The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I looked over my shoulder to see the Armigers ranked behind us, interspersed with Sorcerers to Hold Power for them and a few Tragamors for depth of attack. Half of them were in yellow and half in black, standing well apart, alike in intent though not in allegiance.

  “Well then,” said Ganver, “I will let my page choose, for it matters nothing to me.”

  I had had enough of blackness, blackness of shadows and grayness of spaces where nothing happened. The yellow reminded me of the Daylight Bell, so I moved a step to the left.

  “Zyle it is,” said Ganver. There was a low growl from the black-clad Armiger, and he stalked off toward his fortress with the others after him. We, surrounded by a yellow-clad escort, went toward the left-hand fortress. As we drew near, I saw they were much alike, these two bastions, both with high, crenellated walls and fangy portcullises, both decked with banners that hung slack in the quiet morning air. When we came through the barbican gate, we were confronted by a pale, slender man wearing the shabby cloak of a Prophet and walking with the aid of a cane.

  “Accept my apologies for delaying you Gameswomen. It is my way of saving travelers the inconvenience of serving Castle Zale. If you will accept a meal, rest perhaps a day, there are tunnels which will take you into the forests north and safe away. . . .

  Ganver mimed confusion, modest outrage. “And what if my page had chosen Castle Zale?”

  The Prophet dug into the paving with his cane, seeming unconcerned at the question. “Few do. They find the black garb of my . . . of the Dragon Zale forbidding. Also—I am able with some degree of certainty to See if that is a likelihood. . . .”

  I remembered then that Prophets have the Talents of Flying, Fire, and Seeing. If the Dragon of Zale was indeed this one’s brother, they shared family Talent. If I remembered the Index aright, both Prophets and Dragons were Armigerians; Zale would lack Seeing and have a limited power of Shifting instead.

  Ganver was asking in a cold voice, “And if you had Seen that likelihood?”

  “I . . . ah, I would much have regretted it. The Dragon of Zale does not treat travelers well. We do what we can to assure fairness.” He looked at us with dead eyes that did not seem to see us, glancing always away toward the other keep across the valley as though whatever he could feel was housed there, not in this place at all. As though, I told myself, his heart were there, with his enemy.

  Ganver did not press further; we accepted the hospitality of the place, I wondered all the time what this was about. Evening came. Ganver asked to see the Prophet Zyle, and we were escorted into his presence. As we went, Ganver whispered once more, “Watch and learn.”

  The Prophet was on the walls, and we went to him there. As we came up to him, I heard a sound, far and far to the north, like a reverberation from memory, quiet as evening and yet with a plangent hush that flooded the world. The Shadowbell. In a moment the echo returned from the south. The Daylight Bell, resonating softly to keep the shadow in check.

  Both Ganver and the Prophet stood facing me. In Ganver’s face I saw the brightening, the awakening, the hearing that I knew was on my own. On the Prophet’s face nothing, no consciousness. He turned from me impatiently, peering at the keep across the valley, and I thought again it was as though his being dwelt there and not here where we were.

  This one lacked something. If he did not lighten at the Daylight Bell, however soft and far its sound might be, it meant something within him was missing. My heart was sick within me, and I could not understand. He had treated us well, though coldly. He had not seemed a soulless wight. The Eesty caught my eye, shaking like a garment the Elator head it wore.

  “We came to express our thanks, Prophet. If it is convenient for you to show us the tunnels to the north, we will take our leave. We go on a matter of some urgency. “

  And we went, to come out far to the north under the early stars. “Now we will return,” said Ganver, “in yet another guise.” Ganver whirled, whirled, and it was afternoon. In new forms we were coming down the long hill to the valley from the north, seeing the castles of Zyle and Zale on our right hand and our left. Ganver was in the likeness of a crowned Sorcerer, and I at his back in the black frock and white collar of an Exorcist.

  This time we chose the black-garbed Armiger and were taken before the Dragon of Zale.

  He was charming. Full of humor and gaiety, sudden quips and outrageous jests. He invited us to eat with him, listened to Ganver’s fictitious tale of a Great Game to the north, and when the meal was done he invited us to walk with him upon the battlements.

  There were men there, Divulgers and other torturers, busy with braziers of hot coals and devices to rend and tear. There was a chuffing of a little bellows and the shrill cry of a wheel on which knives were sharpened. I stopped short. Ganver stopped also.

  And beside these horrors the Dragon of Zale turned toward us with a charming smile as he offered to cast lots with us to see which of the two of us would be tortured to death where we stood.

  I could not believe the words coming from that smiling mouth. As he spoke, the Bell rang as it had the evening before. And his eyes did not hear it, neither the Bell of the dusk nor the Bell of the day, and I knew that in this one, too, some necessary part was missing.

  “Why would you say such an outrageous thing?” asked Ganver. “We have no Game with you, nor was Game announced to us. You have treated us hospitably. Why would you now take one of our lives?”

  “Oh, I will take both,” said the Dragon of Zale offhandedly, with a twinkling smile and a charming shrug. “One today and one on the morrow. As to why, it is a Game I play with my brother. He dislikes it very much, to see me at my play. He does all that he can to forestall me, but in the end I always win.” And the Dragon laughed, a high-pitched wail of amusement, like a wind-soul lost in chasms of dark. My skin crawled as though slimy things moved there, testing their barbed feet. Ganver was looking at me, urging me to do something, and I caught my lip between my teeth, thinking furiously. This was a lesson, and I had no idea what it was I should learn.

  “I will die first, Master Sorcerer,” I said, surprising myself immensely.

  “Ah, faithful one,” said Ganver in an odd tone. “I call upon the Rules of the Game, Dragon. I claim the Victim’s Interrogation.”

  Well, I had forgotten. It isn’t often one is threatened with terminal torture—I should imagine once in a lifetime would be about the limit. However, the Rules of Play did allow the Victim’s Interrogation, the three questions that must be answered honestly. I wondered if the Dragon of Zale would allow it.

  He merely smiled, without objection, and we stood there in the dusk on the battlement as his Divulgers and Invigilators readied the irons and the knives and I tried not to look at them. I did Inward Is Quiet very softly to myself in the passive mode, hoping it would help me understand what was happening. I concentrated, not helped by the sizzling noises behind me as the Invigilators spat upon hot irons.

  “Dragon Zale,” intoned Ganver, “were there midwives at your brother’s birth?”

  The Dragon stared at us with empty eyes. “There were.”

  “And were there midwives at your birth?”

  “There were not. You have one question more.”

  Across the road, only a little way, I could see a knot of men assembled upon the battlements of Zyle Keep and knew the prophet of Zyle stood there, peering this way with his cold, empty face. Ganver was speaking again.

  “Dragon of Zale, have there been times when your brother might have killed you but did not?”

  He stared at us then with a bleak, unholy joy in his face. “Many times he might have killed me, traveler. And each time he withheld his hand. For love of me, he said. For hate of me, I think. And now to the rack, Exorcist, unless you would like to try to drive out the devil that dwells here.” He tapped himself upon the breast, smiling at me with lively malice.

  “No,” said Ganver in a great, Eesty voice, whirling and whirling. “There is no devil there, Dragon. The
re is only yourself.” The world went still; I saw the Dragon’s face fall apart like shards of glass, the fortress crumble beneath him like a sand castle, built in an hour, washed away in moments. Ganver whirled while the world remained motionless and the castle melted beneath Ganver’s tide, finer and finer, to flow away in silver dust. Rain came to pock the dust with the world’s tears, and it was gone.

  Across the way Zyle Keep still stood. “Look,” said Ganver, turning my head so that I saw the face of the Prophet. It stared at the place where Zale had been with hopeless intensity and a longing so great I had no name for it. “Come,” beckoned the Eesty, and we were gone.

  “That was long ago,” I said when I was able to breathe once more. “Long ago, Ganver. Before the Daylight Bell was broken. Perhaps it was not even real.”

  “I remember it,” Ganver said. “Lom remembers it. Now you remember it. Which makes it real enough.”

  “Was it you destroyed the Dragon then, Ganver? Or did he go on and on?”

  “He went on,” breathed the Eesty without expression, “for many years. Until the Prophet of Zyle died, and there was no reason to go on after that.”

  “I am trying to understand the lesson,” I mused.

  “Ah.”

  “There were midwives at the Prophet Zyle’s birth, and they would not have let him live if his future had not shown him to have a soul. There were no midwives at the birth of the Dragon of Zale, and he may have been soulless. I think perhaps he was.”

  “And?”

  “And they hated one another. The one for what the other had; the other for what his brother had not. And in the hate, the one lost what he had had while the other gained nothing. At the end was only emptiness.”

  “And so?”

  “And so, Ganver, I will think on it. Perhaps the lesson will mean something to me as I consider it.” Privately, I thought I might never perceive it. So far, it was only a tangle of Sanctuary, Dragons, Prophets.

  “Perhaps.” Ganver mused in the gray place where we were. “Come, we will go elsewhere.”

  We came out of the grayness this time on a shore where a silver river ran laughing into the sea, Ganver in his own shape and I in mine. My shape, my own Jinian shape, was ravenously hungry and thirsty, as though it had not eaten for many days—and indeed, perhaps that was true. Who knew what time was like in the gray spaces between memories, or whether meals eaten there were real or only remembered? Ganver, perhaps, but it did not tell me. I ran across the sands to drape myself across a stone and suck water into me like a great empty jug. After a time I was sloshingly restored but as hungry as ever. There were silver fishes playing in the pool beneath me, delicious-looking fishes, and I knew I could catch them with my hands if I drove a few of them into one of the shallow pools along the stream.

  “Look, Ganver,” I called. “Fish. I’ll catch a few for my supper!” The Eesty strolled over to me, stood peering down into the water. “Jewel fish,” it said at last. “The only breeding population of jewel fish on Lom. Rare and few.”

  I was hardly listening, full of plans for filling my belly. Still, there was something in the tone in which Ganver had said, “Rare and few. . . .” I tried speaking to the fishes. Nothing. Their language was a flip of the tail, the feel of a splash of water on the skin, four or five words, no more. Food. Fight. Flee. Breed. Chemical words, running quick hormonal fingers along their spines and fins.

  “Ganver,” I said, “the fish have no souls.”

  “Ah,” said Ganver. I knew that “ah” and disliked it. “Is that so?” the Eesty asked.

  “They have no awareness even.”

  “True.”

  I sat there watching those damn fish, mouth watering until I thought I would die. There were some table roots near the stream. A sharp stick dug them out, and I sat looking at the fish while washing them clean and peeling them one by one before crunching their unsatisfying bland sweetness. They were not bad baked or boiled as an accompaniment to other things: roasts, stews, broiled fish. . . .

  A flower clump moved in the wind, and I thought of Chimmerdong. The Forest of Chimmerdong, where every flower seemed aware of itself. No. No, where the forest seemed aware of every flower.

  “What place is this?” I asked.

  “Boughbound Forest,” said Ganver. “Long ago.”

  “Tricky, Ganver,” I remarked in a conversational tone. “Very tricky. And undoubtedly the being which was Boughbound knew of these fish, as I know of my toenail or little finger or hair?”

  “Possibly.”

  “If I catch a few of them to eat, there won’t be enough of them to guarantee reproduction, is that it?”

  “Likely.”

  “They are—ah, how would we say this. They are part of the soul of something greater?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And while it wouldn’t be wrong for me to take nuts from a tree or roast a bunwit for my lunch—there are plenty of nuts and plenty of bunwits . . .”

  “True.”

  “It would be wrong to take these.”

  The implications of this were so provoking that I forgot to be hungry. “There are plenty of men,” I said at last. “If a man had a soul, it would be wrong to kill him. If he had awareness but no soul, it would be less wrong. If he had neither, it would not be wrong at all?”

  “What did you do at the Sanctuary?”

  “I let those pitiful creatures go to sleep forever.”

  “Why?”

  “Out of mercy, Ganver.”

  “But you did not do the same for the Fathers of the place.”

  I thought on this. “But they had awareness, Ganver. I did not want them to get off so easily. I wanted . . .”

  “You wanted to punish them.”

  It was true. I had wanted to punish them.

  “Why did you not let them go mercifully as well?”

  Why? Why, indeed. Why had I sought to punish, to hurt, rather than merely let them go? Did the Fathers of the Sanctuary have bao? I thought not. They had had no sense of fitness. They had shown no mercy. They had prolonged pain and caused it, to no purpose. Out of seed ego. Out of worship for St. Phallus.

  But I had been no more merciful than they! Out of shape ego. I had told myself the Fathers were aware, therefore—therefore they should have known better. They were aware, therefore they should have understood. They were aware. Shape ego. My own kind, therefore . . . therefore nothing.

  It slipped away from me. “Ganver, I’m too tired and too hungry to concentrate on this lesson. Are you finished with your teaching?”

  “There are five points on the star,” it said. “Five lessons to learn, five parts to understanding. I have given you what I can.”

  “Then feed me, Eesty, or take me somewhere there is something I can feed myself. And when I have eaten, perhaps it will all make sense. Are you sure you can’t explain it to me in simple language?”

  “There are certain lessons which are not difficult to explain but which are very difficult to live by,” said Ganver, moving away once more into the gray, the roiling, the smoke place between time. “And one who has not tried to live by the lesson of the star-eye cannot yet understand it. And one who thought it did live by that lesson may learn it did not do so. Come, Jinian, it is safe to let you leave the Maze now. The Oracle has gone elsewhere, and I must follow.”

  We slipped between places and came out at the edge of a forest, the sun high overhead, a dusty road stretching south before me. Far down that road, six little figures trudged along, coming in my direction. I knew them. Oh, yes, I knew them. A noise came from behind me, half a sigh, half the sound of a door closing. I knew without looking that Ganver had gone and suspected I would never see the Eesty again. In that moment I was so joyous to see Murzy and Cat and Bets and Sarah and Margaret and Dodie that I did not take time to care. Later, when I understood the lesson it had tried so hard to teach me, and the reason it had not lived by that lesson itself, I grieved for Ganver’s grief.

  8

&
nbsp; PETER’S STORY: THE SPY

  Himaggery and Barish had decided that our first and most important problem was the one of spies. Huldra and Dedrina had set out from the north with quantities of the amethyst crystals, and we had to expect they would use the vile things. If there were a spy in the kitchen, any meal might contain an unpleasant surprise. If there were a spy in the wine cellar, the shock could be equally unexpected and even more widespread. So, we very methodically set about determining whether those employed in sensitive positions were trustworthy, using me for part of the task and well-trusted Demons for the rest.

  “It would be a good deal easier,” Barish fussed, “if we could do the whole thing openly, just line them all up against a wall and have at them, but the way the men are feeling just now, full of suspicion and ill will, it wouldn’t take much to have a rebellion on our hands. No. Better take a little longer and do it quietly.”

  So we took longer and did it quietly, with me pushing the idea of cooperation to everyone I encountered, remembering how the Eesty shape had done it. It was hard, tiring work, frustrating because we found nothing. It made no sense! Why put one not-very-clever spy into the Demesne when they could have planted a dozen?

  I went down to the dungeons to have a word with Shaggan, the one spy we knew of.

  “I don’t know,” he kept babbling in answer to my questions. “I haven’t any idea how I got here. The last thing I knew, I was on the road from Fangel, south to Betand, with a few friends, all of us making for Pfarb Durim for the Harvest Festival, and the next thing I knew I was here.”

  “He came shortly before the siege, Lord Peter,” said another of the guards. “I remember it well enough. He came knocking at the gates saying he was out of coin and out of patience and needed something to keep himself for the next season or so. Well, we’d been recruiting right along, so I saw no reason not to take him.”

  “No one else presented himself at that same time, or around that time?”

  “Nobody. Later on, the Lady Sylbie came, of course, but those who escorted her simply left her at the gates and went on south. And then only a few days after that, here came the besiegers with enough baggage to last them two seasons.”