Sheri Tepper - King’s Blood Four

“These two had a Talent which was rare. They called it Wisdom. Or, so it is said by some. They caused the Immutables, you know. They learned the true nature of the Talents. They codified many things which had been governed until then, in approximately equal parts, by convention and superstition. Those who lived by convention and superstition could not bear that matters of this kind be brought into the light, and so they sought out Barish and Vulpas with every intention of killing them.

“Later the Guardians announced that Barish and Vulpas were dead. There was much quiet rejoicing. However, there are books which one may read today (if one knows where to find them) which were written by Barish and Vulpas many years after the Guardians announced their deaths. Could it be the Guardians lied? Who is to say. It was long ago, after all…”

“The Gamesmen,” I said firmly.

“Barish claimed,” she went on, “that the pattern of a Talent — nay, of a whole personality — could be encoded into a physical object and then Read from that object as it could be Read in a man, by one with the ability to do so.”

“That would be utter magic,” said Silkhands.

“Some may say so,” the knitter said. “While others would say otherwise. Nonetheless, the books say that Barish made his claim manifest in the creation of a set of Gamesmen. There are eleven different pieces in the set, embodying, so it is written, the Talents of the forebears.”

“Why?” I breathed, ideas surging into my head all at once. “Why would he have done this thing? It’s true, Silkhands. I know it’s true. It was exactly like Reading a person. I felt Dorn, felt him sigh. It was he who raised the spectres up, not me. How terrible and wonderful. But why would he do it?” I babbled this nonsense while the knitter fixed me with her yellow eyes and the Morfuses clambered ever higher against the stones.

“If Barish was able to code the Talents in this way, then he must also have been able to perceive them for himself. In which case, he would have perceived the Talent of Sorah, Seer. Perhaps through Sorah he saw something in the future. Who can say? It was very long ago.”

“You are saying that the Wizard did this thing long ago so that someone — Peter — could use these Talents now?” Silkhands seemed to be asking a question, but it was directed more at me than at the knitter, sounded more like a demand than a query. “So that Peter can use them,” she repeated. What did she want me to do? Gamelords! She seemed to want something, Yarrel wanted something else, Mertyn another thing, Mandor something else again. While I…what in the name of the seven devils did I want? Nothing. I wanted to do nothing. Nothing at all. Doing things was frightening. Every time I had done anything at all decisive, I had been terrified,

I said it to Silkhands, praying she would understand. “When I heard Dorn sigh within me, I was afraid…”

The knitter interrupted. “But you knew Dorn could control the Ghosts. You knew you could do it.”

“I knew someone could. Someone. But it didn’t feel like me.”

“Aha,” she chortled, rocking so hard that the wood of the chair began to creak in ominous protest. “You felt you were someone else, did you? And when Grimpt cracked Grimpt’s skull and put him down the oubliette? Hmmm? Who did that?”

“No one knows about that,” I said, horrified. “No one at all.”

“No one except those who do know about it. Watchers. Morfuses. Seers. Bitty things with eyes that peer from crannies and cracks.”

Silkhands said, “Who is Grimpt?”

“Ann, shh, shh, we’ve upset him enough. Poor boy. All this Talent throbbing away at his fingertips and he doesn’t know where to put his hands.”

What was I to say? She was right. I had the Talent in my mind or in the pouch at my belt to fling Mandor and all his house into the nethermost north, into the deepest gorge of the Hidamans. All I needed was a source of power great enough … and even with ordinary power, the heat in the stone beneath me, I could summon up legions of the dead and was afraid to do so. “You’ve a poor tool in me,” I said. “A poor tool indeed. Dorn terrified me. Sorah would probably petrify me. Why couldn’t I have been a pawn, like Yarrel. I’d have been a good pawn, moved about by others…”

“Better a poor tool than an evil one,” she said. Then she reached out to touch me for the first time, and it was as though I had been lightning struck. “You’ve been too long in the nursery, boy. Too long with lads and dreamers and cooks. Come out, come out wherever you are! The cock crows morning, and the Great Game is toward! Play it or be swept from the board.”

From high above came a keening howl, a ghost noise, like wind down a chimney. We looked up to see the Morfuses’ black shapes against a glow of sky. They had found a way out and called to us of their discovery.

“There it is,” said the knitter. “The way out. You can go that way if you like. Sit on a pile of stone up there on Malplace Mountain and watch the Game. Or, you can go out through the funeral doors to the tombs, out with a host behind you.” She was across the floor and up the wall like a spider, arms, legs, head all a blur as she moved toward those two figures high on the wall. “It’s your choice, boy. Mothers should not force their young. It’s bad for personal development …”

“Who,” I rasped, choking. “Who…who are you…”

“Mavin Manyshaped, boy. Here to cheer you with two of your cousins.”

The Morfus shapes before the light flickered and changed before us. Now there were only two slim youths grinning down at us out of glittering eyes, flame-red hair, falling across their faces. Then they were out of the hole and gone, her behind them, so quickly gone there was no time to say anything. Mavin-Mother. And two Shapeshifter cousins, children, that meant, of Mavin’s sister or sisters. And a way out. High and pure through that sunny hole came the sound of a trumpet calling “To Air, To Air” for the Armigers. A drum answered from a hillside, “Thawum, Thawum,” signal to the Tragamors, “move, move.”

“Oh, hells,” I giggled hysterically. “Who is doing battle with whom? Is it Himaggery? Or the High King? Or merely some trickery of a Shapechanger who says she bore me…”

Silkhands cried, “Oh, Peter, if you’re going to go all sensitive and nervous, this isn’t a good time for it at all.”

I screamed at her, screamed at her like a market stall woman or a mule driver, thrust her before me up the rocky slope until she was pushed half out of the opening, half laughing, half crying at me. “Be damned, Healer,” I shouted at her. “It isn’t you has to do the things you expect me to do. Go out there and watch the Game, you silly thing, you chatter-bird. Go, go out; out of here and leave me alone…”

Then I tumbled back down the rock wall into the bottom of the cavern to lie face down on the stones, weeping miserably and feeling that never, never in my fifteen years of life had I been understood by anyone at all. After which I went and raised up the dead.

I MUST LEAVE MYSELF AGAIN to tell you what I later learned had happened to others. I must go back to Himaggery’s realm, back to the fourteenth day of my captivity. An Elator arrived from Schooltown to tell of Mertyn’s arrival only hours before he himself arrived. I have visualized that arrival many times. King Mertyn, in a dusty cloak, his travel hat stained with rain, beard floured with the dirt of the road, riding into the courtyard of the High Demesne among the mists and the blossoms. They offered him time to bathe before he came to Himaggery, and he refused it. He came into the audience hall to find Himaggery awaiting him, not seated upon his chair, elevated, but standing alone without servitors by the door. The two had not met before. And the King used his Talent. He used Beguilement upon Himaggery, a fatal charm, a deadly charisma. Standing in that room of power, where no chill might rob him of the full use of that Talent which was his, he used it as he had not used it in his life theretofore. So he has told me, his thalan, since that time. He wagered his life upon being able to charm Himaggery into doing what the King wished.