Without transition, Adept Havelock passed from amiable lunacy to wild fury. “Cunt!” With a roar, he brandished his right hand, pinching the fingers together as if he held a checker. “This is you!” Wheeling to the table, he banged his hand down on the board several times, jumping imaginary pieces; then he mimed flinging his checker savagely into the corner of the room. “Gone! Do you understand me? Gone!
“Don’t you think I want to be sane? Don’t you think I want to help? He was the only one who knew how to help me. But I used it all up! This morning – against those catapults! I used it all up!”
Dumb with shock, Terisa gaped at him. He was too far gone. She didn’t know how to reach him.
An instant later, however, his rage disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Both his eyes seemed to grow glassy with sorrow, and he turned his back on her slowly. “Today I can’t help you,” he murmured to the blank checkerboard. “Go deal with Gilbur yourself.”
He lowered himself into a chair near the table. His shoulders began to shake, and a high, small whine came from his clenched throat. After a moment, Terisa realized that he was sobbing.
Lost and numb, she left him alone there and went to deal with Gilbur herself.
She was so sick with dread and dismay and grief that she didn’t even wince when she heard the Adept bolting his door after her, locking her away from any possibility of escape.
Like a sleepwalker – like a woman trying to locate herself, discover who she was, in a glass made from the pure sand of dreams – she returned to the room where Havelock kept his mirrors.
Master Gilbur was already there.
He didn’t notice her. He was too full of wonder at what he had found: mirrors he had never known existed, dozens of them; a priceless treasure for any Imager with the talent to use them, any Adept. She could have tried to hide. The look on his face made her think that it might even be possible to sneak past him. He was so caught up in what he was seeing—
With a forlorn shrug, she took one of the small mirrors stacked on a trestle table near her and tossed it to the floor so that it shattered in all directions.
A cloud of dust billowed from the impact, softening the sound. The whole room was thick in dust; the mirrors apparently hadn’t been cleaned in decades.
Nevertheless the sound of breakage got his attention. He jerked around to face her, raised his massive fists. His eyes burned; fury seemed to fume from his beard. “You dare!” he coughed. “You dare to destroy such wealth, such power! For that, I will not simply kill you. I will hack you apart.”
“No, you won’t.” To her astonishment, her voice was steady. Perhaps she was too numb to be afraid any longer. As if she did this kind of thing all the time, she put the trestle table between them so that it blocked his approach. “If you take one step toward me, I’ll break another mirror. Every time you do anything to threaten me, I’ll break another mirror. Maybe I’ll break everything here before you get your hands on me.”
Numbness was a good start. It led to fading. She could stand here and confront Master Gilbur with all his hate like a woman full of courage – and at the same time she could go away, evaporate from in front of him. Give up her existence and follow mist and smoke to safety. By the time he got his hands on her – she knew he was going to get his hands on her somehow – she would be gone.
And in the meantime she might delay him long enough—
“You would not!” protested Gilbur, momentarily surprised out of his rage.
Terisa picked up another mirror and measured the distance to the Master’s head. “Try me.”
Numbness. Fading.
Time.
“No, my lady.” His features gathered into their familiar scowl. He was breathing heavily, as if his back pained him. “You try me. All this glass is beyond price – in the abstract. In practice, it is useless. A mirror can only be used by the man who made it. There are new talents in the world, and mine is one of them. I can make mirrors with a speed and accuracy which would astound the Congery, if those pompous fools only knew of it. But only an Adept has the talent to work translations with a glass he did not make.
“If you believe I will not kill you, you are stupid as well as foolish.”
He took a step toward her.
She threw the glass at him and snatched up another.
The delicate tinkling noise of broken glass shrouded by dust filled the room.
He halted.
“Maybe nobody except Havelock actually has that talent,” she said, nobody except Havelock, for all the good that did her, “but you think you might be able to learn it. It might be a skill, not a talent. You’ve never had a chance to find out the truth because other Imagers won’t let you experiment with their mirrors. With these, you could do all the experimenting you want. You could learn anything there is to learn.”
Fading. Time. With her peripheral vision, she picked out the mirror she wanted – a flat glass in a rosewood frame, nearly as tall as she was. Through a layer of dust, its Image showed a bare sand dune, nothing else. Somewhere in Cadwal, she guessed. One of the less hospitable portions of High King Festten’s land. In the Image, the wind was blowing hard enough to raise sand from the dune like steam.
Carefully, she edged toward it.
“But I’m not going to let you have them,” she continued without pausing. “Not if you try to get me.”
Master Gilbur faced her as if he ached to leap for her throat. One hand clutched his dagger; the other curled in anticipation. He restrained himself, however. “A clever point,” he snarled. “You are cleverer than I thought. But it is futile. You cannot leave this room without coming within my reach. Or without moving out of reach of the mirrors. In either case, I will cut you down instantly. What do you hope to gain?”
Time. It was amazing how little fear she felt. Her substance was leaching away before his eyes, and he was blind to it. Now she could ease herself into the dark whenever she wished, and then there would be nothing he could do to hurt her. Nothing that would make any difference. All she wanted was time.
She took another small step toward the glass she had chosen.
Then she went still because she thought she heard boots.
“I’m not greedy.” Now her voice tried to shake, but she didn’t let it. Instead, she began to speak louder, doing what she could to hold the Master’s attention. “I don’t want much. I just want to frustrate you.
“You and Eremis are so arrogant—You manipulate, you kill. You don’t have the slightest interest in what happens to the people you hurt. You’re sick with arrogance. It’s worth breaking a few mirrors just to upset you.”
Suddenly, she saw movement in the passage behind him.
Trying to gain all the time she could – trying to strike some kind of blow in Master Quillon’s name, and Geraden’s, and her own – she flung the mirror she held at Gilbur’s head.
He dodged her throw effortlessly.
And even that went wrong for her. Her life had become such a disaster that she couldn’t even throw something at a man who hated her without saving him. Dodging, he pivoted and leaped toward the table to close on her. As a result, the first guard charging into the room missed his swing.
Before the man could recover, Master Gilbur hammered him to the floor with a fist like a bludgeon.
The second guard had the opposite problem: he had to check the sweep of his sword in order to avoid his companion. That took only an instant – but an instant was all the time Gilbur needed to plant his dagger in the guard’s throat.
Castellan Lebbick entered the room behind his men alone.
He held his longsword poised; the tip of the blade moved warily. He glanced at Terisa, then returned his gaze to the Master. He was coiled to fight, ready and dangerous. She thought that she had never seen him look so calm. This was what he needed: a chance to do battle for Orison and King Joyse.