The End of the Game (73 page)

He nodded, rather distantly, as though acknowledging a stroke of wind. There, I heard that, he seemed to indicate, without giving any appearance of intending to continue the conversation.

“People, people,” shrilled the turnip, rushing away among his fellows, shrieking as he went. “Come see, come see. It’s people.”

Murzy came through the trees, the others following, and we all stood there in various states of amazement as the turnips gathered. I looked about curiously to see whether there were any other talking roots or ambulatory bushes, but these seemed to be the only ones. Which seemed a good-enough fact with which to start a conversation, I thought.

“Can you tell me how these beings came by the power of speech?” I shrilled in turnip talk.

The Gardener said not a word, but all the turnips began talking at once. They had always had it. No, they had not had it until after they started eating shadow. No, they had had it since the enchantress gave it to them, many centuries ago. The outcry was so great it was some time before I noticed that the Gardener was shaking his head, over and over. I gestured for silence, quelling the outcry by threatening to roast and eat several of them if they didn’t hush. They subsided with a grumpy babble.

“I gave them speech,” said the Gardener in his tumbling voice. “I crossbred them with the Sensible plant.”

“I don’t know the Sensible plant,” said Cat wonderingly. “Where may it be found?”

“It cannot be found,” the Gardener replied. “It is extinct. Sensibly. It was parasitic upon other plants, and when it became conscious of its own nature, it chose to become extinct rather than continue to be what it was. A pity, I felt, though exemplary from an ethical point of view. So I preserved some of its qualities in these turnips, though their parasitism has been carefully controlled. They eat only soil and shadow. Not foreseen, precisely, but useful nonetheless. Actually, shadow makes quite good mulch. For them.”

I considered that while shadow seemed lethal to animal life, it had not, in fact, seemed to have any effect upon plants.

“Have you come to get us?” cried a turnip. “It was foretold that people would come to get us and when that time came, we could go to seed!” There were cheers, cries of encouragement, and three of the turnips began a dance that I could only interpret as frankly erotic.

“I have forbidden them to seed,” said the Gardener. “As it would have upset the ecological balance between light and shadow to have them sucking up shadow at every turn. They’re greedy, as you can see. Despite the overcrowding, still they insist on overeating and becoming fat. If 1 were not who I am, I would be tempted to eat them myself.”

“Who are you?” said Murzy, coming closer to him. “Who are you, Gardener? Are you creature of Lom? Son of mankind? What are you?”

“Ah.” He drew a long, gnarly hand across his face, seeming to be in some confusion. “After all this time, who can say, person? Does it matter? I am here. The garden is my task. To grow and hybridize and combine. To seek out new things and try them. To set out into the world those things which seem advantageous. To destroy the others.”

“And the turnips? Are they advantageous?”

He was given no time to reply. A tumult broke out among the turnips as one called, “Shadow. Shadow by the fruit trees!”

We looked up to see several questing flakes settling along the wall, around the roots of the trees there. A mob of turnips began to rush toward them. Once at the shadow’s edge, they dug themselves in, roots flipping soil like some digger-toads I have seen, squirming into the dirt like little corkscrews. Soon nothing was to be seen except the tufts of leaves, and every inch of the shadow perimeter had a turnip planted adjacent.

“By Towering Tamor,” whispered Bets. “The shadow’s shrinking.” So it was. Fading. Shrinking. Dwindling. Within moments it was gone and the turnips began to uproot themselves once more with an air of complete though somewhat petulant satisfaction.

The Gardener had regarded this display with no change of expression. Now he reverted to Murzy’s earlier question. “Advantageous? I really don’t know. They are company, of a sort.”

“Would you mind dreadfully if we borrowed some of them?” I asked. “We would find them most advantageous. There is rather more of the shadow about than is generally considered useful.”

The Gardener seemed puzzled by this. “There has seemed to be more than usual. However, that may  be only a local phenomenon. The Shadow Tower is close by. I had wondered if perhaps there were a leak.”

Cat, with her usual passion for both getting and giving information, set about bringing the Gardener up to date while I wandered off among the turnips, recruiting several hundred of them with ridiculous ease. They tumbled over one another in their eagerness, and I had some trouble choosing the stoutest and strongest as those best suited to the trip. Since their power of locomotion was not of a protracted or speedy kind, we considered how to get them where we were going and decided on a kind of narrow-wheeled vehicle halfway between a barrow and a cart. The Gardener very kindly helped us build two of these—which I resolved to exchange for a well-built wagon and some wateroxen at the earliest opportunity—and helped load the volunteer turnips into these conveyances.

“Would you mind,” he asked when we were ready to depart, “if I came with you? I haven’t been
outside
for some time. If there is indeed an
imbalance,
as your teacher person suggests, I should be aware of it.”

I thought “imbalance” was rather a slight word for the threat that hovered over us all but could see no reason why this strange being should not come with us. Soon we were returning the way we had come, with the turnips riding at ease in the barrows, exclaiming shrilly at every turn in the trail. When we rested for the night, it was in a circle of them with still others dotted among us, ready to suck up any shadow that came upon us in the night. And so our travels went, with us staying to the sunny valleys where we could for the turnips’ sake, stopping at every streamlet for a good drink, and making more progress than one might suppose, given the awkward nature of the barrows.

Two nights later, the Sending came.

We heard it casting about in the sky, crying my name like a lost child, high and far in the star-pierced dark, “Jinian, Jinian.” I knew it was Sylbie’s voice almost immediately, though the timbre was nothing like. Something in the intonation, perhaps. I told the others who it was, and their faces turned cold and stern. We gathered ourselves promptly, setting up Wize-ardly defenses and protections. The turnips were planted away from us, the Gardener set to stand among the trees. The rest of us set ourselves in a fire-centered circle with seven little fires burning around us, waiting what would come.

`Jinian,” it called, still casting east and west, high above us in the northern air. It had gone far to the north in seeking me and was now on our trail of return. “Jinian.”

“Only a girl, isn’t that what you said?” Margaret asked. “Little more than a child herself?”

“A year younger than I,” I answered. “She bore Peter’s baby in Betand, a Shifter baby who had been haunting the town. Bryan is the baby’s name.”

“Bryan is now a motherless child,” whispered Murzy. “No live creature casts about so among the clouds, riding the moonlight in that way. No, she is dead, poor Sylbie, sent by an evil creature to find you, Jinian.”

“I know who is responsible for this Sending,” I told them. “Huldra, the witch. More than a Witch, however. One who has studied the art.” They shivered, as I had known they would. There are things the sevens hate, among them those who study the art for evil’s sake, spilling blood as if by right.

“She is more Peter’s enemy than mine, but Dedrina Dreadeye is mine, and she stands beside Huldra,” I went on.

At this there was general consternation, for it was the seven who had captured the daughter, Dedrina-Lucir, the one I killed with the Dagger of Daggerhawk. We had no further time to think about it. High above, the Sending called out triumphantly, ` Jinian,” and plummeted down upon us only to recoil from the circle of fire and land wearily outside it on the meadow grass.

“Jinian Footseer,” it cried in a high, inhuman voice. “I bring word from Huldra, sister-wife of Huld, mother of Mandor. Peter is held fast and will shortly begin to die a long death if you come not to the Ice Caverns where the hundred thousand lie and submit you there to Huldra.” The specter drooped in the starlight, white as a peeled branch, its voice becoming human once more. “Bryan,” it wept. “Bryan.”

Cat had already started Dream Chains to Bind It to hold the Sending where it was. Bets was busy with her book of charts, judging where we were and how long it might take us to come south. We had figured it several times before, but we had been farther north and east then. I simply stood there in a state of shock, unable to move or think or say anything. Peter. Did they really hold Peter? How could they? My loving, Shifterish Peter. Murzy put one hand on my shoulder and said three hard, sharp names. The world steadied and I became icy calm.

I waited until Dream Chains to Bind It was finished, then asked the wraith, “Where is Bryan? Where did you leave him?”

“Sleeping,” cried the wraith. “Sleeping in his crib in the gatehouse of the Bright Demesne. The crying we used to decoy Peter outside was only pretense. Bryan lies sleeping.”

I found myself coldly hoping that either Mavin or Thandbar had been at the Bright Demesne and had been conveniently located when Bryan had wakened.

“We’re going to have to use her to carry the message back,” said Murzy. “There’s no way to get around it.”

“Can we limit it?” asked Sarah. “Dissolve her as soon as the return message is given?”

“Limit it, and send her by a route north of here,” said Cat. “So that the Witch cannot find where we are.”

“Why limit her suffering?” I asked. “She betrayed Peter.” Immediately there was a pain in my head and I gasped with it. “No. No, I didn’t mean that,” I said. There’d been a sharp, revelatory gleam in my mind, like a sword of light. Oh, Gamelords, I had been acting as though there were some bao here, something that could be taught. There was nothing, only a wraith. It could suffer, but it could not learn, and to impose suffering on something that could not learn was . . . was a bad thing, I told myself, wondering where I had learned it. Evil. The purest kind of evil. “Let us do as Cat suggests. Let’s limit it.”

So they began to weave Dream Chains to Bind It into a complex thing, a fabric, a basket, a holding that would untie all knots as soon the return message was delivered. They ended the spell with Inward Is Quiet, the same one I had used on the creatures at the Sanctuary, and I felt ashamed to have felt anger toward the pathetic thing.

“What message?” I asked. “Don’t let Huldra hurt him!”

“I think it unlikely she’ll hurt him much, girl. Not until you arrive. Then, likely, she’ll try to kill you both, but we won’t allow that. Come now. Don’t fall apart like this. You’ve been endangered before and known him to be endangered without going to pieces. Stand yourself up her and deliver the message. It must be in your voice; you can trust Huldra to check whether you sent the reply yourself, and she must not know we are with you.”

So I stood and delivered. “The Sending finds me fourteen or fifteen days’ travel from the Ice Caverns. Jinian will come as she is bid.” Actually, we felt the distance was something like ten to twelve days’ travel, but we had decided to overstate the time it would take, both to mislead the Witch and to allow for accidents on the way.

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.

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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.