The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Then we let the Sending go. It rose into the sky, still crying, this time, “Bryan, Bryan. . . .” to flee first toward the southeast, then turn sharply toward the north. It would go some distance that way before turning southeast once more. We had done all that we could to mislead the one who had sent it. However, we had first seen the direction it would go to meet Huldra.

  “Ah,” said Cat, who had tracked its southeastern flight against the stars. “Then Huldra is not yet at the caverns. Let me see your charts, Bets.” They bent over them, measuring and nodding. “That line of flight will intersect a line between the Bright Demesne and Bannerwell at about . . . here. It may be she is as far from her destination as we are. So. If we speed ourselves, we may come there two to five days before them.”

  We went as quick as we might along the rolling road, among live forests and dead ones, smelling the stinks of distant fumaroles as though they had been the stinks of a body decaying, waking sadly in the mornings and walking the day through no happier, urgently going, driven by our own need to do whatever it was needed doing without any real hope that it would do any good at all.

  As we went, I did as I had promised and told them about Ganver’s teaching, not once but many, many times. They tried, as I had tried, to unravel it, with as little success. Whatever the secret truth of the stareye might be, thus far the Oracle had been right about it. Its power, if any, was beyond me. It might as well have been merely symbolic, as the creature had said. Only stubbornness and respect for Ganver’s pain made me continue to believe otherwise.

  10

  PETER’S STORY: HULDRA

  While the Sending was away, Huldra had amused herself by making me acutely uncomfortable. This was mostly by way of mockery and jeering, companied by some rough cruelty without much subtlety to it. It was enough to make me sweat, nonetheless; sweat and fear for the future. After a day or so of it, she tired of her amusement and left me in the care of a warder, who sat beside me, took me out among the bushes from time to time, and fed me twice each day. They did not even loosen the cords that bound me, and the pain of muscles that could not move became torture enough after a time.

  It was evening of the second or third day—third. I had been in the warder’s care for a full day at that point—when Sylbie’s ghost returned. I heard it crying far off in the northwestern sky, “Bryan, Bryan.”

  The warder had me just inside an open tent flap, mostly because he liked seeing what was going on. I saw Huldra and Dedrina move toward the fire, Huldra’s hands making endless weaving motions as though knotting a net. The motions burned in the air, leaving a trace of fire behind. By the time the Sending came down, however, she was still, waiting.

  “Tell me the answer to my Sending and who gave it,” she called imperiously, beckoning the Sending to come nearer.

  ‘ Jinian is fourteen or fifteen days to the north. She comes to the Ice Caverns now, to meet you there.” So cried Sylbie’s ghost.

  Huldra made an impatient motion. “Tell me where she is, now, precisely!”

  But the ghost did not reply. Instead, it began to fade, raveling away like something knitted of smoke.

  “Hold!” Huldra cried, busy with her hands. “Hold, I say.”

  But there was no holding it. It moved on the wind like a column of smoke and was gone. I heard only the whisper of sound. “Bryan.” Huldra raged, burning and howling in her fury. “That bitch. That serpent. That Wize-ard filth. She has taken my own Sending and unknotted it against my will. It was to have told me where she was, but it told me nothing!”

  “She said she will meet you at the caverns. It is what you asked.” Dedrina gazed at the Witch slantwise from the corners of her eyes. “Why this fury?”

  “Because it was my will to come upon her while she was yet a distance away and unsuspecting. Now she will be prepared, and it may be more troublesome. That is all, snake, that is all. Mind your own business and I will mind mine.”

  “Who do you call sssnake?” hissed the Basilisk. “Careful, Huldra, Witch. Let usss continue as friendsss.”

  The Witch was in no mood to temporize. She snarled her way out of my sight, leaving the Basilisk beside the fire. I could see the lizard hands as they made long, scaled talons and scrabbled at the earth, a dangerous sound, one betokening great anger.

  Huldra returned shortly with two Elators to sit muttering with them. Though I tried, I could not hear what was said, and I did not really need to hear. She was sending them in search of Jinian. I saw her gesturing toward the sky, motioning the direction from which the Sending had come. Her voice rose. “Fourteen or fifteen days’ travel to the caverns.”

  One of them murmured to the other and flicked out of sight. In a moment the second one also disappeared, and Huldra returned to the fire. After a time she twisted her lips into a mockery of a smile and said, “Do not ever threaten me, Dreadeye. Do not ever grow so angry with me that you presume to threaten me. We are allies, but there is no question as to preeminence between us. You are a mere Talent of no particular distinction. It would be unwise to press your fortune.”

  Dedrina looked at her with a long, lizardlike stare, then rose and left the fireside. I did not see them together again in the days that followed, and I thought it unwise of Huldra to have so gratuitously made an unfriend on the eve of battle. It cheered me a little. Enmities among one’s enemies are always comforting.

  I was comforted, too, by the Sending’s vanishment. This spoke of an older mind than Jinian’s, one more subtle because more experienced. I thought it likely my love was part of her seven once more, and I had hope for her and therefore for myself.

  The Elators did not return. This made me more hopeful still. Days went by as we traveled toward the caverns, and they did not appear. Days went by, and Huldra grew more furious and violent with each one that passed. Whenever she looked in upon me, I pretended to be asleep or unconscious, offering no target for her frenzy. Withal, I was careful to eat everything the warder offered and to strain every muscle once each hour or so, pushing against the cords since I could have no other exercise. I knew something Huldra did not; if she kept on in the direction she was going, she would come within the range of the Immutables. Then—if the cords that bound me were Talent made—then might well be an opportunity for me, and I was determined to be in condition to take it if it arose.

  While my days wore wearily on, behind me in the Bright Demesne, things were happening that Huldra had not intended and did not yet suspect. I learned of them later, a few words from Mavin, mostly from Himaggery, and can tell of them here.

  The Sentinel had not seen me leaving the Demesne, but he did see Sylbie creeping away from the walls. She had opened the little door out of the gatehouse and was sneaking along the buttresses, making for Huldra’s camp, the shadows heaped at either side of her path, as though commanded to clear a way. He cried out to her, those cries I had heard during my enchantment, then he saw the smoke and fire rising from the besiegers’ camp, and this caused him to set up the alarm. In a moment the walls were swarming; men had secured the little gatehouse, and Himaggery was on the walls staring across at the besiegers, wondering what had set off the scare.

  It was only when a servant said she had seen me leaving the main house with Sylbie and when the Sentinel said he had seen Sylbie sneaking away to the camp, confirmed by their finding evidence of my passage through the ditch, that they realized what had happened. Barish was wise enough to realize I had been decoyed away; he even suspected they had used the baby to do it. The baby, however, was found sleeping in his crib, and with a total lack of foresight, they left him there, unattended except for a half-wit serving man, who promptly fell asleep and was still asleep when the baby later wakened.Barish and Himaggery immediately went into conference with all Barish’s Gamesmen who were present to plan an attack against the besiegers in order to rescue me. Barish and Himaggery had been working on a Wizardly stratagem against the shadow; they decided it must be tried immediately, did so with a minimum of fanfare and
found it would not work. It had to do with sucking the shadows down with a great fan, chopping them up with the blade, and compressing them somehow. The shadow sucked up nicely but refused either to be chopped or compressed. It merely flowed up again, against the wind, as it were, and resumed its patrol. All this went on during the night, you understand, and then Bryan woke early.

  Bryan’s mother was not present. The serving man was asleep, possibly drunk, for he did not awaken even when Bryan turned into his most monstrous gorbling form and fled the tiny gatehouse to wreak havoc in the Demesne. According to Himaggery, people were fleeing every which way, the place was like a hive of warnets that had been overset, and there was serious danger of the inhabitants breaching the gates in their panic and falling straight into Huldra’s hands. Huldra, however, had departed before dawn, leaving only half her strength behind. Otherwise, the story of the Bright Demesne might have ended at that point.

  The noise brought Mavin out of the orchard, blossoms in her hair and apples growing from her ears. She did not wait to be told what had happened but went straight to the place Bryan was gorbling and boiling, howling like a monstrous siren. There she began to take bulk, screaming at Barish and Himaggery to bring her bread. Afterward, it became a kind of joke. “Twenty more loaves,” she cried. Only they two and some of the Gamesmen could withstand Bryan’s howling. All the others in the Demesne had fled as far away as possible, and only the loyalty and training of Himaggery’s men kept the walls manned.

  When Mavin had gobbled enough bread to give her the bulk she needed, she Shifted into the form of a giant basket, which snatched up the gorbling ghost. Then she closed, compressing what was within into smaller and smaller shapes, compressing even more, and more, until baby Bryan was uncomfortably pressed into his own shape, no other, and had learned he could not terrorize the Demesne with impunity any longer.

  “It was quite a horrid sight,” said Himaggery thoughtfully. “In some respects, it is not easy to love a Shifter.”

  “I quite frankly thought I would be ill,” said Barish. “Thandbar never did anything like that in all the time I knew him.”

  “I found it interesting to watch,” said Dealpas the Healer. “I thought she’d squash the baby, but she didn’t. Bryan was perfectly all right, though less temperamental subsequently.”

  “The part that interests me is that taking on of bulk,” said Shattnir the Sorceress. “Theoretically, at least, it should provide additional power to . . .”

  Well, you get the idea. Other Gamesmen find Shifters either repulsive or odd, for the most part. Himaggery told me all this much later, including the comments of those present, laughing over it in genuine amusement, and I suppose I laughed as well. Mavin would not have been offended. She had come past the time of being hurt over what others think of us Shifters. One thing Jinian never said to me was that it was difficult to love a Shifter. Perhaps that is why I loved her so much when I finally decided that I loved her at all.

  Which is beside the point. All of this happened by midmorning of the day I had been carted away.

  Not content, then, with merely having squelched the baby and restored general order, Mavin decided to get into the besiegers’ camp and see to my rescue herself. She did this just as I had, eeling herself along the drainage ditch from the Porridge Pot, slything out onto the bank among some bushes, then creeping silently as any wraith—avoiding the shadow meantime—into the camp. While there was shadow plastered over every possible exit from the Demesne, there was none at the drainage ditch. I was known to be the only Shifter present; everyone thought Mavin was far away. It’s a mistake ordinary Gamesmen often make: assuming we’re far away when we’re not.

  In the camp there were scattered tents for the Gamesmen, a rather large contingent of Armigers and Armigerian types, along with any number of Tragamorians. No Elators. Huldra had taken them all with her. No Seers or Demonics or Healers. No Rulers, of course. Huldra would not have wanted her own sway threatened by any other’s Beguilement. There were, however, several Sorcerers and Sentinels, ready to assist an assault on the Demesne if and whenever its defenses failed.

  Mavin noticed all these and ticked them off as of no importance once she knew I was no longer there. Her interest focused on that other tall tent at the midst of the camp, a tent with closed flaps and guards set close around it. Though I had never seen her do it, Mavin had told me of her practice at moling and weaseling, a skill that took her underground, beneath the guarded tent, and allowed an extruded eye to protrude inside at the canvas edge.

  There were two beribboned forms within the tent, forms with painted faces and a strange way of moving. “Like Eesties,” she said, “trying to move like humans, waving their points first here, then there.” She watched for a time, not betraying her presence, and was horrified to realize that the creatures were controlling the shadow.

  “It made me peevish,” she said with her typically Mavinish under-statement. “They were so silly looking; so much a travesty of humanity. Making a parody of us in order to mock us; waving and weaving their points to make the shadows flow first here, then there. Well, those two will not mock again.”

  She told us later what she did to the Eesties, leaving the tent empty. “For the mystification of the guardsmen. Mystification is always good for guardsmen,” she remarked. “It makes them watchful.”

  She returned to the Demesne in time to supervise Bryan’s supper and bedtime. She did not bother to tell Himaggery what she had done until afterward, by which time he had already noticed great rents and vacancies in the shadow. The fluttering menace seemed no longer organized by malicious will; though dangerous still, it was patchy rather than ubiquitous. Waiting for a propitious conformation, Himaggery and Barish made a sortie in force from the main gates, shadow or no shadow. Good fortune may have had something to do with it. They were not shadow eaten, and they left very little of the besiegers for the were-owls.

  “We will go after Peter,” Himaggery announced, furiously ordering horses and wagons and equipage fir the road while the Gamesmen ran hither and thither and Barish gave similar orders to his own men.

  “No,” said Mavin. “You must go to the Old South Road City,” and she told them why. She says they were very stubborn about it, almost disbelieving. It was only when she threatened to turn Bryan loose on them that they began to listen seriously to her. And, at last, she had her way—and mine. Himaggery, Barish, and all but a small garrison of the inhabitants of the Bright Demesne set out for Old South Road City, while Mavin, somewhat slowed by being burdened by Bryan, came after me. Often I wonder what might have happened had she gone with Himaggery instead. Often now I wish she had done so.

  11

  JINIAN’S STORY: THE CAVERNS

  Murzy had been right. By moving swiftly, calmly—and by trading the barrows for a farm wagon on the third day of our trek—we managed to reach the Ice Caverns before Huldra did. The old codger living at the edge of the marches had not been at all willing to let his only wagon go, but between Cat’s talking and Margaret’s Beguiling, he couldn’t hold out against us. He was well paid for the wagon, and we left half a dozen of the shadow-eaters with him as lagniappe. When we left him, he had begun telling them the story of his life, and one of the turnips had a sprout out its top that looked suspiciously like a flower head to me.

  “They’ll seed, you know,” said the Gardener in his gloomy, uninflected voice. “Soon they’ll be all over everything.”

  “I can think of worse things,” said Sarah. “Wildthorns, for example. Or purple briar. Or shadow.”

  “True,” murmured the Gardener. “Except that wildthorn extract cures heaves in wateroxen. And split purple briar makes the best sieves in the world.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Cat, showing immediate interest. “What else are they good for?”

  He told her, for the better part of a day. Everyone else walked away from the wagon, tiring of his voice, but Cat sat up there on the seat, taking it all in, and the turnips babble
d to one another about every cloud in the sky and every new flower or stone along the way. I was beginning to see differences among them, differences in their markings and the locations of their eyes. I named them to myself; Bulgy and Flop-top and Big-blue, who had the widest, bluest belt. Pasty, all white with yellowish leaves; Fringes, who had at least ten or twelve root legs; Molly-my-dear, slender—relatively speaking—and coy, with an almost supersonic giggle. They had no names for themselves and were delighted when I began to name them, after a time beginning to think up titles for themselves, some of which made them collapse into the bottom of the wagon, full of mysterious, vegetable mirth. I could understand the words well enough, but not what they really meant. It was not a humor I could share, though that fact seemed to frustrate no one but me.

  The Gardener had been right. More than a few of them were sending up flower stalks and casting meaningful looks at one another. I had not thought of pollination as an erotic exercise before, but these hybrid creatures did not regard it as routine, so much was obvious. They were full of devious, volatile pranks, reminding me rather of the deep dwell-ers I had summoned up in Fangel. Devious or not, they were more interesting than the Gardener. I had yet to see him display any interest in anything whatsoever.

  All of which was a mere distraction, to keep my mind off Peter. When I thought of him, I thought of him being tortured, maimed, savaged by Huldra’s wanton evil or Dedrina’s casual brutality. Once or twice I had fallen into shivering fits, and Cat or Murzy had had to recall me to myself with an utterance of names. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering whose names we uttered and why they made any difference. Who, or what, was Eutras? Who, or what, was Favian?

  At any rate, we came down Cagihiggy Creek at some speed. The way is level along there, not precisely a road but without major impediments to travel. As we neared the place where we thought the caverns were, we made camp while Murzy, Cat, and Bets sent up some kind of Wize-ardly signal, a tall, blue smoke with sparkly bits in it. They went on making it for some hours. Along about dusk, it was answered by a cautious call from behind some rocks, then by a tall, serious-faced man, who stepped out and approached us with visible trepidation.