The End of the Game (35 page)

“None. On the festival of Finaggy-Bum tomorrow, pick yourselves a new Merchant’s man. There is an excellent candidate, one Queynt, among the visitors. As soon as that is done, send carpenters and metal workers to me where I reside at Brombarg’s house. They will be given instruction.” I turned, wishing for some glorious gown and high headdress to punctuate this speech and make a dramatic exit. Well, the smock from Zog would have to do. It was certainly unlike anything being worn in Bloome. I let myself out, not pausing to listen to the babble behind the door. Peter would be hearing it all from the ductwork, anyhow.

“Done?” I asked him when he returned below.

“Done! Half of them don’t believe you, but they’re all willing to give it a try. There are one or two say they’ll hunt Brom down and kill him if you’re lying, and another few who talk of putting you into the hopper if you’re leading them a fool’s track. All told, however, I think they’re peaceful enough. For now.”

I nodded, thinking very hard. This put a serious expression on my face, and Peter did what he always did when I got that expression. He reached for me.

That particular expression, he had told me, reminded him of Jinian when he had first met her, so serious, so determined, like a belligerent child, set upon knowing everything there was to be known. That particular expression turned his stomach to jelly, so he said, and he could no more stop himself reaching for me than he could have stopped eating ripe thrilps. He flexed an arm to draw me closer mere in the dusty, roaring room, me all unprepared for his lips on mine and the warmth of his body pressed tightly to my own.

I trembled, adrift, unable and unwilling to do anything at all except drift there in his arms while the hot throb of my blood built into its own kind of ending. I was saved by an urgent summons from Queynt, a clatter of feet coming down the stairs. Peter tried to hold my hand, but I drew it away, suddenly so distressed I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t fair of him to do that. Not fair. I had talked to him about it. He knew well enough what gaining the wize-art meant to me. I felt tears beginning to burn, half frustration, half anger. Oh, why couldn’t he ...

Fuming, I slipped down the stairs after the others, reaching the bottom only moments before the council members erupted into the street. Peter was looking for me, but I slipped away from him. He was doing this more and more frequently, as though to make my own body betray me. As though to test whether I would choose between him and my Wize-ardry. He simply wasn’t content any more to let patience solve the matter.

My knees were weak. I could hardly breathe. I was angry, and sorry to be angry, and wanted to run after him, and wanted to run away. Things couldn’t go on like this. Once we had taken care of the matter of Brom, something would have to be done about it.

CHAPTER FIVE

Early in the morning, Brom was valeted by the three men. They dressed him in pink vertical, lacing and buttoning, rigging the internal bones and stays that held the unlikely garment aloft, trying vainly to keep their faces straight. There was as much of it above his head as there was from head to foot. That part above his head was decked with such unlikely ornamentation as to cast doubt upon the humanity of the wearer, and the part below his head was of sufficient discomfort as to deny whatever humanity existed. It took some time.

I watched for a while, disbelieving any of it, then went to the tower room where I could be private and laid two spells upon him.

First I laid Bright the Sun Burning, a beguilement spell. No one looking at Brom that day would consider him any less than stylish. He would gleam like the sun itself, making a warm space in any perception, a suffused glow like a little furnace. And, lest that perception wane as the day passed, I laid Dream Chains to Tie It, a keeping spell—though I had a devil of a time finding a live frog and finally had to summon one from the garden window. There were other and more esoteric uses for Dream Chains, but Murzy had always taught that the tool might be turned to the task if the Wize-ard willed. When it was all done, I tested it by going down and asking Chance how he thought Brom looked.

“I thought it was enough to make a pombi laugh,” Chance said, walking around Brom and looking him over from top to bottom. “It looked like pure foolishness on the hook. Now—well, it has a kind of majesty to it, don’t it?”

I nodded, contented. It was probable the council members would keep their agreement with me, but why have the town buzzing about their reasons for letting Brom go? If the town talked, some rumor might reach Fangel. No. Let the matter be self-evident. Brom had become stylish enough to escape, and a naif was present to take over the job.

At the end, Queynt could not bring himself to wear Brom’s cast-off things. Instead he burrowed into the wagon and found those garments he had been wearing when he first met Peter and me, wildly eccentric clothing that was certainly not in fashion. Then Queynt and Brom swaggered into the street, a colorful exercise in contrasts. It would have been difficult to say which of them looked more ridiculous.

Chance disappeared into the town with a few innocuous words. Seeing his compact form disappearing down Sheel Street, I shook my head over the fate of the gamblers of Bloome. Peter dozed in the garden, the warmth of the sun provoking dreams—probably erotic—that made him twitch and mumble in his sleep.

Looking down on him from a window, I could almost tell what he was dreaming of, as though I could read his mind. I frowned and bit my lips. There were only two seasons of my oath to run, but while I had kept that oath to the letter, the spirit of it had been lost long since. It was impossible to concentrate on the art—or on anything else—with Peter around. The more casual I tried to be, the closer he came. There were a dozen things one might do; putting a spell on him came first to mind. A distraint. That same spell I had used on Brom, Dream Chains. I still had the frog. It would do Peter no harm. He wouldn’t even be aware of it.

No! I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t compel him to do anything, or not do anything. Not ever. I would rather have lost him, or so I thought then, than do anything to put him under compulsion. No matter how tempting it might be.

And it was very tempting. I could only distrain his touching me. Nothing else. And only for a short time. I could still allow affectionate speech, companionship.

And yet—if he couldn’t touch me when he willed, something would have been taken from him. As something must have been taken from Queynt when he was given the blue dream crystal by the Shadowpeople.

Though he denied it, I thought it must be so. It was unlikely he had not been changed by it. So he was compelled, whether he knew it or not, by something or someone outside himself.

And yet, being honest about it, I’d met him after he’d tasted the thing, not before. So how could I say whether he was changed by it or not?

I sat upon the windowsill, looking out over the town with its crumbling towers, its moldy roofs, the streets clean swept and shining for festival, the lower walls painted and gleaming, and all above the street level falling to dust and decay. The vibration of the mill shook the stone I was sitting on, a ceaseless quivering, a gentle dust of mortar from between the stones, a constant reminder the mill was there. The people of Bloome had made an uneasy peace with the mill, but I was going to change all that. Compellingly. But that was Game, of a sort. Compulsion was allowed, in Game.

Barish, for example! He had arranged for himself to be put to sleep, to sleep for a thousand years or so. And while he slept, one hundred thousand great Gamesmen were to be abducted and frozen into sleep like his own.

Compelled. For some misty idea he had about a better future world. An idea so misty that he and Himaggery had done nothing but argue about it constantly before we left and were probably still arguing about it. Meantime the hundred thousand rested beneath the mountain, still frozen. Compelled.

Everyone else did it! So why did it bother me so?

Besides, there were situations when it seemed right.

If I had come upon that man and woman outside Bloome, for instance, sucking upon their piss-yellow crystals and lying there in their own stink. If I had compelled them, even against their wills, to give up the crystals and live again, wouldn’t I have been their friend?

A better friend, perhaps, than their own inner spirits, who had let them die? Or was the right to die part of one’s own right? If so, was it everyone’s right, or only the right of some? A child, for example. If a child risked its life foolishly, without knowing what it was doing, shouldn’t one save that child by compelling it to forgo the risk? Or a stupid man, perhaps one besotted?

Though if one were to follow that argument, it was probable the besotted one got that way of his own will and had been told often enough the dangers of it. Or true naifs, simpletons, those who would never learn the ways of the world, the eternally surprised, the perpetually astonished? Should they not be compelled, for their own good?

When one played Game, there were rules—oh, often disobeyed, but still acknowledged. If one compelled outside of Game, then what was it one was doing? If one seduced, which was another kind of compulsion?

“Saving one’s life, perhaps,” I mumbled, remembering too well what I had had to do to the centipig in the Forest of Chimmerdong. “Saving someone else’s life.” Or, said some deep voice, saving something more important than life itself.

I remember putting my head down on the stone, wishing Murzy were there to give me some advice. It would be so easy to hold Peter at a comfortable distance, just for a time. Surely there were rules! Surely there were answers!

Well, Murzy wasn’t there, so it did no good to wish it. I gave up the whole matter and went to find myself some breakfast.

The delegation from the Cloth Merchants’ Council arrived a little after noon bearing Queynt on their shoulders and hailing him as the new Merchant’s man.

He already wore the sparkling seal of office, the letters “DM” entwined in gems upon jet. Brom, sneaking along behind so as not to draw any attention to himself, stayed only long enough to divest himself of the pink vertical and get his horse out of the stable. It seemed he had been packed long since, for the merchants had scarcely begun advising Queynt of his future duties before the titty-tup of Brom’s horse’s hooves was fading down Sheel Street.

“The garbage schedule tomorrow,” Madame Browl was saying in a firm voice. “First thing tomorrow!”

“Not tomorrow,” said Queynt. “Tomorrow the Merchant’s man is summoned to Fangel. Brom told me so. I leave tonight.” The council members scowled at one another, robbed of their opportunity to show authority immediately and thus, some seemed to feel, robbed of it perpetually.

“Well then, when you return. As soon as you return.”

Queynt had no more intention of returning than I did, but he agreed amicably and things went on pleasantly thereafter as they discussed the matters of garbage and machine-feeding detail and the maintenance of the fire brigade. In the midafternoon the festival ended—early, because there would be no fireworks—and soon after that, the workmen I had asked for arrived. Peter and I went off with them to the great mill while Chance and Queynt prepared to depart. There was something in my boot, and as I stopped to empty it, I heard the two of them behind me.

“What’s she up to, that girl? Lately she’s seemed troubled.” Chance was a dear to care like this. Though he never seemed to be taking notice, nothing really escaped him.

“She has power, Chance. Power she may use, if she will. Power she fears using unwisely and thus fears using at all.”

“Looked on Barish, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Yes, she looked on my brother, Barish, and what Barish did. Jinian sees the implications of that, I think. She does see things like that.”

“But Barish took the hundred thousand for something greater. So you said.”

“Oh, yes. And now he must try to answer the question I’ve been trying to answer for these hundreds of years, Chance. The question those hundred thousand will ask when they wake. The question Jinian is trying to answer. Is there anything greater?” And there it was, of course. That was the thing that had been bothering me, and it didn’t help greatly to know that many others had wrestled with it as well.

We went out onto the dusty cobbles of Sheel Street, littered with torn banners and tangled worms of confetti.

Birds quarreled in the gutters over spilled confections.

Wagons were moving from corner to corner while weary crews filled them with the festival flotsam. Down the hill we went, twisting and turning to arrive at the yard before the mill. We got to work, Peter and me and a dozen carpenters and metal workers, toiling away on the roof.

When Queynt and Chance arrived in the wagon, each endless length of pink cloth that had spewed from the front of the building was drawn up like a great fustigar tongue, licking the nose of the mill.

Chance was astonished. “Now, by all my grandma’s teacups, what’re they up to?”

“Rollers, I should imagine,” said Queynt. “Drawing the stuff up the front, and across the top, and down the back into the hoppers. Saves all that using up in between.”

“Well, why didn’t the silly Bloomians think of that?”

“Religion, I imagine, friend Chance. Religion serves to prevent thought in many cases, and I’d say it had done so here. They started with the presumption that anything as complex as the mill must exist for a good reason. Then they spent all their time inventing a good reason—and some god to be responsible for it—rather than looking for a sensible solution to their problem. Jinian has merely substituted Drarg for whatever other deity they had involved.”

“Clever,” mumbled Chance. “Only I don’t think she’ll let herself enjoy it. By night she’ll be worrying whether it was the right thing to do.” He leaned back to watch the carpenters where they hammered away on high and saw that I’d been listening. He merely winked at me. Chance wasn’t at all shy about his opinions.

There was a cheer from the roof as the first of the cloth reached the hoppers in back. Queynt clucked to Yittleby and Yattleby, who strode off around the building to the rear. Wide bands of pink descended in a steady flow to disappear into the huge, shaking hopper.