The End of the Game (55 page)

“Mavin will, when they find her.”

“
If
they find her. If they find her in time. If she agrees to go. If she gets there. If she gets back.”

“I see. You want me to go.”

“Someone has to. I can’t. I’m no Shifter.”

“Jinian. Oh, Jinian, I’m not nearly the Shifter Mavin is, either. You may not know that, but in Shiftery, experience counts. Mavin was much older than I when she flew the Western Sea. Stronger. She had more experience with the forms, with the quick changes. My pride suffers to have me say it, Jinian, love. But I’m not sure I’d make it, Jinian Footseer.” I hadn’t known. He always seemed so confident.

Then I remembered that clumsily staggering form that had left me a few days before, wobbling across the sky, and I wanted to cry. Wings, I suppose it took years to really get accustomed to wings.

And it dropped into my head like a stone into a pool.

Wings. The great flitchhawk of Chimmerdong owed me a boon. The last one of the three great boons I had earned in Chimmerdong. And if any creature alive in this world had wings, it was he.

There was no reason to wait, so I didn’t. Peter and I sat beside the fire, and I called him. I let Peter see me do it; that was against the rules, but I did it anyway.

“The ways of the sky are yours, treetop and cloud, sunlight and starlight, wind and rain. I have need of these and call for a boon.” We sat quietly for a time until he arrived. On all previous arrivals, I had been buffeted by the huge feathers. This time Peter was in the way. He stood up to it no better than I ever had. It sent him sprawling.

“Your eyes are like moons, flitchhawk,” I said. “Have you seen much of the world in the last two years?” He perched on the ground, a monumental thing, his beak like the curved roof of a tower, his legs like obelisks, wings out like the boughs of mighty trees, shading us against the sun. When he looked down at me, I felt very small, and yet that gaze was no less friendly than it had ever been. He answered me.

“Destruction and wrack, Jinian Dervish daughter. High winds and low. Chimmerdong lives yet a while, but elsewhere the green of life dims to gray. I have swum in clouds, waiting for your call.”

“I want you to take my love over the sea, flitchhawk. Far over the sea to a great chasm, where he must gather crystals as blue as your skies and bring them to Mertyn and Riddle and Quench.”

“Is this the boon you would ask?”

“It is,” I said.

“No,” said Peter. He strode from beneath the great wing to stand facing the flitchhawk, unafraid of it, his face quite calm and adamantly strong.

“No?” The great bird flexed its feathers, letting the light shine through them. We stood in its dappled shade.

“When I said no, I meant that it wasn’t quite right,” Peter said. “Not quite what was wanted. You see, I must stay here. Otherwise Jinian will go into the Great Maze without me, and if I cannot be with her to help her and protect her, then I do not care if Lom dies. If I do not care, I could not do the job well over the Western Sea.”

“So you don’t want me to take you,” the flitchhawk murmured, raising those wings.

“No. We want you to go instead. The crystals are blue. They lie at the bottom of the great chasm. The Stickies will bring them to you if you ask. Beedie’s people will help you if you ask. Birds are holy to that people. Messengers, so they say, of the Boundless. If you will go now to the south where Beedie and Roges are, they will direct you.” He said this all in a rush, never taking his eyes off the flitchhawk, and I could not stop him.

“And is this your wish, Jinian Star-eye?” The wings were fully raised, high.

I didn’t even take time to think. “Yes,” I cried.

The wings came down, a huge buffet of air knocked us to the ground, the flitchhawk lifted away, circled, higher and higher, and we saw him turn away south, in the direction Beedie and Roges and Queynt and Chance had gone.

I was crying. Not sadly. Not happily, either, come to that, but out of a certain fullness inside me. “We may never come out of the Maze, you know,” I said to him.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t let you go alone.” We stayed there that day. Resting a little. Talking of things long gone. Not that we had lived so long as to have many such things, but those we had were precious. I talked about the girl in the window of Schooltown who called up her love and gave him a slice of hot nut pie. He told me of seeing a girl at a banquet in Xammer and never being able to forget her after that. We were not even tempted to make love. Something sadder and higher had us by the throats, and we slept in one another’s arms, needing nothing more than that.

And in the morning we left the little hut by the lake and went up the trail to the Great Maze. Somewhere inside it lay all the answers to all the questions we had ever asked. We stood a long time hand in hand above it, readying ourselves. I knew what we must look for in that Maze. A book. A light. A bell. Twice now, Seers had Seen those things as having meaning for me, for us, and if they existed in this world, then Lom should remember them.

The little path Cernaby had shown me lay below us.

Beyond those first few rooms? Cells? I did not know what we would find.

And there were no answers where we were. Peter kissed me. I heard him sigh, two sighs, both of us.

Then we went in.

Jinian Star-eye

1
THE GREAT MAZE

So far as one could see from the outside, the Great Maze was merely a jungle of paths and hedges, trees and bushes, a mighty entanglement lying to the south of the Pervasion of the Dervishes, stretching from there away to the distant sea. Standing on the hill above the Maze, I had looked down into it to see winding trails, clearings, pathways, even quite large open spaces with impenetrable edges of luxuriant green, and in some of these spaces the easily recognized outline of well-known plants: rainhat bush, thrilps, giant wheat. Only natural things.

I suppose if you took the top of my skull off and looked at the quivering stuff inside, you would see only flesh, only natural things. Looking at that quaking jelly, one wouldn’t see ideas or fears; no dreams would leap from the pinky-gray convolutions to dance on the brain top.

So, when Peter and t stood beside the Great Maze of Lom—which is the name the Shadowpeople give to this world—we saw no memories rising from the clearings or insinuating their way through the underbrush. And yet, according to Mind Healer Talley, who had told the Dervishes long before, the Maze holds the memories of our world.

Each time I thought of this, my mind chased about for a moment and then stopped working. It was not easy to believe, a whole world, remembering. A world actually thinking, planning. A world dreaming, perhaps. A world regretting. A world dying.

No. Not merely dying. Killing itself.

Outside the Maze  were boiling fumaroles casting acid palls onto age-less forests; chasms opening to swallow mighty rivers; mountains bursting into flame and ash. Outside the Maze was a world sick unto death and with no desire for healing. And we were on it, with nowhere else to go.

Oh, yes, part of our fear and pain was for ourselves. Why deny it? And part for those we loved. I fretted, thinking of Murzy and the rest of my seven away south. Peter groaned, thinking of Mavin, his mother, and Himaggery the Wizard, his father, and other kin dear to him. And both of us together thought of` Queynt and Chance, fondly and with foreboding. At one point I even found myself regretting Queen Vorbold, back in Xammer, for all her unsympathetic pride. But if we went to them, there was nothing we could do to help any of them. If anything could be done, it would be done here, now.

The reason for Lom’s death would be found among those memories. The reason had to be there, somewhere in the past.

Perhaps if the reason were known, something could be done to reverse this final agony.

There seemed to be no one else to make the attempt.

We might be able to do something. If we were very lucky, it might even be the right thing.

Peter said all this to me, and then I repeated it to him with all the tone and frenzy of conviction. So we encouraged ourselves. Both of us knew that each of us was sick with anxiety and apprehension, and each of us was very busy concealing it from the other. “Oh, yes,” we seemed to say, “this is perfectly possible. Of course we will get on with it at once,” while our stomachs hurt and a smelly sweat oozed on skins already damp. Even I could smell us. A fustigar could have followed us for leagues. We stank of fear, and everything we saw and heard made it clear how late it was to attempt anything at all. If we failed, we died with the world. And even if we succeeded, there was no guarantee we would survive the effort.

I had been inside the Maze once before, only just inside a shallow edge. Cernaby of the Soul had showed me one way in and one way out, and now that Peter and I were going in together, it seemed wise to start by retracing those earlier steps. To get the flavor, so to speak. Or rather, to let Peter get the flavor, since I was afraid I already had it. A flavor of confusion, mostly. Of connections just out of reach. At any rate, after an affectionate and—if we’re honest about it—bravely-hiding-our-true-feelings-for-fear-of-frightening-ourselves embrace, we went in hand in hand by the same path I had tried before, an easy path making a shortloop into the Maze and out again, the entrance and exit only a few paces apart along the road.

We took one step . . .

. . . To find ourselves upon a height, sharp with wind. Below lay a cliff-edged bowl carpeted in spring green, sun glinting on the western rim of stone, the depths still in shadow. From above came an enormous screaming, mightier than any fleshy voice, metal on air, burning gasses, hot shrieking wind.

Down from above a silver spearhead, falling butt end first, buoyed on its bellowing, gas-farting rear, down into the green. I smelled the burning; trees burst into flame; the grass crisped into ash; smoke billowed into the morning. Then quiet. A feeling of dread; dread and excitement, curiosity and pain. Mixed.

A door opened high on the silver spearhead, and a strange creature came out. It was too thick through to be normal. Too thin from side to side and too thick from back to front. Not star-shaped, as would have been normal. Limbs oddly jointed. Naked-faced. Not attractive. Ugly, rather. It called with a weak little voice into the shadowed bowl. Um, um, blah, um. Uttering nonsense. Um, um, blah. I knew what it was saying but could not understand a word. A nasty little human creature, an invader, and I could not understand a word.

I shook myself, frightened, grasping Peter’s arm and hanging on as though I were drowning. I had not seen that creature through my own eyes but through the eyes of the world. Through Lom’s eyes. I gasped, blinked, tried to find myself in all this.

“Jinian . . . Jinian?” He was shaking me gently, looking at me with that tender concern he showed sometimes, the kind that made my heart turn over and stop beating.

“It’s all right,” I breathed. “It’s all right. Let’s get out of here.” I tugged him to our left along the rim of the cliff, toward the grove of midnight trees. He followed me reluctantly, eyes turned back to watch that silvery vehicle in its patch of burned grass. Just before we reached the tree, the silver vessel disappeared from the green bowl below and we heard the howling begin high above us. As we stepped into the shadow, I looked up. It was coming down again. Below us in the valley the green meadow was untouched; the blackened scar had vanished. “What?” Peter started to say.

“Shh,” I said. “Just come on a few more steps, then we’ll figure it out.” I was shaken. When I had been here before, I had merely observed, not been battered about by these waves of feeling.

We stepped out from the shadow of the tree onto the Wastes of Bleer. The place was unmistakable; a high plateau, barren and drear, with the contorted shapes of the Wind’s Bones all around. `Thorn bush and devil’s spear and great Wind’s Bones. There was no feeling here, only a waiting numbness.

“Quick,” I said to Peter, moving toward the crevasse I remembered from the time before. “Before it comes down on our heads.” Above us, out of a clear sky, a moon was falling at us, burning bright, soundlessly, hideously plunging out of the east. He looked up, gasped, almost fell as I pulled him down into the hole . . .

. . . Into the great, gray temple I remembered from last time. Outside the walls, the menacing roar of many voices. Above us, a great
^-
vacancy, an enormous height. Smoke rising. Somewhere doors opening and closing, the sound far away and vague, as though heard inattentively. Shadowy forms moving around us, back and forth across the immense nave. Two pedestals were toppled against the wall, the lamp that had evidently rested on one of them lay at my feet. Beside the other fallen pedestal was a great book, its leaves crumpled.

Before I could stop him, Peter broke from my side and ran to a carved stone monument that loomed beneath one of the high windows. He was up in it in a moment, neck craned to peer through the opening. I remember being surprised that he Shifted a little as he went, making spidery arms and legs for himself. Somehow I had felt our Talents would not work in the Maze. There was no time to consider it. I cried out, “Peter, don’t. . . .” afraid he would go
through
into some other place. He heard the tone of panic in my voice, if not the words, came scurrying back. My heart was pounding;  every muscle was tight. I could barely breathe among the feelings of apprehension and horror. We fled around the low curbing of an empty pool toward the stairs and the altar. From high above came the dreadful breaking sound that I remembered half hearing the time before, a sound like a great tree breaking, tearing apart in an agony of ripped fibers. . . .

We stepped behind the altar and out onto the path in the Maze. It opened to our right onto the same road we had left.

“Wall,” Peter gasped, breathless. “Gah. Oh. That wasn’t what I expected.”

I tried to take a deep breath, choking myself in the effort. Horror. Sheer horror. After a time the feeling diminished. I managed to ask, “What did you see out the window?”