The End of the Game (29 page)

Starved to death, from the look of them, and with food all round for the picking or digging—furry, thickskinned pocket-bushes full of edible nuts, a northern thrilp bush—smaller fruit, and sweeter than the southern variety—table roots just beside the tiny stream.

“Hell,” I said to Queynt, disgusted. “I suppose they’ve got those yellow crystals in their mouths, like all the rest.” Half-right. In the lantern light we could see the male corpse had one on a thong around his neck; the female had one in her mouth, having sucked herself to death on it. Their bodies were still warm. The baby was cold, probably dead of dehydration after screaming his lungs out for several days trying to tell someone he was hungry and thirsty and wet.

Chance and Peter were dismounted by the corpses.

Peter gave me a troubled look, knowing I’d be upset by the baby. Chance eased his wide belt and mused, “I suppose we could dig them in, though there seems little sense to bother.” At first we’d stopped to bury the human dead along the road, but they had become more and more numerous as we came farther north. There had soon been too many to bury, but it still bothered me to let the babies lie. “I’ll bury the baby,” I said in a voice that sounded angry even to me. “Let the others alone.” Queynt shook his head, but he didn’t argue. All the babies reminded me of one I’d taken care of in a class back in Xammer. The one in Xammer had the same baffled look when he fell asleep that many of the dead babies did, as though it had all been too much for him and he was glad to be out of it. I wrapped this one in our last towel, reminding myself to buy towels the next time we got to any place civilized—if there were any place civilized in these northlands. I’d used up our supply burying babies and children.

Queynt said, “Jinian, if you’re going to go on like this, I’ll lay in a supply of shrouds. It would be cheaper than good toweling.” I flushed, getting on with the half-druggled grave I was digging with the shovel we used for latrine ditches.

“I know it doesn’t make sense, Queynt, but otherwise I get bad dreams.” He already knew that; we’d discussed it before.

There’s a city somewhere ahead,” said Peter, trying to change the subject. “I can hear it.” It wasn’t surprising. He had Shifted himself a pair of ears which stood out like batwings on either side of his head. Probably hadn’t even realized he was doing it. I turned away to hide the expression on my face—he did look silly—only to see Queynt touching his tongue to the crystal the dead man had had around his neck.

Even though Queynt had told us over and over he was immune, seeing him do that made me shudder. I was going to find out about that alleged immunity sooner or later, but so far he hadn’t explained it. Now he saw me shiver and shook his head at me.

“We have to know, girl!” Well, he was right. We did have to know. Those louts outside Zog had had crystals hanging around their necks, too. Reddish ones. Queynt hadn’t had a chance to taste one of those, but then he hadn’t needed to. It was evident what dreams of violence and rapine they were breeding in the brats. Along with everything else, they had been chanting a litany to Storm Grower while they tried to kill us. We’d been hunting Storm Grower for some seasons now, and hearing the name in this context made the hunt seem even more ominous than we’d already decided it was.

Queynt nodded at me about this yellow crystal, telling me it was like the others we’d found beside the dead bodies along the road. Anyone touching it to his tongue would be utterly at peace, in a place of perfect contentment with no hunger, no thirst, no desires.

Someone sucking a crystal like that wouldn’t hear a baby crying or the sound of their own stomach screaming for food. Someone sucking on that dream would lie there and die. And there were hundreds along the road who had done just that—families, singletons, even whole mounted troops, dead on the ground with the horses still saddled and wandering. We’d found one pile of small furry things which Queynt believed were Shadowpeople, though the carrion birds had left little enough to identify. All with yellow crystals in their mouths, their hands, or on thongs around their necks.

We hadn’t found a single one on anyone still living.

When the grave was filled in, I pulled myself up on the wagon seat again. Queynt nodded sympathetically as we started off into the gray light of early dawn.

“Someone’s getting rid of excess population,” he mumbled. “Dribs and drabs of it.”

“What I can’t figure out is how and why certain ones are so all of a sudden excess! We’ve found dead Gamesmen and dead pawns, young and old, male and female. All with these same damn yellow things. The crystals are all alike, same color, same size. Someone has to be making them!”

“You’ve mentioned that before, Jinian. Several times, as I recall.” He sighed, yawned, scratched himself. “You know, girl,” he drawled, going into one of his ponderous perorations, “though we may conjecture until we have worn imagination to shreds, theorize until our brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we find out where they’re coming from, anything we guess is only hot air and worth about as much.” He fell into a brooding silence as we rattled on with the krylobos talking nonsense to one another and Peter and Chance riding just ahead. So we had ridden, league on league, hundreds and hundreds of them, ever since leaving the lands of the True Game. Some days it seemed we’d been riding like this forever.

I could see Peter’s animated profile from time to time as he turned to speak to Chance. His face was bronze from the sun. He’d grown up, too, in the last few seasons. The bones in his cheeks and jaw were bold, no longer child-like, and there was a strong breadth to his forehead. It was his mouth that got to me, though, the way his upper lip curved down in the center, a funny little dip, as though someone had pinched it. Every time I saw that, I wanted to touch it with my tongue. Like a sweet. No. Not like a sweet.

Well, I needed comforting, and seeing him there within reach, within touching distance, made me want to yell or run or go hide in the wagon.

Sometimes I wished that the way I felt about Peter was an illness. If it were an illness, a Healer could cure it.

As it was, it went on all the time with no hope of a cure.

Every morning when the early light made sensuous wraiths of the mists, every evening when the dusk ghosts crept into erotic tangles around the foliage (see, even my language was getting lubricious), I found myself thinking unhelpful thoughts that made me blush and breathe as though I’d been running. I furnished every grove with likely spots for dalliance, and lately I’d taken to crossing off every day that passed, counting the ones that remained until the season my oath of celibacy would be done.

Queynt had been watching me; I caught his kindly stare and blushed. “Troubled about your oath?” he asked me sympathetically.

He caught me unaware. One of the things that bothered me about Queynt was his habit of knowing what I was thinking. He wasn’t a Demon. He had no business just knowing that way. “Yes.” I turned red again. It wasn’t any of his business, and yet. “By the Hundred Devils and all their pointy ears, Queynt, I can’t understand the sense of it. They said it was to let me study the art without distractions, but I’m not studying the art! I’m traveling. Trying to keep my skin whole. Trying to locate Dream Miner and Storm Grower and find out why they want me dead. Praying Peter keeps on being fond of me at least until the oath runs out. Celibacy doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense!”

“Oh,” he said mildly, “it does, you know. If you examine it. For example, you’ve been doing summons, haven’t you?” Well, I had, of course. A few. I might have called up an occasional water dweller to provide a fish dinner. Or maybe a few flood-chucks, just to help us get through some timber piles on the road. I admitted as much, wondering what he was getting at.

“Well, if you’ve been doing summons, have you ever stopped to think what an unconsidered pregnancy might do to the practice of the art?” An unconsidered pregnancy—or even a considered one—was about the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. But this was something not one of the dams had mentioned to me, not even the midwife, Tess Tinder-my-hand, who would have been the logical one to do so. My jaw dropped and I gave him an idiot look.

“Well, let’s say you’re pregnant and you summon up something obstreperous in the way of a water dweller. Then you go through the constraints and dismissal, but the water dweller considers the child in your belly was part of the summons. That child has neither constrained nor dismissed. So, time comes you give birth to something that looks rather more like a fish than you might think appropriate. Recent research would indicate a good many of the magical races are the results of just such Wize-ardly accidents.”

“Mermaids? Dryads?”

“Among others, and not the most strange, either. Have you ever called up a deep dweller?” I had heard them laugh a few times during bridge magic but had never called them. Murzy had told me to be careful, very careful, with them. I shook my head again.

“I have. Pesky, mischievous creatures, but more than half-manlike, for all that. If it weren’t for their fangy mouths, you’d think them children. I shouldn’t wonder if that race came from some magical accident during pregnancy. Not that deep dwellers are common.” All of which was something to think about. I snapped my mouth shut and thought about it.

I’d never really understood the reason for the oath—three years of celibacy (virginity in my case)—sworn when I was just fifteen. I’d done it, of course, because they wouldn’t let me be in the seven otherwise, and if I weren’t in the seven, I couldn’t go on studying the art.

At that time, the art was just about all I had to care about except for the seven old dams themselves. Well, six and me.

So, I took the oath, and got initiated, and learned some fascinating things, all a good bit of time before Peter came along. When he did come along, however, the oath began to feel like a suit of tight armor. There was it, all hard and smooth outside, and there was me, all sweaty and passionate inside. And that’s the way this trip had gone, with me being hard and cold half the time and hiding in the wagon the rest of the time, afraid of what might happen if I came out. I didn’t wonder that Queynt could see it. No one could have missed it.

Peter came galloping back, head down, looking thoroughly tired and irritable. “More trees down. A real swath cut up ahead. We’ll need to find a way around. No possible way of getting through it.” When we arrived at the tumble, it was obvious he was right. Seven or eight really big trees, fallen into a kind of jackstraw mess, their branches all tangled together. Lesser trees were fallen in the forest, the whole making a deadfall that we could have scrambled through if we’d had a few extra hours with nothing better to do and hadn’t minded leaving the wagon behind.

Off to the right the forest thinned out a little. There were wide-enough spaces between the trees to get down into a meadow, and the meadow looked as though it stretched past the obstruction and back to the road. Chance was at the edge of the open space, beckoning.

Queynt krerked a few syllables to Yittleby and Yattleby, they turning their great beaks in reply. He had said, “Can you handle this?” and they had replied, “Why even ask?” He had picked up a few words of the krylobos language over the years. I wasn’t always sure that he knew what he was saying.

It was first light, still very dim. I got off to walk beside the wagon as it tilted from side to side over the road banks and through the scattered trees. Watching where I was walking had become a habit, and when I saw it I stopped without conscious effort, hollering to Queynt, “Shadow! Stop. Look there.” Unlike the rivers of dark we had seen flowing along the road farther south, this patch was a small one, the size of an outspread cape. It lay under a willow copse, directly in my path, easy to miss in this half-light.

When we’d started this adventure, traveling along the shores of the Glistening Sea among the towns of the Bight, we’d seen shadow piled on shadow. We’d taken refuge in the wagon more than once when we’d encountered great swatches of it creeping and crawling about us in the forests and chasms. In comparison to that, this little patch was almost innocent looking.

“What’s holding you?” asked Peter, riding down behind us.

“Shadow.” Queynt was laconic about it. Though he claimed to have seen it seldom before we started our northern trip, he had accustomed himself to the sight better than I. Shadow never failed to give me a sick emptiness inside, a fading feeling, as though I had become unreal. I had been shadow bit once, in Chimmerdong. As they say, once bit, twice sore.

“Well.” He sat there for a moment, staring at it, shifting from haunch to haunch, looking cross the way he does when he’s hungry. “It doesn’t look any different from any other we’ve seen. Are you going to sit here all morning looking at it, or can we go around it and get back to the road?” Peter was, as usual, impatient.

There was no reason to watch it. Shadow seldom did anything. When it was angered, and as far as I knew no one knew what made it angry, it attacked. Otherwise, it simply lay. Anything that stepped into shadow, of course, would be better off dead sooner than it died.

Moved by a fleeting curiosity, I took off one boot and set my bare foot on the ground. There was a tingle there, very slight, which meant there was a remnant of the Old Road buried deep beneath us. I’d had the suspicion for some time that the shadow gathered mostly where there were remnants of the Ancient Roads, though I had no idea what it meant. Seeing Queynt’s curious gaze focused on me, I flushed and put my boot back on.

We led the birds around the shadow patch, though I think they were fully capable of avoiding it on their own, and then back up through the meadow to the road once more, where the stack of shattered trunks was now blocking the way behind us. Since hearing those Zoggian brats chant their litany to Storm Grower, I had a pretty good idea where this kind of damage came from—not that we could verify it. Ever since we’d first seen this random destruction, we’d asked about it.