The True Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Then, however, came three more together: an Exorcist, a Medium, and a Timereacher. Chance drew in breath in a long, aching sigh as the three joined the Bonedancer, all at one fire, all talking together. "Game toward," he murmured. I was inclined to agree with him. Why else so many dealers with the dead in this one place?

  "What is it Timereachers do?" I asked. "See the past?"

  "It's said so," he whispered to me. "Mediums as well. A combination of Seeing and Deadraising? So I've heard."

  "Exorcists too," I said. "Seeing, Healing, Deadraising. Able to settle ghosts, I recall, and perhaps to See where a ghost may trouble before it actually begins haunting. Still, to have all three, plus a Bonedancer? Someone means to raise something great, and he wishes to be sure he can put it to rest again. Who do you think?" The four were taking no notice of anyone around them, but there was something almost familiar about one of the figures. What was it made my skin crawl?

  "Do you wish we were away from here?" I whispered.

  "Enough to get away from here," he murmured in reply. It needed no discussion. He stood and walked away to the toilets, merely another one in a constant stream of toing and froing. After a moment, I went the same way. We met at the picket line, loosed our horses, and led them quietly into the night. Inasmuch as we had prepared no food for ourselves, nothing had been unpacked. When we had led them far enough for quiet's sake, we mounted and rode northward again, seeing the yellow glows of the little fires dwindle behind us in the dark. I was thinking, suspecting, wondering about the Gamesmen we had seen, the way they had moved and walked, the order of their arrival. Four. A Bonedancer, an Exorcist, a Medium, and a Timereacher. Three with Seeing; two with Healing; one to hold Power; one to raise Fire; and all four to Raise the Dead. I groped for Dorn in my pocket and read him this list.

  "If such a four can find a battlefield," he whispered in my mind, "or the site of a great catastrophe in which many died, not so long that bones have fallen to dust yet long enough that flesh has left the bones, why then, were I Gaming, I would guess those four will raise a multitude and will seek, thereby, to do some evil work…" I waited for him to go on. After a long time, he said, "A Healer may Heal. Know also a Healer may Unheal. Do not let the Medium or Exorcist lay hands upon you…"

  I had already learned that in School House, the unwisdom of letting those with the power of the flesh (another name for Healing) lay, hands upon one. An Exorcist could lay hands on one and leave a bloody handprint where he had broken every little blood line in one's flesh. It was said, among boys, that Mediums could raise the dead and set them on your trail, and that they would follow forever. I asked Chance if he believed that.

  "Well, there are haunts set, lad. You told me you put down one such in Betand. And there are Ghostpieces."

  "I have yet to hear one straight word about Ghostpieces," I said with considerable asperity. "Windlow mentioned them once, and others have talked of them. I have never learned what it is they can and cannot do. Perhaps in your wide travels, Chance, you've learned the answers to all this." I was being sarcastic.

  He became very dignified at once. "Lad, don't get all exercised at me. So there's Deadraisers on the Great North Road, and so you think they have something to do with you. Well, I'm not ringing any great bell to tell them where you're hid. I don't know a midgin more about Ghostpieces than the next one; what we've heard is all. We've heard of things raised up which could not be put down again. We've heard of things that turned on those that raise 'em. Himaggery would say to put your reason to work on it, and I can't say better than that."

  When Chance got offended like that, there was no use trying to get anything out of him, so I rode along feeling ashamed of myself. Reason said that anything raised had to take power from somewhere. Reason said that, and so did experience, for when Dom had raised up the dead under Bannerwell, I could feel the power flowing from him-me. But then once they were raised up, they went on their own-at least those in Bannerwell had. It had been like pushing a wagon from the top of a hill, a hard push to get it started, then it rolled of itself. So at least under some conditions things raised up would move on their own. Well, reason had not led me far. I would have to think more on it.

  Meantime, we had come so far on the road that the Phoenix Demesne stood due east of us. It was time to rest, for us and for the animals. Here and there in the flat farmland, crisscrossed by a thousand little canals which flowed down from the east fork of the River Reave, were small hillocks covered with trees, woodlots left to provide fuel for the farms. In one of these copses we took cover for what remained of the night, tethering the animals so they could not wander out to be seen from the road. I went to sleep in discomfort and foreboding. Gamelords know what I dreamed, but I was so wound up in my blankets that Chance had to help me out of them in the morning, and the sweat had soaked them through.

  We breakfasted over a small fire, built smokeless and quickly extinguished when the first travelers appeared on the road. We lay behind a shield of dried fern, peering through. There was an hour or so of usual travel, farm wagons, a herd of water oxen, a girl leading three farm zeller by the rings in their noses, their udders swinging full before milking. Then came a burst of travelers from the south, all riding speedily without looking around them, then another three or four, then a space, then a bunch riding with eyes ahead as though intent upon covering the leagues. There was another little space, then two men riding hard and whipping their animals. After them, the bones.

  They came in a horde, a hundred, perhaps more, complete skeletons, so loosely joined that the arms and legs might go off dancing on their own, jerking and rattling, only to come back to the other bones and accumulate once more into more or less complete sets, the grinning skulls bouncing and lunging at the tops of the backbones as though on springs. Behind this clattering aggregation rode the Bonedancer on a shabby black horse, and behind the Bonedancer the Exorcist, the Timereacher, and the Medium-No! It wasn't a Medium. In the firelight the night before I had seen only the dark gray cloak pulled forward, hiding the face. Today the cloak glittered with gold spiderweb embroidery and the hood was thrown back to reveal the magpie helm beneath. A Rancelman-same Talents as a Timereacher, but with Reading added. I sharpened my Shifter's eyes to see more clearly, then muttered an oath as I saw more clearly than I liked.

  "It's Karl Pig-face," I said. "A Rancelman!"

  "No!" Chance fiddled with his glass, easing it through the dried fern so as not to betray us where we lay. "So it is! But what's wrong with his face? That isn't the Karl you knew!"

  I looked again, more carefully. It was Karl Pig-face, right enough, but the face was… empty. Pale. Dry, rather than sheened with sweat as I had always seen it. At that instant, his head began to turn toward me, and as his head turned every skull in that endless train of bones began to turn also. Without thinking, I reached for Didir, felt her flow into me, and made my own mind dive down like some depth-dwelling fish to let her shield me. Through my eyes, I felt her watch the skeleton heads swing restlessly to and fro, like pendant fruit, the wormholes of the empty eyes seeking me. Then Karl's head faced forward once more, and they went on, on to the north. I did not move or speak until they were vanished in dust, beyond even a Shifter's ability to see them.

  "That one sought you, Peter," whispered Didir. "Sought you out of hate, malice, and because he is forced to do it. He wears a cap, like the other one you are remembering. He felt you, Peter."

  "But he did not tell them…" I replied wonderingly.

  "They are fools," she said. "Whoever wears the cap will do only what he is told. They told him to find you, not to tell them he had found you. So he found you, lost you, and went on seeking. Their stupidity has saved you, this time."

  "Who?" I breathed.

  She did not answer. I had not thought she would. Karl had not known who sent him, and for her to attempt to Read any of the others would have been to signal our presence.

  "So we are behind them now," said Chance.

&nb
sp; "Behind them," I said. "But who knows how many have been set on my trail. It began the minute we left the Bright Demesne. I am not such a fool as to think these boneraisers are the end of it. Someone has gone to considerable trouble."

  "Ah," said Chance.

  "Huld!" I said. I was certain of it. It had all the marks of Huld, all his energy, his relentless malice, his fascination with the mechanisms of the techs. Who else could have learned from Mandor that Karl Pig-face was my enemy? Who else would have known of my association with Silkhands… Silkhands! "Silkhands is in great danger," I said. "Huld would not let the chance pass to use her against me. He will take her when she leaves Xammer, depend upon it, and she is all unwary of this."

  "Well, lad, I wouldn't let him do that if I were you."

  Curse the man. No sympathy. No hooraw and horror, no running about squawking. Merely "don't let him do that." Tush. Xammer was more than a hard day's ride south, and she might be leaving at any time. Or have left already.

  "There's that Hafnor," said Chance, fixing me with his beady little eyes. "In case you've forgot."

  Damn him. Of course I hadn't forgotten. The idea made me sick to my stomach was all. Stopping existing in one place. Flicking away to another place. Starting to exist there. All in an instant. It was worse than the bones. I felt my inner parts lurch and sway, a kind of vertiginous gulping of the guts.

  "No other way I can see," said Chance, still staring at me.

  With no sense of volition about it at all, I reached into the pouch to find Hafnor, knowing him in the instant by the unfamiliarity of him. I clenched my hand around him and took a deep, aching breath, only to have my mind filled with a gust of mocking laughter. "Well, and where are we here?" I felt someone using my eyes, my nose, my tongue to taste the air, my other hand to feel the ground beneath me. I saw the shape of every tree, the volume of the leaves against the sun, felt the texture of the dried grasses. "That's here," said the laughing voice. "Where do we want to go?" I tried to explain about Silkhands, about Xammer, but felt only a mad, laughing incomprehension and impatience. "Where, where, where? What walls? What smell of the air? What floors? What doors leading in and out? What windows? Draperies? Furniture? What landmarks seen through those windows? Where, where?"

  All I could think of was the room in the Guest House, and I tried to remember it in a way that would suit Hafnor. Sudden memories surged up, ones I had not known of, the color and sound of the fire, the feel of the woolen carpet on my hands, the smell of the polish used on the furniture. The memories assailed from every side, and I dropped the tiny figure of Hafnor in panic, to stand heaving like an overridden horse. When I had panted my way back to a kind of sanity, I said to Chance, "If I go, and if I am gone when night comes, then go to… to Three Knob. Get rid of that yellow horse and his strange shoes. Tell anyone who seems interested that the young man who was with you has gone away… to Vestertown, or Mominghill. But you go to Three Knob and wait there, however long it takes me. We'll meet you there, Silkhands and I."

  He did not argue or make any great fuss about it, merely watched me, nodding the while, as I took Hafnor into my hand again. I summoned up the memories of that guest room and saw them take visible shape before me, as though framed in a round window. From the corner of my eye, I saw another window which looked out onto a flame-lit cavern, and another which showed the attics of Mertyn's House in Schooltown, and another which showed the long, half-lit corridors of the magicians' lair beneath the mountains. I spun, seeing these windows open about me, as though I stood at the center of a sponge or a great cheese, all around me holes reaching away to every place I had ever been or known of. "Where?" whispered Hafnor, and I turned to the hole which showed the guest room in Xammer, stepped through it, and stumbled upon the rug before the cold fireplace to fall sprawling.

  When I had stopped shaking and had time to get up and brush myself off, for I was still covered with half dried grasses from that hill beside the road, far to the north, I sneaked down to the courtyard and appeared there to the first person I could find from Vorbold's House. It was Gamesmistress Joumerie, who looked me over curiously and answered me words I did not like.

  "Silkhands? Why, no, Gamesman. She rode out this morning with young Jinian and several servants and two Armigers for safety's sake, riding to King Kelver's purlieu, away north. They will not move over fast, not so far you may not catch them up, ride you swiftly."

  I left her with scant courtesies to find a hidden corner and take Hafnor into my hand once more. "What do I do now?" I begged. "I must find her, but I don't know the road well enough to…"

  "Hoptoad, lad," came the laughing voice with more than a hint of malice at my discomfiture. "Hoptoad. Do you look far ahead, keen as your eyes will go, and I will do the rest." That is what we did. I looked as far down the road as I could see, sharpening my vision to the utmost, spying the place ahead, the trees, the canals, whatever might be about, bit on bit, and then we flicked, and I was in that spot. Then I did it again, and flick, and again, and flick, each time scanning the road between to be sure we did not miss her. Until we saw the confusion and heard the screaming and flicked to find ourselves among a crowd, all shouting and running about near the unconscious body of one Armiger and the bleeding, perhaps dead, body of another.

  I shook one of the bystanders and demanded that he tell me quickly what had happened. He pointed a trembling finger at the forest edge. "Ghoul," he whispered. "Came with a horde of dead out of the trees. The Armigers tried to fight them, but you can't fight that. The Ghoul took the women. Dragged them away into the trees."

  Though obviously frightened, he had kept his wits about him. I ran for the forest, knowing that Hafnor could not help me there. It would take Grandfather Tamor, swift flyer, to lift me up where I could see. So it was. He caught me up like a feather, moved me like a swooping hawk to peer this way and that, seeking the movement of leaves or the rustle of undergrowth below, quartering again and yet again, hearing only silence, working slowly westward, a little faster than a man might run.

  It was the cold first, then Silkhands' voice which led me to them. The Ghoul could not stop her chatter any more than I had ever been able to do, and her voice went on resolutely, almost as though she knew someone would be searching for her. I came into a tree top to watch them. The Ghoul dragged them along, one on either side of him, his host of dead following in a shamble of rotting flesh. Ghouls do not move clean bones; they have the Talent of Moving, of Power, of Raising the Dead. How much power did this one have? Plenty, it seemed, and was drawing more, for the place was icy as winter. I hung above them judging the distance.

  Then as he passed below I stooped upon him, screaming as I flew, "Ghoul's Ghast Nine, I call Game and Move!" as I snatched the two girls from him and launched myself upward toward another tree…

  Only to know in one hideous moment that I had played the fool, the utter, absolute and unGamed fool. I had called a risk play, an Imperative, unwise and unready as I was, and the Ghoul would not ignore it. I hung there in the tree, the girls reaching out to cling to the branches as the strength left my arms. There was no power in the place to draw and I was weak… weak. I was in the Ghoul's Demesne, and he had drawn it all. Such power as I had I had expended prodigiously in the flick, flick, flick of Elator's hunt in finding them, in the reckless flight and swoop and call. Now there was no more strength in me than enough to move myself away a few yards, thyself only, and no way to get more. I gasped, unable even to think what might be done.

  I saw him reach for his power. He had more than I would have guessed, for two of the rotting liches staggered to the tree where we clung and began to climb, clotted eyes fixed upon us. They climbed awkwardly, leaving parts of themselves stuck to various small twigs and branches, but they came higher by the moment. Beneath them, others assembled, waiting, lipless mouths gaped in silent grins of amusement at the fruit about to fall into their hands and jaws. I heard Silkhands whimper, saw the girl, Jinian, glaring down at the Ghoul while rumblin
g curses in her throat. I wanted to close my own eyes, half dead as I was with cold and terror. I could fly myself away to another place, me, alone, with no burden. Or move Silkhands away without me. No more than that, and the place cold, cold.

  Below me the Ghoul laughed and screamed into the quiet forest, "Armiger's Flight Ten, fool flyer. Armiger's Flight Ten." He was calling my death and the death of those two with me, and I knew it as did they.

  I wondered if I would have the strength to move Silkhands away. My hand clenched in my pocket, clenched, and then gripped again as I felt that other unfamiliar shape in my fingers. Buinel. Sentinel. Firemaker. He came into my mind like a bird onto an unfamiliar nest, fussing and turning. I felt the thousand questions he was about to ask, anticipated the lengthy speech he was about to make. Oh, something within me recognized him, knew him for that Buinel whom Windlow had called Buinel the flutterer.

  The branch under my foot swayed. I looked down into the face of one of the liches as it fastened a partly fleshed hand upon my boot. I kicked wildly, and the thing fell away as Jinian shouted shrilly at my side.

  "Buinel," I cried silently. "Fire. Or we die, you die, we all die. Forever."

  "Who?" he fussed. "Who speaks? What authority? What place is this? Who is that Ghoul? What Game?"