I told her that I had.
“By all the old gods. How marvelous. Oh, how I wish I’d had some of these that time long ago when I brought Himaggery down from the north in the shape of a singlehorn and the shadows tracked us, league on league. What a wonder. I’d been wondering how we’d—well, from what Peter has said, it seems likely there will be a force to oppose us when we reach Old South Road City. A shadow force, likely. It’s not something I was eager to face.” And I saw in her expression again that woman longing, that desire to be at peace, playing with the baby, if only for a time, rather than risking her life as we all risked ours in some great endeavor. She shook her head, repeating firmly, “From my prior experience . . .
I shuddered. From my own prior experience, a shadow force would be unopposable. The best one could do was hide from it, and little construction got done while builders cowered in caves or huts. “I know,” I said. “That’s why we brought them. There are more on the ridge out there, watching the battle.”
At the word “battle,” Big-blue cried in an excited voice, “Snakes. Snakes and fire and trumpets. Tara tara.”
“Taratta tara,” echoed Molly-my-dear, waving her root-legs. “And people feet.”
“Settle down,” I said. “If you’ll plant yourselves here by the door, I’ll take you back down when I leave.”
The Gardener was already by the cavern entrance, peering out in his dispirited way at the fireworks in the valley. “How goes the battle?” he asked as though it did not matter.
“As well as can be expected,” I said, and he nodded gloomily as we went on into the hum and babble inside and through that to the distant, twisty little room off the tunnel where we had slept.
“I remember this place,” said Mavin, staring about with eves full of recollection. “You and I were here, Peter. In this very place. Gamelords, that seems long and long ago. . . .
“We had just saved Himaggery, remember? We came into the cavern through that tunnel, there. It goes back and back into the mountain and out to that Base place.” She touched Peter’s face with a tender gesture, patting him, flushing a little, then wandering off to disappear with Bryan behind a pillar, obviously intent upon reminiscences she did not intend to share.
Peter looked after her, his face sober. “She’s right. We were here. I remember all too well. The fool Magicians, without any idea what they were doing, had set off some kind of infernal device which was going to blow the mountains up. Mavin and I were trying to escape, with Himaggery. The resurrection machine had failed when we tried to put Windlow back together. I had his blue in my pocket with the other blues, the Gamesmen of Barish. We came on the railway, through that tunnel.” He pointed down the twisty way, shaking his head at the memory, musing for a time as we moved deeper into the room. “Huld was out there in the cavern. He had some kind of firebolt shooter. If it hadn’t been for the Gamesmen of Barish, I’d have been cooked.” He stared at nothing, remembering. I came close and took his hand as he went on, “The entrances were all sealed. I used Shattnir the Sorcerer to clear a way to the sky. Tamor the Armiger helped me fly out, carrying Himaggery. Then the mountain fell in. We thought Huld was dead.” There was a long, long pause.
“But Huld wasn’t dead,” I said, prompting him.
“No, he wasn’t,” said a deadly voice. “Not then.”
We spun around, disbelieving, all our safety, all our peace riven by that voice. She stood blocking the entrance to the little room with Dedrina close beside her and a scatter of Elators behind them. Huldra. She had figured it out, then. She knew about the Immutables, and while the seven were kept busy down below, believing they were fighting her, she had come into our stronghold to take us.
“Destruction of the caverns can wait,” she whispered, pointing one bony finger at Peter. It was a foul, slimy whisper that clung in the ears like swamp muck. “You I will have, and then we will see to the caverns.”
“Those who sent you to destroy the caverns are dead,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and indifferent and get her attention off Peter. Mavin was behind the rock pillar. They might not know she was there. “Storm Grower is dead. Eaten out by your Sending, Huldra, which she swallowed down like a thrilp seed. Dream Miner is dead, poisoned by a yellow crystal. They are dead, Huldra.”
“They were only the Oracle’s dupes,” sneered Huldra. “The one who wanted you dead is still alive, Wizard. The Oracle is still alive and kicking about the world. Storm Grower is no more, but enmity remains.”
“Mine, Wizard,” hissed Dedrina. She was already half-transformed into her Basilisk shape, her dirty yellow claws scraping the tunnel floor. “Storm Grower may have ruled the caverns, but you are my meat, Jinian Dangle-wit, murderer of my child. Perhaps my daughter was too young and impressionable when she faced you. Perhaps you played unGamely, Dangle-wit. Perhaps she did not have her wits about her. But I have mine, Eller’s daughter. It was I who found the old tunnel down into these caverns; I who told the Witch where you might be found.”
The words hit me as though I had been struck with a hand, moving me to fury. Peter squeezed my hand, bringing me to myself. Of course the creature wanted me angry. Angry and unthinking. “Lizard,” snarled Peter. “Foul words are all the dirtier when they come from a filthy mouth.” His voice was full of fury, and his neck flushed. So much for self-control.
Still, it had given me a split moment in which to think. Huldra had spoken of the Oracle. I remembered my first meeting with the Oracle. It had been angry at the Basilisks. Angry enough to steal the Dagger from them. The Dagger the Oracle itself had created and given them long before. And the Oracle had set that Dagger in my hands. Playing with me. Well, let the play go on!
I was standing behind Peter, slightly to his left, holding his left hand in my right. Keeping his hand fast between our bodies, I slipped my hand into the slit in my pocket and pulled the Dagger of Daggerhawk from its scabbard strapped to my thigh. He knew what it was when I pressed it into his palm. I hoped he understood why I gave it to him. He had no art with which to fight Huldra. I could not fight Dedrina and use the art at the same time. He would have to do it for me. His anger would make the Dagger lethal.
Huldra made an imperious gesture, turning our faces toward hers as she stared at us with voracious eyes. “Let me tell you what is in store for you. For you, Jinian, the Basilisk’s claws and the long, slow dying they bring while the flesh falls away from filthy wounds that no Healer can help,” she sneered, mocking, drawing her hands up and down in a pantomime of raking claws. “And for Peter, a thousand years or so of sleep, to lie paralyzed, motionless, like ice in these caverns among those of the hundred thousand who remain here today, For when we have done with you, we will do with the caverns, not for the sake of the giants, but for our own amusement. . . .”
I heard her. I knew she would have that paralysis spell ready for immediate use. I would have had, in her shoes. Just as I had The Net of Enlees, which the other six Wize-ards had insisted be set upon me, invocable with one word. And the paralysis spell might not be the only one!
It was well I was thinking of preset spells. Dedrina was scratching at the floor, and my eyes wanted to watch her, but Murzy’s words of warning rang in my head. Peter would have to take care of Dedrina. I stared hard at Huldra, catching the gesture of binding before it was half-made. No, the paralysis spell hadn’t been the only one.
“———” I shouted, seeing for an instant a green net of fire fall around me. I wasn’t even sure it had worked, but Huldra was. She screamed in fury, then turned to make the same gesture at Peter. If she couldn’t bind me, she would paralyze him, eliminating at least one possible opponent. I couldn’t let her do that. Peter was backed against a wall, the Dagger in one hand. The sleeves of that stupid robe were too long for him. They covered the hilt of the Dagger. Ridiculously, I wanted to laugh. The Basilisk literally did not know what weapon she faced, but I had no time to gloat over that.
Instead, I bowled a ball of Witch fire at Huldra�
��s head. She threw up a hand to ward it away, breaking the gesture she had aimed at Peter, twisting it to send a knot of boiling black cloud at my face, spitting lightning. I ducked and came up with a water spell half-done, completing it with a quick whirl to my left. As I came around, I saw Peter lunge at Dedrina, missing her by a finger width, then saw Huldra again, soaking wet. It hadn’t been a very good water spell. I’d really wanted to drown her.
There weren’t all that many things that could be done without paraphernalia! Missiles of various kinds. Fire, water, earth. Earth. I muttered a quick buried-in-earth spell, then changed it to water halfway. I was hoping for quicksand, but the best I got was a mud puddle. Still, she was in it up to her neck.
And out of it just as quickly, both hands weaving, weaving. What was she up to? I muttered ice at her, under her feet, and saw the weaving change frantically to a grope for the wall as she slipped and lost her balance. Screams from my right. Don’t look. If Peter’s dead, he’s dead, but don’t look!
I couldn’t help myself. One quick glance. Peter was still on his feet. I couldn’t tell about Dedrina. Back to Huldra, too late. Something slimy plastered itself over my eyes.
I gargled out the water spell once again, receiving a deluge. That washed the sliminess away but left me floundering. Something was happening at the top of the cave. I couldn’t look up. Dedrina screamed. I remembered the sound of that kind of scream, that kind of breathless agony with a note of terrible surprise in it. So Dedrina-Lucir had sounded when she had been touched by the Dagger. If Peter had touched Dreadeve, if he had been angry when he touched her, then she was dead. Dead and gone. And he had been angry enough, I knew.
Huldra turned, confused only for a moment by what she saw, then those hands came out toward Peter and I saw her mouth open, knowing verv well she would cry one word and one word only. The thousand-year spell, aimed at Peter. A thousand-year death. Aimed at Peter. I lunged forward, to be between her and him when the word was spoken, slipped fell, rolled . . .
. . . To look up and see the ceiling fall around her, a great basket of rock, what looked like rock.
“——-” Huldra cried.
I heard Peter calling, “No, oh, no, oh, no. . . .”
Then I smashed into the wall with my head.
When I came to myself, the others of the seven were there. Way off, somewhere, I could hear weeping. Peter. So he was alive.
Hands tried to hold me down, but I fought my way up from the place they’d put me and followed the sound of weeping.
He was there. Knelt down, bowed down, his head on his hands, crying. Before him on the cavern floor lay Mavin, young looking, as though she were asleep, her mouth slightly tilted in surprise. Mavin. Pale and hard as stone.
She had dropped upon Huldra just as the word of enchantment had been uttered. She had contained the word, received it, been ensorcelled by it.
All I could do was sit there beside Peter and hold his hand. The tears ran as though they would never stop, as though they came from some inexhaustible store. After many hours, someone went away and came back with someone else. A tall woman, taller than any woman I had ever seen, with a cloud of black, black hair and eyes like jet. She placed her hand on Peter’s shoulder, closed her eves for a time, then shook her head.
“He is only grieving,” she said. “And I cannot cure grief.” I knew then it was Mind Healer Tallev, that they had found her and raised her up at last. She gave me a long, strange look, then went away. Later they told me she had gone north, toward the Great Maze.
While I sat there, Mertyn led the Immutables into Huldra’s camp in a fury of revenge and anger. Her Gamesmen, bereft of their Talents, he placed under Game bond and then released. A few he even recruited and sent southwest, toward the ruins of the Old South Road City. More than a few he killed for reasons of his own, which may have had something to do with several of them calling him “Shifter kin” in a certain tone of voice.
Riddle had found an Immutable woman to care for Bryan.
And the work of resurrection went on in the caverns while Peter wept and I sat there urging him to have a little tea, or broth, or a bit of bread, to all of which he shook his head while the tears flowed endlessly down.
I didn’t cry then. Later, I cried. But not then.
When Mertyn and the seven had done everything they could at the caverns, we set out ourselves, down past the Blot toward the south, then following the coast to Hawsport, then up the Haws to Zebit, into the hills, and to the Willowater, almost the route we seven had thought of long and long ago.
We had wagons, now—enough to hold the turnips without crowding. And we had horses. Huldra had been well supplied, and we had all her beasts and equipage. She, the Witch, had been crushed beneath Mavin’s huge body, that body which had taken the full brunt of the enchantment. There was little enough of Huldra left to bury, but we put what there was into a pit with the Basilisk. I had been too late to save Peter; but Mavin had been in time. I knew she would have done the same even if she had known what would happen. This did not comfort me. I did not mention it to Peter. It would not have comforted him.
It did comfort me, perhaps foolishly, that Mavin was in her own shape. Peter said her own shape had come upon her when Riddle arrived. I would have hated to think of her lying for some thousand years as a twisted, stony thing. Her body was in one of the wagons, close-wrapped in linen clothes. It was not possible to bury it, her. She looked too much alive, as though she might waken at any moment. I went to Murzy and Cat, begging them to undo Huldra’s spell, but they shook their heads at me.
“We have already laid Sleep Brings a Darkening upon her, Jinian. She does not know what is happening. She is not condemned to be conscious for the thousand years which was the fate Huldra planned. She truly sleeps, without dreams. But the paralysis—that was a spell bought with lifeblood, Jinian. As was most everything Huldra did. To undo it would take the same, and not by any willing sacrifice, either, for part of the power would be lost if life were freely given. And it is the law of the art, as you know well, that causes beget causes. A thing ill done to waken Mavin would follow her like a curse afterward. As all the things Huldra did followed her to her end. It was Huldra’s fate to be killed by her own enchantments. No, child. There’s nothing we can do.”
There was nothing we could do. Peter went several times each day to the wagon in which her body lay. As did Mertyn, weeping. As did I. As did most of us. And there was nothing we could do.
14
OLD SOUTH ROAD CITY
We came to the southern height above the Old South Road City at the end of a journey full of threats and hesitations, much of it through dead forests and across bare, ashen slopes that looked like lands long abandoned by life. Just finding food for ourselves had been a great problem. There were other groups than ours traveling the desolation. Refugees from one place or another clotted the roads and got in one another’s way, some moving west toward the sea, others moving inland away from the sea’s threat. There was talk of monsters from the deep; there were many dead from the yellow crystals; we were attacked several times and had to use the art.
Sometimes we had surprised great globs of shadow lying in hollows. Sometimes we found a way around; sometimes the shadows rose like a monstrous flight of vicious birds to hover above us while we cowered in the wagons. Once there was no other way for the wagons to go, and the shadow-eaters jigged on their root hairs to the edges of the patch, sucking the dark monsters up with their roots, moving inward as they went, until at last the high-piled central shadows lifted and went away, a sinuous dark line upon the sky, as though going off to report what had happened.
We lost two watchmen. Though we heard nothing in the night, we woke to one gone the first night, one gone the second. The third night we began to sleep close together, a thick line of the shadow-eaters outside the watchmen’s posts, and after that we lost no more.
Despite all this, we lost very little time, coming to the heights north of Old South Road Cit
y in a season that should have been bright and pleasant but was, in fact, chill and dismal beneath a leaden sky. I looked down into the city itself with a cry of dismay. Only after staring at it for some time could I see it had not actually suffered since I had visited it as a child. Then it had been tumbled but almost covered with a greenery that made it appear relatively whole. Now it was uncovered, all its shattered parts, its fractures and splinters, laid bare. Gamesmen sent from the caverns swarmed along its streets and among the piled stone, working beside pawns as though there were no difference between them.
Actually, much work had been done. I began to see it as we rode down the hill. Stones had been assembled in orderly stacks near the buildings they were to go into. Walls were being rebuilt. Pawns heaved at pulleys while Tragamors heaved with Talent, and the stones slid home. The street we reached at the bottom of the hill was virtually clear for much of its length, and the facades of the buildings on either side looked largely finished. A weary-looking Tragamor came toward us, holding out a hand to Mertyn.
“Dodir, Tragamor,” he said. “Called Dodir of the Seven Hands. And I wish it were true!”
“Mertyn, King,” Peter’s thalan said, introducing all the rest of us in our turn. “There is a large troop behind us to bring you assistance, Dodir. And we bring something more valuable even than that—shadow-eaters.” He pointed to the turnips, thronging in their wagons. “Can we have a council to tell us your situation?”
“Well, as to that,” replied Dodir, staring curiously at the turnips, “I can tell you our situation in few words. We’ve made some progress, as you can see, but the heart has gone out of the Gamesmen. Often the Talent fails. There are times even the power fails. The Wizard Himaggery arrived. . . .”
“Himaggery! Here already,” exclaimed Peter in a voice of hurt urgency. I knew what he was thinking. Himaggery didn’t know about Mavin yet, and it would be Peter’s place to tell him.
“He arrived two days ago, and he is attempting to set up a relay of power from the Bright Demesne, which he says may help our situation.”
The End of the Game Page 60