly betrayed. I hope that he did not learn the truth before he died. It would have been unutterably bitter.”
But there were no bodies.
No remnants of weapons and gear.
No bones.
The entire region had been cleaned.
Carrion eaters might have emptied the mail, picked the iron clean; some of them might have dragged bones away to gnaw. Nevertheless the dead should have left more behind than just their blood.
Scouts brought back no word of Cadwal. Everywhere the men rode, they met old blood. In gullies protected from wind or rain, they found the marks of boots and hooves, running in all directions, trampled everywhere. But none of them encountered any evidence of High King Festten’s army anywhere.
The Tor voiced the opinion that this was impossible. Castellan Norge and Prince Kragen sent out more scouts, doubled and tripled the number of men scouring the hillsides, the dry waterbeds, the stands of stubborn thicket. Yet the scouts discovered nothing, learned nothing.
And an hour or two before evening the vanguard of Orison’s army and Alend’s arrived in sight of Esmerel.
Master Eremis’ “ancestral seat” sat at the head of a wedge-shaped valley, almost directly against the sheer defile which brought a brook running into the valley. A bowman on the roof of the manor could have hit the valleysides in three directions. From the defile, however, the valley spread wide until it was more than broad enough to accommodate the armies approaching it. Its brook, and the expanse of its floor, gave the impression that it must be one of the most pleasant places in the Care of Tor.
Its walls, on the other hand, were high and rugged; impassable more than not. Blunt outcroppings of rock supported them like ramparts. And they didn’t decline as the wedge spread wider. Instead, they reared their black stones against the sky until they ended abruptly, hooking inward before they stopped as if to constrict the wide foot of the valley.
There was no blood here. Nearly a mile outside the valley, all evidence of the Perdon’s life and death disappeared.
The valley itself was empty.
Esmerel was a low building, for reasons which were obvious to the eye: even in this dull, cloud-locked light, the manor’s flat-roofed, rambling profile suited its surroundings, providing enough contrast to be distinctive, enough self-effacement to be harmonious. Terisa had heard from Geraden that much of the house was belowground, anchored in the rock of the valley. Instinctively, she believed that – although she couldn’t forget the sealed window and the faint light in the room where Eremis had chained her. Maybe Nyle’s cell was on the aboveground level. Certainly the window was. It shouldn’t be hard to locate.
With Prince Kragen and his captains, the Tor and Castellan Norge, Geraden and Master Barsonage, she studied Esmerel’s front up the length of the valley. From this distance, she couldn’t make out what gave the walls their texture; but she could see the portico clearly, supported over the main entrance by sturdy pillars.
The door was closed. All the windows were shuttered and dark. No one moved around the building, or in the neat horse-yard on one side of the house, or along the brook. Under the dark clouds, the whole place had an air of desertion, as if it had been forgotten a long time ago.
The ground, however, still held the scars of hundreds of horses, hundreds of men.
After a while, Prince Kragen asked, “What do you think, my lord Tor?”
“I think,” the Tor muttered as if his confidence were ebbing, “we must look inside.”
“It’s a trap, my lord,” commented Norge.
“Of course,” the Tor sighed. “Is that not why we have come, Geraden, my lady Terisa?” He glanced at them morosely. “To place our heads in the trap?”
For some reason, Geraden’s mount distrusted the valley and tried to shy away. Reining his horse uncomfortably, he said, “The only way we can find out what we’re up against is to go look at it, my lord.”
Terisa couldn’t take her eyes off Esmerel. It held her as Master Eremis himself did, full of promises and destruction. She had been a prisoner there. Had met Vagel; seen Nyle. Eremis had almost had his way with her—