Sheri Tepper: Necromancer Nine

“Interesting.” said Huld. “Very interesting. Well. If you will just show me whatever books there are which describe the defenders, our business may be concluded for a time.”

“Oh, my dear Huld. I thought you understood. There are no manuals for the defenders! Either there never were any, and that may well be the case, or Nitch took them when he went. In any case, it doesn’t matter. They are self-repairing, my dear fellow. You needn’t concern yourself about them. If we need them, we have only to press that lever down. Everything else has been done.”

I could feel Huld’s baffled fury from across the room, feel his heat. “Dean Manacle. What will happen when the lever is thrust down? Do you know?”

“Well, of course. We will be defended. Haven’t I said so again and again. Really, Huld, sometimes you are very trying.”

Didir and Dorn pushed me deep into the corner, perhaps to avoid touching Huld as he stormed away, followed by the others who were full of twittered commiseration. “Gamesmen!” said Shear. “They have no manners.”

“After all our courtesies to him. Well. He was simply furious to see that we didn’t need his warnings as much as he had thought we would. Dreadful blow to his ego. Full of pride, that one is. Still. He’ll get over it.” Manacle, comfortably full of his own view of his world.

In a moment they were gone. Didir let me come to the surface of myself, drove me to the surface of myself like a volcano exploding within me. I saw shattering lights, felt electric burning and shock, heard her voice, loud, “They are wrong, Peter. Wrong. That is not the way it was. I was there. I was there, I know how it was.” Bits of her memory fled across my mind.

A babble erupted inside me, Dorn and Trandilar, Wafnor’s hearty cheer dimmed in a wild crosstalk which felt like panic, like fury, like fear. Finally Dorn’s voice, dark and heavy as velvet, “Turn the keys back, Peter. Turn the keys back and take them away,” only to hear Didir once more, “No! It must be done in a certain order, a certain order or it goes.”

I trembled with vertigo, sick, thrust this way and that by those inside me, without balance or direction. I screamed silently, “Stop! Stop!” and the interior babble ceased. Then Didir’s voice, thrumming like a tight bowstring, held from panic by her ancient will, “Did you see the order in which the keys were turned, Peter? Did you observe?” At which I laughed. She herself had kept me submerged during all that time. I had only heard what came to my ears. I felt that tight bowstring thrum, thrum, begin to ravel. “Then leave them alone. Can you lock the door into the corridor?” she shrieked at me.

I could do that, and did, before she broke in a shower of fiery sparks which shook every fiber of me, went down every nerve, dropped me to the floor to lie twitching like some maddened or dying thing while I knew what it was that Didir knew. If the lever in that quiet room behind me were pushed down, something huge and horrible would happen — something final and irretrievable. And Didir believed it would happen to all the place we were in, to the corridors, the mountains, caverns, to all the black-clad magicians and their servants, to their monsters, their machines, and perhaps — perhaps to the world as well.

I CONVULSED, there on the floor thrashing like a fresh caught fish. If anyone had come by, they would have found me there in my own shape, naked as an egg and helpless as any fledgling. The presence within which had been Didir became a scattered shower of sparkling half-thoughts, fleeting memories; pictures of herself going to this place or that; pictures of someone else I did not know, tall and dark, gold-decked; premonitions of disaster which unmanned me to leave me gasping without ever making connected sense. Then there was a time, long or short, I never knew, of darkness. When I came to myself again it was to feel the hard, cold floor beneath my wet cheek where I had lain in my own drool.

After a little time, I was more or less myself again. I recognized what had happened — panic. Through all the confusion, I found myself wondering how one of the Gamesmen of Barish could feel panic. But then, I told myself, they were more than mere constructs. They had reality, though they had to use my head to express it — a head which was still splitting with an excruciating pain, pain enough to have panicked me and shut down all the places which the Gamesmen had occupied. Didir was gone, but so were Dorn and Trandilar, Shattnir and Wafnor. My head felt empty, vacant and echoing. The pain diminished almost at once, and I lay against the door of that dreadful room, frightened and quite alone. I wondered almost hysterically whether they would come back to me again, so felt for Shattnir because she was the one who was hardest, least vulnerable. Nothing. Her figure lay in my fingers like a doll, wooden, slightly chill. Well, there was no time to experiment or wonder. I had no knowledge of the time which had passed. I had to find Mavin, quickly, and tell her what I knew.

Furred-Peter grew a pair of wide, fragile ears upon his head, like those of the shadow people, and fled through the halls listening for any movement. There was no Didir to warn me, and I was vulnerable in those metal corridors. I fled, promptly losing myself in the maze, unable to fish for thoughts to help me locate myself, following this one and that one at a distance until at last I came to a familiar place from which the committee room could be found. I got there, got in — and found it empty. Mavin was not there. Whether she had been there. I could not tell.

I was alone there for a long time, time enough to get hungry, to find my way to a place food was stored for Tallmen, Tallmen who came and went, saying nothing to me in the guise of a Tallman as I also came and went. The food was tasteless stuff, but it sustained me. I slept a time. I strode back and forth through the committee room, looking at the portraits of Deans from ancient times to the present. Perhaps it was my imagination, but they seemed to grow more and more foolish-looking at either end of the time. Some in the middle looked hard and competent — rather like Himaggery. I thought about that for a while, without reaching any conclusions. Then I had a fit of apprehension about Mavin. Had she been caught? Perhaps killed? Was she lying somewhere wounded, waiting for me to rescue her? I cursed the panic which had driven Didir out of my head and tried to get her back. Nothing. The little figure lay in my hand like a stick. Not a quiver. No, perhaps a quiver, but remote. I tried Shattnir once more. Only a far, faint tingling. Well, whether it was something in the Gamesmen or something in myself, I could not tell. My head felt as though it had been struck by lightning. Perhaps there were fibers there which could be temporarily severed, synapses which could be shocked into quiescence. I waited. I walked about. I chewed my fingernails off, grew others and chewed them off as well. I was about ready to give up and go on searching alone when she arrived, breathless and weary, desperately glad of the food I had hidden in the balcony of that dusty room.

“Lords, Peter, but that was a journey,” she said, falling into long silence while she chewed the tasteless food, eyes closed, body swaying with fatigue. “The techs in that place fiddled about for hours, talking among themselves, mostly about old Quench. It seems that ancient firebrand has been preaching revolution and rebellion to the techs, along with his other strange activities. The techs are mere pawns, Peter, brought in here, put in boots, forced to maintain the place. Some of them are clever. They have learned a lot though they are not given the chance to learn enough.” She swayed, chewed, sighed. “At last they put Himaggery and Windlow upon a kind of cart and wheeled it into a corridor where the cart was attached to a train of similar carts, all loaded with bodies and blues and crates of one thing or another. I hid myself on one of the carts, and a group of pawns rode it as well. Most of them are older men. I believe there have been no young techs trained for some time.” She stopped to sip some of the bottled water I had found. “Lords, what a journey. We went north and west, I think, though it is hard to say because of the ways the corridors curve and join. Whatever the direction, we went far and long to the place they keep the bodies, distant and high, lying under some great glacier, I think — some source of endless cold. They are stacked there, Peter, thousands of them, piled like wood for the war-ovens. Endless aisles of them. I saw Throsset of Dornes. He was on top of a pile, like a carving. I saw Minery Mindcaster. I knew her when I was a child and she a marvelous, twinned Talent. They drove the carts into a side room and left them, then they all got on the one little machine which had hauled the rest and went away. There was no place on it for me to hide, and they all knew one another.” She put her hand on mine, still shaking with cold. “So, I followed them on foot, and became lost, and took endless time to return.” I let the food and drink restore her before I told her what I had learned. When I had done, she questioned me.