The End of the Game (71 page)

Oh, Sylbie, Sylbie, foolish, silly girl. First rule of the Game, Sylbie. Put not yourself into another’s hands. First rule. And you put yourself in Huldra’s hands completely, holding nothing back, no motivation, no emotion, nothing you could use to fight with. And you put me in Huldra’s hands as well, making me impotent to help you. Because you didn’t like my being Shifter. You destroyed us both, Sylbie, because you did not like my being Shifter.

The waves of smoky black still came over me from time to time. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the hair across her face lay quiet and there was blood on her chest, soaking her shirt. Beside the fire Huldra chuckled as she dropped something into her cauldron.

“Rise Gambelor, Rise Gundegor. Rise Gurnasham!” She shrieked at the cauldron, stirring it, steam coming out of it in a great rush as though it had been one of the hot springs. “Rise Boldam, Burwar, Bass!” The steam coalesced, began to roil and eddy, making faces and forms in an endless succession, mouths that opened and shut, teeth that gaped, eyes that stared through shadow holes at the Witch, Huldra. On the other side of the fire, Dedrina sat, smiling, watching.

“Rise Sorfut, Sarbat, Shandypas!” screamed the witch. “Bring her whose heart I fed you to do my will!”

The horror of it clutched me. When Dorn the Necromancer had been my companion, I had seen Mandor, many days dead, rise up from his grave to answer my questions, and I had seen the ghosts of Bannerwell march to war. But I had not seen the newly dead called forth before, still grieving over life, rising from the cauldron in which her heart’s blood boiled. Oh, Sylbie, Sylbie.

She was there, weeping, shadow hands reaching out. I saw her mouth moving and could read the words on her lips. “Bryan! Bryan!” Calling for the baby she had left, her child and mine. Silently calling, “Bryan!”

Helpless, hopeless, I swore vengeance against Huldra. “Mavin,” I pled, “if I am dead, venge me against this Witch. Himaggery, if I am gone and the world goes soon after, still requite me against this hag.” All this horror and pain while still unable to move more than a muscle, tied tight by enchanted bonds and knowing nothing of what the Witch intended.

That was soon obvious. She beckoned the ghost, waving her hands in an endless dance, fingers making quick signs of fire, like letters in the air. Almost I thought I could read those signs. The ghost seemed able, also, for it wept and pled.

“What are you doing?” growled the Basilisk.

“Telling this unwilling Sending what it must do,” replied the Witch. “I tell it the child is forfeit if its mother does not do my bidding. It knows the man is forfeit if she does. So. It hangs there, quivering, in agony. Aha. Amusing, is it not, great lizard? So caught in their little feelings of goodness and badness, of love against love. Foolish, to care so much for any creature. . . .

“Still, I remember the love of a child. I had a son once. Mandor, his name was, as beautiful as the sun itself. That one inside there, that Peter, killed him—or as good as, though Mandor took his own life in the end. My son declared Game against King Mertyn of Schooltown, using Peter as Talisman in the play. Perhaps he knew Mertyn was thalan to the boy, perhaps not. It no longer matters what he knew or did not know. There was a hidden Sorcerer in play, and Mandor was burned with Sorcerer’s fire. Even I could not bear to look at my son after that. He was hideous who had been so beautiful. Well, my vengeance has been slow in coming, but it will be all the better for that. Watch now. The Sending is ready to depart.”

The Witch stood taller, reaching toward the sky as though to summon something hideous from beyond the clouds. “Find Jinian,” she cried. “Tell her I hold Peter the Shifter in my care. Soon he will begin to die if she does not come to me, and his dying will be long. If she will come to the caverns where the hundred thousand lie, if she will come there and submit to me, I will release him from his bondage.”

Ah, so and so she would release me. At the point of a knife, perhaps, or in the new heart of a fire, or only to bind me again in some new and more stringent chains. I begged silently that Jinian would not listen to this Sending, this screaming ghost that fled upward now into the sky, a streak of bloody gray, leaving the two hags behind to stare after it.

“I thank you for your cooperation,” the Basilisk was saying. “So we will be alike in vengeance. For your son, Mandor. For my daughter, Dedrina-Lucir. What avengement is in your mind?”

“I had thought to freeze him yet alive in the ice of the caverns where we go. It can be done with an ensorcellment to leave him alive and thinking for every moment of a thousand years. We will leave him so and seal the caverns behind him. Let him lie there and think of Mandor, and of Huld, my brother-husband, whom he also killed. Let him think of them until he dies at last, after a millennium, in the lonely cold.”

“This seems good to me.” The Basilisk stretched, talons forming at the ends of her fingers, scrabbling at the ground on which she sat to leave long furrows there. “As with him, so with Jinian also. Let them both lie a thousand years in the ice before they die,” and she began to laugh, choking herself with her mirth. “Except that I will scratch her first, only a little.”

In a moment the Witch summoned someone to drag Sylbie’s body away.

The day wore on. I heard the cries of carrion birds and knew they feasted upon Sylbie’s flesh. A servant came in to press bites of food into my mouth, food that I chewed and swallowed stubbornly, keeping my strength for the moment in which it might do me some good. Huldra did not come to gloat over my captivity, unusual for her family. Both Mandor and Huld had been gloaters.

Late in the evening we began to move once more, leaving the road to wend our way north and west across the fertile valley toward the mountain wall to the west. If we kept on in this same direction, we would come to Bannerwell, and from Bannerwell we could drop westward to the River Haws. North along that river would bring us to Cagihiggy Creek, and upward along that creek would bring us eventually to the ruins of the Blot and the Ice Caverns. How many days? Ten or twelve at the least. With wagons, probably longer than many days? And Jinian, alone there in the north, traveling to that place. For she would. I knew she would. ‘Though she feared Huldra and Dedrina Dreadeye, still she would come for me.

And for the first time in years, I gave way to slow, impotent tears, unable to hold them back.

It was then Huldra came to punish me for the fact that Mandor had died.

9
JINIAN’S STORY: THE SEVEN

I greeted the seven with a good deal of grabbing and squeezing and exclamations of joy. Cat shook me, wagging her head from side to side. “You’re all bones, girl! What’ve you been up to?” Then hugged me when I tried to tell her.

We went no farther than a few hundred paces to a grassy hollow among a dozen great trees, there to build a fire for the making of tea while the words poured out of me like wine from a cask, bubbling and frothing and spilling somewhat as I tried to make sense of it all. Ganver and the Great Maze and everything that had gone before.

“And I have failed,” I cried. “Ganver tried to teach me the meaning of star-eye, but I have not learned it.”

Five of them drew in their breath, in awe, their eyes wide. Dodie did not know enough to do it, but she watched them with her mouth open. “What does that mean?” she whispered to them, to me.

“To have been taught by an Eesty!” Murzv marveled. “Why, if you could learn it,” she said, “you could do the final couplet. It is said no Wize-ard has done so since the time of Trindel the Marvelous.”

“The final couplet?” Dodie asked.

“Eye of the Star, Where Old Gods Are,” I told her. “To summon up the old gods, one and all. I have used Eye of the Star to fasten the Dervishes down while I spoke to them. They did not like it much. I wonder if the old gods would like it at all, being summoned up.”

“That spell would be worth having, considering what we are facing,”said Cat. “Can you tell us of the lessons? Or did you take an oath of secrecy?”

“No
oath, no nothing,” I told her. “And I’ll tell you everything. Perhaps you can make more sense of it than I. But let me tell you as we go. We must move ourselves. We must go to the Old South Road City and build it up again.”

They looked at one another, like so many owls. “Build it up again?” asked Sarah Shadowsox at last. “That seems rather a large job for one seven, Jinian.”

“Of course,” I cried. “Of course it’s too large for us alone. There must be more. Other sevens beside us. And Dervishes. The Immutables. All the Great Gamesmen from the Ice Caverns. The hundred thousand.”

“There should be,” murmured Murzy, shaking her head. “Indeed there should be, Jinian. The question is, can there be? Can there be any at all?”

“I don’t understand,” I faltered, afraid that I understood all too well.

“Shadow,” said Bets. “Murzemire Hornloss, Seer that she is, has done a bit of peering and prying. She Sees shadow and more shadow. Everywhere. The Bright Demesne under siege by shadow. Great drifts of it cutting the road south of Lake Yost. Xammer cut off. Schooltown cut off. Betand surrounded—at some distance, true, and there is still travel in and out—but Pfarb Durim is completely isolated. Most of the cities and Demesnes had some warning; most of them brought in stores and prepared for siege; but still, travel is becoming very difficult, Jinian. The question is whether anyone can get to the Old South Road City at all.”

“Gamelords,” I whispered. “Ganver said the Oracle had learned to control the shadow, but I had not thought of this. Are you sure that what you saw is
now?
”

They shook their heads. No, they weren’t sure it had happened yet, but it would be soon if not now.

“No
matter,” I said. “We must get there. There is no other way. Somehow we must reach Old South Road City; we and all the others needed there. Tragamors to rebuild the city and the towers. Sorcerers to Hold Power for them. Elators to carry messages; Armigers to Fly aloft and see where ancient walls and roadways ran. Perhaps even Necromancers to Raise up the ghosts of that place to learn how the Bell was cast in the first place.”

“We have spread the word as widely as we could, Jinian. And the Dervishes tell us they have carried word to the seven as well as the other Wize-ards everywhere. If we can get to Old South Road City, there will be others come to help—such as can.”

“What are the Dervishes doing?” I cried, thinking mostly of Bartelmy of the Ban, my mother.

“Running the roads of the world,” said Cat. “In their hundreds and thousands. They seem proof enough against shadows, at least when they are moving, and have taken up this work as though it were some kind of penance for an old guilt. Do you know why?”

I shivered and mumbled something about it being better late than not at all, which was enough for them to guess the rest. I really didn’t want to talk about Bartelmy. “So, shouldn’t we start south?”

“Yes, we will go south,” said Murzy firmly. “Dealing with what comes as it comes.”

Which we did, me in new clothes they had brought for me and a new pair of boots. The old ones had holes through the soles, and I’d been slipping pieces of bark into them for days. “Did you See my boots had holes in them?” I demanded of Murzy, half-exasperated at  the lack of privacy her Seeing seemed to grant me. “Did you actually See my trousers were ripped in the seat?”

“Common sense,” barked Bets Battereye. “Your boots have always had holes since you were three. And if you ever had trousers which weren’t ripped in the seat, none of us can remember when.”

Which was somewhat comforting. It’s preferable, I think, merely to be known for one’s peculiarities than to have them constantly peered at. More familial, somehow. I put on the new clothes without further comment, and we headed south.

The Great Maze lay north of the Shadowmarches. Peter and I had approached the Maze from the east, having come there by a long, torturous route that had taken us far to the east and north before coming to Bloome and Fangel. From the Maze, the land sloped generally southward, ending at the widely separated peaks that marked the edge of the marches and fell away on the other side to the wide valley of Cagihiggy Creek. By following the creek west and south to its source and then striking west into the tumbled mountains, one could come to the Ice Caverns, where Peter had been headed. This was not the most direct route to the Old South Road City, but we discussed going there nonetheless. If Shifters or Dragons had been awakened from among the hundred thousand, we might find someone willing to carry us to our destination, thus saving much time.

If, on the other hand, we were to attempt to go straight to Old South Road City—which I knew well from my childhood, as it was not far from Stoneflight Demesne—then the shortest route would lie down the River Haws to Zebit, then up into the hills to the Willowater, a smallish river that ran from among the mountains into River Banner, south along Willowater to its source, then southwest along the curve of the mountain to the canyon lands north of Stoneflight. I wondered if Stoneflight was still there. And this made me wonder if my un-mother, Eller, and her son, Mendost, were still alive. I didn’t ask if anyone knew, telling myself I didn’t care whether they were or not.

At this point it didn’t matter which route we might eventually choose. We were still high north in the Shadowmarches with a long way to go before we decided east or west.

So we trudged south, me unable to put shadow out of my mind. I was simply scared to death of the stuff. Mavin had said it made people eat themselves sometimes. Or freeze themselves into a kind of black haze. Or it could make people chew themselves up from inside, as it had done with me. Whichever or whatever, I hated the idea of shadow. Even Ganver had hated shadow. I remembered the Eesty flailing about inside the Maze, trying to get away from the flapping flakes. “Would I had a dozen of the Gardener’s shadow-eaters. . . .” I repeated, remembering Ganver’s growl.

“What was that?” asked Cat, quick as a flitchhawk stoop.