by Gene Wolfe
“Now you will die, all of you.” It was the voice of the fourth wizard, of Marin’s wizard. “She because she cannot get away. You because you will not leave her. They because they cannot leave their squares. But not I. Kakos is mine, you see, my crowning achievement.”
Then voice and wizard were gone, not vanished, but crushed to a broken doll whose crimson blood splattered Syb and the unfortunate sailor standing before the player who was Marin’s tower. The black statue had reentered its own temple through the door like the figurehead of a galley that flies before a gale, and it had struck him like that galley’s ram.
The demon’s shoulder followed its arm. Narrow though the crevice was, it oozed through it like clay through a potter’s fingers. Oeuni cried, “Noen!” Her body writhed with effort, the muscles outlined beneath her thin shirt like cables.
The hook came free. The slab slammed the edge of the floor as the weighted jaw of a rattrap crashes down when the rat pulls at the bait, and it left the demon’s arm squirming at Oeuni’s feet.
“You all right?” It was Dinnile, panting, sword drawn, leaning over Noen as Noen leaned over Oeuni. Freed from their squares, the rest, sailors and players, clustered around.
“My hand,” Oeuni said, and gripped the bent iron socket that had held her hook.
Noen said, “Your hand is fine,” and touched it to prove it.
“But—”
He took a deep breath, feeling that when he had explained she would want him to explain more, and knowing that he could not. “When you dropped your sword, it was from your left hand. But when you reached into there the first time and brought up that necklace—here it is—on your hook, the hook was on your left hand. It can’t be an illusion, because your left hand couldn’t have held back the slab; I don’t know what it was.”
Nordread and Dinnile, Baldy and Marin and a dozen others were all speaking at once, but Noen paid no heed to them. Leaning close to Oeuni, he heard her whisper, “It’s right, what they say. I had to choose. Lose my other hand, or the demon would have killed you and Dinnile and everybody. It wouldn’t have killed me—it told me that.”
Baldy had taken advantage of his small size to penetrate the crowd. “Let me see it,” he said, and examined Oeuni’s right arm. “Ha!” He tugged at the iron cup. “This is a prop.”
Noen grasped him by the shoulders. “What did you say?”
“It’s a prop, Captain. I may not be much of a wizard, but I’m a pretty good stage manager, and the properties come under my jurisdiction. That is, we use one just like this in The Pirates of Port Chai. See, the player sticks her hand in it and holds the handle, and it looks like she’s lost it. But it comes off. That is, this one won’t because it’s dented in.”
At that moment it did. The hand that emerged from the metal cup was Ler Oeuni’s own, slightly larger than most women’s and much harder, though by no means so hard as iron. She flexed her fingers and stared at them, laughing and crying at the same time.
“Cap’n?” It was Su; she and another sailor were holding the tall wizard, one at each arm. (Noen suspected there was a dirk at his back as well.) “Cap’n, this ‘un’s still here. We asked that tower woman if he was the real ’un, and she said she didn’t think so.”
Noen turned away, sorry to part from Oeuni’s joy. “Well,” he snapped, “are you?”
“No,” the wizard admitted. His voice was as resonant as ever, and loud enough to be heard over the tumult around them. “If my good wife will but remove my hat and my beard (carefully, please, my dearest, though I think perspiration has somewhat loosened the gum), she can tell you who—”
Nordread’s sword clattered to the floor. “Amail!” Her embrace might have broken the ribs of a bear. Noen looked across the room to the white flagstone where the third wizard had stood beside Dinnile. It was empty, save for a single black feather lying upon the graven symbol of a wizard’s hat.
That night, aboard the Lady of Liavek, Rekkue asked, “Was it Amail Destrop who buried the old wizard?”
Oeuni nodded. “He found the body, and he thought if he made himself up as Xobbas, whoever had killed the real Xobbas might attack him. Then when he heard that the false Xobbas was trying to get the players to go inland, he scared them so much they didn’t. Only Lady’s captain took the wizard’s bait.” She paused. “We don’t usually think of actors as being brave, but I suppose they are, sometimes.”
Marin, who had been leaning on the rail listening to them, said, “I think what Nordread did was braver.”
“Who was the wizard?” Rekkue asked. “Did the captain ever find out?”
“Not really,” Oeuni told her. “Noen thinks he was a Pardoner who’d found the temple earlier and stowed aboard Lady in Cyriesae because he saw that Destrop’s theatrical company would be ideal for staging the shah game. His pet devil had to be fed every day, but he made it spare the players. Of course he raised the storm that brought the ship to Temple Bay, and made sure she went aground. And now I’d better see …” Oeuni glanced toward the quarterdeck, where a midshipman stood watch.
Rekkue wailed, “Please, Oeuni! One more thing, or I’ll go stark mad. That statue and the game, I don’t understand them at all. How—why did it come out of the wall like that?”
Oeuni paused, looking from the sea to the sky, then at the trim of Lady’s sails. “Noen and I, and sometimes Noen and Dinnile, play conventional shah, using a flat board with sides. But there’s another game; you pretend the board’s a cylinder, that it wraps around the whole world, so to speak. Then a piece that goes off one side diagonally appears in the next row on the other, the way the black sultana did. You see, while we thought we were playing conventional shah, the gods were playing cylindrical shah. I think there’s a message there, though I’m not sure I know what it means. Anyway, that’s why I left the emeralds around the statue’s neck—as a gift for the player, whoever that is.”
Marin said, “You were right, and you were right about me too, that night by the fire. You see, I often take female roles, and when I saw Captain Noen thought Nordread really was a man, I couldn’t resist showing off.”
Oeuni took her hands from the rail and started aft. Marin tried to follow her, but Rekkue caught him by the arm. “Passengers are not permitted on the quarterdeck,” she said sternly. “I, however, am off duty.”
Marin grinned. “Hello, sailor. New in town?”
Acknowledgments
“The Green Rabbit from S’Rian” copyright © 1985 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Liavek, edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull.
“Beech Hill” copyright © 1972 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Infinity Three, edited by Robert Hoskins.
“Sightings at Twin Mounds” copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe.
“Continuing Westward” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 12, edited by Damon Knight.
“Slaves of Silver” copyright © 1971 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Galaxy.
“The Rubber Bend” copyright © 1974 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Universe 5, edited by Terry Carr.
“Westwind” copyright © 1973 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Worlds of IF.
“Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee” copyright © 1970, 1978 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 8, edited by Damon Knight.
“The Packerhaus Method” copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins.
“Straw” copyright © 1974 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Galaxy.
“The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton” copyright © 1977 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Universe 7, edited by Terry Carr.
“To the Dark Tower Came” copyright © 1977 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 19, edited by Damon Knight.
“Parkroads—A Review” copyright © 1987 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Fiction International.
“The Flag” copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe.
“Alphabet” copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Fiction International.<
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“A Criminal Proceeding” copyright © 1980 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Interfaces, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd.
“In Looking-Glass Castle” copyright © 1980 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in TriQuarterly.
“Cherry Jubilee” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“Redbeard” copyright © 1984 by Gene Wolfe; first published in Masques (Maclay & Associates, 1984), edited by J. N. Williamson.
“A Solar Labyrinth” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
“Love, Among the Corridors” copyright © 1984 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Interzone.
“Checking Out” copyright © 1986 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Afterlives, edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson.
“Morning-Glory” copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Alchemy and Academe, edited by Anne McCaffrey.
“Trip, Trap” copyright © 1967 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Orbit 2, edited by Damon Knight.
“From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
“Civis Laputus Sum” copyright © 1975 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Dystopian Visions, edited by Roger Elwood.
“The Recording” copyright © 1972 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
“Last Day” copyright © 1982 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Speculations, edited by Isaac Asimov and Alice Laurence.
“Death of the Island Doctor” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The Wolfe Archipelago by Gene Wolfe.
“On the Train” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“In the Mountains” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories.
“At the Volcano’s Lip” copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories.
“In the Old Hotel” copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe.
“Choice of the Black Goddess” copyright © 1986 by Gene Wolfe; first appeared in Liavek: The Players of Luck, edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull.
By Gene Wolfe from Tom Doherty Associates
Novels
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Devil in a Forest (forthcoming)
Peace
Free Live Free
The Urth of the New Sun
Soldier of the Mist
Soldier of Arete
There Are Doors
Castleview
Pandora by Holly Hollander
Novellas
The Death of Doctor Island
Seven American Nights
Collections
Endangered Species
Storeys from the Old Hotel
Castle of Days
The Book of the New Sun
Shadow and Claw
(comprising The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator)
Sword and Citadel
(comprising The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch)
The Book of the Long Sun
Nightside the Long Sun
Lake of the Long Sun
Caldé of the Long Sun
Exodus from the Long Sun (forthcoming)
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
STOREYS FROM THE OLD HOTEL
Copyright © 1988 by Gene Wolfe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
eISBN 9781429967341
First eBook Edition : August 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Gene.
Storeys from the old hotel / Gene Wolfe.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3573.O52S76 1995
813’.54—dc20
95-34766
CIP
First Orb edition: December 1995