The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  Two others had seen the Monuments dance, of course; Mavin, herself, and the Wizard Himaggery. They, too, had gone away separately after promising to meet again when twenty years had passed. Now Mavin Manyshaped rode her tall horse along that Ancient Road, so lost in memory of that other time she paid little attention to the clouds towering over the city. Two decades ago there had been wild drumming in the hills, a fury of firelight, and a flood of green luminescence from the dancing arches. The murmur of present thunder and the threatening spasms of lightning merely rounded out the memory.

  A challenging shout brought her to herself. A gate guard, no less fat and lazy than those who had been here long ago. “Well, woman? I asked were you bound into Pfarb Durim or content to sleep on your horse?”

  “Bound in, guardsman. To Mudgery Mont.”

  He gave her a curious glance, saying without saying that he thought her a strange guest for the Mont. Most of those who stayed there came with retinues of servants or with considerable panoply. She gave him a quirky smile to let him know she read his thought, and he flushed slightly as he turned away. “Go then. The gates are open to all who have business within.”

  As indeed they always were, she reflected. There was no city in all the lands of the True Game so open, not even Betand, which was a crossroad itself. And, as in other of the commercial cities of the land, there was little large scale Game – though much small scale stuff, Games of two, family duels and the like – and a minimum of Game dress. Helmed Tragamors could be seen around the inns and hotels. Even here guards were often needed. A gaudy band of Afrits entered the square as she crossed it, bound away south, no doubt, to the Great Game lately called in the valley land beside Lake Yost, in the midland. Everyone had heard of that; the first Great Game in a decade and a half. The Gamesmen in the land headed to it or from it, as their own needs struck them.

  The streets were shrill with hawkers, bright with banners, alive with a smell she remembered, rich and complex, made of fruit both rotted and fresh, smoked meats, hides, the stink of the great cressets upon the wall full of grease-soaked wood. The pawnish people of Pfarb Durim had a distinctive dress; full black trousers thrust down into open work boots (which let the dust and grit of the road sift in and out while somewhat hiding the dirty feet which resulted) and brilliantly colored full shirts with great billowy sleeves. The women belted these garments with an assortment of sashes and chains, topping all off with an intricately folded headdress; the men used simple leather belts and tall leather hats. Both sexes fluttered like lines full of bright laundry or a whole festival of pennants, and were shrill as birds with their cries and arguments. The tall horse picked his way through this riot fastidiously, ears forward, seeming interested in all that went on around him.

  As she came farther into the city, the noise quieted, the smell dwindled, until, between the rumbles of thunder, she could hear the wind chimes and smell the flowers in the Mont gardens. The courtyard wall was surmounted with huge stone urns spilling blossoms down the inner wall where a dozen boys plied wet brooms to settle the dust, though by the look of the sky this task would soon prove redundant. The Heralds at the entry looked up incuriously, and then returned to their game of dice, dismissing her in that one weighing glance. “Of no importance,” their eyes said. Mavin agreed with their assessment, content to have it so.

  A liveried stableman came to take the horse, and she let him go thankfully. It was no easy matter to ride upon another’s four legs where she could go easier upon her own. But Shifters were not always welcome guests, not even among Gamesmen notable in treachery and double dealing, so she came discreetly to the Mont, clad in softly anonymous clothing of sufficient quality to guarantee respect without stirring avarice or curiosity.

  Now, she thought, I will meet him as I promised, and we will see. What it was she would see she had not identified. What it was she would feel, she had carefully avoided thinking of. Each time her mind had approached the thought it had turned aside, and she had let it turn, riding it as she might a wilful steed, letting it have its own way for a time, until it grew accustomed to her – or she to it. She went into the place, shaking her head at the man who would have taken her cloak, wandering through the rich reception halls toward the terrace she remembered. It lay at the back, over the gardens which stretched down to the cliff edge and the protecting wall, bright under their massed trees, their ornamental lanterns. The door was as she remembered it, opened before her by a bowing flunkey–

  And she stood upon the terrace, shaken like a young tree in a great storm.

  “Gameswoman?” She didn’t hear him. “Gameswoman. Are you well? A chair, Madam? May I bring you something to drink?”

  Evidently she had nodded, for he raced away, stopping to say something to some senior servant at the doorway, for that one turned to look at her curiously. She took a deep breath, grasped at her reason with her whole mind.

  “Come now, Mavin,” she said to herself in a stern, internal voice seldom used, always heeded. “This is senseless, dangerous, unlike you. Sit down. Take a deep breath. Look about you, slowly, calmly. Think what you will say when he returns, how you will set his curiosity aside. Now. He is coming. Careful, quiet.”

  He set the glass of wineghost before her and she took it into her hand, smiling her thanks. “I was here last many years ago at the time of the great plague,” she said in a voice of calm remembrance. “It was a tragic time. We lost many dear to us. The memory caught me suddenly and by surprise. You are too young to remember.” She smiled again, paid him generously, and waved him away.

  At the door he spoke once more to the other man, shaking his head. The other man nodded, said something with a serious face, but did not look in her direction. So. All was explained. All was calm. She sipped at the wineghost, staying alert. No one was interested in her. The few on the terrace were talking with one another or admiring the gardens or simply sitting, looking at nothing as they soaked the last of the morning sun slanting below the gathering clouds. Was Himaggery among them? Had he seen her come out without knowing her?

  She examined the others carefully, one by one, discarding each as a possibility. She knew what he would look like, had visualized him many times. And yet – could it be that plumpish fellow by the wall? Perhaps it was. Her stomach knotted. Surely not. Not. No. He had turned toward her with his pursey mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. Not Himaggery.

  One of the men by the stairs, perhaps? The tall, martial-looking man? “Silly,” she said to herself. “He has a Sorcerer’s crown. Himaggery, if he wore Gamesman’s garb at all, would wear Wizard’s robes.” She finished the wineghost, stood up abruptly and left the terrace. She had been so sure that he would be here when she arrived, so sure. So certain.

  Inside she dithered for a moment. She could wander about the place, spend half a day doing it, without knowing whether he was here or not. There was a simpler way.

  “Your title?” demanded the porter, officiously blocking the door of his cubby. “Your title?”

  “If there is a message for me,” she said, “it will be addressed simply to Mavin. I am Mavin, and my title is my own business.”

  He became immediately obsequious, turning to burrow in the untidy closet among papers and packages, some of them covered with the dust of years. It was obvious that nothing was ever thrown away on the Mont. She was ready with significant coin when he emerged, the sealed missive in his hand. “Who brought it?” she asked.

  His eyes were on the coin as he furrowed his face, trying to remember. “A pawn, Gameswoman. A lean, long man in a decent suit of dark clothes. Many lines in his face. A very sad face, he had. The air of a personal servant about him. He did not stay at the Mont, you understand. He just left the message with me, along with the payment for its safe keeping and delivery.” He looked at the coin once more, his expression saying that the previous payment could not have been considered sufficient by any reasonable person. She flipped it to him, left him groveling for it in the dusty closet as she turned the
packet in her hands. So. Not Himaggery. A message delivered by a man who could only be Jonathan Went, old Windlow’s man. Windlow. Himaggery’s teacher. Himaggery’s friend.

  The last of the morning light had gone and rain was falling outside. She found a quiet corner in one of the reception rooms, behind a heavy drapery which held away the cold. The note in the tough parchment envelope was not long.

  “Mavin, my dear,” it said. “I have no doubt you will be in Pfarb Durim, faithful to your promise. Himaggery will be there, too, if he can. If he is not, it is because he cannot, in which case you are to have the message enclosed. Over the years, each time he has left me to go on one of his expeditions he has left a letter with me for you. This one was left eight years ago. I am sending someone with further information. Please await my messenger upon the Ancient Road – where the Monuments danced…

  “I think of you often and kindly. My affectionate regard. Windlow.”

  It was sealed with Windlow’s seal. Another letter lay within.

  She stuffed them both into the pocket of her cloak, rose abruptly and went out into the courtyard, shouting for her horse, though the threatened rain had begun. When he was brought to her, she mounted without word and clattered through the city, almost riding through the guards at the gate. The rain had become a downpour and the roadway ran with water, but she urged the horse into a splashing canter up the hill toward the crossroad. She would not, could not have stayed in Pfarb Durim another moment. The city seemed to swallow her. She needed a smaller scope, with trustworthy walls around her.

  The tiny inn ghosted into existence through the slanting knives of rain. She shouted to bring a stable boy out of the barn; his mouth was half full of his lunch. Inside the inn she found a room, acceptably clean though sparsely furnished, with a fire ready laid upon the hearth. Food was brought, and beer, and then the kitchen girl was gone, the door shut behind her, and Mavin sat beside the fire with the unopened letter in her hand.

  “Well,” she said. “Well and well. So all this hurry was for nothing, Himaggery. All this long ride from Schlaizy Noithn, this Shifting into acceptable form with an acceptable face and acceptable clothing. All for nothing. Nothing.” Her thumbnail moved beneath the seal. It broke from the paper with a brittle snap, flying into the fire to sizzle upon the wood, hissing like a snake. “For nothing?” she said again, opening the page.

  Mavin, my love:

  Though I have called you my love often in these past seasons, you have never heard me. If you read this, the chance is great that this is the only time you will ever hear me.

  I am going into the Northlands tomorrow, first to see the High Wizard Chamferton – who, I am told, knows much of the true origins and beginnings of things which have always intrigued me – and then farther north into places which are rumored often but seldom charted. There is a legend – well, you probably are not much interested in such things. If you were here now, Mavin, I would not be interested in them either.

  Since it is not likely you will read this – I have been, after all, fairly successful at looking after myself for some dozen years – I will allow me to say the things I could not say to you if you were here for fear of frightening you, sending you off in one shape or another, fleeing from me as you fled from Pfarb Durim so long ago. I will say that you have been with me each morning and each night of the time between, in every branch which has broken the sky to let sunlight through, in every deep-eyed animal I have caught peering at me in the forests, in each bird cry, each tumult of thunder. I will say that the thought of you has held me safe in times of danger, held me soft in times of hardship, held me gently when I would have been more brutal than was wise or fair.

  Mavin, if I am gone, treasure how deeply I loved you, how faithfully, how joyously. Live well.

  Yours as long as I lived,

  Himaggery.

  She sat as one frozen into stone, eyes fixed on nothing, the room invisible around her. So she sat while the food chilled and the fire died; so she sat until the room grew cold. “Ah, Himaggery,” she said at last. “Why have you laid this on me, and you not here.”

  She rode out at dawn, spending the day upon the Ancient Road, waiting for Windlow’s messenger. That day she did not eat, nor that night. The next day she ate something, though without appetite, and stayed again upon the road. The third day she told herself would be the last. If Windlow’s messenger did not come, then no messenger would come, and she would ride south to Tarnoch to talk with Windlow himself.

  So for this last day she sat upon the tall horse as he fidgeted beneath her, sidling in and out of the shadows once more. “Be still, horse,” she said, patting him without thinking. “We are waiting for a messenger.”

  The horse did not care. He had waited for three days and was not interested in waiting more. He jumped, hopped, shook his head violently until the links upon the bridle rang and jingled.

  She dismounted with a sigh and led him upon the new grass of the hill. “Here then. Eat grass. Founder upon it. I’ll not sit on your twitchiness longer.”

  She stretched her arms toward the threatening sky, shifting her ribs experimentally around the soreness remaining from the long ride east. She had left Battlefox Demesne last year, had spent the intervening seasons in Schlaizy Noithn – trying, without success, to remedy an unpleasantness in that tricksy land – and had come out not long ago to Shift into her own shape and equip herself for the journey. So, horse legs instead of her own legs; real clothing instead of mere Shifting; her own face instead of the grotesqueries she had used lately. There was nothing Shifty about her now, nothing to betray her except the quivering Shifter organ deep within her which would announce the presence of another of her kind.

  As it did now.

  She crouched, ready to assume fangs and claws if needed for her own defense. There was no one on the road in either direction. She searched the dark forest from which a questioning howl rose, abruptly broken off, and her teeth lengthened slightly and her feet dug into the soil. The plump fustigar which trotted from the trees did not threaten her, however. It sat down a good distance from her, peering about itself with attention to the road and the surrounding thickets, then Shifted into a woman’s shape clad much as Mavin was in tight breeches and boots.

  “Mavin Manyshaped?” the woman said, beating the dust from her trousers. “I am Throsset of Dowes, and I come from the Seer Windlow.”

  Mavin’s mouth dropped open. Throsset of Dowes? From Danderbat keep? Mavin’s own childhood home? Such as it had been. Well and well.

  “Throsset of Dowes?” she asked wonderingly. “Would you remember Handbright of Danderbat keep?”

  The woman grinned. She was a stocky person with short, graying hair, bushy dark brows and eyes which protruded a little, giving her the look of a curious frog. Her shoulders were broad and square, and she shrugged them now, making an equivocal gesture. “Your sister, Handbright! Of course. She was younger than I. I tried to convince her to come with me, when I left the keep. She would not leave Danderbat the Old Shuffle.”

  “They said you were in love with a Demon, that you went across the seas with your lover.”

  The woman frowned, her face becoming suddenly distrustful. “The Danderbats said that, did they? Well, they’ll say anything, those old ones. Likely Gormier said that. Or old Halfmad. Or others like them. I left, girl. So did you. It’s likely we left for the same reasons, and lovers had no part in it.”

  “It was Handbright told me, not the old ones.” Mavin felt an old anger, for Handbright, for herself.

  “Ah.” Throsset’s voice turned cold, but her mouth looked tired. “She had to believe something, Mavin. She couldn’t allow herself to believe that I simply went, that I got fed up with it and left. Girls of the Xhindi aren’t supposed to do that, you know. We’re supposed to be biddable – at least until we’ve had three or four childer to strengthen the keep. Well, it would be better to say the truth. I am not only Shifter, Mavin. When I was sixteen or so, one of the old ones t
ried something I didn’t care for, and I found a new Talent. It seems I had Shifter and Sorcerer Talent both, and the Danderbats didn’t know how to handle that. One Talent more and I’d have been a Dervish, and time was I longed for it, just to teach them a lesson. Still, there’s no punishment basket will hold a wary Sorcerer, though they tried it, surely enough. I burst the basket and the room, and then I left. I’m sorry Handbright didn’t go with me. How is she now?”

  “Dead,” said Mavin flatly, not caring to soften it.

  “Dead!” The woman slapped at her legs, hands going on of themselves, without thought, as though they might brush the years away with the dust. “I hadn’t heard. But then, I haven’t been back to Danderbat keep.”

  “They wouldn’t have been able to tell you had you gone there. She died far away, across the Western Sea. She was mad – until the very end. She had two sons, twins. They’re fifteen-season childer now, five years old, at Battlefox Demesne, with Handbright’s thalan and mine, Plandybast Ogbone.”

  “So she did leave Danderbat at last. Ah, girl, believe me, I did try to get her to go with me. She said she stayed for your sake, and for Mertyn’s. She loved him more than most sisters love their boy-kin. I could not break her loose.”

  Seeing the distress in the woman’s face, Mavin tried to set aside her own remembered anger and to dissipate the chilliness which was growing between them. Handbright’s servitude and abuse had not been Mavin’s fault, or Throsset’s. “Mertyn made her stay,” she said sadly. “He had Beguilement Talent even then, and he used it to keep her there because he was afraid she would leave him. He was only a child. He did not know what pain it cost her. Well. That is all long gone, Throsset. Long gone. Done. Mertyn is a man now. Though his Talent was early, it has continued to grow. He is a King, I hear. Lately appointed Gamesmaster in some school or other.”