Stephen R. Donaldson
The Mirror of Her Dreams
To Ross McGuire Donaldson:
For love,
laughter,
And just enough dignity.
“Steeped in the vacuum of her dreams,
A mirror’s empty till
A man rides through it.”
PROLOGUE: TERISA AND GERADEN
The story of Terisa and Geraden began very much like a fable. She was a princess in a high tower. He was a hero come to rescue her. She was the only daughter of wealth and power. He was the seventh son of the lord of the seventh Care. She was beautiful from the auburn hair that crowned her head to the tips of her white toes. He was handsome and courageous. She was held prisoner by enchantment. He was a fearless breaker of enchantments.
As in all the fables, they were made for each other.
Unfortunately, their lives weren’t that simple.
For example, her high tower was a luxury condominium building over on Madison, just a few blocks from the park. She had two bedrooms (one of them a “guest room,” fully furnished and entirely unused), a spacious living room with an impressive view west, a separate dining room which contained a long, black, polished table on which candles would have gleamed beautifully if she had ever had any reason to light them, and the kind of immaculate modern kitchen displayed in remodeling catalogues.
Her home cost her father what the people she worked with would have called “a small fortune,” but it was worth every penny to him. The security guards in the lobby and the closed-circuit TV cameras in the elevators kept her safe; and while she was living there she wasn’t mooning passively around his house, gazing at him and his business associates and his women with those big brown calf-eyes that seemed too inert, or even too stupid, to intend what he read in them: the awareness of unlove that saw all his pampering and expense as a form of neglect. So he was glad to be rid of her.
And she thought she was glad to be living where she was because the bills were paid, and she could afford to work at the only job she felt herself competent for, the only job in which she thought her life might count for something: she was the secretary for a modern-day almshouse, a mission tucked away in a small ghetto only a fifteen-minute walk from the shining windows and reflected glory of her condo building; and she typed letters of mild explanation and appeal, vaguely desperate letters, for the lost old man who ran the mission.
Also, she thought she was glad to be living where she was because she had been able to decorate her rooms herself. This had been a slow process because she wasn’t accustomed to so much freedom, so much control over her environment; but in the end what it came to was that her bedroom, living room, and dining room were decorated completely in mirrors. Mirrors had a seductive beauty which spoke to her—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that there was virtually no angle in her apartment from which she couldn’t see herself.
That was how she knew she existed.
When she slept, her mind was empty, as devoid of dreams as a plate of glass. And when she was awake, moving through her life, she made no difference of any kind to anybody. Even the men who might have considered her beautiful or desirable seemed not to see her when they passed her on the street, so blind she was to them. Nothing around her, or in her, reflected her back to herself. Without dreams—and without any effect—she had no evidence at all that she was a material being, actually present in her world. Only her mirrors told her that she was there: that she had a face capable of expression, with brown eyes round with thwarted softness, a precise nose, and a suggestion of a cleft like a dimple in her chin; that her body was of a type praised in magazines; that both her face and body did what was required of them.
She was completely unaware of the enchantment which held her. It was, after all, nothing more than a habit of mind.
As for Geraden, he was in little better condition.
He was only an Apt to the Congery of Imagers—in other words, an apprentice—and he had been given a task which would have threatened a Master. In fact, the opinion of the Congery was sharply divided about his selection. Some of the Masters insisted this task belonged to him because all their auguring seemed to imply that he was the only possible choice, the only one among them who might succeed. Others argued that he must be given the task because he was the only one of their number who was completely and irredeemably expendable.
Those who claimed that the act of bringing any champion into being was inherently immoral were secretly considered toadies of that old dodderer, King Joyse—and anyway they were only a small minority of the Congery. Apparently, all auguries indicated that the realm couldn’t be rescued from its peril without access to a champion brought into being through Imagery. But how that translation should take place—and, indeed, who that champion should be—was less sure.
The Masters who considered Geraden expendable had good reason. After all, he wasn’t just the oldest Apt currently serving the Congery: he was the oldest person ever to keep on serving the Congery without becoming skillful enough to be a Master. Though he was only in his mid-twenties, he was old enough to appear ridiculous because he had failed to earn the chasuble of a Master.
He was so ham-handed that he couldn’t be trusted to mix sand and tinct without spilling some and destroying the proportions; so fumble-footed that he couldn’t walk through the great laborium which had been made out of the converted dungeons of Orison without tripping over the carefully arranged rods, rollers, and apparatus of the Masters. Even rabbity Master Quillon, who had surprised everyone by casting aside his self-effacement and speaking out loudly (as King Joyse might have done, if he weren’t asleep half the time) against the immorality of wrenching some champion out of his own existence in order to serve Mordant’s need—even Quillon was heard to mutter that if Geraden made the attempt and failed, the Congery would at least gain the advantage of being rid of him.
In truth, this capacity for disaster rendered moot the central ethical point. Normally, the Master who had made that particular glass could simply have opened it and brought the champion into being. But Geraden had again and again shown himself incapable of the simplest translation. He would therefore have to do exactly what King Joyse would have demanded: he would have to go into the glass to meet the champion, to appeal for the champion’s help.
His advantages were a willing heart, ready determination, and a quality of loyalty usually ascribed to puppies. His short chestnut hair curled above his strong brow; his face would have well become a king; and the training of being raised with six brothers had left him tough, brave, and little inclined to hold grievances. But his expression was marred by an almost perpetual frown of embarrassment and apology, occasioned by the petty mishaps and knowledge gone awry that harried his heels. His instinctive yearning toward the questions and potential of Imagery was so potent that his unremitting dunderheadedness left a gloom on his spirit which threatened to become permanent until the Congery elected by augury and common sense to send him on the mission to save Mordant’s future.
When that happened, he recovered his ebullience. Where he had formerly worked for the Masters with a will, he now labored in fervor, doing the things their art demanded—mixing the sand and tinct with his own hands so that the glass would welcome him, stoking the furnace with wood he cut himself, shaping the mold and reshaping it a dozen times until it exactly matched the one that had made the mirror in which the Masters watched their chosen champion, pouring the hot liquid while blood hammered like prayer in his veins, sprinkling the specially ground and blended powders of the oxidate. At every failure of attention, error, or mischance, he groaned, cursed himself, apologized to everyone in sight—and then threw himself back into the work, hope singing to him while sweat soaked his clothes and all his muscles ached.