The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Are you leaving? So soon?”

  “No. I am taking a room in this place for the night, unless you will let me share yours. Whichever, I will go there now to sleep. Which you should do, unless you are determined to linger by the fire and think deep thoughts. If I thought I could help you, I would offer to do so, for long ago I cared about Handbright. Cared for her, failed her. There should have been something more I could have done, but at the time I thought I had done everything.” She stared into the fire herself, obviously thinking deep thoughts of her own.

  Marvin, curious, asked, “Is there a name for this combination of Talents you have, Throsset? I have gone over and over what little I know of the Index, and I cannot remember what Gamesname you should be called.”

  Throsset flushed. “There is a name, Mavin. I would prefer to be called simply Shifter, if you must call me. Or Sorcerer, if Shifter is not enough. I sometimes think those anonymous ancestors who made up the Index suffered from an excess of humor. Their name for one of my Talents is not one I choose to bear. Well. No matter what I might have called myself, Handbright would not hear me when I spoke to her. You have not said how it was she left at last.”

  Mavin murmured a few words about the lateness of the hour, indicating she did not want to talk about it then. The thought of Handbright saddened her always, and she was sad enough at the moment over other things. Throsset nodded in return, signifying that another time would do. The time did not come, however. When Mavin woke in the morning, the bed beside her was empty and Throsset was gone. The map lay on a chest beside the door. The innkeeper said the account had been paid.

  Outside in the stableyard Mavin’s tall horse whickered, and after a time of thought Mavin sold him to the innkeeper. Somehow in the deep night the matter had become decided, and she needed no flesh but her own to carry her to whatever place Himaggery had gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a note attached to the map with a silver pin. “Mavin, my dear child, this is a copy of the map Himaggery and I made up before he left. Most of the information is from some old books I had, but we got one or two things from some recent charts made by Yggery, the Mapmaker in Xammer. Himaggery was to go first to Chamferton, who is reputed to have access to an old library. If you decide to go looking for Himaggery, there is no point in coming here. Everything I know is on the map or Throsset will have told you. I hope you will want to go after him. I would do so if these aging legs would carry me, for he is very dear to me.” It was signed with Windlow’s seal, and she stood staring at it for a very long time.

  She bought a few provisions from The Arches, more for appearance’s sake than anything else. It was better to let those who saw her upon the road, those who might speak of her to others, think she had had to sell the horse to buy food than that they know her for a Shifter who could live off the countryside as well as any pombi or fustigar. Shifters were not highly regarded in the world of the True Game, not by Gamesmen or pawns, and there was recurrent unpleasantness to remind her of it. Better to be merely another anonymous person and wait until she was out of sight of the inn before Shifting into a long-legged form in which she could run all day without weariness – in which she had run day after day in Schlaizy Noithn.

  According to the map, the High Wizard Chamferton dwelt in the Dorbor Range, east of the Shadowmarches, in a long canyon which led from the cliffs above the Lake of Faces northward among the mountains. Mavin knew her way to the Shadowmarches well enough. She had traveled there before; to Battlefox the Bright Day, where her own kin lived in a Shifters’ Demesne; to the lands of the shadowpeople where Proom lived with his tribe, wide-eared and bright-fanged, singing their way through the wide world and laughing at everything; to Ganver’s Grave, the place of the Eesties, or Eestnies as some called them; to that enchanted, pool-laced valley she remembered in her dreams where the two fabulous beasts had lain together in beds of fragrant moss. North. The location did not surprise her. If she had been told to seek out knowledge of ancient things, northward is the way she would have gone. Still, the paths she knew would not help her in coming to Chamferton. She had not been that route before.

  Bidding a polite farewell to the innkeeper she stepped onto the road and walked northward on it. The night’s storm had given way to a morning of pale wet light and steamy green herbage dotted with flowers. Far to the west she could see Calihiggy Creek in a plaza of webwillow, yellow as morning. It was calming to walk, stride on stride, aware of the day without worrying where night would find her. She yawned widely as she turned aside from the road onto the wooded slope of the hills.

  She was now a little east of Pfarb Durim, ready to run in fustigar shape along these eastern hills until she came some distance north of Hell’s Maw. Having walked into that labyrinth once, she had no desire to see it or smell it again. Once she was far enough north, she would climb down the cliff in order to reach the Lake of Faces, a new feature upon the maps, created, so it was said, only within recent years. She had a mind to see it, to learn if what was said of it was true, though half her mind mocked the rest of her with believing such wild tales. Still, there would be no time wasted. The Lake of Faces lay in the valley below the entrance to the canyon where the Demesne of the High Wizard Chamferton would be found. She felt the map, tightly folded in her pocket. Once she abandoned her clothing, she would make a pocket in her hide for it.

  Soon she was lost among the trees, invisible to any eyes except small wild ones peering from high branches or hidey holes among the roots. Keeping only the little leather bags which held her supply of coin, she put her clothing into a hollow tree, the boots dropping against the trunk with a satisfying clunk. Fur crept over her limbs, sensuously, slowly, so she could feel the tickling emergence of it; bones flexed and bent into new configurations. She dropped to all fours, set eyes and nose to see and hear the world in a way her own form could never do. A bunwit flashed away among the bushes, frightened out of its few wits by this sudden appearance of a fustigar. Mavin licked her nose with a wet tongue and loped away to the north. A bunwit like that one would make her supper, and she would not necessarily feel the need to cook it.

  Dark came early, but she did not stop until she had reached the edge of the cliff and crawled down it in a spidery bundle of legs and claws. Once at the bottom she could smell water and hear many trickling falls, thin and musical in the dark. A shaving of moon lit the Lake of Faces and made silver streamers of the water dropping into it from the cliffs above. The spider shape yawned, Shifted; the fustigar yawned, Shifted. Mavin stood in her own shape upon the shore, ivory in the cool night. She scratched. Whatever shape one Shifted into, the skin stayed on the outside and all the dirt of the road stayed on it. The water welcomed her as she slid beneath its surface, relishing its chill caress.

  The lake had been so inviting she had taken no time to look around her. Now, floating on her back with her hair streaming below her like black water weed in the moonlight, she began to see the Faces.

  White poles emerged from shadow as she peered into the dark, an army of them in scattered battalions on the shore, in the shallows, marching out into the fringes of the forest. One such stood close beside her, and she clung to it, measuring it with hands which would not quite reach around it, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. She lay on the water and thrust herself away from the pole so she could look up into the face at its top, white as ivory, blind-eyed, close-lipped, its scalp resting upon the top of the pole, a thin strap extending from ear to ear behind the pole and nailed there with a silver spike.

  It was a woman’s face, a mature woman, not thin, not lovely but handsome. The face had no hair, only the smooth curve as of a shaved skull, pale as bleached bone.

  Though it seemed no more alive than a statue and was no more real, it troubled her. She swam away a little, found another of the white posts and confronted a man’s face, weak-jawed and petulant-looking, the blind eyes gleaming with reflected light. The moon had come higher, making the pale poles stand out against the da
rk of the forested cliffs like a regiment of ghosts.

  From high above the cliffs, a scream shattered the silence; the harsh, predatory cry of some huge bird. Mavin looked up to see two winged blots circling down toward the lake. Shifting herself, she sank beneath the waters to peer at them with protruding, frog-like eyes.

  Harpies! She edged upward, let her ears rest above the water in the shadow of the pole, drawn by something familiar in the cry. Yes. Though she had not heard that voice for twenty years, she could not mistake it. One of the descending forms was Pantiquod – Pantiquod who had brought the plague to Pfarb Durim, who had almost killed Mertyn, who should have been far to the south at Bannerwell with her evil children – screaming a welcome to another child.

  “Well met, daughter! I thought to find you during new moon at the Lake of Faces. And here you are, at old Chamferton’s oracle. Does he send you still to question the Faces?”

  The voice in reply was as harsh, as metallic, with an undertone of wild laughter in it. “Pantiquod, mother-bird, I had begun to think you too old to take shape. What brings you?” The two settled upon the shore, folding their wings to stalk about on high, stork legs, bare pendulous breasts gleaming in the moonlight. Mavin became aware of a smell, a poultry house stink, chemical and acrid. Shifting her eyes to gather more light, she saw that the shore among the poles was littered with Harpy droppings, white as the masks themselves.

  “Not too old, daughter. Too lazy, perhaps. Since Blourbast is dead, I have luxuriated with no need to Game or bestir myself.”

  “And how are my half sister and brother,” the younger Harpy cried, voice dripping venom. “The lovely Huldra, the lovelier Huld?”

  “Well enough, daughter. Well enough. since Huldra bore a son, Mandor, she has had little to do with Huld. She hates him, and he her, and both me and I both. I do not let it trouble me. I stay with them for the power and the servants and the comfort. In the caves beneath Bannerwell there is much pleasure to be had.”

  “I can imagine. Years of such pleasure you’ve had already. More years than I can remember, yet never a word from you since Blourbast died. Why now, mama? Why now, loathsome chicken?” And she cawed with wild laughter, at some joke which Pantiquod shared, for the older Harpy shrilled in the same tone.

  “Oh, does Chamferton call you that still? And me as well? I came not before, dear daughter, because I do not serve him still and would not be caught again in his toils. I come now because you do serve him still and I want to borrow it from you. For a moment or two.”

  “I do not serve him. He holds me, as he once held us both. And you want to borrow it? The wand? Foolishness, mother-bird. He would know it in a minute.”

  “Would it matter if he did? After eight long years, is he still so violent? Would he punish you? For granting a small request to your own mother?”

  The younger Harpy lifted on her wings, threw her head back and screamed with laughter, jigged on her stork legs, wings out, dancing. “Would Chamferton punish me? Would Chamferton punish me? What a question, a question!”

  Mavin paddled her way closer to the shore. They were talking more quietly now, the screaming greetings done, and she thrust her ears upward to catch each word.

  “I will not lend it to you, Mother. Do not ask it. Try to take it and I’ll claw your gizzard out and your eyes as well. But I’ll use it for you, perhaps, if you have not any purpose in mind Chamferton would find hateful enough to punish me for.”

  “It is no purpose he would care a thrilpskin for. Does he care for Huld? Is the Face of Huld still here?”

  “He cares nothing for Huld, and the Face is still here, where he had you put it, Mother. Long ago.”

  “He has probably forgotten it. But I have not forgotten, and I need to know from it a little thing. Ask it for me: Will it grow and flourish like webwillow in the spring? Or will it shrivel and die? Ask it for me, daughter. And I will then do what is best … for me.”

  The two stork-legged shapes moved away among the poles, Mavin after them flat as a shadow on the ground, invisible as she crept in their wake. They wound their way through the forest of poles, searching for a particular one. At last they found it, cawing to one another excitedly. “Oh, it is Huld’s Face, as he is today. He was handsomer when young, daughter. For a time I thought him a very marvel of beauty, before Blourbast changed him and made him what he is.”

  “Ahh, cahhh, ah-haa, mate a Ghoul with a Harpy and blame the Ghoul’s influence for what comes out. Well, Mother. Shall I ask?”

  There were whispers. Then the younger Harpy stood back from the pole with its Face and called strange words into the silence of the place, striking the pole three times with a long, slender wand she had drawn from a case on her back. Three times she repeated this invocation. On the ninth blow, the lips of the Face opened and Huld’s voice spoke – Huld’s voice as it would have come from another world, beyond space. It was the timeless ghost of his voice, and it made shivers where Mavin’s backbones might have been.

  “What would you know?”

  “Will you live or die, Huld?” asked the Harpy. “Will you flourish or wilt into nothing?”

  “For a season I will flourish. I will lose that which I now hold precious and discover I care not. I will heap atrocity upon atrocity to build a name and will lose even my name in a dust of bones.” The lips of the Face snapped shut with the sound of stones striking together. The young Harpy spun on her tall legs, snickering.

  “So, Mother? Is that enough?”

  “It is enough,” Pantiquod said in a dry, harsh voice. “I felt something of the kind. A pity. If one would choose, one would choose a son who would not be so ephemeral. Still. It is he who will dwindle and die, not I. There is time for me to protect myself. I will be leaving Bannerwell, daughter.”

  “And your other daughter, lovely Huldra?”

  “As she will. She may choose to stay, or go.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “If I do not wish to share Huld’s eventual ruin, away from him. Into the Northlands, I think. I have heard there are fortunes to be made and damage to be done in the Northlands. And I will not go empty-handed.”

  “Ah-haw, cawh, I would think not. Will you wait with me now, Mother, while I do Chamferton’s bidding? Will you keep me company?”

  “We were never company, daughter,” said Pantiquod, rising on her wings and making a cloud of dry, feathery droppings scud across the ground into Mavin’s face. “But I fly now to Chamferton’s aerie, and you may return there before I go. Maybe he will have news for me of doings in the north.” She flew up, circling, crying once at the top of the spiral before wheeling north along the valley.

  Now the younger Harpy moved among the Faces, chattering to herself like a barnyard fowl, full of clucks and keraws. Three times she stopped before Faces and demanded certain information of them. Three times the Faces replied before returning to their silent, expressionless masks. A man with a young-old Face was asked where he was and answered, “Under Bartelmy’s Ban.” It was a strange Face and a strange answer. Both stuck in Mavin’s memory. An old woman’s Face opened its pale lips and chanted, “Upon the road, the old road, a tower made of stone. In the tower hangs a bell which cannot ring alone…” There was a long pause, then the lips opened once more. “The daylight bell still hangs in the last tower.” The Harpy chuckled at this before going on to the next Face, that of a middle-aged man with a missing eye who announced that the Great Game being played in the midlands near Lake Yost would soon be lost for all who played, with only death as a result and the Demesne of Lake Yost left vacant.

  By the time Mavin had heard the words of invocation said three times for each of these, she could have quoted them herself. The moon was high above. The young Harpy seemed to have finished her assigned duties and now moved among the poles and Faces only for amusement, Mavin still following doggedly, her curiosity keeping her close behind.

  She almost missed seeing Himaggery’s Face, her eyes sliding across it as they had a hu
ndred others, only to return, shocked and fascinated. It was the face of a man in his mid years, perhaps forty, with lines from nose to mouth and a web around his eyes. And yet – and yet see how those lips quirked in a way she had remembered always, and the lines around his eyes were those her fingertips remembered. He looked as she had dreamed he would, as she had known he would, and that second look told her it was he beyond all doubt.

  She came up from the guano-smeared soil in one unthinking movement, grasping the Harpy with fingers of steel before she could react.

  “I will take the wand, daughter of Pantiquod.”

  The Harpy did not reply, but began a wild, wheeling struggle, beating her wings against Mavin’s face, thrusting with her strong talons. When she found she could not escape, she began screaming, raising echoes which fled along the lake-shore, rousing birds who nested there so that they, too, screamed in the night. Mavin felt the distant beating of wings, heard a cry from high above, knew that fliers there could plunge upon her in moments.

  “Call them off,” she instructed breathlessly. “At once. I have no desire to kill you, Harpy, unless I must.”

  There was only a defiant caw of rage as the Harpy redoubled her struggles. Mavin shook her, snapped her like a whip, raised her above to serve as a shield – and felt the talons and beak of whatever had plummeted from the sky bury themselves in the Harpy’s body. Abruptly the struggles ceased.

  Mavin dropped the body. Perched upon it was a stunned flitchhawk, its dazed, yellow eyes opaque. Mavin pulled it from the Harpy’s throat and tossed it away. It planed down onto the soil to crouch there, panting.