“TOTEM TO KING’S BLOOD FOUR.” The moment I said it, I knew it was wrong. I said, “No!”
Gamesmaster Gervaise tapped the stone floor with his iron-tipped staff, impatiently searching our faces for a lifted eye or for a raised hand. “No?” he echoed me.
Of the three Gamesmasters of Mertyn’s House, I liked Gervaise the best.
“When I said ‘no’, I meant the answer wasn’t quite right.” Behind me Karl Pig-face gave a sneaky gasp as he always does when he is about to put me down, but Gamesmaster Gervaise didn’t give him a chance.
“That’s correct,” he agreed. “Correct that it isn’t quite right and might be very wrong. The move is one we haven’t come across before, however, so take your time. Before you decide upon the move, always remember who you are.” He turned away from us, staff tap-tapping across the tower room to the high window which gaped across the dark bulk of Havad’s House down to River Reave where it wound like a tarnished ribbon among all the other School Houses¾each as full of students as a dog is of fleas, as Brother Chance, the cook, would say. All the sloped land between the Houses was crowded full of dwellings and shops, all humping their way up the hills to the shuttered Festival Halls, then scattering out among the School Farms which extended to the vacant land of the Edge. I searched over the Gamesmaster’s shoulder for that far, thin line of blue which marked the boundaries of the True Game.
Karl cleared his throat again, and I knew his mockery was only deferred, unless I could find an answer quickly. I wouldn’t find it by staring out at Schooltown. I turned back to the game model which hung in the air before us, swimming in icy haze. Somewhere within the model, among the game pieces which glowed in their own light or disappeared in their own shadow¾somewhere in the model was the Demesne, the focal area, the place of power where a move could be of significance. On our side, the students’ side, Demon loomed on a third level square casting a long, wing-shaped shadow. Two fanged Tragamors boxed the area to either side. Before them stood Gamesmaster Gervaise’s only visible piece, the King, casting ruddy light before him. It was King’s Blood Four, an Imperative¾which meant I had to move something. None of the battle pieces were right; it had to be something similar to Totem. Almost anything could be hiding behind the King, and Gamesmasters don’t give hints. Something similar, of like value, something…then I had it.
“Talisman,” I blurted. “Talisman to King’s Blood Four.”
“Good.” Gervaise actually smiled. “Now, tell me why!”
“Because our side can’t see what pieces may be hiding behind the King. Because Talisman is an absorptive piece, that is, it will soak up the King’s play. Totem is reflective. Totem would splash it around, we’d maybe lose some pieces…”
“Exactly. Now, students, visualize if you please. We have King, most durable of the adamants, whose blood, that is, essence, is red light. Demon, most powerful of the ephemera, whose essence is shadow. Tragamors making barriers at the sides of the Demesne. The player is a student, without power, so he plays Talisman, an absorptive piece of the lesser ephemera. Talisman is lost in play, ‘sacrificed’ as we say. The player gains nothing by this, but neither does he lose much, for with this play the Demesne is changed, and the game moves elsewhere in the purlieu.”
“But, Master,” Karl’s voice oozed from the corner. “A strong player could have played Totem. A powerful player.”
I flushed. Of course. Everyone in the room knew that, but students were not strong, not powerful, even though Karl liked to pretend he was. It was just one more of his little pricks and nibbles, like living with a hedgehog. Gamesmaster tilted his head, signifying he had heard, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he peered at the chronometer on the wall, then out the window to check where the mountain shadow fell upon the harbor, finally back to our heavily bundled little group. “So. Enough for today. Go to the fires and your supper. Some of you are half frozen.”
We were all half frozen. The models could only be controlled if they were kept ice cold, so we spent half our lives shivering in frigid aeries. I was as cold as any of them, but I wanted to let Karl get out of the way, so I went to the high window and leaned out to peer away south. There was a line of warty little islands there separating the placid harbor with its wheeling gulls from the wide, stormy lake and the interesting lands of the True Game beyond. I mumbled something. Gervaise demanded I repeat it.
“It’s boring here in Schooltown,” I repeated, shamefaced.
He didn’t answer at once but looked through me in that very discomforting way the Masters sometimes have. Finally he asked me if I had not had Gamesmaster Charnot for Cartography. I said I had.
“Then you know something of the lands of the True Game. You know of the Dragon’s Fire purlieu to the North? Yes. Well, there are a King and Queen there who decided to rear their children Outside. They wanted to be near their babies, not send them off to a distant Schooltown to be bored by old Gamesmasters. They thought to let the children learn the rules of play by observation. Of the eight sons born to that Queen, seven have been lost in play. The eighth child sleeps this night in Havad’s House nursery, sent to Schooltown at last.
“It is true that it is somewhat boring in Schooltown, and for no one more so than the Masters! But, it is also safe here, Peter. There is time to grow, and learn. If you desire no more than to be a carter or laborer or some other pawn, you may go Outside now and be one. However, after fifteen years in Mertyn’s House, you know too much to be contented as a pawn, but you won’t know enough for another ten years to be safe as anything else.”
I remarked in my most adult voice that safety wasn’t everything.
“That being the case,” he said, “you’ll be glad to help me dismantle the model.”
I bit my tongue. It would have been unthinkable to refuse, though taking the models apart is far more dangerous than putting them together. Most of us have burn scars from doing one or the other. I sighed, concentrated, picked a minor piece out of the game box at random and named it, “Talisman!” as I moved it into the Demense. It vanished in a flash of white fire. Gervaise moved a piece I couldn’t see, then the King, which released the Demon. I got one Tragamor out, then got stuck. I could not remember the sequence of moves necessary to get the other Tragamor loose.
One thing about Gervaise. He doesn’t rub it in. He just looked at me again, his expression saying that he knew what I knew. If I couldn’t get a stupid Tragamor out of the model, I wouldn’t survive very long in the True Game.
Patiently, he showed me the order of moves and then swatted me, not too gently.
“It’s only a few days until Festival, Peter. Now that you’re fifteen, you’ll find that Festivals do much to dispel boredom for boys. So might a little more study. Go to your supper.”
I galloped down the clattering stairs, past the nurseries, hearing babies crying and the unending chatter of the baby-tenders; down past the dormitories, smelling wet wool and steam from the showers; into the firewarm commons hall, thinking of what the Gamesmaster had said. It was true. Brother Chance said that only the powerful and the utterly unimportant lived long in the True Game. If you weren’t the one and didn’t want to be the other, it made sense to be a student. But it was still very dull.
At the junior tables the littlest boys were scaring each other with fairy tales about the lands of the Immutables where there was no True Game. Silly. If there weren’t any True Game, what would people do? At the high table the senior students, those about to graduate into the Game, showed more decorum, eating quietly under the watchful eyes of Gamesmaster Mertyn, King Mertyn, and Gamesmaster Armiger Charnot. Most of those over twenty had already been named: Sentinel, Herald, Dragon, Tragamor, Pursuivant, Elator. The complete list of Gamesmen was said to be thousands of titles long, but we would not study Properties and Powers in depth until we were older.
At the visitor’s table against the far wall a Sorcerer was leafing through a book as he dawdled over his food, the spiked band of his headdress glittering in the firelight. He was all alone, the only visitor, though I searched carefully for one other. My friend Yarrel was crowded in at the far end of a long table with no space near, so I took an open bench place near the door.
Across from me was Karl, his red, wet face shining slickly in the steam of the food bowls.
“Y’most got boggled up there, Peter-priss. Better stick to paper games with the littly boys.”
“Oh, shut up, sweat-face,” I told him. It didn’t do any good to be nice to Karl, or to be mean. It just didn’t matter. He was always nasty, regardless. “You wouldn’t have known either.”
“Would so. Grandsire and Dadden both told me that ‘un.”
His face split into his perpetual mocking grin, his point made. Karl was son of a Doyen, grandson of a Doyen, third generation in the School. I was a Festival Baby, born nine months after Festival, left on the doorsteps of Mertyn’s House to be taken in and educated. I might as well have been hatched by a toad. Well, I had something Karl didn’t. He could have his family name. I had something else. Not that the Masters cared whether a student was first generation or tenth. There were more foundlings in the room than there were family boys. “Sentlings,” those sent in from outside by their parents, had no more status than foundlings, but the family boys did tend to stick together. It took only a little whipping-on from someone like Karl to turn them into a hunting pack. Well, I refused to make a chase for them. Instead, I stared away down the long line of champing jaws and lax bodies. They all looked as I felt¾hungry, exhausted from the day’s cold, luxuriating in warmth, and grateful night had come.
I thought of the promised Festival. I would sew bells onto my trouser hems, stitch ribbons into the shoulder seams of my jacket, make a mask out of leather and gilt, and so clad run through the streets of Schooltown with hundreds of others dressed just as I, jingling and laughing, dancing to drum and trumpet, eating whatever we wanted. During Festival, nothing would be forbidden, nothing required, no dull studies, the Festival Halls would be opened, people would come from Outside, from the School Houses, from everywhere. Bells would ring…and ring…
The ringing was the clangor of my bowl and spoon upon the stones where I had thrust them in my sleep. The room was empty except for one lean figure between me and the fire: Mandor, Gamesmaster of Havad’s House, teeth gleaming in the fireglow.
“Well, Peter. Too tired to finish your supper?”
“I…I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Oh, I drift here and there. I’ve been watching you sleep for half an hour after bidding some beefy boy to leave you alone. What have you done to attract his enmity?”
I think I blushed. It wasn’t anything I wanted to talk about.
“Just…oh, nothing. He’s one who always picks on someone. Usually someone smaller than he is, usually a foundling.”
“Ah.” He understood. “A Flugleman. You think?”
I grinned weakly. It would be a marvelous vengeance if Karl were named Flugleman, petty tyrant, minor piece, barely higher than a pawn.
“Master Mandor, no one has yet named him that.”
“You needn’t call me Master, Peter.”
“I know.” Again, I was embarrassed. He should know some things, after all. “It’s just easier than explaining.”
“You feel you have to explain?”
“If someone heard me.”
“No one will hear you. We are alone. Still, if this place is too public, we’ll go to my room.” And he was sweeping out the door toward the tunnel which led to Havad’s House before I could say anything. I followed him, of course, even though I had sworn over and over I would not, not again.
The next morning I received a summons to see King Mertyn. It didn’t exactly surprise me, but it did shock me a little. I’d known someone was going to see me or overhear us, but each day that went by let me think maybe it wouldn’t happen after all. I hadn’t been doing anything different from what many of the boys do in the dormitories, nothing different from what I’d refused to do with Karl. Oh, true, it’s forbidden, but lots of things are forbidden, and people do them all the time, almost casually.
So, I didn’t know quite what to expect when I stood before the Gamesmaster in his cold aerie, hands in my sleeves, waiting for him to speak. I was shocked at how gentle he was.
“It is said you are spending much time with Gamesmaster Mandor of Havad’s House. That you go to his room, spend your sleep time there. Is this true?”
He was tactful, but still I blushed.
“Yes, Gamesmaster.”
“You know this is forbidden.”
“Gamesmaster, he bade me…”
“You know he is titled Prince and may bid as he chooses. But, it is still forbidden.”
I got angry then, because it wasn’t fair. “Yes. He may bid as he chooses. And I am expected to twist and tarry and try to escape him, like a pigeon flying from a hawk. I am expected to bear his displeasure, and he may bid as he chooses…”
“Ah. And have you indeed twisted arid tarried and tried? Hidden among the books of the library, perhaps? Fled sanctuary from the head of your own House? Taken minor game vows before witnesses? Have you done these things?”
I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. How could I? Prince Mandor was my friend, but more than a friend. He cared about me. He talked to me about everything, things he said he couldn’t tell anyone else. I knew everything about him; that he had not wanted to leave the True Game and teach in a Schooltown; that he hated Havad’s House, that he wanted a House of his own; that he picked me as a friend because there was no one, no one in Havad’s House he cared for. The silence between the Gamesmaster and me was becoming hostile, but I couldn’t break it.
At last he said, “I must be sure you understand, Peter. You must be aware of what you do, each choice you make which aids or prevents your mastery of the Game. You cannot stand remote from this task. You are in it. Do you know that?”
I nodded, said, “We all know that, Gamesmaster.”
“But do you perceive the reality of it? How your identity will emerge as you play, as your style becomes unique, as your method becomes clear. Gradually it will become known to the Masters¾and to you¾what you are: Prince or Sorcerer, Armiger or Tragamor, Demon or Doyen, which of the endless list you are. You must be one of them, or else go down into Schooltown and apprentice yourself to a shopkeeper as some failed students do.”
“It is said we are born to it,” I objected, wanting to stop his talk which was making me feel guilty. “Karl says he will be Doyen because father and grandfather were Doyens before him. Born to it.”
“What Karl may say or do or think is not important to you. What you are or may become should be important.” He seized me by the shoulders and turned me to stare out the tall window. “Look there. In ten years you must go out there, ready or not, willing or not. In ten years you must leave this protected town, this Schooling place. In ten years you will join the True Game.
“You do not know this, but it was I who found you, years ago, outside Mertyn’s House, a Festival Baby, a soggy lump in your bright blankets, chewing your fist. If you have anyone to stand Father to you, it is I. It may be unimportant, but there is at least this tenuous connection between us which leads me to be concerned about you,” He leaned forward to lay his face against mine, a shocking thing to do, as forbidden as anything I had ever done.
“Think, Peter. I cannot force you to be wise. Perhaps I will only frighten you, or offend you, but think. Do not put yourself in another’s hands.” Abruptly he left me there in the high room, still angry, confused, wordless.
“Do not put yourself in another’s hands.” The first rule of the game. Make alliances, yes, they told us, but do not give yourself away to become merely a pawn.
This is why they forbid us so many things, deny us so much while we are young and defenseless. I leaned on the sill of the high window where golden sunlight lay in a puddle. A line of similar color reflected from a high House across the river, Dorcan’s House, a woman’s house. I wondered if they gamed there as we did; learning, waiting for their Mistresses and peers to name them, being bored. I knew little about women. We would not study the female pieces for some years yet, but the sight of that remote house made me wonder what names they had, what name I would have.
It was said among the boys that one could sometimes tell what name one would bear by the sound of it in one’s own ears. I tried that, speaking into the silent air. “Armiger. Tragamor. Elator. Sentinel.” Nothing.
“Flugleman,” I whispered, fearfully, but there was no interior response to that, either. I had not mentioned the name I dreamed of, the one I most desired to have, for I felt that to do so would breed ill luck. Instead, I called, “Who am I?” into the morning silence. The only reply came in a spate of gull-scream from the harbor, like impersonal laughter. I told myself it didn’t matter who I was so long as I had more than a friend in Mandor. A bell tolled briefly from the town, and I knew I had missed breakfast and would be late for class. In the room below, the windows were shut for once to let the fire sizzling upon the hearth warm the room. That meant no models that day, only lectures; dull, warm words instead of icy, exciting movement. Gamesmaster Gervaise was already stalking to and fro, mumble-murmuring toward the cluster of student heads, half of them already nodding in the unaccustomed heat.
“Yesterday we evolved a King’s game,” he was saying. “Those of you who were paying attention would have noticed the sudden emergence of the Demesne from the purlieu. This sudden emergence is a frequent mark of King’s games. Kings do not signal their intentions. There is no advance ‘leakage’ of purpose. There may be a number of provocations or incursions without any response, and then, suddenly, there will be an area of significant force and intent¾a Measurable Demesne. Think how this differs from a battle game between Armigers, for instance, where the Demesne grows very gradually from the first move of a Herald or Sentinel. Just as the Demesne may emerge rapidly in a King’s game, so it may close as rapidly. Mark this rule, boys. The greater the power of the piece, the more rapid the consequence.”
He rattled his staff to wake the ones dozing.
“Note this, boys, please. If a powerful player were playing against the King’s side, the piece played might have been one of the reflective durables such as Totem, or even Herald. In that case…”
He began to drone again. He was talking about measuring, and it bored everyone to death. We’d had measuring since we came into class from the nurseries, and if any of us didn’t know how to measure a Demesne by now, it was hopeless. I looked for Yarrel. He wasn’t there, but I did see the visiting Sorcerer leaning against the back wall, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.
“Sorcerer,” I defined to myself, automatically. “Quiet glass, evoking but Unchanged by the evocation, a conduit through which power may be channeled, a vessel into which one may pour acid, wine, or fire and from which one may pour acid, wine, or fire.” I shivered. Sorcerers were very major pieces indeed, holders of the power of others, and I’d never seen or heard of one going about alone. It was very strange to have one leaning against the classroom wall, all by himself, and it gave me an itchy, curious feeling. I decided to sneak down to the kitchen and ask Brother Chance about it. He had been my best source of certain kinds of information ever since I was four and found out where he hid the cookies.
“Oh, my, yes,” he agreed, sweating in the heat of the cookfire as he gave bits of meat to the spit dog. He poked away at the Masters’ roast with a long fork. The odors were tantalizing. My mouth dropped open like a baby bird’s, and he popped a piece of the roast into it as though I had been another spit dog. “Yes, odd to have a Sorcerer wandering about loose, as one might say. Still, since King Mertyn returned from Outside to become Gamesmaster here, he has built a great reputation for Mertyn’s House. A Sorcerer might be drawn here, seeking to attach himself. Or, there are always those who seek to challenge a great reputation. It probably means no more than the fact that Festival is nigh-by, only days away, and the town is full of visitors. Even Sorcerers go about for amusement, I suppose. What is it to you, after all?”
“No one ever tells us anything,” I complained. “We never know what’s going on.”
“And why should you? Arrogant boy! What is it to you what Sorcerers do and don’t do? Ask too many questions and be played for a pawn, I always say. Keep yourself to yourself until you know what you are, that’s my advice to you, Peter. But then, you were always into things you shouldn’t have bothered with. Before you could talk, you could ask questions. Well, ask no more now. You’ll get yourself into real trouble. Here. Take this nice bit of roast and some hot bread to sop up the juices and go hide in the garden while you eat it. It’s forbidden, you know.”
Of course I knew. Everything was forbidden. Roast was forbidden to boys. As was sneaking down to the kitchens. As was challenging True Game in a Schooltown. Or during Festival. As was this, and that, and the other thing. Then, come Festival, nothing would be forbidden. In Festival, Kings could be Jongleurs, Sentinels could be Fools, men could be women and women men for all that. And Sorcerers could be ... whatever they liked. It was still confusing and unsettling, but the lovely meat juices running down my throat did much to assuage the itchy feeling of curiosity, guilt, and anger.
Late at night I lay in the moonlight with my hand curled on Mandor’s chest. It threw a leaflike shadow there which breathed as he breathed, slowly elongating as the moon fell. “There is a Sorcerer wandering about,” I murmured. “No one knows why.” Under my hand his body stiffened.
“With someone? Talking with anyone?”
I murmured sleepily, no, all alone.
“Eating with anyone? At table with anyone?”
I said, no, reading, eating by himself, just wandering about. Mandor’s graceful body relaxed.
“Probably here for the Festival,” he said. “The town is filling up, with more swarming in every day.”
“But, I thought Sorcerers were always with someone.”
He laughed, lips tickling my ear. “In theory, lovely boy, in theory. Actually, Sorcerers are much like me and you and the kitchen churl. They eat and drink and delight in fireworks and travel about to meet friends. He may be meeting old friends here.”
“Maybe.” My thought trailed off into sleepy drifting.
There had been something a little feverish about Mandor’s questions, but it did not seem to matter. I could see the moonlight reflected from his silver, serpent’s eyes, alert and questing in the dark. In the morning I remembered that alertness with some conjecture, but lessons drove it out of my head. A day or two later he sought me out to give me a gift.
“I’ve been looking for you, boy, to give you something.” He laughed at my expression, teasingly. “Go on. Open it. I may give you a gift for your first Festival. It isn’t forbidden! It isn’t even discouraged. Open it.” The box was full of ribbons, ribbons like evening sky licked with sunset, violet and scarlet, as brilliant and out of place in the gray corridor as a lily blooming in a crypt. I mumbled something about already having bought my ribbons.
“Poof,” he said. “I know what ribbons boys buy. Strips of old gowns, bought off rag pickers. No. Take these and wear them for me. I remember my first Festival, when I turned fifteen. It pleases me to give them to you, my friend…”
His voice was a caress, his hands gentle on my face, and his eyes spoke only affectionate joy. I leaned my head forward into those hands. Of course I would wear them. What else could I do? That afternoon I went to beg needle and thread from Brother Chance.
Gamesmaster Mertyn was in the kitchen, leaning against a cupboard, licking batter like a boy. I turned to go, but he beckoned me in and made me explain my business there, insisting upon seeing the ribbons when I had mumbled some explanation.
“Fabulous,” he said in a tight voice. “I have not seen their like. Well, they do you credit, Peter, and you should wear them in joy. Let me make you a small gift as well. Strip out of your jacket, and I’ll have my servant, Nitch, sew them into the seams for you.” So I was left shivering in the kitchen, clad from the waist up only in my linen. I would rather have sewn them myself, even if King Mertyn’s manservant would make a better job of it, and I said as much to Chance.
“Well, lad. The high and powerful do not always ask us what we would prefer. Isn’t that so? Follow my rule and be in-conspic-u-ous. That’s best. Least noticed is least bothered, or so I’ve always thought. Best race up to the dormitory and get into your tunic, boy, before you freeze.” Which I did, and met Yarrel there, and we two went onto the parapet to watch the Festival crowds flowing into town. The great shutters had been taken from the Festival Halls; pennants were beginning to flicker in the wind; the wooden bridge rolled like a great drum under the horses’ hooves. We saw one trio go by with much bravura, a tall man in the center in Demon’s helm with two fanged Tragamors at his sides.
Yarrel said, “See there. Those three come from Bannerwell where your particular friend, Mandor, comes from. I can tell by the horses.” Yarrel was a sending, a farrier’s son who cared more for horses than he ever would for the Game. He cared a good deal for me, too, but was not above teasing me about my particular friend. Well, I thought Yarrel would not stay in the School for ten years more. He would go seek his family and the countryside, all for the sake of horses. I asked him how he knew that Mandor had come from Bannerwell, but he could not remember. He had heard it somewhere, he supposed.
Hitch brought the jacket that evening, sniffing a little to show his disapproval of boys in general. It felt oddly stiff when I took it, and my inquiring look made Nitch sniff the louder. “There was nothing left of the lining, student. It was all fallen away to lint and shreds, so while I had the seams open, I put in a bit of new wadding.
“Don’t thank me. My own sense of the honor of Mertyn’s House would have allowed no less.” And he sniffed himself away, having spoken directly to me for the first and last time. I was glad of the new lining come morning, for we put on our Festival garb and masks while it was still cold. Yarrel smoothed the ribbons for me, saying they made a lovely fall of color. We had sewn on our bells and made our masks, and as soon as it was full light we were away, our feet pounding new thunder out of the old bridge.
Yarrel’s ribbons were all green, so I could pick him from the crowd. All the tower boys wore ribbons and bells which said, “Student here, student here, hold him harmless for he is yet young…” Thus we could thieve and trick during the time of Festival without hindrance, though it were best, said the Masters, to do it in moderation. And we did. We were immoderately moderate. We ate pork pies stolen from stalls and drank beer pilfered from booths until we were silly with it. Long chains of revelers wound through the streets like dragon tails, losing bits and adding bits as they danced to the music blaring at every street corner, drums and horns and lutes and jangles, up the hill and down again. There were Town girls and School girls and Outside girls to tease and follow and try to snuggle in corners, and in the late, late afternoon Yarrel and one of the girls went into a stable to look at the horses and were gone rather longer than necessary for any purpose I could think of. I sprawled on a pile of clean straw, grinning widely at nothing, sipping at my beer, and watching as the sun dropped behind the town and the first rockets spangled the dark.
The figure which came out of the dark was wholly strange, but the voice was perturbingly familiar. “Peter. Here you are, discovered in the midst of the multitude. Come with me and learn what Festival food should be!”
For a moment I wanted to say that I would rather wait for Yarrel, rather just lie on the straw and look at the sky, but the habit of obeying that voice was too much for me. I staggered to my feet, feeling shoddy and clumsy beside that glittering figure with its princely helm masked in sequins and gems. We went up the hill to a lanterned terrace set with tables where stepped gardens glimmering with fountains sloped down into green shade. There was wine which turned into dizzy laughter and food to make the pork pies die of shame and many sparkling gamesmen gathering out of the darkness to the table where my friend held court, the tall Demon and the Tragamors, from Bannerwell, as Yarrel had said, all drinking together until the night swirled around us in a maelstrom of light and sound.
Except that in the midst of it all, something inside me got up and walked away. It was as though Peter left Peter’s body lolling at the table while Peter’s mind went elsewhere to look down upon them all from some high, clean place. It saw the Demon standing at the top of one flight of marble stairs, one Tragamor halfway down another flight, and the other brooding on the lower terrace beside a weeping tree. Torches burning behind the Demon threw a long, wing-shaped shadow onto the walkway below where red light washed like a shallows of blood. Into that space came a lonely figure, masked but unmistakable. King Mertyn. The warm, night air turned chill as deep winter, and the sounds of Festival faded.
Mertyn looked up to see Mandor rise, to hear him call, “I challenge, King!”
The King did not raise his voice, yet I heard him as clearly as though he spoke at my ear. “So, Prince Mandor. Your message inviting me to join you did not speak of challenge.”
The Peter-who-watched stared down, impotent to move or call. Couldn’t the King see those who stood there? Demon and Tragamor, substance and shade, True Game challenged upon him here, and the very air alive with cold. King’s Blood Four, here, now, in this place and no other, a Measurable Demesne. But Mandor surely would not be so discourteous. Not now. It was Festival. Drunken-Peter reached a hand, fumbled at the Prince’s sleeve.
“No, No, Mandor. It’s not…not courteous…” The hand, my hand, was slapped away by an armored glove, struck so violently that it lay bleeding upon the table before drunken-Peter while the other me watched, watched.
The King called again. “Is it not forbidden to call challenge during Festival or in a Schooltown, Mandor? Have you not learned it so?
Answered by crowing laughter. “Many things are forbidden, Mertyn. Many things. Still, we do them.”
“True. Well, if you would have it so, Prince¾then have it so. I move.”
And from behind one of the crystal fountains which had hidden him from us came that lonely Sorcerer I had wondered at, striding into the light until he stood just behind the King, full of silent waiting, clear as glass, holding whatever terrible thing he had been given to hold.
Drunken-Peter felt Mandor stiffen, saw the armored hand clench with an audible clang. Drunken-Peter looked up to see sweat bead the Prince’s forehead, to see a vein beating beside a glaring eye. From the Sorcerer below light began to well upward, a force as impersonal as water building behind a dam. Peter-who-watched knew the force would be unleashed at the next move. Drunken-Peter knew nothing, only sat dizzy and half sick before the puddled wine and remnants of the feast as Prince Mandor stooped above him to say:
“Peter…I do not wish to be…discourteous…” The voice hummed with tension, cracked with strain. With what enormous effort did he then make it light and caressing? “Go down and tell Gamesmaster Mertyn I did but…jest. Invite him to have wine with us…” Peter-who-watched screamed silently above. Drunken-Peter staggered to his feet, struggled into a jog past the tall Demon, imagining as he went an expression of¾was it scorn? on that face below the half helm, then down the long flight of stairs toward the garden, lurching, mouth open, eyes fixed upon Gamesmaster Mertyn, onto the red-washed pave, hearing from above the cry of frustrated fury, “Talisman…to King’s Blood Four.”
Peter-above saw the power strike. Drunken-Peter cried as he fell, “No. No, Mandor. You would not be so false to me…to me…” before the darkness fell.
I woke in a tower room, a strange room, narrow windows showing me clouds driven across a gray sky. It hurt to move my head. At the bedside Chance sat, dozing, and my movement wakened him. He hrummed and hruphed himself into consciousness.
“Feel better? Well then, you wouldn’t know whether you do or not, would you? You wouldn’t even know how lucky you are.”
“I’m not…dead. I should be dead.”
“Indeed you should. Sacrificed in the play, like a pawn, dead as a pantry mouse under the claws of the cat. You would be, too, except for this.”
He picked my ragged jacket from the floor, holding it so that I could see what the rents revealed, a tracery of golden thread and silver wire, winking red eyes of tiny gems set into the circuits of stitchery in the lining.
“He bade Nitch sew this into your jacket. Just in case.”
“How did he know? I don’t understand…”
“It would be hard to understand,” said Chance, “except by one long mired in treachery. Ah. But Mertyn is not young, lad. He has seen much and studied more. He saw those ribbons, and he knew. Oh, if they’d been a few colorful tilings such as any friend might give, he’d have understood. A love gift, after all. But those you had? Nothing else like them in the town? What purpose a gift like that?”
“I thought he gave them to me so that he would know me among all the other maskers…”
“Then you saw deep, lad, and didn’t know it.”
“Did he mean to play me, even then?” I cried in my belly, a hard knot of pain there which hurt more than the fire beneath the bandages on my face and arms.
Chance shrugged, leaned to smooth my pillow. “Do you students know what you will play before the game begins? You set your pieces out in the game box, all shining, the ones you think you’ll play and the ones you hold in reserve. Maybe he brought you along to see him win. But, he wasn’t strong enough to win against the King, and he wasn’t brave enough to stand against the move and bear the play as it came, so he threw you into the game like a bone to a Fustigar.”
I think I cried then, for he said nothing more. Then I slept. Then I woke again, and it was morning, with Mertyn in the chair beside my bed.
“I am sorry you were hurt, Peter,” he said. “Perhaps you would rather be dead, but I gambled you would not feel so a year from now. Had I the skill with shields and deflectors I do with other strategy, I would have saved you these wounds.” For a long time I simply looked at him, at the gray hair falling in a tumbled lock across his forehead, at the line of his cheeks and the curve of his lips, so much like my own. There was nothing there unkindly, and yet I was angry with him. He had saved my life, and I hated him. The anger and hatred made no sense, were foolish. I would not repay him with foolishness, therefore I could not repay him.
He stared at his boots. “When you were put into play, Sorcerer struck. An Imperative. Nothing I could do. The screen in your jacket was not perfect. There was considerable splash, and you caught a little of it. Mandor caught most.”
I had to ask. “The Prince? Gamesmaster Mandor?”
“I do not know. His players carried him away. They do not know at Havad’s House. Likely he is lost in play. He had provoked me more than once, Peter, but even then I did not call for that Game.”
“I know.”
He sighed, very deeply. “I am sending you away from Mertyn’s House. Shielding you was forbidden. When we do things that are forbidden, there is always a price. For me, the price will be to lose you, for I have been fond of you, Peter.” He leaned forward and kissed me, forbidden, forbidden, forbidden. Then he went away. I did not see him again.
For me, the price was to be sent away from everything I had ever known. It was hard, though not as hard as they could have made it, for they let Yarrel and Chance go with me. We were to become an Ordo Vagorum, so Chance said. I had put myself in another’s hands, truly and completely. I had learned why that is foolish. Never mind that it is forbidden. It is foolish. They did not forbid me to play the Game¾someday.
I was no nearer to being named. There were wounds on my face which would make scars I would always carry. They said something about sending us to another House, one far away, one requiring a very long journey. I got over being angry at King Mertyn. Each morning when I woke I had tears on my face left over from brightly colored dreams, but I could not really remember what they were.
I REMEMBER ONLY ODDS AND ENDS about the time that followed, pictures, fragments as of dreams or stories of things that happened to someone else. I remember sitting in a window at harborside, water clucking against the wall beneath me, the blue-bordered curtain flapping in the wind, flap, flap, striking the bandage on my head.
The border was woven with a pattern of swans, and I bore the pain of it rather than move away. Chance and Yarrel seem to have ignored me then as they went about the business of readying us for travel. The piles of supplies in the room behind me grew larger, but I had no idea what was in them.
I remember Chance reading the let-pass which had been issued by Mertyn’s House and countersigned by the Council of Schooltown, a pass begging the indulgence of Gamesmen everywhere in letting us go by without involving us in whatever might be going on. It was only as good as the good nature of those who might read it, but Chance seemed to take some comfort from it, nonetheless. Chance spoke of Schooltown as built remote from the lands of the True Game and warded about with protections in order to “keep our study academic and didactic rather than dangerously experiential.” Yarrel mocked him for sounding pompous, and he replied that he merely quoted Gamesmaster Mertyn. That sticks in my head, oddly.
I remember Chance buying charts from a map-man, the map-man waxing poetic about the accuracy with which the Demesnes were shown and the delicacy with which the cartouches were drawn¾these being the symbols mapmakers use to show which Gamesmen may dwell in a given place. I remember boarding the Lakely Lass, a fat-bellied little ship which was to take us from the mouth of the River Reave along the north and western shores of the Gathered Waters until we came at last to Vestertown and the highroad leading south. There was a Seer standing at the rail as we came aboard, his gauze-covered face turned toward me so that I could see the glitter of his eyes beneath the painted pattern of moth wings. Then I remember huddling with Chance and Yarrel over a chart spread on the tough table, shadows scurrying across it from the hanging lantern each time the ship rolled, Chance pointing and peering and mumbling…
“Over there, east, is the Great Dragon Demesne. See the cartouche, dragon head, staff¾that’s for a warlock, a slather of spears showing he’s got Armigers. Well, we’ll miss that by a good bit.”
“How will we know the highroad is safe?” asked Yarrel in his usual practical tone.
“We’ll go mousey and shy, my boys, mousey and shy. Quiet, like so many owl shadows under the trees, making, no hijus cries or bringing on us the attentions of the powerful. Well, hope has it there are many alive in the world of the Game who have never seen the edge of it played.”
I said, “I don’t understand that.” They both stared at me in astonishment.
“Well, well, with us again are you? We’d about given you up, we had, and resolved to carry your senseless carcass the whole way to its new House without your tenancy. You don’t understand it? Why, boy, it’s ‘most the first lesson you learned.”
“I can’t remember,” I mumbled. It was true. I couldn’t.
“Why,” he said, “when you were no more than four or five, we used to play our little two-space games in the kitchen before the fire, you and me. You with your little-bit queen and king on each side, the white and the black, and your wee armigers and priests and the tiny sentinels at each end, standing high on their parapets, and me the same. We set out on the board in such array, like the greatest army of ever was in a small boy’s head. You remember that?”
I nodded that I did, wondering how it connected.
“Well, then. We’d play a bit, you and me, move by move, and maybe I’d win, or maybe by some strange cleverness,” he winked and nodded at Yarrel, “some most exceptional cleverness, you’d win. And there on the board would be the lonely pawn, perhaps, or the sentinel on his castle walk, never moved once since the game began. True?” Again, I nodded, beginning to understand.
“So. That piece was not touched by the edge of the game. It stood there and wasn’t bothered by the armigers jumping here and there or churchmen rushing up and down. It’s the same in the True Game, lad. Of course, in House they don’t talk much about the times that Gamesmen don’t play, but truth to tell much of life is spent just standing about or traveling here and there, like the little pawn at the side of the board.”
He was right. We didn’t spend any time in House learning a thing about not playing. All our time was spent in learning to play, learning what moves could be made by which Gamesmen, what powers each had, what conditions influenced the move, how to determine where the edge of a Demesne would lie.
“But even if they’re not involved in the play,” I protested, “surely they feel the power…”
“’Tis said not,” he said. “No more than in the lands of the Immutables who stand outside the Game altogether.”
“Nothing is outside the Game,” I protested once more, with rather less certainty.
“Nothing but the Immutables, Lad, and they most unquestionably are.”
“I thought them mythical. Like Ghost Pieces.”
Even saying it, I made the diagonal slash of the hand which warded evil. Chance cocked his head, his cheeks bulging in two little, hard lumps as he considered this, eyes squeezed almost shut with thought under the fluffy feathers of his gray hair.
“No, not myth. And, it may be that ghost pieces are not mythical either. In the Schooltowns many things are thought to be myths, as they may be¾in Schooltowns. Out in the purlieus, though, many things happen which we do not hear of in the towns. Who knows what may be, where we are going.”
I remarked wonderingly that I did not know where we were going, and they laughed at me. Not as though they were amused, but more as if they would as soon have tied me up and used me for fish bait but allowed laughter as a more or less innocent substitute for that. I knew from their laughter they must have told me before, more than once.
There was even slight annoyance in Yarrel’s voice as he said, “We’re sent to the School at Evenor, near the High Lakes of Tarnoch.” When he saw no comprehension, he went on, “Where the High King’s sons are schooled, ninny.” I wanted very much to inquire why we went there but was hurt enough by the laughter to give them no room for more of the same. Where had I been those last days? Well, I knew where I had been, and there was no good sense in it.
Chance patted my shoulder kindly. “That’s a’right, lad. King Mertyn said you’d suffer some from shock and from the painkillers they gave you for the burns. We’ll welcome you back whenever you arrive. Now, try a little sleep to hurry things along.”
The next thing I remember after that is the sun, broken into glittering shards by the waves, and shouts of men on the fantail where they trolled for lake sturgeon. Two enormous fish were already flopping on the deck surrounded by determined fish hackers. I knew they were after caviar, the black pearls of the Gathered Waters, famous all over the purlieus of the South, so they say. Later that day we came to a little lakeport, and there was much heaving of sacks and cartons, much jocularity and beer. We ate in a guest house, grilled fish with sour herbs, lettuces, sweet butter, and new bread.
Chance and the kitchen wife became quite friendly; I had wine; the moon broke the night into pieces through the diamond panes of the window of our cabin. And the next morning I was myself. The world had hard edges once more; there were no odd-shaped holes between one moment and the next; I began to think about where we were going and the process of getting there; I saw the lake, amazed at the extent of it. From Schooltown it had seemed small enough, limited to the south by the line of little islands which made a falsely close and comforting shore. Out here, it had no edge but the horizon, a sparkling line which loved to stay always the same distance from us.
This world edge was furred with cloud, red in the rising sun. Our Captain stared into that haze, his face tilted to one wrinkled side as he considered. “I smell wind,” he announced. “Tyeber Town is but two hours down coast. We’ll go no farther than that today.”
He was wrong. The wind came up strongly to push us farther and farther into the lake, wallowing and heaving. Then, toward evening, when the wind began to abate, there was a singing twang and a shout from the helmsman. It seemed something essential had broken and our little ship could no longer steer itself. While Chance and Yarrel slept, and I tried to, there was a clamor of feet and tools around and above us as the sailors tried to fix it. I went on to the deck to stare at the scudding clouds and saw there the bundled figure of the Seer. He turned his featureless face to me and asked, through the gauze, if I were Peter, son of Mavin. I said no, I was Peter of Mertyn’s House, without family. He stared at me long enough to make me uncomfortable, so I went back to the narrow bunk and eventual sleep.
By morning the repair effort had succeeded, and we went wallowing away in a wind more violent than before, only to sight a black sail on the quivering horizon. There were general cries of dismay.
“Pawners,” Chance cried out with the others. “Would you believe it? Coastal boats don’t get taken by pawners.”
“We’re not coastal at the moment,” I pointed out. This did not seem to comfort him. As the hours wore on the pawners drew closer across the wind-whipped waters, making our Captain give up his attempt to return to the western shore and turn instead to flee eastward before the black-sailed boat. Thus we sped away, like a fat wife running from a tiger, the slender black sail gaining upon us until the ship was within hailing distance.
“…oh,” the voice came. “…oy…ai…ame…eeter.” Chance and Yarrel looked at me in astonishment, and the Seer drew close enough to lay hand upon my arm.
“ ‘Ware, lad,” he said. “I see evil and agony in this. ‘Ware, Captain. Do not believe what these men say.”
Around us the air grew chill, and we knew the Seer had drawn power making a little Demesne where we stood. I shivered, not entirely from the cold.
“They say they want only the boy named Peter,” said the Captain. “That if we give him up, they’ll go away and leave us alone. I have little need of your warning, Gamesman. Pawners are not to be believed.”
I looked at the man with respect. He did not cringe or beg. He simply told us what the circumstances were and left it for us to respond. On impulse I took the spyglass from his hand to set it upon our pursuer. High upon her foredeck a cadaverous man leaned against the rail, another glass fixed upon us so that we looked, he and I, eye to eye. I could see the curve of his lip and the slant of black brow, altogether villainous, as why should he not be, being what he was.
I whispered to the Captain, “What may we do?”
“There’s a small fog coming up, lad. We can run on before him, for he closes slowly, waiting for it to get a bit dimmer, meantime calling back and forth with much misunderstanding. If the fates are willing, we may lose ourselves and run into the harbor of the Muties.”
“I might have known,” breathed Chance.
“Muties?” I asked.
“The Immutables, young sir. The one place that pawners might not follow. If they follow and catch us up, we are lost for we are outmanned.”
Indeed, it was so. The black-sailed ship had twice our crew, young and strong. I nodded at the Captain, telling him by this to do as he thought best. You are thinking that I was quite mad? That would be a reasonable thought. At that moment none of us asked why such a ship should come out of the wind in search of me, an unnamed foundling boy, half-schooled and wholly unsatisfactory in his own House. I did not say, “why me?” nor did Yarrel, nor Chance. It was only when the little wraiths of fog had grown into curtains and we had sneaked away among the velvet folds of mist, only when we heard a yell of fury from the other ship, bodiless and directionless in the half light, only then did I turn to Chance to say for the first time, “Why me? The Captain must have misunderstood. No one would come after me ...”
To which the Seer, who had stood by us throughout the long flight, murmured, “You, none other, Lad. And the time will come when you will know why too well…”to drift away then, as I understand Seers often do, into a silent musing from which he would not be aroused.
I did not know why then. Moreover, I could not imagine why. There was an exercise frequently called for by Gamesmasters when student attention flagged in the mid afternoon. They called it simply “imagining,” and the task was to imagine a series of moves at the end of which some extremely unlikely configuration of pieces might occur. I had never been good at it. Yarrel had been better. It was not surprising then, that by the time our pathetic fat ship waddled into the harbor of the Immutables, Yarrel had thought up at least three reasons why.
“Mandor may have sent them. If he is not dead, he may be remorseful and desirous of making it up to you.”
I thought this most unlikely. I had seen Mandor’s face when Mertyn moved against him.
“Mertyn may have sent them,” he went on. “He has decided he made a mistake to send you away and ...”
Chance hushed him, as did I. In our opinion, mine for what small count it has, Mertyn makes very few mistakes of any kind.
“Or, someone may have seen the play,” Yarrel continued, “when the power flew at Mandor, and may have thought it came from you…”
I said, “Nonsense.”
“Truly, Peter. Some kin of Mandor may have thought so and desires to take you for vengeance.”
“But I did nothing to him. It was he who tried to kill me.”
“But, they may not know that. Someone watching from a bad vantage point, they might think it was you.”
“Or someone from afar,” agreed Chance. “Someone who saw or heard about it but did not know the truth. Perhaps they think you a Wizard Emergent, and the pawners are recruiting for a True Game somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Who knows where. Somewhere. Some petty King of a small purlieu may have offered high for a Wizard. No tested Gamesman would go to a small purlieu, so a pawner would be paid to look for a student, or a boy with talent just emerging.”
“But, it was Mertyn’s Sorcerer, not me. Mertyn’s power, not mine. Power bled into that Sorcerer for days, perhaps, little by little, so that we’d not feel it going, so that he’d be ready when the moment came. It was Mertyn! Not me.”
Chance agreed, pursing his lips and cocking his head like a bird listening to bugs in the wood. “You know it, lad. I know it, and so does Yarrel, here. Someone else may not.”
I exploded, “What do I look like? Some Wizard Child?” There was a moment’s terrified silence. One does not shout about Wizards or their children if one cares about surviving, but no lightning struck at me out of the fog.
“I look like what I am. A student. No sign of talent yet. No sign of a name. No nothing. Oh, I know what they said at the house, what that fat-faced Karl always claimed, that I was Mertyn’s Festival get. Well. So much for that and that. I’m gone from Mertyn’s House with no sign of Kinging about me to rely on. Now, this is nonsense and makes me sick inside.”
Yarrel had the grace to put his arms around my shoulders and hug me, after which Chance did the same, and we stood thus for a long moment while the ship wallowed and splashed itself toward the jetty. Around us masts of little boats sketched tall brush strokes of stone gray against cloud gray, tangles of rigging creaked and jingled while a circle of wan light hung far above us like a dead lantern. It was mid-day masked as evening with dusk bells tolling somewhere in the fog, remote and high, as though from hills, and such a feeling of sadness as I had not felt before. Long minutes told me it came from the pungent soup of salt and smoke, as of grasses burning on the water meadows, a smell as sad and wonderful as youth in speaking of endings and beginnings.
Came a hail out of the shadow, and we grated against the stones. The Captain was over the rail in a moment, talking earnestly to those he met there. The plank clattered down to let us off the unquiet deck, our legs buckling and weaving like dough from the long time on the water. Howsoever, we stiffened them fast enough to gather up our gear and follow Chance up through the lanes, twisting and dodging back upon our trail until we came to a tavern. That is, I suppose they would have called it a tavern, though most they served there was tea and things made of greenery.
There was one there to meet us, their “governor,” so they said, a brown, lean man with a little silver beard tike the chin hairs of a goat. He said his name was Riddle.
“Riddle. A question with a strange answer, or an answer with strange sense, or so my daughter says. She’ll be along by and by to guide you south overland. We want no part of you, nor of those pawners who came after you.”
“They actually came into harbor after us?” Chance’s question was more curious than fearful. Well, it wasn’t him the pawners were after.
“They did so. The Demon with them is already complaining that he is blind and deaf here in our land. So, we say, let him get out of it.” He smiled sarcastically. “And let you get out as well. You Gamesmen have no Game here. Your Demons cannot read any thought but their own; your Seers cannot see further than their eyes will reach. Your Sentinels can make no fire but with steel and spark, as any child can.”
“Your land truly is outside the Game? Almost I thought Chance was jesting with us when he said it…”
“No jest. Here, no Game of any kind. Howsoever, we bear no malice, either, and will send you away as you would. South, I think you said.”
“I thank you for helping us,” I mumbled, only to be stopped by his harsh laughter.
“No help, lad. No. We want none of the nonsense of the Game, none of its blood and fire here. If you are gone, so will the pawners go. It is for our own peace, not yours.”
So I learned that people may be kind enough while not caring a rather. He sent his girl child to us after a bit, she with long, coltish legs, scarred from going bare among the brush, and hair which fell to her waist in a golden curtain. Tossa, her name was. Riddle held her by the shoulder, her eyes level with mine, unsmiling, as he spoke to Chance.
“We have none of the Festival brutishness here, sir. These your boys need be made ‘ware of that. See to it you make it clear to them, or you’ll not walk whole out of our land.”
Chance said he would make it clear, indeed, and Yarrel was already blushing that he understood. I was such an innocent then that I didn’t know what they were talking about. It made no difference to me to be guided by a girl or a lad or a crone, for that. Tossa threw her head up, like a little horse, and I thought almost to hear her whinny, but instead she told us to come after her quick as we might and made off into the true night which was gathering.
Oh, Tossa. How can I tell you of Tossa? Truly, she was only a girl, of no great mind or skill. In the world of the Game she would have been a pawn, valued perhaps for her youth or her virginity, for some of the powerful value these ephemera because they are ephemera, and perhaps she would have had no value at all to spend her life among the corn. But to me¾to me she became more than the world allows in value. Her arms reaching to feel the sun, her long-fingered hands which floated in gestures like the blossoms of trees upon least winds, her hair glinting in the sun or netting shadow at dusk, her laugh when she spoke to me, her touch upon the bandage at my head as she said, “Poor lad, so burned by the silliness abroad in the land”…
She was only teasing me, so Yarrel said, as girls tease boys, but I had no experience of that. Seven days we had, and seven nights. She became my breath, my sight, my song. I only looked at her, heard her, filled myself with the smell of her, warm, beastly, like an oven of bread. She was only a girl. I cannot make more of her than that. Yet she became the sun and the grass and the wind and my own blood running in me. I do not think she knew. If she knew, she did not care greatly. Seven days. I would not have touched her except to offer my hand in a climb. I would not have said her name but prayerfully…
Except that on the seventh dusk we came to the end of the lands which the Immutables call their own. We stood upon a tall hogback of stone, twisty trees bristling about us, looking down the long slope to a river which meandered its way through sand banks, red in the tilting sun, wide as a half-day’s march and no deeper than my toes. A tumbled ruin threw long shadows on the far side, some old town or fortification, and Chance got out the charts to see where we were. We crouched over them, aware after a moment that Tossa was not with us. We found her on a pinnacle, staring back the way we had come, frowning.
“Men on the way,” she said. “Numbers of them.” She put the glass back to her eyes and searched among the trees we had only lately left.
“Trail following. Riddle didn’t think they’d follow you!” She sounded frightened.
Chance borrowed the glass. “They’ve stopped for the night? Can’t tell. No sign of fire, but they’ve not come from under the trees yet. Ah. An Armiger, lads. And a Tragamor.”
Tossa exclaimed, “But they are powerless within the boundaries.” Still, she was frightened.
Chance nodded. “Yes, but they have blades and spears and fustigars to smell us out. They have more strength than we. And the boundaries are too close. The river marks them, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. Yarrel was thinking, his face knotted.
“Let the girl go away to the side,” he suggested, “while we take to the river. They aren’t following her. The river will confuse the fustigars. They have no Seer with them? No Pursuivant?”
Chance told him he saw none, but Tossa would have none of it. She had been sent to guide us out, and she would guide us out. “We will all go by the river, quickly, before they can get up here to see which way we went.”
Strangely, as we went down the hogback and into the river, I began to think of the boundaries and what they meant to the people who lived there. They were all pawns here, I thought, with no strength in them except their arms and their wits. In this land the Armiger could not rise into the air like a hawk on the wind; the Tragamor could not move the stones beneath our feet so that we stumbled and fell. In this land, we were almost their equals; no Chill Demesne would grow around us, blooming like a hideous flower with us at its center. Almost, I smiled. Now I recoil when I remember that almost smile, that sudden, unconsidered belief that we and those who followed were on equal footing. We galloped down the slope and into the river as dusk came, almost gaily, Chance muttering that we would run down the river then cut back into the Immutable land. The water splattered up beneath our feet; Tossa reached out to seize my hand in hers and hasten me along. When she fell, I thought she had stumbled. I mocked her clumsiness, teasingly, and only when I had prodded her impatiently with a foot did I see the feathered shaft protruding from her back. Then I screamed, the sound hovering in the air around us like a smell. Chance came and lifted her and there was no more smiling as we raced down that stream for our lives, angling away into a creek which fed it at a curve of the river, praying those who followed would go on down the flow rather than up the little stream, running, running, until at last we came to earth among trees in a swampy place, Tossa beside us, barely breathing.
I could feel the shaft in me, through the lung, feel the bubbling breath, the slow well of blood into my nostrils, the burning pain of it as though it were hot iron. I sobbed with it, clutching at my own chest until Chance shook me silent.
“Be still,” he hissed at me. “You are not hurt. Be still or we are dead.”
The pain was still there, but I knew then that it was not from the arrow but from some other hurt. I hurt because Tossa hurt; it was as though I were she. There was no reason for this. I didn’t even blame it upon “love,” for I had loved Mandor and had never felt his hurts as my own. This spun in my head as I gulped hot tears into my throat and choked upon them, smothering sound. Away to the south we could hear the baying of the fustigars, a dwindling cacophony following the river away, toward the border. The soil we lay on was wet and cold; the smell of rot and fungus was heavy. I heard Yarrel ask, “Is she dead?” and Chance reply that she breathed, but barely.
“A Healer,” I said. “Chance, I must find a Healer. Where?”
He muttered something I couldn’t hear, so I shook him, demanding once again. “Where? I’ve got to find someone…”
“That ruin,” he gargled. “Back where we came into the river. The chart showed a hand there, a hand, an orb, and a trumpet…” A hand was the symbol for Healer. The orb betokened a Priest, and the trumpet a Herald.
“Let me go!”‘ Yarrel was already dropping his pack. I thrust him back onto the earth beside her.
“Help her if you can. I cannot. I hurt too much. I must go or I’ll die. They won’t be looking for one person, alone…”
“Your bandages,” Yarrel said. “One glimpse of you and the pawners will know.”
“They will not,” I hissed. I ripped the pad of gauze from my head and dropped it into the muddy water, sloshing it about before unwinding it to spiral it around my head, covering my face. “Your cloak,” I demanded of Chance, taking it from him before he could object.
“Oh, High King of the Game,” he protested, “take it off, Peter. Of all forbidden things, this is most forbidden.”
“And still, we do them,” I quoted at him furiously. “Quickly, give me soot from the lantern for the face…”
He fumbled fingers into the chimney of the dark lantern, cursing as he burned them on the hot glass, cursing again as he drew sooty fingers across the muddied gauze to make the eyes, nose, and slitted mouth shape of a Necromancer. “Oh, by the cold but you’re doing a terrible thing.”
I turned from them, from her where she lay so helpless beside them, telling them to bring her near the river and across it as soon as they saw me return. It would do no good to bring a Healer into the land of the Immutables. Then I ran, not knowing that I ran, not thinking of anything except the hand in the ruins, the Healer there.
The waters of the river fountained beneath my feet. The hard meadow of the farther shore fled behind me until the ruins loomed close on their rocky hill. I felt a chill, and with the chill came a measure of sanity which said, “You will do her no good if you are caught in some Game, no good if you are hasty.” The truth of that stopped me. Shuddering, I circled the hill to measure the Demesne, keeping the chill upon my right hand, six hundred paces, more or less. A small Demesne, someone at the center of it pulling only so much power as it might take to rise into the air (as Heralds can) to spy out the land around. I crept toward the ruin’s center, searching the skyline from moment to moment. Shattered corridors led into roofless rooms, and at last I found a wall with slitted windows overlooking a courtyard. Of the three gathered there I saw only the Healer at first, her pale robes spread upon the mossy stones, half in shadow, half in light from the fiery pillar which rose and fell in a languorous dance. Beside it stood a Priestess, gesturing in time with the firelight. One glance was enough to tell me what she was, for such beauty and glamor are unreal, passing all natural loveliness. The Herald sat near her, bright tabard gleaming, raising and lowering his finger to make the fire move. They were within sound of my breath, and it seemed to me they must have heard my heart. Close as they were, it would do me no good unless I could get the Healer away from them and to the river’s side.
Even as I struggled to find a plan, the fire sank from its dancing column into an ordinary blaze, a small campfire. The Priestess sighed, complaining, “So I build a fiery web, Borold, with none to see and admire…”
He rose to put a cloak around her shoulders, stroking her arms gently. “I admire, Dazzle. Always…”
The Healer moved in a gesture of exasperation. “You have only made the place cold. Why can’t you be content to leave well enough alone and give up these children’s tricks?”
The Herald objected. “Give over, Silkhands. She has made a pillar of fire and I have made it dance. Together we have pulled no more power than you might use to heal a sparrow. Why should she not do something for her own amusement?”
“When has she ever done anything not for her own amusement?” the Healer countered. “We are sent here to sit like badgers upon an earth because Dazzle insisted upon amusement.”
When the Priestess turned toward her I saw again that matchless face, curled now into spiteful mockery, “You will not be content until you destroy me, Healer-maid. You are disloyal to me now as always, hating and jealous of my following.” The woman preened in the firelight, stretching like a cat in satisfied self-absorption.
“We will not be here long, only until Himaggery decides that he misses me, which he will, and sends word for me to return to the Bright Demesne. The Wizard will bring us back soon.”
“I have never been disloyal,” said the Healer in a low voice, full of strain. Though I could not see her face, I thought she was fighting tears. “But I would rather live where I can use my skills to heal. Here I can do nothing, nothing.”
I thought I would give her something to do as I turned from the slit window to approach them from below. I had gone only a pace or two before turning back in a fit of inspiration to strip off my white shirt and hang it within the window. The breeze moved it slightly there, pale in the firelight.
Once out of the ruin and on the plain below them, I put my hands to my mouth to make that echoing ghost call with which we boys had frightened each other in the attics of Mertyn’s House.
As I approached the tumulus the Herald rose above it to stand high upon the air. He called, “Who comes?” but I did not answer. I knew what he saw; black cloak, skull face, a Necromancer. I spread the cloak in a batwinged salute and called in the deepest voice I could make.
“One comes, Herald, bringing a message from a Wizard to one known as Silkhands, the Healer…”
There was a little fall of rubble as the Priestess and the Healer climbed onto the piled stone beneath him. I kept eyes unfocused, unseeing of that face, but still I could feel the pull of her eyes. Priests have that quality, and Kings, and Princes¾by some called “follow-me,” and by others “beguilement.” Dazzle had more of it than any I had seen, so I did not look her in the face. She called.
“Come, Necromancer, closer that we may hear this message you bring in comfort…”
“Nay, Godspeaker. Let her whom I have named come with me to hear the words of Himaggery.” The Healer struggled down the pile toward me. When she was close, I whispered, “You are to come with me, Healer, to do a thing the Wizard desires.” She followed me as I turned away, but the Priestess was not of a mind to let us go.
“Oh, come up to me, Necromancer, that I may judge whether this is a true message…”
Her voice was sweet, sweet as honey, a charm and an enchantment. Almost I turned before I thought. The three of them had no power of far-seeing among them, but the disguise would not stand close inspection, as Chance had well known. I would have to try the trick I had planned. I turned again toward her where she stood above me on the stones.
“My Master, who is your Master also, has warned me that you are not always quick to do his will. Therefore, he has suggested I take the time, if you are troublesome, to show you your dead…”
I gestured high, letting the sleeve fall away from my pale arm as I pointed at the far slit window behind them. Luck was with me. As they turned, the breeze caught my shirt and moved it as though something living or undead moved among the stones. Once again I gave the ghost call. The Priestess shuddered. I could see it from where I stood and knew then that she was one of those with reason to fear her dead. I led Silkhands away. From behind came a frantic call.
“The shade you have raised remains, Necromancer. Will you not remove it?”
“The shade remains only for a time, Godspeaker. Go to your rest. Come morrow it will be gone.” As it would be. I had no intention of letting them discover the trick.
The Healer followed me, mute, until we drew near the river. I gestured her ahead to the place where Yarrel and Chance waited, a dark blot upon the earth between them. She ran toward them. I tried to say something to her, command her, but my body had gone dead, as though all the energy which had forced me to the ruin and into the masquerade had drained away leaving me empty. I felt horror, breathlessness, an aching void, then fell, hearing as I did so the Healer’s voice crying:
“She is dead, dead.”
I WOKE WITH THE HEALER’S HANDS ON MY CHEST, my heart beating as though within them. Some mysterious message seemed to move between my eyes and hers, shadowed against the dawn sky.
She said, “Well, this one lives, and he is no Necromancer. Nor, I’ll warrant, was it any Wizard’s message which sent you to me. Why did you bring me to her?” She gestured with her chin to the place Tossa lay, tight wrapped in her own cloak, a package, nothing more.
“I could not have healed her even had she been alive when I came. She is an Immutable, not open to healing.”
I struggled away from her hands. “I thought, if we brought her outside their land…”
“No, no,” she said impatiently, with a gesture of tired exasperation which I was to see often. “No. It is something they carry in them, as we carry our talents in us. Not all of them have it, but this one was armored against any such as I.”
“You could tell? Even with her dead?”
“Newly dead. If I had had great strength, and if she had not been what she was¾well, it might have been done. But, she was what she was. And you are what you are, which is not a Necromancer from Himaggery’s Demesne.”
Chance stepped forward to offer her a cup of tea, his old head cocked to one side like that of a disheveled bird, eyes curious as a crow’s. He made explanation and apology. I felt no pride at all in the trick I’d managed, but the Healer seemed slightly amused by it, in a weary way. I would have been amused, perhaps, if it had worked. As it was, I felt only empty.
“What happened to me?” I asked.
“It was as though you had been the girl herself,” the Healer answered. “Arrow shot, heart wounded. But, there was no mark on you. Were you close kin? No, of course not. Stupid of me. She was an Immutable. What was she to you?”
I didn’t answer for I didn’t know. The moment passed. What had Tossa been to me? Chance murmured something by way of identification of her, a guide, a mere acquaintance, daughter of the governor of the Immutables (at which Silkhands drew breath). What had she been to me? I was terrified, for I could remember what she had been but felt nothing at all, nothing. The Healer caught my look and laid her hands upon me. Then it was all back, the agony of loss, the terror of death.
“Will you bear it?” she asked. “Or, shall I heal it?” In that time it seemed an ultimate horror that I could be healed of the pain while Tossa lay unmourned. I said:
“Let me bear it¾if I can.” I was not certain I could. They carried her body back to the edge of the trees, wrapped well against birds and beasts, and buried it under a cairn, leaving a message there to her father for those who would come searching. Chance trembled at the thought of that man’s anger following us; the Immutables were said to be terrible in wrath. We went off to the ruins as I wept and ached and drew breaths like knives into me. She had been a girl, only a girl. She had been. She was not. I could not understand a world in which this could be true and the pain of it so real. I did not know her at all; I was her only mourner. This was more horrible than her death.
The Healer called out as we approached the ruins. While the others circled it, I went through the tumbled stones to retrieve my shirt. The trickery had been laid bare, but it was a good shirt and I had no intention of leaving it there. The route I had taken on the night before eluded me; I came at the slit windows from a different direction. There was a sharp, premonitory creak, then the earth opened beneath me to dump me unceremoniously into a dusty pit. My head hit the floor with a thump. When I stood up, dazed, it was to find myself in a kind of cellar or lower room which smelled of dust and rats. The walls were lined with slivered remnants of shelves and rotten books. Something small turned under my foot. I picked it up, saw another, then another, stooped to gather them up. They were tiny¾no longer than my littlest finger¾game pieces carved from bone or wood, delicate as lace, unharmed by time. Pieces of a rotten game board lay beneath them, and a tiny book. I gathered it up as well, even as I heard Chance calling from above.
I wondered afterward why I had moved so quickly to hide them and put them away in my belt pouch. It would have been more natural to call out, to show them as a prize. Later I thought it was because of the way we had lived in the School House. There had never been any privacy, anything of one’s own. There were few secrets, virtually no private belongings. Secret things were wonderful things, and these were truly marvelous, so I gathered them as a squirrel does nuts, hiding them as quickly. They were not paying any attention to me at any rate, for the Healer had attracted it all. She had found all her belongings gone, Borold and Dazzle gone, and was in full lament.
“My clothes,” she wailed. “My boots. My box of herbs. Everything. Why would they do that?”
“Probably because they thought they were following you,” said Yarrel, sensibly. “To that Wizard Peter pretended the message came from…”
“Oh, by the ice and the wind and the seven hells,” she said. “They would be just such fools as to do that.” Then she fell silent and we didn’t find out for some time what that was all about. There was nothing for us to do but travel together, for the Bright Demesne, of the Wizard Himaggery lay south, the way we were going.
We slept before starting out, I crying myself to sleep, hurting because of Tossa, saying to myself, “This is what love is.” It was not love, not at all, but I did not know that then. When we woke it was with a high riding moon to light our way south.
During the way south I learned something more of women. Yarrel taught me. He did not see the Healer as anything mysterious or strange. He saw her as a woman and treated her, so far as I could see, as he had treated Tossa, with a certain teasing respect which had much laughter in it. The first village we came to he insisted we buy her a pagne to wear, she having nothing with her but the one dress and light robe, both becoming raggedy from the road. Once the people saw a Healer was come, however, nothing would do but that they stoke the oven in the market place and bring the sick to lie about it. She, all glittering-eyed and distant, walked among them touching this one and that until, when she was finished, most had risen on their feet and the oven was cooled no warmer than my hand from her draw of power from it. They paid her well, and she insisted on repaying us for the pagne, though I argued it was small pay for healing me.
“I have your company,” she said simply, for once not going on like a coven of crows gabbing all at once. She was tired. I could see it in her face. “It is good to have company on the road, even pawns and boys, if you take no offense at that.”
We told her we were not offended by truth. Later, when we stopped for the night, she wrapped herself in the bright pagne and combed out her hair. I thought once again of birds, but this time of the clamorous, unpredictable parrots with their sudden laughter and wise eyes. Her hair was the color of silver wood ash, and her eyes were green as leaves in her pale, oval face. Chance was once more gloating over his charts, and she leaned on his shoulder to trace our way south among the hills.
“Dazzle has gone to the Bright Demesne,” she said. “She and Borold, thinking Himaggery sent for me. Oh, she will be a jealous witch, Dazzle, thinking anyone has sent for me.” She sounded very tired. I thought of Dazzle’s beauty and shivered. How could one such as that be jealous of anyone? Silkhands went on. “She believes she loves him, you see, the Wizard. But Himaggery is proof against her, and it drives her to excess. Ah, well, we will get there soon after her and no doubt bring her away again. She will be very angry.”
Yarrel asked, “Why do you care? Are you her leman?”
“Half sister, rather. Our father was the same, but she was born to another mother than Borold’s and mine. I am oldest, by six years.”
“Why were you sent away?”
“Because Dazzle stirs trouble as a cook stirs soup. You called her Godspeaker, Priestess, but she is no Priestess. She is a witch, as uncontrollable as storm.”
“Where is this Bright Demesne?” asked Chance. “I can’t find it here what should be so sizeable.” She helped him search, but there was no sign of it upon the chart. Chance puffed his cheeks in complaint.
“No trust, lads, that’s what it comes to. Pay gold, or healing, or laughter if you’re a clown, and get nothing but tricks and lies. This chart was said to be complete, and look at it¾some old thing dusted off and sold with pretense.” He folded it sadly, stroking the parchment with a calloused hand. I knew how he felt. It was a godlike feeling to spread the charts and trace one’s way softly along a crease of hill, imagining the way, learning the names and aspects of the land. It was less wonderful if one knew that the charts lied. Then it was only pretend, not true game.
That night I lay awake after the others slept, mazed by a lucific moon, and set out the tiny Gamesmen I had found. For the first time I noted they were not like those I had played with as a child. Of the white pieces, the tallest was a Queen, but there was no King beside her. Instead there was a white Healer. There were two Seers, two Armigers, two Sentinels, but no Churchmen. Of the black pieces the tallest was a Necromancer. There was a Sorcerer almost as tall, then two Tragamors, two Elators, two Demons. I could not tell what the little men were, crouchy and fuzzed in the moonlight. In the first morning light I looked again. They were crouchy indeed, Shapeshifters all, of the same ilk but differing in detail. Each piece had the same fascination in the hand I had felt when I first held them. Unwillingly, I put them away, each wrapped in a scrap of cloth and buried under my needfuls.
Traveling south, sun and rain, forest and meadow, Silkhand’s chatter, Yarrel’s silences, Chance’s wry commentary upon the world, no chill, no menace. Silkhands said that Himaggery had taken much of the land around Lake Yost and assembled thousands of Gamesmen there. Chance laughed, but she claimed it was true. How so many could find power to exist, she did not say. We did not ask. It was only a tall tale, we thought. Hum of bees, quiet sough of wind. Then, suddenly, as we climbed a high ridge of stone, a cold gust from above, chill as winter, without warning. We ran for overhanging stone and peered from beneath it like badgers.
“Dragon,” whispered Yarrel. I saw it then, planing across the valley beyond, great wings outspread, long neck stretched like an arrow, tail behind, straight as a spear. Fire bloomed around its jaws. I was the first to see the other, higher, diving out of the sun. It was something I had never seen before.
“Cold Drake,” someone said in a hiss. The cold intensified. We huddled close, pulling clothing from the packs to wrap with our blankets around us, to keep our heat in. Neither of the Gamesmen knew we were there or cared. They would soak our heat for their play just as they would that from the sun-hot stones. All we could do was wait in the shelter of the stones, praying they would fly on before it grew too cold for us.
I wondered as we lay there how many thousands of pawns¾and lesser Gamesmen, too¾had died thus, lying helpless under stones or trees or in their houses while Gamesmen drew their heat away, slow degree by slow degree, until they fell into that last sleep. We had seen bones here and there as we traveled, littering the roadside, heaped around the ruins where Silkhands had been, all those who had stayed quiet and cold while Gamesmen played. Even so, it was a wondrous thing to watch the Dragon and the Cold Drake fight. The one was all sinuous movement, twisting coil, black on black with frosty breath; the other all arrow darting, climb and dive, amber on gold with the breath of fire. As it grew colder around us, it grew more difficult for the Gamesmen to draw heat as well, and their movement slowed. We kept expecting them to move away, over the sunwarmed plains, but they did not. We knew then that they dueled, that they had set the boundaries of their Game and would not leave them until one or both were dead.
The end came as suddenly as the beginning. The Cold Drake caught the Dragon full in a looping coil which tightened, tightened. The Dragon screamed. They fell together, linked, faster and faster, wings unmoving, a blur in the clear air. Then they were upon the plain before us, lost in a stirred cloud of frigid dust which erupted into the wind and was gone. The Healer sobbed and moved into the open, stumbling toward those distant bodies, we after her. She paused at one body only a moment, then went on to the other. He breathed feebly, back in his own form, a slender youth looking scarcely older than I, pale of skin with black hair and the long ears of the southern people.
He tried to focus his agonized gaze upon the Healer, said “Healer…please…” Silkhands reached out as though to touch him then turned away.
“Too cold,” she said. “Oh, there is nothing to make into a fire. If we could have fire swiftly…” We all looked around, but there was nothing to burn upon the hard-packed earth. The youth gave a bubbling cry and was silent. I turned to find Silkhands weeping.
“Too cold, always too cold and I can do nothing. No power, no way to get power. Oh, Lords of the seven hells, but I wish you were a Tragamor…” She sobbed upon Chance’s chest like a child. Looking toward the far line of forest I, too, wished I were a Tragamor, though with the cold as it was I doubted even a Tragamor could have ported wood from that forest in time. My eyes caught a glitter there; we all stared at the procession which came. It was not lengthy but puissant, the tall figure on the high red horse most of all. I knew him by the fur-collared robe embroidered with moonstar signs, even before Silkhands sank to her knees murmuring:
“The Wizard Himaggery.” My eyes did not stay long on the Wizard, for behind him rode one whose face I well remembered, that pawner from the Gathered Waters who had sought me, followed me. Well, I thought, run as we might he had found me. Blood gathered behind my eyes and I launched myself at him, shouting.
The next thing I knew I was on the ground with two men sitting on me. There had been a sudden burst of heat from someone in the train, a Sorcerer most like. The Elators sitting on me had not needed it, however. They had needed only their own strength and my clumsiness. The Wizard sounded amused.
“And what occasions this animosity, my good pawner? Is this the one you have been telling me about?”
There was a mumbled reply before the Wizard spoke again. “Let him up, but keep your eyes on him. This is no time nor place to sort out such matters. We must look upon the bodies of our foolish young.” And with that he rode forward, almost over me where I struggled with the Elators, unwilling to give up. He stopped by the youth’s body and spoke to Silkhands. A Sorcerer rode out of the train and offered her his hand so that she might draw upon his stored power if she would. She shook her head. Too late. The Wizard turned his mount and came toward us again.
“Oh, stop squirming, boy. You will not be dealt with unfairly,” and rode away toward the forest. There were extra horses, evidently brought in the hope the duelers could ride home. Chance and Silkhands had one, Yarrel and I the other. Behind us the bodies of the duelers rose into the air to float behind us, a Tragamor riding before each with a Sorcerer between. Even irritated as I was, I admired the crisp way it was done, each knowing what to do and doing it. Yarrel did not notice. His face was glorious. There would never be anything in the world as important to Yarrel as horses.
The Gamesman who rode beside me, one I could not identify¾gold tunic embroidered with cobweb pattern, magpie helm and gray cloak¾began to talk of the ones who floated behind.
“Young Yvery and even younger Yniod,” he said, “both having conceived a passion for the Seer, Yillen of Pouws, and having studied the madness of courtly love (much studied by them and some other few fools in Himaggery’s realm) did each claim the other had insulted the lady. She, having been in trance this seven month, could not intervene. So was challenge uttered, and by none could they be dissuaded. Himaggery demands that all may have free choice, and so did this occur.”
I found my voice somewhere beneath my giblets and got it out. “Which of them did the Seer love?”
“Neither. She knew neither of them. They had only seen her sleeping.”
“What is this courtly love you speak of?”
The Gamesman gestured to Silkhands. “Ask your Healer friend, she knows.”
Silkhands turned a miserable, shamed face to me. “Oh, yes, the Rancelman is right. I know. It is some factitious wickedness which Dazzle thought up and spread among the impressionable young. She may have read of it in some ancient book or come upon it in amusements for herself, and none will do unless there is combat and ill feeling. That is why we were banished to the ruin. Three times we have lived in the Bright Demesne, and each time Dazzle has started up some such foolishness. It does nothing but cause trouble, dueling, death, stupidity. Each time Himaggery has sent her away…”
“Her? Not you?”
“No.” She seemed almost angry that I had asked. “Not I. Not Borold. But we cannot let her live alone…”
“I would,” snorted Yarrel. Of course, he had not seen Dazzle. “So long as she has you to comfort her, why should she mend her behavior?”
“So says Himaggery,” she admitted. “But this last thing must have started ages ago. Dazzle could not have begun any new mischief. There has not been time.”
I mumbled something intended for comfort. We went on through the fringe of forest and out into the clear, blue shining of the lake’s edge. For a moment I did not understand what I saw rising from the earth. Fogs spiraled from steaming springs which fed the waters. The town was scattered among these mists, and I knew why Himaggery had taken the Lake of Yost and how it was that thousands could gather here.
“There is power here,” I said as I felt the heat.
“Yes,” Silkhands agreed. “There is plenty of power here, and not much is needed here. There is none out there, and that is where it is always needed. It is never here I need it!” Her voice rose in a pained cry.
I said, “It hurts you! When you need to heal and have not the power, it hurts you!” The idea was quite new to me.
“Yes. That is true for all Healers. And for all Seers, and all Demons, too. We who are the children of Gamesmother Didir have this pain.”
She was speaking of the legendary grandmother of our race. Didir was progenitress of the mental powers, Gamesfather Tamor the progenitor of the material ones. Religion has it that all of us are descended from these two. I was not thinking so much of that, however, as of the idea of pain. When Tossa had been wounded, I had felt her pain, felt her death. When Silkhands had felt pain, I, too, had felt it. What did this pattern mean? Understand, for boys of my age¾and, I suppose, for girls too, though I had no way of knowing¾the most important thing is to know what name, what talent we will have. We search for signs of it, hints, even for auspices. We beg Seers to look ahead for us (they never will, it is forbidden). What did this mean? Was I a Demon emergent, reading the feelings of others? But, no, this was foolishness. Tossa could not have been read in this fashion. It spun in my head endlessly, so I tried not to think about it.
So, we were given food and water and proper amenities and brushed up to be presented to Himaggery in his audience hall as soon as might be. I heard water under the floor, the warmth of the stones telling their own tale of power. Dazzle was there, and the pawner. When they had been heard, Chance took our let-pass from his breast and gave it to the Wizard who perused it.
“All right, lad,” the Wizard said. “You’ve heard the pawner say he was hired to find you, hired by a Demon and paid well for his work. You’ve heard Silkhands say you played a forbidden game to get a Healer to a wounded Immutable, something anyone could have told you wouldn’t work. I’ve heard complaining from Dazzle, as usual, but you merit no punishment on that account. Now, let me hear from you. Why does this Demon want you?”
“I do not know, sir. I have met only one Demon in my life, at the last Festival, and I don’t even remember his name.”
“Well, easy tested by a Demon of my own.” He gestured to a tall Demon who stood at his left, and that one fixed his eyes upon me. There was a tickling in my head, a fleeting kaleidoscope of colors and smells, quickly gone. The Demon shook his head and said to Himaggery:
“He speaks only truth. He is only what he seems, a student, a boy, nothing more.”
“Ah. So. Well then, why did you try to kill this pawner? He was, after all, in my protection.”
“He killed Tossa,” I grated. “He killed her or had her killed. What had she done to him? Nothing. Nothing! And he killed her.”
The pawner squirmed. “An accident, Lord. A…misunderstanding. It was not my intent to kill anyone, but one of the men in my train…he was caught up in he chase…”
The Wizard said, “It seems to be explained. The boy has committed no wrong except for a bit of forbidden disguise. The pawner, however, has killed the governor’s daughter, an Immutable. It is likely he won’t live long to regret that. We’ll cry you to them, pawner. I’ll not have blame laid on me or mine.”
“But, Lord…”
“Be still. If you anger me more, I’ll give you to them rather than merely cry you to them. As for you, Silkhands, you’ve done nothing ill except exercise poor choice in certain matters we’ve discussed before. And Dazzle is with us again ...”
He had stepped close to me as he spoke, putting his hand on my shoulder. I felt the solid weight of it, smelled the mixed leather and herb scent of his clothing, and followed his glance to the window where Dazzle was posing like some exotic bird or silken cat. I saw her, then saw her again and turned sick with horror. One eye socket gaped empty. One side of her nose was gone, eaten away. From her jaw jagged splinters of bone and tooth jabbed through multiple scars, all as though one half of her face had been chewed away by some monster. I choked. Himaggery removed his hand, and the horror was abruptly gone. I reached out to him for support, and the vision returned. He saw the sick terror on my face, stooped toward me to whisper, “You saw?” then drew away, eyes narrowed in thought as I nodded, unable to speak.
“Say nothing,” he whispered. “Be still.” He caught curious glances around us. “Tell them I am forbidding you to pretend to Necromancy.” Then he left me tottering there. I could not leave the room quickly enough to suit me. Even in my own room, I retched and was sick. When I had settled myself somewhat, I went out onto the little balcony and sat there, hunched against the wall, trying not to think of anything. I saw the pawner in the courtyard below me with some other men. In a few moments they mounted and rode away, turning south along the lake shore. At the moment it meant nothing to me. Later I was to wonder, why south? The Gathered Waters and the pawner’s ship lay north of us. I had not long to brood over anything, for Silkhands came to fetch me to the Wizard.
We found him in his own rooms, out of dress, Wizardly costume laid aside in favor of a soft shirt and trousers which could have clad anyone. He was examining a fruit tree in the enclosed garden.
“They will not ordinarily grow this far north,” he told us. “Except that they find eternal summer among these mists. We have fruit when others have none, power when others have none. If we can find our way into the heart of life¾within the Game or, likely, out of it¾we may build a great people from this place.”
I think I started at this heresy, not sure I wanted to hear it, but he pretended not to notice, grinning at me over his beard, blue eyes glittering with humor and understanding. He went on.
“And you, Healer. Are you ready to admit that your presence does nothing to help Dazzle, indeed, only makes her worse?”
“Lord, certainly I make her no better.”
“Did you know this lad saw her?” Silkhands turned a shocked face to mine, was convinced by the expression she found there.
“But how? None can. Except you, Lord, and I.”
“He can,” said Himaggery, “though I cannot think why. Well, life is full of such mysteries, but it were better for you, boy, if you forgot this one. Am I right that you saw through my eyes? I thought so. Well then, it may be emerging talent of some kind, and no point in worrying about it.”
“How did she…why is she…I…” I couldn’t get the question out.
“Why is she a hideously maimed person? Why does no one know it? Why? Ah, boy, it’s one of those mysteries I spoke of. But, I don’t think Silkhands will mind my telling you.” He looked to her for permission, and she nodded, eyes fixed upon her twisting hands. He patted her shoulder and told me the story. “There were two children of Fuller the Seer and his loved wife, a Tragamor woman out of the east: Silkhands, here, and her full brother, Borold, born two years apart. When they were still children, their mother died, and Finler took another woman, a Tragamor from Guiles whose name was Tilde. They had a daughter, some six years younger than Silkhands... Dazzle.
“Silkhands and Borold manifested talent quite young, when they were about fifteen. Silkhands, being a Healer, was much respected in the place they lived as Healers often are, whether they merit it or not, though from everything I have learned I would judge that Silkhands merited it more than most. Borold showed flying early, and then moving, and was named Sentinel. Dazzle was a beauty, even as a tiny thing, and grew more beautiful than any in the place had ever seen. But she was not fond of Silkhands…”
“It was Tilde’s fault, somewhat,” interjected Silkhands. “She resented my mother even though mother was long dead. She was jealous of her reputation in the town, and of the fact that I, her daughter, was a Healer. We cannot blame Dazzle…”
“Be that as it may,” the Wizard went on, “Dazzle deeply resented her half sister. And, when at last she manifested a talent of her own, it was along the lines she had first laid down, glamor, beguilement, powerholding, and fire¾the measure of a Priestess or Witch. Because she was a power-holder, Silkhands sought her help in healing, for Dazzle could have carried power with which Silkhands could have healed many…”
“She wouldn’t,” cried Silkhands. “She would not do it. She would not carry power for anything except her own amusement and delight. If there were sick, she would turn away saying, ‘They are nothing to me. They stink, besides. It is better if they die.’”
The Wizard nodded. “So. And Borold fell under the spell of the girl and turned away from Silkhands and would not help her in healing, though at one time he had carried her through the air in search of the sick and wounded. He stopped that and flew only for Dazzle’s amusement.”
“Then came a Game,” said Silkhands in a monotone, as though reciting scripture. “A very great Game, the armies of it massing near the place we lived. And the Tragamors of that Game rained stones upon the opposing armies directed by the Seers and Demons of that Game, but something went awry and the stones fell upon the town and upon our house and upon us.
“And my father died, at once. And Tilde lay with her legs beneath a stone, screaming. And the Game had pulled all the power so that I had none with which to heal her, so I called to Dazzle, as Borold and I tried to roll the stone away. ‘Dazzle, your mother is sorely hurt. Give me power to heal her or she’ll die.’ But Dazzle said, ‘I’m old enough to need no Mother now. I need my power for myself, to keep me safe...’ and she cowered in the corner weaving a beguilement for herself, about herself, that she was safe…
“Then another stone came, shattering the roof, and a huge tile of the roof came down like a knife, shearing her face. Borold did not see. I saw and screamed at the horror of it. Her mind was not touched, only her face, and I begged her for power to heal her, but she only said, ‘Don’t try your tricks on me, Silkhands, I’m all right. Let me be. Don’t try to get my juice for that old woman.’ And she went on weaving the glamor around her with all her power so that Borold could not see the wound and she herself could not see it when she sought her mirror, and so has she woven since. Tilde died. I could do nothing but ease the pain a little. It was very cold. Shortly the Game was over and help came, but it was too late. And Dazzle went on beguiling…”
“Then she doesn’t even know?” I asked, astonished.
Himaggery made a sour face. “She does not know. She leches after me from time to time and is in perpetual annoyance that I do not return her lusts, but I cannot. Would not, even were she whole, for there is a deeper maiming there than the face.”
“Can’t she be truly healed, here, where so much power is?”
Silkhands answered sadly, “The power of healing works through the mind, Peter, as all our powers do. If an old wound is long healed, the mind accepts it and will not help me fight it. I am no Necromancer to raise dead tissue to a mockery of life.”
“So, boy,” said Himaggery. “I will appoint you judge of this matter. Sometimes we do this in the Bright Demesne¾appoint a pawn judge of some issue or other...”
“But, no,” I exclaimed. “Such a one would not know the rules.”
“Exactly. You have the heart of the matter there. Well, since you do not know the rules, what would you rule in this case? I believe Silkhands should go away, that staying with Dazzle only makes matters worse. What say you?”
Since there were no rules, I could only use what sense I had. Though Chance had never thought me overburdened in that respect, I had sometimes resented his opinion so did my best. I thought of the young Dragon and the young Cold Drake, dead because of Dazzle’s machinations. I thought of Mandor as I had last seen him, full of envy, ready to destroy me because of it. I thought of Silkhands and her pain that she could not heal more…and I said:
“She should go away. If Dazzle is like one I have known, she will not hesitate to destroy you, Silkhands. If you are gone away, then part of the cause of her anger will be gone.”
“Exactly!” Himaggery beamed at me. “I need her to carry a message for me; she needs to go away. You need company upon the road, so does she, you go the same place. See how neatly it works out.” He turned to her.
“I want you to go with the lad to the High Demesne at Evenor. He is not half healed yet, and you can rid him of those scars along the way.”
“Why me?” she muttered, wiping tears.
“Because you’ll be welcome there; Healers always are. Because if I sent a Seer or Demon they would think I sent a spy. Because you are to go to an old friend of mine who needs your help and care; I hope to bring him back here with you. The High King will not want to let him go, and you must use all your wiles as honestly as you can¾which you will, because you are honest and cannot think thoughts which would seem treasonable. Are those enough reasons?”
She cried, and he comforted, and I listened, and the hours went by while they talked of other things. They talked of heterotelics (I wrote it down) and an animal in the wastes of Bleer which makes scazonic attacks (I wrote that down, too) and of great Gamesmen of the past¾Dodir of the Seven Hands, the Greatest Tragamor ever known, and Mavin Manyshaped. That name seemed familiar to me, but I could not remember where I had heard it before. And they talked more of that one to whom she was being sent, an old man, a Gamesmaster, but something more or other than that as well. They talked long, and I fell asleep. When I woke, Himaggery was brooding by the fire and Silkhands had gone.
I was moved to thank him. The occasion demanded something from me, something more than mere words. I took the pouch from my belt and placed it in his hands, saying, “I have nothing worth giving you, Lord, except perhaps these things I found. If they please you, will you keep them with my thanks for your kindness?”
When he opened the pouch, his face went drear and empty, and he took one of the pieces in his hand as though it were made of fire. He asked me where I had come by them, and when I had answered him, he said, “There, in a place I would not go because of her I had sent there. So, they were not meant for me, and it does no good to think about them.
“Boy, I would have given the Bright Demesne for these if. I could have found them myself. However, they did not come to my hand and they are not to be given way. I may not tell you what they are¾indeed, it may be I do not truly know. I may not take them from you. I can say to you take them, put them under your clothes, keep them safe, keep them secret. I will remember you kindly without the gift.”
I wanted to ask him…plead with him to tell me something, anything, but his face forbade it. The next morning we left the Bright Demesne, and only then did I realize how strange a place it was. There had been no Gaming while I had been there. I had not seen a single pile of bones. I had no idea what talent the Wizard held. “Strange talents make the Wizard” they say, but his were not merely strange, they were undetectable. Later, of course, I wondered what talent enabled him to see Dazzle as she was. Later, of course, I wondered what talent enabled me to see through his eyes.
JUST BEFORE WE LEFT THE BRIGHT DEMESNE, Dazzle saw fit to throw an unpleasant scene during which she accused Silkhands of every evil she could think of¾of being Himaggery’s leman, of being his treasonous servant, of plotting against her and Borold, of abandoning one whom she had been unable to compete with because her powers were pulish and weak, of being envious¾childish, evil, acid words. Neither Dazzle nor Borold saw us off, though Himaggery did. Silkhands was drawn and tired, looking years older than herself, and she only bit her lip when Himaggery told her to put it out of her mind, that he would take care of Dazzle. So, we rode off mired and surrounded in Silkhand’s pain. I could feel it. The others could see it well enough. As I could feel her pain, so I could feel Yarrel’s joy.
We were mounted on tall, red horses from Himaggery’s stable, and Yarrel beamed as though he had sired them himself. As for me, Silkhands bade me leave the bandages off, and as we rode she held my hand and led me to think myself unmarred once more. There was one deep wound which could not be healed, a puckered mark on my brow. Silkhands said my mind held to the spot for a remembrance. Certainly, I did not want to forget what had happened in Schooltown.
She led me to think of Tossa and speak of her until that hurt began to heal as well. I learned that what I had felt was not love. It was some deeper thing than that, some fascination which reaches toward a particular one, toward a dream and thus toward all who manifest that dream. She made me talk of the earliest memories I had, before Mertyn’s House (though until that moment I had not known of any memories before Mertyn’s House) and I found memory there: scents, feelings, the movement of graceful arms in the sun, light on a fall of yellow hair. So, Tossa had been more than I knew, and less. Even as I grieved at her loss, I grieved that I could not remember who the one had been so long ago, before Mertyn’s House. I could not have been more than two or three. I tried desperately, but there were only pictures without words. Tossa had matched an inexplicable creation, an unnamed past.
As well as being Healer, Silkhands became Schoolmistress. Believing Yarrel and I had been too long without study, she began to drill us in the Index as we rode, day by day. It was something to do to while the leagues passed, so we learned.
“Seer,” she would say. “Give me the Index for Seer.”
Obediently, I would begin. “The dress of a Seer is gray, the mask gray gauze, patterned with moth wings, the head covered with a hood. The move of a Seer is the future or some distant place brought near. The Demesne absolute of a Seer is small, a few paces across, and the power use is erratic. Seers are classified among the lesser durables; they may be solitary or oath bound to some larger Game…” Then she would ask another.
“The form of the Dragon is winged…breathing fire…and the move is flight through a wide Demesne. Dragons are among the greater ephemera…the dress of a Sentinel is red…of a Demon is silver, half-helmed…of a Tragamor is black, helmed with fangs…of a Sorcerer is white and red, with a spiked crown…” and so and so and so. Some of the names she knew I had never heard of. What was an Orieiromancer, a Keratinor, a Hierophant? What was a Dervish? I didn’t know. Silkhands knew, however, the dress, the form, the move, the Demesne, the Power, the classification.
“When I was a child,” she said, “there was little enough to do in the village. But there were books, some, an Index among them. I learned it by heart for want of anything else to do. I think many of the names I learned are very rare. Some I have never seen anywhere in life.” Still, she kept me at it.
“Of a Rancelman is cobwebbed gold, magpie helmed…of an Elator is blue, with herons’ wings…of an Armiger is black and rust, armed with spear and bow…of a King is true gold, with a jeweled crown…”
“And Shapeshifter,” she said. “What is the Index of a Shapeshifter?”
I said I did not know, did not care, was too hungry to go one pace further. She let us stop for food but continued teaching even as we ate.
“The Shapeshifter is garbed in fur when in its own shape. Otherwise, of course, it is clad in the form it takes. The Demesne of a Shifter is very small but very intense, and it goes away quickly. It takes little power to make the change and almost none to maintain it. They are classified among the most durable of all Gamesmen, almost impossible to kill. They are rare, and terrible, and the most famous of all is Mavin Manyshaped.”
“Why Manyshaped?” asked Yarrel. “Can she be more than one thing at a time?”
“No. But she can become many different things, unlike most shifters who can take one other shape, or two, three at most. But Mavin¾it is said she can become anything, even other Gamesmen. That, of course, is impossible. It couldn’t happen.”
When we had eaten, we went on again, silent for a time while we digested. Yarrel stopped us several times to examine tracks on the road before us. “A party of horsemen,” he said, “some four or five. Not far ahead of us.” For the first time I thought of the pawner who had ridden away south.
“How far ahead?” I asked. I did not want the man near me and was suddenly sorry I had not asked Himaggery to hold him or send him back to his ship under guard. “How far?”
“A day. We will not ride onto their tails, Peter. You think the pawner rides ahead?”
“I think, somehow, he knew where we were going.”
“We made no secret of it.”
“Perhaps we should have done.” I was depressed at my own ignorance and naiveté. Why had I thought the man had given up? All our ruminations were interrupted, however, by a blast of chill from above. Silkhands threw one glance behind her, cried “Afrit,” and rode madly for the timber, we after her in our seemingly permanent state of confusion.
“Is it looking for us?” I asked. She shook her head. Another blast of chill came from another direction. She frowned.
“What is going on up there?” She led us toward rising land from which we might see the countryside around. We found a rocky knuckle at last and climbed it to peer away across a wide valley. Our way led there, straight across, to a notch in the hills at the other side. It was not a way we would take. Drawn up upon the meadows were the serried ranks of a monstrous Game, files of Sorcerers and Warlocks standing at either side, glowing with stored power. Wagons full of wood lined the areas of command where pawns struggled beneath the whip to erect heavy sections of great war ovens. Above the command posts Armigers stood in the air, erect, their war capes billowing about them, rising and falling like spiders upon silk as they reported to those below.
“Lord of the seven hells,” said Chance. “Let’s get away from this place.”
Silkhands looked helplessly across the valley. Our way was there. Our way was blocked. We could not wait until the Game was over. Games of this dimension sometimes went on for years. We could not go around too closely or we risked being frozen in the fury of battle. Silkhands had no power to pull from those mighty ovens and thus protect us in the midst of war.
“Borold,” she cried, “why are you not here when I need you?” Her brother could have tapped that distant power. We were forced to a fateful decision which meant that we were to come to the High Demesne. Had we gone across the plain, we would have gone no further. We did not know it, but we were awaited in that far notch of hills.
Strange, how all plays into the hands of mordacious fate. Mertyn used to say that.
“We’ll go far around,” said Silkhands, and Chance agreed. It was all we could do. And we would not have done well at it except for Yarrel. It was he who read the maps, who found the trails, who found camp sites sheltered from the wind and rain, who kept the horses from going lame and us from being poisoned by bad food or worse water. He bloomed before my eyes, growing taller and broader each day. I woke one morning to find him standing beneath a tall tree looking out across the land, his face shining like those pictures one sees of the ancient pictures of Gamesmother Didir with the glory around her head.
“Yarrel,” I said, “why were you ever in Schooltown? What was there for you?”
He hugged me even as he answered. “Nothing, Peter. Except a few years during which my mother needed not worry about me. We pawns sometimes have short lives. My beloved sister was used in a Game, “lost in play” by some Shapeshifter who needed a pawn and cared not who it was. We are not considered important, you know, among the Gamesmen. If they wish to eat a few hundred of us in battle, they do it. Or use up a few of our women in some nasty game, they do that. By buying my way into the House, they protected me for a time.”
“Bought your way in?”
“With horses. Fine horses. Paid for my rearing, my schooling. Who knows. It may have done me good. Certainly, I know more than my family does about Gamesmen. And Games. And what can and cannot happen. To most of us the Game is a true mystery. If I get back to them, I will have a school of my own¾for pawns. To teach them how to survive.”
“Then you never expected to develop talent.”
“No. To get me into the School, mother had to lie, had to say I was Festival got, by a Gamesman. I never believed that. My father is my father, like me as fox is like fox, no more talent than a badger has, to be strong, to dig deep.”
“You could live among the Immutables, be safe there.”
“Yes,” he replied somberly. “I have thought about that in recent days.”
Yarrel my friend, Yarrel the pawn. Yarrel Horselover, my own Yarrel. Yarrel who had helped me and guided me. I saw him as in a mist, struggling beneath the whip to assemble war ovens, to cut the monstrous wagon toads of wood. Yarrel.
“How you must hate us,” I said. “For all you’ve lived among us since you were tiny…”
“I suppose I did. Still do, sometimes. But then, I learned you are the same as us. You want to live, too, and eat when you are hungry and make love to girls¾oh, yes, though you may not have done so yet¾and sleep warm. The only thing different is that you will grow to have something I have not. And that something will change you into something I am not. And from that time on, I may hate you.” He was thoughtful, staring out across the fog-lined vales, the furred hills, the rocky scarps of the range we traveled toward. When he went on it was with that intrinsic generosity he had always shown.
“But I do not hate Silkhands. Nor Himaggery. And it may be I will go on liking you, as well.”
“There were no games at the Bright Demesne.” I don’t know why I said that. It seemed important.
“No. There were no games, and I have thought much about that. All those Gamesmen. All that power. And no games at all. What did happen, the Dragon, I mean, was regretted. It means something. In Mertyn’s House we never learned…never learned that there was any…choice.”
Choice. I knew the word. The applications of it seemed small. One glass of wine or none. Bread or gruel. Stealing meat from the kitchens or not. Choice. I had never had any.
“It is hard to imagine…choice.” I said. He turned to me with a face as remote as those far scarps, eyes seeing other times.
“Try, Peter,” he said. “I have tried. I think sometimes how many of us there are, so many pawns, so many Immutables, all of us living on this land, and we have no Game. Yet, for most of us the Game rules us. We let it rule us. Imagine what might happen if we did not. That’s all. Just imagine.”
I was no good at imagining. Yarrel knew that well. For a time I thought he was mocking me. I was nettled, angry a little. We worked our way more deeply into the mountains, struggling always toward a certain peak which marked the pass into Evenor, and the way was hard. We talked little, for we were all weary. Far behind us in the valley were still smokes and confusions of battle. Ahead were only mountains and more mountains. I went on being angry until it seemed boring and foolish, and then I tried to do as Yarrel had asked and imagine. I tried really hard, harder than I had ever tried in Mertyn’s House. It was no good. I could not think of choices and pawns and all that. And then in the night…I found myself standing beside my horse on a low hill overlooking the field of battle. I could see the ovens red with heat, the Armigers filling the air like flies, raining their spears and arrows down onto the Gamesmen below. I could hear the great whump, whump of boulders levered, out of the ground and launched by teams of Tragamors and Sorcerers, hand-linked as they combined their power to raise the mighty rocks with their minds.
Behind enemy lines I could see the flicker as Elators twinked into being, struck about them with double daggers, then disappeared only to flick into being again behind their own lines. On the heights Demons and Seers called directions to the Tragamors and Armigers while Sorcerers strode among the Gamesmen to give them power. Shifterbeasts ran through the ranks, slashing with fangs or tusks, or dropped from the air on feathered wings to strike with blinding talons. And on each side, at the center of the Game, stood the King and the Princes and the other charismatics to whose beguilement the armies rallied. Among the wounded walked Healers, each with a Sorcerer to hand.
I could see it as though it were happening before me. And I saw more. At the edges of the battle, beyond the Demesne, stolid files of pawns. They stood with stones in their hands, and flails, and hay forks, sharp as needles. And it came to me in the dream, for it was a dream, what would happen when the war ovens grew cold and the Sorcerers were empty of power, the Armigers grounded, the Tragamors helpless, the Elators unable to flick themselves in and out of otherspace.
What then? I heard the growl of the pawns and saw the flails raised and felt the battlefield grow cold. And woke. For a time, then, it remained as clear to me as a picture painted upon plaster, the colors bright as gems. Then it began to dwindle away, as dreams do, only bits remembered. How can I tell it now? Because I dreamed it again, and again as time passed. Then, on the wild-track to Evenor I saw it only for a brief time in the chill dawn and lost it thereafter. But for what time I was cold in fear, thinking I felt the mute anger of the pawns and the touch of hay forks on my flesh.
I HAVE SEEN no place more beautiful in the world than the high lakes at Tarnoch. There is a wild grandeur about them which caught me hard at first sight of them and held me speechless for long hours as we wound our way down the precipitous drop from the high pass we had crossed at noon. When I say that Silkhands the Chatter-bird was silent also, you will know that it was not only a boy’s romanticism that was stirred. At noon the lakes were sapphires laid upon green velvet, the velvet ripped by alabaster cliffs spread with rainbows. As the afternoon wore on, shadows lengthened to soak the green with shade, and still more as evening came so that the whole shone like a diadem of dark and light under the westering sun, the lakes now scarlet with sunset.
The High Demesne stood upon one of the white cliffs over a cataract of water which spun its falling veil eternally into the gem-bright pools below. We came onto the approach road at starshine, the gates of the bridge before us crouching like fustigars, great stony buttresses of paws in the dust and tower tops staring at us from lamp-lit eyes. We were expected. Each of us had felt the brain tickle of a Demon’s rummaging, had seen the flare of a Sentinel’s signal fire as we rounded the final curve. I found myself hoping that they Read my hunger and thirst and would be hospitable.
I need not have worried. There was no formality to our welcome, only a busy hall-wife escorting us to rooms where baths and food came as quickly as we could be ready for them. “The High King will see you tomorrow,” she told us, making off with our boots and cloaks to see what could be done with them, for they were sorely stained with travel. She left us to hot, savory food, generous jugs of wine, and the utter joy of clean, soft beds.
Such was done, I suppose, to put us at our ease, for in the night we were examined more than once. Why I lay awake when the others slept, I don’t know. Silkhands was in a room of her own, but Chance, Yarrel, and I shared a room, one equipped with several beds and large enough for a Festival Hall. Perhaps it was Chance’s snoring¾he did that, trumpeting at times like a Herald and betimes a long, rattling roar like drummers on a field of battle so that I woke in the night listening, waiting for the fifes to join in. So it was I felt the Demon tickling in my brain again and again, deeper, and deeper yet, so that my arms and legs jerked and twitched, and I fought down the desire to scratch. What they were looking for, I don’t know, except that Silkhands was wakened by it, too, and came to my bed like a wraith, slim and white in her sleep-robe, rubbing her head as though it ached.
“Oh, they will be at me and at me,” she complained. “I carry everything I know and think on the top of my head like a jar of water, but they will go digging and digging as though I could hide a thought away, somewhere.”
“Can that be done?” I asked. “Can anyone hide thoughts from a Demon?”
“Oh, some say they can recite a jingly rhyme or think hard on a game or a saying or on reciting the Index or some such and it will hide deeper intents beneath. I have never tried it, and I’ve never asked a Demon about it. But this digging at me and digging at me means they think it is possible at least. I wish they would let me sleep.”
“What was it Himaggery said? That the High King might suspect someone was spying on him unless it was a Healer. Maybe they think it anyhow.”
“Well, so let them think it. Good sense should tell them better, and I wish they’d give over until morning and let me sleep. Here, let me share your bed, and you can rub my bones.”
So she lay down beside me on her belly to have me rub her ribs and backbone. I had done this for Mandor, and it was no different with Silkhands, save her hips swelled as his had not and she made little purring sounds as he had not, and we ended up asleep side by side like two kittens. Yarrel was full of teasing in the morning until she told him to lace his lips and be still. His teasing set me in mind that perhaps, next time, I would not sleep so soon, Silkhands willing, but no more than that.
The Seer was at our breakfast, gauzy masked and all, staring at us with glittering eyes from behind his painted wings. We sighed and tried to ignore him¾or her; it could have been a her for it said not a word to us but stared and stared and went away. And, after that an Examiner came to ask us about Himaggery, and about our trip, and about the battle on the plain, and about everything we had thought or done forever. And after that, lunch, and after that an audience with the High King who had decided, it seemed, that we were not intent on damage to himself or his Demesne. I did not take to him as I had to Himaggery. The High King was a tall man, stern, with deep lines from nose to chin, bracketing his mouth like ditches. His nose was large and long, his eyes hooded under lids which looked bruised. He was not joyed to see us, and all his questing in our heads had not allayed his suspicions, for the first thing we had to do was tell him once more all that had happened to us since we were weaned.
“And you have come from the Wizard Himaggery?” he asked again. “Who is still up to his nonsense, is he? Saying that those who are Kings perhaps should not be Kings, that’s one of Himaggery’s sayings. Those of us who were born to be Kings do not agree, of course.” He watched us narrowly, as though to see how we would react to this. Then he went on, “And you come for what reason?” His voice was as harsh as a crow’s, and deep.
“To visit Himaggery’s old teacher, the Seer Windlow. Because Himaggery wishes me to use my skill on the old man’s behalf, High King, if that would be useful to his aged weakness. Also, I bear messages of regard and kindness and am told to ask if the Seer Windlow would visit Himaggery in the Bright Demesne.” All the while she spoke the King nodded and nodded, and behind him his Seer and Demon and Examiner nodded and nodded, so that I thought we were in one of those Festival booths which sell chances to knock the nodding heads from manikins with leather balls, five chances for a coin.
Someone Read me, for the King glared in my direction, and all of them stopped moving their heads. I blushed, embarrassed.
“Ah,” the High King responded. “Windlow is old. Far too old for such a journey. The thought will please him, however. He welcomes visits or messages from his old students. But¾no. He could not leave us. It would be too dangerous for him to attempt it. We would miss him too greatly. But the thought, yes, the thought is kind. You must tell him of that kind thought, even though it is impossible…”
He turned to me abruptly. “And you, boy. A special student of my old colleague, Mertyn, eh? Caught up in a bit of dangerous play during Festival, you say, and given let-pass by the Town Council? To come to Windlow’s house.” He sighed, a deep, breathy sigh which was meant to sound sorrowful but was too full of satisfaction for that. “Windlow’s House is much diminished since Mertyn knew of it. I wonder if he would have sent you had he known how diminished it is. No students left, these days. My sons all grown, not that I would have bothered Windlow with their education, the sons of my people gone. I doubt there is one student left there now, but you are welcome to go, you and your servants…”
Beside me, I felt Yarrel stiffen. I laid my hand upon his arm and said firmly, “Not my servants, King. My friends. My guides. We could not have come this way without their skills and great courage.” The King nodded, waved me away. He did not care. The distinction meant nothing to him. Still, I felt Yarrel’s muscles relax beneath my hands, and he smiled at me as we left the hall.
Windlow’s House was evidently some distance away through the forest, but the High King was not prepared to let us go there at once. We were to spend several days in the company of his people, his Invigilators, his Divulgers (though we were not threatened with actual torture), his Pursuivants. He was still not sure of us, and he would not let us away from his protectors until he was convinced we could do him no damage. I complained of this and was mocked once more for being naive.
“Why, it’s the way of the Game, lad,” said Chance. “And the way a great Game often begins. First a trickle of little people across a border, a flow of them bearing tales here and there, bringing back word of this or that. Then the spies go in, or close enough to read the Demesne…”
“The High King has Borderers well out,” said Yarrel. “I noticed them when we rode in. I doubt a Demon from outside could get close enough to read anyone at the High Demesne. You see how it’s placed, too, high on these scarps where no Armiger can overfly it. No, this High King is wise in the ways of the Game and well protected.”
“And not inhospitable,” said Silkhands, firmly. I was reminded once more that everything I thought and said would be brought to the High King and that it would be better to think of something else. It was not difficult to do, for the High King had done more than set his palace in a place of great natural beauty. He had added to that beauty with gardens and orchards of surpassing loveliness and peopled them with pawns of exotic kinds, dancers and jugglers and animal trainers. At first their entertainments did not seem fantastic or difficult until one understood that it was all done by patience and training, not by Talent. When the dancers leapt, it was their own muscles took them hovering over the grass, not Armiger’s power of flight. When the jugglers kept seven balls whirling between their hands and the heavens, it was training let them do it, not a Tragamor’s Talent of moving. Once one knew that, there was endless fascination in watching them. Seeing I had no Talent yet, they accepted me almost as one of them, and a band of acrobats taught me a few simple tricks in which I took an inordinate pride. I began to notice the grace with which they moved. Talents are not graceful. Or, I should say, often are not. I have seen some Gamesmen who were graceful in their exercise of Talents, but not many. These pawns, however, moved like water or wind on grass, flowing. It made me wonder why Talents should not be used so.
“Silkhands uses her Talent with grace,” Yarrel said, drily.
I thought about that, and of course it was true. “Himaggery also,” I said. “Though I am not sure what his Talent is.”
“Perhaps he is not using Talent at all.”
Now that was a thought. Like many of Yarrel’s comments, it was troubling and dissatisfying and went in circles. So, I thought about learning to do cartwheels and walking upon my hands. Remember, I was only a boy. Finally, after some nine or ten days of amusement and fattening on the High King’s excellent meals, we were summoned to him once more. He was doing several kinds of business on the morning; receiving a delegation from some merchant group or other, buying some exotics from a bird-dealer, and disposing of our visit. He did them all with dispatch and sent us off to Windlow’s house with some potted herbs and a caged bird as gifts for the old man. The bird was said to be able to talk, though it did nothing on the journey except eat fruit and mess the bottom of its cage, It was very pretty, but I did not like the way it smelled.
The way to Windlow’s House led through forest which had never been burned or cut within memory. The trees loomed like towers, vast as clouds. The trail was needle-strewn and redolent of resin, sharp and soft in the nostrils. Flowers bloomed in the shade, their secret faces turned down toward the mosses, and the trickle of water was around us. We led a considerable pack train from which I understood that Windlow’s House was supplied from the High Demesne, unlike the Schooltown I had known with its own farms and merchants. We asked if this were so, and the guide replied that except for garden stuff, meat, milk, and wool, and firewood, which was cut by the School’s own servants, all supplies came from the King.
The place was a day away from the High Demesne, set at the top of a south sloping valley, a single white tower with some lower buildings clustered at its foot. It looked very lonely there. However, when we arrived we found the place well staffed. The kitchens were bustling, the stables clean and swept, the courtyard gleaming with fresh washed stones. The men who had come with us unloaded the train, received a meal, and went back the way they had come. Only we were left, with some three or four Gamesmen from the High Demesne who evidently rotated duty in keeping watch on Windlow’s House. Of Windlow, we had seen nothing yet. Nor did we until the following morning. Then we found him in the garden behind the tower, wrapped in a thick blanket in the warmth of the early sun. I had never seen anyone so old before. He was frail, tottery, his face wrinkled like an apple dried in the barrel. But, when he smiled at us we knew his mind was not dulled, for his glance twinkled at us in full knowledge of who we were.
“So, released by my old student the High King at last, are you? I wondered how long he would hold my guests this time. Last time I was lucky to get to see them at all. He protects me, you know.” He winked outrageously and drew a serious face. “He says he believes I much need his protection.” And his eyes sought heaven in a clown’s mockery.
Silkhands laughed and sat down beside him, taking his hand in hers. The rest of us simply sat around soaking up the sunlight, waiting for him to be ready to question us or speak to us, as he chose. It was very peaceful there, and I amended my earlier thought of loneliness. Peace, rather. Content, A vast quiet which was not at all disrupted by the cackle of fowls in the yard or the bustle of the laundress crossing the yard.
“Now,” said the old man, “tell me everything about everywhere. My Talent was never large, and of late it has reached no further than the kitchen garden. I see a plague of moth there, but not until late summer.” Once again he winked and drew that clown’s face, and this time I knew it for what it was, a cover for more serious things, a nothing to hide thoughts that were deep as oceans.
He caught my eye and said, very quietly, “You may speak, lad. Your thoughts are not spied upon here and now. In my garden today, no Demon intrudes.”
So, as Silkhands held him by his wrist and worked her way with his aged arteries (so she later said) we told him everything that we knew and guessed about the world outside. We told him especially of the Bright Demesne and of Himaggery’s invitation. “He needs you, Sir,” we said. “He says to tell you that he needs you, to come to him for now is a time when you should…”
At this he was quiet before beginning to talk in his gentle voice about the distance, the time it would take, the weariness of the journey, and of the High King. We all knew that none of it meant anything except his talk of the High King, and we all knew the High King did not intend to let him go. “He was once my student, a proud, haughty boy, Prionde,” Windlow said. “He wanted my love, my adoration. What is the Talent of a King, after all, if it cannot inspire adoration? Even then, I think he knew he would be a King. But, what good is a Master who can be summoned and sent like a little tame bunwit? What good a Seer who is blinded to the qualities of those around him? So, I could only give him my teaching. He gave me respect, but no understanding. He would not understand what I so much wanted him to learn, so when the time came that he could, he held me captive to his ignorance, as though to say, ‘See, I have power over this Gamesmaster! What are his teachings worth? I command his obedience, and what I do not understand is not worthy of understanding.’ So, he preens in his possession of me, for others respect me and he believes his possession gives him prestige. He does not know that he possesses nothing. Nothing. This rack of bones is nothing…” He fell asleep with that word, the sudden sleep of the very old. Silkhands stayed beside him, but the others of us wandered about the garden, looking at the thousand varieties of potted herbs, from the tiniest to some the size of small trees. Their combined fragrance in the sunwarmed space made us dizzy. Later there was more of the same kind of conversation, but Windlow seemed more alert than before.
In the evening Yarrel and I chased fireflies in the meadow. I had never seen them before, and we took immoderate pleasure in behaving like infants. Chance drank a great deal of wine and traded tall tales with the kitchen people. It was a generous and pleasant time.
By the third day, Silkhands’ work with the old man had made a difference we could all see. He was more alert, more erect, and his questioning of us was quick and incisive. Silkhands said she had made small changes in the flow of blood to his brain, had added a chemical here or there, dissolved bits of cloggy tissue in one place and another, and built small walls other places. “It is only small repair,” she said. “I cannot stop age nor forestall death. It will come, still, inevitably. But the small weaknesses and pains of age, those I can ameliorate, and to do it for him is a pleasure. His mind in mine feels like sunshine and rain.”
With his incisive questioning came also his own dialogue with himself. We heard for the first time about his own life, about who and what he was.
“They named me Seer,” he ruminated, remembering a time long past. “They named me Seer for I knew, as Seers do, what would happen in future times. Small things. A fall of rain here. A wager won there. The outcome of a Game. The life or death of a man. As a Talent it is seldom controllable, never dependable, and yet when it happens, it is unmistakable. Well. Every Demesne must have a Seer or two, or six, or a dozen. The more the better coverage, so they say. And so I became a Seer, attached to a King. That’s the best place for a Seer. At least the meals are dependable. Well, Seers have a lot of time on their hands. Seeing doesn’t require time. I began to read. Books. Old books, mostly. There aren’t many new ones except among certain classes of pawns and the Immutables. I read those, too. Everything. Old books half rotten. Old books all mouldy. Old books in pieces. Old books about still older books. You would not believe the trash which accumulates in the cellars of old School Houses or in old towns the Immutables no longer use or in some old ruins. I stopped thinking of myself as a Seer and began to think of myself as a Reader. Well, what one reads, one learns, of course, and it was not too many decades before I realized that all those books were the bits and pieces of a puzzle, shards of a broken pot, clues to a great mystery. It was all there, boys, in the past. Something shaped differently from the way things are shaped today.”
“Were you the only one,” asked Yarrel. “The only one reading? How did you get about? All those travels?”
The old man smiled. “Oh, told small lies and begged small favors. Whenever there was a particularly good Seeing, I’d beg a boon of the King, or the Prince, of whomever it happened to be at the time.” He smiled to himself at some ancient, innocent villainy. “Seers wander about a good deal, anyhow. It is said to improve the quality of the vision. And, as to your question, boy, no I was not the only one. Most of the others were Necromancers, however, or Shapeshifters, or Rancelmen. You don’t know Rancelmen? A little like Pursuivants. Their Talent is finding things which are lost.
“Well, I believed that there was a mystery in the past, far back, in the time of Didir and Tamor perhaps, at the beginning of things. I came to believe there would be a document, a book, a certain book…called the onomasticon, the Dictionary of True Names. I came to believe I would find it, that I needed to find it. Once I could learn the right names for things, you understand, I would be able to decipher the puzzle. You understand?”
“You mean that if there had been different names for things once and we knew what those names were we could…know how things started?” Yarrel seemed bemused by this idea. “But we wouldn’t even understand those words.”
Windlow was patient. “We might. They might not be strange words, you see, only words used differently. Or, so I think. And as I read the old books, then older ones and older still, I saw that the meanings of words did change. I stopped being a Seer and became a Historian.” He mocked himself with pursed lips, as though we should not take him too seriously.
Silkhands, however, took everything seriously. “That is not a name in the Index, sir. I know all the names in the Index, every one, and that one is not among them…”
“I know,” he hushed her. “Of course, I know. But it could be there. It isn’t a strange word, you see. All of you know immediately what it means.”
Yarrel said, “Well, yes. Among the pawns there are vegetarians who believe in eating only vegetables. And librarians who believe in keeping books. So, an historian would be…someone who believes in…keeping history?”
“But it isn’t in the Index,” complained Silkhands. “It has nothing to do with Talents…”
“It really does,” said the old man. “It takes certain talents to read and study and remember.”
“Those aren’t Talents,” she said.
He shrugged. “Not in today’s world, no. But, in History they may have been talents. History. Of the Game. Of the world. Why is a King a King? Why are Sorcerers what they are? Who was the first Immutable, and why?”
“That’s religion,” I objected. “All of that is religion.”
“Well, lad, I thought not, you see. I thought that if one asked a question and then found a definite answer to that question it was most certainly not religion. I thought it was History. But then, most Gamesmen believe precisely as you do, so it turned out I was not a Historian, after all. I was a Heretic.”
I made the diagonal ward to reflect evil. I didn’t believe for a moment he was a Heretic, but it was the automatic thing to do. He didn’t have horns, for one thing, and his teeth didn’t drip with acid. Everyone knew that Heretics were like that. I found him smiling at me in a pitying sort of way which made me squirm.
“I don’t think you’re a Heretic,” I said. “I don’t.”
“That’s kind of you,” he said drily. “I do appreciate that. I wish the High King would accept your opinion as fact, but he is a very religious man. Still, perhaps if one sends enough Rancelmen into the world to find what is lost, one may come up with some answers. Now, I find myself suddenly very tired…”
So, we went away to let him nap in the sunshine among the herb-scent and the birdsong and the laundrywoman’s slap, slap, slap of wet clothes and the far-off call of the herdboys in the meadow.
“You know, I understand what he means about words meaning different things,” said Yarrel. “In the village when I was a child, when the Gamesmen marched in Game Array we called it ‘trampling death.’ In Mertyn’s House we learned to call it a Battle Demesne of the True Game.”
“I learned to call it True Game as a child,” said Silkhands. “But when the stones came through the roof of our house, I called it ‘death.’”
What they said was true. If it had been Yarrel beneath the whip, stoking the war ovens, I would not have called it “True Game.” When Mandor played me at the Festival, I did not think of it as “True Game”. I called it “betrayal” in my head. But still, I was baffled by one thing.
“How does he know there is such a book as the one he is searching for?” I asked. “To send all those Rancelmen searching? How does he know?”
“Peter, sometimes I think you do not think,” complained Yarrel. “The old one is a Seer. He told us so. He has Seen the thing he searches for, probably Seen it in his own hands at some time in his future, maybe here in this place which is another reason why he will not come with us to Himaggery.”
The old man had been so gentle with us, so twinkly in his glances and humorous in his speech, I had not thought of him as a Seer, not even when he had said it was his Talent. Then, too, he had not the gauze mask with moth wings or any of those appurtenances which lend awe to the Seer’s presence. This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came true or not? This idea was exciting, for it was the first time I could remember myself “imagining.” By evening, I had thought up several other ideas which were interesting and quite original. When I tried them out on Yarrel, it seems he had thought of most of them first, and I was embarrassed. Still, I was at least getting the idea.
The next day in Windlow’s garden he said, “If I talk heresy to you, you may become tainted and some Demon will pick it from your heads and tell someone, perhaps the High King, who will feel he should do something dramatic about it such as flaying you all, or selling you to pawners for transport to the southern isles or something else equally unpleasant. So, let us talk religion instead.”
“Sir,” I interrupted him, “did not Mertyn send us to you for Schooling? If we are to be Schooled, surely there is some work we should be doing. If we are not to be Schooled, then we must be careful not to impose upon your hospitality ...”
He gave me a look which saw through me to the bones of my feet. I felt it distinctly; my soles tingled. “My School House is much diminished, boy! The High King’s sons are long gone into the Game, not that they were allowed to learn much from me. The sons of the followers are gone out into the world as well. There are few young at Evenor. The High Lakes of Tarnoch echo no more with childish laughter and the splash of boyish play. I know this. Am I not a Seer? Long since I told Prionde that his Kingdom would dwindle, that he would crow at last like an old cock upon nothing but a dung heap, ashes and broken crockery. So I told him, but I made the mistake of telling him why. History, I said. Not Seeing. Since that time, the visions have come, but he chose to disbelieve them. I tell you, lad, that men will believe if one says, ‘The Gods say…’ They will believe if one says, ‘I had a Vision…’ They will believe if one says, ‘It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold…’ But, if one says, ‘History teaches’, then they will not believe.
“Mertyn sent you here for Schooling. So, I’ll school you. Himaggery sent you here for his own reasons. They will be fulfilled. So, be, patient. Talk to me here in my garden while the sun shines. Chase the firebugs of the meadow in the evening. Flirt with the maidens who keep the tower clean and prepare our meals. Be at peace. The other will come soon enough!”
So, he taught us. “Do you remember the chart of descent from Didir and Tamor?” he asked us. “Can you recite it?” I told him I could not. We had seen it, of course. It hung upon the wall in Mertyn’s own rooms, and I had seen it there on the day he had warned me against Mandor, but we had never learned much about it. We had not studied religion much, in Mertyn’s House.
“I want you to learn it,” he told us, then quoted it off to us line by line for the first of ten or a dozen times. “In the time of the ancestors was born Didir, and she had the Talent to Read what lay in the minds of all about her, so they named her Demon and she was taken from them. And in that same time was born Tamor, and he had the Talent to rise into the air and fly so that he looked down upon the habitations of men so that they named him Ayrman, which is to say Armiger, and he was taken from them to another place. And from the union of Didir and Tamor was born a son, Hafnor, an Elator. And from the family of Didir after many generations came Sorah, named Seer, daughter of that line. And from the line of Didir and the line of Hafnor came a son, Wafnor, who was the first Tragamor. And of a son of Hafnor and a daughter of Sorah was the first Healer born, a daughter, Dealpas.
“And of the family of Dealpas and the line of Sorah came a son, Thandbar, the Shapeshifter, and of his line Shapeshifters forever to the current time. And from the line of Wafnor came Buinel, Sentinel, and of that line Sentinels to the current time. And of a mating between Wafnor’s line and Hafnor’s line came Shattnir, Sorceress, and of her line and the line of Sorah came a daughter, Trandilar, a Great Queen, and of her line Kings and Princes to the present time. And, of that line after many generations, came Dorn, a Necromancer, and of his line Necromancers to the present time.
“And of the pawns who served our forefathers was bred a new people, the Immutables, which was planned and done by Barish and Vulpas, Wizards of the twelfth generation of the Game, and from that line have come Immutables to the current time. But Barish and Vulpas were sought by the Council for they had committed heresy in creating these Immutables. So did the Council claim them pawnish and forfeit and sent to have Barish and Vulpas slain.
“But the Immutables which they had made fled into the mountains and the caves and bred there a numerous people, so that when they came among the Gamesmen once more in a later time they could no longer be used and were proof against all the Gamesmen could do.”
Silkhands had been writing down as much of this as she could, and I saw Yarrel mouthing it to himself to commit it to memory.
That noon we figured it out and put it into a chart on a piece of parchment like the one I remembered on Mertyn’s wall. We showed it to Windlow in the afternoon, and he chuckled at it. “Very good,” he told us, “but learn it the way I told it to you, for that is the way it is written in the books of religion. If you think of it in that way, the Demons will not think you are fulminating heresy.”
That night we were saying that we could not see what all this nonsense was about “heresy”. He had not told us anything so very wonderful or different. Chance heard us and said, “Well, do not dwell upon difference, boy, if you want to stay living. A little heresy may be all right in his garden among the pet birdies and the pot plants with the guards half asleep and leagues between this place and the world. You may think what you like here, but how do you unthink it before we go away again? Hmm? And you would have to unthink it, lad, or you would not last a handful of days.”
So we stopped talking about it altogether and got on with what Windlow called our schooling. We reviewed the different sorts of games; games of two, that is, “dueling,” and games of intrigue such as that one Mandor had played during Festival, and Battle Games of all sizes from little to great, and hidden games played by Gamesmen for their own purposes with no others knowing of it, and games of amusement, and art games, and the game of desperation. And we reviewed the language of True Game, the labels of risk, King’s Blood, Dragon’s Fire, Armiger’s Flight, Sorcerer’s Power, Healer’s Hand¾all of them. One says “King’s Blood” to mean that the King is at risk in the play. If the risk is small, one says, “King’s Blood One.” If the risk is great, if the King will be killed or taken, one says, “King’s Blood Ten.” I asked Windlow why we did not simply say, “King’s Risk” or “Dragon’s Risk,” the same for all of them. It would be much simpler.
“The nature of the artificer is to make things complex, not simple,” he said, his mouth frowning at me while his eyes smiled. “We invent different labels for things which are not different and so we distinguish among them. I have read that in the utter past people did this with groups of animals. One would use a different name for each type of animal. It persists still today. We say, ‘a coven of crows’ or ‘a follow of fustigars.’ It makes us sound learned. We who are Gamesmen wish to seem learned in all aspects of the Game. So, we use the proper titles for the risks we run. It is more dramatic and satisfying to say, ‘Sorcerer’s Power Nine’ than it would be to say, ‘I’m about to smash your Sorcerer…’” We laughed. He asked if we understood. I told him solemnly that I understood well enough. King’s Blood Four meant that the King was not seriously threatened, but that some other Gamespiece might be.
“Oh, yes,” he shrugged. “There are always throwaway pieces. Talismen. Totems. Fetish pieces of one kind or another. Pawns or minor pieces used as sacrifices because the Game requires a play and the Player is unready or unwilling to play a major piece. And then there are Ghost pieces…”
“I thought they were only stories,” said Yarrel. “To scare children…”
“Oh, no. They are real enough.” The old man rearranged the blanket around his shoulders, shifted to a more comfortable slouch in the woven basket hair.”After all, when Necromancers raise up the dead, the dead were once Gamesmen. They would be Ghost Gamesmen, with Ghost talents.” At which point, just as we wanted to ask a hundred questions, he fell asleep. Before he woke to continue our lessons, the tower Sentinel cried warning to the House, and we looked up to see a cloud of dust on the long road down from the forest edge through the valley. I was standing beside Windlow when the cry came, and he woke suddenly, his eyes full of pain and deep awareness.
“The High King, Prionde, has sent these men,” he said. “He has been made deeply suspicious of us. Someone has come to him bearing tales of guilt and treachery. Guardsmen come to take us all prisoner.” I saw tears in his eyes. “Poor Prionde. Oh, pitiful, that my old student should come to this.”
Silkhands, who had been sitting beside him, holding his hand as she did for hours each day said, “Dazzle. Dazzle and Borold. They are the ones.” She said it with enormous conviction. It was not Seeing, of course. She had no Talent of that kind, but she knew, nonetheless. We all heard her and believed her, and we were not totally unprepared when the dusty guardsmen rode in to gather us up as though we had been livestock, handling the old man with no more courtesy than a sheep, and shut us within the Tower to await some further happening. Silkhands spoke softly to one of them, asking if a Priestess had come to the High Demesne. Yes, one said. A very beautiful Priestess with her brother, a Herald and a group of pawners had come to the Demesne the day before. This was enough for Silkhands. She sat in a corner and wept away the morning.
“But all they need to do is send a Demon to Read us,” I protested. “They did it often enough when we were there! They know we have no plots against the High King.”
Old Windlow spoke softly to us from the cot where we had laid him. “My son, be schooled by me. If your people taught you when you were a child that there are monsters in the wood, you would have believed them. Then, later, if a woodsman had come and said to you, leading you among the trees, ‘See, there is nothing here but shadow and light, leaf and trunk, bird and beast. See, I show you. Look with your own eyes.’ Though you would look and see nothing, still you would believe there were monsters there. You would believe them invisible, or behind you, or hiding beneath the stones, or within the trees somehow. No matter what the woodsman said, you would believe your fear. Men always believe their fear. Only the strong, the brave, the curious¾only they can overcome their fear to peer and poke and pry at life to find what is truly there…
“Prionde believes his fear. His Demons tell him we are harmless to him, but he is afraid we have discovered some way to fool the Demons, some way to avoid the Seers, some way to trick the Tragamors. He believes his fear…”
There were tears in the old man’s eyes, and with both Windlow and Silkhands mourning, Yarrel, Chance, and I did not know what to do except be still and let the day wear out. The guardsmen did feed us and bring us wine and a chamber pot, which we did not need for there were old closets built into the wall of the tower, unused for many years.
The day diminished. We lit the lanterns and sat in the fireglow of evening as the stars pricked the sky above the lightning bugs in the meadow. We grew very bored and sad. There was a gameboard set into the top of an old table in the room where we all were, and I thought it might make things more bearable to play an old twospace game with Chance as we had done when I was a child. I took the pouch from my belt and set the pieces and the little book out, quite forgetting what Himaggery had said about them. After all, I was among friends. Chance was curious at once, full of questions about where I had found them. After a time, Windlow got up and tottered over to have a look while I went on chattering about the ancient room in the ruins. Something in the quality of the silence elsewhere in the room made me look up, words drying in my mouth. Everyone was looking at Windlow, and he at the table, face shining as though lit from within. Perhaps it was a trick of the lantern light, but I think not. He shone, truly.
He touched the carved Demon. “Didir,” he said. Then he lifted the Armiger. “Tamor.” He laid a trembling hand upon my shoulder, leaning to touch the Elator. “Hafnor,” he said, “Wafnor,” as he laid his finger upon the Tragamor. He named each of them, “Sorah, Dealpas, Buinel, Shattnir, Trandilar, Dorn.” Last he picked up one of the little Shapeshifters and said, “And Thandbar and his kindred. How wonderful. How ancient and how wonderful.” I mumbled something, as did Silkhands, and the old man saw our confusion. “But don’t you understand? It is History! The eleven!”
Yarrel said, “We are stupid today, Sir. We do not understand what is special about these eleven.”
“Not these eleven, boy, or those eleven. The eleven. The eleven Gamesmen who are spoken of in the books of religion. The first eleven…” We looked at one another, half embarrassed, not sharing his excitement. Yes, there had been eleven mentioned in the books of religion. Yes, there were thousands of types of Gamesmen, each mentioned in the Index, each different. What did it matter that these tiny, carved figures were of the first eleven. As we watched him, his wonder turned to caution. He said, “Who knows of these?”
I replied, “Only those of us here, and Himaggery. I showed them to him, and the book as well…” I put the little volume into Windlow’s hands, half hoping to distract him from this strange passion, for he looked very distraught. It did not have the desired effect. It was only a little glossary, directions for a Game, I thought, written in an archaic lettering, much faded. I had not paid it much attention. Windlow, however, took it as though he took the gift of life from the hands of a god. He peered at it, opened it, caressed the page, raised it to his face to smell of it. He leafed through it, leaning so close to the lantern I thought he would burn himself.
When he murmured, “The Onomasticon…” the word meant nothing to me. “All those Rancelmen…” he said. “Year after year, hundreds of them sent into the world, to search, search, always looking for it, and it is put into my hands by an ignorant boy¾beg pardon, lad, no reflection upon you personally¾who does not know what he gives me. Ah. Life is full of these jokes. Full of jest…”
Then I understood. This was the book, the one he had been searching for. At least, he believed it to be the book. I remembered he was a Seer. If this was the book he had Seen himself having, then it surely was the book.
He went on talking, almost to himself. “See. The word Festival. In the Onomasticon it carries the meaning ‘opportunity for reproduction.’ We talk of School House, but the book says, ‘Protection of Genetic Potential.’ We say True Game. The book says ‘Population control.’ We say King. The book says…”
Yarrel leaned forward to put a hand over his lips. “Sir, is it safe to speak so?” Windlow looked up, dazed, lips still moving. Then he became still, as though listening.
“No. No, lad, not safe to speak so. Not safe to say what I have said, not even to those I have spoken to. I would not go from this place before, for I had Seen myself having the book here, in the old Tower. Also, I have been fond of Prionde as though he were my own sister’s son. Now, however, the book is here and my love is a foolish thing, for Prionde has turned against me. Let us leave. Let us get out.”
“OUT?”
I think Chance said it, though it may have been Yarrel. We were all equally astonished, not at the thought, for each of us had probably considered the idea since we had been shut up in the tower. We were astonished at the matter-of-fact way Windlow stated it.
“Out?” I repeated. “How do you propose that we do that?”
“Why, I have no idea,” Windlow said. “Though I do know that we are to get out, or at least that I am, for I have Seen myself with the Book in another place than this. I have the Book, and there seems little reason for delay if we can think of a way to go now…”
None of us could think of a reason for delay either, but this did not help us think of a way to get out. The guards who had been sent by the High King showed no signs of relaxing their alert stance. There was an Invigilator among them who, while not quite as thorough in pursuit as a Pursuivant might be, was nonetheless to be reckoned with. At least one of them was an Armiger, which meant we could be seen from above if we succeeded in leaving the Tower but needed to cross the meadows. We had no Armiger of our own to carry us through the air. I wondered if it might be possible to burrow under the ground and said something of the kind to the others. At once Yarrel fastened upon the idea and began wandering about the tower with an abstracted look of concentration.
“That old earth closet,” he asked Windlow, “does it go into a pit? Do you know?”
“Why, no.” The old man searched his memory. “There is a stream up the valley which was diverted, yes, I recall when the builders were at it. They brought it underground so that it would not freeze in winter. It comes into a tank above the cookhouse and laundry. Then the drains and the rest of it run down under the Tower, here, and the closet empties into it.”
“How?” Yarrel sketched a circular dimension with his arms. “Like a pipe, small? Or a tunnel? How did they build it?”
“Why, a tunnel, small as tunnels go, I suppose. About as high as your shoulders. The walls and floor were laid in stones, I remember, with beams over the top and earth on that.”
“And it comes out where?”
“I don’t know.” He looked almost ashamed, as though he were guilty of some obscure sin. “I didn’t pay attention. Do you think it might join the stream again, further down?”
“It would make sense to do that,” said Chance. “I’ve seen it done that way many a time. Probably dumps out into a pool somewhere to overflow into the old riverbed. So I’ve seen it done.”
Yarrel’s eyes were glinting with an adventurous spark. He said, “Well, easy enough to find out. Shall we go together, Peter? You and I? Exploring once more?” He was remembering when we were very small boys searching the crannies of the attics in Mertyn’s House. The, memory brought back smells of dust and sunwarmed wood and the look of bats hung on old rafters like black laundry.
We cut a blanket into strips and made rope out of that. Chance lowered us one at a time down the old closet. It hadn’t been used in a long time, so it smelled no worse than an old barnyard midden, musty and rank, but not actually foul. Once at the bottom with our little lantern, we kicked away piled rubbish to disclose the turgid flow of water which crept from one side of the shaft to the other.
“I’ll wager it’s broken or plugged further up,” said Yarrel. “Which is lucky for us. There’s hardly any water at all.” Still, there was enough to make the place slimy with mold and greeny slickness on the walls. In places the old beams had broken or half broken to sag down into the already low ceiling of the place and drop clods of mud and things with legs onto our necks. The way turned and swerved inexplicably, but Yarrel said it was probably that they had dug it in a way to miss large outcroppings of rock. Whatever the builder’s reasons, it made a confusing way, and I soon lost any sense of the direction in which we moved. However, it was only a short time until we saw a glimmer of light ahead and came up to an opening all overgrown with brush through which the trickle wandered out and down a little slope into a mire. I could hear the river but not see it. We were surrounded by trees.
“Thank the Game Lords, Peter. We are in the trees and behind the stables. We may go from this place undiscovered and mounted, all else willing.” I left him where he was and went plodding back up the little tunnel to be hauled up into the light once more, blinking and filthy. Silkhands wrinkled her nose at me, and old Windlow said, apropos of nothing at all, “I have always wondered how moles keep clean…” He did not seem at all surprised when I told them the way was clear and we needed only wait until dusk to meet Yarrel at the tunnel entrance. We then spent some time, in devising a way to carry Windlow through the tunnel, for Silkhands demanded that he not be forced to huddle and crouch like the rest of us. In the end we slung him into an uncut blanket, and Chance and I carried him between us. Before we went, however, nothing would do but he must scurry around like a tottery old heron and pack up bits of herb and grass about himself, bladders full of this and wraps of that. By that time the warders were bringing our evening meal, so we shut the closet door and pretended Yarrel was within. When they had gone, we ate two bites and packed up the rest before lowering Windlow into Silkhand’s waiting arms. I went down, then Chance, pulling the makeshift rope after him. We abandoned it in the tunnel. The second trip down the little tunnel was easier for me, for I knew where it ended. Yarrel was not at the entrance, but three saddles were, together with other tack. He had even managed to steal some water bottles from somewhere. We had brought such clothing as we thought we would need, and now waited impatiently for Yarrel to come while Windlow lay upon his back making learned comments about the stars. He seemed to know much about them, as he did about everything, from all that Reading, no doubt. I could hear whickering of horses in the meadow, that coughing noise they make when they are quite contented, but interested in something. It was not long until they came, three of them, following Yarrel as though he had been their herd leader.
“There were only these three loose,” he said. “I do not want to risk being discovered in the courtyard where they have stabled the others. These came after me like lambs, no commotion at all, but it means we will have to ride double. Chance, you and Silkhands take the roan, he’s a sturdy beast. I will take Window upon the gray. That will leave the white for you, Peter. You’re among the lightest of us, and it’s a small beast. I should not wonder if it had not some onager blood. Still, even double is quicker than afoot.”
We agreed, saddled the animals and led them away through the trees as quietly as owls’ flight. Only when we had come over the ridge separating the Tower from the forest did we mount. As we mounted we heard a braying from the south, as of a brazen trumpet, but it sounded only once and was blown away on the wind. We held still for long moment waiting for it to be repeated. There was only an uneasy silence. At last we rode away in the, belief our departure was yet unnoticed, leaving it to Yarrel to find us our way in the wilderness¾that long way north to Lake Yost and the Bright Demesne.
We would have ridden faster had we known of the tumult behind us. A cavalcade had arrived from the High Demesne; Dazzle and Borold with it, the pawner I had escaped twice before, and a Demon of some considerable power. The trumpet we had heard summoned warders from the surrounding hills. We were pursued long before we knew of it, and we rode though moonlight and shade down the dark hours, guided by what Yarrel, could learn of the slope we traveled, marking our way by the river’s edge, waiting for enough light to sight some landmark which would set us more firmly upon our way.
Before we had left the Tower, Chance had puzzled over the charts so that he could tell Yarrel of them now what lay north, what ranges and valleys. All of us knew that this study may have been useless. The charts might be true or false, true as any man’s skill could make them, or false as a man’s need might draw them. One never knew in buying charts what Game the maker played.
The Demon behind us could not see us or touch us, therefore he could not pick out our thoughts from the countryside. He could only throw his net into the void to skim whatever vagrant pulses were there, to recognize fear, perhaps, or some thought of the pursuer in the mind of the pursued which would tell him that those he sought were in one direction only. Though we did not know it, he did not find us for some time, for we had dropped below the rocky ridge of hills, out of his line of search. Then, at the bottom of the first long slope, we dropped down once more into a maze of little canyons which twined themselves down the long incline like a twisted rope, joining and rejoining among high, flood-washed walls. Once we were into the twisting way we were doubly hidden. He had to leave the search and climb the highest mountain to our west in order to Read us. Once he had done so, however, he found us soon enough, and the pursuers came behind us at twice our speed.
Morning came. We stopped to eat the little food we had brought, and when Yarrel laid the old man down, his eyes opened in surprised alertness. “I see,” he said. “They are coming behind us. We are pursued.” There was almost panic in his voice.
Silkhands shook him gently, touched his face. “Have you Seen our arrival at the Bright Demesne? Have you seen us with Himaggery?”
He nodded, still in surprise and with something of shame. “I have seen myself there, dearest girl. So, I assumed…Oh, wrong to assume. Wicked to do so. Having seen myself in safety, I did not think for you, not any of you. How vain and mean to let you come this way with so little protection.”
We hushed him, comforted him, but I was fearful. They might pursue him, true, but I thought he needed fear little more than being taken back to his garden and his birds. Me? Well, someone wanted me for something, but I did not think I had offended anyone enough that I was seriously in danger. But Silkhands was another matter. Her fate would be a dire one, denounced by her envious sister, accused of treachery by sister and brother to one who would kill at a word and mourn his error later. Windlow had been right. The High King was a bare, hard man who would believe his fear first. I did not want Silkhands lost to him.
Windlow pulled himself together and we made plans, hasty plans, plans with perhaps too little chance of success. Still, it was better than doing nothing and falling meekly into their claws. It was decided that we would split up, each horse would take a separate way down the twisting canyons. As we went, we would each concentrate on playing a game of two-space-jumper in our heads. It was an infants’ game, one we all knew, played with two Armigers on an otherwise empty board. If we could keep our concentration clean, uncorrupted by other thought or fear, the Demon following us could not tell us apart. We would all be alike to him, and perhaps the searchers would split up, as well, or failing that, would choose one way and ignore the others.
Then, when we had gone in this way until noon¾and it would not be easy to keep only those thoughts for so long a time¾we would sit quietly upon the slope of the canyon, wherever we happened to be, chew a certain leaf which Windlow gave us, and “become as one with wind and leaf.” I had no great confidence in being able to do this, but Windlow said the herb would do it if we did not fight it. “Let go,” he said. “Let everything go. And if you are pursued, they will lose you and pass you by.”
If we did it well, there was a chance the pursuit would pass us by and we could hide behind them, protected from their searching minds by a thousand rocky walls. This was the hasty plan, depending much upon luck and resolution rather than on skill, for we had no practice of this deep meditation while the hunters came after us on swift feet.
“Ill prepared or no, we must go on,” said Windlow. “If we had waited another day, we could not have escaped at all. We must go on.” So we did. Yarrel and Windlow went down the middle way, the widest and smoothest. Chance and Silkhands took the western branch, narrow and deep. I went down the easternmost way. If the chart told true, all these ways would spill into the Long Valley sooner or later and we would meet there if we met at all. As we left one another, I was not at all confident of it, and Yarrel’s half-pitying glance over his shoulder at me did little to reassure me.
My way led among rocky heaps full of whistling burrowers who marked my passage with alarm sounds. I paid them no attention, being intent upon the Armiger game, jump by jump, trying to keep the whole board in my head and remember which squares had been ticked off. This thought had to be interrupted only a few times to remind the horse that he was expected to keep moving. Once or twice, I checked the place of the sun in the sky. I lost myself in the game, truly, able to keep that and only that in mind far better than I would have thought possible.
So¾I did something foolish. Only later did I realize what it had been. The canyon I was in was a twisting one. The sun was only a little before noon, in the corner of my right eye. Much later, oh, much, much later I caught it still in the corner of my right eye and said to myself, see, the very sun is standing still. It had not. Nor had I. The way had turned upon itself, the sun had moved past noon, and I was still thinking the Armiger game in my head. It took a moment to realize what had happened. By then, of course, mine had been the only mind which the pursuers could have followed for a very long time.
I knew it was probably too late to do any good, but losing myself in the herb and the silence could at least do no further harm. If anyone had been Reading during the past hour, only my thoughts would have been there. Perhaps I had decoyed some pursuit away from the others. I tried to convince myself this was a good thing if it had happened. The white horse and I went up the slope to hide among the trees where I sat beneath a fragrant, needled tree and chewed Windlow’s leaves, concentrating the while upon the grasses around me which moved so gently in the sun and air. In a little time it was as though the world dropped away, and I was me no longer. I was grass. I was air, perhaps, as well, but certainly grass, moved by the wind, gloriously green and flexible in the sun. So time passed and I was not. Even as I became the grass upon the hillside, they came down the canyon after me. All the others had vanished at noon, gone into nothingness. I had not. The Demon had tracked me as a fustigar does a bunwit. They came down the canyon below me, would have gone on by me into the great valley without seeing me, precisely as planned. Except for the little, white horse. From wherever I was, whatever I was, the noise of the little horse was no more than a bird call, a beast cry, a little “whicker, whicker, here I am, abandoned and left all alone upon the hillside…” The noise which followed, however, was more than that; shouting, calling of men, whistles blown shrill into echoes. Something deep within me wrenched, and I was myself upon the hillside as men clambered toward me. The little white horse had been lonely, no doubt, had thought himself abused, had called out to the mounts of the men who passed below. At that moment somewhere deep inside me it seemed that I knew a way of escape but had forgotten it. I longed to become as the grass again, then mocked myself for so foolish a desire. No matter how convinced my mind might be, the men would see me for what I really was. All this occurred to me within seconds, and without abating that strange notion that escape was there, within reach, if I could only remember…
And then they surrounded me. Dazzle was there, Borold fiercely smiling, the lean and villainous pawner, and a Demon. Now I knew the Demon. I had seen him last on Festival night in School Town: Mandor’s friend from Bannerwell. I was not afraid, only confused. What could this assemblage want with me? Despite all Yarrel’s imaginings, I could not be convinced that I was the real object of their search, could not be, would not be.
Part of the puzzle unraveled at once. The expression of fury on Dazzle’s face told me that I had not been her quarry. She was infuriated that Silkhands was not with me, demanded to know where she was. My thoughts said, gone, down the valley, safe to Himaggery’s. So I thought, and so they believed. Why should they not? I believed it. Some in the train had been sent in search for old Windlow. I put my head into my hands and thanked the Gamelords that Silkhands was well gone. If she had been found with Windlow, the two escaping together, it would have been considered proof enough of that treachery which the High King so feared. What did it really matter if his old teacher ran away to a better place? It did not, save to the High King, and for no good reason. I turned my thoughts from this as they clambered around me and over me, searching the rocks and trees, sure that the others were not there and yet bound to search for them, bound by the same terror which chained the High King. Doubt. Doubt and more doubt. Fear and more fear. I sighed. The little white horse whickered at me, and I cursed him and his lineage for several generations.
I sat in the landwrack of my dreams and cursed a horse, doing the dreams no good and the horse no harm. So it is with much of life, as old Windlow had said, a jest. We stand at the side of the board and are overrun by the Game of others. When I was younger, I would not have believed that.