“I told you.” The kindness was gone from his voice. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“What do you see?” she insisted. “What do you see in my eyes?”
For a long moment, he hesitated. Then he said roughly, “Pain.”
She thought she might feel better if she hit him. She might feel even better if she put her arms around him. Yet she stayed where she was, with her back to the door, holding the only light in the room.
“That’s how I know I’m real. Master Eremis says I was created by your mirror, but that can’t be true. If I didn’t exist, I couldn’t be hurt.”
“Terisa.” He swallowed hard. She had touched him: she thought she could see grief shifting behind the rigid lines of his face. “Nobody says you don’t exist. Not even Master Eremis. You’re here. You’re real. Everything you do has consequences. The question is, were you real before I translated you?”
Automatically, she wanted to ask, Have you changed your mind? Do you still think I was real – back where you found me? But she pushed that question down.
“I must have been,” she said. King Joyse had told her to reason. “If the place I came from was only created by the mirror you saw me in, then that must be true of every mirror, every Image. So when you look in a flat glass, you don’t actually see a real place. You see a created copy of a real place. So when I translated myself into the Image of the Closed Fist, I shouldn’t have arrived in a real place. I should have arrived in the copy – a different copy than the one you went to. I should have stopped being real myself until somebody translated me back out again.
“Isn’t that right?”
The light of the lamp was imprecise, but she seemed to see a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. The shadows there deepened as he listened to her. The sight caused her heart to accelerate a bit.
“That’s good,” he said. “I wish I’d come up with that argument myself. But I don’t think it’s enough. Eremis will just say, That’s why translations through flat glass produce madness. The only translation that can be done safely is one between the real world and a created Image. Reality is too powerful to tolerate the manipulations of Imagery.” In spite of his clenched condition, he began to sound more like his old self as he talked – more like he was interested in the discussion for its own sake. “So the closer a created Image gets to reality, the more dangerous it becomes. And when the Image actually copies reality, reality takes precedence. It rips the translation away from the Image, and the force of that distortion is what causes madness.”
She hung on the change in his tone, hoped for it to continue. Almost at once, however, he closed himself again. “Terisa, you didn’t come here in the middle of the night to debate the ethics of Imagery.”
“Is that right?” Pained to feel the side of him she wanted to nurture slipping away, she made a mistake. “To you it’s just a debate. To me it’s my life. I can’t make sense out of who I am unless I know the truth.”
Right away, she knew she’d gone wrong: his gaze dropped from hers; his eyes filled up with shadows. He didn’t need to be reminded that other people were suffering: he was already too sensitive to that; he already believed he had made her unhappy. But she refused to back down. She had come too far to retreat. Instead, she changed tactics.
“If I wasn’t real until you brought me out of that mirror of yours, how did I become an arch-Imager?”
He didn’t lift his head. In a muffled voice, he said, “You know I don’t believe that. That’s Eremis, not me.”
Unexpectedly angry, she retorted, “Wake up. What do you think we’re talking about here?” She put the lamp down on a nearby table to free her hands, as if she were getting ready to wrestle with him. “Why do you think who I am and where I come from matters? What he believes is going to affect everything he does to both of us.
“Tell me how I became an arch-Imager.”
Now Geraden raised his eyes. Studying her closely – and holding himself completely still, as though he feared what she might do if he moved – he replied, “I created you. When I shaped my glass, I made you.” Almost silently, he caught his breath in surprise and recognition; the implications took him aback. “I have the capacity to create arch-Imagers.”
“Not just arch-Imagers,” she amended for him. “Arch-Imagers who can shift glass the way you do, arch-Imagers who can work translations that are irrelevant to what you see in the Image.”
“I could create a whole army of them. A whole army of Imagers as powerful as Vagel. He wouldn’t stand a chance.” Staring at her – at the ideas she proposed – Geraden murmured, “No wonder he wants me dead.”
“And that’s not all.” Gripping her courage, Terisa took the risk. “How does he know you don’t have glass here?”
Geraden jerked his head back, glowered at her in astonishment or dismay. “What—?”
“How does he know” – she forced herself to complete the thought, even though Geraden’s expression made her feel that she was accomplishing the opposite of what she wanted – “you aren’t busy creating an army of arch-Imagers right now?”
She horrified him. What a pleasure. All she wanted was to help him – to comfort or encourage the Geraden who had gotten lost and become iron – and what did she achieve? Horror. For a moment, he was so shocked that the lamplight made him look as pale as bone. Then he sprang off the bed, rushed to her and caught her by the shoulders, groaned through his teeth as if he were stifling a wail, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
She stared at him dumbly.
“He’ll send everything he’s got after me. If he catches me here, he’ll reduce Houseldon to rubble to get at me.”
It had to be said. She had gone too far to turn back. And this was the point, wasn’t it? The reason she had brought the subject up in the first place? Distinctly, she remarked “He has to try that no matter what you do.”
He stared at her in dismay.
“He knows you’re here,” she said. “But he won’t know it when you leave. Unless he has a mirror that lets him see you here. If you run, he won’t know it until he’s destroyed Houseldon looking for you.
“I did that.” For a moment, her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back fiercely. “It’s my doing. When I told him about seeing the Closed Fist in your mirror, I set you up.
“You didn’t know you were coming here. I told him, but I didn’t tell you. You were just trying to escape – and hoping you wouldn’t end up somewhere you couldn’t get back from. He has to destroy Houseldon so that he can stop you, and I set you up for it.”
Geraden, it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.
His face was thrust close to hers, his fingers ground into her arms; but she couldn’t seem to read his face. His passion was part of his skull, definitive under his features; yet the flesh over it was so tight and strict that she couldn’t distinguish between them.
When he spoke, however, his voice shook her as hard as if he had shoved her against the wall. It was strong, compulsory; it had the power to command her.
“Terisa, people I have known and loved all my life are going to die because I came here.”
I swore I was never going to let anybody I loved die ever again.
But there was nothing he could do. Houseldon was already as well prepared to defend itself as possible. He was helpless to save anything or anybody. Because he needed so much from her, she didn’t cry or apologize or defend herself or get angry. She faced him squarely and said, “I think I would probably feel better if you hit me.”
He looked like he might hit her: he was angry or desperate enough to hit something.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Slowly, she shook her head. At least he wasn’t closed anymore. She had achieved that much. And even fury was preferable to his rigid isolation, his mute hurt. “That’s not the point,” she countered. “It doesn’t matter. I just made a mistake, that’s all. I didn’t know how important all this is.” And later on she had been so embarrassed by her submission to Master Eremis that she found it impossible to speak.