The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  A nice conclusion to the tale, his and mine. A good place to leave it, is it not? All of us properly paired off, loving couples or with some hope of being, having achieved great things. Many of the old stories end in such a way. “And then they lived happy all their lives.”

  And so with us, except that our lives were to be short ones lasting at most only a few hours from that time. As it was, we few stood alone upon the Wastes of Bleer waiting for too short a time to pass before we died. It was then and there I began this tale.

  From what I have said, you know we did not die. The way of our salvation was this.

  We stood together then upon the Wastes of Bleer, the great convoluted forms of the Wind’s Bones all around us, eleven Gamesmen plus Barish-Windlow, and five of us who had come there, seventeen in all, while against us marched an army of bones stretching from one side of the horizon to the other. I had reconciled to dying, almost, and the others as well. We would die, but we would fight. We would die, but we would die honorably—and I considered the distinction with some wry, mordant cheer. A false distinction, but better than none under the circumstances. I had cried and scribbled one night away, sorry I could not have forgotten the oath for that last night. It seemed such a futile thing if I were to die, never to have loved him fully. But then I thought if I were to die, better to die true to myself than false. And who knows, making love under such conditions might not have been very wonderful the first time. I understand it often isn’t. Margaret explained that to me. So, I stood there facing the marching horde, the Dagger in my hand, hoping I would have a chance of letting one of the human movers of that horde feel the edge of it, grieving a little.

  Then there was no more time to grieve over lost loving, for the army of bones was upon us. Peter had Shifted into a grole, ready to eat as many of the enemy as he could. The rest of us were ready to fight, knowing it would be futile against that array, about to be overrun.

  And then ... in the middle of that great tumult I felt Peter trying to raise up the Wind’s Bones, those great buried hulks that lay all about us, trying to link with the Gamesmen as he had so often in the past, trying to use their strength to bring the great old bones of the world to our defense. They were too monstrous, too deep, too heavy, too far buried. He could not. They quivered only slightly, shifting reluctantly in their age-old bed. And yet, they had been beasty things after all, no matter how huge. Things of the earth, I thought half-hysterically as the marching skeletons came in their white rattling thunder toward us. Buried things, old things ...

  The words rang in my head like a bell. “Earthways are mine, and things old and buried. If you need help with such things, call on me.” The boon I had been promised by the gobblemole.

  There was no time to do what I did! Time slowed around me as I ducked into a hidden place between the stones, set out the articles, drew the design, said the words of summoning and the boon requested, all in one great gust of breath as though I would not have a moment in which to finish. Never before, and not often since, have I felt the power of word, gesture, and intent unified into an irresistible summons as it was in that moment. I did not see old gobblemole, but I could feel him, feel him in the way the great bones heaved up all at once, higher and higher, monsters of ancient times trampling up into the daylight with the mold still falling from them. Bones to fight bones. Dead things to fight dead things. The dead things of this world to fight the dead things that had come from another world.

  Gobblemole held them in himself, of course, just as forest held every tree and silver-bell, just as flitchhawk held every darter’s wing, just as d’bor wife held every minnow. Old gods, holding all their kind in their minds, marvelous and mighty. And I heard them speaking as if they were beasts alive once more, heard their subterranean fury swell from the clinging soil to burst with shattering ferocity upon the skeletons of men: “Adown the false, foul, outlander bones. Adown the brittle, breaking, wildly shaking skeletons from the afars. Adown the interloper, stranger, alien horde. Adown them all, all, into dust, sand, soil, stone ...”

  And in the end, as you know, they were indeed adown, into dust upon the wind, blots upon the stone, while the great old beasts trampled still, only falling to the stones once more when the long day was done. When it was over, we felt like rags, sodden and limp, the sweat drying clammy on us, unable to raise a finger. It was timely to see Peter’s folk come down at us out of the sky, bearing little help for what we had been through but much comfort and food and cheer now that it was over.

  In the quiet that came at last, I set my feet upon the ground to feel the tingle there where the Old Road still ran.

  They shut up the old gods, Bartelmy the Dervish had said, shut them up. Wounded them.

  “I would not allow myself to be shut up,” I had said to Cat once, knowing nothing about it at all. It had seemed a simple thing.

  It was not that simple, neither the shutting up nor the turning loose. Certainly the towering anger that came in answer to my summons was not a simple thing. There was wrath beneath my feet, vengefulness, a great force that might be loosed against all things not of this world. As I was not. As Peter was not. Though it came to my call, that was no guarantee it hated me less than it had hated the bones. No. It was not a simple thing to shut up an old god. So were my thoughts, momentarily.

  There was no time to ruminate upon it. I walked among the Gamesmen of Barish, looking them over as others were doing, wondering to find myself here among legends and almost-gods. I heard them talk with one another, with Mavin and Himaggery, heard them plan for a new age, a better time, plotting to raise up a hundred thousand great Gamesmen to achieve their purposes. There was Tamor, Armiger; Dealpas the Healer. There was Thandbar, the first Shifter, forebear of Peter and his mother. There was Trandilar, great Queen, mistress of Beguilement, cosseting Peter in a tone that turned me red and eager, not with envy but with some hot feeling it was not easy to put down. Sorah was there, the great Seer of ancient times, pretending to have a vision for him.

  Then I saw her face change and the vision became a real one. She was saying. “Shadowmaster. Holder of the key. Storm Grower. The Wizard holds the book, the light, the bell.”

  And I did not consider it. I laughed, with Peter, both of us red-faced and a little embarrassed, and we forgot it. The terror was over. All either of us could think of was the fermenting, bubbling joy of being alive, of having a future. Nothing else seemed important. I knew nothing then about the shadowmaster except what Bartelmy had told me. I did not care to hear more about Storm Grower. I had only seen one edge of the bell—had I really seen it at all?—and knew nothing of the book or light. I was only a young girl. I was alive, who had thought she would be dead. I was in love.

  I did not give much thought to Bartelmy’s words, or those of the Oracle who tells only part of the truth—not then. Peter had invited me to go with him, northward still, to see the world we had not seen before.

  There were things ... things my head wanted. And I’ll confess it, even then a faint fatal curiosity was beginning to brew.

  But Peter had asked me to go with him northward.

  And for that little time, that was enough.

  Dervish Daughter

  CHAPTER ONE

  Just across the chasm from the town of Zog a bunch of wild brats with crossbows—and poisoned arrows, to add to the general sense of fun—had given us quite a run. We’d barely gotten away from them with our skins whole.

  There had been constant storm damage blocking the roads, continuous sullen clouds, and a threatening mutter of sentient-seeming thunder. I had a huge, aching lump on my forehead from not being quick enough ducking into the wagon during the hail storm four days before. Hail the size of goose eggs!

  Add to that the remains we kept finding along the way, more and more of them as we went farther north. Human remains, mostly, and the yellow dream crystals that had killed them.

  Throw in the fact we’d been driving two days and nights without sleep, dodging shadow, whic
h seemed to be everywhere.

  Then season the whole horrid mess with a harsh scream as a night bird plummeted across the moonlit sky screeching, “Lovely dead meat, not even rotten yet!” I understood it as easily as though it had been shouted at me by some old dame in the underbrush.

  The bird’s cry said “human meat,” not some luckless zeller killed by a pombi’s claws. I put my hand over Queynt’s where they lay on the reins.

  He snapped out of his doze, immediately alert, as I reached beneath the wagon seat for my bow. “More trouble ahead,” I said wearily, nocking an arrow.

  Queynt yawned, giving my bow a doubtful look.

  Though he had been teaching me to shoot with the stated intention of providing for the pot, my inability to hit anything smaller than a gnarlibar had become a joke. They had begun to call natural landmarks that were suitably huge a “good target for Jinian.” The problem was that I couldn’t shoot anything that talked to me. Oh, if someone else shot it, I could eat it, and if something came at me with unpleasant intent, I was able to kill it readily enough no matter what it was saying. Bunwits and zeller and tree rats, however, were safe from my arrows so long as they said good morning politely. I hadn’t discussed this with Queynt, though I thought he suspected it.

  He glanced down, then back into the wagon where his Wizard’s kit was. I knew he was considering getting out his own bow or taking time to set a protection spell, evidently deciding against it. We’d learned to trust the instincts of Yittleby and Yattleby in times of danger, and neither of the two tall krylobos pulling the wagon seemed overly disturbed. Their beaks were forward, their eyes watchful as we came around a curve at the crest of a hill, but neither of them showed any agitation. We came out of the jungle at the top of a long, sloping savannah, dotted with dark, crouching bushes and half-lit by a gibbous moon. I could see all the way to the bottom of the hill where the forest started again and two twinkling lanterns, amber and red, moved among the trees near the ground. That had to be Peter and Chance. They’d been riding ahead and had evidently found something, disturbing the bird at the time. Queynt clucked to the krylobos, and we began the slow descent toward the lanterns with him looking remarkably alert for such an old man.

  Vitior Vulpas Queynt is over a thousand years old.

  Everything I have learned about him indicates this is really true and not some mere bit of rodomontade. He hadn’t made a special point of claiming to be that old, mind you; it simply came out as we went along. Peter and I had met him a couple of years before, or rather, he had picked us up on the road—he and his remarkable tall-wheeled wagon and the two huge birds that pulled it. He had picked us up and made use of us and we of him, all in a fit of mutual suspicion, and when it was over we found ourselves quite fond of one another. And the birds, too, of course. Krylobos are very large—tailless, as are all native creatures of this world, with plumy topknots and somewhat irascible tempers. They like me since I can talk to them, and I like them because they dislike the same things I do.

  Bathing in very cold water, for example. Or eating fruit that isn’t quite ripe. They don’t have teeth to set on edge, but the expression around their beaks is quite sufficient to evoke sympathy.

  Which is beside the point. Queynt has a fondness for fantastical dress and ornamental speech and enjoys being thought a fool. He says he learns a great deal that way. He is an explorer at heart, so he has said, and exploring is what he and Peter and Chance and I had been doing for some time. He is the only person to whom Chance has ever given unstinting admiration. So Peter says, who has known Chance far longer than I.

  This admiration is more understandable in that Vitior Vulpas Queynt and Chance much resemble each other. Both are brown, muscular men who look a little soft without being so at all. Both are jolly-appearing men who seem a little stupid and aren’t. And both have quantities of common sense. As for the rest of it, Queynt is a Wizard of vast experience and education, while Chance is an ex-sailor with a fondness for gambling who was hired to bring Peter up safely and did so more or less. Both of them have had a certain tutelary role in our lives. Peter’s and mine, and truth to tell, I like them both mightily. Even on an occasion like this, when weariness made it hard to be fond of anyone.

  We approached the lanterns. A faint sweetish smell told me everything I wanted to know about it before we got there. More dream crystal deaths.

  Before we ever started on this trip—after the Battle of the Bones on the Wastes of Bleer it was, when we were all remarkably glad merely to be alive—I had known about dream crystals. My un-mother (the woman who bore me but did not conceive me, if that makes sense) had had at least one. It had led her into ruin and ended, I supposed, by killing her. My much hated enemy, Porvius Bloster, had had one, and it had done him no good at all except to make him exceed his limitations and bring destruction upon his Demesne. Even girls at school had had dream crystals, assortments of them, like candies. I had known what they were in a casual way, known enough to stay away from them and mistrust those who used them, but it was not until this trip that I had seen them in general use. Misuse.

  Whatever. It was not until this trip I had seen them killing people by the dozens. There, that’s plain enough.

  The current situation was a case in point. It was another of those pathetic encampments we had seen entirely too many of during the past season.

  One couldn’t dignify the structures even as huts.

  They were the kind of shelter a bored child might build in a few careless moments; a few branches leaned against a fallen tree—its trunk loaded with epiphytes and fogged by a dense cloud of ghost moths—and a circle of rocks rimming a pool of ash. And the corpses.

  Three of them this time; man, woman, and baby.

  Starved to death, from the look of them, and with food all round for the picking or digging—furry, thickskinned pocket-bushes full of edible nuts, a northern thrilp bush—smaller fruit, and sweeter than the southern variety—table roots just beside the tiny stream.

  “Hell,” I said to Queynt, disgusted. “I suppose they’ve got those yellow crystals in their mouths, like all the rest.” Half-right. In the lantern light we could see the male corpse had one on a thong around his neck; the female had one in her mouth, having sucked herself to death on it. Their bodies were still warm. The baby was cold, probably dead of dehydration after screaming his lungs out for several days trying to tell someone he was hungry and thirsty and wet.

  Chance and Peter were dismounted by the corpses.

  Peter gave me a troubled look, knowing I’d be upset by the baby. Chance eased his wide belt and mused, “I suppose we could dig them in, though there seems little sense to bother.” At first we’d stopped to bury the human dead along the road, but they had become more and more numerous as we came farther north. There had soon been too many to bury, but it still bothered me to let the babies lie. “I’ll bury the baby,” I said in a voice that sounded angry even to me. “Let the others alone.” Queynt shook his head, but he didn’t argue. All the babies reminded me of one I’d taken care of in a class back in Xammer. The one in Xammer had the same baffled look when he fell asleep that many of the dead babies did, as though it had all been too much for him and he was glad to be out of it. I wrapped this one in our last towel, reminding myself to buy towels the next time we got to any place civilized—if there were any place civilized in these northlands. I’d used up our supply burying babies and children.

  Queynt said, “Jinian, if you’re going to go on like this, I’ll lay in a supply of shrouds. It would be cheaper than good toweling.” I flushed, getting on with the half-druggled grave I was digging with the shovel we used for latrine ditches.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense, Queynt, but otherwise I get bad dreams.” He already knew that; we’d discussed it before.

  There’s a city somewhere ahead,” said Peter, trying to change the subject. “I can hear it.” It wasn’t surprising. He had Shifted himself a pair of ears which stood out like batwings on either si
de of his head. Probably hadn’t even realized he was doing it. I turned away to hide the expression on my face—he did look silly—only to see Queynt touching his tongue to the crystal the dead man had had around his neck.

  Even though Queynt had told us over and over he was immune, seeing him do that made me shudder. I was going to find out about that alleged immunity sooner or later, but so far he hadn’t explained it. Now he saw me shiver and shook his head at me.

  “We have to know, girl!” Well, he was right. We did have to know. Those louts outside Zog had had crystals hanging around their necks, too. Reddish ones. Queynt hadn’t had a chance to taste one of those, but then he hadn’t needed to. It was evident what dreams of violence and rapine they were breeding in the brats. Along with everything else, they had been chanting a litany to Storm Grower while they tried to kill us. We’d been hunting Storm Grower for some seasons now, and hearing the name in this context made the hunt seem even more ominous than we’d already decided it was.

  Queynt nodded at me about this yellow crystal, telling me it was like the others we’d found beside the dead bodies along the road. Anyone touching it to his tongue would be utterly at peace, in a place of perfect contentment with no hunger, no thirst, no desires.

  Someone sucking a crystal like that wouldn’t hear a baby crying or the sound of their own stomach screaming for food. Someone sucking on that dream would lie there and die. And there were hundreds along the road who had done just that—families, singletons, even whole mounted troops, dead on the ground with the horses still saddled and wandering. We’d found one pile of small furry things which Queynt believed were Shadowpeople, though the carrion birds had left little enough to identify. All with yellow crystals in their mouths, their hands, or on thongs around their necks.

  We hadn’t found a single one on anyone still living.

  When the grave was filled in, I pulled myself up on the wagon seat again. Queynt nodded sympathetically as we started off into the gray light of early dawn.