The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Someone’s getting rid of excess population,” he mumbled. “Dribs and drabs of it.”

  “What I can’t figure out is how and why certain ones are so all of a sudden excess! We’ve found dead Gamesmen and dead pawns, young and old, male and female. All with these same damn yellow things. The crystals are all alike, same color, same size. Someone has to be making them!”

  “You’ve mentioned that before, Jinian. Several times, as I recall.” He sighed, yawned, scratched himself. “You know, girl,” he drawled, going into one of his ponderous perorations, “though we may conjecture until we have worn imagination to shreds, theorize until our brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we find out where they’re coming from, anything we guess is only hot air and worth about as much.” He fell into a brooding silence as we rattled on with the krylobos talking nonsense to one another and Peter and Chance riding just ahead. So we had ridden, league on league, hundreds and hundreds of them, ever since leaving the lands of the True Game. Some days it seemed we’d been riding like this forever.

  I could see Peter’s animated profile from time to time as he turned to speak to Chance. His face was bronze from the sun. He’d grown up, too, in the last few seasons. The bones in his cheeks and jaw were bold, no longer child-like, and there was a strong breadth to his forehead. It was his mouth that got to me, though, the way his upper lip curved down in the center, a funny little dip, as though someone had pinched it. Every time I saw that, I wanted to touch it with my tongue. Like a sweet. No. Not like a sweet.

  Well, I needed comforting, and seeing him there within reach, within touching distance, made me want to yell or run or go hide in the wagon.

  Sometimes I wished that the way I felt about Peter was an illness. If it were an illness, a Healer could cure it.

  As it was, it went on all the time with no hope of a cure.

  Every morning when the early light made sensuous wraiths of the mists, every evening when the dusk ghosts crept into erotic tangles around the foliage (see, even my language was getting lubricious), I found myself thinking unhelpful thoughts that made me blush and breathe as though I’d been running. I furnished every grove with likely spots for dalliance, and lately I’d taken to crossing off every day that passed, counting the ones that remained until the season my oath of celibacy would be done.

  Queynt had been watching me; I caught his kindly stare and blushed. “Troubled about your oath?” he asked me sympathetically.

  He caught me unaware. One of the things that bothered me about Queynt was his habit of knowing what I was thinking. He wasn’t a Demon. He had no business just knowing that way. “Yes.” I turned red again. It wasn’t any of his business, and yet. “By the Hundred Devils and all their pointy ears, Queynt, I can’t understand the sense of it. They said it was to let me study the art without distractions, but I’m not studying the art! I’m traveling. Trying to keep my skin whole. Trying to locate Dream Miner and Storm Grower and find out why they want me dead. Praying Peter keeps on being fond of me at least until the oath runs out. Celibacy doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense!”

  “Oh,” he said mildly, “it does, you know. If you examine it. For example, you’ve been doing summons, haven’t you?” Well, I had, of course. A few. I might have called up an occasional water dweller to provide a fish dinner. Or maybe a few flood-chucks, just to help us get through some timber piles on the road. I admitted as much, wondering what he was getting at.

  “Well, if you’ve been doing summons, have you ever stopped to think what an unconsidered pregnancy might do to the practice of the art?” An unconsidered pregnancy—or even a considered one—was about the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. But this was something not one of the dams had mentioned to me, not even the midwife, Tess Tinder-my-hand, who would have been the logical one to do so. My jaw dropped and I gave him an idiot look.

  “Well, let’s say you’re pregnant and you summon up something obstreperous in the way of a water dweller. Then you go through the constraints and dismissal, but the water dweller considers the child in your belly was part of the summons. That child has neither constrained nor dismissed. So, time comes you give birth to something that looks rather more like a fish than you might think appropriate. Recent research would indicate a good many of the magical races are the results of just such Wize-ardly accidents.”

  “Mermaids? Dryads?”

  “Among others, and not the most strange, either. Have you ever called up a deep dweller?” I had heard them laugh a few times during bridge magic but had never called them. Murzy had told me to be careful, very careful, with them. I shook my head again.

  “I have. Pesky, mischievous creatures, but more than half-manlike, for all that. If it weren’t for their fangy mouths, you’d think them children. I shouldn’t wonder if that race came from some magical accident during pregnancy. Not that deep dwellers are common.” All of which was something to think about. I snapped my mouth shut and thought about it.

  I’d never really understood the reason for the oath—three years of celibacy (virginity in my case)—sworn when I was just fifteen. I’d done it, of course, because they wouldn’t let me be in the seven otherwise, and if I weren’t in the seven, I couldn’t go on studying the art.

  At that time, the art was just about all I had to care about except for the seven old dams themselves. Well, six and me.

  So, I took the oath, and got initiated, and learned some fascinating things, all a good bit of time before Peter came along. When he did come along, however, the oath began to feel like a suit of tight armor. There was it, all hard and smooth outside, and there was me, all sweaty and passionate inside. And that’s the way this trip had gone, with me being hard and cold half the time and hiding in the wagon the rest of the time, afraid of what might happen if I came out. I didn’t wonder that Queynt could see it. No one could have missed it.

  Peter came galloping back, head down, looking thoroughly tired and irritable. “More trees down. A real swath cut up ahead. We’ll need to find a way around. No possible way of getting through it.” When we arrived at the tumble, it was obvious he was right. Seven or eight really big trees, fallen into a kind of jackstraw mess, their branches all tangled together. Lesser trees were fallen in the forest, the whole making a deadfall that we could have scrambled through if we’d had a few extra hours with nothing better to do and hadn’t minded leaving the wagon behind.

  Off to the right the forest thinned out a little. There were wide-enough spaces between the trees to get down into a meadow, and the meadow looked as though it stretched past the obstruction and back to the road. Chance was at the edge of the open space, beckoning.

  Queynt krerked a few syllables to Yittleby and Yattleby, they turning their great beaks in reply. He had said, “Can you handle this?” and they had replied, “Why even ask?” He had picked up a few words of the krylobos language over the years. I wasn’t always sure that he knew what he was saying.

  It was first light, still very dim. I got off to walk beside the wagon as it tilted from side to side over the road banks and through the scattered trees. Watching where I was walking had become a habit, and when I saw it I stopped without conscious effort, hollering to Queynt, “Shadow! Stop. Look there.” Unlike the rivers of dark we had seen flowing along the road farther south, this patch was a small one, the size of an outspread cape. It lay under a willow copse, directly in my path, easy to miss in this half-light.

  When we’d started this adventure, traveling along the shores of the Glistening Sea among the towns of the Bight, we’d seen shadow piled on shadow. We’d taken refuge in the wagon more than once when we’d encountered great swatches of it creeping and crawling about us in the forests and chasms. In comparison to that, this little patch was almost innocent looking.

  “What’s holding you?” asked Peter, riding down behind us.

  “Shadow.” Queynt was laconic about it. Though he claimed to have seen it
seldom before we started our northern trip, he had accustomed himself to the sight better than I. Shadow never failed to give me a sick emptiness inside, a fading feeling, as though I had become unreal. I had been shadow bit once, in Chimmerdong. As they say, once bit, twice sore.

  “Well.” He sat there for a moment, staring at it, shifting from haunch to haunch, looking cross the way he does when he’s hungry. “It doesn’t look any different from any other we’ve seen. Are you going to sit here all morning looking at it, or can we go around it and get back to the road?” Peter was, as usual, impatient.

  There was no reason to watch it. Shadow seldom did anything. When it was angered, and as far as I knew no one knew what made it angry, it attacked. Otherwise, it simply lay. Anything that stepped into shadow, of course, would be better off dead sooner than it died.

  Moved by a fleeting curiosity, I took off one boot and set my bare foot on the ground. There was a tingle there, very slight, which meant there was a remnant of the Old Road buried deep beneath us. I’d had the suspicion for some time that the shadow gathered mostly where there were remnants of the Ancient Roads, though I had no idea what it meant. Seeing Queynt’s curious gaze focused on me, I flushed and put my boot back on.

  We led the birds around the shadow patch, though I think they were fully capable of avoiding it on their own, and then back up through the meadow to the road once more, where the stack of shattered trunks was now blocking the way behind us. Since hearing those Zoggian brats chant their litany to Storm Grower, I had a pretty good idea where this kind of damage came from—not that we could verify it. Ever since we’d first seen this random destruction, we’d asked about it.

  Those we’d asked didn’t answer. Since we had no Demon with us to read minds, we had given up asking, but we hadn’t given up wondering. We went on, with me still suspiciously looking for shadow as we rattled along the road.

  “There’s the city Peter heard,” said Queynt.

  We had topped a rise and looked down into a green valley, a city cupped at the center. The place was crowned with ostentatious mansions, much carved stone and lancet windows and so prodigious a display of banners—which were either excessively pink or blushed by the sunrise—some festival must have been in progress. I sighed. Towns of any kind seemed to mean trouble recently, and I was too tired even to fight for my life.

  “I wonder if there’s an inn with a good cook?”

  “Burials make you hungry, do they?” I swallowed my protest. Fact was, they did make me hungry. As did traveling, practicing the wize-art, talking to animals, or virtually anything else one wanted to mention. “Good appetite, long life,” I said sententiously.

  “I suppose you’re right.” He sighed, peering down at his own round belly. “My appetite is very good, and I seem to have lived some time.”

  “Which is a story you have promised to tell me, Queynt. About long life, and immunity to crystals, and things.”

  “Ah, well, Jinian. Sometime.”

  “I’ll make you a deal, Queynt. You tell me about you and the crystals after breakfast, and I’ll tell you something you don’t know.”

  “It’s a long, dull story.”

  I snickered. Queynt didn’t tell dull stories. Oh, he could be dull, but if he was, it was for a purpose. At storytelling, he was a master. I said, “I presume as much, and we haven’t time now, anyhow. The city will be all around us shortly. But when we find lodging? Is it a promise?”

  “You won’t let me alone until I do. You’re a presumptuous chit. A nuisance. Still, there’s no real reason not to tell you, and it may gain me a little peace.”

  I held out my hand to clasp his, making a bargain. I’d wanted to hear that story for a long time, but Queynt always seemed to evade telling me about it.

  A difference in the sound of the wagon wheels rang in my ear. Paving. The talons of the krylobos scraped upon cobbles. Beside the wagon a sign. BLOOME WELCOMES YOU. Another, only slightly smaller. SHEBELAC STREET.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We rode on Shebelac Street, paved as far as the eye could see with glistening cobbles, shiny as turtle backs from the night’s rain. At either side were high, carved curbs, and above that, slabs of walk-stone, embellished with an incised serpent’s twist, to make them more interesting to walk on, I suppose. On either side of the walks, the houses and shops of the outskirts of Bloome were still quiet against the jungle in the dawn time, not bursting from doors and windows with banners and bells and drums as they would on the morrow.

  It took us very little time to learn that five days before had been the procession of Jix-jax-cumbalory and that tomorrow would be Finaggy-Bum. It took us no time at all to learn that today the procession route would be announced, and every house and shop holder attentive in the forum to know whether he would need to spend the night getting ready or might sleep for once.

  Those along the Forum Road, Tan-tivvy Boulevard and Shebelac Street had given up sleeping long since. All processions came to the Forum along one of those three and left by another of the same. A one-in-three chance of sleeping the night before procession meant less and less as the season picked up speed. Five days hence, we were told, would be Pickel-port-poh, with Shimerzy-waffle three days after. The cloth merchants would rise early. The banner makers not long after.

  Tent and marquee manufacturers would be in their shops even as we rode. As I say, we were soon to learn all this. And more.

  And in the high mansion upon Frommager Hill, reached from the Forum by the twisty peregrinations of Sheel Street, Dream Merchant’s man Brombarg—whom we were shortly to meet—woke in an unusually foul temper. Time had come to make a decision. Time to go on or get out, one or the other, and he couldn’t make up his mind. If he decided to retire, he’d need a naif to lay the job off on, and there weren’t any strangers in Bloome to choose from.

  He rose, fuming, yawning, scratching his crotch with erotic insistence. (I am not certain about this, but it seems in character.) The festivals of Finaggy-Bum and Shimerzy-waffle! Merchants’ men were always elected on the one and sworn in on the other. He could wear the pink vertical for the election. No one had seen it yet, and hideously hot and uncomfortable though it was, it was the most stylish thing he possessed. And it was pink! It would be at least a season before the fashions would swing back to anything comfortable to wear, and it might be forever before there was any other acceptable color. Damn the machine. Couldn’t afford the fine if he was judged to be far out of fashion, either. Being Dream Merchant’s man took every coin he could lay hands on. (It did, too. The poor fellow had next to nothing of his own.) Still scratching, he leaned from the westernmost of his tall, lancet windows. From this tower he could look across the city walls to the jungle, brilliantly, wetly green in the morning light, swarming with birds. From here every street in Bloome was clearly visible. Only the huddle of servitors’ huts along the walls themselves could not be seen, they and the prodigious mill that rumbled on the eastern border of the town, shivering the ground in a constant hyogeal vibration.

  Sheel Street sinuated down Frommager into the Forum. He followed it with his eyes, imagining himself on a capacious horse riding there. Down Sheel, across the Forum, into Tan-tivvy and along that, titty-tup, tittytup, all the way to the city edge and away northwest.

  Leaving it. Dressed in a simple shirt, mayhap, with trousers that fit. A cape to keep off the storm and a hat to shelter his eyes. “Oh, by all the merchants in Zib, Zog, Chime, and Bloome,” he moaned. “But I am sick of this.” And he was. He would leave it in a minute—if they would only let him!

  A distant movement caught his attention.

  There. Entering the city along Shebelac, which ran south, far south, becoming merely a track at the base of the mountains if one went far enough. What in the name of five foul fustigars was that? A wagon drawn by birds? And two riders alongside on great southern horses.

  Sweating with sudden excitement, Brombarg moved toward his closet. Day before procession he could get away with somethi
ng fairly simple. He dressed quickly, knowing he had to get to them before anyone else did.

  Them, of course, was us, riding down Shebelac in the early morning. Chance and Peter kept their eyes busy looking at the houses and shops while I yawned and struggled to stay awake. The two days without sleep, mostly on the run, was taking its toll.

  “Years since I’ve been here,” Queynt said, looking about him with interest. “Three, four hundred, maybe. Cloth-manufacturing town, as I remember. It isn’t much bigger. They used to have a special kind of wineghost—Good merciful spirits of the departed. What’s that?” Queynt drew up the reins, and the tall, dignified birds halted as one, their long necks bent forward to examine the creature that had come into the road at the distant corner and was now plodding toward them.

  “Gods,” I murmured sotto voce. “A madman, perhaps?” At that first instant, I really thought it was, and my hands started for my bow.

  But Peter shook his head. “A player, maybe. The town shows signs of festival. Costume booths on every corner. Banner wires across all the streets.”

  “Trust you to notice such a thing.” I gave him a relieved and adoring look—remembering too late to make it merely friendly—and he flushed with pleasure, pushing back the ruddy wave of hair that seemed to be always draped across his forehead. I went on hurriedly, “I did see the streets were freshly swept. Look at those trews!” We examined the trousers together, equally interested, unequally appalled. I didn’t care that much about dress, quite frankly, and was simply dismayed at the thought of wearing any such thing. As a Shifter, however, Peter was professionally intrigued, busy calculating how the vast protrusions were kept afloat. The man coming toward us seemed to have a huge hemisphere of fabric around each leg, which bulged forward, back, and to either side like halves of a monstrous melon.

  From the back of his shirt, five vasty wings exploded, their inclined planes just missing the edge of his huge, circular hat brim. Glitter shot from his hands; more glitter from the throat, where some seal of office—a plaque of jet picked out in brilliants—hung on a lengthy chain. Only the boots seemed rational, and even they were topped with a fringe of chain that swung and tinkled as he walked.