The Mirror of Her Dreams (23 page)

As well as she could, she said, 'Please understand. I'm no Imager. None of this could possibly have anything to do with me. You didn't force me to come with you. You just asked me to come, and I came. I don't know why,' she admitted. 'I guess I just wanted to believe my life didn't have to be the way it was. I didn't want to just
sit
there- But now I know I made a mistake. You don't need me. You need that champion. I think the best thing for me to do is just go back where I came from.'

'It's your right.' Behind its dismay, his voice held a note of dignity and even command which she remembered vividly. The importance of what he was saying lit his eyes. 'But you are needed here. Mordant's peace will be the first good thing to be lost- and the smallest. In time, the Congery will be destroyed, and Orison will be torn down stone from stone, and what remains of the realm will be reduced to nothing but bloodshed and treachery.'

Somewhere in his voice, or his words, she heard a reminder of horns, calling out to her heart in dreams and changing everything.

'You give us hope,' he continued. 'You say you aren't an Imager. Maybe you aren't. And maybe you just don't know yourself yet. Maybe you just don't know yet that you're more powerful than any champion.

'I can't explain it-but I believe you're here because you
must
be here.

'And'-all at once, he relapsed to normality, and his gaze clouded-'you make sense out of my life. As long as I can believe in you, it's all been worthwhile.'

His insistence should have repelled her, frightened her. It was so unreasonable.
She
was necessary?
She
had power?
She
made sense out of his life? No. It was easier to believe that she had already lost herself, faded away into dreams. Or that she had never existed-that the translation had created her-

Nevertheless what he wanted and offered moved her. His appeal and the reminder of horns moved her.

'Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?' she said unsteadily. 'We don't know yet whether this is going to work. We should find that out first, before we worry about anything else.'

He studied her hard, trying to gauge her emotions. Then he nodded. 'You're right, I suppose.' Suddenly decisive, he said, 'Here-hold my hand. I'll go first, just in case something goes wrong.' At the same time, he stepped closer to his mirror.

She became increasingly conscious that the air in the room was cold. She looked at his hand, the glass, the hard lines of determination on his face. Now that she had gained her point, she found herself hesitating. 'Don't we have to go through some kind of ritual first?' Her ambivalence felt absurd, but she couldn't control it. As soon as she made anything which resembled a choice, she lost confidence. 'There must be magic powders-or spells-or something? Aren't there?'

'Is that how Imagery is done in your world?' he demanded with a glare.

'No, of course not. I mean, we don't have Imagery. I keep telling you. We don't have magic.' Self-consciousness flushed her cheeks. 'I just thought you must need preparation.'

He made a visible effort to unclench himself a bit. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you. Imagery is in the way the glass is made and shaped and coloured. That's the preparation. Then it either works or it doesn't, depending on whether the person who tries it has the power. If we wanted to translate something out to us, that would be different. There are words and gestures that help the process. But we aren't going that way. Right now, ail we have to do'-he attempted a smile which didn't succeed-'is do it.'

Again, he extended his hand to her.

This time, she took it.

What she was doing made her feel sick.

He drew her to the mirror and braced his free hand on the frame to keep it-or himself-steady. 'First I'll just stick my head in,' he murmured, thinking aloud, 'take a look around. Then I'll come back, and you can decide what to do next. Hold on tight,' he added to her. 'As long as we've got a grip on each other, you can pass in and out of the glass as well as I can.'

Abruptly, he dashed his forehead at the surface of the mirror.

And his head vanished, cut off as cleanly as a knife-stroke at the neck. Beyond the glass plane, the Image of the back of his head blocked part of the landscape and the ship.

Instinctively, she braced herself against his weight. He had pushed himself forward too hard: he was losing his balance, starting to fall. His hand pulled on the frame of the mirror, shifting the focus of the reflection. As he toppled forward, she saw one of the armoured defenders aim a hot shaft of light at him.

Somehow, she jerked him back. He pitched out of the glass and stumbled away from it, then caught himself with his feet splayed and his knees locked.

All the colour was gone from his cheeks: he was as white as flour paste. Panic and astonishment stared out of his eyes.

'Are you all right?' she asked.

'He shot at me,' whispered the Apt hoarsely. 'He almost hit me.'

'I saw him. I saw the back of your head.'

'Glass and damnation.' He swallowed repeatedly. 'If I had gone there the first time. Instead of finding you. They would have killed me before I could open my mouth.'

Her heart began to hurt as the implications struck her. The mirror which had impossibly taken Geraden to her when it should have put him in front of the champion now did what it was supposed to do. 'I don't believe it.' That mirror was her only doorway home. She was stuck here. 'I want to try.'

'My lady!' His surprise and fear turned instantly to dismay. 'You'll be shot! They might not miss twice.'

'Come on.' Without thinking, she grabbed one of his hands and tugged him towards the mirror. She was stuck here forever. There was no other way she could get back to her own life. 'I've got to try.'

He twisted out of her grip, then clapped his hands to her shoulders and shook her. 'No!' He was shouting at her. 'I'm not going to let you kill yourself!'

'I've got to try!' she yelled back at him. It was quite possible that she had never yelled like that at anybody in her entire life. 'Let me go!'

Wrenching away from him, she swung around towards the mirror-and tripped on the hem of her gown. Helpless to stop herself, she fell as if she were diving straight at the glass.

Apparently, he got one hand on her just in time to make the translation possible. Instead of shattering the glass, she passed into it.

The transition felt shorter this time: it didn't have as much impact on her as the one which had taken her out of her apartment. It was quick and timeless, vast and small, as if eternity had winked at her while she went by; but this time its familiarity made more of an impression on her than its strangeness.

Then she landed hard enough to jar her breath away on a hillside of thick, rich grass dotted with wildflowers.

More precisely, her body from the waist up landed on the grass. She must have been lying with her stomach across the bottom edge of the mirror's frame, because she was cut off at the navel: everything beyond that straight, flat severance was gone. She could feel her legs. They gave her a sensation of movement. Someone was holding them. But she had left them in another world.

This world was warm and tangy with springtime. A low breeze made the bright heads of the wildflowers dance and cooled the touch of the open sunlight on her hair; the sky was so blue it looked whetted. The hillside sloped down to her right towards a fast stream almost big enough to be called a river. The water ran like crystal over the gold background of its rocks and sand and gurgled happily to itself as it rushed past.

She saw now that she was in a valley that closed sharply as the ground rose ahead of her. A few hundred feet away, the valley became a narrow defile, almost a chasm, mounting towards the mountains in the distance; and this cut was given both a marked entry and a guard by the tall, rugged, ponderous stone pillars like sentinels which the hills had set on either side of the stream. Shaded by the steepness of its walls, the defile looked dark and secretive-and also inviting, like a place where it would be possible to hide and be safe.

Her heart went out to it at once. Because she had grown up in a city, she had seldom seen a place so beautiful before. For a moment, she simply stayed where she was and inhaled the scent of spring grass, the tang of wildflowers.

Soon, however, she thought of Geraden. This wasn't an alien landscape where men in armour shot beams of fire at people. She wanted to show it to him.

Too full of wonder to call out, she began to crawl backward.

As she did so, more and more of her body disappeared past the plane of translation. And Geraden was unceremoniously trying to help her. Her chest vanished; then her shoulders.

Shortly, she found herself on her hands and knees in front of the mirror.

The stone under her palms felt cold. The air in the room was cold. Even the lamplight seemed cold.

The scene in the glass had scarcely changed at all. The commander was conferring with the defender who had fired at Geraden. Perhaps they were trying to understand the man's head which had unexpectedly appeared and then vanished before their eyes. Perhaps they thought they were faced with some new trick by the people they were fighting, the natives of the planet.

'My lady,' Geraden panted as if he had been fighting for her life, 'are you all right? What happened? I couldn't see you. I didn't see them shoot at you. They didn't seem to know you were there. What happened?'

'Geraden-'

She was so shaken and cold that she could hardly lift her weight off her arms, hardly get her legs under her. The change was too abrupt, too complete. It left her gasping, disoriented. Springtime -? A stream dancing in sunlight-? No, not here. Not in this converted stone dungeon. And not in the mirror, where men of violence discussed their work.

Somewhere inside her, the translation was still going on, still happening. Now, however, she knew what it meant. Doubt accumulated in her nerves: she was on the verge of failure. It was the sensation of fading, of losing existence, concentrated to crisis proportions; it was the pure moment in which she lost her hold on herself, on actuality, on life. This was what she had been failing towards ever since she had begun to be unsure of her own being.

It was happening to her now.

Although Geraden hovered beside her, urgent to know what she had seen, she couldn't shift her attention to him. She was staring at the glass he had left uncovered-the flat glass that showed a snow-clogged meeting of roads-

The Image in that mirror had changed.

The way she stared made him turn.

When he saw the mirror, he gasped. 'That's impossible. How did you-?'

He fought to control his amazement. 'I
know
that place. I've been there-I practically grew up there. We used to play there when I was a boy. We called it the Closed Fist. It's in the Care of Domne. It can't be more than five miles from Houseldon.' Through his confusion and surprise, his voice shone with pleasure. That valley is a jumble of rocks inside. A great place to climb. And there must be a hundred little caves and secret places to hide. We had the best games-'

She believed him: she had just been there herself. She recognized the contours of the ground, the shape of the valley. The hillside was blanketed in snow; ice choked the stream; the pillars wore frost like thatches of white in their grey hair. But the scene was the same. Only the season had changed. Spring had become winter.

Now Geraden was gazing at her as if she had done something wonderful. 'My lady,' he said in awe, 'I don't know how you did that. It isn't possible. Mirrors can't change their Images. But you did it. Somehow. You're an Imager. You're certainly an Imager. Nothing like this has ever been done before. It's a good thing for us you're here.'

The colour was back in his cheeks.

She had no idea why he had jumped to the conclusion that she was the cause of this impossible change. But at the moment that was secondary. She couldn't think about it yet. Other things staggered her.

She had just seen the same scene in two different mirrors. A scene he said was real. But she had seen it in two different seasons. One of the mirrors was wrong. This was winter, not springtime. The mirror which showed the Closed Fist in springtime was wrong.