The End of the Game (82 page)

Peter was there at the gate. I called out, a harsh, grating cry from a dry throat. He raised his head, saw me, didn’t move, just stood there, his face empty. Then he raised his hand and came up the hill toward me. I waited, unwilling to go closer, afraid.

Even at the distance, I could see his face was wet and he walked as though crippled, haltingly. Behind him those at the city gate went into the city, their voices raised in sorrow, joining another lament by other voices. I began to run, stumbling, as halting as Peter. I was sore, hurt. He, too.

He caught me in his arms.

Always, always when Peter held me, the flesh of his arms
Shifted,
only a little, becoming warmer and wider, as though to touch as much of me as he could. The first time he had ever really held me, long ago, oh—longer ago than seems possible and yet only a year or two, only that. He had held me then as he did now, and I had felt that Shifting, that softening, as though his arms would cushion me against all the threats and pains of the world. And always when he had held me, it had been like that.

Yet now he held me in his arms and they were only arms. “Wiz-ardry?” he mumbled into my ear. “Some Wizardry, Jinian? Lost. All of us. Our Talents. All. Gone.”

I stared at him stupidly, not hearing him. What idiocy was he talking? I couldn’t understand what he meant. His Talent gone due to some Wizardry? Whose? Who was left?

Over his shoulder I could see a small figure behind him, toiling up the hill. Proom. The Shadowman, looking at me out of great, haunted eyes. He came close to me, stared into my face, took my hand into his own soft, long-fingered one, and spoke to me. I could not understand him.

And it was then I knew.

The Talents were gone. All. Everyone’s. Lom had given. Lom had judged.

And Lom had taken away.

Proom sang to me with tears in his eyes: Lolly ulla lum a lolly lom. Like a bird. All around me was the sound of mystery. A tree rat chattered. I did not know what it said. High on the hill, a flitchhawk called, and I knew it might be calling me, but I could not understand.

I cried out then, something, I forget what. Peter reached out for me. We stood there on the hillside, tight in each other’s arms, weeping for what was lost, and gained.

Lom was alive. Lom the glorious, field and forest, stream and meadow, flitchhawk on the air, bunwit in the copse, all alive. And thinking. And knowing.

And all our Talents were gone. Healer and Necromancer, Sorcerer and King, Tragamor and Elator, gone. All our Talents gone. Taken away. As punishment?

And in that I took hope, for if Lom thought we had no bao, it would not have punished us. It would have done the merciful thing.

We walked down into the city. There was a body at the gate, Little Flitch, a knife between his ribs to the hilt.

“He said it was all he had,” whispered Peter. “All he had.”

“It is not all you had,” I said firmly, choking it out. “It is not all you had, Peter.”

“I keep telling myself that,” he said, holding my hand so tightly it hurt. “I do, Jinian.”

We came to a place where Dodir had been working. A great stone lay on the street, and he leaned against it, trembling, crying as though his life had broken before him. He looked up at me, through his tears, wiping them away as though ashamed. “Jinian?”

I shook my head at him. “They were never our gifts to begin with, Dodir. Lom gave them. And Lom has decided we will be better creatures without them.”

His face turned grayer. Dodir had used his gifts well, always. All those in the city had done. Here, more than any place in the world, might this great loss be justifiably resented.

“I?” He was disbelieving. “I, too?” It was undeserved in Dodir’s case. He knew it.

“All,” I said. “All of us.”

At first nothing, then perhaps a flash in those brown eyes. Anger. Yes. I think so. A little anger. And his shoulders straightened as he stood tall beside the great stone, and I knew of the two things, Dodir or the stone, Dodir was the stronger, for he would not be broken.

“Then we will build it without,” he said. “But build it we will.”

Beside me I felt Peter straighten, sigh. “Yes.”

And we three turned together to help others, even as the lament went on.

16
END AND BEGINNING

We live now, Peter and Bryan and I, in a pleasant glade above Old South Road City. We have a house there, one we are building with our own hands whenever we can find time away from the construction crew down in the city. Peter is becoming something of a stone mason. Though fancy carving is beyond him, so he says—and I think it is only that he lacks patience for it—he finds the laying of stones pleasant work, tiring work, work that exhausts him so he can sleep without remembering what used to be. Many Gamesmen these days would rather not remember what used to be.

The change has been hard for us all. I went up a hill in my blue gown able to speak the language of any bird or beast. I came down knowing only my own tongue. As for me, so it was for everyone. There was no time to adjust. There was no prior announcement. One moment we had the gifts Lom had given us. The next moment they were gone. Peter never Shifted again, and there are still nights I lie beside him while the bed quivers with his unconscious, dreaming effort to change. I see his hands clench, his muscles knot. To no purpose. He is still my Shifterish Peter, but Peter, Shifter, no longer.

For most of us it was as though we had lost our sight or our hearing. Though we rejoiced in a world that was healing and growing, still we mourned. Some, like Little Flitch, gave it no time but simply died. Some Gamesmen may mourn their lives away. Certainly many have not stopped grieving yet.

Peter and I, alone among all Gamesmen, know that the Talents had been Lom’s gift. We, alone among all Gamesmen, are able to explain what has happened. Those who know us well believe what we tell them. Some others do as well, seeing it as the only explanation that makes sense. Across the world, however, there are those who seek some magical solution, some application of Wizardry, some religion, some prophecy. Temples are springing up, I am told. Prophets are gaining reputation. How strange that the Gamesmen should need any other explanation than the true one! And yet their sense of themselves—so says Barish-Windlow—will not allow them to believe they had all that power by gift, that it was not their own by birthright.

Whatever one wishes to believe, we have all had to find other ways to live. Some of us are doing well, learning as quickly as any ordinary pawn might ever have done. We have Tragamors who are engineers; Elators who are messengers; Armigers who are guards. Trandilar has set up a school for weavers. It was her hobby in times long past, and she seems glad to take it up again. She is still beguiling, but it is only her natural self. There is no magic in it. Dorn, the Necromancer, says he is glad his Talent is gone. He has become a teacher of children, and his face is less lined than it was in the past. He rejoices to have done with the dead. The living need our attentions more, he says. Who can argue with that?

Not all Gamesmen have fared so well. There have been incidents of pawns rising up to dispose of former Gamesmen Rulers. In most cases, the disposal was just. Many old Demesnes are vacant now. Stoneflight rose up against Bram Ironneck, and Eller, who pretended to be my mother, is now the kitchen maid of a merchant-prince. So I am told, by Murzy. She is not a Seer any longer, so I don’t know how she learned this. I have not asked.

Those of us with the art fare a little differently—I will not say “better.” While the Talents were a gift from Lom, the art was largely our own learning, and it has stayed with us. The art was always a matter of respectfully invoking the power of beings larger than ourselves. If we have friends among those powers, it can be done. Peter is learning something of that, too, and bids fair to turn out a respectable hedge Wizard. This pleases Himaggery, and Himaggery says it would please Mavin as well. And Lom. We all suppose it must please Lom. Otherwise it would not be allowed. So, the sevens go on as they have in the past. Most of mine is here with me, though Cat Candleshy has gone traveling to see this new world and what it makes of itself.

As for Himaggery, he has gone back to the Bright Demesne. He says the people there are no less his people because the world has changed.

We will visit there, after the baby comes, to see him and Barish-Windlow. Barish suffered most, I think, from what happened. He had based his whole life upon a strategy that is suddenly useless. Now he is mostly Windlow, and Peter says he doesn’t know from day to day how to feel about that.

When it happened, so suddenly, I believed Lom’s recovery was due to something Mind Healer Talley had done. She says, however, that though she did what she could, Lom began to wish to live at the ringing of the Daylight Bell. She tells me that the destruction of a certain memory may have had much to do with that, and perhaps also to the fact that the Eesties—the old Eesties—had assumed their proper role of recollection once more. Perhaps it was no one thing but all of these things together. If so, I can take pride in helping, as can Peter. When we get depressed sometimes, we try to remember that.

When the Bell came from the mold, the little missing place on its rim was filled in with the sign of the star-eye, almost as though my own talisman had been reformed in that place. When it rang, it was with the same clear, unmistakable tone I remembered from our travels in Lom’s memory. Whatever the alloy was, it was correct. Foreordained? If so, by whom? Fortuitous? If so, why? Who knows? Even those I know among the Wize-ards are less likely to speculate about such things than once they were.

Soon the Daylight Bell will hang where it belongs once more. The Tower is almost finished. Only the arched windows at the top and the gently curving roof remain to be completed. Peter spends endless hours with the ex-Tragamor architects—Dodir among them—who claim the work is harder now but more satisfying. Peter and I are the only humans now alive who ever saw the Tower and the city as it was before its destruction. Thank all the old gods we remember it well enough to direct its rebuilding. The city is far-enough along that there are various kinds of people moving into it, even now. Among these are the blind runners. They still run the roads, but only as ritual, for short distances. They have taken the maintenance of the city and the roads as their task. Looking down from my window, I can see some of them now, sweeping the stones and scrubbing them to an ivory glow. They who once ran the roads blindly now look at them very carefully. Strange how things turn out. Many things are turned about to show their faces where once their backs were. I find myself wondering sometimes if any of it was real then, or if we only dreamed it.

The shadow is gone except when the Shadowbell rings, far away in the north, where the Shadow Tower stands. Almost all of the turnips have returned there with the Gardener. Big-blue and Molly-my-dear live in my garden. They still swing upon my sash ends and play wicked tricks and laugh uproariously at them, but I can no longer understand what they say. Their children bid fair to become impish reminders of times past. I can imagine ten thousand fireside stories beginning, “Long and long ago, when there were no turnips to swing upon our pant legs, the people of this world had strange powers. . . .”

Forests are green again, and the roads are being repaired, some by us and the runners, some spontaneously. Eesties run those roads. The Dervishes are their apprentices. Evidently the skill of Dervishes was like the art of the wize, a thing they learned for themselves, for they have it still. I have not seen Bartelmy of the Ban. Perhaps someday I shall. The world is so changed, I do not know what I can say to her. She will be so changed, perhaps we will have nothing to say.

Mavin lies asleep in her crystal coffin beside the pool in the Tower. The lamp glows ever more brightly upon its pedestal. The book is back where it belongs, and the Shadowpeople sing from it every day. The pool has begun to fill once more with the milk from which crystals grow. There are no crystals in it yet, but perhaps there will be, in time. Surely, Lom will have messages for its people once more. Surely, after what we have been through, we have learned to be people of Lom, people who will listen.

When Peter and I make love, he always asks if it is the same as when he was Shifter. I always say yes. It is not the same, but that doesn’t matter. Himaggery said to me once that being loved by a Shifter spoiled one for any other lover. I can see how that would happen, but it is Peter I loved and summoned with nutpie and Lovers Come Calling, not merely a Shifter, so I do not dwell on that. I will admit to certain dreams from which I wake trembling, but I do not speak of those to him.

He asks me sometimes about bao, and I explain that it is something some creatures have and others do not, and that no race of creatures always has it in every individual and that no shape guarantees it. “And when one does not have it, Peter, then it is pure evil to punish that creature for its lack. It must be destroyed, quickly, without causing it fear or pain, for it lacks the quality all things must have to live together, and lacking that, has no reason to live.”

And he thinks about that. Though he would be quick enough to destroy a rogue waterox, one that preyed upon its fellows, still I am not sure he understands bao or the lack of it in humans. Mavin would have understood it, I’m sure of that.

“We must not pretend to ourselves that something has bao because it shares our shape or our seed,” I tell him, trying to explain. “To do so prolongs cruelty needlessly.”

“But the old gods didn’t destroy the shadow.”

“The shadow is part of the bao of Lom.”

“Or the Oracles . . .”

“The Oracles were part of the bao of the Eesties. The Oracle was Ganver’s own child. Ganver had to take the final step—merciful destruction. Each of us must take responsibility for our own. No one else can do it for us, for that way lies the death of all that is good.”

At the end, of course, Ganver had done it, though I have no doubt the Eesty grieves for it still.