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coarse mind of the fish trapper Tamlin had often borrowed for her training.
And as nothing about the fish trapper's existence had ever been dear to her,
the Sathid found no hold to exploit. It hes-itated, thrown off balance, and in
that instant, Taen's will predominated. Her dream-sense cleared. She saw
herself once again through Emien's eyes. He sat, limp and trembling on a bench
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in the palace courtyard. Tathagres supported his elbow, her expression sharply
concerned.
"What happened?" she demanded. "Did you faint?"
Taen guessed at once that her conflict with the Sathid had not proceeded
without effect on her brother's mind. Even as the matrix gathered itself for a
second assault, she felt the boy's painful confusion, and saw also that
Tathagres' sympathy masked deeper feelings, strung like beads on a wire of
mistrust. Yet the
Sathid allowed no scope to explore further. Like a swimmer rising for a gasp
of air, Taen gripped her brother's mind with inarguable firmness and forced
speech past his lips.
"I'm a little dizzy," the boy replied. "The guardsmen weren't very gentle when
they caught me." And before she released him, Taen cast a veil of confusion
over her brother's thoughts, that the disorientation he had experienced
following his de-parture from the King's audience chamber could not be too
clearly examined. Then as the Sathid sprang to engage her once more, she dove
down through a twisting spiral of space and time to the dockside inn of an
island village, where a familiar and boring acquaintance clad yet in reeking
oilskins stood be-neath a shuttered window, begging the favors of a buxom
tavern wench.
The Sathid sensed the fact that its control was slipping. Unprepared for the
defensive, it scrambled for strategy, but found nothing in Taen's recollection
to suggest her reason for seeking the personality of the fish trapper. Denied
any direc-tion, the matrix chose the familiar. In the same manner as it had
transformed Taen's memories of the shells and the wild-flowers and the
solstice fires, the Sathid fixed on her object of concentration and created
the illusion of its opposite.
Taen's opinion of the fish trapper's method of courtship was precisely
defined, no trial for the Sathid to encompass. And the simplistic mind of the
fish trapper provided an easy opening. With full command of a dream-reader's
skills, the matrix shaped its resistance and altered the fellow's perception.
Standing chilled but hopeful amid the frost-browned stems of last season's
herb garden, the fish trapper experienced brief disorientation. The instant
his muddled senses cleared, he dis-covered a spray of seven red roses clutched
in his callused hand. Shocked speechless by the sight of flowers in the dead
of winter, he noticed the remainder of the Sathid's illusions more
reluctantly. For nothing about him was the same.
The mildewed oilskins stood replaced by a cloak of brushed gray felt. His
hip-high, fishy-smelling boots disappeared, trans-formed into soft calf
leggings with silver buttons and embroi-dered cuffs. And the wild red snarl of
hair and whiskers which habitually buried the man's neck and most of his
features ap-peared clean and neatly trimmed, revealing an expression of
bug-eyed astonishment.
He swallowed twice and raised a trembling finger to touch one of the roses. A
thorn scraped his knuckle. Convinced the illusion was madness, he shouted
aloud in disbelief.
The noise displeased the object of his passion. Above his head the shutters
banged open and the tavern wench thrust her head out, her mouth opened for
carping complaint. With its ruse nearly ruined, the
Sathid was forced to intervene. It in-cluded the woman in its dream spell and
extravagantly added a velvet waistcoat to the fisherman's attire.
And finding the suitor beneath her window was not the tiresome pest who
brought the reek of cod into her taproom each evening, the woman yelled with
predatory delight. Here stood a clean, strapping fellow who obviously had
wealth by the look of his clothing; and roses in winter were a luxury no
island doxie could expect unless she were courted by royalty. This one never
hesitated. She smiled, hiding her broken tooth with her tongue, and swooped
over the sill to be kissed. The fish trapper's eyes went wide at the sight of
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what bounced within inches of his nose. And unable to contain her humor over
the fish trapper's ridiculous predicament, Taen burst into peals of laughter.
The Sathid recoiled in dismay. In the spectrum of human emotions, ridicule lay
furthest from the cowering dejection of defeat. And having only Taen's
upbringing within the harsh environment of Imrill
Kand on which to draw conclusions, it understood very little of humor, except
that its attempt to in-timidate had failed. Flustered, it abandoned the
structure of its attack.
Caught with her face half-smothered in the greasy beard of the fish trapper,
the tavern wench emitted a muffled yell. She tried to yank back, but the
fellow by now had thrust a fist inside her blouse. Bleached linen tore with
hardly a pretext of modesty. The woman yelled again, while her suitor stared
crestfallen at a bodice stuffed with woolen rags.
The sight reduced Taen to a quivering paroxysm of mirth. In vain the Sathid
tried to reestablish its hold; [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]