Roger Taylor - Ibryen

Chairs and tables had been knocked over, ornaments and crockery broken, rugs and carpets scattered. It was almost as though the servants and the mirror-bearers had been brawling and rampaging while their masters were away. She had barely taken in the scene however, when the mirror-bearers washed to one side of the room like an incoming wave up a beach. She stepped back involuntarily, then there was a sudden whirl of activity and the still-screaming Gevethen rushed from the room, escorted by a furious mob of their own kind. Jeyan stood still for a moment, as shocked by the sudden silence and stillness as she had been by the frenzied movement and noise. What she took to be another piece of upturned furniture caught her eye in the half-light. She looked at it curiously then took a lantern and moved to examine it further.

She stopped as the light from the lantern fell on two bodies. Their simple dress identified them as mirror-bearers, and what she had taken to be the ornamental legs of a small table jutting into the air proved to be their arms reaching up, fingers bent into claws.

She turned up the lantern and stepped forward uncertainly. The floor became alive with glittering lights and there was a noisy unsteadiness beneath her feet. She paused and crouched down carefully. The floor about the two mirror-bearers was covered with countless fragments of glass. She picked up one of them. Her face, tiny, drawn and fearful in the light of the lantern, looked up at her. About her feet, other images of her stirred as she moved. For a moment she thought she was going to sink into them. The fragments were the remains of their mirrors, she realized as she shook off the impression. But what could have broken them so totally? And what had killed the mirror-bearers? For she needed to check no pulse to know that they were dead. Even if their rigid postures had not told her, their gaping eyes and mouths would have.

She shivered. What had happened in the Gevethen’s ‘crude and ill-formed ante-chamber’ to bring this about? What had been the consequences in this room of the buffeting and vibrating that had shaken the mirrors’ inner world? And which was cause, which effect?

She remembered that as Ibryen had disappeared and the Gevethen had staggered back, the scene had fragmented into a storm of jagged and frightening lights. Lights which passed clear through her. As she looked down at the dead figures she felt an unexpected twinge of pity. What terrible burdens did these wretched people carry in addition to their mirrors? What hideous bargain had they stuck to bring them to this?

She became aware of the servants gathering around her, hands raised to protect their eyes from the brightened lantern. She dimmed it.

‘What’s happened here?’ she demanded, though more from want of something to say than from any hope of receiving an answer. There was no reply. Briefly she considered pressing the question but she knew that it would be to no effect.

‘Get help,’ she said quietly, standing up. ‘Get… your friends… taken away and tended to properly, and… get this mess cleaned up.’

She had scarcely finished speaking when she was surrounded by hectic but disturbingly silent activity as the servants began to do what she had asked, though whether this was because of her order or in response to some other command she had no idea. As the bodies were carried out she noticed that they were as rigid as their arm positions suggested. It was as if they had been dead for some time. Then the fragments of the mirrors were removed. As Jeyan watched, this began to assume the quality of nightmare, so obsessively meticulous was the behaviour of the servants as they crawled about picking up first the large pieces and then bending closer and closer to the floor in search of ever smaller pieces.

At one point, she was sorely tempted to scream at them as the Gevethen had done, but again a sense of the futility of the action deterred her.

Now they were gone. And they had left the door ajar. A strange final flaw in the chaotic and frightening events of the day. No wiser for her further review of what had happened, she stood up and moved purposefully out into the corridor.

Jeyan was far from clear about what it was she intended to do. She was also fearful about the consequences that this impromptu exploring might bring down upon her.

‘I was anxious to follow your Excellencies but I’m unfamiliar with the Citadel and I became lost.’

Like a child she had prepared this excuse when barely a dozen paces from her room in the event of her encountering the Gevethen or being challenged. After all, the door had been left not only unlocked, but open, hadn’t it? Initially she included an account of the time spent removing the two bodies and the remains of the shattered mirrors, but some more reflective instinct told her to make no reference to these unless they were mentioned first.

Her heart was thumping painfully as she moved cautiously through the corridors of the Citadel. Not only was she afraid of meeting anyone who might call her to account but she had little or no idea where she was and still less about where she was going. During her trips to and from the Judgement Hall she had been surrounded by Guards and mirror-bearers and, more significantly, she had been too preoccupied to pay much attention to her whereabouts. Soon however, meeting no one, she grew calmer, and old Ennerhald habits returned, slipping her silently into darker shadows at the least sound or sign of movement. Several times she caught herself glancing rapidly from side to side to assure herself that Assh and Frey were keeping station. The involuntary action made her grimace, reminding her as it did, brutally, of the deaths of the two dogs and of the wound that their absence left in her life – a wound she was struggling to ignore. It gave her little consolation that in some way they were still alive. They were a hunting trio – she needed the touch, the sight, the smell and the sound of them, the look in the eye, the soft, scarcely audible whine. And she needed them in this world, now, not in some strange other world to which access could be made only through the mirrors and, as far as she knew, at the behest of the Gevethen.

Finally she made a determined effort to force the anger and distress from her mind. They weren’t here and that was an end to it!

‘Lord Counsellor?’

Jeyan spun round, hand reaching for a knife that was no longer there. In front of her stood one of the Citadel officials – an ordinary clerk of some kind, she registered, from his livery. His eyes were lowered and he was just dropping awkwardly to his knees. Jeyan recalled how those watching her as she was paraded to the Judgement Hall had knelt when she looked at them.

Relief followed the initial shock of the encounter and lingering remains of her old life prompted her to tell the man to rise. She should confide in him, ask him where she was, how she might escape from the Citadel. The thoughts caught her unawares and mingled confusingly with a frisson of elation at the power that the man’s obeisance invested in her. Then came anger again that she should even think such foolishness after all she had learned in the Ennerhald.

Without knowing why, she laid a hand on the man’s head. He flinched and she felt him trembling as he struggled to remain still. This time the confusion of emotions effectively paralysed her.

It was the Ennerhald that released her. Be silent, she thought. Within the Citadel at least, it could be that the Lord Counsellor’s uniform was as effective as any shield wall, but the place was still unbelievably dangerous. She must say nothing – to anyone. She must watch and listen and learn.

Besides, she realized, she was far from certain that she wanted to escape from the Citadel. Where would she go? To the Ennerhald again? A bleak and unlovely prospect after even these few days of luxury, and how empty it would be without Assh and Frey. She could always try to reach the Count in the mountains but, the practicalities of the journey aside, what purpose would that serve? No more now than it had ever done. In the Ennerhald she had been near the source of all her distress – now she was within dagger’s reach.