I WAS SURPRISED when Mavin said she would go with me. I had always thought of her, when I thought of her, as elsewhere, not with me. When I had met her on the pinnacle, it had been with no thought that she would accompany me anywhere. If I had had any expectations of that meeting, it would have been to spend some time with her, in her own place, and learn what I could from her to make my Shifterish soul more comfortable. So, when she said very calmly that the twins would escort Izia to her childhood home and she would come with me, I was speechless for a time. Remnants of courtly training suggested I should protect her by refusing her company. Good sense told me how silly that was. Of the two of us, she was probably better able to take care of herself. Certainly she had had far more experience than I. At the end, I said nothing, not even thanks.
“I would have gone eventually anyhow,” she said, over Izia’s sleeping form. “The time has come to find out what happens beyond the Blot. Many of us have known for a long time that strangeness and disturbance comes from there. If you saw Windlow’s body, then it is certain Himaggery is there as well. Do you think they are alive?” She did not wait for my nod, we had been over this before. “Himaggery, yes, and probably Throsset of Dornes, that great Sorcerer, and Mind-Healer Talley, one of the few Healers ever to have great skill in healing sick minds, and who knows—a thousand more who have disappeared. Pawns as well, I suppose. I have seen them go by the dozens into that place like dazed sheep. Into the mumble mouths, riding the little cars. Many of us know, have known, but we have not been organized ... No. We have simply been too fearful to go into that place.”
“You? Fearful?” I doubted this.
“Do not mistake my arrogance for courage, my son. It is true that I am renowned for what I can do. But I am afraid of the unknown, as are most men, Gamesmen or pawns alike. My sisters and I were told as children that monsters dwelt in the West, that night creatures would come from there to take us if we were naughty, that all darkdreams came from the West. When I grew older, I learned that there was truth in that. Of course I fear it. We should both fear it, but there is at least one place worse than this!”
“And we will go?”
“Of course.
Swolwys and Dolwys were not so sure. They gave her arguments which extended into the night, all the while that Izia slept. I went now and then to see that she was covered and to look at her legs. The grayness was fading. There were patches of smooth skin behind her knees and along the ankles. I gave thanks to Dealpas in my heart, but did not summon her. I remembered the skipping chant which the children of Schooltown used to sing beneath the windows of Mertyn’s House, as they sang in every village of the world. “Pain’s maid, broken leaf, Dealpas, heart’s grief.” There was a verse for each of the eleven, so familiar to all children that we did not even think of it as anything religious or special. I thought of others. “Mind’s mistress, moon’s wheel, cobweb Didir, shadow-steel.” That one was right enough, a web of adamant woven from moonlight and shadow. “Only-free and sent-far, trickiest is Thandbar.” I hoped that one was right, too, for we two of Thandbar’s kindred. From what Mavin had said about the Blot, we would need to be tricky. I was frightened, too, but I did not hesitate except to stroke Izia’s hair and touch her cheek. I knew then that I loved her, but I was not sure whether I loved her because she was Yarrel’s sister or because she was herself. It did not matter. I might never see her again after the morrow.
When she woke, I sat at her side and held her hands in mine, though she cowered and tried to jerk them away. I made her look at her legs, at the places which were healing, made her listen as I told her that she was healing, healing, that all of the years with Laggy Nap were past, gone, done with, forever dissolved in time. She shivered and sobbed, at last letting her hands lie in mine. Only then I asked, “Do you remember a time before Laggy Nap? Do you remember when you were a child?”
“I remember horses,” she said.
I laughed to myself. Oh, assuredly this was Yarrel’s sister.
“Do you remember a boy, your own age? A brother?” I wanted her to name him. Oh, I held my breath wanting her to name him.
“I remember Dorbie,” she said. “Dorbie was my fusty.”
“No, Izia. Not a fustigar. A boy. A brother. What was his name?”
Her eyes became unfocused, concentrating. “It was ... was Yarry,” she said at last. “Yarry was my brother. Twin. Twins we were.” Years welled to spill down her cheeks. “I lost him. I lost everything.”
“No.” I squeezed her hands, kept myself from hugging her, for I knew it would only frighten her and remind her of Laggy Nap. “No, Izia. They aren’t lost. Tomorrow you will travel with my cousins to find Yarry, and your parents.” Later I cursed myself for mentioning her parents. I had not heard of Yarrel’s family in a year. One or both might be dead. Well, it was too late to change the words. “Your family are still there, Izia, and they have never ceased thinking of you.
“Oh, fool, fool,” she said, singsong. “They sold me to the Shifter. They did not care for me.” The sobbing commenced again.
“Shhh. Izia, that was Laggy Nap’s lies, all lies. You were not sold to the Shifter. He took you, by guile, by trickery. Try to remember how he took you! It was the Shifter who did it, Izia, no one else.”
She subsided onto the pallet, and I gave way to Mavin who brought yet another cup of hot broth from the fire, her cure for all ills, to be spooned down the girl’s throat a few drops at a time. She shook her head, made a bitter face as though she tasted gall when she saw Izia crying. Later she said much to me about Gamesmen who prey upon children. She needed have said none of it. I already had my opinions, and she could not have made them worse.
By noon Izia was enough recovered to finger the healing places on her legs with trembling hands, to seem to understand when we told her she was to return to Yarrel, even to be eager to depart. Mavin took some time, more than I thought necessary, to tell her that Dolwys and Swolwys were “good Shifters” who would see that she was kept safe. She also spent some time with my cousins, instructing them how they should behave toward her to avoid hurting her further. Swolwys went into the plains to fetch horses. When he returned, Izia became herself once more, walking about the animals, picking up a foot to examine a hoof, all the actions I had seen her perform in Nap’s camp. So, they went away, and Mavin and I were left alone.
“I had thought,” she began with a brooding stare into the darkness of the Blot, “that we would take the shape of those two creatures you dispatched down there. I can manage the duplicate creature if you can manage the shape of the Fatman.”
I considered it. When we had destroyed Fatman, we had not much damaged the Fatwagon, and I thought I could figure out how to run it. I could not imagine taking the shape of the Dupies, however, and I asked Mavin how she would manage that.
“I will keep myself low, in the belly, I should think, with bony plates around my brain. The heads of the creature will have to be managed like puppets. With practice, I should be able to make both of them speak at once, though that may not be necessary.” Still she brooded, finally swearing a horrible oath and stepping from her perch. “I don’t like it. It is like taking a shape of shame. The Guild of Midwives has much to answer for.’’
“Not their fault,” I said. “The Dupies said they had been ‘saved from the horrible Midwives.’ I did not understand what they meant at the time.”
She shook her head. “It has to do with the oaths the Midwives take, Peter. With their religion, if you will. I find myself more in sympathy with it, the older I grow.” She saw my puzzled look and went on. “Do you think you have a—a soul?”
Windlow, Silkhands, Yarrel and I had discussed this at Windlow’s tower in the southlands, in a recent time which seemed very long ago. It was old Windlow who had pointed out that each of us was conscious of being two persons, one which did and one which observed the doing. He had told us it was this which made mankind different from the animals we knew. So, I considered Mavin’s question and said, “I have more, perhaps. than a fustigar. Or so Windlow thought.”
“The Midwives believe in the soul. However, they do not believe that it is inborn in mankind. They believe it comes partly with the learning of language (which mankind alone of the animals seems to have) and partly from our fellowmen, a gift of human society to each child. Do you think that sensible?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” I said. “You mean, if I had been born among fustigars, and reared by fustigars, learning no language, I would be more fustigar than human?”
“Something like that. But more. The Midwives believe that only those who perceive their own humanity and perceive that others have the same become ensouled. Some who look like men can never believe that others are like themselves. They do not believe that others are real. One such was Mandor.”
I nodded. I believed her. Mandor had seen the whole world as his fingernail, to be cut at will and the parings thrown away.
“Huld, too,” she went on. “Though he talks a mockery of manners. The soulless ones can be well-mannered, as a beast may be well-mannered. Or so say the midwives who have studied the matter.”
“What has this to do with Dupey?”
“Ah.” She came to herself with a start. “The Midwives take an oath, very solemn and binding, that they will look into the future of each child born, and if they do not see that one gaining a soul, then they do not let it live. It is the Talent of the Midwives to see the future in that way, more narrowly than do Seers, and more reliably. It is called the Mercy-gift, the gift the Midwife gives the child, to look into the future and find there that it will have gained a soul.”
“How explain Mandor, then, or Huld?”
“The great Houses want no Midwife at their childbeds. No. They care nothing for ‘souls.’ They care only for manners, and this they can train into any if they be but strict enough. However, I do not think the Dupey was the offshoot of any great House. More likely he was scavenged from the Midwives, or born in some House where Midwives did not go.” This last was said with a hesitating fall, as thought she knew where that might have been. The talk was depressing me, but it had raised a question I had to ask. “And did the Midwives deliver me, Mother?”
She smiled such a smile, a dawning on her face. “Oh, they did, Peter. And you have had all the gifts we could give you, Mertyn and I. No fear. You are no Mandor. Nor any Dupey. If men all were better, perhaps even a Dupey could be given a soul, but it would take holy men and women to do it. No simple mother could do it. The horror would be too great, and the pain of the child too monstrous to bear. How did he live? And why? While it is true that monstrous things are sometimes born, it takes something more monstrous, evil, and prideful yet to keep them alive.”
“And the Fatman?” I asked. “Legless, he was, with no lower body at all. Had he been born that way, he would have died unless someone intervened. Why? How and why? Well, perhaps Windlow can tell us, for he is very wise.”
“If we can find him. If we can free him. If he yet lives. Well, we will not do it standing here. It is time to go.”
We stayed only long enough to set a boulder before Mavin’s cave. There were things inside which she treasured. We went empty-handed, clad only in our fur until we reached the puddled shadows of the Blot. There clouds of flies rose from the remnants of Dupey and Fatman. There we took those shapes and moved about in them, trying them. They were hateful. They were wrong. There was no logic or kindness in those shapes, and I began to understand what Mavin had tried to say about souls. One could not exist in those shapes without becoming compressed, warped, envenomed. There was pain intrinsic to the shape, and I began to think what it would be like to live with that pain forever. I began to modify the shape to shut the pain away, and I heard Mavin panting.
“I cannot inhabit it,” she said. “I must carry it upon me like a rigging.”
“Perhaps we should try something else,” I offered.
“No,” she said. “My mistake was in trying to take the identity of the creature. We must only appear to be these creatures. We must not be these things or we will become monstrously changed.”
So, we were warned, and I was glad for the time spent in moving and trying that body. It took time, but at last we were able to make an appearance not unlike what had been before while still maintaining our own identities untouched. I was as weary as though I had run twelve leagues.
“Rest,” said Mavin. “Here is food. We will carry some with us, for Gamelords know what will be found within.”
Even in those few moments rest, we found that we shifted away from those shapes. Mavin barked a short laugh.
“Mavin Manyshaped,” she mocked herself. “I do not deserve the name.”
I thought of the shapes I had taken easily, almost without trying. “It is not lack of Talent,” I told her, sure that I was right, feeling it through some internal shrinking as though my spirit shrank from what I was. “The shapes are evil, Mavin. Moreover, they were meant to be evil.”
She did not contradict me, and we went toward the mumble mouth in those evil shapes, building within ourselves certain barriers against becoming what we appeared to be. I do not know how Mavin managed. For myself, I built a kind of shell between me and the image of Fatman, and within that shell dwelt Peter and the Gamesmen of Barish, within and yet no part of that thing. Mavin had evidently observed the Blot for some time, for she knew how to open the mouths by striking them sharply with a stick, crying in the Dupey’s voice, “Open, open, old silly thing. Open and let Dupies come in.”
There were shriekings and clatterings from within, and then the mouth opened to extrude its long metal tongue. Grooved tracks divided it lengthwise, tracks into which the flatcar had fit. The Fatwagon did not fit these, but I managed to straddle them with my own wheels as I followed the Dupey shape up the ramp and into the place beyond. I had expected a tunnel, a place not unlike the catacombs beneath Bannerwell. This place was not what I had expected.
The walls were metal, long sheets of it, dim and slightly glossy, polished at one time but now faintly fogged with time. At intervals the metal was interrupted by panels of glass, many of them broken, the shards lying upon the floor of the way. Behind some of the intact glasses were greenish lights, feeble, sickly lights. It was enough to find one’s way by, not truly enough to see by, so we strained to see, pushed at the dimness with our minds, grew fractious and annoyed in the effort. Above us the metal panels extended to a high, curved ceiling, and in this were screened holes emitting sighs and drips, moody winds and dampness smelling of rot. Something in the place tried to help us by lighting the way ahead, darkening the way behind. Each effort was accompanied by frustrated clicks and whinings, often with no result except to plunge us into darkness. Then there would be running noises, hummings, squeals as of slaughtered belts or gears, and light would come again, only to go off again when it was most inconvenient.
“Gamelords,” said Mavin in fury. “Why can’t the place ignore us and let us be.” At the sound of her voice the clickings and hummings redoubled in inefficient clatter. She stopped. forehead furrowed. “It hears me.”
“Tell it to turn the lights on and leave them on.” I grated between my teeth. At my words the spotty lights went on down the whole length of the corridor and all the noises stopped. We looked at one another, expecting some other thing to happen, but silence succeeded silence, dripping water fell behind us, small breezes beat damply into our faces. We went on. The lights stayed on and there were no more of the noises. “Someone heard us,” I said.
“Something heard us,” she corrected. “This is a place of magicians. A place of mechanisms. Like the machine which unloaded the cargo, things created to fulfill special functions.”
“They do not do it well,” I commented, half angrily. The wheels of the Fatwagon had begun to squeal. Mavin reached over with the can of oil she had taken from Dupey’s body and the squeak faded to a high shriek at the very limits of perception. It set my teeth on edge. Our journey was not helped by the fact that we had come to side corridors, branching ways, each helpfully lit into dim distances.
“The tracks.” Mavin said, noting my confusion. I saw then that the grooves in the floor did not go into the side corridors. I flushed. I should have seen that, as she had. We went on, as quietly as we could, the endless corridor fading behind us into phosphorescent distance, an equal tunnel always ahead, no change, no variation except in the pattern of broken glass or the shape of the puddles under the dripping vents. We had brought food with us. Twice we stopped to fetch it forth and nibble as we went on. My internal clock said that half a day had gone, or more. The corridor did not seem to curve, and we had walked far enough to come under the mountains which had been visible from the pinnacle.
“Snowfast Range,” Mavin said. “We call them the Forbidden Mountains, full of glaciers and crevasses. We have a long history of explorers going into the Snowfasts and not returning.”
Then we stopped, confused. The tracks divided into three before us, one going on down the endless corridor, another swerving right down a long declivity, one going left up a long slope into the dark. I could not kneel, so Mavin did, peering at the tracks to see which ones evidenced wear, which were dimmed with corrosion. She gestured us off to the left. When we entered that way, the lights came on, fewer of them than in the way we had left, but still enough that we could avoid stumbling over the fragments of ceiling which littered the middle of the way.
Now side corridors led off with increasing frequency. We begàn to hear sounds, murmurs, buzzing as of machinery or distant voices in conversation. Mavin began a little song, silly and repetitive, the kind of thing the Dupies would have sung for themselves, discordantly twin-voiced. She had mastered the shape at last and was able to make both heads move and speak. From deep within me the voice of Didir came in a faint sigh, “Persons, nearing, beware.” I passed the warning on to Mavin, who needed it not. Neither of us were surprised when we were confronted, though both of us took pains to simulate paroxysms of hysteria as we knew our shapes would have done.
Black they were, pale faces showing like moons against the dark, bodies and limbs hidden beneath the straight black dresses they wore, hair and ears hidden beneath square black caps which rode upon their heads like balanced boxes, held there by tight cloths which came down over the ears, under the throat, down the back of the neck. Around each wrist was a metal band, and upon each hand a fingerless glove. Against all that black the fingers squirmed like worms in gravesoil, and the faces peered at us without expression. We backed away, gibbering in our pretended fright, and one of them spoke.
“Well, Shear, monsters escaped from the pits? How come here? And why?”
“I have no idea, Dean Manacle. None. But they are not going from the pits, you will note, but toward them.”
Mavin chose this moment to say, “Oh, Dupies need to talk to Tallman, good Tallman will help Dupies. Dupies got into the mumble mouths, we did, came to find Tallman.”
“Oh, do not be in a temper, great sirs,” I managed to gulp. “The calling machine did not function, and we have word.”
“Dupies say ‘Patience, patience’,” Mavin went on, wickedly. “Fatman says we must find Tallman, oh, good Tallman, to tell Dupies what to do.”
“Creatures from some portal,” said the one called Shear. “That is why they go toward the pits. Creatures from some portal who have come into the base in search of their hitch.”
“An inescapable hypothesis, Shear. Also, an interesting occurrence. One worthy of note. Perhaps a small monograph? However, practicality dictates that they not be allowed to remain here. Will you call for removers?”
“Certainly, Dean Manacle. As you wish.”
It was as though they heard nothing we said, as though we had chirped like birds or howled like fustigars to make some general noise without content. Mavin realized it as soon as I did, and we both subsided into meaningless babble. They took no notice of this, either. The one called Shear fiddled with a wrist band, poking at tiny knobs upon it with a fierce display of concentration which even I could recognize as mannered. Who were these strange ones? Mavin made a face at me from Dupey’s left head and went on with the nonsense sound she was making. The two before us continued to converse as though we were not there.
We had not long to play this game. A shrill shrieking set Fatman’s ears on edge. I damped the sound, a sound which seemed to accompany every machine which moved in this place. A little cart came gravely around a corner, ridden by two replicas of Tallman, or perhaps by one replica and Tallman himself. It did not matter, for the one called Manacle made it clear there was no difference, no distinction.
“Tallmen! There are two monsters here, probably from a portal. See they are removed and that the Tallman responsible is sent to the pits.”
The Tallmen did not reply. I began to understand that the black-dressed ones, who must be those magicians we had heard so much of, did not hear words unless spoken by one of their own kind. The treelike figures merely unfolded themselves from the cart and reached toward us with their hands. A bolt of force, small and controlled, but nonetheless painful, struck us both. We cried out, both Dupey heads in unison and Fatman in shock and surprise, a long harmonic of anguish. We moved in the direction indicated.
“Tallman,” I cried, “Fatman has news, news, listen Tallman to what Fatman has to say.”
One of them spoke, not quite the voice I had heard before. “Hold your noise, monsters. We are not your hitch. He will be found, you may be sure, and disciplined beside you in the pits. Were you not told never to enter the labyrinth! You were told. All the hitches are told. Now you have made them angry.” Another, totally gratuitous, bolt struck us from behind though we were moving as rapidly as possible. I conceived a hatred for the Tallmen in that moment. Vengeance would have to come later, however, for now it was enough that we were being escorted into the maze. I comforted myself with this while Shifting my burned flesh about. The bolts had been painful enough, but they had not done any real damage. The Tallmen did not speak between themselves. All was quiet except for the shrieking wheels of the cart, the drip of water from the ceiling, the moody sighing of the ducts. Soon the ceilings began to rise; we came to larger spaces; we encountered other carts and other black-clad magicians striding along the corridors without seeming to notice what went on around them. Then, almost without warning, we were at the pits. They opened before us, broad and deep as quarries, sheer walls dropping into a swarm of ceaseless movement as of a hive of insects overturned. A cage of metal stood at the pit wall, tall metal beams which reached from the pit floor to the ceiling far above, and within this square of beams a smaller cage was suspended. We were forced inside; the door was shut behind us; the endless machine shriek began as were lowered into the swarm where a thousand creatures like ourselves flurried in ceaseless agitation. The door opened to let us out, and we moved hesitantly into nightmare. Beside me I heard Mavin’s voice from Dupey’s throat. “Gamelords! What madness is this?”
They crawled about us, oozed, flopped, hopped or stumbled, by every means of locomotion and by none. Some had one leg and some had none, or three, or six. Some were one-headed, some had two, or none, or four. There were blobs which lay while features chased themselves across their surfaces; some attached to mechanisms which made the Fatwagon seem a model of simplicity. There were howlers, moaners, silent ones whose thoughts beat at me in a tide of agony. The place stank of refuse, and excrement, and blood. Some things, dead and half eaten, lay against the walls of the place. Instinctively Mavin and I moved to the wall and put our backs against it. I looked up to see the hooded heads of the Tallmen peering down at us. I had never seen a Tallman’s face, and I wondered in that instant if they had faces. Some of the creatures around us did not. Something crawled across my feet and lay there, rippling at me. Deep within, I heard Didir recoil. “Wrongness, Peter. Wrongness. Beware, beware.”
The walls of the pit were pierced with black arches, screens behind which we could discern faint shadows, black on black. A bell rang somewhere, and the creatures began to edge toward these arches. There were troughs beneath them which began to flow with half liquid soup. The creatures fed. I watched, feeling the place with my skin. It was like being in a waking dream, a dream from which one knows one should be able to waken. The cage rattled upward, then down once more. Inside it was a Tallman and great bundles of solid food, stinking sides of meat, sacks of beaten grain. The Tallman came from the cage before it tipped to spill the food upon the floor. When the cage rattled upward again, the monsters broke from the arches, howling, to descend upon the scattered food. The Tallman kept away from them, turning, turning until glittering eyes from beneath the concealing hood met mine.
“Fatman,” he breathed. “I will kill you.” He moved toward me. I let him come close, close enough that he could not be seen from above. Then Wafnor reached out and held him, bound him about with arms of steel, held him fast while I looked under that hood at his eyes. Tallmen had faces, of a sort. At least, this one did. The face burned hatred at me and at Dupey behind me. “Who are you?” it asked at last. “You are not Fatman.”
“No,” I admitted. “I am not Fatman. I am one who will hear you talk, Tallman. Tell me of this place, of these magicians, of these pits.” He was not willing to do so, but it did not matter. Didir Read him; Wafnor shook words out of him; Trandilar entranced him. The bell rang again. The creatures assembled before the arches once again, and I looked with a Shifter’s eyes through that dark glass to the shadows beyond. Pale, moon faces were there under their square hats; younglings were there, dressed in black but with soft caps covering their heads, eyes wide and fingers busy as they wrote on little pads of paper, wrote and peered, wrote and peered.
“What are they doing?” I demanded.
“Monster watching,” Tallman gasped. “It is what they do. It is why they say they are here.”
I thought this a lie, and yet Didir said Tallman believed it to be true. Since they were watching us, we behaved as monsters should, howled, bubbled, rocked and capered, all the while holding Tallman fast so that he could not move. Those watching would have only seen him stand, head down, face obscured. After a time the bell rang once more, the monsters left the arches to resume their endless movement in the pit.
We questioned. At last, we knew all the Tallman knew and let him go. He backed away from us to the center of the pit, staring about him with wild, glittering eyes, maddened by shadows. They were not shadows who came after him, however, but things of the pit which seemed to bear Tallmen some malice. He had a weapon of some kind, and he did some damage to them before he was buried beneath their bodies. Mavin and I did not watch. We were intent upon those other Tallmen who hovered at the edge of the pit, far above.
“He did not harm his hitch,” said one. “I would have killed mine had they disobeyed me. Why did he not kill his hitch?”
“Mad,” said the other. “He was mad. Sometimes we go mad, you know. They say so.”
“I would have killed them,” replied the first. “Mad or not.” They moved away from the pit and were gone. I caught a Dupey eye upon me with Mavin’s keen intelligence behind it.
“We have spent time enough here,” she hissed.
There was the matter of the Fatwagon, which should be left in a place it would not attract attention. There was the matter of the arches behind which the watchers lurked. She knew this as well as I, and we sought a solution to the dilemma. We found it at the base of the metal cage, a slight declivity in the pit wall, a space large enough to hide us as we Shifted. When next the moveable cage fell and rose, we rose with it, hidden beneath it like a false bottom to the thing. Once the space around the pit was empty, two Tallmen came into being and moved away to the fringing corridors. When we had found a secluded place, we stopped to set some plan of action. Tallman had believed what he had told us. He had not known the name “Himaggery” or “Windlow.” He knew only that a certain cargo was ordered for them, that it would go behind the inner doors to them, to be used in certain ceremonies which were to happen soon. He knew only that the monsters were created by them, in order that the monsters could be watched by them.
They made things, things which were sent out into the world to be sold or given away by the Gifters. They needed pawns to serve them, so pawns were brought in through the mumble mouths. Tallmen were created by them to maintain the corridors, to maintain the portals, to repair things which broke. “But we cannot,” he had said pitiably. “No one knows how to fix them.” They did not talk to Tallmen, except to give instructions. This Tallman had not been through the inner doors; he did not know what happened there. We asked what friends he had? None. What acquaintances? None. Surely he slept somewhere, in some company? No. At most, they could gather in pairs. Why sleep in company? Why eat in company? One slept wherever one was.
We had asked him how he had learned to speak? Surely he remembered a childhood?
At that his eyes had rolled back in his head and he had trembled like a drumhead. Mavin had said sadly, “Let it go, Peter. I do not know whether it was born of human kind, but it has been changed beyond recognition. This is only an empty vessel, drained of all but limited speech and directed action and fear of pain. Let it go.”
That was when we had let him go.
Now we leaned against a wall and considered. Somewhere in this tangled, underground labyrinth were the inner doors the Tallman had spoken of. Somewhere in this web of a place we would find some answers, but we would not find them standing against a wall. We would have to follow some of them. “I will not do this,” Mavin said with asperity, “mock that unfortunate creature by saying them. They are magicians, and so I will say.
“Say away,” I commented. “Particularly if it will help some.”
Easier conceived of than accomplished. There were none of the magicians about. Perhaps it was not a time they moved about. Perhaps the earlier occurrence had been a random happening with little chance of repetition. We wandered, baffled and frustrated. Bells rang. Machines wheezed and gulped. Tallmen moved quietly past. Silence came.
“Perhaps it is night outside,” said Mavin. “These beings must once have lived beneath the sun. Perhaps they keep its time still.”
“If that is so, they maybe sleeping rather than watching what goes on around them. And if that is so, then we might risk other bodies than these.” We hesitated, wondering whether it was wise to take the risk.
At last she said, “If it finds us anything, it is worth it. I will go left, you right, as fast and as far as possible. Meet here when they begin to move about again.”
So we agreed, and I set out as furred-Peter once more, on legs as swift as I could Shift them. I had no luck, none, and returned to the place heavy with anger and disappointment. Mavin was there already, curled against the wall half asleep, and I knew at once she had been luckier than I.
“I found them,” she said. “Found the inner doors. Sleep now, and when we have rested, we will find a way through them.” We were well hidden. I gave up anger in favor of sleep and dreamed long, too well, of Izia.
THE PLACE OF THE MAGICIANS was full of niches and corners, almost as though they provided space for invisible beings, Tallmen and servants whom they did not see. We found such a niche, a place from which we could see the doors Mavin had found without being seen ourselves. The doors were quite ordinary, a wide pair of time-blotched panels without handles or knobs, and beside them a little booth of glass, though I suspected it was of a material more durable than that. We had not long to wait before one of the magicians came into the booth, an old one, jowls jiggling and pouches beneath his eyes, a nose which, had I seen it in a tavern in Betand, I would have considered evidence of much wine toping. He hawked and mumbled to himself for a time, his voice carried out to us through some contrivance or other which made it echo and boom.
“Huskpaw here,” he mumbled. “On duty, Huskpaw. Huskpaw is on duty. Doors unlocked. Oh, turn to turn, boredom, weariness, and ennui, clutches and concatenations of all tedium.” Then he must have heard a sound because he stiffened, sat himself down before the glass and took a pose of watchfulness. We heard the voice of Manacle. “Doctor Manacle, here, Proctor Huskpaw. Desirous of egress ...”
“What business have you among the monsters?” rapped Huskpaw, so rapidly I knew it was rote, even as he reached for whatever thing it was controlled the doors.
He received a giggle in response, the voice of Shear. “Doctor Manacle goes forth to select monsters for consecration, Proctor Huskpaw. It is time. The ceremonies will not wait.”
“Lecturer Shear,” Manacle’s voice, cold as a battlefield after Great Game. “I can make my own explanations, if you please! Huskpaw, give your handle a twist there, my good fellow. Your Dean goes forth among monsters to select a few for consecration. Write me down as upon the business of the college.”
“Certainly, Dean Manacle. At once, sir. Written as upon the business of the college. Surely. Proctor Huskpaw at your convenience, sir...” opening the doors through which Manacle and Shear emerged, Shear still in a high good humor, obviously unsuppressed. Mavin twitched at me, and we followed them, hearing Huskpaw’s voice behind us as we went, “Oh, certainly, Dean, certainly, Doctor, Dean Manacle, Dean Mumblehead, Dean monster-lover. Blast and confusion upon him and his lickass Shear, old stuff-sox. May he rot.” We followed the two on a circuitous route before they stopped at last beside one of the monster pits, whether the one we had been in or some other, I could not tell. They leaned at ease upon a railing, looked at the farther wall without letting their eyes move downward, and discussed the grotesques which seethed below.
“Nothing here worth consecration, eh, Shear? Not for us, at any rate. Perhaps for Quench? Now, I have the idea that Quench would select some of these for consecration, don’t you?” Titter, giggle, elbow into the ribs of the shorter magician. “But nothing for us. Pity. That’s what comes of being discriminating. Bother and overwork, all to maintain one’s standards.”
They wandered off along the corridors, Mavin and I still close behind them in our Tallmen guises. They might have seen us if they had turned, but they did not. They were oblivious to our presence as though they were the only living creatures in all that vast place. They came to a second pit, or perhaps the same one from another side. Mavin shifted uneasily at my side. The two magicians leaned upon the railing once more and stared at the ceiling fifty manheights above them.
“Now, there are some likely ones here, aren’t there, Shear? That three-legged one, yonder, with the tentacles? Most interesting. I must remember to bring that to the attention of my son, Tutor Flogshoulder, to be included in his research. Ah, yes, that one would make interesting watching. One could get a decent footnote out of that. Somehow, however, I do not feel it would be ... quite ... right for consecration, do you, Shear?”
Shear, tittering, responding with a shaken head, a flurry of expostulation. “Not at all, my dear Dean. At least, not for one of your taste and standards. No. Certainly not. For Quench, perhaps. Or for Hurlbar. Not for you. Certainly not.”
They were off again. Again we followed. Three times more the scene was repeated. I watched them carefully. They never looked into the pits they talked over. They never saw anything except the featureless walls of the place. It was some kind of Game, perhaps a ritual. I could sense Mavin’s impatience, but the play was nearing its close. They had come to a different kind of pit, shallower, cleaner, in a place where the dismal hooting of the ventilators was somewhat muted, the drip from the ceilings somehow stopped. This time the two looked down, and this time they were silent as they looked. Mavin and I faded into an alcove.
“Oh, here are some who will do!” Manacle, greedy as a child seeing sweets. “Not well, but better than the others we have examined.”
“Yes.” Shear in agreement. “Not perfect, but then, who can expect perfection in these difficult times? Still, better than any of the others we have seen ...”
Manacle whistled sharply, and a Tallman materialized at his side out of some corner or cross corridor. There were murmured instructions. The Tallman entered the cage, dropped below my sight. The creak of the rising cage riveted our attention as it squealed its way upward. In it the Tallman stood, surrounded by four little girls. “No, no, no,” Manacle cried, full of shrill anger. “Not that one, idiot. That one, over there in the corner. Take this one back and get me that one.” The cage dropped again to return with some exchange made which I could not detect. The little girls were clad in white kilts, not entirely clean, above which their slender chests were as breastless as any baby’s. Shear and Manacle gazed at them with greedy satisfaction. “Oh, these will do very well, won’t they, Shear? Bring them along, Tallman. We will consecrate these monsters at the doors.” With that they were off, nodding and bubbling in mutual satisfaction and congratulation.
“Monsters?” I whispered to Mavin.
“Females,” she said harshly. “Have you seen any female here, anywhere? The magicians, their servants, the Tallmen, all are male. These children are the first females I have seen.”
“But why ‘monsters’? They look perfectly normal to me.”
“I think not,” she said. “Come, this is our chance to get through the doors.”
She carried out her plan so swiftly I had barely time to make the shifts with her. First she showed herself to the two children who were last in line behind the shambling Tallman, cutting them away from the others and sending them wandering down a side corridor. Then, we became those children, “conserving bulk” as she hastily directed, following the Tallman as he strode along mindlessly, his shadowed face betraying nothing of interior thought or confusion or misapprehension. I felt heavy, squeezed into the smaller form, but we managed it well.
At the doors, Huskpaw was instructed to assemble a group of magicians. There was a good deal of coming and going, lengthy chanting and waving of papers. The ceremony seemed to be called “conferring honorary degrees.” The two real children did not respond except to move where they were pushed; Mavin and I did likewise. The eyes of the real girls showed only a kind of vacancy, like that of the Tallmen, only more so. I knew then that they were not normal children but were something else, perhaps monsters, perhaps something I could not name. Eventually the magicians dropped a robe over each of us, black as their own, and the ceremony appeared to be over. We were ushered through the doors and into a wide reception chamber where the group was joined by others to be served with wine and sweet cakes by a pair of costumed pawns as silent and vacant as the little girls. The girls, we among them, stood in a loose huddle at one side of the room, largely ignored except for occasional lascivious glances from Manacle. I was to be grateful for this seeming invisibility. I had expected to see only strangers in this place, and the entrance of someone I knew brought a sudden terror. He came through an arched door, dressed much as I had seen him last at Bannerwell, half helmed as a Demon, clad in silver. Huld. Thalan to Mandor. My tormentor in Bannerwell; him I had conquered and imprisoned in turn. Now, here. In this place. I could not stop an involuntary shudder. He had no reason to suspect I might be here, but I shuddered nonetheless. If he had any cause to suspect, his questing Mind would Read me among this multitude and find me in moments. Only the clutter of thoughts in the room hid me now. Within me Didir stirred, whispered, “I will shield you, Peter. Go deep, deep, as you have done before.” I could not take her advice. I had to warn Mavin.
The two little girls were holding hands, clinging together as two kittens might in a strange place. I copied the action, caught Mavin’s hand in mine to spell letters into her palm. She stiffened, began to swing her eyes toward him even as I moved before her to screen her from his gaze. Then she saw the Demon helm, and that was enough. Her face went blank, and I knew she was focusing upon some nonsense rhyme, some jibble tune to keep her thoughts busy on the surface, invisible beneath. Didir spoke from within once more, “Go deep, Peter. I will shield you. Watch, listen, but do not be.”
I had done it before, in Bannerwell, had become a witless nothing which wandered about with no more surface thought than a kitchen cat. So I did it now. I became the child whose body I mimicked, became a girl without a mind, a passive body, sank deep into that soft vacancy and listened. Words flowed through my head like water, meaningless as ripples. It did not matter what they meant. When the proper time came, I would remember, or Didir would tell me.
“Huld, my dear fellow.” Thus Manacle engaging in rough shoulder pats which caused Huld to tighten his lips and smile angrily. Manacle, not noticing. “Dear fellow. So nice of you to join us. This is an occasion, you know. Signal Day is only two days hence, and it is time to rededicate ourselves to our historic mission. We bring in a few new monsters to serve as breeders, properly consecrated, of course. My position requires me to be first, to set an example. Not the most enjoyable of our duties, but” ¾manly chuckle¾”not the least. Will you join us?”
“May I hope, Dean Manacle, that in the flurry of preparations you have not forgotten why I am here?” Huld, stiff, angry, but with something behind the anger¾a kind of gleefulness? Something out of place, something conniving. Didir heard it.
“Certainly not, dear fellow. Of course not. I have transmitted your warnings to several of my colleagues. They are concerned, most concerned. They consider your request quite appropriate, under the circumstances. The Committee will meet tonight, and we will bring the matter before them at that time.”
“And you’ve received the cargo? All of it? That Seer, Windlow, and Himaggery, so-called Wizard? Most important, the young Necromancer, Peter?”
Manacle shifted uncomfortably. “Well now, there’s a bit of bother about that. We have two of them, brought in only a few days ago. Yes. But one seems to have been killed en route, so to speak, at least so I am told. The Tallman believed so. He sent the Gifter back to find one of those gamespeople who are supposed to be able to raise the dead. Nothing to that supposition, of course. Impossible to raise the dead. Not like your own talent, my dear Huld, which we have studied and find some scientific basis for. At any rate, the young one isn’t in the cargo.”
Huld glared, heat coming off his skin to make Manacle move back from his blazing. “I do not believe he was killed.”
“My dear man, the Tallman was quite explicit. The Gifter said a rockfall had completely buried him. No chance of his having survived. Shear, come over here and tell our friend what the Tallman said about that boy who was killed.”
“I don’t care what your Tallman said.” Huld in fury. “Haven’t you understood anything I’ve said to you? Let me say it again. The Council plots against you, against the magicians. I came to warn you, out of friendship, in return for past favors. The Council works through certain Gamesmen in the outer world. They have done so for decades. Now, they move beyond that. They create Gamesmen. Gamesmen with new Talents, powerful Talents. Peter is one. He is no ordinary Gamesman, no ordinary Talent! I, too, once thought him dead, or as good as! I was wrong. You are wrong now.”
Shear interrupted, his mouth full of wine and crumbs which exploded into a little shower upon his black dress. “We do not like being called ‘magicians,’ Huld. The ignorant Gamesmen may do so, but we expect more courtesy from you. We respect your warnings, but if this Peter is dead, surely.”
“You fools, don’t you understand? He isn’t dead. I don’t care what your Gifter said or pretended. Peter is not dead.”
Manacle now, chilly as winter. “I do not appreciate being called a fool. As a direct descendent, unto the thirtieth generation, of the original Searchers, as fifth in a direct line to win the title of Dean, I am not one to be lightly called fool. We bear with you, Huld, though you are a mere Gamesman, because you have been useful. We do not bear with insult, however.”
I heard Huld’s teeth grind together. To be called a “mere Gamesman” would have been enough. To hear the scorn in Manacle’s voice was more than enough.
“You bear with me, Dean Manacle, because I am the only one who can warn you of what the Council plots against you, what the Council intends. Without me, you are at the mercy of that strange people, not a tender mercy, Manacle. Now, where are they? Where are the Wizard and the Seer?”
Manacle drew himself up with a trembling hauteur, pompously waving the hovering servitor away. “They are in the laboratories, Huld. I will take you there tonight, after the meeting. You may see for yourself. I will tell you then what the Committee has decided about your request, your request to have access to our defenders. I do not think they will be sympathetic, Huld. They believe that the Council and the Committee are effective counterweights to one another. They believe it is so we keep the world in balance.”
“Until the Council grows tired of balance.” It was said very quietly, but with enormous menace. With that utterance the room became perfectly still. One of the little girls whimpered, the sound falling into quiet as a pebble into a pool, the ripples spreading ever wider to rebound from the walls, an astonishment of sound. Manacle stared at Huld with eyes grown suddenly wary. “Why would they wish to destroy the historic balance?” he quavered.
“Why would they not? They grow proud, powerful. They long for new things. Why else would they have created this ‘Peter,’ this new Talent? For what other purpose than to change the balance?”
One of the magicians who had stood silent during this exchange, one taller than most, with a face the color of ash, said, “Do you know this to be true?”
“Professor Quench, I know it almost surely. The likelihood disturbs me greatly. And it should disturb you.”
“We must know,” said Quench in a voice of lava, flowing, hardening, roughening the room with its splash and flow. “We must know, Manacle. We must know, Shear. Likely isn’t good enough. We must know.”
Manacle dithered, shifted his feet, picked at an invisible spot of lint. “The Committee of the Faculty,” he offered, “the subject is to be brought before the Committee when it meets tonight.”
Quench stared him long in the face, then nodded. “See that it is,” he said, walking out of the room, voice splattering behind him. “See that it is. I will be there.”
Manacle now very much on his dignity, feeling diminished by ashy Quench and burning Huld, flutters at Shear. “Take the consecrated monsters away, Shear. This has quite disordered my day. If we are to have questions raised like this, out of order, before the Committee has had a chance to consider, well. I have much to prepare.” He bustled away in the direction Quench had gone. Shear herded the girls away, and my last glimpse of Huld was of his fiery eyes watching Manacle to the end of sight. We went, Mavin and I, quiet as bunwits, down the carpeted hallway and into the place designated. There were pallets there for sleeping, and spigots for a kind of gruel, and a pool for bathing. There was nothing of interest save the tall, barred door which led into Manacle’s quarters. Once Shear had gone, it would be no trick to shape a finger into a key, to go out and lock the door behind us.
So we did. “What will he think when he finds two of us gone?” I whispered to Mavin.
“He will think the two remaining ate the two who are missing,” she snarled at me. “Don’t be a fool, boy. Leave the door open as though Shear forgot to lock it. Then he may wonder where his breeders are, but he will not suspect a spy in his own place.”
Shamefaced, I went back to unlock the door. Inside the room the two little girls had settled upon one of the pallets and were engaged in a game of a curious kind. I turned my face away, flushing. Evidently they were not totally mindless. They had been trained to do at least one thing. “What now?” I asked Mavin.
“Now I need to think,” she rasped. I could not understand her anger until she spoke again. “What is he up to, that fustigar vomit? What does he mean saying you were created by the Council? I know better than he how you were created, and it was in the usual way. No Council had part in it save the counsel between man and woman. He seeks to trick these magicians in some way for some reason. What is the reason?
“Who are these people, these magicians who do not like to be called magicians? They say they are ‘faculty’ of a ‘college.’ Well, I know what a college is. It is only another word for school. Windlow had a college. So did Mertyn. What are faculty except schoolmasters. Hm? Except these seem strangely preoccupied with signs and rituals, speaking often of Signtists and Searchers. Is this some kind of religion? Manacle claims himself descended from original Searchers. Well enough. Searchers after what? They hold Gamesmen in contempt. There are no women among them. They seem to admit only four kinds of beings: themselves, monsters, Gamesmen, and pawns.”
“Tallmen,” I offered.
“Only a lesser kind of monster, or perhaps I should say a superior kind of monster. What is this Council that Huld uses to frighten them with, as a nursemaid uses night-bogie to frighten naughty children?”
“Himaggery spoke of a Council. I thought he said it was a group of very powerful Gamesmen¾I think he said Gamesmen. They search out heresy ...”
“Some such group has been rumored, yes. But is it that group which Huld speaks of? And meantime we know nothing about Himaggery and Windlow except that they are ‘in the laboratories.’ Where are the ‘laboratories’? What are they? We are rattling around in here like seeds in a dry gourd, making a slithering noise with no sense. Come, son, set a plan for us.”
To hear Mavin say this in such noise and frustration amused me. There was no time to be amused, no time to treasure that moment, but I stored it away to gloat over later. Of such moments are adulthood made. I almost said “manhood,” but thought better of that. “We must not be misled by the puzzle,” I told her. “Whatever the Council is, whatever this place may be, whatever the history of the place or its reasons for existence¾none of these are more important than Himaggery and Windlow. Manacle will meet Huld after tonight’s meeting. So we will go to the meeting and hear what is said. After that we will follow Manacle to his meeting with Huld, and Didir must protect me as best she can. If we are inconspicuous, we will likely pass unnoticed.”
When I said the word, inconspicuous, it made me think of Chance, and for a moment I was overcome with a terrible homesickness for him, for Schooltown, for the known and familiar and sure. I gasped, but Mavin had not noticed.
“I will be inconspicuous,” she growled. “And I will be patient, but this place itches me.”
It itched me, too, as I tried to find the place of the meeting. No mind I sought through knew of the meeting or where it might be held. “An exclusive group,” murmured Mavin, when I told her this. “Do you suppose the room is never cleaned?”
This took me a moment to puzzle out. Then I understood that the room would undoubtedly be cleaned by someone, a pawn. I began to search among pawnish minds, Didir dipping here and there as we moved above the place. On the sixth or seventh try, we found a mind which had once known of the place. We went to it. All of this had taken so much time that we were there only a moment before the magicians began to arrive, only time to find a dark corner in a kind of balcony over the main room where two additional chair-like shapes would go unnoticed. The place was under a duct which brought in heat, and Mavin settled into it with a tired sigh.
“One more shift and I would have started to eat myself,” she confessed. “I cannot store as you do, my son.”
I realized with some guilt that Shattnir had gone on storing power for me at every opportunity. It had begun to feel as natural as breathing. I let power bleed between us. “Take from me,” I whispered to her. “I feel we will not move from this place for some time.”
One wall of the place below was made up of hundreds of tiny windows, blank and black, except that on one or two a light crawled wormlike and green. One end of the long table had a slanted surface with buttons and knobs on it. There had been many surfaces like that in this place, controls for the contrivances of the magicians. Both the windows and the control surface looked dusty, unused. A side wall held rows of portraits, face after face, mushroom pale above black garb, gold plates identifying each in letters too small for me to read. The last portrait in the bottom row was of Manacle, however, which told us enough. The tops of the higher frames were black with dust. The carpet of the place was worn through in spots. At each chair was set an empty bottle and a drinking glass, a pad of yellowed paper and a writing implement. At one place the writing implement had been shifted in position, and I could see a pale pattern of it where it had once lain upon the paper. Whoever might once have cleaned the place had not done so recently, perhaps not for years. Dust lay upon everything in a thick, gray film.
Quench came in to sit at the place where the writing implement had been moved. He moved it back onto its shadow, carefully, centering it upon its image before settling into the chair, arms folded across his wide torso. The lines of his boxlike hat seemed to continue downward through his head, obdurately square.
Others entered. There were whispers, mumbling conversations. I risked a questing thought to get pictures of long, half ruined corridors, tumbled portals far to the north and south, ramified networks of dusty catacombs, buried in decay. One of those who entered had white tabs at his throat. Others bowed toward him, murmured “Rector.” Time passed. Some fifty were assembled before Manacle entered. Well, now we would learn what we would learn.
“Evening, gentlemen. Evening. Glad to see everyone is here so promptly. Well, we have a considerable agenda this evening. Let’s call the meeting to order and get started. Will the Rector give the invocation.”
The tab-fronted one rose, stared upward and intoned, “Oh, Lord, we your children have pursued your purposes for thirty generations upon this planet. For a thousand years we have been faithful to your commandments. We have watched the monsters in this place, have kept ourselves separated from them, have kept your sacred ordinances to research and record everything that the monsters do. Now, as we approach the holy season of Contact With Home, be with us as we consider grave matters which are brought before us. Let us be mindful of your ordinances as we consecrate monsters to our use in order that your will may be continued unto future generations. Keep us safe from the vile seducements of Gamesmen and the connivances of the Council. We ask this as faithful sons. Amen.”
During this pronouncement, the others in the room had peered restlessly about themselves as though someone else were expected to enter, but no one did. There was a brief silence when the man finished speaking. Manacle sat in his chair with head forward, as though he were asleep. Quench cleared his throat with a hacking noise, and Dean Manacle jerked upright.
“Hmmm,” he mumbled. “We will move to the minutes of the last meeting.” He rose and pushed one of the buttons on the table before him, saying as he did so, “I am Manacle of Monsters, son of Scythe of Sinners, Dean of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of the College of Searchers. Will Central Control please read the minutes of the last meeting.” He tilted his head to one side and seemed to be counting. Around the room the others stared at their fingers or murmured to one another, bored. When a slow count of fifty had passed, Manacle went on, “Since Central Control does not think it necessary to read the minutes of the last meeting, may I have a motion to approve them as unread.”
“So move,” said Quench. He did not move, however, which was confusing. Again, I knew it must be ritual.
“Seconded,” said an anonymous voice from the end of the long table.
“It has been moved by Professor Quench, seconded by Professor Musclejaw, that we approve the minutes of the last meeting as unread. All those in favor.”
A chorus of grunts and snarls greeted this. “Opposed? Hearing none the motion is passed.” There was a pause while Dean Manacle collected himself and shuffled through the papers before him. “We shall move to subcommittee reports ... the subcommittee on portal repair.”
“Nonsense,” said Quench.
“I beg your pardon.” Manacle looked up, bristling. “The agenda calls for…”
“Nonsense. The agenda calls for nonsense. Stupidity. Obtuseness. Obfuscation. Let’s talk about the Council. Let’s talk about this Gamesman, Huld, who wants access to the defenders!”
Grunts of surprise, voices raised in anger. “The defenders? We don’t allow access to the defenders! What did he say?”
“We will have the report on portal repair,” Manacle shouted. “And the report on the problems at the monster labs, and on the food stocks brought in by Gifters. These are important matters, Quench. Vital matters.”
“How vital?” boomed Quench. “If the Council is planning to destroy us all, how vital is it that the monster labs shall or shall not meet quota? If we are all killed, how important that the northern portal cannot be repaired, as we know it cannot, as the southern portal could not in its time. If there are none left to have appetite, how vital is it that the Gifters bring in their full cargoes of grain and meat? Vital? Manacle, you’re a fool and your father before you was a fool.”
I had not seen until then the little hammer which Manacle picked up from before him. He whapped it upon the table, raising a cloud of dust at which several members began to sneeze and wipe their eyes. If this was meant to restore order, it failed its purpose. A trembling oldster was shouting at Quench who was bellowing in reply. Elsewhere in the room confusion multiplied as small groups and individuals rose in gesticulating argument. Manacle thrashed with his little hammer, voices rose, until at last Quench shouted down all who would have opposed him.
“Sit down, you blasted idiots. Now you all listen to me for a while. If you choose to do nothing after I’ve spoken, well, it will be no less than you’ve done about anything for fifty years. I will speak. I’m a full professor, entitled to my position, and I will be heard, though I am a doddering Emeritus.
“Most of you in this room recall the meeting a generation ago when Dean Scythe admitted to this Committee that the techs could not repair the portal machines, or the air machines, or most of the others, so far as that goes. You recall that we had before us at that time a suggestion, made by me, that we set some of our brighter young men to studying the old machines and the old books in order to learn about them. You recall that my suggestion was met with typical revulsion and obstinate lack of understanding. No, you all said, we wouldn’t deny our sons their chance at earning their degrees by asking them to be mere techs.” Quench spat the word at them bitterly. “Oh, no. Every one of us had been assistant, associate, tutor, lecturer, assistant professor¾all of it. Each of you wanted the same for his boys.
“So, old Scythe suggested we pick some Gamesmen and bring them in to learn about the machines, that we give some Gamesmen the old books, that we turn our future over to the Gamesmen because we were too proud to be techs. So we brought some of ‘em in. There was that fellow Nitch, came and went for a decade. Where is he now? Gone to use what he learned for his own profit, I have no doubt. And there were others. Fixed a few things, but not for long. Now there’s this fellow Huld, threatening us with the Council. Telling us the Council is going to destroy us¾the Council we’ve cooperated with for hundreds of years by taking up dangerous Gamesmen and putting them away when the Council told us to. Now here’s Huld telling us the Council is creating Gamesmen with dangerous new talents. Here’s Huld saying he will protect us if we only give him access to the defenders. And idiot Manacle has half told him we’d do it. And, while all that’s going on, Manacle wants us to sit here talking about repairing the north portal which has been in ruins for five generations. Outrageous piffle!” He subsided into seething silence, picked up the writing implement before him and broke it in two. There was a horrified gasp from others in the room.
“You broke the pencil.” Manacle trembled. “They’ve been here since my great-grandfather’s time, and you broke one.”
“Piffle,” repeated Quench. The angry silence was not broken until an old voice quavered in treble confusion.
“Excuse me, but what are you suggesting, Professor Quench? Are you saying we should not listen to Huld? Or should listen to Huld? Do we now distrust our colleagues of the Council?”
“I’m suggesting,” said Quench, “that we do now what we should have done generations ago. Get some of the young assistants and associates out of the watching labs. Let them put their ‘search’ aside for the moment. There’s nothing new in it anyway. Hasn’t been anything new in it for ten generations. We can create monsters until we’re sick of it and watch them till we’re bored to death, and there’ll be nothing new in it. Why, a year’s watch doesn’t produce a footnote. No, let’s create a degree in machinery, for College’s sake. Create a degree in repair. Let the young men ‘search’ in the old books. Stop depending upon these Gamesmen.”
“Heresy,” thundered the Rector. “Professor Quench, you speak heresy of the most pernicious sort. Our forefathers made a sacred covenant with Home to search and record information about monsters. To think of creating a degree in some other discipline…”
“Oh, monster offal,” snarled Quench. “You pray that we be kept safe from the vile seducements of the Gamesmen, and then you fall right into their vile seducements yourself.”
“Holy Scripture.”
“Holy Scripture be shat upon. You read it your way, Rector, and I’ll read it mine. When we’re all dead, what will be the sense of Holy Scripture? You know what I think of your sacred covenants? They don’t make sense!”
“Sir, you question the very basis of our history, the foundations of our faith.”
“I question your data, Rector.” There was a shocked intake of breath. This was evidently a serious charge, though I could not tell why. “I question whether our forefathers ever agreed to do what you say they did. In any case, it’s susceptible of proof. Ask Home.”
The shocked silence extended, built, was broken at last by Manacle. “Ask Home? What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean, ask Home. Two days now, isn’t it? Aren’t we getting the blues assembled for the ceremony? Getting ready for the rigamarole? Going to send the Signal? Right? Signal says we’re all spandy-dandy, doing well, following the sacred covenants, right? This time let’s tell them we’ve got some religious questions and would appreciate clarification of the scriptures.” He glared at the open mouths around the table. “I dare you. And, while we’re at it, it might be a good idea to find out if the defenders still work. Lord knows the portals don’t.”
“The defenders are self-repairing,” said Manacle. “If the Council were to strike at us for any reason, it would be at their peril. I would release the defenders in a moment, Quench, and they would work as they did a thousand years ago. Depend upon it.”
“I don’t depend upon it,” he replied. “I depend upon rust and decay, spoilation and corrosion, that’s what I depend upon. And on my memory. I remember that we need food and fuel from outside. There are Gamesmen out there who would limit our access to those, and the Council has helped us with that by identifying the rogues and removing them, sending them in to us to be made into blues. In return, we supply drugs to make them live long. Balance, Manacle. Balance. Mutual advantage. Why would they change all that? I think this Gamesman of yours may be full of vile seducements, all right, and the evil intentions may not come from the Council.”
The Rector, sneering, said, “Does our respected Professor Emeritus postulate a fifth force? Some mythological concept?”
“Maybe,” replied Quench, with a sneer of his own. “Have you heard of Wizards, Rector? Not your field, hmmm’? Haven’t heard of Immutables, either, I suppose? Not your field. No, I thought not. Well, an aged Emeritus can prowl around outside a little, as I have done. No, no, don’t look horrified¾I said I can prowl around out there without compromising my academic dignity, even if it isn’t my field. There may he a fifth force, Rector. And I’d like to move we find out.”
“You’re out of order.” Manacle hammered, raising another cloud of dust with every blow. “The Agenda says...”
“Get your head out of your backside, Manacle! I move we get some of the young men working on the old books, if they have wits enough.”
“Is there a second? Motion dies for lack of a second,” gabbled Manacle, his voice a shriek which cut through the babble around him. “I will appoint a subcommittee to study the matter which the Gamesman Huld has warned us of. Is there further business to be brought before this committee¾hearing none this meeting is adjourned.” He collapsed momentarily into his chair, lips moving in and out like a fish’s.
“Piffle,” shouted Quench. “There’s no hope for you.”
Mavin and I did not move. There seemed little hope for us either. We had understood hardly a word of what had been said, and below us in the meeting room, Manacle rose and fled through the door as though to escape Quench’s words.
“DON’T LET MANACLE OUT OF OUR SIGHT,” Mavin whispered as we slithered out of our chair shapes and into the guise of ubiquitous, invisible Tallmen. Her warning came late, for we had already lost sight of him, and it was only the sound of his voice echoing back from a twisting corridor which led us in the right direction. He had been joined by Shear, who was receiving a Manacle harangue with obsequious little cries of outrage and acclaim.
“You know why he does it!” asserted Manacle, beating Shear upon the shoulder to emphasize his point. “That Quench! He does it because he never begot a son on his breeders, not one. Only monsters. Dozens of them. Why, the pits are full of his get, but not one boy to carry on the academic tradition. Why should he care whether our boys get their professorships? Not him! ‘Get the boys out of the monster labs. Create a degree in machinery,’” he mimicked viciously. “Emeritus or not, he ought to be stripped of his membership on the Committee. He ought to be driven off the Faculty.”
“He has some followers,” Shear said nervously. “Some who believe he may be right.”
“Right? The man’s a fool. Wants us to turn out the only person who’s capable of helping us. Wants us to send Huld away empty-handed. Scared to death Huld will learn something that will endanger us. Poof. I could give Huld the keys to the defenders this minute, and it wouldn’t hurt us as much as making an enemy of him. Well, I have no intention of sending Huld away in a fury. Quench can blather all he likes, but I think we need the man, and I’ll tell him how highly we regard him when we meet him.”
“You’re meeting Huld?” Shear stared guiltily about, afraid he might be seen. His eyes slid across Mavin and me, but we did not exist in his vision. “Do you think that’s wise?”
“I wouldn’t do it otherwise,” snarled Manacle. “I’ve had enough, Shear, now don’t you start on me. Just trot along here to the labs where I’m meeting Huld and we’ll have a talk. My son, Flogshoulder, is supervisor of the transformation labs this term. We’ll have privacy, and you can watch them make the blues. That always amuses you.”
“Yes. But should Huld see that? I mean, it’s private ... part of the ritual.”
“Oh, poof. I know it’s part of the ritual, but what does Huld care about that? He knows, in any case. What’s he going to do? Steal the bodies?”
I stole a glance at Mavin to find her watching me, puzzlement meeting puzzlement. “What are blues?” I whispered. She crossed her eyes at me in answer.
It was not far to the anteroom where Huld waited, a glossy, much used area beside a high transparent wall. We stared at the place beyond that wall, a lofty area of tall glittering machines, lights which spun and danced, wormcrawls of green light upon a hundred black screens. Green-clad figures moved in this exotic milieu with strange devices in their hands or clamped upon their heads, or both. Manacle greeted Huld, took him by the arm, and tapped upon the glass wall to attract the attention of one of those inside. That one bowed and came to slide a portion of the wall aside.
“Dean Manacle,” he said.
“Now, now, no formality, my boy. You’ve met our good friend, Huld? Huld, my son, Tutor Flogshoulder. He is supervisor of the term here in the transformation labs. You wanted to see the cargo for yourself? Well, Flogshoulder will be glad to take us through and explain the process. If it’s convenient, my dear boy.”
The dear boy, who suffered from an unfortunate superfluity of teeth, gaped, then covered this gaucherie with a self-conscious giggle. “Oh, it’s quite convenient, Father. Most interesting for guests, too. Just come through here. Don’t mind the techs, they haven’t the wits of a bunwit and don’t understand anything but machines.”
He led the way into the polished room, Mavin and I following. I believed they would stop us, see us, forbid us entry. They did not. Across the room a pair of Tallmen pushed brooms along the aisles, as invisible as we.
At the first sight of Huld, I had gone deep into myself and now was letting Didir guide me by small promptings from within as the words of those in the room flowed through and away. The sight of the two bodies upon the chill dark slab at the center of the place almost broke my composure. Mavin’s was destroyed. I saw her stumble and turn pale before catching herself, to continue the endless recitation of some nonsense rhyme. The bodies were Windlow and Himaggery, cold and gray as when I had seen Windlow at the Blot. I let Didir tune my eyes to their keenest and watched, to see the slow, slow rise of chests over the shallowest of breaths. They were alive, alive but laid out like meat on that dark slab.
Huld approached the slab and hung over the bodies like some predatory bird, his nose stabbing at them beakwise, peering and peering until he was satisfied and returned to Manacle’s side.
“So, you have two of them,” he said. “If you had the boy, I would have cheered you, Manacle. As it is, you have only delayed the time of ruin, not forestalled it.”
“Oh, come, come, my dear fellow. The situation is not that grave.”
“Grave enough. If you are not to perish with all your colleagues, measures must be taken. Still, having these two is better than nothing. What do you do with them now?”
“We’re getting ready for the ceremony, dear fellow. We’ll use these to make blues and bodies for the occasion, two bunwits with one arrow, so they say. That will remove the threat of these two, permanently, just as it has removed the threat of thousands in the past, and it will give us trade goods for the Gifters. Would you like to see the process?”
I do not know why Mavin and I did not act then. Surely we did not understand what was to occur, or we did not realize it would happen at once. Perhaps we had concentrated so on being unseen and unnoticed that we had not allowed for the need for sudden intervention. In any ease, we did nothing. Flogshoulder gestured imperiously at one of the green-clad “techs.” That man leaned forward to move a long, silver lever. At that the dark slab rotated, dropped, and moved beneath a contorted mass of metal and glass with wires and tubes protruding from it which had been making a low humming sound. The hum ascended into a scream; lights flickered; there was a smell of burning and a cloud of acrid smoke. One of the techs coughed, shouted, pumped a piece of equipment to produce a puff of bad smelling mist. The fire went out; the scream dropped into a hum once more; the slab twisted and returned to its former position.
Himaggery and Windlow were still there, still there, but I knew before Manacle reached forward to tap old Windlow’s arm what sound I would hear¾the sound of ice, faintly ringing, bell-like, metallic, dead. Beside each frozen skull rested a Gamespiece, tiny, blue. I looked upon them with my Shifter’s eyes, eyes which can be those of a hawk to see the beetle upon the grass from a league’s height. These “blues” were no crude carvings, no anonymous, featureless gamespieces. These were Himaggery and Windlow in small, each in his appropriate guise, and even the moth wing mask of the Seer could not hide the glitter of Windlow’s eyes. If this thing did not weep, I was blind. I started to move forward, but Mavin caught my arm to hold me. If Huld had been alert and Reading at that moment, we would have been discovered. Huld, however, was listening with avid attention to Manacle. If Huld thought the information important, then I did also.
“The contrivance,” said Manacle in a pompous, didactic tone which reminded me a little of Gamesmaster Gervaise, “was used by our forefathers when we came to this place. Evidently the length of the journey, or the time it took, did not allow persons to travel while awake and alive in the ordinary way. No, the fleshy part was preserved, as you see, for storage. They can be kept forever, these bodies, or so the techs say. However, when resurrected, these bodies would have no memory, no intelligence¾all of that is wiped clean by the process, so we are told. So a record was made. A record containing all thought and memory, and this record was embodied in the form you see. Blues. That is what we call them. We make a few hundred each year to use in the Calling Home ceremony. Then we give them to the Gifters to use in trade.”
“I have seen them,” said Huld. “Kept in cold chests. Why are they kept cold?”
“Well¾I am not certain. Perhaps one of the techs would know. The techs make the gameboards, after all, don’t they Flogshoulder?”
“I will ask a tech. Father. It is not something which interests me. Hardly in our field, you know.” He went away to return in a moment with an old, pleat-faced man with tired eyes. “Tech, why are the blues kept in cold chests? And are the gameboards made here? You have a word for it, I think. Micro-micro something?”
“Microcircuitry, Supervisor. The gameboards are made with microcircuitry. To make the Gamespieces move. They are kept cold because they are supposed to last longer that way. The manuals say they break down very rapidly if they get warm.”
“There are manuals?” Huld, greedy-voiced. Too greedy-voiced, for Manacle gave him a sharp look before taking him by the arm to guide him away. “So. Interesting, isn’t it, Huld? And now you need worry about those two no more. Their bodies will be stored in the caves, used in the ceremony, then put into the caves once more and forever. Their blues will go into some Trader’s wagon to be given to some Gamesmaster as a giftie. I sometimes wonder if they feel anything, those bodies. They seem very dead.”
Huld, pretending a disinterest I knew he did not feel, “How are the bodies and the blues joined together again?”
“Oh, my dear fellow. Who knows? I wouldn’t know. We haven’t done that in a thousand years. There may be a book about it somewhere, but I doubt the machinery to do it even works. Why would one care?” They went out the way they had come, still chatting, leaving Mavin and me behind, hidden among the sighing machines. When they had put a little distance between them and us, I hissed at her.
“One of us must go after them. One must stay here to see where they put Windlow and Himaggery. Which?”
She thrust me away. “You must go after Huld. I have no Didir to protect my mind, and I cannot keep up this rhyming and jiggy song forever. You go. I will stay. I will meet you in that place they held the meeting, soon as may be. Go!” And I went. I went in a fever of impatience and anger, anger at myself, at Huld, at the silly, fatuous Manacle and his idiot son. If we were to save Himaggery and Windlow now, we would have to restore them to wholeness, put their two halves together, body and spirit, and who knew how to do that? The books? What books and where? I was reaching the end of my ability to slink and sly about, the limit of my self-control. It was Didir and Dorn who saved me, who soothed me into sleep like a fretful child and held me there, barely ticking, while they followed Huld, Manacle, Shear and toothy Flogshoulder deeper into the labyrinth while Huld sought information. “These books, Manacle. The ones which tell about rejoining the bodies. Have you seen them? Read them? What did they say about ... the blues?”
“I don’t recall seeing anything about them in books. But then, I recall what my father said about them. A pattern, he said. The pattern of a personality. Yes. That was well put. The pattern of a personality. In ancient times, of course, the pattern was reunited with the body when both had reached their destination. It is this process we reenact during the ceremony. We don’t really do it, of course. Some of the younger men act the part of bodies, and we use the blues symbolically. It’s only a ritual, but very impressive for all that. But then I’ve told you all this before.”
“Why don’t you actually do it?” Huld asked. Didir could detect an avidity in this question though the tone of voice was deliberately casual. “That would be even more impressive.”
“Why, ah … I’m not sure,” began Manacle, only to be interrupted by his unfortunate son.
“Because no one knows how, the techs say. The manuals aren’t there, not where they belong. Of course, all techs are fools, as we all know, but that’s what they say.”
“Do they think the books were lost?” Huld, pursuing. “Or destroyed, perhaps? Or taken away?”
Flogshoulder put on a thoughtful face, marred by the obvious vacancy within his skull. “I should know. Truly I should. I’ve heard them talking about it often enough. They say Quench asked for the same books, and they’ve been looking for them.”
“Quench.” Manacle turned red, blustering. “Quench!”
“Yes, Father. Quench thinks it was Nitch took the books, that’s it. You remember Nitch? The books have been gone since he went.”
“Went?” asked Huld softly, so softly. “Went?”
“Away. He went away. At least, I think he went away. Didn’t he go away, Father?”
Manacle nodded angrily, muttering and counting under his breath as he walked along. “Quench, thirteen fourteen. Damn Quench. Fifteen. Mind his own business, keep to his place. Sixteen. He and Nitch two of a kind, ungrateful wretches. Seventeen. Ah, this is it. The seventeenth door from the corner, on the right. You wanted to see the defenders, Huld. Well, here we are. I’ll just find the key here, somewhere, among all these little ones I think. Gracious, haven’t looked in here almost since my investiture. Yes. This one.”
The door swung wide. They went through it, leaving it open behind them. I faded into the wall surface, unseen, unheeded. The room was empty save for one of those control surfaces which abounded in the place, this one with a large red lever and five covered keyholes, all bearing legends in archaic letters of a kind I had seen only once before¾in that old book which Windlow had so coveted, the one I had found with the Gamesmen of Barish.
“They are self-repairing,” said Manacle in a self-important tone. “Requiring no maintenance, no techs, for which we may rejoice. Should we need to activate them, I have only to turn these keys in those holes, five of them. At one time each key was kept by a separate member of the faculty, but upon my investiture, I brought them all together in the interest of efficiency. There are times when ritual must give way to convenience, don’t you agree? So, I have only to insert them thus, and thus, and thus, here, and here, turning each one, so. Now, if any of us were to move the lever, the defenders would be activated at once. We will not do that, of course. There is no need. However, I will leave the keys here and turned, just in case. No point in wasting time later, if your warnings, dear Huld, were to prove accurate and immediate.”
“What¾ah, what form do the defenders take?” This in Huld’s sweetest voice. Peter, who had been Huld’s captive in the dungeons of Bannerwell, did not trust that voice.
“I do not recall ever having heard what form the defenders take. What is that phrase in the ritual, Flogshoulder? You have learned it more recently than I¾gracious, I have not thought of that in fifty years. Something about ‘Defense of the home, to hold inviolate¾’”
“No, Father. It goes, ‘Should they gain power to the extent that the base is threatened, in order that Home be held inviolate the defenders shall be activated that the Signtists and Searchers be held in glorious memory.”
“That’s not how I learned it,” objected Shear. “I learned it when I was only a boy, before I could read. It went, ‘Should their power and extent again threaten the base, the defenders will assure that Home is inviolate through the selfless action of signtists and searchers held forever in glorious memory.”
“Glorious memory,” said Manacle happily. “I think of that whenever we have the ceremony. The base. That’s where the shiptower is, dear Huld, and therefore the ceremony is held there. It’s very impressive, quite my favorite occasion. Let me tell you about it.
“We begin by placing a number of the bodies in the shiptower, along with some of the young fellows who play the part. We put some blues there, as well, for verisimilitude. The unloading machines are all polished and garlanded with flowers.
“Then I, as Dean, have the honor to take the part of Capan. I emerge from the shiptower and recite the inspiring words of dedication. All the Faculty is there, of course, down to the least boychild. I recite the words, then I start the unloading machines and they bring out the bodies and the blues. We put the young men into the rejoining machine, together with some blues to make it look real, and they emerge at once, all glowing and eager. Then I give them the Capan gown. This is symbolic, you understand, of our continuation in the academic tradition from the time of Capan to the present. We still wear the Capan gown in his honor. It is moving, my dear Huld, very moving. Then the machines take the rest of the bodies and the blues, the real ones, away to the caverns while Capan (I still have that part, of course) brings a monster out of the ship and puts her in the pit. This is symbolic too. It symbolizes our mission to search the monsters and record everything about them. Everyone cheers.
“Then, I go back in the shiptower and do the ‘Calling Home’ or ‘Signal Home’ as it’s sometimes called. I go alone into the shiptower and instruct the instrument to contact Home with our message, then I come out and tell everybody what message has been called Home and what Home said. Everyone gets very choked up at that, and the choir sings, and the techs serve special cake, and we all drink wine. A very happy time, Huld. A very happy time.” He wiped his eyes on the corner of his robe, looking all at once grave and grandfatherly, eyes full of an old and childlike joy. I wanted to kick him, but he went on in happy ignorance of my intent. “We give each other gifts, too, in honor of the occasion. I still have some gifts my father gave me, years ago.”
“You bring a monster out of the ship?” said Huld. “Does this mean that in that long ago time your forefathers brought the monsters to this place?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly. Our forefathers came. With the monsters. To keep Home inviolate, to watch and record.”
“Gamesmen were here, then, when your forefathers came?”
“Oh, I suppose so, Huld. Yes. They must have been, how else would they be here now? Your people. And the pawns, of course.”
“And the monsters in your pits are the descendents of those your forefathers brought?”
“Oh, no, sir,” babbled Flogshoulder, eager with his tiny bits of information. “They do not reproduce at all well, sir. No, many of the monsters in the pits are made in the monster labs. I will be supervisor there, next term. Also, we pay the Gifters to bring some from outside. And some ... well, some…”
“You may say it, my boy,” said Manacle, still kindly with his nostalgic glow. “Some are born to our own consecrated monsters, to be reared in special pits and adapted properly for our use. Waste not, want not.” He made a high pitched little obscenity of laughter.
“Interesting.” said Huld. “Very interesting. Well. If you will just show me whatever books there are which describe the defenders, our business may be concluded for a time.”
“Oh, my dear Huld. I thought you understood. There are no manuals for the defenders! Either there never were any, and that may well be the case, or Nitch took them when he went. In any case, it doesn’t matter. They are self-repairing, my dear fellow. You needn’t concern yourself about them. If we need them, we have only to press that lever down. Everything else has been done.”
I could feel Huld’s baffled fury from across the room, feel his heat. “Dean Manacle. What will happen when the lever is thrust down? Do you know?”
“Well, of course. We will be defended. Haven’t I said so again and again. Really, Huld, sometimes you are very trying.”
Didir and Dorn pushed me deep into the corner, perhaps to avoid touching Huld as he stormed away, followed by the others who were full of twittered commiseration. “Gamesmen!” said Shear. “They have no manners.”
“After all our courtesies to him. Well. He was simply furious to see that we didn’t need his warnings as much as he had thought we would. Dreadful blow to his ego. Full of pride, that one is. Still. He’ll get over it.” Manacle, comfortably full of his own view of his world.
In a moment they were gone. Didir let me come to the surface of myself, drove me to the surface of myself like a volcano exploding within me. I saw shattering lights, felt electric burning and shock, heard her voice, loud, “They are wrong, Peter. Wrong. That is not the way it was. I was there. I was there, I know how it was.” Bits of her memory fled across my mind.
A babble erupted inside me, Dorn and Trandilar, Wafnor’s hearty cheer dimmed in a wild crosstalk which felt like panic, like fury, like fear. Finally Dorn’s voice, dark and heavy as velvet, “Turn the keys back, Peter. Turn the keys back and take them away,” only to hear Didir once more, “No! It must be done in a certain order, a certain order or it goes.”
I trembled with vertigo, sick, thrust this way and that by those inside me, without balance or direction. I screamed silently, “Stop! Stop!” and the interior babble ceased. Then Didir’s voice, thrumming like a tight bowstring, held from panic by her ancient will, “Did you see the order in which the keys were turned, Peter? Did you observe?” At which I laughed. She herself had kept me submerged during all that time. I had only heard what came to my ears. I felt that tight bowstring thrum, thrum, begin to ravel. “Then leave them alone. Can you lock the door into the corridor?” she shrieked at me.
I could do that, and did, before she broke in a shower of fiery sparks which shook every fiber of me, went down every nerve, dropped me to the floor to lie twitching like some maddened or dying thing while I knew what it was that Didir knew. If the lever in that quiet room behind me were pushed down, something huge and horrible would happen¾something final and irretrievable. And Didir believed it would happen to all the place we were in, to the corridors, the mountains, caverns, to all the black-clad magicians and their servants, to their monsters, their machines, and perhaps¾perhaps to the world as well.
I CONVULSED, there on the floor thrashing like a fresh caught fish. If anyone had come by, they would have found me there in my own shape, naked as an egg and helpless as any fledgling. The presence within which had been Didir became a scattered shower of sparkling half-thoughts, fleeting memories; pictures of herself going to this place or that; pictures of someone else I did not know, tall and dark, gold-decked; premonitions of disaster which unmanned me to leave me gasping without ever making connected sense. Then there was a time, long or short, I never knew, of darkness. When I came to myself again it was to feel the hard, cold floor beneath my wet cheek where I had lain in my own drool.
After a little time, I was more or less myself again. I recognized what had happened¾panic. Through all the confusion, I found myself wondering how one of the Gamesmen of Barish could feel panic. But then, I told myself, they were more than mere constructs. They had reality, though they had to use my head to express it¾a head which was still splitting with an excruciating pain, pain enough to have panicked me and shut down all the places which the Gamesmen had occupied. Didir was gone, but so were Dorn and Trandilar, Shattnir and Wafnor. My head felt empty, vacant and echoing. The pain diminished almost at once, and I lay against the door of that dreadful room, frightened and quite alone. I wondered almost hysterically whether they would come back to me again, so felt for Shattnir because she was the one who was hardest, least vulnerable. Nothing. Her figure lay in my fingers like a doll, wooden, slightly chill. Well, there was no time to experiment or wonder. I had no knowledge of the time which had passed. I had to find Mavin, quickly, and tell her what I knew.
Furred-Peter grew a pair of wide, fragile ears upon his head, like those of the shadow people, and fled through the halls listening for any movement. There was no Didir to warn me, and I was vulnerable in those metal corridors. I fled, promptly losing myself in the maze, unable to fish for thoughts to help me locate myself, following this one and that one at a distance until at last I came to a familiar place from which the committee room could be found. I got there, got in¾and found it empty. Mavin was not there. Whether she had been there. I could not tell.
I was alone there for a long time, time enough to get hungry, to find my way to a place food was stored for Tallmen, Tallmen who came and went, saying nothing to me in the guise of a Tallman as I also came and went. The food was tasteless stuff, but it sustained me. I slept a time. I strode back and forth through the committee room, looking at the portraits of Deans from ancient times to the present. Perhaps it was my imagination, but they seemed to grow more and more foolish-looking at either end of the time. Some in the middle looked hard and competent¾rather like Himaggery. I thought about that for a while, without reaching any conclusions. Then I had a fit of apprehension about Mavin. Had she been caught? Perhaps killed? Was she lying somewhere wounded, waiting for me to rescue her? I cursed the panic which had driven Didir out of my head and tried to get her back. Nothing. The little figure lay in my hand like a stick. Not a quiver. No, perhaps a quiver, but remote. I tried Shattnir once more. Only a far, faint tingling. Well, whether it was something in the Gamesmen or something in myself, I could not tell. My head felt as though it had been struck by lightning. Perhaps there were fibers there which could be temporarily severed, synapses which could be shocked into quiescence. I waited. I walked about. I chewed my fingernails off, grew others and chewed them off as well. I was about ready to give up and go on searching alone when she arrived, breathless and weary, desperately glad of the food I had hidden in the balcony of that dusty room.
“Lords, Peter, but that was a journey,” she said, falling into long silence while she chewed the tasteless food, eyes closed, body swaying with fatigue. “The techs in that place fiddled about for hours, talking among themselves, mostly about old Quench. It seems that ancient firebrand has been preaching revolution and rebellion to the techs, along with his other strange activities. The techs are mere pawns, Peter, brought in here, put in boots, forced to maintain the place. Some of them are clever. They have learned a lot though they are not given the chance to learn enough.” She swayed, chewed, sighed. “At last they put Himaggery and Windlow upon a kind of cart and wheeled it into a corridor where the cart was attached to a train of similar carts, all loaded with bodies and blues and crates of one thing or another. I hid myself on one of the carts, and a group of pawns rode it as well. Most of them are older men. I believe there have been no young techs trained for some time.” She stopped to sip some of the bottled water I had found. “Lords, what a journey. We went north and west, I think, though it is hard to say because of the ways the corridors curve and join. Whatever the direction, we went far and long to the place they keep the bodies, distant and high, lying under some great glacier, I think¾some source of endless cold. They are stacked there, Peter, thousands of them, piled like wood for the war-ovens. Endless aisles of them. I saw Throsset of Dornes. He was on top of a pile, like a carving. I saw Minery Mindcaster. I knew her when I was a child and she a marvelous, twinned Talent. They drove the carts into a side room and left them, then they all got on the one little machine which had hauled the rest and went away. There was no place on it for me to hide, and they all knew one another.” She put her hand on mine, still shaking with cold. “So, I followed them on foot, and became lost, and took endless time to return.” I let the food and drink restore her before I told her what I had learned. When I had done, she questioned me.
“What is Huld up to? You knew him. What do you guess?”
“I guess he is up to gaining power,” I said. I knew this to be true, though I was not sure what power Huld sought in this strange haunt of magicians who seemingly were not magicians at all but merely bad custodians of ancient skills and knowledge.
“Huld is not content to be merely Demon, merely Gamesman. He has no wish, I think, to be willingly followed. It is power he wants, power over the unwilling. He wants to be worshipped, yes, but out of fear and trembling, not out of beguilement. He had that, through Mandor, and it was something, but not enough for him. Still, that is why he hates me. Because I conquered Mandor and held Huld against his will, even for that little time.”
“And he came to this place¾how?”
“I think he learned, somehow, how I had been protected in Schooltown, how Mertyn and Nitch had protected me. He could have Read that from me, easy enough, when I was captive there. I think Huld sought Nitch, sought him and found him, perhaps killed him for what he knew. This is only supposition, but I know Huld, and the idea hangs together.” Surprisingly, the idea did hang together, though I had not known until that instant that I had figured it out. “So Huld came here, seeking power, and found Manacle.”
“And Nitch had taken certain books?”
“Perhaps. And perhaps Huld had not thought to Read Nitch concerning books, so perhaps the books are gone forever.”
“Or perhaps they were lost half a thousand years ago.”
“Perhaps.”
“So there may be nothing we can find to tell us about these defenders, nothing we can find to tell us how to restore Himaggery and Windlow and a thousand, thousand more.”
“About the defenders, I know only what I caught from Didir’s mind before she fled me in panic¾or before I drove her out in a panic of my own. She knew of the defenders. Originally there were five keys, kept by five persons, one of whom was someone near to Didir. The reason for this was to prevent the defenders being accidentally released. Now Manacle has unlocked all the bonds. Any one who gets into that room needs only press a lever down, and whatever it is the defenders do will occur. The idea of this drove Didir into panic, the others as well, and it burst my head with them. Now I cannot raise them.”
“You locked the door?”
“I locked the door. Manacle has a key. I have no helpful thoughts about that. Let us think of Himaggery and Windlow instead. So far we have failed horribly at everything we tried to do.”
She replied with some asperity. “Who would have thought that rescuing them would have entailed putting them back together? It is difficult to go into a place such as this to set someone free if that person is able to walk and think and assist in the process. I have done that, in one Game or another. It is more difficult if the prisoner is unconscious or wounded, and I have played that Game too, in my time. But to have a prisoner who must be reassembled prior to rescue denies logic and sets all sense awry. I did, however, try to make our process somewhat simpler. I have half of them with me.” And she reached into some interior pocket to bring forth the two blues, Himaggery the Wizard, Windlow the Seer, tiny and impeccable, cold and hard. They were only patterns, as Manacle had said. Patterns of personality. Mavin waved at me to keep them, saying. “I have been thinking all the way back how we might put them together again. It may be that the machine used to separate them is the same machine used to reassemble them. In which case, we need only bring the bodies to that laboratory place.”
I remembered something Manacle had said. “We need not do that. The bodies are to be brought to a machine, Mavin. Not to the laboratory, but to the ‘base’ where the ceremony is held. There will be a machine there, too. They will pretend to use it to restore those who play the part of voyagers. The ship thing is there. Manacle called it a shiptower. At any rate, the bodies will be brought there, and there we should be waiting for them.”
When she asked me where that might be, I shook my head. I could not use Didir to fish for answers. We knew that Manacle would go there, however, and he was easy enough to find¾we knew where his quarters were. “Manacle,” commented Mavin, as we went toward his rooms. “The techs hate Manacle. I think some kind of mutiny brews there, my son, an old mutiny.”
I thought of Laggy Nap and his power over the boots. “Perhaps the contrivance which controls the boots has fallen into disrepair. Perhaps, if techs are expected to repair things and techs are also controlled by the boots, they have found a way to disrepair it.”
“As I said,” she murmured, “mutiny. Something brews.” Though I had not seen Huld since he had stormed away from us outside the room of the defenders, I felt his presence still like a weight upon my lungs. Without Didir to protect me, I had to be more sly and secretive than heretofore. Thus, it took a sneaking time to come to Manacle’s place and hear his rumbling whine through the open door. Shear came out, then went in again, several times. Flogshoulder, too, went in and out, bearing garments of some ceremonial type. They emerged together to go to a dining place, from which we later stole food which was of better quality than that given to Tallmen.
“How long until this ceremony?” I muttered. “How long must we lurk in this way?”
“We are so far underground time is without meaning,” she said. “Nonetheless, if Manacle said ‘two days’ when we came into this place, then it cannot be long now. We have blundered about in here for the better part of two days at least. Time grows short, and I am glad of it. I could not bear much more of this.”
I felt it, too, the being without sunlight, without passage of day and night. I wondered if this was how ghosts felt in the grave, separated not only from life but from time as well. This led to other thoughts of gloom and destruction, from which Mavin had to rouse me when Manacle came from his quarters for the final time.
We had no doubt he came out prepared for ceremony. There were stripes of gold upon his sleeves and his high square cap was splattered with gold as well. Shear and Flogshoulder came behind, also decorated, and we went in procession down and down corridors toward a distant gate. It was truly down, as though toward a valley, and it was into a valley we came to see the first light of dawn rouging the heights before us, brightening the cliffs with morning while the forests lay still in night below. Here was a green meadow crisscrossed with metal tracks, heaped with mounds of wrack and jetsam (or so they appeared), with a blackened tower standing at its center, silvered at its tip. A tiny opening gaped high in the side of the tower, like a missing tooth, and a tall spidery ladder stood beneath it. Upon the valley floor small groups of techs removed covers from machines which had been covered against the depredations of time and weather. Near the tower was a machine similar in every respect to that one which had so changed Himaggery and Windlow.
“The blues,” whispered Mavin. “See, they are carrying the blues into the tower.”
She was right. Some of the techs were carrying boxes of the blues to the tower where a lower section had been opened into some large cargo space. There were no Tallmen on the field. We would have to take the form of techs, and I looked at them closely with my Shifter’s eyes before fading back into the shadows to take their shape. Even as we emerged onto the field, the wagons of bodies came out of the tunnels to clatter their way toward the tower. We went purposefully after it, looking neither right nor left, intent upon our pawnish, techish duties.
When we arrived at the tower, we began helping with the loading. Mavin went up into that cargo space, then I. We lifted body after body into it, stacking them, within moments ceasing to think of them as bodies at all. They were only things. When the tech outside put Windlow’s feet into my hands for a moment I forgot what I was doing. Mavin brought me to myself.
“Here, pass him to me. I have found a place to hide them.”
So then I did double duty while she dragged Windlow away somewhere, then Himaggery, when he emerged from the general pile.
When the tech outside thrust up the last body to me where I stood inside the tower, he said, “Those who follow Quench, in the southeast portal, as soon as the ceremony starts ...” then turned away from me as though he had not spoken, waiting for no answer. I had sense enough to step back out of the light. When I turned, Mavin was there, nodding.
“I heard him,” she said. “I told you, Peter. Mutiny. It will happen during the ceremony, when all the magicians are here. Mark me, it will happen. Now come see where I have put it.”
The tower seemed small from outside, but from within it was a warren of twisting halls and tiny cubbies, many no bigger than closets, with mattressed shelves which were obviously beds. So it was a ship. A ship. How could it be? I turned to Mavin with the question on my lips.
“Not a water-going ship, Peter. Think! Put together the pieces. You spent long enough with Himaggery to have learned to do that.”
She showed me where she had put them, in one of the little cubbies, half hidden behind a huge pipe which seemed to run the entire height of the place, from tip to base. At that moment I wanted only to lie down beside the cold bodies and sleep, but she dragged me around the pipe and into it, where stairs wound up and up to some dizzying termination.
“We need to find a place to watch from,” she said, dragging me along behind her. So we went, up and up, coming at last to that open place we had seen from the tunnel mouth. The spidery stairs were just outside. Far below on the grass the magicians were assembling.
Now, how can I make you see what we saw, Mavin and I? I must, for in what we saw was much of old Windlow’s conjecture and Himaggery’s purpose, much of my confusion and Mavin’s effort. It was in that ceremony we learned what we were, and why, and I, all unwitting of what was to come, was only sleepy, lonely, and a little afraid of what might happen at any time. So let me step outside of that and tell you what you would have seen, had you been there.
On a grassy hill were rows of the young magicians, ordered inexplicably by one who stood before them, each holding a book before him. Here and there upon the grass groups of the magicians stood about, chatting with one another. The sun came down, lighting all with a kind of innocent glory. The young magicians began to sing. I had never heard music like that before. It soared and pierced, made me want to laugh and cry. Some of the voices were as high, almost, as women’s voices, others a rumbling bass, muttering like drums. I had thought these magicians wholly without honor or sense. Now I had to revise my opinion. Whatever they lacked, they did not lack art. Perhaps it was this art that had kept them alive. I looked down from my high perch to see Manacle at the foot of the ladder, the tears flowing down his face, a face lit from within with a kind of exaltation.
After the singing came a blare of trumpets. This came from a machine somewhere. The sound was inglorious compared to what had gone before. Manacle came up the ladder, slowly, puffing a little as he climbed. Below him the groups of magicians drew away to seat themselves. I counted them while he climbed, perhaps a thousand. Not many to rattle in a place of such size. Of that thousand, there were only fifty or sixty young ones, and one or two were very young indeed, being carried by their fathers who pointed out each step of the ceremony. Mavin and I took the shapes of the place around us, were invisible when Manacle stepped from the high ladder into the tower. Once there he closed the door behind him, then waited for some signal from without. It came in a second blare of trumpets, and a hideous, monstrous machine-like roaring which built into an unbearable level of sound before fading away. I heard Manacle murmur, “The sound of the ship landing. Now. The ship has landed.” He thrust the door before him open and went out onto the ladder.
See it now, this tiny man upon this high place, all in gold-decked black, his fellows gathered below and staring upward, pale faces like saucers there, silence, and respect from every eye. Hear him cry out in a voice changed and made dramatic, “Behold the planet. I, Capan Barish, have brought Signtists and Searchers from afar upon a sacred mission. Come forth! Come forth!”
Then see the machines reach into the shiptower and remove the bodies of the young magicians who were playing the part, all covered with paint to appear gray and hard. See the machines take blues from the ship, clatter and clamor across the grass to the great, garlanded resurrection contrivance, decked with flowers and fluttering with ribbons of silver and gold, all dancing in the light wind of morning. See the young magicians laid upon the slab with the blues, from which they leap up, shouting, wiping the paint from their faces as Manacle comes down from his high place, slow step by slow step, all in dignity and purpose to greet each one of them and drop a black gown over each clean-wiped head. Then see them move away across the meadow while the machine goes on unloading, real bodies this time, and Manacle begins his slow climb up the spidery ladder once more. As he climbed, the singing began again, and I found myself wishing he would not climb so fast if the singing might go on while he climbed forever. Silly. Yes, but it was what I thought and what you would have thought had you heard it.
Then was an unexpected interruption. Manacle came through the entry and back into the ship to make inexplicable clicks and bangs, opening and shutting something. In a short time he was back, leading by the hand one of the consecrated monsters. No. Leading by the hand a young woman. She was naked to the waist, her high breasts tilted and goosefleshed in the chill, her empty face staring outward at nothing. Manacle led her out upon the ladder, crying, “Behold, the monster! Toward which all your Search shall be that Home be kept inviolate!” Then he took her down the stairs to a pit they had prepared for her somewhere below. I did not see that, could not. When he had led her out, I had remembered. They were Didir’s memories, burned into me outside that room of the defenders, as real to me as my own. I remembered the landing, the huge sound of the engines, fires guttering blackly at the base of the ship, green hills in early light. I had been half naked, just wakened by Captain, as he had promised, before any of the others. He supported me with one arm, gesturing out at the world, “Behold, little monster. A world for you, and for me, and for our children and our children’s children.” And I, Didir, had said, “The researchers will not let us have this world,” and he had replied, “Some day.”
It had been the sight of the girl’s body and the gold-striped uniform which had stormed the old memory, the sound of a male voice, lustful, adoring, confident. It was only a memory, but it collapsed me, and I came to myself with Mavin shaking me, saying, “Peter! What ails you? Come to, boy. Manacle is coming back up the ladder.” So, I drew myself together and we hid ourselves once more, fortuitously, as it happened. Before Manacle arrived, someone else came up the hidden stair. Quench.
Quench, scuttering into the place and hiding himself all in one swift motion as though he had practiced it twenty times before. I heard Manacle arriving, heard the singing begin again, slow, ceremonial, mighty and premonitory. Some great climactic thing was to happen now. The music made that clear.
But all that happened was that Manacle shut the door behind him and sat down, disconsolately, upon the metal floor. He took a writing implement from a pocket, with a piece of paper, and sat there, alternately chewing the one and jotting upon the other.
The singing built into a climax, slowed, and dwindled to silence. Still he sat. After a time the singing began again, and it went as before. At this, he stood up and sighed, murmuring to himself. “Well, well. That will do as well as any message. I used it five years ago, but it will do as well as any.” And reached to open the door.
“Do as well as what, Manacle?” It was Quench, leaning against a shiny panel, boring into Manacle with eyes which could have burned holes in stone. “Why have you not Called Home, Manacle? That is what you are supposed to have done. Call Home. I wish to hear what Home has to say!”
“Oh, Quench. Quench, you monster. What are you doing here? Why have you come? You are disrupting the ceremony. Get out of my way. I have to tell them.”
“Tell them what? That you did not Call Home? That there was no message from Home? That there has not been any message from Home for¾for how long, Manacle? How long, you little, insignificant dribble. How long?” He shook Manacle, waving him like a flag. “Tell me, or I’ll break your bones.”
“Don’t be a fool, Quench. You know it’s only a ceremony. We all know it’s only a ceremony. The message from Home is only a ritual. We all know.”
“We don’t all know. We all may suspect, but we don’t all know. How long has it been. Manacle. I want to know. Now!”
“My ... my great-grandfather’s time. Not since then. Not since then to Call Home. And no message received from Home long before that. The machines stopped working, Quench. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. They just stopped working.”
“So it’s all a mockery and a deceit. All of it. The monster watching, and the Faculty¾all of it.”
“No, no, Quench. You know that isn’t true. It’s worth something, worth preserving. You mustn’t, mustn’t ...”
“I mustn’t, mustn’t I? Manacle, for the sake of those poor fools down there, I won’t drag you out on the platform and expose you for what you are, an empty sack of nothing. I’ll leave you to go to them, Manacle, with your lies and your ceremonial message. You! I remember a time when being Capan meant something. As for me, I’m off to the Council.”
“What¾where¾what are you going to do?”
“I’m leaving, Manacle. I’m leaving with all the techs who want to leave with me, and that means almost all of them. We disabled the power machine for the boots this morning. You can’t hold them, and they won’t be held. We’re going. Some of the younger men may go with us, and if not¾well, be that as it may. I’m sorry for you all, Manacle, but there’s nothing I can do to save you, and I won’t perish with you.”
And he was gone, clattering down the spiralling stairs. Mavin and I could hear him, down and down until the sound faded, and I knew he had come to the cargo space at the bottom and gone out through it. Manacle was crying before us, great tears oozing down his face. The singing outside had reached its climax once more. He gulped, made a little heartbroken sound, then wiped his face upon his sleeve, leaving long red welts upon it from the harsh gold trim. Unconscious of this he stepped to the door, straightened himself, and opened it. As Mavin and I slipped away to follow Quench, we heard his voice crying to the world, “Message, message from Home.”
WE ARRIVED AT THE CARGO SPACE near the bottom of the tower¾the “ship” ¾only moments before Manacle himself came down. He wore a forced, fixed smile as he met Flogshoulder and Shear near the ladder. I heard Shear say, “Where are the techs? They should be here to unload the bodies and take them back to¾” and Flogshoulder interrupting, as always, with some inconsequentiality. Manacle did not hear either of them.
He laid hands upon Flogshoulder and said, “Quiet, my boy. Be still. Now listen to me, for all your life is worth. Remember the room where we were yesterday? The room which controls the defenders? Good. That’s a good boy. Now, I want you to go there. I left it unlocked for you. I want you to press the lever down. Just do that, my boy. Then come back and tell me.” He patted Flogshoulder, almost absentmindedly, as he turned to Shear with that same fixed smile.
“Shear. There’s a minor emergency. Nothing we can’t take care of, but I think the Committee should be advised. Can you go among the celebrants and suggest that we move the celebration indoors? Hmm? And tell the Committee members we will meet them in the Committee room. Have you seen Huld? No. Well, that was more than I could hope for, perhaps
Shear and Manacle began a slow circling movement among those gathered in the grassy space. I remembered Manacle saying that the techs would serve cakes and wine. There were no techs, and the magicians were looking about themselves with pursed lips and expressions of annoyance. A mutter began, grew in volume as the celebrants moved away, away toward the doors. We waited for the last dawdlers to leave before emerging from the ship with the bodies of Windlow and Himaggery carried before us. We staggered across the grass to the machine. When we came close, I was horrified to see that the ribbons and garlands covered areas of corrosion. Wires and tubes appeared fused together into a blackened mass. We stared at each other for a moment. “What can we do but try?” asked Mavin. “We must.”
We laid Himaggery upon the slab, placed the tiny blue in the recess beside his head, and Mavin went to the long, silver lever which protruded at the side. Her eyes were shut, her lips moving. I don’t know whom she invoked, what godling or devil. Perhaps it was only herself she counseled. Her hands were steady when she thrust the lever up, in the opposite direction we had seen it moved in the laboratories, and I knew she had been thinking of that, puzzling it out. Could it be that simple? I could not dare to hope it was.
The machine screamed. I bit my lips until the blood came. The slab moved, turned, swung beneath the blackened mass which towered above it. I smelled smoke, burning oil. There was no device here to put out fire. I only held my breath and waited, waited while the scream rose to an agonized howl before diminishing to silence. The slab had not returned. Mavin jiggled the lever, once, twice. Slowly the slab dropped from beneath the machine, down, twisting, out and back toward us once again. The blue was gone. Himaggery looked like Himaggery once more. I could see his chest move, tiny, tiny movements, the shallowest of breaths. We pulled him from the slab and put Windlow in his place.
I knelt above Himaggery while Mavin went to the lever again. I heard the ascending howl, smelled burning once more. This time there was smoke, harsh and biting. I coughed. Himaggery coughed. His head moved, his hand. I found myself patting him, stroking him, mumbling nonsense into his ear. Then Mavin’s cry from behind me brought me to my feet.
The machine was on fire. Below the contorted mass, the slab moved out slowly, too slowly. Already I could see that the blue was still there. Nothing had happened. Then, when it came further into view, I knew that something had happened. Windlow’s body had been ... changed. Was it the heat of the machine? Some ancient device which had broken at last, irretrievably? It didn’t matter. What lay upon the slab could not support life again, and I knew this with every cell which Dealpas had inhabited. “Dead,” I whispered, unable to believe it. “Dead.”
“Dead?” The voice behind me was Himaggery’s. I turned to see him trying to sit up, failing, and trying once again. His eyes were unfocused, blind. Mavin was beside him in that instant, ready with one of the black dresses which Manacle had used in his ceremony, ready to wrap him and coerce him back into life once more. I reached over the slab and took Windlow’s blue into my hands, hands sticky with tears. I tried not to look at the slab again, but could not stop the thought that this, this is what old Windlow had foreseen and begged for my help against.
Perhaps Mavin read my mind, or my face. She snapped at me. “There is no time for guilt, Peter. We must get out of this place. What Didir feared will happen very soon.”
“The door is locked,” I said stupidly. “Flogshoulder will find the door locked. He will have to return to get the key. We have a little time.”
“We have no time. Didir warned of some general catastrophe. Gamelords know how far we would have to go to escape it, but the farthest, the soonest would be best.” She leaned across Himaggery once more, urging him to his feet. I do not know how he did it, but the man lurched upright, mouth open in anguish as he did so. She went on even as she urged him toward the tunnels. “The cars that brought the bodies to this place are still there, still on the track. I watched them when they ran them. They will take us away.”
I followed her, placing Windlow’s blue tenderly in my pocket as I went. The carts were there, just as she had said. Himaggery and I climbed into the foremost one as Mavin fumbled with the controls. It shuddered, made a grating noise, then began to run forward into the mountains.
“Where?” I asked her, seeing the daylight vanish behind us. “Where will you take us?”
“Where the tracks go,” she replied. “The carts came from those cold caverns, they should return there. We need distance between us and this place, and any other way would take too long.”
So we ran off into a half darkness. There were no magicians. There were no techs. We saw one or two Tallmen from time to time, but they stood by the walls as still and silent as trees, but unalive. It was then I began to know that they had not truly been living things¾or not entirely living things. I thought of Tallmen, and I thought of music, and I wondered how those who made the one could make the other. I have not yet made an answer to that.
Somewhere early in the journey, Himaggery began to regain his wits. He wanted to know what had happened, and in order to tell him that I had to tell him everything, Laggy Nap, my journey, Mavin, Izia, the Tallmen, Manacle, Quench ... and Didir. We passed one of those dining places once, and Mavin stopped while we raided it. After that, Himaggery seemed to be better, though still rather disoriented and weak. When he asked about Windlow, I could not answer him. I could only look back the way we had come and let the tears run down my face. So it was Mavin who told him, and then there was a silence which seemed without end. Finally he broke it. “So what is happening now?”
“Now we are trying to get away,” I answered. “Flogshoulder will go to the room. He will find it locked. He will return to Manacle, and one way or another, with Committee approval or without it, Manacle will give him the key. Or Manacle will go himself. Whatever occurs, it will not take long. Manacle will believe that Quench is more of a threat than he ever believed the Council was. The defenders are to be used against a threat. So, he will use the defenders.”
“What will happen?” whispered Himaggery from a dry throat.
“I don’t know for sure. I believe that the defenders were never designed to defend the magicians. They were designed to defend Home, wherever that may be. Another world, somewhere.”
“So you’ve figured that out,” said Mavin, drily.
“Yes. The defenders were designed to defend Home against the monsters.”
“Monsters?” asked Himaggery. “What monsters? Who?”
“Oh, Himaggery.” I laughed and cried all at once. “You. Me. Mavin. All the children of Didir. She was the monster, the girl monster, the one the ship brought. Only she. And all those others to watch her and write down everything she did. All of it, the defenders, everything. Just to keep one little woman monster from threatening Home.”
“I thought so,” said Mavin. “I thought that was the way of it.’’
“Well, if you thought so, I wish to heaven you had told me!” I said.
“So what will the defenders do?” Himaggery went on, tenacious as always.
“Destroy the place,” said Mavin with finality. “Destroy Manacle and stupid Flogshoulder and sycophantic Shear, all the Tallmen and the pits, all the monsters¾the real ones¾and machines. Everything. Or so I believe.”
“So do I,” I said. “And we had best be far away when that happens.”
“How far away?”
I couldn’t tell him. Didir had thought only of danger, danger to everything. She had not limited it to a certain circle, a Demesne which could be measured for chill. “Far,” I said. “As far as possible.”
“At least to the end of these tracks,” said Mavin, practical as always. So we rode along the tracks, deeper and deeper under the mountains as Himaggery grew stronger and I felt more the pain of Windlow’s death. Once I thought of asking Mavin whether there was some way out of the place she was taking us, but decided she would not appreciate the question. If there was a way out, there would be a way out. If not, not. My asking would not change it.
The way to the caverns was a long way. When we arrived there, I wished we had not come. The bodies around us lay in piles as high as my shoulders, five or six bodies high, men and women together, stacked in endless rows. In one area to the side of the entry, Mavin and Himaggery found body after body of those they had known. Here were those Mavin had mentioned to me, but many others as well.
“And all of their minds¾their memories, all, gone? Out there? In the aeries of Gamesmasters, to be used as teaching aids for children?” Himaggery sounded unbelieving, but we assured him it was true.
“Then what threatened us and worked against us was not the Council at all? It was these old men in this moldy place? Abducting us one by one and storing us away like fish?” Again we assured him this was true.
“Then we have only to tell the world what has gone on here, and it will stop. The Traders can be watched.”
“That may be true,” I said. “But there may be more to it than that. It was these old men who abducted and kept you, true. But Quench said it was the Council told them who to take and keep. And it is to the Council that Quench has gone, gone with every tech in the place.”
“And,” said Mavin, “I would wager with every book they could lay hands on.”
We had not yet gone into the largest part of the cavern, a place from which a chill wind came to assure us of egress somewhere. It was then, as we were readying ourselves to find it, that the first rumble came, shivering the rock about us and dropping dust and ice onto our heads from far above. The shaking went on. Rock grated and twisted beneath us.
“We have taken too long,” shouted Mavin. “Through the large cavern, quickly.”
But we were not allowed to go. We had no sooner stepped within the large cavern than he came from behind a pile of bodies, Demon helmed, all in silver, a strange device cradled in his arms, its ominous tip pointed toward me. “Peter, the Necromancer,” he said. “I told them you were not dead! I would not let you be dead! Not you, Peter. Not until I could do it myself! I call Game, and Move. Necromancer Nine!”
Himaggery leapt to one side, behind a pile of bodies. Well, he was older than I. He had more experience with this kind of thing. On the other side, Mavin Shifted into something quick and fierce, and the corner of my eye saw her fade into an aisle. Well, she, too was a more experienced Shifter than I. I did not move. The tip of the thing which pointed at me said do not move, and I understood its language. “What have you there, Huld?” I asked him, almost conversationally. I was not unafraid. I was simply too surprised to act frightened.
“A thing Nitch made for me, Peter. Was that not kind of him? It was when you all thought me bottled up in Bannerwell. Do not trust Immutables to do your bottling for you, Peter. They do not do it well. They have no skill in foxing or outfoxing; any Gamesman could outwit them, as I did. I had another place to go, a better place. I found Nitch as he traveled between Schooltown and that place of the magicians. Nitch. It was Nitch who was responsible for what happened to Mandor, Peter. Remember that. What happened to him was just.”
“What happened to him?” I had put one hand into my pocket, feeling desperately for¾for what? Shattnir could do me no good in this cold place. Those around me were not dead to be raised by Dorn. And neither would come to me in any case.
“Why, he died,” he said, pretending surprise. “After he had made me the things I wanted, told me the things I wanted to know, given me the books he had. He made this shield, like the one you had in Schooltown. This weapon, like no other you have ever seen. Oh, Peter, with this weapon there will be no Gaming against Huld. No. All the Gaming will be as I choose.” He stroked the thing exultantly. “After I dispose of your family.”
He drew out the word to make it an obscenity. Until that moment, I had not thought of them as my family, but they were. Himaggery. Mavin. My own kind. My fingers still groped in my pocket. Habit, not hope.
And closed around a Gamesman, closed to feel a warm, wonderful certainty rise through me, soft and gentle, kind as summer, the voice whispering as familiar, almost, as my own. “Peter. Why are you standing here? Valor is all well and good, but shouldn’t you be elsewhere if you can manage it?”
It was Windlow. I almost laughed aloud before remembering the threat. Yes, I know that is foolish. It was only an instant thing, as quickly suppressed. I let Windlow go and burrowed deep to close around a figure I had not tried until then. Old as Didir, powerful as she, her mate and coeval, Tamor. Grandfather Tamor. Towering Tamor.
There was no hesitation. The block, whatever it might have been, had been healed. Perhaps Windlow had healed it. Tamor came into me like a hawk stooping, and I was looking down on Huld as he peered at the place I had been. There was no sensation of flying as I had often thought there would be. No, I was simply lying high upon the air, above Huld, seeing Mavin and Himaggery moving stealthily toward him around barriers of chill bodies.
“Huld!” I cried.
He pointed the device up, released a bolt of force which blistered past me and melted stone and hanging ice from the arched ceiling far above. Liquid rock fell past me, hardening as it came, and Huld ran from the lethal rain even as I swooped away to another part of the cavern. More stone and ice rained down. This was no result of Huld’s weapon. This was more of the same quaking we had felt before. Mavin waved to attract my attention, pointed to the far end of the great cavern. I nodded to show her that I understood. I should have watched Huld, not Mavin, for another bolt from the weapon came toward me, touched me agonizingly, and splashed against the ice. “All right,” said Tamor from within. “Keep your eyes open, boy. Shall we rescue your friend?” Himaggery did look lonely and lost, sprawled out below me between two piles of bodies. We swooped down, not at all birdlike, to grab him and lift him high in a long shallow glide which took us toward the cavern end. I heard Huld screaming in fury. He had known of some of my Talents. He had not known of them all. Well, how could he have done? I had not known of them myself.
“You will not get away,” he was screaming at me. “I’ve closed that way out. I knew you’d come here, come where the bodies of your allies lay. I knew you’d try to get them. It’s the kind of Gamish stupidity they taught you, boy.”
“Even if you escape, it won’t stop me. I’ll come after you again, and yet again. I have allies, too. And plans. And the world will not hold us both as Masters, so you will serve my Game.”
“Tchuck.” Tamor made a tsking sound in my head. “That kind of hysterical threat is unbecoming. undignified. I do not like being called Grandfather to that.” We were away on another long. swooping glide that broke twice to escape bolts from Huld’s weapon. A great slab of stone turned red behind us and slid toward the floor, half flowing. Without thinking, I reached for Shattnir and felt her run into me like wine, reaching out toward the melted stone to draw its heat and power into every fiber. We stayed there, hidden behind the bodies, until I heard Huld coming, then rose once more, lying flat, skimming like an arrow behind the stacked bodies toward the chill wind. Himaggery gasped. I was holding him under one Shifted arm, huge and hairy as a pombi’s leg. Well, he should have been used to Shifter ways. In order to get me upon my mother he should have known her rather well.
The shaking of the cavern was constant. I heard Huld shout something, away behind me, then another shout which sounded like fear. He had either been under a falling chunk of rock or had been narrowly missed. I didn’t care which. The opening of the cavern was before me. Mavin was already there. The entrance was covered by a narrow grill which sizzled with the same force Huld’s weapon had used. Mavin spread her hands wide in consternation. She could not Shift to go through the narrow openings without frying herself. Within me, Shattnir laughed. The laughter of Shattnir had nothing of humor in it. It was not an experience, then or thereafter, which I greatly enjoyed. All the heat of the great melted slab went into the bolt which broke the grill, melted it in its turn, and spread its broken shards over half the mountain side. Mavin fled through the opening, out and down, knowing I would follow. Around us the earth clamored, no longer quivering but heaving to and fro in long, hideous waves. I flew through the opening into nubilous air, high into gray cloud to see the white wings of a huge bird slide through the gloom beneath me. Then we saw it, Himaggery and I. Away to the southeast, where the shiptower might have been, a ball of flame, swelling, swelling into a little sun, a cloud rising from it lit from below, bloody and skull-shaped in the murk, fires within it, lightnings playing upon its top. The wind took us then, tumbling us over and over in the high air on the face of a hot wind which Shattnir merely sucked into me and stored away. The earth roared, heaved, and fell in mighty undulations. I saw a mountain tremble, throw back its head and laugh into roaring fragments as we spun through the air again, rolling on the wind. Wild fire licked and crackled and eventually died. After a time we came down, onto a green hill which sat quietly beneath us, steady as a chair. Wind from the north whipped the bloody clouds to tatters and away. The sun broke through, midway down the western sky. It was not a day, yet, since we had hidden in the shiptower to see the Ceremony of Calling Home.
Beside me, Himaggery picked up a straw and closed trembling lips upon it. “Well, lad. What do you think we should do now?”
I picked up a straw of my own. “I don’t know what you want to do, Himaggery,” I said.
“But I’m going to change myself into a Dragon and go looking for my mother.”
WE FOUND MAVIN ON HER PINNACLE, just where I had thought she would be, and she was properly admiring of the most splendid Dragon she or anyone in the world had ever seen. It was exactly as Chance had said, a fool idea. The fire and speed and wind in the wings were all very well, but there was still Windlow in my pocket and the bodies of ten thousand great Gamesmen (as well as a few pawns) lying in the cavern under the snows. Oh, we had gone back, Himaggery and I, just to be sure. The cavern was quite intact except for a little fallen ice and melted stone. Huld was not there, dead nor alive, which meant he was still at large in the world, hunting me. I was growing tired of that.
So, once I had done my gomerousing around as a Dragon, I settled with Himaggery and Mavin on the pinnacle, to await the arrival of my cousins. We sat about Mavin’s fire, me watching Himaggery be excruciatingly polite to her while she twitted him at every opportunity. I finally took her aside and told her to let him alone. If she truly did not want to be the man’s pawnish mate, I told her, then she should not keep saying so so vehemently, which would just make him believe the opposite. I don’t know how I figured that out, except that Trandilar probably had something to do with it. At any rate, it bought us some peace and we got along better.
Swolwys and Dolwys arrived in good time. They had delivered Izia, improved in both health and spirits by the time they arrived. More important, when they had come to Izia’s home, Yarrel had been there and she had remembered him. The cousins did not say much about that meeting. I hoped for their sakes that Yarrel had not treated them as coldly as he had treated me when last we met. His rejection of me still hurt, and I hoped that Izia’s return might make him feel more kindly, though I knew that if he learned all she had gone through in the intervening years, he might hate all Gamesmen even more. And this line of thought brought me to thoughts of Windlow. I figured that matter out in the privacy of the cave, unwilling to talk about it with anyone. I simply chipped at the corner of the tiny Didir figure with my thumbnail until the white covering flaked away to show the blue beneath. The Gamesmen of Barish were blues, simply (simply!) blues, made in the long past for some reason I could not know, though I was beginning to make some rather astonishing guesses. The Gamesmen themselves did not tell me, though whether they could not or would not, I did not know. At the moment I was content to let things be. Except for one thing.
At one time or another, casually, over a period of several days, I handed one or another of the Gamesmen to my cousins, to Mavin, even to Himaggery. They handled them as I had done, with bare hands, but they gave no indication that they felt anything or experienced anything at all. So. “Blues” could not be Read by anyone who handled them. It was a particular Talent which I had, seemingly I alone of all the world. So again. No one had seen me take the Windlow blue. No one knew I had it. I doubt that either Mavin or Himaggery ever thought about it, and I did nothing at all to remind them. We traveled to the Bright Demesne together, three horses and two horsemen. We younger ones were the horses, two for riding, one for baggage. I thought of Chance when I did it. He would have approved mightily of how inconspicuous I was. I could not help but overhear the long conversations between my mother and Himaggery (I could not think of him as “Father”). As the hours of our travel wore on. they spoke more and more often of certain Gamesmen they had known. I heard again the name of Throsset of Dornes. I heard again the name of Minery Mindcaster. Himaggery spoke of the High Wizard Chamferton, and Bartelmy of the Ban. They were cataloging all those they had seen in the cavern or suspected might be there. And they were making plans to bring all the blues of all the world to the Bright Demesne. “There will be a way,” Himaggery insisted. “A way to do it without the machines. Or to build a new machine to do it. So many, so great. We cannot leave them there, stacked like stove wood.”
And then they would talk more, list more names, and end by saying the same thing again. Peter in the horse’s head nodded wisely. We were no sooner out of one mess than we would get into another.
And, of course, they talked about the Council. The mysterious Council. The wonderful Council. The probably threatening Council. They could not decide whether it was totally inimical, perhaps beneficial, or, possibly, nonexistent. Peter inside the horse’s head nodded again. Such questions could not be left unanswered, not by one like Himaggery. Peter inside the horse’s head had other thoughts, about Quench, Huld, books, about what several hundred or thousand pawns who had been “techs” might do when loosed into a world which did not know they existed.
And we came at last to the Bright Demesne. Word having been sent ahead, we were expected. There was a certain amount of orderly rejoicing, and Mertyn seemed to have some trouble letting me out of his sight for several days. Chance, on the other hand, behaved as though I had only been gone on a day-long mushroom hunt and was no different on my return than on my going. Only the quantity and quality of the food which kept appearing before me told me that he had worried about me. I helped him by pretending I did not notice.
There was mourning, too, for Windlow. I wept with the rest and kept my mouth shut.
And then Izia arrived¾with Yarrel.
They rode into the kitchen court about noon. I was in the kitchen garden with Chance, pulling carrots. There is no Talented way to do this easier than simply stooping over and yanking them out by their tops. So I was muddy and sweating and unsuspecting when the clatter of hooves came from the cobbled yard. I looked up, wiping my eyes with my shirttail, and saw Izia looking at me, very pale and very beautiful. She reached one hand to the person beside her, and then I saw Yarrel. He was looking at me, too, but with an expression in which resentment and eagerness seemed equally combined. He slid from the horse’s back, helped Izia down, and they came together toward me. All I could think of was that I wanted to hide, not to have him angry or hateful to me again. Perhaps he saw this emotion on my face, for he stopped and smiled, almost shyly. “Peter.” Was there something of a plea in that voice? I gritted my teeth and stepped forward, the shirttail still between my hands, wiping away the mud so that I could offer him a clean hand. He did not wait for that, but took both muddy fists in his own and drew me within the circle of his arms.
It was only a moment, a moment before he stepped back, his face calm again as he raised his hand to Chance and let me guide them into the kitchens. We sat there in the fireglow as we had sat year on year, within hands’ clasp of one another, eating Chance’s baking and telling one another of all that had happened in our worlds. It would be good to write that all was as it once had been, the old friendship, the old closeness. But that would be a sentimental story, not true. It was not as it had been; it was only better than it was before he came. And Izia sat there, sometimes smiling a little, a tiny smile, tight and tentative, but a smile, nonetheless. Once she even laughed, a short little hoot of laughter, like a surprised owl. I knew then that I had loved her for herself, and because she resembled him, and because I had rescued her. I knew in that same way that she would never know it, that it would only be a burden to her. She could accept Yarrel’s touch, and only his, a gentling, animal-handler’s touch, with nothing in it of lust or human ardor. She would grow more secure, less frightened, as the years went by. But¾no, she would never accept what might remind her of Laggy Nap. Nap. I had not thought of him or wondered where he had come to. I wondered now, idly, whether it would be worth the trouble to avenge myself and her. So I rejoiced that Yarrel had come, and grieved that Yarrel had come bringing Izia, and then simply stopped feeling and was while they were there.
And after they had gone, I went to Himaggery, where he sat in his high, mist-filled room and asked him whether he would still accept my help, my Talents and my help, in whatever it was he intended to do. Mertyn was there with him. It was being said that Mertyn would stay, would not return to the Schooltown, so I thought the matter might well be discussed with them both. “Ah, you see,” said Himaggery to my thalan. “It is precisely as Windlow said.” Then, turning to me, “Windlow told me you would come into this very room and say that very thing, Peter. He did not know when it would be. Ah. Ah¾but his vision was wrong in one thing. He thought he would be here, too. Tshah. I shall miss him.”
“As I will, also.” I said. Oh, Windlow, I thought, why did you not simply tell me before I left the Bright Demesne! If you saw the threat, knew the danger, why didn’t you tell me.
But there was no answer to that. He rested softly in my mind and did not answer though he was present, as he had foreseen. So I asked the question of Himaggery again, and this time he told me, yes, he would accept my help with great pleasure. It was precisely as I thought, of course. We were to locate the Council. We were to bring the blues to the Bright Demesne. We were to find a way to reunite the body and spirit of ten thousand Gamesmen. We were to pursue Justice, for Windlow had desired that. We were, in short, to do enough things to take a lifetime or two, most of them complicated, some of them dangerous, all of them exciting.
And, I had an agenda of my own. Huld, for example, who had called Necromancer Nine on me, Huld who did not know that he had been right. He had called Necromancer Nine on the young Necromancer, Peter; it was his intention that Peter die, and that Peter had died indeed. I did not quite know who the Peter who survived would be, but he would not be Dorn, or Didir, or Trandilar.
So I smiled on Himaggery and offered him my hand. Time alone and the Seers knew what would come next. Highest risk, Necromancer Nine. I was not afraid.