The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  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 were
n’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.

  I repeated it, shaking my head. “Something Ganver said when the shadows pursued us into the Maze.”

  Cat looked at Murzy, then both of them at Sarah, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I never heard of it.”

  Bets denied any knowledge of shadow-eaters, as did Margaret Foxmitten, but Dodie spoke up—she who had said little or nothing until now, youngest of the seven as she was—”The Gardener? Oh, I’ve heard of the Gardener.”

  “Well, tell, child. Don’t be mysterious!” Bets was as impatient as ever. The two years or so I’d been gone hadn’t changed her.

  “I’m n-not being mysterious,” Dodie stuttered. “It’s just I don’t know what to say. My grandda, that’s my mum’s da, he used to tell tales of the Gardener. Tales he had from his grandda and he from his, way back, before all the people left the marches.”

  “Well? Well?”

  “Do you want me to tell you all the tales? There’s dozens.”

  “Why don’t you start with one exemplary one.” This was Cat, being academic. “Start with one you heard frequently.”

  “Well, let’s see.” Dodie thought for a moment. “There’s the one about the three bunwits trying to steal the Gardener’s greens and losing their fur on the fence, so the Gardener turned them into fish. And there was the one about the Gardener fooling the tree rats into eating webwillow instead of table roots and how they got so sick they never came near the garden again. And the one about the Gardener feeding shadow to his turnips. . . .”

  “The one about what?” Murzy, amazed.

  “The one about the Gardener feeding shadow to his turnips?”

  “Tell us that one,” said Murzy, moving toward a circle of stones, where we all sat down like a coven of crows, looking expectantly at Dodie. She cleared her throat nervously, smoothed her shirt down over her trews, folded her hands as though about to sing, and told us.

  “The Gardener, he had a fine crop of turnips growing along in the hot time, burgeoning big and getting somewhat ahead of themselves in the growth department, beginning to push at each other in the rows and get argumentative over root space. Every morning the Gardener would come down to the garden to look them over, and every morning what did he see but more of them limping about with their roots all twisted and bruises on their cheeks.

  “‘Enough is enough,’ said the Gardener. ‘What’s the matter with all you turnips, you can’t get along?’

  “ `It’s crowded we are,’ said the turnips, `so crowded there’s no air to breathe or sun to gollop up or dark, fertile wet dirt to suck. Time we was thinned out, I say.’

  “But there was an uproar over that, you may be sure, for none of the turnips planned to be the ones thinned. And sure as sure, the Gardener hadn’t planned to thin them, either, for he wasn’t one to eat his garden stuff. He was more in the nature of an experimenter, trying this thing and then that thing, and some he’d turn loose in the world and some he’d root out entirely, because that was his job to do for the whole world. So far he’d been very satisfied with the turnips and wasn’t inclined to thin them at all, but he had to admit the space was running short to put them. There was dark wet dirt in the forest, but no sun, and good sun on the mountain, but no dirt. Air was no particular problem, but finding all three together, that was something else.

  “ `You could clear some of these trees,’ said the turnips, `to make space.’

  “‘No,’ said the Gardener. `The trees are some I’ve been growing since they were seeds, a new kind I’m mighty fond of.’

  “ `Well, you could knock down that rocky mountain there to the north with the three poky peaks on top. It’s an ugly thing and it would make good gardening there.’

  “‘No,’ said the Gardener. ‘That mountain has seven whole tribes of mushrooms growing on it I’ve been working on for a hundred or so years. There’s just no space to be had unless I move out of the marches and start another garden down in a valley somewhere.’ Everyone in the garden knew the Gardener wouldn’t want to do that. He was a mighty secretive fellow and didn’t have much truck with other beings, except for my great-great-great- a hundred times great-grandda, who showed him a new way to prune fruit trees flat against a sunny wall.

  “So he thought and he thought. There wasn’t any space in the forest, and no space on the roads, but there was the Shadow Tower back in the marches, and there was space around that. So the Gardener said to the turnips, Whyn’t we go off through the trees here to the space around the Shadow Tower? Every evening the Bell rings the shadows out, and they’re dark as any dirt and full of whatever they’ve sucked up around the world. They’ll be lying thick on the ground, there, and maybe you can catch a few.

  “So that’s what the turnips did. They walked themselves a little way through the woods to the place near the Shadow Tower where all the trees stood back away from it. And they plunked themselves down around the Tower, their leaves spread out, and when the Shadowbell rang and all the shadows came out thick as leaves falling in the cold time, well, those turnips moved all their little hairy roots into the shadow and sucked all the dark, moist stuff in them up.

  “And that’s how the Gardener’s turnips grew and grew, but he didn’t let them out into the world for fear they’d eat all the shadow that was, so he kept them there in his garden except for every dusktime when the Shadowbell rang.”

  Dodie unfolded her hands, wiped a few beads of perspiration from her forehead, and plumped herself down, grinning.

  “Well,” said Murzy. “Isn’t that interesting.”

  “My
th survival?” asked Cat in her usual teacherish voice. “Or something real turned legend, do you think?”

  “Whichever! It is worth our time to find out!”

  I gathered from this they perceived a kernel of truth in the story Dodie had told. “How . . .” I started to ask, only to shut my mouth, for the others were already digging into their lockets or boots for the pool fragments each had been given at oath-taking time. I hadn’t had mine out of my locket in the last two years, and the locket was in my pouch. By the time I had my pie-shaped fragment ready, the others had laid theirs upon a flat stone, and only mine was needed to make a circle. “Do you know what the pool stuff is?” I asked pedantically, ready to lecture on the subject. “I found out. . . .”

  “Yes, dear. Of course,” said Sarah in her soft voice. “Of course we know. Now do put your piece in so we can look.”

  Abashed, I pushed my piece into the circle and sat down with the others, peering into the silvery circle that began to shimmer once the pool was completed.

  “A mountain,” said Murzy in a firm voice. “A mountain with three peaks. In the Shadowmarches.”

  Darkness swam across the pool, then light, then darkness once again. Something flapped horribly within the pool, seemed to look out at us, then fled. We seven reached out to take hands, making a circle around the pool, bending our will to Murzy’s in order that she might See.

  “A three-peaked mountain,” she repeated insistently. “A mountain in the Shadowmarches, with three peaks. . . .”

  Something floated up at us; not a mountain. A Tower. Black and tall. Except for the color, I knew it. It was the Tower of the Daylight Bell in reverse image. Dark as coal. Shadow swarmed at its base, around its walls, poured from the arched openings at its top. Something seemed to peer out at us from those openings.

  Patiently, Murzy repeated, “A mountain with three peaks.”

  The Tower dwindled. We were looking down on it from above. It dwindled still further, and I could see the fold of valley that held it, the road spur that ran to it, the road that ran past it farther down the hill. Against the sky was the mountain with three peaks. This, too, diminished until we were looking down on it. There was the sea, to the west, and the line of road east and west through the marches, and to the north of the road a faint glimmering, as though a star burned there. “Enough,” said Murzy in a weak voice. “Enough for now. We have the general direction. Let’s get closer before we try to see in greater detail.”