The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Then at last, when I had given up expectation—never having felt hope—the sound of wings. The window was large but scarcely large enough. His mighty talons gripped the sill, and his beak jutted in as he spoke.

  “Well, Jinian Footseer. Have you summoned me for the boon I promised you?”

  “No, flitchhawk. Not for a boon for myself. For you and the forest, perhaps. Here is the Dagger of Dagger-hawk.” I held it so he could look upon it, so he could see it clearly. When he saw the image of the hawk impaled upon it, something went hard and icy in his eyes.

  I went on wearily, “If these bodies are found here, flitchhawk, they will come for me. And for the forest. And perhaps for you. I cannot carry them away. I cannot carry myself.”

  “A boon for me indeed,” the bird whispered, a high, keening whistle that set my hair on end. “And what of you, Jinian? Do you still refuse to be dangled?”

  “I will be dangled,” I whispered, hearing shouts from the courtyard below. “There is no time for anything else.”

  So, I was dangled once again. Only as far as the bottom of the hill, behind a stony scarp, where we could not be seen. Then the hawk was away, the corpses of Dedrina-Lucir and her aunts tucked up beneath him in one mighty foot like bunwits in the talons of an owl. The thought did not bear following to its logical conclusion, so I thought of nothing as I hid the evil Dagger away and trudged down into the gray, thence into the green, thence along the edge of the forest to the place we had set the fire.

  It was still burning, spreading into the surrounding gray, which smoked with a sullen, creeping glow, like charcoal, stinking as it smoldered. The forest had drawn its skirts, away from the fire. A tree pulled up its roots and walked back among its fellows, three bushes and a clump of silver-bells following its example.

  “Perhaps it will burn forever,” I said to myself in a dull, lifeless voice, not recognizing it as my own when I heard it.

  “Oh, dear child,” said the Oracle from behind me, “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it did. What a stench. Not that one wouldn’t have done it, even knowing what a smell it would cause.” It was standing under the shelter of the trees, leaning against one of them, its fantastic face shadowed by the leaves. “Do you have news for me, dear girl? Oh, I so hope so.”

  I shivered. “Yes.” There seemed no point in saying more than that. Undoubtedly the Oracle already knew. I took the thing from my tunic and displayed it, only briefly. “I will not put it into your hands. I will not tempt you with it.”

  “Oh, my dear girl, how sensitive of you. But then, the heroine type would be, wouldn’t she. Better you keep it, dear child. To protect yourself with. You and your love ... if it should come to that .. .”

  The voice faded back into the trees. The feeling was strong even then that I hadn’t heard the last of it, though it was some time before I saw the Oracle again.

  17

  The grayness burned and went on burning as though it had contained some volatile material that could not be extinguished. Though it rained in the night, on the morning the grayness continued to smoke, sending long, ugly coils of black into the air to be blown away toward the east. I thought of those in Xammer, looking to the west only to see all these smelly vapors.

  I could not get near the place we had put the woodpile. There was too much smoke and ash. So while the fire burned itself farther away on either side, east and west, bunwit, tree rat, and I wandered about, doing nothing, with me sometimes spending long hours sitting at the foot of trees, believing I was thinking. Looking back, there was no thinking going on. It was a mere, mushy grayness in my head, no whit different from the plague of Chimmerdong. It surrounded me and held me in. I had not the wits to know it. Once tree rat chivied me up the ladder tree to spy upon Daggerhawk. A mounted party rode out in the mid-morning, returning late that afternoon. There seemed to be some shouting going on. Near evening, I saw Porvius Bloster come down the road from the fortress, the Pursuivant at his side. Tree rat and I went down, he headfirst, I less ebulliently. We hid in a copse and listened.

  “You could not find Dedrina-Lucir while she was held captive, now you cannot find her or my sisters. Cholore, perhaps your time of service to our Demesne is at an end.”

  “Oh, do not bluster so! I am no neophyte to be accused in this fashion!” The Pursuivant turned a harsh face upon Bloster, chopping the air with his hand. “I can find what is to be found, but you know as well as I that things can be hidden where no Pursuivant, no Rancelman, no finder of any kind can come upon them. Your thalan was hidden from me for a time. She and two of your sisters have been hidden from me now, or have hidden themselves for some purpose of their own. You have other sisters. Soon Dedrina Dreadeye will return from the north. Perhaps she knows.”

  “Those two would not have left the Demesne without the Dagger. Dedrina-Lucir would not have left. Not voluntarily.”

  “So, they were abducted. You will receive Game declaration from some Gamesman soon enough, offering them for ransom. Perhaps from Mendost of Stoneflight, whom you so much detest. Perhaps from some other you have offended. Whatever. One would think you had no experience of such things.” He turned away, disgusted.

  “Somehow,” said Porvius, eyeing the greenery around him with a suspicious glare, “I think not.” He ventured toward the fiery place only to be driven back as I had been by the choking smoke. “We will have to spray this again when the fire burns itself out ...”

  “Why?” the Pursuivant asked in irritation. “Why this obsession with Chimmerdong, Bloster? I know the people of Daggerhawk have called themselves the Keepers of Chimmerdong, but why? It seems a futile, useless task.”

  “A bargain made when the world was young, Cholore. The Demesne, the power we have held—all given us in exchange for guarding Chimmerdong and keeping it inside the circle. This was an end much desired by the Magicians.”

  “Your Demesne has been close to the Magicians?”

  “Close! Who can say close? Who knows what Magicians think or want? They send messages by their traders, we send messages in return. Who knows if the traders tell them what we have really said, or tell us what the Magicians really desire?”

  “And it is they who want that girl Jinian killed? The Magicians have some reason to want her dead?”

  “The Magicians? I doubt they know she exists. No. That order came from others. The ones who gave us the Dagger. Them. You know. From up north.” These words were in such a portentously gloomy tone, they caught my attention even through the lethargy. Porvius Bloster was stroking the dream crystal which hung on his chest.

  “Them? Dream Miner? Storm Grower? What brought you into their indenture, Bloster? I did not know you were addicted to the Miner’s wares. I thought you smarter than that.”

  I was surprised to see the Pursuivant pale as he spoke, this Gamesman who had seemed beyond any feeling.

  “What they want, they find ways to get. And they grow stronger as time passes.” Porvius snarled as he turned toward the road once more. “They know more than any Seer, see deeper than any Demon. The future, the past, all are one to them, and they move us like pieces on a gameboard. If they have decided on this girl’s ruin or death, it is for reasons they consider sufficient. Better her ruin than mine, and better you not speak of them at all.”

  Porvius, like his sister, should have talked less. If he had come and gone silently, I would not have had energy to oppose him. I could barely find intention enough to feed myself. This talk of mysterious persons in the north who would give casual orders about my life or death, however, was an irritation. Though I felt strangely little curiosity about it, anger was raised in me again. Only a little anger, but enough to make me vengeful. That night bunwit and I slipped into the fortress and set fire to the storehouse where the sprayer things and the cans of gray stuff were kept. Just as the forest burned, so that storehouse burned, with a mighty, hot malevolence that kept all at Daggerhawk busy for some days.

  When the fire was out at last, the place was beyond h
abitation. It was filthy with smoke, stinking of greasy ash, and where one set bare skin, blisters erupted that refused to heal. Tree rat and I watched from the treetop as they left the Demesne, wagon and cart, horse and fustigar, going north. Much later I realized I should have paid attention to that direction. At the time, it meant nothing.

  At the head of the procession rode Porvius Bloster, head down and chin dragging, a lean, reptilian woman at his side. When all of them had gone, I went to the place, wrapping my boots with leaves and vines, careful to touch nothing. The false dagger was stuck through some papers into the top of the great table. Evidently they had tried its powers, for there was a pawn in the corner, wounded slightly on the arm, then stabbed through the heart. Perhaps, with Dedrina’s mother in the north, Dedrina herself gone, and two other of the Basilisks missing, Bloster had attempted some ceremony of allegiance to himself. If he had, his demonstration of the dagger’s power had failed. Now it served only to pin a document to the table.

  I looked at it without curiosity, a thing of swirling black letters upon parchment, the letters leaping out at me in fragmented phrases. My own name. “The girl called Jinian is ...”

  “Daughter of ...”

  “Must be eliminated ...” The form of the letters themselves brought an uncontrollable terror. I shuddered, fleeing the place. Good sense did not prevail until much later, but when I returned to the place, the papers were gone, removed by what? Or whom? No living thing could have walked unscathed amid that ash unless protected as I was. It had been no bird or small beast collecting paper for a nest, of that I was certain.

  By this time, the fire had burned a swath of considerable width. One could walk from the edge of the forest outward, through the circle the gray had made to the fields once more. Moved by an unconsidered habit of tidiness, I swept at the ashes with a broom of dried grass. One pale stone appeared, then two. Then another, then a line. I wished for creatures with broomy tails. Neither tree rat nor bunwit had any. While wishing, I kept on sweeping. A road was there, under the ash, not whole, broken in places, but not badly. I moved stones, swept ash, got filthy. Once the ashes were swept away, rocks could be moved without burning the skin. I sometimes removed my shoes to feel where the stones could be found. At the end of a long day, one could look down the line of pale stones from the forest’s edge to the land beyond. Whatever wished to enter or leave Chimmerdong upon that road could do so. I had intended only to break the gray ring, but in doing so I had uncovered a road. In the slow, endless days that followed, the beasts and I went on uncovering it as far as the ruin, a silver thread leading to the world outside.

  Then even that slight excuse for activity was gone. All anger been used up, all old pains mined out for what rage they could supply. There was nothing more to use. I sat on the tailings of my discontent, staring out the window, thinking nothing. Time went by unmeasured, dark and light. How long? Very long. Perhaps. No one counted the time. Nothing mattered.

  Sound came. Rain, perhaps. A pattering. No. Wind? Odd. The sound was somehow familiar. Curiosity brought my head up and my feet under me. The remote, uncaring person inside me watched some other Jinian get herself outside the ruins where she might listen.

  More a whirring sound. Like a giant top, spinning.

  Then of course I remembered even before I saw the shape come spinning down the road from the north, the road I had unburdened. A Dervish. Perhaps the Dervish—Bartelmy of the Ban. The one who ...

  It came to a stop before me, the fringes settling into their disturbing stillness. “Jinian Footseer,” it said to me in that toneless, emotionless voice. “The road is open. Well done.”

  “That is true,” I said.” A road is open.” My voice was as toneless as the Dervish’s. Truth to tell, I didn’t even care about the Dervish.

  “When one is open, workers may come in,” she said. “When one is open, workers will come in. Tragamors, perhaps, to move great hills? Sorcerers to hold power for them?”

  I did not answer. What was there to say?

  “What have you to tell me?” it asked then, still not moving, as though we had all day and night to stand there and talk before the ruins. I wanted to sit down.

  “Will you come in?” I offered. It was only studied politeness, the habit learned from a year and a bit at Vorbold’s House.

  “Stand,” it said. It wasn’t a preference. It was an order. I stood. “Tell me.”

  I mumbled a bit about summoning the forest, about the Oracle, the Dagger, the Oracle again. The Dervish hissed, not like the Basilisk but like a tea kettle, full of hot annoyance. I had not thought they ever became annoyed.

  “The Oracle! Here! Where is the Dagger?”

  “I have it,” I said dully. “I will use it, if need be. I learned I will need it, as the answer to one of my questions.”

  An angry buzz then, like a whole hive of warnets. A cry almost of pain. “Oh, Jinian, what questions did you have!”

  Something snapped in me. “A lot!” I screamed at her. “A hell of a lot! Nobody tells me anything! Why don’t I have any Talent? That’s one question! How come Mother and Mendost were always so hateful? That’s another! How come Murzy keeps things from me? How come I’m all alone out here in the middle of nowhere with everybody, including you, coming at me from all sides! What the hell am I supposed to do!” Then I sobbed. I don’t know where the pain and tears came from, all at once, out of nowhere. I thought I had used them all, but there were more ...

  The Dervish trembled. I saw it even through my own tears, feeling as surprised at that as I did at my own uncontrolled emotions. The Dervish trembled like a tree in wind, as though it wanted to move—toward me? away from me?—but could not. A sound came from it. If I had not known better, I would have said it was an anguished sound. Not from a Dervish, though. Never.

  Perhaps never. When it came, the voice was still toneless, unemotional, but it held a timbre as of concealed sorrow. “I will come into your dwelling, Jinian Footseer. I will answer your questions, those I can.” She spun once more and moved through my ancient doorway. I saw with astonishment that the door was shaped correctly for it, narrow at the bottom, wide at the top, as though the creatures that had come here in the far past might have been like this one who came here now.

  And I followed to bend over the hearth where a small fire burned. Habit made me offer the Dervish tea, a quiet, minty brew made of plants Murzy had showed me. The pot was always full of it. It was all I had eaten or drunk for a long time. The Dervish accepted a cup and stood there, pillar still, with the hand and cup beneath the fringes as she drank, her face invisible. The cup came down empty in a wide hieratic gesture, like a ritual. I thought suddenly of thirst endured for its own sake, of hunger endured for its own sake. Of endless, whirling hours spent in concentration. Of never sitting, seldom lying down. Of becoming something other than oneself. In that moment I thought all those things and knew the Dervish thought them, too.

  “You don’t care that you have done a good thing,” she said at last. “You don’t feel at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I try to care, but I can’t.”

  “Ah,” she said. “When did this unfeeling begin?” I tried to think. It had begun before I had trapped the pig, for this deadly lethargy had almost killed me then. I had never noticed it until after talking with the forest. Perhaps then. When the shadow had gathered. My body had continued to move for a while, out of habit, then for a time out of anger. I said this. She nodded, slowly. “You went to the window and pulled the curtain aside, only a crack, but that which waited outside needed only a crack. It lashed within as a whip lashes. It touched you. It needs only touch, no more than that. I have seen it before. The vital web which controls your body and connects it to your mind has been broken. Your mind thinks, but your body will not move. Or perhaps it moves wildly, without control. Sometimes you sit for hours, oppressed by a weariness so deep there is no relief from it. Sleep does not cure, it merely postpones. Instead of standing poised within th
e flow of all, you have fallen below it, into depression, into subsidence. There is no hope in you.”

  She was right. I didn’t care, but I knew she was right.

  “I have seen some persons so sunk in shadow they do not move for years,” she said. “Standing like stones. I have rescued some such. Perhaps you have some immunity to it, for you have managed to go on living. Pay attention now.” She reached for me, touched me.

  She hurt me.

  She hurt me and went on hurting me.

  It was worse than the time the Healer had come when I was a child. Worse than the time at the citadel when she had looked at me in the Dervish way. Worse than anything I’ve ever felt. Worse than the pain of thorn or bruise or insect bite. Fire running down every nerve, meeting obstruction, then leaping across that obstruction in an explosion of heat and color that was felt, not seen. Bridge! my mind screamed, agonized. Bridging broken places with fire. Oh, stop, stop. Oh, gods, stop. Please. I babbled. I twitched, fell down, the Dervish’s hand coming with me. Back, ribs, chest, arms, then down into my groin, my legs, every toe, liquid fire running everywhere.

  How do I describe pain? Everyone knows pain. The bitter companion, the hated protector. I learned in that one, endless instant to know pain. And when it was over, to value it. But not until later.

  “There,” breathed the Dervish over my sobbing, thrashing body. “The shadow breaks all webs, shatters all nets. The shadow disrupts all continuity. I have bridged the places that were broken. It is painful, for the broken places must be shocked into awareness, realigned and reconnected. Now they are alert again.”

  She made me look at her, made me follow her pointing finger with my eyes. “Shhh. Settle now. It is over. You have done a similar thing yourself, Jinian. There.” And she pointed to the length of road, clear to the north. “You, too, have bridged the broken places. Consider whether there may have been pain when you did so.”

  I looked at the pale line of road in shocked amazement, suddenly granted an insight which I cursed myself for a fool that I had not seen before. The tingle I felt when I walked upon the road. Dissimilar only in intensity to that I had just felt.