The End of the Game (34 page)

“Ah, well,” I said comfortingly. “It is the Merchant’s man who is to go, is it not?”

“I. Me. The Merchant’s man, yes.”

“And on the festival of Finaggy-Bum, tomorrow, the arbiters of Bloome will select their Merchant’s man?”

“From among the least stylish, yes. But you have found me out. You were not naifs at all. My chances of laying the job off on one of you are next to nothing.” So saying, he burst into angry tears, letting them flow down his face and into his beard without bothering to wipe at them at all. The truth tea had this effect of truth telling even upon emotions. Chance patted the fellow on the shoulder, commiserating, while Queynt tried to hide his smile.

“I think we may assure your stylishness tomorrow,” I told him. “And one of us will wear your old clothes, friend Brom, thus guaranteeing that it will be one of us who goes to Fangel as Merchant’s man of Bloome.” Of course, which one of us it would be was another matter.

“One of us, then,” I said to the troupe. “Whoever wishes to act the part?”

“I,” said Queynt. “Peter and Chance may be known to Huldra or Valearn. You traveled in the High Demesne, didn’t you, my boy? Some three or fours years ago?”

“We did, yes. But I never saw Prionde’s wife. Chance, did you?”

“I didn’t see any such lady. Oh, there was talk of a wife hiding somewhere in a tower, but I never saw her.”

“Still, she may have seen you. You, Jinian, will be needed for something else. Therefore, it must be me.” Queynt smiled again, posturing. “I will make a very good Merchant’s man.”

“We are not too different in size,” said Brom. “The old things would fit you. But... but no matter what we do, it may be the Cloth Merchants’ Council will still hold me to the position. They’ve said I’m not bad at the job. Or maybe they just hate me. Oh, it may be hopeless!”

“We will see to that,” I promised him. “Do they meet at any given time and place?”

“They will meet tonight,” he answered. “In the loft of the weaving mill.” He turned away, his face working, murmuring as he went, “Think of it. Riding out of Bloome. Titty-tup, titty-tup, along Tan-tivvy Boulevard. Not to Fangel. No. West, I think. Or even south. Tittytup, titty-tup.” He went down the corridor, galloping as though he had a hobby between his legs, lashing one thigh with an imaginary whip.

“Mad,” said Queynt almost affectionately. “Quite mad.”

The great mill of Bloome crouched upon the eastern edge of the city, a heaped monstrosity, glaring banefully through a hundred eyes, growling and munching as it ate the provender brought by the citizens, spewing out its cloth in endless lengths to be rolled into bolts and carried away. Day and night those who were not involved in the festivals of Bloome were involved in feeding the mighty machine or carrying its excreta away.

Just now all the shoulder-high slots in the courtyard were vomiting fabric of an excruciating pink color into waiting wagons. A bored knife man stood to one side, ready to cut the weave when each cart was full, and around him the drivers sat, some drinking, some playing at dice, some half-asleep.

From this cluttered courtyard, a narrow door opened upon an even narrower iron stair, which twisted its skeletal length upward through roaring, dust-filled spaces to a loft. This space, tall as a church, was lit by grimed windows and a few scattered bulbs whose filaments alternately glowed and dimmed as the mechanicals below grumbled and howled. There, at a brokenlegged table, the Cloth Merchants’ Council of Bloome sat upon rickety chairs at its interminable meetings. It was here they were assembled while the fireworks shop burned on Shebelac Street, unable to hear the sirens for the endless growling of the looms below.

If one looked out the dirty windows by daylight, one could see the hoppers at the rear of the building where the carts lined up each day to dump weeds and trees, trash and old furniture, last night’s costumes and banners and tents into the huge, shaking hoppers. The hoppers emptied into a steel enormity where no man had ever gone alive and from which only fabric emerged at the other end. There were only two rules of life so far as the Cloth Merchants’ Council was concerned. Never let the machine run out of stuff to weave. Never run out of ways to use the weaving up.

The machine had run out of raw materials only once.

Bloome had learned then that the machine had its own ways of collecting materials if it was not sufficiently fed.

Babies, geese, fustigars, tame zeller, houses, people: the machine did not discriminate. Since that time (called “The Exemplary Episode” in the minutes of the council) the machine had not been allowed to run dry.

That was practical politics, that rule.

The other rule was religious.

Bloome had been a cloth-making town as long as anyone remembered. The mill had always been there. It was assumed to have been put there by a god or by the ancestors, either to be equally revered. Since neither god nor the ancestors did things without purpose, the cloth, arriving in quantities ever greater and always far more than could be used in Bloome, must have a purpose. It had been up to the people of Bloome to find it.

They had found it at last, after many trials. Festivals.

At first only once or twice a season, later six or eight times a season, most recently every few days. Every few days a new festival, to deck the city with new banners.

Every few days a new festival, requiring new costumes for residents and visitors alike. Every few days a new festival, with new tents and marquees to be sewn. And in the quiet times between, weary cleanup crews laboured to gather the materials to take to the hoppers again. A precarious balance, but better than another “Exemplary Episode”.

“I’m not selling the pink stuff,” said a banner maker, who, as he often mentioned apropos of nothing, had been a member of the council for fifty years. “It won’t go. They don’t want it. Everyone is sick to death of it.”

“Bonus points,” remarked a heavyset, dark-skinned woman, scratching her nose and making notes at the same time. “We’ll award bonus points for pink. The way we had to do with the puce chiffon three years ago. Machine made it for two seasons, and we couldn’t give it away.”

“How about lining the streets with it? We did that once, I remember. In my mother’s time.”

“Trouble is, the stuff tears so. Shoddy. You’d have half Bloome tripping and rolling around on the cobbles. No, we’ll award bonus points and double to tent makers if they’ll quilt it in layers. Next?”

“Arahg,” growled the long-faced banner maker, referring to his notes. “Everyone’s running out of thread. Machine hasn’t given us any thread for three seasons. We’re going to have to set up to ravel if we don’t get some soon.”

“We saved out a thousand bolts of that loose, blue stuff last year,” said the heavy woman. “The thread pulls right out. No weave to it to speak of. We can put the children on it.”

“Going to look like hell,” growled the banner maker.

“So what else is new?” The door opened to admit a wizened man in a violently striped cloak, notable for its inclusion of the pink stuff in wide, bias-cut borders. “Evening,” he said. “Mergus. Madame Browl. Gentlemen. Sorry I’m late. Stuck around my front door for a little extra time tonight waiting to see if Brom’s guests came out. I think he may have found a naïf.”

“Evening, Philp. I didn’t know anyone came to town today. Why, when there was no festival?”

“Wasn’t till early this morning. Don’t think they came for festival. Four of ‘em. Wagon with birds pulling it. Haven’t seen anything like that before. Two older fellows. One young one, one girl. Brom got to ‘em before anyone could stop him. They didn’t exactly look simple. Brom may have a time with ‘em.”

“The problem is,” said Madame Browl, scratching her nose once more, “whether we want to let Brom off the platter. He’s been a good Merchant’s man, all things taken into account.”

“Gettin’ restless, though.”

“Well, restless is one thing.”

“Mad is the other. Don’t want him doing anything silly. We had one once who did, remember?”

“Tried to blow up the machine, by Drarg. Got a hundred or so of us killed.”

“Still, I’d be disinclined to let Brom go. A visitor simple enough to accept the honour might be too simple to do the work!”

“Might have been an honor once,” said Mergus, the droopy cheeks of his long, lined face wobbling as he spoke, one tufty eyebrow up, the other down in a hairy diagonal that seemed to slide off his face near his large left ear. “Since the Dream Merchant’s been in on it, it’s less so.”

“Dream Merchant only took advantage of the fact we’ve flocks of revelers,” said Philp. “The Merchants’ men in Zinter and Thorpe have to distribute crystals, too. We’re not the only town with the burden.”

“Not the only town under threat from storm, either. We haven’t been hit by wind or hail yet, but there’s towns farther north that have!” Madame Browl growled at them, looking from face to face. “Towns that complain learn to regret it. I say we do whatever’s needed to keep things peaceful and running, and Brom’s not been bad at that.”

“Still,” said Philp, “there was a time the Merchant’s man of Bloome worked for the Cloth Merchants’ Council of Bloome, not for some foreigner. Makes it hard to hold him accountable.”

“Come, come,” huffed Mergus. “We hold him accountable enough. Except for a day or two a year when he’s off to Fangel or a few days when the emissaries from Fangel come here, he’s biddable enough. I vote we keep Brom in the job, no matter he’s been tryin’ to bribe the costume makers to get him off the hook.” High in one shadowed corner of the room, a slithery shape that had been extended over a roof beam withdrew itself into a ventilation duct, slithering out again some distance down in the building with me in its dusty coils. Peter and I had heard all we needed to hear.

“Well?” asked Queynt.

“They’re not inclined to let him off,” said Peter, brushing the dust off his slithery skin even as he Shifted back into a shape closer to his own. “Funny thing. They don’t seem to be in control of the weaving machine. All these festivals? Just to use up fabric.”

“Ah,” Queynt said, scratching his head with one finger. “What happens if they don’t use up the cloth?”

“Two of the oldsters were mumbling about the machine seeking raw materials on its own. The way they figure, they have to use it up so they can feed it back in.”

“It seems to be religion,” I said. “They’re predisposed to believe that the cloth has to be used for something.”

“Ah. Well then, we’ll have to take that into account. If the problem has emanated from a religious source, the solution will have to come from some similar source. What do you think, Jinian? If it’s me to be the naif, then it’s you to be the plenipotentiary. From whom will you say you have been sent, do you think?”

“A god, perhaps. There’s less chance of controversy that way. If I represent myself as coming from an ancestor, someone is likely to ask which ancestor, and that might lead to endless conversation. Who do they worship here? What gods are given houseroom?”

“Few or none,” said Chance. “I trotted up and down half a dozen streets, in and out of a dozen taverns or so. They swear by no gods I know of, though they swear often in a cowardly craven manner by the wind and the hail...”

“By Storm Grower?” I asked him.

“Never. They swear by the wind and the hail, and then they spit, thus, to drive the evil away. Oh, and sometimes they swear by Great Drarg, Master of the Hundred Demons.”

“Great Drarg of the Hundred Demons,” I mused. “There’s something I can use. Well. No time like the present.” And I went off that weary climb up those long, metal-echoing stairs to the room where the council met, leaving Peter to scramble into the ventilation ducts once more.

I could read their faces well enough. The Cloth Merchants’ Council of Bloome had probably not been interrupted in living memory. Never by a stranger, certainly. Still, they were impressed by my demeanor, by my hauteur, my poise.

“Good citizens,” I said. “Council members of the town of Bloome. I have arrived today as plenipotentiary of Drarg, Master of the Hundred Demons, sent to beg your pardon and ask a small boon on Drarg’s behalf.”

The voice I used was one learned from my Dervish mother, Bartelmy of the Ban. It was a cold voice, without edges, which left nothing of itself lying about to be picked at by the argumentative. The best Madame Browl could do was stutter, “We ... what have we to do with ah... Drarg?”

“Nothing, madame, save that his minions have been trifling with you. You have here a certain great machine established by your ancestors. Is that not true?” They nodded that it was true, very true. Since they were sitting on top of it, it would have been difficult to deny.

“And this machine has a voracious appetite which cannot be stayed? Ah, yes. So we have been informed. Such was the work of the Demons. My master’s apologies. He has sent me to rectify matters.”

“You mean ... you mean the mill isn’t supposed to be fed—isn’t supposed to run ... all the time?”

I allowed frost to creep into my words. “Have I not said as much?” They nodded, shook their heads. Had this person said as much? Had she? Perhaps she had.

“While my master is unable at the moment to correct the actions of his minions (he is far away on pressing business), he has directed me to take measures to alleviate your troubles. Measures which will allow the citizens of Bloome to sleep, to dream, to cook good food, to make love. Ah”—I changed the voice to one lyrical and romantic, lush as a summer meadow—”to enjoy all life’s pleasures.” It became cold once more.

“Drarg wishes the boon, of course.”

“Boon?” Philp trembled. “What boon would that be?”

“Simply to release your current Merchant’s man from his position. It is not fair that he be kept in his job longer. He has suffered much, as indeed so have you all.” I stared around the table, meeting incomprehension on some faces, distrust on others, hope on a few.

“How do you say, council members?” Madame Browl found her voice again. “If you can do as you say, ah ... Your Excellency? Your Worship? If you can relieve us of the constant necessity to feed the mill—oh, yes, we would grant any boon. Provided no blasphemy takes place. No heretical notions?”