The Gamesmen of Barish
1. Dorn, Necromancer Talent: Deadraising
2. Trandilar, Ruler Talent: Beguilement
3. Shattnir, Sorcerer Talent: Power Holding
4. Wafnor, Tragamor Talent: Moving
5. Didir, Demon Talent: Mind Reading
6. Dealpas, Healer Talent: Healing
7. Tamor, Armiger Talent: Flying
8. Hafnor, Elator Talent: Traveling
9. Buinel, Sentinel Talent: Firestarting
10. Sorah, Seer Talent: Seeing the Future
11. Thandbar, Shifter Talent: Shapechanging
In addition, the Immutables were reckoned to have Talent Twelve, and Peter was found to have Talent Thirteen. The Talent of Wizards is never specified. “Strange are the Talents of Wizards.”
Notes on the Fauna of the World of the True Game
The animals, birds, and water creatures originally native to the world of the True Game lack a backbone and have evolved from a vaguely starfishshaped creature. The basic skeleton is in the form of a jointed pentacle, or star, often elongated, with the limbs and head at the points of the star. Despite this very different evolutionary pattern, the bioengineers among the magicians succeeded in meshing the genetic material of the new world and that from which they came. Among the creatures now native to the world of the True Game are:
BUNWITS: Any of a variety of herbivorous animals with long hind legs and flat, surprised-looking faces under erect, triangular ears. Like all animals native to the world, bunwits are tailless. They eat young grasses and the leaves of webwillows.
FLITCHHAWKS: Swift, high-flying birds which prey mostly upon bunwits of the smaller varieties. Noted for their keen eyes.
FUSTIGARS: Pack-hunting predators, some varieties of which have been extensively inbred and domesticated.
GNARLIBARS: A huge animal which lives in the high wastes below the Dorbor Range. It feeds upon anything it can catch, including old or ailing krylobos. The gnarlibar has a ground-shaking roar which has earned it the name of “avalanche animal.” Gnarlibars always pack in fours, two females and two males; females always bear twins, one male and one female. A set of Gnarlibars is called a “leat” or crossroads, because of their invariable habit of attacking from four directions at once. It is thought that the gnarlibar is the descendant of a prehistoric race of animals so prodigious in size as to be considered mythical.
GROLE: A long, blind, legless animal with multiple rows of teeth which lives by burrowing into soil, stone, or other inorganic materials, utilizing the light metals in its metabolism. The teeth are of adamant and can be used as grinding tools. The so-called “sausage groles” are not related to rockeater groles but are smaller creatures of similar configuration which eat only organic materials, notably the meat of the ground nut.
KRYLOBOS: A giant, flightless bird with well-developed wing fingers, capable of very high running speeds. The krylobos dance contests are among the most exciting of spectacles for adventurous zoologists, as the birds are extremely agile and powerful.
POMBIS: Carnivores distinguished by clawed feet and the ability to climb tall trees or nest in virtually inaccessible locations. Pombis are irritable and have a reputation for unprovoked belligerence.
THRISPAT: A small omnivore which bears its young alive, lives in trees or upon precipitous mountain slopes, and mimics the calls of other animals and the human voice. Small thrispats are favorite pets in the jungle cities where breeders vie in extending the vocabularies of their animals. A good thrispat can speak up to a hundred words and phrases with some indication of understanding their meaning. Thrispats are particularly fond of ripe thrilps, whence the name.
WARNETS: A stinging, flying insect of minuscule size and legendary bad temper, which lives in hordes. Called “saber-tail” by some. It is said that krylobos will take warnet nests and drop them into the nests of gnarlibars during territorial disputes.
Native Peoples
At least two peoples are known to occupy the lands around the area of the True Game.
SHADOWPEOPLE: Small, carnivorous (omnivorous when necessary) nocturnal people delighting in music and song. They are extremely fond of festivals, dance contests, song contests and the like and have been seen to assemble by hundreds within sound of the annual contests at the Minchery in Learner. While Shadowpeople eat bunwits of any size, it is notable that they do not attack krylobos and are not attacked by pombis, gnarlibars, or warnets.
EESTIES: A people said by some to be aloof and withdrawn, by others to be friendly and helpful. Seen most often as solitary individuals. Native language unknown. Habits unknown. In appearance, star-shaped, moving as Armigers do or rolling upon the extremities.
MAVIN MANYSHAPED, my mother, had told me that when a Shapeshifter is not Shifting¾that is, when he is not involved in a Game¾it is considered polite for the Shifter to wear real clothing and act, insofar as is possible, like any normal Demon or Necromancer or Tragamor. I like to humor Mavin when I can. The proper dress of a Shifter includes a beast-head helm and a fur cloak, so I had had a pombi-head helm made up, all lolloping red tongue and glittering eyes, with huge jowls and ears¾fake, of course. A real pombi head would have weighed like lead. My fur mantle was real enough, however, and welcome for warmth on the chill day which found me midway between the Bright Demesne and the town of Xammer. I was mounted on a tall black horse I had picked for myself from Himaggery’s stables, and Chance sulked along behind on something less ostentatious. We were on our way to visit Silkhands the Healer, not at her invitation and not because of any idea of mine.
Chance was sulking because he had recently learned of a large exotic beast said to live in the far Northern Lands, and he wanted me to Shift into one so that he might ride me through the town of Thisp near the Bright Demesne. It seemed there was a widow there ...
I had said no, no, too undignified, and wasn’t Chance the one who had always urged me to be inconspicuous? To which he had made a bad-tempered reply to do with ungrateful brats.
“If she had seen you mounted on a gnarlibar, Chance, she would never have let you in her house again. She would have felt you too proud, too puissant for a plumpish widow.”
“ ‘Twould not be too warlike for that one, Peter. She’s widow of an Armiger and daughter of another. Great high ones, too, from the telling of it.”
“But she has no Talent, Chance.”
“Well. That’s as may be. Boys don’t know everything.” And he went back to his sulks.
Whoops, Peter, I said to myself. Chance is in love and you have been uncooperative. Thinking upon the bouncy widow, I could imagine what Talents she might have which Chance would value. I sighed. My own history, brief though it was, was mainly of love unrequited. I resolved to make it up to him. Somehow. Later. Certainly not before I found out what a gnarlibar might look like. This rumination was interrupted by more muttering from Chance to the effect that he couldn’t see why we were going to Xammer anyhow, there being nothing whatever in Xammer of any interest.
“Silkhands is there, Chance.” I didn’t mention the blues which were the ostensible reason for my trip.
“Well, except for her there’s nothing.”
Right enough. Except for her there was probably little, but between the blues and old Windlow the Seer, I had reason for going.
The Bright Demesne had been like a nest of warnets since Mavin, Himaggery, and I had returned from the place of the magicians in the north. Those two and Mertyn had great deeds aflight, and all the coming and going in pursuit of them was dizzying. They had been horrified to learn of the bodies of great Gamesmen stacked in their thousands in the icy caverns of the north and had resolved to reunite those bodies with the personalities which had once occupied them, personalities now scattered among the lands and Demesnes in the form of blues, tiny Games-pieces used in the School Houses in the instruction of students. Mavin had appointed herself in charge of locating all the blues and bringing them to the Bright Demesne, though how she planned to reunite them with the bodies was unknown unless she was depending upon the last of the magicians, Quench, to make it possible. In any case, uncertainty was not standing in the way of action. Pursuivants were dashing about, Elators were flicking in and out like whipcracks; the place was fairly screaming with arrivals and departures.
Coincident with all this was a quiet search for my enemy, Huld. We were all eager to find him, accounting him a great danger loose in the world and ourselves unable to rest in safety until he was in some deep dungeon or safely dead.
And, of course, there was still much conjecture and looking into the matter of that mysterious Council which was rumored to be managing or mismanaging our affairs from some far, hidden place of power. Anyone not otherwise occupied was trying to solve that enigma. Meantime, I traveled about, collected blues, spent little time at the Bright Demesne. Standing about under the eyes of an eccentric mother, a father who kept looking at me like a gander who has hatched a flitchhawk chick, and of my thalan, Mertyn, who persisted in treating me like a schoolboy, made me short-tempered and openly rebellious in a few short days. I said as much to the three of them, but I don’t think they heard me. They considered me a treasure beyond price until it came time to listen to me, and then I might as well have been a froglet going oh-ab, oh-ab, oh-ab in the ditches. I would like to have been involved at the center of things, but¾well. It would have done no good to talk to Mavin about it. She was a tricksy one, my mother, and though I would have trusted her implicitly with my life, I could not trust her at all with my sanity. Matchless in times of trouble, as a day-to-day companion she had remarkable quirks. Himaggery and Mertyn were preoccupied. Chance was courting the widow in Thisp. There were no other young people at the Bright Demesne¾all locked up in School Houses. What was there to do?
Given the state of my pockets, I had decided to go swimming. During my travels in Schlaizy Noithn, I had learned to do without clothing most of the time, growing pockets in my hide for the things I really wanted to carry about. When one can grow fangs and claws at will, it is remarkable how few things one really needs. Well, pockets in one’s skin sound all very well, but they accumulate flurb just as ordinary pockets do, and accumulated flurb itches. A good cure for this is to empty the pockets, turn them inside out and go swimming in one of the hot pools with the mists winding back and forth overhead and the wind breathing fragrance from the orchards. All very calm and pastoral and sweetly melancholy.
Well, enough of that was enough of that in short order. I sat on the grassy bank with the contents of my pockets spread out, sorting through them as one does, deciding what to do with a strange coin or an odd-shaped stone. While I was at it, I dumped out the little leather pouch which held the Gamesmen of Barish.
There had been thirty-two of the little figures when I had found them. Only eleven had been “real.” The others were merely copies and carvings made by some excellent craftsman in a long ago time in order to fill out a set of Gamespieces. The ones which were only carvings were in my room. The eleven real ones were becoming as familiar to me as the lines in my own hand.
There was Dorn, the Necromancer, death’s-head mask in one hand, dark visaged and lean. I could almost hear his voice, insinuating, dry, full of cold humor, an actorish voice. There was voluptuous Trandilar, Great Ruler, silver-blonde and sensual, lips endlessly pursed in erotic suggestion. There was Didir, face half hidden beneath the Demon’s helm, one hand extended in concentration, the feel of her like a knife blade worn thin as paper, able to cut to inmost thoughts and Read the minds of others.
There was stocky Wafnor the Tragamor, clear-eyed and smiling, his very shape expressing the strength with which he could Move things¾mountains, if necessary. He had done that once for me. There was Shattnir, androgynous, cold, menacing, challenging, the most competitive of them all, the spikes of her Sorcerer’s crown alive with power. Beside her lay the robed form of Dealpas the Healer, tragic face hidden, consumed with suffering, her they called “Broken leaf.” And, last of those I knew well, Tamor the Armiger, Towering Tamor, poised upon the balls of his feet as though about to take flight, Grandfather Tamor, strong and dependable, quick in judgment, instant in action. I knew these seven, knew the feel of their minds in mine, the sound of their voices, the touch of their bodies as each of them remembered their own bodies. I could, if I concentrated, almost summon the patterns of them into my head without touching the images.
There were four others I had not held. Sorah, the Seer, face shadowed behind the moth-wing mask, future-knower, visionary. There was fussy Buinel, the Sentinel, Fire-maker, much concerned with protocol and propriety, full of worry, holding his flaming shield aloft. There was Hafnor, the Elator, wings on his heels, quicksilver, able to flick from one place to another in an instant. And, lastly, there was Thandbar the Shifter whose talent was the same as my own, tricksy Thandbar in his beast-head helm and mantle of pelts. They lay there, the eleven, upon the grass.
And one more.
One not disguised by paint as the Gamesmen were. One icy blue. Windlow. I had not taken him often into my hand, and there was reason for that, but I took him then beside the warm pools and held him in my palm out of loneliness and boredom and the desire to be with a friend. He came into my head like good wine and we had a long time of peacefulness during which I sat with my legs in the water and thought of nothing at all.
Then it was as though someone said “Ah” in a surprised tone of voice. My mind went dreamy and distant, with images running through it, dissolving one into another. My body sat up straight and began to breathe very fast; then it was over, and I heard Windlow saying inside my head, “Ah, Peter, I have had a Vision! Did you see it? Could you catch it?”
And I was saying, to myself, as it were, “A vision, Windlow? Just now? I couldn’t see anything. Just colors.”
“It is difficult to know,” he said. “Your head does not feel as mine did. It doesn’t work in the same way at all. How strange to remember that one once thought quite differently! It is like living in a new House and remembering the old one. Fascinating, the difference. I could wander about in here for years¾ah. The vision. I saw you and Silkhands. And a place, far to the north, called¾’Wind’s eye.’ Important. Where is Silkhands?”
“You and Himaggery sent her to Xammer.” This was true. It had happened well over a year before, after the great battle at Bannerwell. Though Silkhands had long known that her sister and brother, Dazzle and Borold, were kin unworthy of her sorrow, when the end came at Bannerwell which sent Dazzle into long imprisonment and Borold to his death¾for he had died there at the walls, posturing for Dazzle’s approval to the very end¾it had been more than Silkhands could bear. She had cried to Himaggery and to old Windlow (this was long before Windlow had been captured by the traders and taken away) and they had sent her off to Xammer to be Gamesmistress at Vorbold’s House. She had gone to seek peace and, I had told her at the time, perpetual boredom. I had given her a brotherly kiss and told her she would be sorry she had left me. Well. Who knows. Perhaps she had been.
“Ah. Then she is still in Xammer. Nothing has changed with Silkhands since I¾passed into this state of being.”
It was a nice phrase. I knew he had started to say, “Since I died,” and had decided against it. After all, one cannot consider oneself truly dead while one can still think and speak and have visions, even if one must use someone else’s head to do it with. “She is still there, Windlow, so far as I know. You’re sure Silkhands was in your vision?”
“I think you should go to her, boy. I think that would be a very good idea. North. Somewhere. Not somewhere you have been before, I think. A giant? Perhaps. A bridge. Ah, I’ve lost it. Well, you must go. And you must take me along ... and the Gamesmen of Barish.”
I asked him a question then, one I had wanted to ask for a very long time. “Windlow, why are they called that? You called them that, Himaggery called them that. But neither of you had seen them before I found them.”
There was a long and uncomfortable silence inside me. Almost I would have said that Windlow would have preferred that I not ask that question. Silly. Nonetheless, when he answered me, he was not open and forthcoming. “I must have read of them, lad. In some old book or other. That must be it.”
I did not press him. I felt his discomfort, and laid the blue back into the pouch with the others, let him go back to his sleep, if it was sleep. Sometimes in the dark hours I was terrified at the thought of the blues in my pocket, waiting, waiting, living only through me when I took them into my hand, going back to that indefinable nothingness between times. It did not bear thinking of.
Now, since I had never told anyone about having Windlow’s blue, I could not now go to them and say that Windlow directed me to visit Silkhands. A fiction was necessary. I made it as true as possible. I reminded them of the School House at Xammer, of the blues which were undoubtedly there, of the fact that Silkhands was there and that I longed to see her. At which point they gave one another meaningful glances and adopted a kindly but jocular tone of voice. Besides, said I, Himaggery always had messages to send to the Immutables, so I would take the messages. I could even go on to a few of the Schooltowns farther north, combining all needs in a single journey. What good sense! How clever of me! I would leave in the morning and might I take my own pick from the stable, please, Himaggery, because I have grown another handswidth.
To all of which they said yes, yes, for the sake of peace, yes, take Chance with you and stay in touch in case we find Quench.
Which explains why Chance and I were on the frosted road to Xammer on a fall morning full of blown leaves and the smoke of cold. We had been several hours upon the road, not long enough to be tired, almost long enough to lose stiffness and ride easy. The ease was disturbed by Chance’s whisper.
“‘Ware, Peter. Look at those riders ahead.”
I had seen them, more or less subconsciously. Now I looked more closely to see what had attracted Chance’s attention. There was an Armiger, the rust red of his helm and the black of his cloak seeming somehow dusty, even at that distance. The man rode slouched in an awkward way, crabwise upon his mount. Beside him I saw a slouch hat over a high, wide collar, a wide-skirted coat, the whole cut with pockets and pockets. A Pursuivant. Those who worked with Himaggery had given up that archaic dress in favor of something more comfortable. Beside the Pursuivant rode a Witch in tawdry finery, and next to her an Invigilator, lean in form-fitting leathers painted with cat stripes. What was it about them? Of course. The crabwise slouch of the Armiger permitted him to stare back at us as he rode.
“Watching us?” I asked Chance. “How long?”
“Since we came up to ‘em, lad. And they wasn’t far ahead. Could have started out from the hill outside the gate, just enough advance of us to make it look accidental like.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He snorted under his breath. “Why is sky blue and grass green. Why is Himaggery full of plots. Why is Mertyn bothered about a Shifter boy with more Talent than sense. ‘Tisn’t me they’re bothered over.”
“Me?” I considered that. Ever since I had left Schooltown I had been pursued by one group or another, on behalf of Huld the Demon, on behalf of Prionde the High King, on behalf of the magicians. Well, the magicians were probably all dead but one, so far as I knew, but both Huld and Prionde were alive in the world. Unless I had attracted another opponent I knew nothing of.
If someone had put the group together to win a Game against me¾the me I appeared to be¾then they had selected well enough. Both the Pursuivant and the Invigilator had Reading, though not at any great distance. Both the Armiger and the Invigilator could Fly. Both the Invigilator and the Witch could store some power. In addition, the Pursuivant would be able to flick from place to place¾not far and not as quickly as an Elator would have done, but unpredictably¾and he would have limited Seeing. Add to this the Witch’s ability as a Firestarter (her Talent of Beguilement didn’t worry me) and they were a formidable Game Set.
I wondered how much they knew about me. If Huld had sent them, they knew too much. If Prionde had sent them, they might not know enough to cause me trouble. And if someone else? Well, that was an interesting thought.
“' ‘Their aim, what Game?’ “ I quoted softly for Chance’s ears alone.
“No Game this close to Himaggery, boy. Later on, it’ll be either kill or take, wouldn’t it? Why Game else?”
“I wonder what I should do,” I mused, mostly to myself, but Chance snorted.
“You went to School, boy, not me. Fifteen years of it you had, more or less, and much good it did you if you didn’t learn anything. What’s the rule in a case like this?”
“The rule is take out the Pursuivant,” I replied. “But no point chopping away at them if they’re only innocent travelers. I’d like to be sure.”
“Wait to hear them call Game and you’ll wait too long.” He shut his mouth firmly and glared at me. He did that when he was worried.
“There’s other ways,” I said. Under cover of the heavy fur mantle, I reached into the pouch which held the Gamesmen. I needed Didir. She came into my fingers and I felt the sharp dryness of her pour up my arm and into me. Lately she had dropped the formality of “speaking” in my head in favor of just Reading what she found there. I let her Read what I saw. A moment went by.
Then, “I will Read the Witch,” she whispered in my brain. “Small mind, large ego, no Talent for Reading to betray us. Just ride along while I reach her...”
So I rode along, pointing out this bit of scenery and that interesting bird for all the world like a curious merchant with nothing more on his mind than his next meal and the day’s profits. Covertly I examined the Witch in the group ahead. Shifters have an advantage, after all. They, and I, can sharpen vision to read the pimples on a chilled buttock a league away. I had no trouble seeing the Witch, therefore, and I did not like what I saw. She was sallow, with bulging eyes surrounded by heavy painted lines of black. Her mouth was small and succulent as a poison fruit, and her hair radiated from her head in a vast frizzy mass through which she moved her fingers from time to time, the finger-long nails painted black as her eyes. The clinging silks she wore revealed a waistless pudginess. Overall was a Beguilement which denied the eyes and told the watcher that she was desirable, wonderful, marvelous.
“Pretty Witch,” I said to Chance.
“Beautiful,” he sighed.
Oh, my. She was using it upon both of us, not knowing my immunity to it. Or, perhaps knowing my immunity but testing it? The possible ramifications were endless.
“She’s a Witch, Chance,” I said sternly. “A perfect horror. Black fingernails as long as your arm, frog eyes, hair like a briar patch and a figure like a pillow.”
His mouth dropped open a little, but he was well schooled to the ways of Gamesmen. “I’ll keep it in mind, Peter,” he said with considerable dignity. “Be sure I’ll keep it in mind.”
“But if you act like you know,” I added sweetly, “she’ll know I told you. Better pretend you think she’s gorgeous.”
He gave me a hurt look. “I’m not a fool, boy. Had that figured out for myself.” And he went back to staring at her with his mouth open. If I had not known about the widow back in Thisp, I would have sworn he was smitten.
It wasn’t long before Didir spoke to me again. “They seek to take you, Peter, as agents for some other. The Witch does not know for whom. The Invigilator has something dangerous in his pocket, however, something to make you helpless. Be careful.” And she was gone once more. The Gamesmen did not stay in my head. I wondered, not for the first time, if this was courtesy or discomfort. Did they refuse to invade me out of kindness or because my brain was unpleasant for them? As conjecture, it served to keep me humble.
“The rule is to take the Pursuivant out, Chance, but we will break the rule, I think. Since we are warned, let them move first. I’ll see what the Demesne feels like. I think the Witch intends to move soon. Can you carry on a flirtation at this distance?”
“Game is announced, is it?” He mumbled something I couldn’t hear, then, “Well, if she makes a beckon at me, I can manage to stir my bones in motion.” And nodded, satisfied with himself. Old rogue. He was right. Game was announced.
In a formal Game, Great Game, the announcement had to be done in accordance with the rules of Great Game, by Heralds calling the reasons and causes, the consequences and outcomes. In Great Game everyone knew who was Gaming, for what reasons, and what quarter might be given. Then there were Games of Two which were almost as formal. Game would be called by one and responded to by another before their friends and compatriots. Then there was secret Game, covert Game, but even there (if one played according to the rules) Game had to be announced. The announcement, however, could be part of the Game. If the opponent were a Demon, the announcement might be merely thought of. If the opponent were a Rancelman, then the announcement might be hidden. If the opponent were a Seer, then deciding upon the Game was considered announcement enough. A true Seer, it was reasoned, would See it in his future. The variations were endless. In this case the Armiger had called attention to himself and the Witch had thought of the Game. Announcement enough. The only question in my mind was whether the group ahead knew that I could do what Didir had just done. Oh well, trala. Game is announced. On with it.
We continued our journey, the group ahead moving only slightly slower than we so that we gained upon them as the leagues went by. The Witch was closer and closer yet, and Chance looked in her direction ever more frequently. We were not within Reading distance by the Pursuivant and Invigilator yet, and I wanted the first encounter over before they tried to Read me and failed. Chance and I stopped and made as if to go into the bushes on personal business, watching them from cover. When the distance had widened a little, we came after them, all innocence. If they really intended to use the Witch, she would make her Move soon.
And she did.
We watched them pull up, saw the broadly acted consternation as the Witch searched through her clothing, miming something lost. My, oh, my, what had she lost upon the road? Something important. Oh, yes; wide gestures of loss and concern; equally wide gestures to the others to go on, go on, she would ride back and then catch up to them. “Watch her,” I said to Chance. “She’ll head back toward us pretending to search the road for something lost.”
“What did you say she looks like?” panted Chance.
“Black nails, black painted eyes, body like a bolster and hair like wires. ‘Ware, Chance. She’ll eat you.”
“Up to you to prevent it, boy.”
When she was a hundred paces from us, she turned to us, smiling, blazing. Lord, she was beautiful. My mouth almost dropped open, but then I felt around for the pattern that let me see clear even while my fingers fumbled for Wafnor in the pouch. Far ahead on the road the Armiger’s horse was now riderless. I trusted not, tra-la. The Witch pouted, prettily.
“Oh, Sir Shifter, I beg your assistance. I know that Shifters can make their eyes keen like those of the flitchhawk to see a coin dropped in a canyon from a league away. Can you find for me the bracelet I dropped along the way here, perhaps at the edge of the trees?”
Then she turned to Chance, casting that smile on him like the light of a torch. Almost I saw him melt, but then I caught the tucks in his face where he had his cheeks between his teeth, biting down. “Pawn,” she said, “would you help your master find my bracelet by walking along the trees. What he can see, you can retrieve, and have my thanks as he will...”
Chance’s eyes were out a finger’s width, and he gave every appearance of being about to fall off his horse. Meantime, I smiled, bowed, and oozed desire in her direction while I called up Didir to sit in her head and tell me what she planned. I knew the Armiger was above us, somewhere, ready to fall upon us when we came within the trees. I gave a gulping prayer that I had enough power to do what I intended, then turned my eyes to the grassy verge of the road as the Witch came nearer. Under my fingers Wafnor came alive and reached up into the branches. I worked my way almost to the forest.
“Oh, lovely one,” I called. “Here. Could it have caught on a branch? See the sparkling there where the sun catches it, not so bright as your beauty, but able to adorn it...”
Witches are, for the most part, stupid. They tend to come into their Talent early, and this early accession to beguilement gives them too easy success in their formative years. At least so Gamesmaster Gervaise was wont to say. This particular Witch could have served as an object lesson. She came into the trees after me, still glittering and beguiling for everything she was worth. I was reminded of Dazzle, and, yes, of Mandor, and when I turned toward her she must have seen it in my face, for she flew at me with a scream of rage and those black nails aimed for my eyes.
There was no time for thought. I grabbed her wrist, ducked, twisted, and felt her fly over my head to land with a whoosh of expelled breath on the leaf-littered ground behind me. Then Didir did something quick and clever inside her head and the Witch lay there unconscious. Physical combat is not something we ever learned in a School House, but Himaggery believed in it. He had pawnish instructors giving classes every afternoon in the Bright Demesne. I hadn’t seen the sense of it until now.
Chance looked at her where she lay. “Ugly,” he said.
“I told you,” I muttered.
“What now?” Chance always asks me what now when I have no idea what now. I shook my head, put my finger to my lips, concentrating on what Wafnor was doing. Fingers of force fluttered the bright leaves above us. The noise would be the Armiger. I could feel Wafnor searching, then there was a harsh “oof” as though someone had been roughly squeezed. I felt a shaking in my head, then Wafnor speaking in a cheerful grumble. “Stuck. Got him between two branches, and he’s stuck!” One of the tree tops began to whip to and fro as Wafnor continued growling cheerily. “Won’t come loose. Stupid Armiger...”
“Whoa,” I said, weary of the whole thing. “Chance, hold the horses while I climb the tree.”
I found the Armiger hanging by one badly bruised foot in the cleft of a tallish tree. Wafnor assisting me, we thrust one limb aside to let the Gamesman fall, none too gently, into the forest litter. He lay there beside the Witch, the two of them scruffy minor Gamesmen, not young, not well fed. The idea of killing them did not appeal to me. They were not players of quality. I said as much to Chance.
“They haven’t the look of Huld about them somehow. He has more sense than to send such minor Talents.”
“Maybe, lad. And maybe they were hired as supernumeraries by those up ahead. Hired fingers to touch you with, see if you sizzle.”
Chance’s remark had merit. I explored with Didir a possibility which would allow us to let them live, something she might plant in their heads which would take them away. After a short time the Witch and Armiger picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and limped away to the south leading the Witch’s horse. “They will believe they are going to meet others of their company,” whispered Didir. “The notion will leave them in a day or two, but by that time they will be far distant from this place.”
“Now,” I said, “we can ride in a wide circle south which will take us around those two ahead. We’ll leave them behind us...”
“Oh, lad, lad,” sighed Chance. “Go around ‘em and they’re behind you. Lose a Pursuivant and he’ll find you. What are you playing at?”
I sighed, pulled up my boots, looked at the sky, sucked a tooth. He was right. One doesn’t “lose” a Pursuivant easily, and the trick of sending the other two away south wouldn’t fool anyone long. Besides, if Chance’s notions were correct, the two ahead of us were the real threat and came from a real opponent. The more I thought of it, the more I wondered if Huld was behind it. It didn’t feel like Huld, but undoubtedly Huld would have to be dealt with sooner or later. I struck Chance a sharp blow on one shoulder. “Right you are, Brother Chance. Well then, it’s back to the road, ride on, and let them wonder.”
Which we did. The Pursuivant and the Invigilator had moved on a little, leading the Armiger’s horse. I went through a dumb show of waving as though taking leave of someone hidden in the trees. They wouldn’t believe it, but it might confuse the issue still further.
We were a moving Demesne, the Game was not joined. Between the two men ahead of us on the road were five Talents and not inconsiderable ones. This reminded me of my own depleted state, and I fingered Shattnir, feeling the warmth of the sun beginning to build in me. I might need all I could get. The two ahead might be as shoddy as the two just defeated, but they might be the real foe, the true opponent, the True Game. If so, then what? What did I want to happen?
“Young sirs,” Gamesmaster Gervaise had often said. “When you confront True Game in the outmost world, remember what you have been taught. Remember the rules. Forget them at your peril.” Well, so, there was time during this slow jog along the road to remember the rules.
Game had been announced in two ways. By the Witch thinking of it and by the Armiger riding awkwardly. The Witch would have thought what she thought whether ordered to do so or not, but the Armiger would have ridden in that fashion only to attract attention. Therefore, the announcement was directed to one who would see the announcement with his eyes, not Read it. So presumably they had announced Game to a Shifter¾which was, after all, what I seemed to be.
Now the Armiger was gone. Presumably, therefore, they knew that their opponent, the Shifter, had played. They knew I was in the Game. I knew they were in the Game because of what Didir had Read in the Witch’s head, but they did not know that I knew what was in the Witch’s head, therefore ...
“I never had any head for covert Games,” I complained to Chance. “Whenever I get to the third or fourth level of what I know and they know, I lose track.”
“Look, lad. They know you’re a Shifter. They’re expecting that. They may have been told you’re something else as well, but nobody knows exactly what, so they can’t expect everything. Just be original and surprising. My granddad, the actor, used to say that. Original and surprising.”
“Follow the rules.” I sighed again. The rule was to take out the Pursuivant first, because he had the power to change place in an instant, and one might find him behind one with a knife before one could take a deep breath. Two of the Gamesmen of Barish and I had a little conference, waiting for a turn in the road. It might have been quicker to use Hafnor the Elator, but I had never ‘ported from one place to another. The thought made me queasy, like being seasick. Besides, I didn’t know the area ahead, and those with that Talent could only flick to places they could visualize. Which was another reason they were moving ahead of us. They had seen the road we traveled, but we hadn’t seen the road they were on. No. I would use Tamor and Didir. I was used to them. And Shattnir, of course, to provide power, which she’d been doing for the last hour or so. It was moving toward evening before the road set as I wished it to.
We were moving between close set copses, dark trunks still half masked in drying leaves. One could not see far into them, a few paces perhaps. Just ahead of us the road swung around a huge rocky outcropping to make a loop to the left. Shortly before the riders ahead of us reached this place, Chance and I began a conversation which turned into a loud argument¾Chance’s voice much louder than mine. Old rogue. He was an actor as much as his granddad had ever been. As soon as the two ahead had ridden out of sight, I grasped the figure of Tamor and flew up from my saddle, darting away through the trees like an owl among the close trunks while Chance’s voice rose behind me in impassioned debate. From time to time a softer voice would reply, Chance again, but those ahead would have no reason to think it was not me, Peter the Shifter, riding along behind them.
I had to intercept them before they had any opportunity to become suspicious. The trees were close, too close for easy flight, but I came to the edge of the road silently only a few paces behind them. I drew my knife and threw it, launching myself at the same moment, Shifting in midair. The Pursuivant went down, skewered, even as my pombi claws swept the Invigilator from his saddle. Then I sat on him. Beneath me he screamed, struggled, tried to fly. I let him struggle while I drooled menacingly into his face. He screamed a little more, then fainted. At least Didir said he really fainted, sure I was going to eat him. Shattnir drained him of any power he had left, and then we tied him up after going through his pockets. I found the thing almost at once. It was another of those constructions of glittering beads and wires like the one Nitch had sewn into my tunic in Schooltown, like the things Riddle had shown me outside Bannerwell. It was rather like the thing Huld had used against me in the cavern of the bodies, away north. It was shaped like a hood or cap, with a strap to go beneath the chin.
“What does it do?” asked Chance.
Didir sought in the Invigilator’s unconscious mind even as I started to say I did not know. The man stirred in discomfort. She was not being gentle with him. I repeated to Chance what she told me.
“It guarantees docility,” I said. “If they had put it on my head and fastened the strap, I would have obeyed anything they told me to do.” I stood there for a time, thinking, then asked Didir to search further. Did the man know who sent him? Once I was “docile,” where would they have taken me?
Whispering, she told me, “There are some ruins near the river which bounds the land of the Immutables. Old ruins. North of here. He would have taken you there.”
Ah. I knew the place. I had found the Gamesmen of Barish there. Dazzle and Borold and Silkhands had stayed there. Well, I would go there. It would be original and surprising.
“Put the cap on him,” I told Chance. “I’m going to get into the Pursuivant’s clothing.” So much for my fine fur cloak and my pombi head, lost in the mad flight through the trees. I stripped the Pursuivant and put his clothes on, sorrowing for him as I did so. I had not intended to kill him. The knife had turned in flight. When I had done, I carried him into the woods and laid him in a shallow scrape and covered him over with leaves before we rode away.
In a little timee three men rode on: an Invigilator, very silent, the strange cap hidden beneath his leather garb; a Pursuivant, whose clothes fit none too well; and a pawnish servant who rode along behind leading two extra horses.
“Do we go on to Xammer, then?” the servant asked, humming to himself.
The Pursuivant, I, merely nodded. We were indeed going on to Xammer, to meet Silkhands, and then we were going farther on to those ruins I had visited once before. Behind us in the forest the real Pursuivant’s body was food for ants, and before us was food for thought. I hoped it would not give me indigestion.
WE RODE INTO XAMMER, each taking a part in our little play. Chance was playing the grieving servant for all he was worth. The Invigilator, wearing the mysterious contrivance, played himself, though with only such verve as we ordered him to display. I, Peter, played the part of the Pursuivant, trying to convey with every attitude the heartfelt regret I felt at having killed the young Gamesman, Peter, during some unspecified and unfortunate occurrence upon the road. If we were being observed, this bit of acting should have gone further to confuse the observers. We took a room at an inn on the edge of town. I changed aspect and clothing in our rooms and sneaked out the back way, having been able to think of no good excuse for a Pursuivant to visit Silkhands the Healer. Chance was happily immured with a supply of wine and a perfectly biddable audience to listen to his reminiscences. He could have been happier only if the sportive widow from Thisp had been present, so I felt no need to hurry.
It was as well. The town of Xammer may be unique among Schooltowns. There was much to observe.
There are no Festival Halls in Xammer. Vorbold’s House is one which specializes in teaching the daughters of the powerful, daughters of Queens and Sorcerers who have risen to first rank, of eminent female Armigers and Tragamors. They are taught how to play their own Games at Vorbold’s House, the game of survival and reproduction. No Festivals for them, to be impregnated by nameless pawns or bear young at random. No. These maidens are the prizes of alliance and are as protected within the walls of Vorbold’s House as they might be within a fortress guarded by dragons.
So much I knew, for it had been discussed at the time that Silkhands was sent to the place. I had not considered the implications of it, however, and it was these which made the town unique. It was full of shops, shops dealing in luxuries which were purveyed to the School House and to those who visited there. It was full of inns, not scruffy roadside inns but hostelries built with magnificence as the objective. It was full of travelers, powerful travelers entering the town under death bond that no Talent would be used within the walls. It was full, therefore, of courtesies and veiled malevolence as Gamesmen pursued their strategies through earthbound Heralds forbidden to Fly and a pawnish class of merchants who called themselves negotiators and arbitrators. I had never heard so much talk, not even in Himaggery’s council hall.
I had known enough to bring proper dress, a little ostentatious and overdone, and was received with some courtesy for that if for no other reason when I presented myself at Vorbold’s House. It had a high graceful gate leading into a sunny courtyard where a cat and kittens made endless play through the flower pots. I expected to be invited into the School but was instead shown to a small audience room off the courtyard and told to wait. The time was made less onerous by the arrival of a pretty waiting girl who brought wine and cakes and lingered to flirt with me. This was enjoyable for both of us, so much so that I almost regretted the sound of Silkhands’ step on the tessellated pavement. That is, regretted until I saw her.
She was¾yes, still Silkhands, but something more. At first I thought she had somehow Shifted herself to become so lovely, but then I saw it was only a matter of a little more flesh smoothing her face and gracing her neck and arms, a little more sleep in a softer bed than the campgrounds we had shared, less worry and stress and sorrow, a little more silk against the skin to replace the rough rub of traveling clothes. She did not even notice the retreating servant girl¾nor did I¾but came straight into my arms as though I had been some long lost love. “Peter,” she said, “I am so happy to see someone from Home. How is Himaggery? Did they finish the new swimming pool in the orchard? Is your thalan still at the Bright Demesne? How is your mother? I heard about Windlow¾ah¾” and she was suddenly crying on my neck. I could feel the warm trickling wetness of her tears.
I felt as though two years had disappeared and we were traveling from the ruins where I had found her to the Bright Demesne once more. The best I could manage was a mumbled, “You haven’t changed at all, Silkhands,” while my body and my mind jigged with the notion that she had changed entirely, utterly. Of course, it was not she so much, but I figured that out later.
She asked if I were alone, and I told her that Chance and another fellow were at the inn, giving no details beyond that at first. She asked if I wanted to stay in the Guest House of Vorbold’s, and we talked of that. I murmured something about the place being secure, and she looked at me slantwise, a look I remembered from the past.
“I see you have something to tell me, Peter. Well, the Guest House of Vorbold’s is as secure a place as exists in all the purlieus and demesnes. We have guards against trifling as you would be astonished at. So. Will you go to the inn for your baggage, or shall I send for it?”
I thought it best to sneak in and out and to tell Chance myself. It was as well I did so, for the Invigilator had fallen into some kind of a trance, and Chance could not make him move or speak. We took the wicked little cap off of his head and put him to bed, bent up as he was in a sitting position. I told Chance to tie him and gag him loosely if Chance left the room, just in case the fellow came around, but otherwise to do as he pleased for the day or two I would spend at Vorbold’s. “Tell anyone who asks that your Pursuivant companion suffers from a flux,” I suggested, “and if this fellow hasn’t moved in a day or two, I’ll ask Silkhands to take a look at him.” I could have called forth Dealpas, of course. She was preeminent among Healers, but she was so tragic and sorrowful that it was a pity to wake her. The fellow was breathing well enough, and his heart beat steadily. I thought a day or two would not change him greatly if he were kept warm and quiet.
And then I went back to Vorbold’s House to find a guest’s room made ready for me (not in the House itself) and a servant standing ready to unpack or clean or press or whatever I chose. I was glad to have brought clothes with me and thanked Mavin for so directing me. I had thought of traveling without any. The man advised that dinner would be served in the Hall at the evening bell, and he took himself off. I luxuriated in my bath, listened to the music from the courtyard, and tried to shake off the very uncomfortable feelings Silkhands had stirred up in me. After the bath I leaned in the window to watch the musicians. Vorbold’s House collected artists, musicians, and poets from all the lands and demesnes. A representative group of them were gathered in the courtyard below me, all demonstrating their skills. The poets wore their traditional ribbon cloaks, looking something like boys let out of School for Festival, though more ornate and grand. There is some controversy about musicians and artists. Some hold that they are Talented, while others hold that it is merely a skill. In any case, they are not under bond in the town as the more ordinary Talents are. They may use whatever it is they have in a Schooltown or anywhere else, and it is not considered proper to Game against them.
Below me a musician played short phrases of melody over and over while a poet set words to them, and across the yard another poet declaimed a long verse, phrase by phrase, while another musician set notes to that. It seemed there was to be a song contest in the evening on a subject assigned by Gamesmistress Vorbold herself the evening before. In Mertyn’s House, where I was reared, we would have disdained such trifles, and I formed the intention of twitting Silkhands about it. That was before I saw the great Hall.
It lay in the area to which guests are admitted, one ceremonial entrance for the guests, one even finer opposite which led into the School. I found my assigned seat and sat back to watch the spectacle which had aspects of Festival and of a bazaar. The guests were almost all male. Many were there on their own behalf, but others were there as agents. The products which they bargained for sat at other tables, on low daises of ivory hued stone, young women clad in silks and flowing velvets, each table of them with a Gamesmistress at its head. Silkhands sat at a table near my own. I could look across the glossy heads between and wink at her. Somehow the intensity of the atmosphere around me¾though it was all covert, glances and sighs and whispers¾made a wink seem improper. I satisfied myself with an unsatisfactory smirk and bow. I was, by the way, clad most sumptuously and wearing a face not entirely my own. I had cautioned Silkhands against knowing me too well or obviously in this public place. She bowed in return, I thought more coldly than was necessary.
The evening’s entertainment began with welcoming words from the Lady Vorbold, Queen Vorbold. She wore the crown of a Ruler, but her dress was much modified. As I looked about the room I noted that all the women of the House were clad in light delicate gowns under robes of heavier richer stuff; that all the young women who were of an age to have manifested Talents wore appropriate helms or crowns or symbols, but all reduced in size and bulk to the status of mere ornaments. The heavy silver bat-winged half helm of a Demon might be expressed as a mere bat-winged circlet, airy as a spray of leaves. I saw a Sorcerer’s spiked crown, tiny as a doll’s headdress, and a Seer’s moth-wing mask reduced to a pair of feathery spectacles drawing attention to the wearer’s lovely eyes. It was as though they sought to make the Talents less important than the women who wore them. Well. In this House that was probably the case. Why did I suddenly think of the consecrated monsters which Mavin and I had seen in the caverns of the magicians? Was it some similar blankness of eyes? I did not quite identify the thought.
The song duels began, one against one, the musicians playing and singing in turn while the poets sat at their feet. At the conclusion of each song, the diners tapped their silver goblets upon the table to signify praise, and the judges¾a table of elderly Gamesmistresses¾conferred among themselves. I heard one of the phrases I had listened to from my room, woven now into a complete fabric of song. The singer was young and handsome, and his voice was pure and sweet. I thought of the singers among the magicians, lost now under the fallen mountains, and grew sad. The song was one which evoked sadness in any case. He finished in a fading fall of strings and was rewarded by a loud clamor of goblets upon wood. He took the prize. It was fitting. His was the most melancholy music of the evening. All the ladies loved it.
After this entertainment came an intermission during which the young women circulated among the tables to talk idly to the guests. One elegant girl wove her way to the table where I sat, body like a willow waving, garments swaying, face showing that smiling emptiness I had noted before. We greeted her, and she sat to take a glass of wine with us. She was obviously interested only in the tall chill Sorcerer who sat with us. He asked her politely what she was studying.
“Oh, ta-ta.” She pouted. “It is all about Durables and the Ephemera, and I cannot get it in my head. It stays about one instant and then goes who knows where.”
The Sorcerer smiled but said nothing. Thinking to fill the silence, I said, “My own Gamesmaster gave us a rule which made it easier to remember. If a Talent is continuous, as for example it is with a Ruler or a Sorcerer, then the Gamesman is one of the Greater Durables or Adamants.” She smiled. I went on, “Those in whom the Talent is discontinuous but still largely self-originated are among the Lesser Durables. Seers, for example, or Sentinels.”
She cocked her head prettily and looked up into the face of the Sorcerer. Still he said nothing. She made a little kiss with her mouth. “The Ephemera, then? What is their rule?”
“Those Gamesmen who take their Game and power from others, sporadically, are of the Greater Ephemera,” I said. “Demons, for example, who Read the minds of others but only from time to time, not continuously. And finally there are the lesser Ephemera, those who take their only value from being used by other Gamesmen. A Talisman, for example. Or a Totem.”
“I see. You make it sound so interesting.” She gazed up at the Sorcerer again after a quick ironic glance at me, and in that glance was all I had not understood until then. It was not that she failed to remember, not that she lacked interest in the subject. She knew, perhaps better than I, but had been taught not to show that she knew. I caught a sardonic smirk on the face of the Sorcerer and turned away angered. There was not that much difference between these, I thought, and the consecrated monsters of the magicians. I wondered how Silkhands could lend herself to this¾this whatever it was. There might be time to ask her later, but now the intermission had ended and we were to be granted another song by the evening’s champion.
He stood among us, smiling, relaxed, not touching his instrument until all present had fallen silent. When he touched the strings at last it was to evoke a keening wind, a weeping wind which focused my attention upon him and opened my eyes wide. He faced me as he sang, coming closer.
“Who comes to travel Waeneye
knows what makes the wild-wind cry.
Whence the only-free goes forth,
shadow-giant of the north,
cannot live and may not die,
sorrowing the wild-wind cry.”
The wind music came again, cold, a lament of air. He was very close to me, singing so softly that it seemed he sang for me alone.
“Wastes lie drear and stone stands tall,
signs are lost and trails are thinned,
abyss opens, mountains fall,
Gamesman, Gamesman, find the wind...”
Then he moved away, walking among the tables, humming, the music reminding me of night and bells and a far, soft crying in caves. He was standing next to Silkhands as he sang:
“Who walks the Wastes of Bleer must know
what causes this ill-wind to blow.
Shadowmen play silver bells,
krylobos move in the fells,
gnarlibars come leat and low,
listening to ill-wind blow.”
He looked up to catch my eye again, sang:
”Mountains mock and mystify,
hiding Wizard’s ten within.
One more walks the world to cry,
`Healer, Healer, heal the wind.’”
The music ran away as a wind will, leaving only a dying rustle behind it. There was a confused moment, then a barely polite tapping of goblets upon the table. They had not liked it. At once he struck up a lilting dance song with a chorus everyone knew. Within moments virtually everyone in the room had forgotten the wind song, if they had ever heard it, except Silkhands and me and a young woman who sat at Silkhands’ table and now regarded me with an expression of total comprehension. She had large dark eyes under level brows, a pale face with a slightly remote expression, and a tight controlled look around her mouth, like one cultivating silence.
I, too, had found the song disquieting, though I could not have said why. All the evening’s entertainment had done nothing but leave me irritated and cross. When Silkhands came to my room in the Guest House later, this irritation remained and I made her a free gift of it, not realizing what I was doing. I was speaking about the girl who had come to our table, about what I presumed to call her “dishonesty.” Silkhands disagreed with me.
“Ah, Peter, truly you expect too much. Who was it came to your table? Lunette of Pouws? I thought so. Her brother wishes to establish an alliance with the Black Basilisks at Breem. So he seeks to interest Burmor of Breem in Lunette. She is his full sister, and she is no fool. She seems like to manifest a Talent which will fit her well enough among the Basilisks; however, Burmor wants no competitor in Beguilement at the Basilisk Demesne. Thus she plays witless before those he sends to look her over. What would you have her do? Stand upon her dignity and Talent, as yet unproven, and so cause her full brother annoyance and grief? If she goes to Burmor, she will be of value there as symbol of the alliance. She will be protected, and there will be time for her Talent to emerge.”
This argument did not sit well with me, and I said so with much reference to the “consecrated monsters” I had seen in the place of the magicians. “They, too, were taught to be passive, or were so changed in the hideous laboratories that they could be nothing else. They, too, existed for nothing except to breed sons...”
“You may recall,” she said, “that Windlow once told us of the rules of the Game? How those rules had been made originally to protect; how those rules came to be more important than what they protected; how those rules came to be the Game itself! Well, those rules were made by men, Peter. Lunette chooses to make her own safety and her own justice within the Game. It is her choice.”
She was so annoyed with me that I thought it wise to change the subject. “Who was that minstrel who won the prize? Did I mistake him, or did he sing to you and me alone of all that crowd?”
“Ah, one of my students, Jinian, thought the same. He has sung this wind song before. It seems to follow me wherever I go, into the orchards, the gardens. His name is Rupert of Theel, and he is well known among the musicians. Yesterday in my bath I heard ‘Wild-wind weeps and illwind moans. Has the wind an eye? A hand? Has the wind sinews or bones? Healer, Healer, understand.’ It so infuriated me I leaned naked from the window and told him to cease singing `Healer’ or `wind’ in my hearing.”
“Well, last night he sang `Healer,’ but he also sang ‘Gamesman,’” I commented. “He sang to me as well as you if he sang to either.” We wondered at it a bit. What was there in it, after all? A song. There was this much in it: it linked the two of us together as did Windlow’s prophecy. Musing on this I reached out to take her into my arms. She sighed upon my shoulder and we sat there for a long time in the candle shine and starlight, lost in our own thoughts. When she drew away at last, I began to tell her what had brought me to Xammer.
Thus Silkhands learned about the blues, and about Windlow’s blue, the only person besides myself who knew of it, the first person beside myself to know the sorrow of it.
“I take the blue into my hand,” I whispered. “Windlow comes into my mind, a gentle visitor, gentle but insistent. Silkhands, he struggles there. I feel his struggle. He inhabits my mind as a man might inhabit a strange house¾no, a strange workshop where nothing is in its accustomed place. I feel him search for words he cannot find, seek explanations for things which are not there¾connections and implications which might have been obvious to Windlow in the flesh but which he cannot find in me. He struggles, and it is like watching him drown, unable to save him.”
“Not your fault,” she soothed me. “Not your doing.”
“No,” I agreed. And yet it was my doing. “If I do not take him up, then he lies imprisoned in the blue, a living intelligence imprisoned as intelligence is imprisoned in these students of yours who must hide it to protect themselves. Oh, Silkhands, worst of all is when he wants me to read to him.”
“Read? As a Demon Reads?”
“No, no. Books. A book. He wants me to read the little book, the one he called the Onomasticon, over and over. As though there were something in it he needs to know and cannot find. Oh, he is gentle, kind, but I can feel the sorrow like a whip.”
At that she came into my arms again to comfort me, and we lay there upon the wide windowseat staring at the stars until we fell asleep. When I woke, stiff and sore, it was morning and she had gone. I went out to the necessary house behind the Guest House. (A silly place to have it. We had toilets near our rooms at the Bright Demesne.) The singer was there, Rupert, and I thought to find out about the wind song, perhaps find why it disturbed me so.
“I am interested in the song you sang,” I said politely. “The one about the wind?”
“Better you than I, Gamesman,” he said, making a face. “Would I could forget the thing.”
I evinced surprise, and he laughed a short bark without amusement. “I heard it first at the Minchery in Learner. They make shift there to train artists up from childhood, and there is a summer songfest at which many of us assemble to lend encouragement and judge the contests. There are always new songs, some written by students, some brought in from the Northern Lands. Many are of a caliginous nature, dark and mysterious, for the students love such. Well, this wind song was one of them. I heard it, and since have been unable to get it out of my head. I find me singing it when I eat, when I bathe, when I ...” he gestured at the necessary house behind him.
“The places mentioned in the song? Waeneye? The Wastes of Bleer? Where are those?”
“Oh.” He seemed puzzled. “I do not know that they exist, Gamesman. I took them for more mysteries. They may exist, certainly, but I know nothing of them.” He smiled and bowed. I smiled and bowed. We took leave of one another. I believed he had told me all he knew. Considering how the song ran in my own head, I could believe it had haunted him.
When I saw Silkhands, later in the morning, I asked, “Have you a cartographer at the School?”
“Gamesmistress Armiger Joumerie,” she said. “A good Gamesmistress. A difficult person.”
“Difficult or not, I would like to see her.”
And I did see her that afternoon in my room at the Guest House, for no male may enter the School House. As the girls there were much valued for their ephemera they were much protected against its premature bestowal.
I asked the Gamesmistress whether she knew of a place called Bleer, or one called Waeneye. Also did she know of Learner, or of any place where creatures called krylobos or gnarlibars might live. I had heard, I said, that gnarlibars lived in the north, but that might have been only talk.
“Bleer, Bleer,” she mumbled to herself, stroking her upper lip with its considerable moustache as an aid to concentration. She was a big woman, larger than many men, and her face had a hard, no-nonsense look about it. “Yes. That jostles a memory.”
“Possibly a mountainous place,” I offered. The song had mentioned mountains and stone, an abyss, fells.
“No help, Gamesman,” she said tartly. “If one excepts the purlieus around the Gathered Waters and Lake Yost, virtually all the lands and demesnes are mountainous. You are not untraveled! Surely this has struck you. How much flatland have you seen?”
I had to admit having seen little. The valley of the Banner was fairly flat, as were the valley bottoms leading into Long Valley in the southwest. Other than that I could think only of that vast, tilted upland which lay above the River Haws and south of the firehills and Schlaizy Noithn. I would not speak of that to the Gamesmistress, but the thought had reminded me of something. “Shadowpeople!” I said. “Where are shadowpeople said to dwell?”
“Find me a place they are said not to dwell,” she replied. “They live in the far north and west, in the southern mountains below the High Demesne, in the lands around the Great Dragon purlieu far east of here. No, that is no help to you, Gamesman. Give me a bit of time and I will find it for you. The name Bleer echoes in my mind. I have seen it on a chart before.” It echoed in my mind, too, but I could not remember where I had heard of it. Had I asked the right question, I would have had quicker answers.
As it was, Gamesmistress Joumerie returned to me that evening to say she had found the place.
“The Wastes of Bleer,” she informed me, licking her lips at the taste of the place, “lie to the north. A highland, the canyons of the Graywater to the west, the vast valley of the River Reave to the east where lies Learner or Learners, called variously. If you intend to go there, I could recommend the road to Betand and the eastern route from there over Graywater. There is a high bridge there at Kiquo, the only one for many leagues. Or, River Reave is navigable as far as Reavebridge, or even Learner in season. There are trails into the high country from there.”
“What Games, Gamesmistress?” I asked her. “Is there any troubling there? What Demesnes are active?”
She snorted. “Wary are you? You are young to be so wary. My latest charts show little enough. The Dragon’s Fire purlieu lies north on River Reave, but there is no Game there currently or presently expected. Who knows what hidden Games may be toward? Or games of intrigue or desperation?” She fixed me with an eye yellow as a flitchhawk’s. “If you are that wary, lad, best enter my School House here and learn to dissemble as these girls do.”
I flushed at that. She went stalking away to the door, making the floor shake. In the doorway she stopped to speak more kindly, seeing she had hit me fair. “There is a cartographer in Xammer, in Artists’ Street, by name one Yggery. He is honest, so far as that goes, by which I mean he will not put anything in a map he knows to be false nor leave out anything he knows to be true. This means his maps are rather more blank than most. Still, if you have treasure enough, buy a map from him before you go north. And if you take Silkhands with you (for I can see the tip of my nose in a mirror in a good light), care for her. She has had more of Gaming than many of us, and has burned herself in caring for others.”
I had not honestly thought of taking Silkhands with me until that moment. I had not thought she would want to leave Vorbold’s House. Testing this notion, I asked her and was surprised to hear her say she would have made a trip north in any event.
“I go north to escort Jinian, my student,” she said. “I need a time away from Vorbold’s House. There are some here who turn their eyes from the students to the Gamesmistresses, and I am ... weary of that.”
“Have you been molested?” I was angry and therefore blunt. I should have known better, for she laughed at me.
“In Vorbold’s House? Don’t be silly. Of course not. I have been sent proposals at intervals, and I have had to listen to a few representatives for the sake of ... diplomacy. The offers have not been ... unflattering.” She fell silent, thinking of something she did not share with me, then.
“Save to those like us who do not value flattery. I know I do not, and I presume you have not changed.”
The expression on her face as she uttered this last was one I knew she used in the classroom, alert, polite, both encouraging and cautionary. I could hear her speaking thus to her students, “Now, young ladies. We do not value flattery...” I giggled at the thought.
She stared at me for a moment as though I had lost my wits, then giggled with me. We ended up rolling onto the carpet to end in front of the fire, heads pillowed on various parts of our anatomies as we talked it over.
“I did sound properly Schoolhousy, didn’t l?” she asked. “Well, being Gamesmistress does that to you. Perhaps I am too young for it. I am only twenty-one after all. Many of the students are older than I.” She did not consider this remark at all important, but to me it came as a revelation. Only twenty-one. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and she was only four years older? I had thought of her as ... as ... well, older-sisterly at least. I was suddenly aware of her thigh beneath my head and of a quickening pulse in my ears. I sat up too hastily, dumping her.
“Come now,” I said overheartily, trying to hide the fact that my hands were trembling. “We must make plans. I am going from here to the ruins where I first met you because the men who attacked me on the road would have taken me there.”
“Dindindaroo,” she said, blinking in the firelight like an owl. “That’s the name of the place, or once was. Dindindaroo, the cry of the fustigar. It is said the place was once a main habitation of Immutables.”
“Truly? Why was it abandoned?”
“A flood, I think. And a great wind which laid waste to the land about there. At any rate, it was abandoned some three generations ago, perhaps eighty or a hundred years. We used to find old carvings and books when we were there. Himaggery spoke of sending a party of Rancelmen to explore, but he never did.”
“So the Immutables once occupied this place, Dindindaroo. Well, some villainy is centered upon it now, and I must go there in the guise of the Pursuivant to see what I can find. After that, however, if no sign of Quench has been found, why should I not go with you to the northlands? Windlow’s vision sees us there together, and the song directs us there. Let us go.”
She agreed hesitantly. “I must take Jinian to the court of the Dragon King at the Dragon’s Fire purlieu. He and another Ruler, Queen someone¾I’ve forgotten her name¾set up a Rulership there, a kind of King-Demesne. Having no sisters, he chose to build his strategy around sons rather than upon thalani, but all his sons save one were eaten in Game over the years. He has only one left, at school in Schooltown, Havad’s House, I believe. He is desirous of children to replace those lost.”
I remembered out of dim mists having heard that name. “Ah. So the Queen died. Or was lost in Game?”
“Died. Of too much childbearing to too little purpose, some say. Now he desires a strong young Gameswoman to bear him sons.”
“Who will also die of too many babies?”
She smiled a secret smile at me. “No. Our students learn better than that. We may teach them covert game, Peter, but we teach them to survive at it and their children as well. Jinian will not over-bear.”
I did not pursue the matter, though I thought with a pang of the girl who had given me that long, level, understanding look at the dinner. She had not looked like one who would go uncomplaining into such a life. Well. Who could say.
Silkhands went on: “It will be a few days before we are ready to leave. You have your own trip to make. How shall we combine our journeys later?” She looked at me, hopeful and luminous in the firelight. I would have promised to combine a journey with her to the stars, and she seemed to know that, making a pretty mouth at me in mockery. I gestured hopeless and resigned acquiescence, and we spent the remainder of the evening talking of other things. I think both of us thought then that we would become lovers. No. I think she thought it and I hoped it. We did nothing about it except stargazing. There seemed to be time, and no reason occurred to either of us to think time would run out. I can still remember the shape of her in firelight, half of her lit with a soft melon-colored light, the other half in darkness.
So the morning after that found me back in the inn with Chance. The Invigilator had come around to some extent. He would sit up when told, and walk, and eat, and relieve himself. He would do nothing at all unless told to do so, and the strange cap had been on him only one full day. When Didir looked into his head she found an emptiness. “As though untenanted,” she said. I was sorry then that we had put the thing on him. “Perhaps if it had not been on him so long,” whispered Didir, “the effect would have been less.”
We thought this likely. My assailants could not have wanted to make me witless. What good would I have been to them in that condition? I could not even have served as bait. No, the Invigilator had simply been caught in his own trap, but I mourned nonetheless that his body lived while his mind was gone.
Before leaving Xammer, we went to Artists’ Street to buy the chart Gamesmistress Joumerie had suggested, and also to the Gamehall to hire a Tragamor. Silkhands had arranged for the few blues held at Vorbold’s House to be packed and delivered to the inn. The Tragamor, escorted by an Armiger, took them off to the Bright Demesne along with a message from me.
“I am going north,” I wrote, “to stop at the ruins of Dindindaroo. Thence to the land of the Immutables to leave the messages entrusted to me by Himaggery, and thence on the Great North Road in company with Silkhands, traveling to the Dragon’s Fire purlieu. Word may be sent to me in the care of the Gamehalls on the way. Let me know if you find Huld, or Quench. I have found something odd I think Quench would know about.” By which I meant the cap, of course, a thing made by magicians or techs, if I ever saw one. I sealed the letter, then unsealed it and added a postscript. “All affection to Mavin Manyshaped and to my thalan, Mertyn.”
I thought privately that it was a good deal easier to feel affection for them both when I was a good distance from them.
WE RODE OUT OF XAMMER with me in the guise of the Pursuivant once more. He had been a man with lines in his face all crisscrossed from scowling, hard round cheeks and eyebrows which slanted upward over his nose to give him a falsely mournful expression. It was not a face which pleased me nor on which a smile fit easily, and after a time Chance told me to quit twitching it about and settle on something more comfortable for travel. “You can always gloom it a bit when we come to the ruins, lad,” he said. “No sense making me the benefit of it while we’re on the way.” The Invigilator had no comment. We were still having to tell him when to drink and when to go into the bushes to pee, but Didir said there were glimmers of personality deep within which were beginning to emerge again. Evidently the evil little cap had done the same thing a devilish Demon might have done, wiped out all the normal trails in a brain to leave it without any tracks at all. My conscience still bothered me about that. There are worse things than being dead, and this might be one of them.
Once my face smoothed out into my own once more, it was a more comfortable trip. The ruins¾Dindindaroo¾were not far from Xammer, a short day’s ride, no more. There was a lot of traffic on the road, too, for the comings and goings to and from Xammer were constant. Not only by emissaries of alliance hunters, either, but by merchants who found Xammer a profitable stop and a convenient place to buy luxuries for shipment farther north. One day I would go north on the road, I resolved, and see the jungle cities. Meantime, we amused ourselves, Chance and I, identifying Gamesmen in the trains. I saw a pair of Dragons, the fluttering cloaks painted with patterns of wings and flames and the feather crests snapping in the breeze. They nodded to us as they trotted past, hurrying away somewhere north, perhaps to the Dragon’s Fire purlieu which was known for its population of air serpents. There were a good many exotic Gamesmen. I saw a Phantasm, gray and blue, faceplate faceted like a jewel, and a bright yellow Warbler who caroled a greeting at us as he passed, the subsonics and supersonics shivering our horses and making all the fustigars in the forests howl. There was a troop of brownclad Woodsmen, a common Talent among the Hidaman Mountains where they are much valued to fell timber and fight fires because of their ability to foretell where fires will happen and move earth and start backfires of their own. Though I had heard of a Woodsman taking his troop halfway down the range in pursuit of a fire he had Seen which was accidentally caused by his troop only after they arrived. Even old Windlow had said that Seeing was not dependable, and I considered it a good part flummery. Perhaps it was this opinion which made me reluctant to call up Sorah as I felt it would not make her think well of me.
We saw a Thaumaturge and a Firedancer and a Salamander and then about evening came to the fork in the road where the winding trail led away to Dindindaroo, overgrown with weeds and not appearing to have been traveled at all for many seasons. I did not want to come upon the place in the dusk, even with Didir in my pocket telling me she could not Read any minds at all in the place. So we camped, Chance, the idiot Invigilator, and I, with me doing the cooking. Chance amused himself by having the Invigilator make the fire and gather firewood. I think he was making a pet of the creature. Come morning we were up and on the trail at early light, me with my face carefully shifted into a good likeness of the Pursuivant. I felt my Shifting slip away even before we saw the ruins swarming with men. Chance said, “Immutables,” and I knew at once he was right. Well, Riddle might be among them, and he knew Chance, and it probably didn’t matter that I could not hide my own face. Let me go as myself and tell part of the truth.
The men working on the ruins had it marked out with pegs and string and were busy digging and hauling loads away in large barrows. We stopped a distance away from the turmoil, waiting to be decently noticed, and a man came down the pile toward us, wiping his forehead and looking oddly familiar to me. When I told him who I was, he started a little and gave me an extremely curious glance which I put down to his not having expected a Gamesman to visit. I took pains to be polite, coming down from the horse and making no extravagant noises.
“Would Riddle be here?” I asked. “I have a message for him from the Bright Demesne.”
The man went back up the tumulus, peering at me over his shoulder in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of the way the Armiger had ridden ahead of us on the road. Still, that feeling left me when Riddle himself came from some hideaway and stopped to peer at me nearsightedly as though he couldn’t believe what he saw.
“Peter? You? In Pursuivant’s dress? But¾what does this mean?...”
I saved him his puzzlement, not wanting him to start thinking about my Talents or lack of them. He had turned quite pale in his confusion. “We had a bit of trouble on the road,” I said. “A Pursuivant was among our attackers. He is dead now, poor fellow, and I put on his clothes to confuse those who had hired him. Whoever it was, they should have been here. So said this Invigilator.” I pointed the man out, explaining his lack of interest in what was going on. “He’s not very useful at the moment. He had a kind of cap thing in his pocket, a thing like those you showed me at Bannerwell. Well, we put it on him, and it’s had this awkward effect...”
Riddle was nodding and nodding at each thing I said, looking very uncomfortable and grim, which I thought still might have been caused by my appearing thus suddenly in the guise of another Talent. At any rate, he collected himself and asked what brought me. I repeated what I had said before, that I had expected to find whoever plotted against me in this place. “Haven’t there been any Gamesmen about, Riddle? Have you seen anyone lurking?” To which he mumbled and said something or other about having been too busy to have noticed.
It was obvious he was preoccupied, so I gave him the messages Himaggery had sent (something to do with the search for Quench, in which some Immutables were assisting Himaggery) and told him I would stay in the vicinity for a day or two in case Himaggery sent a message for me. And, finally, he managed to shake off his discomfort, from whatever cause, and become hospitable.
I asked him what they were doing, and he offered us tea while explaining. “We are growing more and more crowded in the purlieu, Peter. Our councilmen decided we should expand our territory, and this ruin marks the southern edge of the lands our people once occupied. They called it Dindindaroo, after the sound of the fustigars who den in the canyons and forests. At any rate, my own grandfather was the leader here in his time. It is our intention to build here once again.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to build to one side of this ruin? Why all this digging and delving?”
He hemmed and hawed for a time before saying, “Oh, there may be artifacts here which are of interest to our archivists and historians. We thought it a good idea to take a little time to salvage what might be left from a former time.” Then he changed the subject. His explanations sounded weak to me. They did not seem to be salvaging. They were searching for something particular. At any rate, Chance drew me away to speak privately.
“There seems to be no Gamesman here now, lad, no one to do you harm. So it seems. But there is nothing to keep someone from coming in the night, and even if no Talent may be used with all these Immutables about, still there are knives and arrows that can do a good bit of damage. I’d like it better to be inconspicuous.”
I humored him. We took our leave of Riddle and rode away to the east. Once under the cover of the trees, however, Chance insisted we turn in a large circle which ended us west of the ruins. We found a cavelet well hidden behind tumbled stone, and when we had found the place, Chance asked that Didir look around us to see if anyone lurked. She reported only beast minds and bird thoughts, and I privately thought Chance must be among them to be so concerned. He disabused me of that notion.
“I had a suspicion,” he said when we had settled down. “We came to that place expecting to find one there who Games against you, Peter. No one was there but that Riddle and his Immutables. So what if that Riddle had not been a so-called friend of yours? What would we think then? We’d think, well, here is the one who set that Game on us. So what I want to know is, how do we know he didn’t?”
“Riddle? Ridiculous.”
“Well, how so ridiculous? I dare say those Immutables have reasons and purposes of their own. Can’t you imagine some reason he might want you all quiet and obedient to his will, for him to use some way?”
I could not. I tried. Riddle knew me as a Necromancer. What need or use could he have for me which I would not have fulfilled for him gladly at the asking? I thought of all possible combinations and alliances and strange linkages which could have come about¾Huld, Prionde, the Council, Quench, the techs, Riddle, even the minor Gamesmen such as Laggy Nap and his like. Nothing. I said so. Chance was not satisfied.
“Well, just because we can’t think of what it might be doesn’t mean it isn’t. Would you give me that, lad?” I said yes, I could give him that. He went on, “So ‘ware what you say. Don’t go telling everything you know about where we’re going and what we’re about. Say we’re going along with Silkhands to that Dragon’s Fire purlieu because you and she are¾well, give him that idea.”
In the lands of the Game it did make sense not to trust too much. The only thing that bothered me was thinking of Riddle as a Gamer. Somehow, because he had no Talent, I expected him to be simple. When I said this to Chance, however, he corrected me with a hoot of laughter.
“Out on the sea, lad, where I spent many a season, we’d know a man by what he proved to be, not by what his mouth claimed for him. A man could be a devil or a good friend, and sometimes one and another time the other. Some Gamesmen are honest enough, I don’t doubt, though they have the power to be all else without any to say them no, and some Gamesmen are evil as devils. So I doubt not the Immutables have their good and their bad, their complex and their simple. Well for you to suspect so, anyhow.”
And with that, he left me to lie there, aroused by the puzzle but too weary to stay long awake. We went back to Dindindaroo the next morning to see if a message had come from Himaggery and to take leave of Riddle, for if he was what he pretended to be, a simple and honest man, then he would think more kindly of me for the courtesy. And if he was not what he pretended¾well. We found him down in a hole, pale and frustrated of face, and he showed such discomfort at my arrival that I thought perhaps Chance was right. I dissembled. For all Riddle could have told, we were still his dearest friends.
“What are you doing down there, Riddle,” I demanded. “Burrowing like a grole? Have you lost something? Or found it?” Even as I said it, I realized that the hole he was in was probably the same hole I had fallen into some several seasons ago when I had found the Gamesmen of Barish and the book Windlow called the Onomasticon. I gave him my hand to help him out, and he blinked at me as he brushed dust from his coat.
“I thought for a time we might have found some valuables left here by my grandfather,” he babbled. “All the inhabitants of the place fled, leaving everything. There was great loss of life, a flood, a great wind...”
“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked him, all polite interest and bland lack of concern. “Would it help to raise up the dead here and ask them?” Aha, I thought. If you do not want me to know what you are doing here, then you will not accept this offer.
And also aha, said a quiet voice in my head. If Riddle had wanted you to raise up the dead in this place without knowing what you were doing, might he not have arranged for you to be put into that strange cap the Invigilator carried? Hmmm? Chance gave me a look, and I turned away as Riddle shook his head and fussed and said no, no, the only one who had known was his grandfather and his grandfather was said to have died elsewhere, and besides, he doubted a Gamesman could raise Immutable dead. I nodded my acceptance of this while privately thinking that I could do it if I chose. Whatever it was that made them immune to Talents, I wagered it went away when they died.
I shook my head for the benefit of those standing about. “It is probably just as well, Riddle. The longer they are dead, the less they remember of life. They hunger for life more the older they are, but they remember less. How long ago was the destruction?”
He thought some eighty years. His father had been a young man at the time.
“Well, you have waited a good time to seek what was lost,” I said, all kindness and concern. “A good long time.”
He mumbled something. I think the sense of it was that if he had known earlier what was lost, he would have come earlier to look for it. And this told me much. Riddle had lately learned something new. So. I was not of a mind to hang about making the man sweat. There would be better ways to find out. Besides, I was without Talent in this company and had only one man to stand beside me. It could be less dangerous to be elsewhere. I gave Riddle my hand and bade him farewell, putting the Invigilator in his care.
“He will dig for you, if you put the shovel in his hand,” I said. “And if any Gamesmen come here who seem to know him, I would be grateful if you would send word to the Bright Demesne.” I did not want Riddle to think I suspected him of anything. In truth, I still did not know that I did suspect him of anything. All I could believe was that Chance was wiser than I, and that I would be wiser¾far wiser¾to be more careful. If only I had remembered that later.
We rode away without talking, both of us preoccupied with our own thoughts. After a time I turned to Chance and said, “I don’t necessarily believe it.”
“Well, don’t then,” he said. “But it’d be smart to act as though you do.”
“You know what he was looking for back there.” I made it a statement, not a question.
“For those things you found, I guess. I notice you didn’t offer them to him.”
“The thing I noticed was that he said his grandfather left them there. How came his grandfather by them? And why did Riddle not know of them until recently? For I will bet my lost fur cloak that he did not.”
Chance shrugged, mumbled to himself. Finally, “Would anyone else among those Immutables know? Or is it only Riddle who knows? What about his family?”
“He had only a daughter,” I said. Then there was a long pregnant silence of such a quality that I looked back to find Chance’s eyes upon me, brooding and hot. “Oh, no,” I said. “I will not.”
“She’s buried nearby,” he remarked. “Almost in sight of the ruins.”
“I couldn’t do that,” I said flatly. It was true. I could not even think of raising the ghost of Tossa. It would have made me feel like a Ghoul, and I said as much.
“I didn’t say you should take her with us,” Chance said in mild reproof. “I didn’t say you should drag her around.”
I swallowed bile at the thought. Ghouls did raise certain kinds of recent dead and drag them into a kind of fearful servitude of horror, a thing which no self-respecting Necromancer would think to do. There were others who raised ghosts¾Thaumaturges, for example, or Revenants, or Bonedancers. If what old Windlow and Himaggery had told me was true, full half of all Gamesmen would have some Talent at Deadraising. Full half of all Gamesmen would share any one Talent. If so, it was not a Talent generally used in the way Ghouls and Bonedancers used it, and I felt unclean at the thought.
“No,” I said. “She died, Chance, without ever knowing she was dying. Often the dead do not know they are dead until we raise them up.” In that instant I thought of Windlow with a kind of stomach-wrenching panic, then sternly put that thought down. “The ancient dead are only dust; they have forgotten life and possess only a kind of hunger which the act of raising gives them. I do not feel thus about the ancient dead. But the newly dead¾ah, Chance, that is a different thing. With Tossa, she would know herself dead, and it would hurt her.”
The memory of Mandor’s ghost was recently with me. I was prepared to be as stubborn as necessary, but Chance only said, “Well, then we’ll have to think up some other way to find out. How about someone dead for eighty years or so?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you think you could raise an Immutable?”
“You’re thinking of Riddle’s grandfather? Riddle said he didn’t die in the ruins.”
“Riddle said a lot of things. Don’t know whether I believe him or not is all.”
So we rode along while I thought about that. Riddle was digging in Dindindaroo. He had recently found out that something lay in the ruins which he needed? Wanted? Someone else wanted? Well, which he cared enough about to go to some trouble over, put it that way. Where had he found out, and when? Perhaps on that northern journey he and I had started to make together, when he had turned off toward the east just above Betand? Or in his own land? Perhaps someone had told him? Who? Or he had found old papers?
After a time Chance interrupted this line of thought to say, “You know, these Immutables are just like the rest of us. They drink a little and they talk. Get a little jolly, they do, and they talk. Pawns travel through their land on business. You and me, we could travel there.”
Which was an answer, of course. We would need to disguise ourselves. Riddle knew me as a Necromancer only, or so I believed. Chance and I had been seen together once before in the Land of the Immutables, but only briefly. So suppose we went into that land as two pawns, traveling on business. What business? I put this to Chance.
“Well, as you left me to my own devices in that town of Xammer, boy, and without a hello, goodbye, how was your dinner. I got into a little game or two.”
“Chance!”
“Now, now. Mustn’t react hasty-like. A quiet game with honest folk is always good fun. Anyhow, I took my winnings in various small bits and pieces. A little gold, some gems, fripperies and foolishness. Thought I might turn a profit, up north.”
“So that’s what’s in your saddlebags. I thought you were heavy loaded for having no pack beast.”
He nodded to himself happily. I never knew what pleased Chance most¾winning a game of cards or dice, finding a woman who was a good cook, or locating a wine cellar put together by a master vintner. Whatever else the world offered, he would choose one or more of those three.
He instructed me: “Enough in the bags to make us legitimate, lad. If you can change your face some and get out of those dusty black clothes. Wouldn’t hurt to change horses, too. As may be possible not far from here.”
Which was possible with Chance in charge of the trade. He went away leading my lovely tall black horse and came back with a high-stepping mare of an unusual yellow color with nubby shoes such as they use along the River Dourt, or so Yarrel had once told me. It was not an inconspicuous animal. However, he had obtained a pack beast in the trade and had done something to his own face while away from me, stuffed his cheeks to make them fatter and darkened his hair. He looked a different man, and it was easy to disguise myself as a younger version of the same. When we were done with this switching about we turned west to cross the Boundary River into the Immutables’ own Land. We had decided to be the Smitheries, father and son, and Chance told me to ride one stride behind and mind my manners toward my elder, which so amused him in the saying he almost choked.
So that night I sat in a tavern and learned a lesson in gossip. Chance talked of the sea, and of horses, and of trading in general, and of the goods he had picked up in Xammer, and of the young women in that city and elsewhere, and of how the world had changed not for the better, and of a strange wine he had tasted once in Morninghill beside the Southern Sea, and of an old friend of his in Vestertown, and of a man he had known once who used to live in Dindindaroo.
“Oh, that makes you a liar indeed,” said an oldster, sucking at a glass of rich dark beer which Chance had put into his hand. “If you knew such a one, he was old as a rock. Dindindaroo has been wreck and ruin this hundred year.”
“Not a hundred,” interrupted another. “No, Dindindaroo was wreck and ruin in the time of my mother’s father when my mother was a girl, and that was no hundred year.”
“Oh, you’re old as a rock yourself,” asserted the first. “For all you’re chasing the girlies like a gander after goslings, which you will never catch until the world freezes and Barish comes back. If it were not a hundred, it were near that.”
“Ah, now,” said Chance. “The man I knew was old indeed. Old and gray as a tree in winter. But he said he was there when ruin came down on the place, he said, like the ice, the wind, and the seven devils. Caught a bunch of the people, the ruin did. Or so he said.”
“Oh, it did. Aye, it did. Caught a bunch of ‘em.”
“Caught old Riddle’s grandfather, I heard,” said Chance. “That’s what the fellow told me.”
“Oh, so I’ve heard. Free and safe he was, out of the place, then nothing would do but he go back for something he’d left there, and then the ruin came. That’s the story. Buried in it, they said. Buried in it when the flood came down, and no sign of him and his contrack after that. Oh, a man’ll do strange things, won’t he, when ruin comes.”
“He will, indeed he will,” agreed Chance, nodding at me over his beer. At which I nodded, too, and agreed that a man will indeed do strange things.
“What was it he went back for, do you suppose?” asked Chance, as though it didn’t matter at all.
“Who knows, who knows,” murmured the second oldster, who was growing very tipsy with the unaccustomed quantities of free beer.
“His contrack,” the loquacious oldster said. “That’s what I heard. Was his contrack from the long ago time of Barish. That’s what they kept at Dindindaroo. Charts and books and contracks to keep ‘em safe until Barish comes back for ‘em. That’s what.” And he hiccuped softly into his glass before looking hopefully to Chance once more who bought another round and changed the subject. They got into an argument then as to whether Salamanders are really fireproof. After that was a good deal of calling on the seven hells and the hundred devils, after which we went to bed to lie there in the swimming darkness talking.
“So he died there in the ruins, Chance. I have no bad feeling about calling him up. I didn’t know him, and he’s dead this eighty years, but Dorn himself couldn’t call anyone up with all those Immutables about. All of them would have to leave.”
“As they may do,” suggested Chance, “if they heard that the thing they’re looking for had come to light elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere?”
“Somewhere far off. Leave it to me, Peter. We’ll spend one more night here.”
The which we did. And there was more buying of beer and more talk, and this time Chance made the circle of acquaintances larger so that there were more listeners to what was said. Middle of the evening came, together with jollity and general good feeling, and into a pause in the noise, Chance dropped his spear.
“You know, it was odd your mentioning Dindindaroo last night,” he said to the oldster at his side.
“Odd? Was it? Did I? Oh, yes. So I did. What was odd?”
“Oh, only that I met a man in Morninghill, not a season gone, and he told me he’d dug up treasures around Dindindaroo.”
At this there was general exclamation and interest. Chance turned to me for verification, and I said, “Oh, he said so, Father, yes. Dug up treasures, he said, and was selling them moreover.”
Chance nodded, said nothing more, waited. The questions came. What had the man found? The Smitheries, father or son, did not know. Something small and valuable, they thought. Something wonderful and rare, for the man was a famous dealer in such. Old things, certainly. Then, when interest was at its height, Chance led the conversation away from the subject onto something else. I saw two dark-cloaked men leave the place immediately thereafter, and when I went to the window for a bit of air I could hear the pound of hooves going away south.
We slept there that night, and on the morning went out of the Land of the Immutables, riding publicly east toward the Great North Road. Once out of sight, we turned into the forests and began the circle which would bring us into the cover of the trees nearest the ruins of Dindindaroo.
We spied upon the place, I with my Shifter’s eyes, keen as any flitchhawk’s, and Chance with a seaman’s glass he carried with him. Sure enough, there were two dark-cloaked men talking with Riddle, the three of them standing upon a mound of crumbled stone and soil, Riddle gesturing as though he were in a considerable turmoil. Troubled he was. His face was white with frustration. After a time they settled down, and by noon they had reached some decision, for many of them went away north into their own land while others, Riddle among them, rode south. So. He was going to look around in Morninghill, and a long weary journey that would be.
We waited until early evening, until the westering sun threw long golden spears across the tumbled stone, and then we came to the ruins and walked about on them. The industrious diggers had changed them about somewhat. Still, the crumbling walls were there where Dazzle and Borold had sheltered to watch the fire dance, and so was the high slit window where I had hung my shirt to counterfeit a ghost. I stood, looking at it, feeling that deep brown emotion made of dusk and smoke and sorrow which is so piercing as to be sweet beyond enduring. Then I shook myself and took Dorn into my hand.
“Well, Peter,” he said to me in my mind. “Here lie many dead. Would you have us raise them all?” He knew what I had thought of, but he was ever courteous, treating himself as a guest. Besides, in clarifying for him, I made clear to myself as well. “A name,” he said. “Did you neglect to learn the man’s name?”
I uttered an oath, disgusted with myself. If we were to draw out one from among so many, a name would be needed for we did not know precisely where he lay. “What was his name?” I growled to Chance. And he answered me, soft as pudding, well Riddle of course, same as his grandson. So we went with that.
I began to sense the dead about us, the feeling of them, the luxuriant quiet of them. They were at peace in the long slow heat of summer and the long slow cold of winter, the ageless waft of the wind and the high cry of the hawk upon the air. In them the leaves moved and the wavelets of the river danced. In them sorrow had no place; time for sorrow had gone with the turn of the seasons and the fall of the leaves. “Pity,” said Dorn, “to disturb this peace.”
Still, he called the name of Riddle into the quiet of the place, drawing out and up, and at last we saw a little whirlwind of dust turning itself slowly upon the tumulus before us, spinning and humming a quiet sound into the twilight. Through this whirling dust the sun fell, turning it golden, so that we confronted a shining pillar and spoke as with a Phoenix, for so those Gamesmen whirl into flame and are consumed before rising once again.
We asked, and asked again. This revenant was not so old as those we had raised in the caves beneath Bannerwell, so we had created no monster of dust which hungered for life. Neither was it so short a time after death as the raising of Mandor, so there should have been no remembered agonies. Despite this, it seemed disinclined to speak with us, resisted being raised. I was about to give up when I heard Didir within, unsummoned, feeling¾was it excited? Surely not. Impetuous. “Let me.” She reached into that whirling cloud and seemed to fumble there as though Reading it, making some tenuous connections of sparkling dust.
Then the humming cloud took the shape of a man, a wavery shape, still resistant, not unlike Riddle in appearance, looking at something I could not see.
“I see Dorn,” the phantom said. “Barish promised us immunity, Gamesman. He promised, but I am raised from the dead by Dorn. Ah, but then, I broke my pledge, my oath to Barish. All unwitting, all unwise. Forgive and let go...”
Chance and I looked at one another, a hasty, confused glance. This was not what we had expected. I stuttered, reaching for a question to clarify. “Riddle, tell me of your pledge to Barish.”
“Barish ... Barish. He gave us immunity from your power, Gamesman, for us and our children forever, immutable throughout time, so he said. And in return we must keep his body safe, keep the bodies of his Gamesmen safe where they lie, north, north in the wastes, north in the highlands where the krylobos watch. We must keep the Wizard safe, and the Wizard’s eleven. But he went away and did not return. I brought the Gamesmen here, Barish’s book here, thinking to find him somewhere, find him and return them, but the waters came, the waters came and I died...” The figure writhed, became the humming cloud once more. From it the voice came in prayer and supplication, “The contract broken, all unwitting ... and Barish’s promise broken as well for I am raised by Dorn to suffer my guilt. Ah. Forgive. Let me lie in peace...”
It was not my voice that said it, and not Dorn’s. I thought it was Didir, though I could not be sure. “You are forgiven, Riddle, faithful one. Go to your rest.”
The cloud collapsed all at once and was gone. The sun lowered itself below the undulant line of hills. Dark came upon the tumulus and in the forest a fustigar howled, to be joined by another across the river. A star winked at me, and I realized that I saw it through brimming tears. Something had happened. I was not sure what it was, or why, and the Gamesmen in my pocket did not know either. It was as though they and I had listened in upon some conversation from another time, a thing familiar and strange at once¾familiar because inevitable and strange because I could not connect it to anything I knew. Chance was watching me with a good deal of concern, and I shook my head at him, unable to speak.
“Well,” he said when I could hear him. “What went on there?”
I tried to tell him. All I could get out was that the answers to all our puzzles seemed to lie in the Wastes of Bleer.
“Riddle’s grandfather brought some things here from the Wastes of Bleer,” I said.
“I think it would help us if we stopped talking around and around,” he said thoughtfully. “Let’s not say `things.’ What was brought here was those little Gamesmenyou found and the little book you gave Windlow.”
“I have it with me,” I said. “There may have been other things as well.”
“No matter. What was lost was the Gamesmen and the book. Now did this Riddle fellow steal them?”
“No!” I was shocked. “No. He was supposed to have them. Supposed to keep them safe¾them and the ... bodies.”
The light that engulfed me then seemed to be around me in the world, but it was only inside my head. The bodies. Didir’s body. Lying in the northlands, waiting for her. Her. Her I had in my pocket, not merely a blue, not merely a Gamespiece, but a person awaiting ... what? Resurrection? Awakening? Tamor, there in the northlands, Tamor who had saved my life more than once. And tragic Dealpas. And Trandilar. Oh, Gamelords, Trandilar! Voluptuous as boiling cloud and as full of pent energies, erotic, beguiling Trandilar. And Dorn. Dorn who was almost my elder brother in my head, lying there in the northlands, awaiting his renewal.
And all the while that part of me thought yes, oh, yes they must be found and raised up, awakened, another part of my mind said¾no. No. They are mine, mine. My power comes from them. My Talents. I will not give them up. And the first part of me recoiled as though a serpent had struck at me inside myself so that I gasped, and gagged on the bile that rose in my throat. I struggled while Chance shook me and demanded to know what was wrong, what was wrong. Oh, Gamelords, what was wrong was me!
And then, somehow, I managed to thrust the conflict away, to stop thinking of it. I knew, knew it was there, but I would not think of it. Not then.
“Riddle’s grandfather had a covenant with Barish,” I choked. “But Barish disappeared, didn’t come back. So Riddle’s grandfather brought some things here¾maybe hoping to find Barish. Maybe for safekeeping. Only wreck and ruin came on Dindindaroo.”
Chance objected. “The covenant couldn’t have been with Riddle’s grandpa only.” I shook my head. Obviously not. The contract must have been with the Immutables, father and son and grandson, generation after generation. Chance went on, “Those bodies have been there how long?”
I was careful not to think when I answered. “A thousand years. More or less. And do not ask me how Barish survived or came and went during that time for I don’t know, Chance. It does not bear thinking of.”
“So now what’s our Riddle searching for? What’s he up to?”
“Duty,” I replied. “The covenant. The contract. The pledge his forefathers made to Barish. Oh, Chance, I don’t know. I can’t think of Riddle as anything but honorable. It’s too confusing.”
“Well, lad, don’t get into an uproar over it,” he said, giving me a long measuring look. “Whatever we don’t know, we do know more than we did.”
“Not enough more,” I mourned, thinking of the hundred questions I should have asked the ghost. I could not call him up again. Would not. He had been given absolution by someone, and I would not undo it. I felt tears slide down my face.
“Maybe not enough more,” Chance agreed, “but some more.” He built a fire then and gave us hot soup, then some wine, and then an interminable story about hunting some sea monster during which I fell asleep. When I woke in the morning, I was able not to think about the disturbing thing, and the day was sharp-edged enough to live in.
I TOLD CHANCE ABOUT THE SINGER in Xammer who had sung about wind to me and Silkhands. A mere song seemed a foolish reason to go exploring the northlands, and I hoped Chance, who was never loath to declaim upon foolishness in general, would say so. This would give me reason not to go, but I did not ask myself, then, why I wanted such a reason. Instead I made excuses. Himaggery and Mavin would need me, I said to myself, waiting for Chance to say something to give substance to my rationalization.
But he said, “What was it made you think the singer sang to you?”
“Only that he sang of the far north,” I said without thinking, “and in the Bright Desmesne a Seer told me my future lay there ... with Silkhands.” I did not say the Seer was Windlow.
“Well then, that’s twice,” said Chance. “And Riddle’s grandpa is three times. Remember what I always said about that. Once is the thing itself, twice is a curiosity, but three times is Game.”
I did remember. It had always been one of Chance’s favorite sayings, particularly when I had committed some childish prank more than twice. “Whose Game? Who would be pulling me north?”
“Well, lad, there’s pulling and there’s pushing. The ghost was lamenting the loss of those things you carry. And maybe those things you carry are lamenting the loss of their bodies. I would if it was me. Maybe it’s them want to get back where they came from.”
So Chance was no help, no help at all. The knife of conscience twisted, and the serpent of guilt writhed under the knife. Was it possible? Could they be pushing me without my knowing? I tried to say no. “They have to use my brain to think with, Chance. They are only¾what did old Manacle call it¾patterns of personality. They are whatever they were when they were made. Didir comes into my head always the same Didir. She uses my mind, my memories to think with, but she does not carry those memories back into the blue. They stay in my mind, not hers. What I forget, she cannot remember. They couldn’t pull or push without my knowing!” I said this very confidently, but I was not sure. “And I’m not sure that Silkhands and I ought to go north for such a reason. It’s probably very dangerous.”
He looked at me in astonishment. “And what do I hear? Peter talking about dangerous? Well, and the daylight may turn pale purple and all the lakes be full of fish stew. I thought never to hear such stuff after Bannerwell. If we are not here to seek out mysteries and answer deep questions, why are we?”
“Why, Chance.” I laughed uncomfortably. “You’re a philosopher.”
“No.” He rubbed his nose and looked embarrassed. “Actually I was quoting Mertyn.”
I might have known. Oh, Gamelords, I could not turn my back on this thing without feeling cut in half. I could at least pretend to go wholeheartedly, even if I were torn. Why not follow the scent laid down for me as a fustigar follows a bunwit, “Head high and howling,” as Gamesmaster Gervaise was wont to say. These agonized thoughts were interrupted.
“Where did you and Silkhands arrange to meet?”
“She will be leaving Xammer soon, tomorrow or the next day. I thought it better not to travel together so close to the Bright Demesne. If someone is watching and plotting, let them work at it a little. I told her we would meet her below the Devil’s Fork of the River Reave, at the town there. Here, let us see.”
I burrowed out the chart we had been at such pains to buy, spreading it upon the ground with stones at the corner to keep it flat. It was well made, on fine leather, the lettering as tiny and distinct as care and skill could make it. I found where we were, between the ruins and the Great North Road, then traced that road north with my finger to the place it split below the fork in River Reave. The town was there. Reavebridge.
“Well,” I said, “we can go in disguise, on the road or off it; or in our own guise, on the road or off it. You are the wary one. I leave it to you.”
“Then let us continue as Smitheries, father and son,” he said. I agreed to that, and we packed up our things to ride away northeast where stretched the Great North Road.
The river which the Immutables call the Boundary came out of the northeast, and we followed it through the pleasant forests and farmlands north of Xammer. Ahead of us we could see the frowning brows of Two Headed Mountain, two days’ ride away, which cupped the Phoenix Demesne at its foot. Farther north were the bald stone tops of Three Knob, hazed with smoke from the foundries there. These were both landmarks I remembered from my years at Schooltown, though I had never yet seen either of them much closer than we saw them on our way. Behind Three Knob, between it and the rising range of eastern mountains, was said to be what Himaggery called a Thandbarian Demesne made up of Empaths, Mirrormen, Revenants ... I couldn’t remember the other four Thandbarian Talents by Himaggery’s scheme of Indexing. His scheme depended upon listing all the Talents which shared porting as a Talent, first, then all those left which shared Moving, then Reading, and so on. I wasn’t sure it was any easier to remember than the old Indexes which listed each Talent as a separate thing, unique of its kind. One didn’t seem to make any more sense than the other. There were still thousands of different Gamesmen. If the Talents were evenly distributed, said Himaggery, then half of all Gamesmen would have any one of the Talents. Still, Himaggery was attached to his scheme, and according to him there were seven Thandbarian Talents and over a thousand Elatorian ones. And no Necromantic ones at all except for Necromancers themselves. Which was idiotic, because there were Necromantic ones, Ghouls and Bonedancers and even Rancelmen.
Oh well, and foof. Still, since I’d been thinking about them, I asked Chance if he’d ever seen a Mirrorman (I never had), and he gave me a look as though he’d bitten into something rotten. “Yes, lad, but don’t ask about it. I was a time being able to sleep at night again, after, and I don’t relish the memory.” Well. That was interesting.
It was less than a day’s ride to the Great North Road where it crossed the Boundary River over a long sturdy bridge which had a look of Xammer about it, the railings being turned and knobbed like the balcony railings I had seen in the town. Its building had undoubtedly been commissioned by the town leaders in order to make travel¾and trade¾easier. Past the bridge was a campground, a place with a well and toilets and a place providing food and drink and firewood. The night was warm, so we bought food ready cooked and sat in a quiet corner of the place to eat it. Since we had chosen to sit fireless, our eyes were not flame dazzled and we could see who came in. Who came in was a Bonedancer, black and white, helmed with the skull of some ancient animal long extinct. He had either left his train of skeletons outside the place or currently had none, for which I was grateful. Bonedancers have enough Talents, including Necromancy, to raise dry bones and make them dance¾or to do other things if moved to malice. Mostly they prey upon pawns in remote villages, telling fortunes and threatening horrors. I wondered how they could do it, wondered if they were ever reluctant to do it, wondered if perhaps there were many Bonedancers who simply did not exercise their Talents at all just as some Ghouls refused. Still, having the Bonedancer there did not upset me much. At first.
Then, however, came three more together: an Exorcist, a Medium, and a Timereacher. Chance drew in breath in a long, aching sigh as the three joined the Bonedancer, all at one fire, all talking together. “Game toward,” he murmured. I was inclined to agree with him. Why else so many dealers with the dead in this one place?
“What is it Timereachers do?” I asked. “See the past?”
“It’s said so,” he whispered to me. “Mediums as well. A combination of Seeing and Deadraising? So I’ve heard.”
“Exorcists too,” I said. “Seeing, Healing, Deadraising. Able to settle ghosts, I recall, and perhaps to See where a ghost may trouble before it actually begins haunting. Still, to have all three, plus a Bonedancer? Someone means to raise something great, and he wishes to be sure he can put it to rest again. Who do you think?” The four were taking no notice of anyone around them, but there was something almost familiar about one of the figures. What was it made my skin crawl?
“Do you wish we were away from here?” I whispered.
“Enough to get away from here,” he murmured in reply. It needed no discussion. He stood and walked away to the toilets, merely another one in a constant stream of toing and froing. After a moment, I went the same way. We met at the picket line, loosed our horses, and led them quietly into the night. Inasmuch as we had prepared no food for ourselves, nothing had been unpacked. When we had led them far enough for quiet’s sake, we mounted and rode northward again, seeing the yellow glows of the little fires dwindle behind us in the dark. I was thinking, suspecting, wondering about the Gamesmen we had seen, the way they had moved and walked, the order of their arrival. Four. A Bonedancer, an Exorcist, a Medium, and a Timereacher. Three with Seeing; two with Healing; one to hold Power; one to raise Fire; and all four to Raise the Dead. I groped for Dorn in my pocket and read him this list.
“If such a four can find a battlefield,” he whispered in my mind, “or the site of a great catastrophe in which many died, not so long that bones have fallen to dust yet long enough that flesh has left the bones, why then, were I Gaming, I would guess those four will raise a multitude and will seek, thereby, to do some evil work...” I waited for him to go on. After a long time, he said, “A Healer may Heal. Know also a Healer may Unheal. Do not let the Medium or Exorcist lay hands upon you...”
I had already learned that in School House, the unwisdom of letting those with the power of the flesh (another name for Healing) lay hands upon one. An Exorcist could lay hands on one and leave a bloody handprint where he had broken every little blood line in one’s flesh. It was said, among boys, that Mediums could raise the dead and set them on your trail, and that they would follow forever. I asked Chance if he believed that.
“Well, there are haunts set, lad. You told me you put down one such in Betand. And there are Ghostpieces.”
“I have yet to hear one straight word about Ghostpieces,” I said with considerable asperity. “Windlow mentioned them once, and others have talked of them. I have never learned what it is they can and cannot do. Perhaps in your wide travels, Chance, you’ve learned the answers to all this.” I was being sarcastic.
He became very dignified at once. “Lad, don’t get all exercised at me. So there’s Deadraisers on the Great North Road, and so you think they have something to do with you. Well, I’m not ringing any great bell to tell them where you’re hid. I don’t know a midgin more about Ghostpieces than the next one; what we’ve heard is all. We’ve heard of things raised up which could not be put down again. We’ve heard of things that turned on those that raise ‘em. Himaggery would say to put your reason to work on it, and I can’t say better than that.”
When Chance got offended like that, there was no use trying to get anything out of him, so I rode along feeling ashamed of myself. Reason said that anything raised had to take power from somewhere. Reason said that, and so did experience, for when Dorn had raised up the dead under Bannerwell, I could feel the power flowing from him¾me. But then once they were raised up, they went on their own¾at least those in Bannerwell had. It had been like pushing a wagon from the top of a hill, a hard push to get it started, then it rolled of itself. So at least under some conditions things raised up would move on their own. Well, reason had not led me far. I would have to think more on it.
Meantime, we had come so far on the road that the Phoenix Demesne stood due east of us. It was time to rest, for us and for the animals. Here and there in the flat farmland, crisscrossed by a thousand little canals which flowed down from the east fork of the River Reave, were small hillocks covered with trees, woodlots left to provide fuel for the farms. In one of these copses we took cover for what remained of the night, tethering the animals so they could not wander out to be seen from the road. I went to sleep in discomfort and foreboding. Gamelords know what I dreamed, but I was so wound up in my blankets that Chance had to help me out of them in the morning, and the sweat had soaked them through.
We breakfasted over a small fire, built smokeless and quickly extinguished when the first travelers appeared on the road. We lay behind a shield of dried fern, peering through. There was an hour or so of usual travel, farm wagons, a herd of water oxen, a girl leading three farm zeller by the rings in their noses, their udders swinging full before milking. Then came a burst of travelers from the south, all riding speedily without looking around them, then another three or four, then a space, then a bunch riding with eyes ahead as though intent upon covering the leagues. There was another little space, then two men riding hard and whipping their animals. After them, the bones.
They came in a horde, a hundred, perhaps more, complete skeletons, so loosely joined that the arms and legs might go off dancing on their own, jerking and rattling, only to come back to the other bones and accumulate once more into more or less complete sets, the grinning skulls bouncing and lunging at the tops of the backbones as though on springs. Behind this clattering aggregation rode the Bonedancer on a shabby black horse, and behind the Bonedancer the Exorcist, the Timereacher, and the Medium¾No! It wasn’t a Medium. In the firelight the night before I had seen only the dark gray cloak pulled forward, hiding the face. Today the cloak glittered with gold spiderweb embroidery and the hood was thrown back to reveal the magpie helm beneath. A Rancelman¾same Talents as a Timereacher, but with Reading added. I sharpened my Shifter’s eyes to see more clearly, then muttered an oath as I saw more clearly than I liked.
“It’s Karl Pig-face,” I said. “A Rancelman!”
“No!” Chance fiddled with his glass, easing it through the dried fern so as not to betray us where we lay. “So it is! But what’s wrong with his face? That isn’t the Karl you knew!”
I looked again, more carefully. It was Karl Pig-face, right enough, but the face was ... empty. Pale. Dry, rather than sheened with sweat as I had always seen it. At that instant, his head began to turn toward me, and as his head turned every skull in that endless train of bones began to turn also. Without thinking, I reached for Didir, felt her flow into me, and made my own mind dive down like some depth-dwelling fish to let her shield me. Through my eyes, I felt her watch the skeleton heads swing restlessly to and fro, like pendant fruit, the wormholes of the empty eyes seeking me. Then Karl’s head faced forward once more, and they went on, on to the north. I did not move or speak until they were vanished in dust, beyond even a Shifter’s ability to see them.
“That one sought you, Peter,” whispered Didir. “Sought you out of hate, malice, and because he is forced to do it. He wears a cap, like the other one you are remembering. He felt you, Peter.”
“But he did not tell them…” I replied wonderingly.
“They are fools,” she said. “Whoever wears the cap will do only what he is told. They told him to find you, not to tell them he had found you. So he found you, lost you, and went on seeking. Their stupidity has saved you, this time.”
“Who?” I breathed.
She did not answer. I had not thought she would. Karl had not known who sent him, and for her to attempt to Read any of the others would have been to signal our presence.
“So we are behind them now,” said Chance.
“Behind them,” I said. “But who knows how many have been set on my trail. It began the minute we left the Bright Demesne. I am not such a fool as to think these boneraisers are the end of it. Someone has gone to considerable trouble.”
“Ah,” said Chance.
“Huld!” I said. I was certain of it. It had all the marks of Huld, all his energy, his relentless malice, his fascination with the mechanisms of the techs. Who else could have learned from Mandor that Karl Pig-face was my enemy? Who else would have known of my association with Silkhands ... Silkhands! “Silkhands is in great danger,” I said. “Huld would not let the chance pass to use her against me. He will take her when she leaves Xammer, depend upon it, and she is all unwary of this.”
“Well, lad, I wouldn’t let him do that if I were you.”
Curse the man. No sympathy. No hooraw and horror, no running about squawking. Merely “don’t let him do that.” Tush. Xammer was more than a hard day’s ride south, and she might be leaving at any time. Or have left already.
“There’s that Hafnor,” said Chance, fixing me with his beady little eyes. “In case you’ve forgot.”
Damn him. Of course I hadn’t forgotten. The idea made me sick to my stomach was all. Stopping existing in one place. Flicking away to another place. Starting to exist there. All in an instant. It was worse than the bones. I felt my inner parts lurch and sway, a kind of vertiginous gulping of the guts.
“No other way I can see,” said Chance, still staring at me.
With no sense of volition about it at all, I reached into the pouch to find Hafnor, knowing him in the instant by the unfamiliarity of him. I clenched my hand around him and took a deep, aching breath, only to have my mind filled with a gust of mocking laughter. “Well, and where are we here?” I felt someone using my eyes, my nose, my tongue to taste the air, my other hand to feel the ground beneath me. I saw the shape of every tree, the volume of the leaves against the sun, felt the texture of the dried grasses. “That’s here,” said the laughing voice. “Where do we want to go?” I tried to explain about Silkhands, about Xammer, but felt only a mad, laughing incomprehension and impatience. “Where, where, where? What walls? What smell of the air? What floors? What doors leading in and out? What windows? Draperies? Furniture? What landmarks seen through those windows? Where, where?”
All I could think of was the room in the Guest House, and I tried to remember it in a way that would suit Hafnor. Sudden memories surged up, ones I had not known of, the color and sound of the fire, the feel of the woolen carpet on my hands, the smell of the polish used on the furniture. The memories assailed from every side, and I dropped the tiny figure of Hafnor in panic, to stand heaving like an overridden horse. When I had panted my way back to a kind of sanity, I said to Chance, “If I go, and if I am gone when night comes, then go to ... to Three Knob. Get rid of that yellow horse and his strange shoes. Tell anyone who seems interested that the young man who was with you has gone away ... to Vestertown, or Morninghill. But you go to Three Knob and wait there, however long it takes me. We’ll meet you there, Silkhands and I.”
He did not argue or make any great fuss about it, merely watched me, nodding the while, as I took Hafnor into my hand again. I summoned up the memories of that guest room and saw them take visible shape before me, as though framed in a round window. From the corner of my eye, I saw another window which looked out onto a flame-lit cavern, and another which showed the attics of Mertyn’s House in Schooltown, and another which showed the long, half-lit corridors of the magicians’ lair beneath the mountains. I spun, seeing these windows open about me, as though I stood at the center of a sponge or a great cheese, all around me holes reaching away to every place I had ever been or known of. “Where?” whispered Hafnor, and I turned to the hole which showed the guest room in Xammer, stepped through it, and stumbled upon the rug before the cold fireplace to fall sprawling.
When I had stopped shaking and had time to get up and brush myself off, for I was still covered with half dried grasses from that hill beside the road, far to the north, I sneaked down to the courtyard and appeared there to the first person I could find from Vorbold’s House. It was Gamesmistress Joumerie, who looked me over curiously and answered me words I did not like.
“Silkhands? Why, no, Gamesman. She rode out this morning with young Jinian and several servants and two Armigers for safety’s sake, riding to King Kelver’s purlieu, away north. They will not move over fast, not so far you may not catch them up, ride you swiftly.”
I left her with scant courtesies to find a hidden corner and take Hafnor into my hand once more. “What do I do now?” I begged. “I must find her, but I don’t know the road well enough to…”
“Hoptoad, lad,” came the laughing voice with more than a hint of malice at my discomfiture. “Hoptoad. Do you look far ahead, keen as your eyes will go, and I will do the rest.” That is what we did. I looked as far down the road as I could see, sharpening my vision to the utmost, spying the place ahead, the trees, the canals, whatever might be about, bit on bit, and then we flicked, and I was in that spot. Then I did it again, and flick, and again, and flick, each time scanning the road between to be sure we did not miss her. Until we saw the confusion and heard the screaming and flicked to find ourselves among a crowd, all shouting and running about near the unconscious body of one Armiger and the bleeding, perhaps dead, body of another.
I shook one of the bystanders and demanded that he tell me quickly what had happened. He pointed a trembling finger at the forest edge. “Ghoul,” he whispered. “Came with a horde of dead out of the trees. The Armigers tried to fight them, but you can’t fight that. The Ghoul took the women. Dragged them away into the trees.”
Though obviously frightened, he had kept his wits about him. I ran for the forest, knowing that Hafnor could not help me there. It would take Grandfather Tamor, swift flyer, to lift me up where I could see. So it was. He caught me up like a feather, moved me like a swooping hawk to peer this way and that, seeking the movement of leaves or the rustle of undergrowth below, quartering again and yet again, hearing only silence, working slowly westward, a little faster than a man might run.
It was the cold first, then Silkhands’ voice which led me to them. The Ghoul could not stop her chatter any more than I had ever been able to do, and her voice went on resolutely, almost as though she knew someone would be searching for her. I came into a tree top to watch them. The Ghoul dragged them along, one on either side of him, his host of dead following in a shamble of rotting flesh. Ghouls do not move clean bones; they have the Talent of Moving, of Power, of Raising the Dead. How much power did this one have? Plenty, it seemed, and was drawing more, for the place was icy as winter. I hung above them judging the distance.
Then as he passed below I stooped upon him, screaming as I flew, “Ghoul’s Ghast Nine, I call Game and Move!” as I snatched the two girls from him and launched myself upward toward another tree...
Only to know in one hideous moment that I had played the fool, the utter, absolute and unGamed fool. I had called a risk play, an Imperative, unwise and unready as I was, and the Ghoul would not ignore it. I hung there in the tree, the girls reaching out to cling to the branches as the strength left my arms. There was no power in the place to draw and I was weak ... weak. I was in the Ghoul’s Demesne, and he had drawn it all. Such power as I had I had expended prodigiously in the flick, flick, flick of Elator’s hunt in finding them, in the reckless flight and swoop and call. Now there was no more strength in me than enough to move myself away a few yards, myself only, and no way to get more. I gasped, unable even to think what might be done.
I saw him reach for his power. He had more than I would have guessed, for two of the rotting liches staggered to the tree where we clung and began to climb, clotted eyes fixed upon us. They climbed awkwardly, leaving parts of themselves stuck to various small twigs and branches, but they came higher by the moment. Beneath them, others assembled, waiting, lipless mouths gaped in silent grins of amusement at the fruit about to fall into their hands and jaws. I heard Silkhands whimper, saw the girl, Jinian, glaring down at the Ghoul while rumbling curses in her throat. I wanted to close my own eyes, half dead as I was with cold and terror. I could fly myself away to another place, me, alone, with no burden. Or move Silkhands away without me. No more than that, and the place cold, cold.
Below me the Ghoul laughed and screamed into the quiet forest, “Armiger’s Flight Ten, fool flyer. Armiger’s Flight Ten.” He was calling my death and the death of those two with me, and I knew it as did they.
I wondered if I would have the strength to move Silkhands away. My hand clenched in my pocket, clenched, and then gripped again as I felt that other unfamiliar shape in my fingers. Buinel. Sentinel. Firemaker. He came into my mind like a bird onto an unfamiliar nest, fussing and turning. I felt the thousand questions he was about to ask, anticipated the lengthy speech he was about to make. Oh, something within me recognized him, knew him for that Buinel whom Windlow had called Buinel the flutterer.
The branch under my foot swayed. I looked down into the face of one of the liches as it fastened a partly fleshed hand upon my boot. I kicked wildly, and the thing fell away as Jinian shouted shrilly at my side.
“Buinel,” I cried silently. “Fire. Or we die, you die, we all die. Forever.”
“Who?” he fussed. “Who speaks? What authority? What place is this? Who is that Ghoul? What Game?”
“Buinel,” I shouted at the top of my voice, startling a flight of birds out of the trees around us, “if you do not set fire to the Ghoul and to all the liches in this tree, we are dead and you with us.”
Something happened. I think it was Tamor, the pattern of Tamor, though it may have been Hafnor. Some pattern in my head issued a command, said something harsh and peremptory to the pattern which was Buinel, and the tree behind the Ghoul burst into flame, all at once, like a torch. The Ghoul turned, startled, but not too startled to begin storing the power of flame. Shattnir was in my hand in the instant drawing from the same source. “More,” I demanded. “By the ice and the wind and the seven devils, Buinel, more fire. Burn these liches at my feet.” For another of the corpses had reached to lay hands upon me. The cerements on the creature began to smoke, the very bones began to glow and it dropped away silently as other trees went up in explosive conflagration. Meantime, Shattnir and the Ghoul fought it out for the available heat. There was more than was comfortable.
The Ghoul sent up a clamor, “Allies, allies!” into the roar of the flames. I thought I heard a Herald’s trumpet away somewhere and turned to catch a sudden dazzle of light reflected off something, but I could not see it and could not wait. I had enough power by then to lift the women and flutter away, through the columned forest like a crippled bat, bumping and sliding across branches in a search for water. Behind me I could hear the Ghoul screaming, and I muttered “Ghoul’s Ghast Ten,” to myself. “Move and Game.” I had never planned to die as Armiger’s Flight Ten in a strange wood, eaten by liches. But it had been close.
We found a little islet in a pond, and there Silkhands Healed our burns. I drew more power and Searched as the fire burned in all directions, wider and hotter. It would stop at the river on the south, and there were only flat fields to the east, but it would burn long to the north and west unless some sensible Tragamors brought in clouds and wrung them out. I could do nothing about it alone, chose not to in any case, for I wanted to see who ran before those flames. Twice I caught that dazzle of light, but I could find no one. Whoever it might have been had flown away. At last I gave up and returned to the women.
They had made a couch of grasses behind some fallen trees. All three of us lay there in the late afternoon sun to let it quiet us. Later I was to think it strange that I did not inquire what Talent the girl, Jinian, had. Silkhands had not mentioned the matter in my hearing. If she had had any headdress, it had been lost in the attack. In any case, I did not ask and she did not offer. She did ask to borrow my knife in order to set a snare, but I told her I would furnish a meal before I left them to go away and arrange our farther travel. I did it by Shifting into pombi shape and murdering some foolish farm poultry who had wandered into the woods to brood. While the fowl popped over the flames, we spoke of alternatives. I could have gone back to Xammer to procure horses, supplies, a replacement carriage, even guards and servants. We chose not to do so. Instead, when we had eaten, I Shifted myself into a middling ordinary human shape and went off to find some settlement where goods and beasts would be available.
After that was only a weary time of looking and bargaining and going elsewhere for this thing and that thing which no one, ever, would have thought of having when and where it might be wanted or convenient to any other thing which might have been wanted. The evening spent itself into night and the night into morning. It was noon the following day before I led Silkhands and Jinian out of the trees to see what I had accomplished.
“By the pain of Dealpas,” said Silkhands reverently, “I have never seen such a tumbletrundle in my life.”
I nodded, pleased. The wagon did look as though it might fall apart at any moment, but it would not. I had fixed certain parts of it myself. The animals hitched to it were probably mostly water oxen, though the parentage of either could have been questioned. They were large, ugly, and looked too tough to tempt hunters, too rough to tempt thieves. The clothing in the wagon was of a kind with the rest, ugly and boring.
“No one would want it,” said Jinian.
I cast her a quick look, thinking it a pity she was so plain-looking, for she had a perceptive mind. “Exactly,” I said. “Now we must make sure that no one would want any of us, either.”
I believed that we succeeded. Time would prove, the occasion would tell, but we had certainly changed the conditions of our travel more than a little. No one would be interested in the old man or either of the two mabs at his side. All three had dirty faces and gap-toothed smiles. The girls’ teeth were blackened out with tar; from an armslength away they appeared to be missing. When evening came of this day after I had left Chance, we were on the Great North Road once more, only a little north of the Boundary bridge. Looking back at it, I sighed. We had spent much time and effort coming a very small way, and there were still twenty leagues between us and Three Knob.
I had only one real satisfaction. The episode with the Ghoul had decided me firmly and finally that Huld was responsible. The earlier episode with the Witch might have been Riddle’s doing, but it was Huld who set Bonedancer and Ghoul upon my trail. He had made a fool’s call once, in the ice caverns. He had called Necromancer Nine on me, but he could not Play to fulfill it. Now, he was determined to fulfill it, to fulfill it in a way I could not mistake, using Ghoul and Bonedancer, Rancelman and Exorcist¾all of them with Necromantic Talents. I had used the dead against Mandor and Huld; now he would use them against me to the death. He had underestimated me before and again this latest time, though not by much. He still did not know what I was or could do.
It was rare to find Gamesmen who did many things well. Sometimes there are children born who, when they reach puberty, seem to have bits and pieces of many Talents. Often they turn into ineffectual idiots who sit in the sun playing with themselves, endlessly moving one stone atop another or floating a handswidth above the earth or porting tiny distances around a circle to the accompaniment of loud laughter. Having more than four or five different abilities seemed to carry destruction with it. Minery Mindcaster was sometimes called a twinned Talent. The way we had all learned to think about Talents made it easier to accept her as being a combination Pursuivant and Afrit than simply as having seven separate Talents. I, who had all eleven chose I to use them, would not be thought of as a possibility by Huld. Not yet. He had known me first as Necromancer, and he was stuck with that notion for some time. Perhaps he knew me as Shifter, but I thought not. He had seen me fly in the ice caverns, but did he think it was my own ability or that some Tragamor lurked out of sight and Moved me? When I blasted out the barrier Huld had set across the exit to that place, did he know I had done it, or did he think some Sorcerer was involved? If he thought I had done it, then he was judging me as an Afrit, for these were the Afrit Talents.
However, he was not a fool. He might be misled for a time. His Bonedancer and his Rancelman had not found me on the road. His Ghoul was dead. Nonetheless, Huld was an implacable enemy who grew stronger and more clever with time. Could I lay all my powers down in the northlands and confront him with nothing ... ? Nothing but myself? Inside me I whimpered and cowered until at last I was sickened at myself. I had been more courageous at Bannerwell than I was being now, and I reflected that a little taste of power could take a reasonably sensible person and make some kind of groveling, cringing thing of him.
I HAVE SAID that the land to the east of the Gathered Waters is flat. It was no less flat and unenlivening the second time I traveled it in the space of a few days. The pace of the water oxen may have been as much as a league an hour, when they hurried, which they were inclined to do only toward evening when it grew cool and they sensed water ahead. I had coached both Jinian and Silkhands in the use of jiggly rhymes or songs should any Demon or other Talent with Reading skills come by, and I had set myself a persona, Old Globber, in expectation of some such event. As a matter of fact, one Demon did ride by toward dusk of the second day. So far as I could tell, he cast not even a passing look toward us. We were, indeed, very unattractive.
Boredom began to oppress us early. In midafternoon of the second day, Silkhands and Jinian began to share confidences concerning their emotions and feelings toward those of my sex, and I found myself alternately titillated and embarrassed by their frankness, finally being made so uncomfortable that I sought some way to change the subject. Some idea had been fluttering at the back of my head for several days, and I thought the little book in which Windlow had set such store might net it for me.
“Jinian,” I said, thrusting my request into a brief niche in their conversation, “I have something I’ve been studying, a little book. Would you read it to me?” She said she would, though I could tell that she was surprised at the request. I dug out the Onomasticon and gave it to her. My hope was that hearing it in another voice might let the words fall into some pit of comprehension. Thus Jinian, and when she tired, perhaps Silkhands.
“Shall I start at the beginning?” She was doubtful, having dipped into it and found little sense there.
“Pick a page,” I said. “At the beginning, or anywhere. There is supposed to be some deep meaning or content in these pages, so an old friend of Silkhands and mine thought. However, I’ve been unable to find the key to it. Perhaps you’ll find it for me.”
She began. “ `When the Wizard returns for the ninth or tenth time, there will be much work to do.’ “ She stared at the page, then turned to me. “Which Wizard is that?”
“Barish, I suppose,” I said. “You’ve heard it. So have I. People saying, `When Barish returns.’ I heard one codger in a market say he would drop his prices at the twelfth coming of Barish.”
She nodded thoughtfully and went on. “ `The greater power these Gamesmen have, the more they are corrupted ... yet there are still some born in every generation with a sense of justice and the right ... so few when compared to the others. I would that they become many!’ And I say so-be-it to that,” said Jinian. “I would there were more like you, Peter, and Silkhands, and fewer like that Ghoul.”
I think I may have flushed, conscious as I was of my own struggles to perceive and do the right. Gamelords! It is not hard to risk your life when you have nothing to live for, but it is a hard thing when life is sweet. I tried to catch Silkhands’ eyes, hoping for a lover’s glance from her, but her eyes were closed and she breathed as though asleep. Jinian went on reading, unaware.
“ `In the meantime, Festivals will provide opportunity for reproduction by young people ... School Houses will protect them ... I fear that those at the Base have lost all touch with reality. They are breeding monsters in those caverns and they do not come into the light...
“ `I have met some of the native inhabitants of this place. How foolish to think there were none. They leave us untroubled in this small space but will not do so forever...
“ `I have set this great plan ... a thousand years in the carrying out ... centuries of the great contract between us and the people we have set to guard us.’”
“Read that last part again,” I said to her.
“ ` ... a thousand years in the carrying out. It will depend upon a hundred favorable chances, the grace and assistance of fate and those who dwelt in the place before we came, and the perpetuation through the centuries of the great contract between us and the people we have set to guard us.’”
“Nothing ponderous about that,” I said in an attempt to be witty. “Lords, but the man took himself seriously.”
“What man? Who wrote this? I thought at first it was printed, like some books, but someone wrote it by hand in tiny printing in old style letters. In places it’s all smudged, as though the person was tired or confused.” She thrust it at me, pointing with one strong finger, and I saw what she meant. Over the years the ink had faded and the paper discolored to make the whole monochromatic and dim. Her question triggered that evasive thought which flickered at the edge of my mind. It was too late; we were too weary. I could hardly see the road verge, much less the pages in the failing light.
“I believe Barish wrote it,” I said. “A kind of diary of his thoughts? Though why such a diary should now be considered so important is beyond me. Windlow the Seer searched for this book for decades and read it constantly once he had found it, searching in it for¾what? Right now I believe the Immutables are searching for this book. Perhaps others search for it as well. Oh, it’s an important book, I’m sure. If I could only find out why. I thought hearing it in your voice might help, but the solution won’t come...”
And then, while Silkhands dozed, I told Jinian all that I knew or guessed about this book and about the Gamesmen of Barish while she asked sensible, penetrating questions in a manner which reminded me much of Himaggery on his better days. In the dusk her face had a pale, translucent quality, a kind of romantic haziness, and I remembered I had thought her plain before. Though what was it Chance always said? Any hull looks sound in the dark? Well, her hull was sound enough, dark or light.
“Windlow said something about words changing their meaning over time,” I told her. “He said that if we knew the words, then we would know what things once meant¾or words to that effect. He mentioned, for example, that in this book the word `Festival’ meant `opportunity for reproduction,’ and he said that was important. I don’t know why.”
She was a sober little person, very serious and intent. When she considered things, two narrow lines appeared between her eyes and her mouth turned down as though she chewed on the idea. It made me want to laugh to see her so earnest with the dirt on her face and her teeth blacked out. It was as though she had forgotten how she looked. Silkhands had not. Every time she wakened, she made some petulant remark about it.
“It is true that powerful Gamesmen are careless of the lives of others,” Jinian offered. “We all know that, of course. It’s part of the Game. So if we did not have School Houses, then young people without Talent yet, or those who don’t know how to use their Talents, would be eaten in the Game in great numbers. And if they were shut up always in School Houses, then they would not have babies. We were taught at Vorbold’s House that it is easiest for women to bear children when they are young¾the women, I mean, not the babies. So, when women are young, they are in School Houses, and if they must have babies then, we must have Festivals. Otherwise there would be few babies and everything would stop.” She sighed. “If Barish wrote this, he is saying that School Houses and Festivals are necessary, and further he is saying that he, personally, has invented both. But¾that was so long ago. It is a very old book.”
“Very,” I murmured. “Very old. What was that bit about the native inhabitants?”
She did not answer for some time. I thought she had gone to sleep. I thought of going to sleep myself. The water oxen were now plodding along in starlight, and we had to give serious consideration to stopping for the night so they could browse and we could eat and sleep, preparatory to our mad gallop into tomorrow behind the faithful team. When Jinian spoke at last it was conversation extended into dream.
“Did you ever hear the story of faithful-dog?” she asked. I nodded that I had. It was a nursery tale. “Did you ever see a dog?”
“It’s just another word for fustigar,” I said sleepily.
“No it isn’t,” she said. “In the story of faithful-dog, the dog wags his tail, his tail, you know? Remember? Fustigars can’t wag their tails. They don’t have tails.”
“Well, maybe at one time they did,” I objected. I had never thought of that, though indeed the old story did have a wagging tail in it. That was the point of the story for children, for it was the wag of our bottoms as we acted it out which made it fun.
“Pombis don’t have tails,” she continued. “Cats do. Mice do. Owls and hawks do, but flitchhawks don’t. Horses do. But zellers don’t.”
“We don’t,” I said.
“I know. That’s what’s confusing, because I think we belong with cats and horses and faithful-dog. But we don’t have tails and they all do. Anyhow, it’s as though there are two kinds of animals and birds and creatures, one kind from here and one kind from somewhere else. Only I don’t know if we’re the kind from here or the kind from somewhere else. Do you?”
In the place of the magicians, I had learned an answer to this. “We’re from somewhere else.” She accepted this, as she did almost everything I said, very soberly. “The shadowpeople are from here, however. And they have no tails.”
“Have you seen them?” She was as excited as a child seeing the Festival Queen for the first time. I told her I had seen them, and what they were like, and she laughed when I told her of their songs, their flutes, their dances, their huge eyes and wide, winged ears, their appetite for rabbits (which have tails) and bunwits (which don’t). I told her of their language, the sound of them crying “Peter, eater, ter ter ter,” in the caverns of the firehills. The water oxen had found a convenient wallow at the side of the road where a canal spilled into a little slough, and they refused to plod another step. I shook Silkhands awake, and we burned charcoal in the clay stove I had bought to heat our food. Somewhere to the north of us a shuddering growl came out of the earth, and we felt the vibrations under us. “Groles,” said Silkhands. “Have you ever seen them, Peter?”
I told her I had not, though I had heard the roar often as a child when I had lived in Mertyn’s House.
“Sausage groles?” asked Jinian eagerly, and both Silkhands and I laughed.
“No. Rockeaters. From Three Knob. For sausage groles, one must go on up to Learner, where the Nutters live. Only rockeaters make that noise, and there will be no fustigars or pombis within sound of it, for it drives them away.”
“Do they have tails?” This from Jinian, so sleepily that I knew she would not hear the answer. And she did not, making a little sighing noise which told me she was asleep. I covered her with a blanket and let her lie where she was. The ground was at least as soft as the wagon bed, and probably cleaner. I didn’t know whether groles had tails or not. I thought not. I went to sleep making an inventory of all those birds and beasts with tails, thinking how odd it was that I had learned this from Jinian when none of my Gamesmasters seemed to have known or thought anything about it.
On the morning, we composed ourselves to ugliness once more and got back into the wagon. If the water oxen could be kept to a steady pace, we would arrive at the Three Knob turn off by midday. I hoped Chance had arrived there safely, and I wondered what guise we might travel in as we went farther north which would not betray us to the Boneraisers. I had no doubt they still searched for me, and I had not yet thought of any convenient way to go through the minions which had been sent against me to reach Huld, who had sent them. It would do no lasting good to Game against mercenaries. Huld could wear me to a nubbin sending bought men against me. So, thinking this and thinking that, we rolled along. Almost I missed seeing the skeleton train ahead, but Jinian thrust a sharp elbow into my ribs and began to sing. Silkhands picked up the song, and they two began nodding their heads in time to their hushed la, la, la as I dived deep and grasped Didir to cover me.
“Larby Lanooly went to sea,” they sang. “Hoo di Hi and wamble di dee. Did not matter he would or no, did not matter the winds did blow, put him into the boat to row, Oho for Larby Lanooly.” There were at least thirty verses to the song, and Silkhands knew them all. While I drove, letting Didir manage Peter while Globber held the reins, the skeleton train came toward us, back down the road from the north. Old Clobber was terrified, as he should have been. He clucked and cried and drove the wagon off the road, almost into a canal. He sat there and shivered in his socks while the bones danced past him, the two women next to him clinging together and singing under their breath, “Larby Lanooly went to farm, Hoo di Hi and wamble di darm. Did not matter he knew not how, put him behind an ox and plow, he’ll do well or not enow, Oho for Larby Lanooly.”
If Karl Pig-face had been wearing the strange cap before, he was not wearing it now. His face was red again, shiny with sweat, and he tugged angrily at a cord which bound him to the Bonedancer on one side of him. As they passed, Didir heard one of them say, “If you will not do as you are told, we can put the cap back on you, Rancelman.”
“I’ve told you,” blustered Karl. “When you had that stupid cap on me, I thought I felt him down the road here. But I couldn’t tell you. You need no cap, nor no cord to bind me. Pay me, as you’d pay anyone, and I’ll seek Peter Priss to the end of the lands and purlieus for you. No love between him and me, and I’m glad to do it.”
“Earn our trust, Rancelman. Earn it if you can, and no more sneaking away in the night. Now, stop tugging at the binding and lead us to the place it was you say you felt him last.” And they went on by us, not looking at us at all. It was many a long moment before Globber got himself together to drive the oxen back onto the road. Meantime we had taken Larby Lanooly from farm to shop to mine to devil-take-it.
“If they have anyone in that group who can track,” I said at last when the Boneraisers were gone and we were plodding northward once more, “we may see them again. I doubt not that Chance left readable tracks when he came north from the copse.”
“Three days’ traffic on the road?” asked Jinian. “Would that not cover?”
I clenched my teeth, trying to remember. So far as I could recall, only the yellow horse had had distinctive shoes, nubby ones such as they use along the River Dourt, but the yellow horse should have been sold or traded or simply set loose long since. “Perhaps,” I said. “Though I would feel better about it if there had been rain and a bit of wind.”
“Well, that may happen soon enough,” said Silkhands. “Watch the sky west of us where the black clouds gather and pour. I doubt not we’ll have more rain than is comfortable before nightfall.”
“Before nightfall, we’ll be at Three Knob,” I promised them. We kept that schedule with time to spare, for the sun stood short of noon when we came to the turnoff to the right which led away toward three bald stone hills grouped above the foundry smokes. Stone pillars marked the turn, and we drove between lines of long, low brooder houses where they hatched the groles. There were few of the creatures about during the day, most of them being down below ground, gnawing their way through the stone with their adamant teeth, chewing the rock into gravel and packing it into their endless gut. At night they would digest it, roaring the while, and on the morn the dung gatherers would wash the night’s gravel for powder of iron and nuggets of occamy and silver, less only the light metals which the groles had nourished themselves upon. As we drove, we began to see large groles feeding on piles of broken stone and bone and charcoal. These were the toothlings, just growing their teeth of adamant, soon to be promoted to work in the mines. Handlers stood beside each, stroking the creatures with long iron-tipped staffs, crooning grole songs to them. I shuddered. Imagine a great gut, as wide as a man is tall, as long as five men laid end to end, with a dozen rows of teeth and no eyes, and that is a grole. Still, how would we have metal for our axles and weapons did we not have groles?
“Stop,” said Jinian. “I want to pet one.”
I pulled up the wagon, amazed, and she hobbled over to one of the beasts, staying in character the whole way, to feel its huge side. Nothing would do but that I come as well, and Silkhands, to feel the stony hide of the beast and wonder at its size. The handlers seemed well accustomed to such marveling from travelers, almost uninterested in us.
Then we got back into the wagon and Jinian surprised me further. “You are Shifter, are you not?” Well, of course I had told her I was. “I thought it wise for you to lay hands on the creature. That is how it works, does it not? You must lay hands on it? So I have heard?”
So she thought it wise, did she? She must have seen something of my irritation, for she flushed, then shrugged. “If I have misunderstood, forgive me.” She had not misunderstood. That was how it worked, or at least one way it worked. But Shifting into something like that! The bulk, alone, would take hours to build. One could do it by starting small, eating rock and converting it to bulk, then more and more. I thought the process out, step by step, lost in it, and then blushed, embarrassed, to catch her eyes on me. She knew very well what I had been thinking.
“No need for forgiveness,” I said. “It is an interesting thought.” As it was. I did not ever intend to do anything about it, but it was interesting.
The mines and many small foundries were scattered along the gulches and upon the ridges around the three mountains, but Three Knob itself lay cupped among them like a child’s toys spilled upon a dish. I chose not to ride into the town as we were. Instead we would engage in further deception. We found a twist in the road behind a long, crumbling wall, unharnessed the water oxen and drove them away down the slope of the meadow toward a distant line of trees which marked a stream. Then I took the hammer I had brought for the purpose and beat the wagon into several pieces, separating these from the wheels. When stacked along the wall, it looked like what it was. Wood fit for the fire. Perhaps a wheel or two worth salvage by some desperate wagoner. Our rags were buried beneath the wagon, and we cleaned the dirt from our faces and the tar from our teeth before walking into Three Knob as a middle-aged buyer of something or other and his two daughters. I hoped I would not have to look far for Chance.
As it was, I did not have to look far enough. The yellow horse I had told him to get rid of was cavorting in a paddock near an Inn, nubby shoes and all. Chance was toping wine, red of nose and bibulous, full of good cheer and unresponsive to my annoyance.
“Why, my boy, the Bonedancers are all long gone on ahead. He’s a good horse. No need to trade him off just yet.”
“They’re behind us again, Chance. Behind us. They passed us on the road. Karl Pig-face, with his nasty little mind hunting me, and he did feel me back there when you and I lay up in the copse and watched him. Further, he knows you!”
I wasn’t getting through to him at all until Silkhands reached out to take his hand with an intent expression. She was doing something intricate and intimate to his insides. I saw the flush leave his face and gradual awareness seep in to him. “Ah. Ah, well, lad. I’m sorry about that. Truly, I had not thought they would return. And they may not have one among them who can track.”
“Rancelmen do,” said Jinian. “They have a skill for it. We must think quickly what to do, for they could be on the start of our trail and back here by evening.”
Silkhands nodded agreement to this sadly. Her face was quite drawn, and I felt a quick pity. The way had been hard on her. I could not help her, however, and Chance interrupted the thought.
“It was my doing, so fair it be my undoing. I’ll take the animal with much hoorah and ride off on the back roads. Once far enough along, I’ll get rid of the animal and continue so far as Reavebridge. You all lay by here until you’re rested¾Silkhands needs a night’s sleep in a bed¾then come on north to meet me. Have you barter enough for new mounts, lad?”
I told him truthfully that I did not. The last coin I had had been spent on the wagon and water oxen. So he dug down and gave me a pouch which seemed well filled. Part of his gain from Xammer, no doubt, and he did not deny it. He was generously quick to offer it, and I knew he felt guilty. At the moment, I was in no mood to forgive him, though no great harm had been done if he would ride swiftly away. We had all been talking quietly, so we separated ourselves from him as would any travelers who had made casual talk upon the road and busied ourselves finding lodging. Meantime Chance gathered his string of animals together, and got himself gone with much loud joshing and suchlike, to draw attention.
As for the rest of us, we found two rooms adjoining, upstairs above the stable yard, and set about having a bath in deep tin tubs before the fire. Afterwards, wrapped in great, rough towels, we sat in the window to sip warmed wine and watch for the Bonedancer, hoping he would not come. It was after dark that he came, he and his colleagues, but come he did. They did not leave. The bones lay in a drift against the stable wall. The residents of Three Knob cowered in their homes. The Boneraisers, including Karl Pig-face, sat in the common room below, eating and drinking with much cheer. We, Jinian, Silkhands and I, stayed in the rooms above, quiet and inconspicuous.
As for me, I was hung between two pillars. On the one side, I was as angry as I have ever been, angry at Karl Pig-face for sitting below in the common room, undoubtedly eating and drinking his fill without any need to hide or sly about. On the other hand, I remembered clinging to that tree while the Ghoul pranced beneath me, as close to death as I have ever come. I felt no desire for audacity, but I hungered for vengeance against Huld and all his minions. Across the room from me Jinian sat, staring at me, the fire dancing in her eyes. Silkhands slept. I do not know where I got the idea that Jinian knew what I was thinking. There was no Demon tickle in my head, and it wasn’t that kind of mind reading anyhow. I simply thought that she knew. I was certain of it when she said, “They don’t know me at all. If they ride out tonight, I could lend them a lantern to light them through the dark ... tunnels.”
I was not at all sure I liked her knowing what I thought, but it would work better if she did help. “Tonight would certainly be best,” I agreed.
“They must be encouraged to leave soon, then,” she said. “Perhaps they would be so encouraged if they heard that the horse they are following is soon to be sold or traded? If they heard this from someone?”
“Someone being you?”
She smiled. “Oh, I don’t fear the Bonedancer. I am not pretty enough to attract that kind of attention, either. I can try.”
“They may Read you.”
“I think not. I will do it simply. But not until you are ready.”
I thought about that. “Midnight, then. Or earlier, if it looks like they are going off to sleep.” Privately I thought it fairly risky, but better than doing nothing. I slipped out the back way, walked at the side of the road Chance had taken, able to see the prints of the nubby shoes even in the light of the lantern I had brought with me. The road wound and climbed back into the gullies above the town, dodging behind this bank and that hillock. I had not gone far before I found what I was looking for, a narrow defile where the roadway cut through a bank. I put out the lantern and got to work.
As I did so, I visualized what was undoubtedly going on back at the Inn. Silkhands would stay quietly asleep. As a former Gamesmistress of Vorbold’s House¾to say nothing of her being a Healer¾she might be known to someone in the place. Jinian, on the other hand, would be only an anonymous girl, of Gamesman class by her dress. She would go into the common room to the place the Innkeeper sat in the corner adding up his accounts and keeping an eye on the man who poured the beer and wine. She would wait for a lull in the conversation, then say, “Innkeeper? The man who left this afternoon, the one who owned the pretty yellow horse with the nubby shoes? Do you know if he is coming back? He said he intended to sell or trade the horse at once, and I thought I might offer for it.”
The Innkeeper would say something about the horse, or about Chance. They would talk of his having ridden north on the back road. Jinian would evince disappointment. “Well, the man will have traded the horse by the time I could catch up to him tomorrow. Ah, well. I will not worry on it further.” And then she would take herself off upstairs.
Behind her in the common room, the Bonedancer would snarl at Karl Pig-face. Then, if all went as I thought it might, they would decide to ride out after the man and the horse with the nubby shoes to catch him before the trail was lost. If they hurried, they would say, they might catch him as he slept somewhere, and find they had captured Peter without further effort. I went over this scenario in my head several times, finding it both likely and satisfying. Some time went by. I began to doubt and fidget, never ceasing to chew away at the work I was doing. The moon rode at my back, curved as a blade. In the dim light I saw the shadows at the turn of the road, then heard the clatter, clatter of the bones as they rounded the corner. They had a lantern, for the Bonedancer led them in a puddle of yellow light, Karl trudging sullenly beside him with the others. Then Karl’s head came up.
“I Read him,” he whispered excitedly. “Petey Priss. I Read him. Not far off. Near us. Oh, what a fool to go sleeping by the road! He’s close ahead of us.”
“Well then, walk quiet, little Rancelman,” a whispered reply from the Bonedancer. “At the end of this tunnel here we’ll spread out and seek him. Then you’ll be paid as promised and a good job done.” I saw the gleam of moonlight in their eyes, then lost the light as they entered the tunnel, Gamesmen first, bones after.
Only then did I shut my mighty grole mouth and let the grole innards grind. In the two hours which had passed, I had managed to add enough bulk to grow a man and a half high and nine men long. I had made a believable tunnel. One without an end, unfortunately for those who entered.
I lay there in the darkness, a great, black bowel in the night, trying to decide whether I felt sadness over Karl Pig-face. I decided that he was more digestible to me dead than alive and hunting me. When I had finished the light metal in the bones (delicious to a grole¾they taste with their stomachs, I learned) I pulled the net and gave up bulk, having first heaved myself out of the defile and onto a broader patch of ground. What was left was only a long, vaguely cylindrical pile of rock and some powdered ores. So much for one more of Huld’s reaches in my direction. I was not fool enough to think it was the last or the strongest. Next time would not be this easy.
Next time, I thought, he may send a Game I cannot win.