Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (24 page)

‘Mother’s Smithy!’ yowled the Cattermune. ‘They’re going to melt it down! Not if I get there first!’ And he threw the dice, crying, ‘Eight squares to Mother’s Smithy …’

The dice rolled, rebounded, bounced and jounced and came to rest on the table. Everyone around the table was looking at the place the Cattermune had been. Only Mondragon’s eyes were on the dice, his dice, Makr Avehl’s loaded dice. He picked them up, dropped them in his pocket and waited, holding his breath.

A moment went by.

The Cattermune next to him became misty, indistinct, shadowed. The table turned into smoke, into mist, then vanished. Someone said, ‘So I told the Cattermune …’ the voice fading away into a reverberating silence. The outlines of the room began to quiver and shake, like a mirage. Darkness approached, enveloped everything, and was gone in its turn. He felt himself falling, endlessly, through absolute nothingness.

‘Marianne,’ he cried, wondering for a hopeless moment if he had miscalculated.

‘Makr Avehl,’ said Ellat in a sharp, imperative tone. ‘Answer me!’

He opened his eyes. The hotel room swam before him.

‘What’s wrong?’ she cried again. ‘When are you going to go?’

He took the dice which the Cattermune had used from his pocket and threw them onto the table, watching with satisfaction as they turned up one, and one. Snake eyes.

‘I’ve been,’ he said.

‘Where’s Marianne!’ asked Therat. ‘Where is she?’

‘Call the Zahmanis,’ he yawned. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, Marianne will be in Dagma’s room. Dagma and Aghrehond are probably there as well.’ He threw the dice again, smiling when they came up snake eyes again.

‘What are you playing with those dice for?’ Ellat asked in exasperation as she dialed the phone.

‘Admiring them,’ he said. ‘Admiring a one-way ticket to a Forever.’

‘I would have thought,’ Haurvatat Zahmani said with an expression of acute annoyance, ‘that your great-aunt would have come back with you.’

‘She …’ Marianne hesitated, wondering just how to say it. ‘I think she felt that if Makr Avehl managed to get us back at all, she had very little to come back for. She said pretty much that to me before I … well, before I left. Evidently while Aghrehond and I were busy with Buttercup, Dagma simply concentrated on where she wanted to go and threw a nine.’

‘At the time,’ said Aghrehond gloomily, ‘I could not recall precisely where a nine might take her. Now, of course, it is obvious that she went to the Illusion Fields …’

‘Or to Mother’s Smithy. Or some other place,’ said Marianne. ‘We really don’t know.’

‘And you think she’s there still?’ Arti wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, whether from joy over Marianne’s return or from sorrow over Dagma, she herself could not have said.

‘I doubt it,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘Haven’t vanished people been showing up in droves? I know Fanetta did, because I called Seattle to find out. Your postman, Arti? I’ll wager he’s back. Your butcher’s wife. The man who sits on that charity board with you? Your neighbor and her children. I imagine all of them are back unless they happened to get into a Forever.’

‘Or,’ said Aghrehond ominously. ‘Or …’

‘Well, yes. Or the ones who were hunted down in Cattermune’s Pique.’

‘Dagma wasn’t hunted down. But she hasn’t come back, either,’ said Arti.

Marianne sighed. ‘Mother, there was one Forever nine squares from Cattermune’s Pique. Not an obvious one, to be sure, but then Dagma seldom did the obvious …’

‘Dagma is not the only one in this family of whom that can be said,’ grumped Haurvatat. ‘And here you are within weeks, within days, of having a baby. What if it had been born there?’

Marianne shuddered delicately. ‘I’d rather not think about that.’

‘I should hope not. Think of something else. Something cheerful. Such as, what are you going to name the baby?’ He looked at her triumphantly, sure, from what he was pleased to think of as his intimate knowledge of feminine psychology, that this subject would drive all others from her mind.

‘Ah,’ sighed Marianne. ‘Well, Daddy, it’s going to be a girl, you know. Makr Avehl and I have considered many names. Family names. Historic names. Old Alphenlichtian names. Kavi names, even. Considering everything – and I do mean everything – I really think there’s only one thing I can call her. It will be my way, at least in part, of making up for a broken promise.’ Her tone was rather stiff as she said this, and she avoided meeting Makr Avehl’s eyes.

He shook his head in dismay. Her bearing, her tone, everything told him he was not going to like what she would say next. He swore silently to himself that he would not say one thing, not one thing.

‘But I’ve never known you to break a promise, Marianne,’ said her mother. ‘Never once.’

‘You taught me not to, Mama. But this is one I’m going to have to break. There is no way that I can go to Frab Junction, to the Marveling Galosh, and have lunch with the Queen. That’s why I’m going to name the baby Buttercup.’

‘Buttercup!’ roared Haurvatat. ‘Of all the …’

‘Shhh,’ said Makr Avehl, shaking his head at Marianne with a fondly rueful expression. ‘Father-in-law, don’t upset the mother-to-be. In English it does sound rather silly. We could do it in Latin, of course. Ranunculus.’

‘I won’t have a granddaughter named Ranunculus!’

‘No. I couldn’t take that seriously myself. There is one – a buttercup – that grows in our mountains, however. Ranunculus asiaticus. A rather charming flower, actually. It has a common name, of course. An Alphenlichtian name.’

‘What is it in Alphenlichtian?’ asked Haurvatat suspiciously.

‘
Therat
,’ said Marianne. ‘This time I think she really will be surprised.’

THE END

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Land of The True Game

1.
King's Blood Four
(1983)

2.
Necromancer Nine
(1983)

3.
Wizard's Eleven
(1984)

Marianne

1.
Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore
(1985)

2.
Marianne, the Madame and the Momentary Gods
(1988)

3.
Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse
(1989)

Mavin Manyshaped

1.
The Song of Mavin Manyshaped
(1985)

2.
The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped
(1985)

3.
The Search of Mavin Manyshaped
(1985)

Jinian

1.
Jinian Footseer
(1985)

2.
Dervish Daughter
(1986)

3.
Jinian Star-Eye
(1986)

Ettison

1.
Blood Heritage
(1986)

2.
The Bones
(1987)

Awakeners

1.
Northshore
(1987)

2.
Southshore
(1987)

Other Novels

The Revenants
(1984)

After Long Silence
(1987)

The Gate to Women's Country
(1988)

The Enigma Score
(1989)

Grass
(1989)

Beauty
(1991)

Sideshow
(1992)

A Plague of Angels
(1993)

Shadow's End
(1994)

Gibbon's Decline and Fall
(1996)

The Family Tree
(1997)

Six Moon Dance
(1998)

Singer from the Sea
(1999)

Raising the Stones
(1990)

The Fresco
(2000)

The Visitor
(2002)

The Companions
(2003)

The Margarets
(2007)

Sheri S. Tepper (1929 – )

Sheri Stewart Tepper was born in Colorado in 1929 and is the author of a larger number of novels in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery, and is particularly respected for her works of feminist science fiction. Her many acclaimed novels include
The Margarets
and
Gibbon's Decline And Fall
, both shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award,
A Plague Of Angels
,
Sideshow
and
Beauty
, which was voted Best Fantasy Novel Of The Year by readers of
Locus
magazine. Her versatility is illustrated by the fact that she is one of very few writers to have titles in both the Gollancz SF and Fantasy Masterworks lists. Sheri S. Tepper lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Sheri S Tepper 1989

All rights reserved.

The right of Sheri S Tepper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11607 8

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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