The True Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Few .. of us," said the bird man.

  "Ah. So you warned your own? But you let others learn for themselves. Or die for themselves. How many went in?"

  "Thousands," said Sambeline moodily.

  "And how many came out?"

  "None," said the bird man.

  "Wrong," I said. "They have all come out. All. And now, I demand of you an answer which I have earned from you. Where is the monument of Thandbar?"

  They looked at one another, shifty looks, gazes which glanced away from eyes and over shoulders to focus on distant things.

  "I can do to others what I did to Castle Lament," I threatened, softly. "No matter what shape you take, I will find you."

  It was Sambeline who spoke, placatingly. "Schlaizy Noithn is the monument to Thandbar," she said. "All of it. The whole valley."

  Almost I laughed. Oh, Mavin, I thought. Mother, are you of this shifty kindred, this collection of lick-spittle do-nothings? And, if so, do I want to find you at all? My eyes went to the heights. "Look not upon it," she had written. Well, if I look not upon Schlaizy Noithn, I would look upon the heights. Somewhere up there.

  I did not speak to those who still stood in the wreckage. I turned from them all and went away toward the heights. Behind me I heard voices raised briefly in argument. When I looked down from the trail they had gone. The valley was as I had seen it first, green, wooded, garlanded with rivers and jeweled with lakes. At the edge of the valley nearest me was a scar of gray. "Become grass, and cover it," I whispered to them. "To hide your shame." Within me, Didir stirred. "Never mind," I said. Let them look upon the scarred earth for a while. Perhaps it would make them think of something they should have done. Or would have done, had they learned any of the words old Windlow taught me.

  In that moment I would not have given a worm-eaten fruit for all the Shifters in Schlaizy Noithn.

  6

  Mavin's Seat

  At the top of the slope a trail led around the valley. I turned toward the west since this was the direction opposite the one from which I had come into Schlaizy Noithn. The way led higher and higher, ending at last at a pinnacle which speared out westward over the lands beyond. I leaned against a tree, staring at the far horizons from ice-topped mountains in the south to a far, mist- shrouded land in the north where the jungly swamps were to be found. I leaned, thinking of nothing much, until a movement caught my eye. There upon the pinnacle was Mavin, crouched above a fire over which several plump birds were roasting. My mouth filled so in anticipation of the taste of them that I could not speak as I approached.

  She looked up at me and snarled, "What kept you? I expected you long since."

  It was too much. I felt the hot fury build in me and blow up my backbone like a hard wind. "How could you allow an abomination like that to exist?" I screamed at her. "Centuries of it. Festering like a sore! And you did nothing. Nothing! I came close to being killed. Like the thousands who were killed! Who were they? Little people? Pawns? People of no consequence? Eaten up in play? How could you let your own flesh fall into that trap? How could you… I sputtered out, made mute by rage.

  She did not seem to have listened. She plopped one of the birds upon a wooden trencher, dumped a spoonful of something else at its side, added a hunk of bread and set it all on a stone beside me. "You'll be hungry," she said. "Exorcism is hard work."

  I screamed at her again. She bit neatly into a leg of fowl, using one finger to tuck in a bit of crispy skin. The smell ravished me. She said, "Your dinner will get cold."

  I raged, howled, strode back and forth in a perfect frenzy of extemporaneous eloquence. She went on eating. At last the exertion of the day, the long rage, and sheer weariness caught up with me. I choked, gagging on my own words. At this, she put a wooden mug into my hand. I thought it was water, drank half of it in a gulp, then choked myself into silence. It was pure spirit of wine, wineghost, and it burned away my fury, sweeping through me like a broom through a midden.

  "Ahhg," I said.

  "Ahhg."

  "Exactly." She placed the trencher in my hands. "If you have done with your peroration, my son, I will answer your charges. How old do you think I am? No. Never mind. Surely you do not think me a thousand years old? No. I thought not.

  Well, then, I can disclaim any responsibility for that place you speak of for at least nine hundred years. Since I became aware of it as a curse upon the valley of Schlaizy Noithn, I have tried three times to correct the matter. I tried first to get some of those stiff-necked Immutables to come into the valley. I was sure the Shifter was mad, and I told the Immutables so, but they would not come. None of their affair, they said, whether it ate a thousand Gamesmen or a thousand thousand. Later, I tried to get a noted Healer to come with me into the valley. He refused me, saying he felt the chance of success was small. My third attempt succeeded. Castle Lament is gone, and you are here, eating roast fowl and none the worse for it." I stared at her, unbelieving. She had meant me to fall into that.

  "I was right, wasn't I?" she asked. "It was mad?"

  "It was dead," I mumbled. "Dead, and I could've been killed."

  "Nonsense. You are my son. You are a Shifter. Shifters of Mavin's line do not 'get killed.' We are too shifty, too clever, too sly .. Besides, you have help."

  The wineghost had seeped into my fingers and toes, warming and tickling them into a feeling almost of comfort. The food slid down my throat. I could not summon the energy for anger. "You got me drunk," I accused.

  "I know how to deal with hysteria," she said stiffly. "You did take your time in coming to visit me. Did the invitation confuse you?"

  "No .. no. I wanted to come. But others wanted me to stay. Time went by."

  "The journey? Was it easy?"

  "The worst was the Trader. I did think I might be killed there. He tried."

  "Nap? A smallish man with a wide mouth? Mouth all full of smiles and easy words? Eyes full of flint and old ice? That one?"

  I nodded yes. "Stupid. I was stupid to fall in with him. But he was persistent."

  "He is that." Her voice grated.

  "It took me a while to figure out he wanted to kill me. Or something else. I'm not really sure."

  "What did he try?"

  "Drugged wine. Or poisoned. No, I think drugged, because he was wild when I convinced him I was dead." I went on to tell her in fits and starts what had occurred during the journey, leaving out nothing except what had set me off in haste to her in the first place. Well, I was full of wineghost. When I told her of my long trials in Schlaizy Noithn, she shook her head.

  "We call it the monument of Thandbar, true. Howsomever, it is as much a nursery as anything else. Many of those there are new come to their Talents, or very young, or limited. Sambeline has only three shapes, her own, a pombi, and an owl. Many there are were-owls or were-pombis. Some there are experimentalists, madmen or women who cannot adapt to the Talent at all, who shift and become locked into strangeness. Roads which move. Speaking hillocks. Some experiment themselves into shapes they cannot get out of. I think Castle Lament was one such. I have long thought it would be worthwhile to have a few Immutables available to unlock them, but I have been unable to convince the Immutables of that."

  "They have no fondness for Gamesmen." I yawned. "Though Riddle has been very kind to me."

  "Well, perhaps we can call upon that kindness come someday. Tell me of my kindred? Is Mertyn well? Does he plot still with Himaggery and old Windlow?"

  I cursed myself. She didn't know. I had sat by her fire eating and drinking for an hour, and she did not know. I blurted it all out, the disappearances, Himaggery gone, Windlow gone, Mertyn in the Bright Demesne. She looked at me frozen-faced with suspicious wetness at the corner of one eye.

  "Himaggery vanished! Oh, Gameslords, but I feared it would happen. He is a sweet man, full of juice as ripe fruit."

  She paused, and then said, "He is your father. I remember him kindly always, though he does not so remember me. He would have had me stay with h
im and live with him like some pawnish wife of a farmer; me, Mavin Manyshaped, for whom the world is not too large! So I left him against his will and he likes me no longer."

  "Does he know? Did he .. I mean, that he is my father?"

  "Oh, knowing I am your mother and what your age is. he should have figured it out. Yes. I should think so. Not that it matters. Which is what I told him, but he was full of pawnish ideas. Enough. Whether he likes me well or not at all, still I would not have him vanished into the shadows like so many of our friends. Mertyn did well to send you to me. Now. What's to do about this."

  "Mertyn wanted me to find them, search for them. He told me to ask for them wherever I went, as Necromancer."

  "Tush. Those who are vanished in this way are not dead. We had figured that out a decade ago. Nor do they live, for the Pursuivants cannot find them. No, it is into the Land of Dingold they have gone, the place of shadows, and it is there we must Shift to find them. Nap, now, he knows something, you may be sure."

  This abrupt change of subject caught me by surprise, and seeing this, she pointed down from the height we sat upon to the place below, slowly emerging into the light as the shadow of the precipice grew shorter. I peered down at strangeness, stranger even than Schlaizy Noithn, for it looked like nothing I had seen before that time, a weirdness lying below us at the foot of the cliff.

  If a giant child had built a mud-spider out of shreds and threads, rat fur and murk, then set it upon a stone dish with its legs arrayed full circle around it and its eyes glittering in all directions, this might have been likened to what I saw. Then, if the child had built bulky mud towers between the spider's legs, each tower with doors at the bottom in the shape of faces, each face a maw opening into the dark-why then, that might have been likened to what I saw. Then, if the child had surrounded it all with a saw-edged wall and set the whole thing in quivering motion-well, that was the place. Smoke rose from it. Clangor sounded from it, soft with distance. The faces upon the tower doors grimaced, eyes first open then shut. The spider turned its eyes this way and that, the whole a clot, a bulk of dark in the light of morning.

  "What is it?" I whispered, unbelieving.

  "The Blot," she said. "To which Gifters come. Nap among them."

  "Gifters!"

  "Traders. They call themselves Traders. They are Gifters nonetheless. They bring certain things here, they take certain things from here. The things they take from here they sell, sometimes. Often they give."

  "Is this-the place of magicians?"

  "What do you know of magicians?" she demanded.

  "Only what is said in the marketplace. What Gamesmaster Gervaise said. What Laggy Nap said. That there may be, perhaps, a place of magicians to the west. Gervaise says the little cold Gamespieces come from there. Nap says no such thing, but we both know he is a liar."

  "Some call the place below there a place of magicians. But there are no Gamesmen there. No Immutables. Only a few very strange beings which stay there and other strange creatures which come and go. And soon now, Nap again. He comes regularly, and last time he came here, he left here with your cousins in his train."

  "My cousins?" I remembered two grinning faces under flame-red hair, peering down at me from a height before the battle at Bannerwell. "My cousins? With Nap?"

  "Your cousins. Swolwys and Dolwys. Twins. Scamps. But better Shifters than any you met in Schlaizy Noithn. They have not your advantages, no Gamesmen of Barish to call upon (as I presume you did in Castle Lament, as I intended) but good boys for all that. I sent them to join Nap's train the last time he came to the Blot, and I let them go and return by that road to the north.

  If we had no other evidence, the fact that Nap travels that road would tell us what he is. Past Poffle. Too close. But they should return soon."

  She was staring away to the north where a pair of ruts wound around the edge of the plateau and disappeared. Following her gaze I could see a plume of dust there. Someone was upon that road, certainly, and it came in only the one direction, toward the place below.

  "There they are. Still some hours away, coming no faster than the pace of their water oxen. So, if I were you, my son, I'd sleep a while. Drink the rest of your wineghost and take your full stomach into my cavern yonder. I will call you when they come." She gestured toward a half hidden entrance I had not noticed before. I was too weary to argue, so let her push me in that direction.

  When I came to the cave entrance, I looked back expecting to see her still watching from the prominence, but it was bare. High above me circled a huge bird with wings as long as I am tall. It cried my name and dipped toward me, then caught a current of air to carry it north. It was very beautiful in the sun, white and gleaming, trailing plumes graceful as smoke. I went into the cave with a feeling of exquisite sadness, as though ridden by a memory I could not identify. Had I seen her so before? Or was it something in her voice as she cried to me? Perhaps it was only the spirit in my blood, the aftermath of anger. I was asleep as soon as I lay down.

  She woke me in the late afternoon, shaking me and offering some warm brew from a simmering pot by the fire. "They have stopped," she said. "It is as though Nap is not eager to come to the Blot. They have come almost to the wall, however, and you can see them easily from the pinnacle."

  So I went onto the pinnacle once more to watch the compact circle of wagons near the cinereous walls. The animals were unhitched and led away to a patch of tall meadow grass near the bottom of the long slope. Mavin watched the animals with curious intensity. Until that moment I had given no thought as to what guise my cousins had taken in Nap's train. Now her focused gaze told me where they were and in what shape. A pair of oxen grazed away from the others, toward a stony place heavy with obscuring shadows, grazed around, behind them, and was gone. A rustle among small trees marked their passage.

  "They will be here momentarily," she said with satisfaction. "Perhaps we may learn something. There was the sound of plodding on the trail, silence, and then they appeared around the high stone, precisely as I remembered them. Broad-faced, red-haired, with grins of the same width on lips of the same shape. One of them had an interesting scar over one eye. Otherwise they were identical. The scarred one pointed to his identifying mark.

  "Swolwys," he said. "I keep the scar to make it easier for others to address me by name. It is easier than Shifting into something unique."

  "Our similarity is uniqueness enough," said the other. "Why should we not be known for that fact as well as any other? I am Dolwys. Those mental midgets in the wagon train did not even notice that they had two identical water oxen. We did it to see if they were alert. They are not, or at least, not very. They even believed you dead, Cousin Peter."

  I swallowed. They looked very young to be so insouciant, younger even than I. "I take it you were not convinced."

  Swolwys considered this. "Ah, had we not known who and what you are, it is possible we would have been taken in. It was very well done. Except that we could not figure out why you did not simply Shift and slide away."

  "There was a woman in the train," I said.

  "Ah," said Dolwys. "Izia."

  "Lovely Izia," commented his twin. "Not a type attractive to me, but still, fair. Very fair."

  Mavin's head had come up like a questing fustigar's. "A woman? What is she to you?"

  "She is nothing to me." I laughed, somewhat bitterly. "Why this concern? She is a pawn, a servant. She is in durance, held unwillingly, captive by some device I have not seen or heard of before. Boots. Metal boots, high on the leg, which grow hot at Nap's will. Had I simply vanished, Nap might have thought the woman involved in my disappearance, for I had been stupid enough to let him see me watching her. As you say, she is very fair."

  "But she is nothing to you?"

  I began to bridle at this repeated question. "Not quite nothing, no! She is a captive. As were those in Castle Lament. I have told you my feelings about such matters."

  "Ah. Well. Perhaps we can do something about it."
>
  At that moment, I was glad there was no Demon among them. I had not been able to say she was nothing to me with an honest heart. She was a good deal to me, and the fact that she was now almost within reach of my voice made me tremble. Izia. I could not leave her to Nap's malevolence. I would have to find a way to free her. I did not understand the compulsion, for it was not merely pity, but I welcomed it as I now supposed I had welcomed Sylbie and Castle Lament. They were all problems, problems to be solved, wrongs to be righted. I thought again of Windlow's curious word: Justice. It was odd how many satisfying things could be done under that rubric. So, I ruminated while my cousins and mother leaned upon the stone to watch the wagons below.

  'There," whispered Mavin. "Nap has decided to wait until morning to enter the Blot." It was true. The camp had settled; Nap was seated beside his fire as others moved about the endless duties of the train. I saw Izia at once, moving among the animals, searching for the missing pair, her skirted figure plain among the trousered ones of the men, all walking with that strange hesitation which I now, too well, understood.

  "Is there some way we can free them?" I asked the twins. "From Nap, or from the boots?"

  "If it becomes important, we must find a way," said Swolwys. "However, those boots are locked on in a way we do not understand. I have heard Nap say that an Elator in those boots could not move out of them. A Tragamor could not move them from himself. A Shifter could not change out of them. They transcend Talent, so says Nap. Nap controls them, but he must return to the Blot every season to have that power renewed. It is growing weaker even now, and I think it is only that which brings him back to the Blot. Without his power, control of his servants wanes. The last day or two we have seen indications of rebellion among the pawns, particularly the newest ones. We went far to the south, you know, looking for you, I suppose, cousin. We stopped near the Bright Demesne. You were not there, but Nap bought pawns from a pawner, young, strong ones who look at him with mutiny in their eyes."