The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  ‘Just wanted to reassure you. So far so good, Cattermune,’ said another voice, a lighter voice, though one similar in its furry quality. ‘I checked the placement of the thing, as you suggested. You did brilliantly. The daughter of the man you gave it to is old and dying, and any knowledge of the thing will die with her. Meantime, the supply of immigrants is more than adequate and seems to be increasing. You didn’t need to have been concerned. Nothing’s going to go wrong.’

  ‘Of course nothing will go wrong,’ said the heavy, furry voice with enormous self-satisfaction. ‘I was never concerned, though I suppose it never hurts to check. I told the family they could trust me in this matter. The sacrifices were heavy, but within hours our waiting will be over. Finality will occur. Cattermune’s House will be immortal!’ There was a gelatinous chuckle in the furry voice.

  ‘Clever of you! Though there were some…’

  ‘Ah, well, it was a dreadful risk at the time. And it took the sacrifice of fifty of our family to create the thing. I told them what the benefits would be, but they weren’t what one might call willing. I suggested a lottery, but they’d have none of that, so I ended up picking them out myself. I’m sorry that your mother had to be among them, Cornutes, but she would go on nagging at me. And several of your littermates, too. She’d got to them. And then before we were through, it took the blood of another fifty to break through to the world. And then, finally, it took fifty years to implant, fifty years to become permanent. A long, hard process, but there was no shorter way.’ The heavy voice sighed, again with satisfaction, as a man might who had completed a hard task to his own total satisfaction.

  ‘What would you have done if it had come back somehow? If the man you gave it to had returned it?’

  ‘Oh, if it had been returned, I would simply have placed it in the world again. It would have taken another fifty lives, another fifty years, but still, whatever the cost, it would have been well worth it. However, there was little chance of that. The man I gave it to – he wouldn’t have returned it. I read the man well. A fool. An irresponsible fool. The risk was that his daughter would return it, but even there – she delayed.’

  ‘Yes. She delayed.’

  ‘And now you say she has grown old and is dying. When she dies, all knowledge of the thing dies. When she is gone, someone will take the anchor and put it away, or sell it, or, better yet, melt it down to make something else, perhaps a dozen other things. That’s why it was made of gold, so that it will be kept, somehow, in some form. There’s no way it can get back here. It will be divided up and scattered about in the world, no one will ever put it together and bring it back! The House of Cattermune will be tied directly into a source of supply and the future of the House will be assured!’

  ‘Players,’ said the lighter voice. Green could hear the sound of hands being rubbed briskly together, a swish, swish, swish of flesh on flesh, celebrating.

  ‘Players, yes,’ purred the heavy voice.

  ‘Binkers,’ said the other, with a kind of bubbling snigger. ‘Binkers unlimited.’

  ‘That, too,’ replied the other voice with a deeply gelatinous and shivering laugh. ‘Come now, you’ve kept me from the gaming long enough. You uncle Cadermon bilked me at dice last night. Tonight I will have my revenge.’ And he laughed again.

  Green, in his hidden corner, for no reason that he could identify, shivered with an uncontrollable aversion at the sound of that voice.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Arti Zahmani answered the door herself, unsurprised to find Makr Avehl on the doorstep since he had called from the airport to say he was on his way. His face under the porch light was drawn and tired-looking. She scarcely noticed.

  ‘Where are they?’ she blurted. ‘Where is my daughter? Where is Dagma? She was too weak to get out of bed without help. Haurvatat is having an absolute fit. The doctor knocked me out for simply hours. I suppose you know Aghrehond is gone as well! Where are they, Makr Avehl?’ The tears she had been fighting began to run down her cheeks and she made an ugly, gulping noise.

  He put his arms around her and patted her back, trying to calm her. ‘At the moment, we don’t know where they are, Arti, and if you distress yourself in this fashion, you can’t help me find them. Try to calm down.’ Even as he said it, he knew how futile and silly he sounded. How could she calm down?

  ‘You must know something? You were already on the way when I called Alphenlicht!’

  ‘Aghrehond called me, Arti. He left one of his usual enigmatic messages. And Therat had a feeling. She’d been musing over a strange reading from the Cave of Light, and suddenly it came to her that what was usually interpreted as a harmless set of symbols was in fact rather threatening. She and Ellat insisted that all three of us get here as quickly as possible. Until I talked to you from the airport, we had no idea that Marianne and the others had disappeared, but I am sure that it is somehow connected with whatever it is that your aunt Dagma asked Marianne to do.’ He reached out to take Arti Zahmani by the shoulders, shaking her gently. ‘We can’t do any good by going to pieces, now settle down.’

  ‘This whole thing is ridiculous,’ Arti cried, barely controlling her hysteria. ‘Dagma was asleep when Marianne got here. Marianne had luncheon with us. We talked about all the plans for the baby. Then Dagma woke up, her nurse came down to tell Marianne, and she went up. After about half an hour, Dagma’s bell rang, and she asked for Aghrehond! Aghrehond! Why? Then you called, and we looked for him, and they were gone. All of them.’ She shivered and began weeping. ‘I don’t understand it! Haurvatat is ready to kill someone, probably me.’

  ‘Nonsense, Arti. Just because it’s mysterious is no reason to believe it’s necessarily dangerous. Marianne and the others may be perfectly all right. Have you touched anything in Dagma’s room?’

  ‘You said not to, so we didn’t. Not after we talked to you.’

  ‘Then let’s start there. Will you show me the way?’

  ‘Oh,’ she started, coming to herself, the well practiced routines of the hostess for the moment derailing her anxiety. ‘Of course, Makr Avehl. I’m sorry. Up here.’ She turned to lead the way up the curving stairs and down the wide corridor to the door of Dagma’s room.

  The room bore evidence of a hasty and cursory search. The covers of the bed were thrown back. The closet doors stood open and hangers were disarrayed, as though someone had looked behind the clothing hanging there. A sheet of thick, creased parchment lay half under the coverlet. On the floor at Makr Avehl’s feet was a tiny carved gem and a pair of dice. He picked them up, inspected the dice, grunted and pocketed them while closely examining the tiny animal he had found: a rhinoceros cut from gleaming rose-colored stone. Rhodolite, he told himself, recognizing the color. A rhodolite rhinoceros. ‘Ah,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Interesting. Alliterative. Accidentally, or as part of something very complex? Therat may know. And very fine work to be trodden underfoot. Now why is that?’

  He sat heavily upon the bed and turned over the folded sheet, seeing that it was parchment, believing that it was hand drawn. ‘Personally drawn,’ he corrected himself. ‘Who knows if the one who drew it had hands or not.’ When he had mused over it for some time while Arti stood at the window – alternately staring at him and staring out, as though the missing ones might materialize upon the lawn or at the end of the drive – he folded the parchment and secreted it in his inside jacket pocket, dropping the carved animal in after it before taking Arti by the hand and leading her downstairs.

  ‘Will you stay for dinner?’ Arti asked him. ‘I was afraid you were going to disappear, right in front of me.’

  ‘No, no, Arti. Not me. Where’s Haurvatat? In the city? Even as upset as he must be?’

  ‘Because he’s so upset, Makr Avehl. He was sitting around here driving me mad. I told him to go consult someone, anyone, for heaven’s sake. Marianne and Dagma and Aghrehond have been gone for two days now. Well, one day and part of another one. And you know as well as I do that they aren’t the only on
es. This business of mysterious disappearance is gaining epidemic proportions. My neighbor down the road vanished a week ago Wednesday! And her son and daughter at the same time, only teenagers. A man who serves on a charity board with me disappeared last Sunday! I’m beginning to read about it every day in the newspapers! And it’s all around here! Not New York or Chicago or London. No, here, in Virginia! Hundreds of people gone, disappeared, no one knows where.’

  ‘Shh, Arti. Hold it together, dear. We can’t do any good by falling apart. Do you have a maid who usually cleans Dagma’s room?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Her name is Briggs.’

  ‘May I see her, please?’

  The maid, when summoned, proved to be stocky and plain-featured, with an open countenance and a confiding smile. Makr Avehl laid the parchment out on the desk in the library and invited her to look at it. ‘Have you seen this before?’

  She studied it for the briefest moment. ‘It looks like the game my brother’s got. I think it’s the same. His has little animals to play with. He showed it to me, but I haven’t had a chance to play it with him yet…’

  Makr Avehl showed her the rhinoceros, and she nodded. ‘Well, his were that size, but his was a kangaroo, I think, and a bird of some kind and some other things I’d never seen before.’

  ‘How many game pieces?’

  ‘Four, I think.’ She furrowed her brow. ‘Yes, four.’

  ‘Where did he get the game, do you know?’

  ‘There’s a shop that sells them. In the mall. All the kids hang out at the mall. It’s a store where they sell records and tapes and posters and games, and there are video games there for them to play, you know.’

  ‘And the name of this place?’

  She furrowed her forehead in concentration. ‘I’ve never been in there, but I’ve passed it. On the upper level, beside the shoe store… Cat something. Catfields?’

  ‘Cattermune’s,’ suggested Makr Avehl, who had noticed the name blazoned on several shopping centers on his way from the airport.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Briggs, leaning forward to inspect the parchment. ‘You know, the one my brother has is on a board, not just paper like this.’

  ‘A more recent issue, likely,’ agreed Makr Avehl. ‘This may have been the original. I should not be surprised to learn that old Madame Dagma has had it for many years.’

  ‘Oh, she has,’ Briggs confirmed. ‘I’ve been here eleven years, and all that time she’s kept her handkerchiefs in the top drawer of her bedside table, and whenever she asked me to give her a hanky, I’ve seen this folded paper under it. It’s kind of splotchy, you know. Not exactly all white.’

  ‘That’s because it isn’t paper.’ Makr Avehl smiled at her, thanking her for her observation. ‘It’s parchment. Skin.’

  ‘Sheepskin, maybe?’ asked the maid.

  ‘Something like that,’ he agreed, thinking that it was probably something quite unlike that. ‘Did you by any chance see the game pieces that went with this?’

  The maid shook her head. ‘I never did. She had an envelope in that drawer, but I never looked inside it.’

  ‘Well, it’s still confirmation of a kind. Thank you, Briggs. You’ve been very helpful.’ He smiled, and the maid went out, shaking her head over it all. ‘Now, Arti, forgive me for refusing your kind invitation, but I must tell Ellat and Therat what has happened and then go here and there for the next several hours.’

  After a few more tears and protestations, he was allowed to go.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At the hotel where Makr Avehl had decided they should stay – believing they would have more freedom of action there than at the Zahmanis’ – he cleared the phone, a lamp, and assorted cardboard advertisements from the top of the table and spread the parchment game upon it. Ellat sat in one chair with Therat across from her, each of them leaning forward, chin in hand, to examine the twisting lines and labeled squares. Makr Avehl placed the dice upon the parchment and the rhinoceros beside it.

  ‘Notice the dice,’ he said.

  Ellat stared at them. ‘I notice them, Makr Avehl, but I don’t know what it is I’m noticing.’

  He rolled them over with a finger. ‘Dice are usually made so that opposite sides add to seven. The one dot is opposite the six. The five is opposite the two, and the three opposite the four.’

  Therat picked them up. ‘These add to three, seven, and eleven.’

  ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘They are numbers used in conjury. Here, let me hold them.’ She picked them up, closed her fist, her face knotted in concentration. Suddenly she exclaimed, dropped them shaking her hand. ‘By Zurban, Makr Avehl! These are evil things!’

  ‘And the animal?’

  She touched the little rhinoceros with a tentative forefinger, shivering at the touch. ‘This, too. It is not that the things themselves are evil, rather that the intent for which they were made is evil.’

  ‘They lend themselves?’

  ‘I would say, yes. It would be hard to bend them to a good purpose.’

  ‘Let me tell you what I think happened,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘Dagma asked Marianne to do something which involved this game. I believe there were originally four game pieces. Animals, probably, or birds. Living things, at any rate. My guess is that they were alliterative, the substance and the shape starting with the same sound…’

  ‘To lend force to the enchantment.’

  ‘Yes. I think Marianne, probably without any sense of what would happen, placed a game piece on the parchment and then threw the dice. She vanished.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Ellat asked.

  ‘Because Dagma rang and asked for Aghrehond. If Marianne had wanted him, she would have asked for him herself. If she had been present, she would have asked for him. She didn’t. Dagma did. So – what would Aghrehond do?’

  ‘He would enter the game, going after Marianne,’ said Ellat definitely. ‘You couldn’t have stopped him with a large piece of machinery.’

  ‘And Dagma?’ asked Therat.

  ‘I think he took her along. For reasons of his own, which, probably, were very good ones. I wish I knew what the three missing game pieces had looked like, but I don’t.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t want to…’ mused Ellat.

  ‘I would not want to use Cattermune’s game pieces. I don’t think.’

  ‘Cattermune?’

  ‘Look, there on the parchment. Cattermune’s House. Cattermune’s Pique. Cattermune’s Worm Pits. Then think. How many “Cattermune’s” did we see on our way here.’

  ‘The London airport,’ said Ellat.

  ‘The Washington airport,’ said Therat. ‘And there were those two shopping centers we passed.’ The three of them stared at one another, puzzled. ‘A connection, Makr Avehl?’

  ‘Have you ever heard the name before this week?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now, everywhere?’

  ‘It does seem unlikely.’

  ‘It seems unlikely by accident, yes. It is not at all unlikely as part of a plan. Besides which, the maid, Briggs, says her little brother purchased a similar game at Cattermune’s. I would say a plan. A conspiracy.’

  ‘A plan to what?’

  ‘To disappear a great many people. And don’t ask me for what reason, Ellat. I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to do what Aghrehond did, go in after them.’

  ‘I don’t think you can,’ said Therat, running her fingers over the parchment. ‘I don’t think anyone can.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Makr Avehl put his own hands on the parchment, trying to feel whatever it was she was feeling. There was nothing.

  ‘It feels dead,’ she said. ‘Turned off. Not like the dice or the little animal.’

  ‘Turned off?’ asked Ellat. ‘Therat, what are you talking about.’

  Therat flushed. ‘I can feel – connections. I’ve always been able to. If I put my hand on a woman’s shoulder an
d she is in love with someone, I can feel a kind of current running out of her toward the person she loves. Like a pulse. A vibration. If you hand me a letter someone has written, even though it’s in a sealed envelope, if that person is anywhere near, I can feel the connection. It feels like a circuit, like something flowing. If the person who wrote the letter is dead, the letter feels dead.’

  ‘And this parchment feels dead?’

  ‘It feels like its connections have been turned off.’

  ‘Hmph,’ growled Makr Avehl. ‘Since when? Therat, will you call the papers and the police and ask if anyone has disappeared in this strange fashion since – what is today?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Since … since Monday afternoon.’

  ‘When Marianne disappeared?’

  ‘When Marianne and Dagma and Aghrehond disappeared.’ He got up and stalked about the room, scowling, eyes squinted almost shut. ‘Connections. Maybe that was what it was about. What did the Cave of Light say again, Therat? Roads? Ropes? Something like that?’

  ‘Exactly like that.’

  ‘Something had established a connection. And something that Marianne did broke it.’

  ‘Not at once,’ said Therat. ‘Not if your theory about what happened is true, because Dagma and Aghrehond still went.’

  ‘Maybe what Marianne did to break it didn’t happen all at once,’ he said. ‘Maybe it happened after she disappeared. Maybe it happened when she moved to a certain … to a certain place in the game.’ He turned, stared at the parchment, and put his right forefinger on the square marked ‘Cattermune’s House.’ ‘When she got there,’ he said. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Which means I’ll have to get in there on my own. Using my own dice. And my own game piece, too. Which is fortunate. I really didn’t fancy being a rhinoceros.’