The End of the Game (32 page)

Nothing prospered in the Shadowmarches. Crops withered or were eaten by beasts. Domestic zeller broke the fences and wandered away or went mad and attacked the herdsmen. Rank growths sprang up along the streams, poisoning the water. Noises in the night woke the inhabitants from deep, drugged sleep, and the dawn came through greenish mists with a sharp, chemical smell.

And there were sightings of the rolling stars. Great wheels rolling on the hills, spinning discs down the river valleys, the smell of burned air and hot metal.

Vitior Vulpas Queynt heard all this as rumor in the farm town of Betand, a day’s travel south from the ancient city of Pfarb Durim and as close to nothing as a town could be, a few implement merchants huddled along one dirt street together with one general merchandiser, one farmstock merchant selling both hybrid and thisworld livestock and crops, two inns, and five taverns.

Don’t forget the taverns, said Queynt to himself as he came into the Blue Zeller to stand a moment waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. No matter what world one came to rest on, there were always taverns, and those taverns were always dark. A re-creation of the primeval cave, Queynt thought. Smoky, as from campfires, with rituals as old as time. Probably earliest men crouched in a place not unlike a tavern, fortifying themselves with something brewed or distilled, getting ready for the hunt. Man did not seek to return to the womb, as some alleged. He sought to return to the cave. Drier than a womb. More congenial.

Though not always. The Blue Zeller did not look or sound congenial. The place was almost empty except for a depressed-looking couple against the far wall on either side of a sleepy child.

“Got run out of the Marches,” said the barman, Guire, nodding in the direction of the family. “Lost everything to the rolling stars.”

“I didn’t know it was the stars causing the trouble,” Queynt remarked in his usual uninterested voice. The way some people were feeling lately, it didn’t do to take any position very strongly.

“If not them, then what?” brayed the woman, thin lips drawn back over stained teeth. “You never see anything but them! Them and dead stock. Them and dead crops! You never hear anything but their music—singin’ wild in the hills.”

Queynt commiserated. “Things are better in the south. If you’re set on farming, why don’t you try west of the Gathered Waters. I just came from there.”

“No stock left,” grumbled the man. “Nothing left. Horses died.”

“Horses don’t like it here much anyhow,” Guire remarked, wiping the bar in an immemorial gesture. “And there’s nothing local to cross ‘em to. Still, the animal market says they’ve got a new strain’s more likely to make it.”

“My dad’s dad said it was a damn fool world didn’t have some kind of draft animal on it,” the woman bleated. She did not seem to be able to speak softly. “Nothing but pombis to eat your stock. Nothing but warnets to run you out of your house.”

“If you decide to try south,” Queynt said, “I’d be glad to lend you enough to stock up for the trip.” He did not expect them to thank him, and they did not. Both ignored the statement, peering at each other as though for some confirmation of a closely held suspicion. Queynt did not repeat the offer. They would think it over, and the town was not so large they could lose him in it. He turned back to his beer.

“What about those wild Talents,” the woman shrieked. He wondered if she were deaf, pitching his answer very softly to find out.

“What about them, ma’am?”

“We heard they was profligatin’ down south. More all the time. Traggymores. Flickers. Dragons and all that. Freezin’ out the common folk.” She had heard him. The shriek was simply a harpy’s cry for notice.

“It’s not that bad,” he assured her, lying only a little. It wasn’t bad, quite, though it was getting worse. At first the Talents had been interesting and, if not benign, at least not overtly harmful. Lately, though, there had been more and more births of Gamesmen, the name they had chosen for themselves. Not exactly a game, he thought. Talents were not easy to handle. Someone needed to start some schools for the youngsters, teach them some rules or something. He made a mental note.

“The towns around the Gathered Waters need food,” he said. “The Talents leave the farmers pretty much alone.” Which was more or less true. Gamesmen would be fools to meddle with the farms. Though Queynt had yet to see the limit of their foolishness. Some of the things the new race of Gamesmen did were not only unbelievable but childishly silly and cruel. “There’s lots of good land west of the Lake, and plenty of it left. The farmstock market in Laketown sells on credit, too. I’d recommend you go there and give it a try.”

There. He’d given them his best advice. He finished the beer and left, hearing them coming after him before he was halfway down the short street.

“Sir! Sir!” Her voice like a whetstone, he thought, wondering how the man and child could bear it. Maybe they were deaf. “We’d be mighty grateful for the loan you offered.”

“You’ll go south?” He kept his face neutral, still. No loan would help them if they were determined to return to the northlands.

“South,” the man agreed in a toneless mumble. “We won’t need so much, actually. We do have one good milk zeller left.”

He gave them money. “When you have prospered,” he said, “you are to make this amount available to someone else in need. It is a trust, you understand?”

The woman turned away, eyes wary as a flitchhawk’s, but the man gave him a straight look. “I take it as such, sir. Don’t mind her. We left two children buried there, north.” He put his arm protectively around the woman and they went down the street, the child silent as a shadow at their heels. Queynt stared after them, not the first he had met, not the first he had sent south with enough to buy food and little more. And still he did not know the truth of what was happening there, in the Shadowmarches. He would not know, until he went himself.

He went afoot, trusting no horse—new stock or old—carrying only a few odds and ends and what he needed to eat to supplement stuff taken from the wild.

At one time, he thought sardonically, he would have distrusted anything resembling a hunch, but he was in the grip of a hunch when he walked alone up into the Marches. It was the woman’s plaint about music in the hills that had set him off, and he thought much about that remark during his travels. When he had come past the farthest reach of the attempted settlements, he found a tall rocky hill and camped himself on it in a half cave with its back to the wind.

It was a high, lonely moor he sat upon, the stones at his back raising themselves like the heads of questing beasts toward the lowering sky. Low, woody plants carpeted the hills, amber and wine, bronze and green. At the bottom of the hill, the forests began, twisted and low in a furry mat like the pelt of some great beast, wide swamps of darkness lying beneath the trees. And over all a shrill, keening wind, coming and going like a visitant ghost.

Queynt smiled, well pleased. He took the bait he had brought out of its careful zellerskin wrappings, an ancient instrument, one brought from the former world, a thin column of old wood with double reeds to blow through and a plaintive, importunate voice, unlike any in this world. The thing made a sorrowful, interlocutary cry, which would, he felt, summon any creature with a grain of curiosity in its bones—or whatever passed for bones with northern creatures.

Waiting for a caesura in the wind, he played. While no great shakes upon the instrument, still he had a feel for it when he stuck to easy things, and the simple melodies winged out from the height like native birds seeking nests. A few quiet elegies and nocturnes were what he knew best. When he had finished, the hills around sank into waiting silence.

It was the third day he was there—playing each day a bit at dawn, noon, and dusk, sitting in the meantime quietly over a steaming pot of grain and broth, mostly native stuff — that he heard a phrase from one of the elegies come fluttering at him out of the shadows along the hill. It was almost the sound of his double reed, but not quite, and the phrase was followed by a tiny spitting sound which could not be other than an expression of artistic annoyance.

In a moment the unknown singer tried again, closer this time, but still not exactly. Queynt set the reeds between his lips, gave a faintly expository warble, then played the melody into the waiting air once more.

A small creature, virtually invisible in the dusk, came out upon the hillside before him and sang. It had wide ears, huge eyes. From either side of its face soft, flowing whiskers swept back to join its shadowy mane, and needle teeth glimmered in the half-light. It had the flattish star shape of all the tailless, backboneless creatures of this world, yet with legs, arms, and head that parodied humankind. It stood there and sang.

By the time full dark had come they had progressed to the point that Queynt dared assay a contrapuntal arrangement. The shadow voice dropped into silence.

Queynt played the first part again, encouragingly, taking up the counterpoint when the singer began again. After several false starts the singer got the idea and they proceeded through the composition, harmonically intertwined. During this concert, Queynt was conscious of a soft gabble, interrupted by fragments of song, as though the audience were explaining to one another the intricacies of this new—obviously new—kind of music.

So, he thought with satisfaction, they are musical but did not know harmony. What an interesting gift to have given them. He set his instrument down, put a few more sticks on the fire, and settled himself to await developments. There were none. There was only a softly retreating murmur interspersed with fragments of melody. After some time, he sighed and settled himself to sleep.

The following night they progressed further. Not only did the singer keep strongly to the melody, but the harmony was picked up by other voices in the woods. By the end of the evening Queynt was sure he heard one flutelike voice in an original harmonic line high above the rest.

On the third night they sang and Queynt listened ruefully, wondering if he would ever touch his own instrument again. When they had finished, he felt a small hand tugging at his own to put something in it.

There were half a dozen jewels there, bright blue and faceted. He held them, admiring them, surprised when the same tiny hand took one from him and pressed it to his lips. His sucking reflex took it in, fondling it with his tongue.

When he came to himself again, the fire was burnt to ashes, only a few coals blinking at him from slow, basilisk eyes. Nothing was left of the jewel. It had dissolved into him, permeated him. He could feel it moving in his veins, a flow of quiet certainty. Beside the dead fire crouched the singer. When it saw he was awake, it pointed to the pouch at his belt, to his hand.

The jewels he had held had been put away. Finger on lips, the creature shushed him. Secret. Secret gift. Not to be mentioned. Then it summoned him with flickering fingers. Queynt packed up his few belongings and followed.

Though he was an experienced woodsman, a good tracker, an excellent navigator, he was never able to find the place again. Sometimes, remembering it, he felt there had been some large, brilliant curved structure in the background. Other times he remembered only forest and rock. Whatever the setting may have been, he was sure of one thing. The Eesties.

“The singers call us Eesties or Eeties, which in their language means “bone music” or “bone song” or some other such phrase. Call us something similar if you like.” The star stood to speak with him, tall upon two of its points, the other three moving as though blown by a harsh wind. Later he recalled it as having had a face painted at its upper end, but the voice spoke as much inside Queynt’s head as in his ears. He did not find this surprising. What he did find surprising was the tone of irritation, of an angry contempt that hid something deeper and more vital.

“Why did your like come to this world?”

Queynt spoke of several ships that had fled to this world in recent centuries, his own group only one among many, and of the wars and destruction they had fled from.

“You have fled from destruction, yet brought it with you? Like a beast which flees from the plague it carries?” Since this was what Queynt himself had thought many times, he could only agree.

“We try to flee. We, some of us, do not want such violent things, do not want conflict. So we try to run. But I suppose we do bring some of it with us.”

“Like the little singers, the Shadowpeople. They, too, desire holiness. They, too, have little talent for it.” The creature’s irritation seemed exacerbated by this, a scarcely veiled hostility that did not at first threaten force, but rather seemed to imply anathema, a casting out. It was as though the Eesty tolerated Queynt’s presence at all only with difficulty, and now the mention of his yearnings for peace infuriated it. It was then Queynt thought he identified what lay beneath the anger, beneath the contempt. Guilt. This being, whatever it truly was, was guilty of something, and that guilt ate at it like a cancer. He did not know how he knew this. Later, he realized the crystal he had taken had enlightened him in ways he was scarcely aware of.

“We want you to go hence,” the creature told him. “Go away, to some other world. This one does not need you. You do an evil thing here.” It moved away in a flutter of ribbons, leaving a stink of hatred behind it.

Queynt could not understand what the evil was they were trying to communicate. The concepts swam in his head, half-formed, vertiginous edges of ideas which touched and darted away, only partly seen. A word.

“Bao.” Or maybe “Bah-ho.” It had no meaning for him. In it there were Eesties, Shadowpeople, birds, beasts, trees, long white roads under a scarlet sun, stars spinning upon them in a constant glittering flow. Disruption. He tried to explain that the ships were gone, disassembled, that mankind could not leave. The Eesty went angrily away.

It tried again later. “Badness is being done. (Most desirable of all things) is being destroyed.” Again he struggled with the concept. Humans were doing something wrong. He could not tell what it was. Not a matter of breaking a taboo, not a matter of destroying some holy site. More than that. They were doing this (had done this?) evil by merely existing.