“So I made the mirror – I made it and made it, until we could all see the champion in it perfectly, and the Masters said it was right.” He frowned in bafflement. “I worked on that so hard. I swear it’s an exact duplicate of the original. But when I stepped into it”—he met her gaze and shrugged—“I came here.”
She waited until he was finished; but she already knew what she was supposed to say next. “So now you think the augury was misinterpreted. It said you had to go get someone. It didn’t say who that someone was.”
He nodded slowly, watching her face as if she could make what she was saying true.
“This time the Congery might be wrong.”
He nodded again.
For no good reason, she still wasn’t afraid. “So when you did what the augury showed, you came where you were supposed to be, not where the Congery decided.”
After a moment, he said softly, “Yes. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? It’s impossible. A mirror can’t translate something it doesn’t show. But no matter how badly I foul up, I can’t stop thinking things like that. You must have done something. You must have brought me here.” He glanced away, then looked up at her strongly. “You must have had a reason.”
This remark restored the logical reality of the situation, took away the illusion that she was having a comprehensible conversation. A comprehensible conversation with a man who fell into her living room out of nowhere, shattering one of her mirrors in the process? She wanted to answer him, None of this has anything to do with me. But she had never learned how to say things like that out loud. Often she felt a quiver of shame and a personal fading when she thought them. Looking for an escape from the dilemma – or at least from the room, so that she could try to pull herself together away from the influence of Geraden’s intent brown eyes – she said instead, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
She had his undivided attention. “I think I would” – his smile was at once abashed and pleased – “but unfortunately I don’t know what ‘tea’ is.”
“I’ll get some,” she said. “It’ll just take a few minutes.” Keeping her relief to herself, she started toward the kitchen.
Before she had gone three steps, he said in a completely different tone – a voice strong and formal, and yet strangely suppliant – “My lady, will you accompany me to Mordant, to save the realm from destruction?”
In surprise, she stopped and looked back at him.
At once, his expression became contrite and embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have the right to place demands on you. I just suddenly have the strongest feeling that if you leave this room you won’t come back.”
As soon as he spoke, she realized that one reason she wanted to go into the kitchen was to reach the phone. She wanted to call security and tell them there was a crazy man in her apartment babbling about mirrors and translation and champions.
“Do you have these feelings often?” She was stalling while she tried to figure out what to do.
He shrugged; his expression held the shape of his formal question. “Not often. And they’re always wrong. But I trust them anyway. They have to mean something.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “One of them made me apprentice myself to the Congery. I don’t know why – it certainly hasn’t done me any good. I’ve been an Apt for almost ten years, and I never get any further.” His tone was quiet; she heard anger rather than self-pity in it. “But I still have the strongest feeling that I must become a Master. I can’t stop trying.”
“But you said you wanted some tea.”
“I didn’t know what I was afraid of until you started to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she responded slowly. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Again, she headed toward the kitchen. She was definitely going to call security. This had gone on too long.
“My lady!” he called immediately. His voice was strong, strangely commanding. “I beg you.”
She tried to continue, but her steps slowed of their own volition. In the entryway to the kitchen, she halted.
“If I twist and pull suddenly, my lady,” he said quietly, “I can probably free my ankle. Then I’ll be entirely here, with no way to return. And the Masters won’t know where I am, since what they see in this mirror is the champion. Then I’ll be lost here forever, unless by some chance or miracle they shape a mirror which shows me to them. If, in fact,” he added to himself, “I am anywhere at all, and not lost in the glass itself, as Master Eremis insists.
“But I’ll do it,” he went on more intensely, “before I’ll permit you to leave without hearing me.”
For a moment, she remained where she was. She felt herself leaning forward, trying to take the next step which would carry her out of his sight and into the sanctuary of the kitchen. Yet his appeal held her back as if he had a hand on her shoulder.
After all, she asked herself in an effort to think logically, normally, what would happen if she called security? The guards would come and take Geraden away. If they could – if they could wrench his leg free. And then they would have to let him go. He would be free to haunt her life. Unless she pressed charges against him. Then she would have to see him again as his accuser, making herself responsible for what happened to him. Perhaps she would have to see him several times. And she would certainly have to explain him to her father. Either way, she was stuck with him.
She had no desire to stand up in court – or in front of her father – and say that a man she had never seen before had broken into her living room through one of the mirrors and had asked her to save something called “Mordant.”
Slowly, she turned back to face the young man. For the first time since he had startled her with his unexpected arrival, she was scared. But he was a problem she had to solve, and security wasn’t the solution she wanted. Trying to keep her voice level, she said, “None of this makes any sense to me. What do you want me to hear?”
“My lady –” At once, embarrassment and relief made him look ten years younger. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’ve done this all wrong. The way I’ve been talking, you probably think your mirrors have destroyed my mind. Which is what they should have done. I still don’t understand it. But please –”
He had risen to his hands and knees. Now he pulled his torso upright, so that he was kneeling erect among the splinters of glass. Forcing down his confusion and abashment, he achieved a semblance of dignity.
“Please don’t judge Mordant by me. The need is real. And it’s urgent, my lady. Parts of the realm have already begun to die. People are dying – people who don’t have anything to do with Imagery or kings and just want to live their lives in peace. And the threat increases every day. Alend and Cadwal are never exactly quiet. Now they’re forming armies. And King Joyse doesn’t do anything. The heart has gone out of him. Wise men smell treachery everywhere.
“But the gravest peril doesn’t come from the High King of Cadwal or the Alend Monarch. It comes from Imagery.” He gathered passion as he spoke. “Somewhere in the realm—somewhere where we can’t find them—there are renegade Imagers, Masters of mirrors, and they’re opening their glasses more and more to every kind of horror and foulness. They’re experimenting on Mordant, trying to find in their mirrors those attacks and evils which will be most virulent to the peace, stability, and life that King Joyse forged in his prime. And these Masters seem to have no fear of the chaos that comes from unleashing powers that cannot be controlled.
“Before this winter ends, the realm will begin to crumble. Then there will be war on every hand – war of every kind – and all good things will be in danger.
“My lady,” he said straight to her, “I don’t have any power to compel you. If I did, it would be wrong to use it. And you aren’t the champion the Congery expects. I’ve been such a fumble-foot all my life that my presence here might be just another one of my disasters.