The End of the Game (56 page)

“Eesties. I mean, I guess they were Eesties. I’ve never seen them, but Mavin has. And Queynt saw them, of course. I don’t know what else they could have been. Star-shaped. Hundreds, maybe thousands of

them, all roaring at the building we were in. Why did you yell at me like that?”

“I was afraid you’d slip
through.
Cernaby said each ‘place’ has many ways out. That’s what makes it a maze. If you’d gone somewhere else, I’m not sure I could have found you.”

“Is it all like that?”

“I think so. Places. No, not exactly places. More like events. Did you notice that first one we were in? . . .”

“It was the Base. The place the Magicians called the Base. I’ve seen that ship before. I’ve been there.”

“Have you really!” Somehow this was astonishing to me. Even though I knew Peter had had a life before we met—or met again—evidence of it always had the power to surprise me, to shame me, as though I felt he could not have survived without me. “Then you know what was happening?”

“It was the human ship arriving. The ship with all the Magicians on it. Barish was on that ship, and Didir, and Queynt himself. It landed a thousand years ago. Didn’t you see Barish come out the door on the side of it? I wanted to get closer and see what Barish was like before—when he was just Barish.”

Barish was no longer just Barish. I knew Peter blamed himself sometimes for putting old Windlow’s mind into Barish’s body, but then at the time we all thought Barish had no mind of his own. Since then, the two of them had lived an uneasy joint tenancy, two sets of memories, two sets of opinions on everything, all in one head, and it would have been interesting to see what Barish was like, just as himself. Nonetheless, we hadn’t time to think of it now.

“All I could see was something that didn’t look natural,” I confessed. “Even though I knew it was human, I thought it was very strange. I couldn’t understand it.”

“That’s odd.” He thought about this, peering at me intently, then nodding. “Well, no, not really odd. If these are the memories of the world, as your Dervish friend told you, then you’re probably picking up how the world feels about it. Felt about it. To this world, men would have been strange. Very strange. Come from some far place, not of `itself,’ so to speak.”

This made sense. At least it was no stranger than the rest of it, and it would explain the horrifying feelings I had been having.

“The second place we got into was the Wastes of Bleer,” mused Peter. “At the time the moon fell. You said Storm Grower brought the moon down, just to prove she could. Lom must have found that traumatic, too.” He thought for a time longer. “And I have no idea what the third place was.”

“I don’t, either,” I confessed. “But I do know how it’s connected to the other two things.” It had taken me a while to figure it out, but I had come up with an answer. “Just as we came out, there was this sound from above, the sound of something breaking. Like a great beam of wood.”

“I heard it.”

“Well, after it broke, I think something fell. Something huge.”

“So each event was about something falling?” He sounded doubtful. “I think so. Each event was part of a category labeled `Something falling.’ Or, more specifically, not merely ‘something,’ but ‘something very big.’ I’m not really sure about that last one, because we didn’t stay to see.”

“Could we step back in and find out?”

“I’m afraid to.”

“Can it hurt us?”

“Quite frankly, Peter, I haven’t any idea. Reason says no. My skin savs yes. I barely made it out of there this time.”

You stay here,” he said, patting me fondly on my head as he might have petted a tame fustigar. He stepped back the way we had come, leaving me with my mouth open. I swallowed, choked, started to go screaming after him, then thought better of it. Peter often did things I was afraid to do. Then my fear for him overcame my fear for myself, and I went roaring after him, usually quite unnecessarily. Just now there was something I had wanted to do that would take a few moments alone. There might be no better time later.

Peter had Shifted inside the maze. If his Talent worked there, then mine would probably work close by. Not my Talent of understanding languages, but my Wize-ardlv one. There was a spell I’d been saving, a multiple one Murzy had taught me early on, telling me not to use it save in times of great need. It was a combination spell used to find appropriate destinations. Not particular ones, you understand, but appropriate ones. Murzy called it a blood, dust, and total trust spell. Nothing needed but  a drop of my own blood on a roadway and total faith that what I would ask lay in the will and purpose of the art. The problem with it would be, she had said, its tendency to pull other creatures into it with me. Just as the road would be connected to many other roads, so the spell would connect me to many other things. Considering the puzzle the Maze presented, I thought it worth the risk. Our chances of finding what we needed on our own seemed very remote. So, I plopped myself down on the green edge of the path and made myself concentrate. It was hard. Something about the place made concentration difficult, words hard to remember.

“Day or night, dark or light,” I prayed, gulping a little, shutting everything out except those words, “lead me to the place I need to be. Bright the Sun Burning, Night Will Come Turning, Road’s Dust to Find It, Heart’s Blood to Bind It.” I used the edge of my star-eye to cut a finger, dropped the blood on a thirsty patch of bare road, then sat very quietly, letting the words flow through me until all my parts understood them.

It always seems to take a long time. Actually, it doesn’t. Within moments, I was worrying about Peter again. There was only time for a modest fret before he emerged from the Maze, somewhat untidily. “I Shifted,” he announced. “To stay out of the way. Something enormous fell. It made a noise like some huge being screaming in agony, a great metallic clamor. It killed several whats-its, then after a little while it was gone and everything was just the way it had been originally. It goes on over and over, like some one-act play at a festival. Performances every few minutes.”

“Did it hurt you?” I wrapped my punctured finger in a leaf and tucked the star-eye back in my shirt.

“Oh. No. No, I couldn’t even feel it.”

“Well, if you can hear it and smell it, how come you can’t feel it?” “Probably because the world . . ,”

“Lom.

“Probably because Lom hears it and smells it but doesn’t feel it. I mean, if they’re memories, then they act like memories, don’t you think? If I set myself to remember—oh, that time I tried to rescue you and Silkhands from the Ghoul. Remember that?—I remember the stink, and the heat of the flames, and I can still hear my own voice yelling stupid things, but I don’t burn. I don’t singe. I
wince
at the memory, but I don’t end up half-asphyxiated from smoke. I remember the fire
having happened,
but I don’t reevoke it, so to speak. The stink, though, that always comes back.”

This, too, made sense. Smell, sight, and hearing happen inside one’s head, but assault comes from the outside world. So the memory of smell could be the smell itself, but the memory of pain . . . Well, creatures probably survive better if they can’t remember pain too well.

He nodded. “Of course some memories are very hurtful. It would probably be prudent for us to be careful.”

Now he was talking about prudence. Peter! I didn’t believe it. Agreed with it, yes; believed it, no. Peter had never been prudent in his entire life. He nodded his head a couple of times, as though he were setting that firmly in mind, then asked, “Now. Where do we go, and what do we do?”

During the night we’d just spent together, tight-wrapped in each other’s arms and chaste as two baby bunwits, both trying not to say the things that would frighten us to death or make us cry, sometimes he’d dozed off with his lips next to my throat, his breath tickling me like an owl’s feather. It had been necessary then, since I couldn’t sleep, to think of something unemotional, so I’d spent the time thinking about the Maze. Now I trotted out my conclusions, hoping they were correct. “If these three events are linked, so to speak, by a single line of thought or category or index heading, then we’ll have to suppose other things are linked in the same way. So. We try to find some line of thought that might logically take us where we want to go.’

“Which is?”

“Wherever Lom is thinking about dying.”

He looked depressed. There was nothing I could say to make the task seem either easier or more pleasant. I knew exactly how he felt. It’s how l felt in the Forest of Chimmerdong when something vague and impossible needed doing and I seemed to be the only one around to do it. “I know,” I commiserated. “It’s terrible sounding.”

“It’s not that. You’ve said these events are memories. If Lom is actively thinking about dying, it won’t be in memories, will it? Won’t it be somewhere else? Some other part of its mind?”

I didn’t know. Probably no one did. And if it were so, it was not helpful. “They have to be linked together somewhere, Peter.”

He sighed a put-upon sigh, not offering any better suggestion. “All right. So they must be linked. Now, what shall we look for?”

“That last place? The temple? There were creatures in it. When the thing fell in, whatever it was, you say something got killed. If I’m right, that means there’s a link out of that place to the idea of things dying. We find that link if we can, and we follow it. Event by event.”

“And if nothing got killed?”

“Then we look around until we find an event where somebody did get killed.”

“Makes me feel like a Ghoul,” he said.

So did I, to tell the truth, and only the knowledge that whatever we would see had already happened and could not be changed made me feel any better about it. We took a deep breath, held hands once more, and stepped back into the temple.

Gray and huge and the roar of angry voices. This time I paid moreattention. I looked straight up, trying to see what was above us, but there was only a receding immensity of stone and smoke. There was no roof. We were below a tower. Huge doors on all sides of the room opened to admit hurrying figures, misty, dim, not fully remembered, I guessed. They might have been Eesties. I got the impression of fluttering robes or ribbons around a low curbing at the center of the place. Peter pressed me tightly against the stones, becoming a kind of wall between me and whatever was coming. The roar was louder, a furious chanting. Then a cracking noise. High above us. Huge. Like a tree coming down in a forest. That creaking again, as when something tries to remain whole but is destroyed fiber by fiber. And then it let go.

I heard it coming. An agonized scream of metal. A tumbling clangor, banging down the tower with thunderous crashes. It was only a few instants before it hit. Shattering. Shards of metal flying in all directions. One buried itself in the wall beside me. Voices crying out, weeping. The furious roaring outside suddenly stilled, as though in horror at what had happened. Then one voice raised, then another, rebelliously cheering.

Struggling gray forms on the floor, one or two. I went toward them, trying to feel where one might go out. No door. No exit. Even close beside the writhing figures, I couldn’t see them clearly, and the revelation almost stopped me in my tracks. The sound was as clear as my own voice, but these figures were misty, which meant that Lom didn’t remember them very well. It remembered the sound and those outside, but not these. Just something, something dying. There was a rush of unfocused anguish, a kind of thinning in the atmosphere of the place. I grabbed Peter’s hand and moved toward it, trying to find it. It was stronger beside the monument he had climbed upon earlier, shattered now. The anguish I felt was anguish at the destruction of this! Not at the death of the creature, but at this shattering. . . .

I moved in the direction of the feeling, pulling Peter along by one hand, not certain where.

And came out.

We were standing in a desert. Nothing was happening. A chilly wind blew a few grains of sand restlessly across the parched soil. Bristly growths spiked here and there on the limitless flat around a jagged line of broken statues.

“Don’t move,” I said, frustrated. “I think we came in the wrong direction.” I tried to breathe, gasping, as though I had been crying. What was it?

“What were you after?”

“There was this feeling of anguish. Grief.” I stopped, unable to go on. The feeling was still there, all around me, a sadness so palpable it stopped my breath. I gritted my teeth, did a small concentration spell, and was able to breathe once more. I went on, “At first I thought it was grief over something dying, but Lom didn’t even remember the things that were dying, so it had to be the grief over something else. Maybe grief over the destruction of’ the carving. Perhaps it was a work of art.”

“Maybe not.” He mused over the unchanging scene. “It could have been a monument. A cenotaph, maybe. A memorial to someone or something dead which Lom did remember. And these may be more of the same.” He gestured toward the shattered statues.

There was a funerary air to the place. Solemn. Still. No rush or fury of life. Only the barren soil, the keening wind, the stark bulk of the carved stone against a line of distant mountains. The statue nearest us looked away from me, to one side, staring into eternity. I couldn’t tell what it was from this distance, but I was afraid to go closer. I didn’t want to leave the place we had come in without marking it. And how did you mark something in a place like this? I tried scraping away at the sand beneath me. It scraped very
^,
nicely, then slowly filled itself up like oozy mud. Evidently I could have only a temporary influence here. I tried breaking a branch off a thorny bush. It broke, nipped my finger with a thorn, quietly dissolved in my hand, and reappeared on the bush. The hole in my finger was still there. “We can’t make any lasting changes, Peter. [t restructures itself.”

“If we can’t make any changes . . .” His voice trailed away as he stared at me. I knew what he was thinking. If we couldn’t make any lasting changes, then how were we to have any effect on Lom’s mind? He broke off the thorn branch I had broken. It dissolved in his hand and reappeared on the bush. He broke it again, stubbornly, and went on doing it while I watched, wondering what he thought he was doing.