Sheri Tepper: Necromancer Nine

“I have no right to ask it, Peter, but I beg a service of you. One you may be loath to give.”

“I will do what I can,” I murmured, half asleep.

“We need to speak with Mandor’s spirit.”

The sickness rose in me so that I choked on it, retching, tears pouring from my eyes as I tried not to vomit upon the table. In a moment he was putting cool water on my face, giving me a cup to drink. “How can you ask it,” I gargled at him. “And why? What would you know that his ghost can tell you?”

“We have found certain … things in Bannerwell. After Huld had gone, our people found them and summoned me. They are … things which some of these pawns have reason to remember with great pain. We have studied them as best we may. We need to know what they are, how used, but more important, from whence they came. Mandor would have known. We believe they belonged to him.”

“Certain things.” He showed them to me. They were stored in a back room of the stone house, strange things, crystal linkages, wires, boards on which wires and crystals together made patterns full of winking lights which told me nothing. They reminded me of something … something. Suddenly I had it. “Riddle. Long ago—ah, not long ago. About a year. Mertyn sought to protect me from being eaten up in a Game. His servant, Nitch, sewed a thing into my tunic, a thing of wires and beads, a thing like these things. If you would know of them, ask Mertyn.”

“We have done. It was Nitch who knew the doing of it, not Mertyn. Nitch has gone, gone in the night without a word.”

“Vanished? Like the others?”

“No. Simply gone. Have you heard of ‘magicians’?”

Where had I heard of… yes. “Gamesmaster Gervirnse. He said the little blue Gamesmen were made by magicians, west somewhere. I had not heard of magicians before, save as we all have. At Festivals, doing tricks with birds and making flowers appear out of nothing.”

“I do not think a Festival magician made these.” He shut the door upon them and led me back to the table before the fire. I knew he would ask me again. I wanted to refuse. How could I refuse? Oh, Gamelords, in what guise might the spirit of Mandor rise to greet the eidolon of Dorn?

“By Towering Tamor, Riddle, you ask a hard thing.”

“I know. But it is said your Talent is great. I would not ask it, save you come so fortuitously to our need. I thought of it when I saw your mask, at first, and I would not ask not if I thought it endangered you.”

How could I tell him that it did endanger me? It sickened me, yes. Brought nightmares and horrors, but endangerment? Well, I would lose no blood nor flesh over it. Perhaps that was the only endangerment which counted. Riddle’s daughter, Tossa, had lost her life in aiding me. I could not refuse him.

“In the morning,” I begged. “Not at night.”

“Certainly, in the morning,” he agreed. I might just as well have done it in the dark for all the sleep I had.

We went to the pit in the gray dawn. They had not laid Mandor with his ancestors and predecessors in the catacombs beneath the fortress, and I was thankful of that. There the ghosts were as thick as fleas on a lazy dog, and I had no wish to raise a host on this day. No, Mandor lay beneath the sod in a kind of declivity a little to the north of the walls, a place fragrant and grassy, silent except for the sigh of wind in the dark firs which bounded it. Riddle let me go into the place alone, staying well away from me in order that his own, strange “Talent” not impede mine… or Dorn’s. As I left him, he said, “We need to know whence these things came. What their purpose is. By whom made. Can you ask these things?”

I tried to explain. “Riddle, I have not heretofore questioned phantoms to know what knowledge they may have. Those discarnate ones I raised on this land before were ancient, long past human knowledge, only creatures of dust and hunger, fetches to my need.”

“It is said that Necromancers are full of subtlety.”

“I will be as subtle as I can.” Though it would be Dorn being subtle, rather than Peter. I took the little Gamesman into my hand, fingers finding it at once in the pouch as though it had struggled through the crowd to come into my grasp. He came into me like heat, burning my skin at first, then scalding deeper and deeper, nothing wraithy or indistinct about it, rather a man come home into a familiar place. I was not surprised when he greeted me, “Peter.”

“Dorn,” I whispered. Before, I had been fearful. This time I was less so, and perhaps this accounted for my courtesy to him, as though he were my guest. I explained what we were to do, and he became my tutor.

“Here and here,” he said. “Thus and thus.” My hand reached out, but it was Dorn who pointed the finger at the grass, Dorn who called the dust and bones within to rise. Mandor had not been long dead. The ground cracked and horror came forth, little by little, the worms dropping from it as it rose. I heard Riddle on the hill behind me choking back a gasp, whether awe or fear I could not tell.

“Thus and thus,” Dorn went on. “So and so.”

The bones became clad in flesh, the flesh in robes of state. The head became more than a skull, then was crowned once more, until at last what had been so horrible at the end of Mandor’s life became the beauty I had known in Schooltown, bright and lovely as the sun, graceful as grass, and looking at me from death’s eyes. From this uncanny fetch came a cry of such eerie gladness that my heart chilled. “Whole,” it cried in a spectral voice. “Oh, I am risen whole again.”

I could have wept. This wholeness was not an intended gift, and yet … it was one I would have made him during life if I had known how. “So and so,” said with Dorn within me. “You could not have made him so or kept him so in life for any length of time.”

Riddle called from the hillside, reminding me of our purpose there. So I asked it, or Dorn did, of those strange crystalline contrivances which Riddle was so concerned about. The phantom seemed not to understand.

“These are not things which Mandor knew. These are things of Huld. Playthings for Huld. Magicians made them. Huld understood them, not Mandor. Oh, Mandor, whole, whole again …”

I heard Riddle cursing, then he called to me, “I’m sorry, Peter. Let the pathetic thing go back to its grave.”

But I was not ready to do that. I had remembered Mertyn’s words concerning those who had vanished.

“Mandor, do you speak with others where you are? Do the dead talk together?”

The fetch stared at me with dead eyes, eyes in which a brief, horrible flame flickered, a firefly awareness, a last kindling.

“In Hell’s Maw,” it screamed at me. “They speak, the dead who linger speak, before they fall to dust, in the pits. When all is dust, we go, we go.”

“Have you spoken to Himaggery?” I asked. “To Windlow the Seer?” I remembered the names of others Riddle had told me of and asked for them, but the apparition sighed no, no, none of these.

Then it drew itself up and that brief flame lit the empty eyes once more. “Words come where Mandor is … troubling all … seeking those you seek … not there … not in the place … Peter … let me be whole, whole, whole.”

I sobbed to Dorn. “Let him be whole, Dorn, as he goes to rest.” And so it was the phantom sank into the earth in the guise he had once worn, the kingly crown disappearing at last, in appearance as whole as he had been in Schooltown before his own treachery maimed him.

And I was left alone, Dorn gone, Mandor gone, only Riddle standing high upon the rim as the wind sighed through the black firs and the grasses waved endless farewell on Mandor’s grave. Inside me a small dam seemed to break, a place of swampy fear drained away, and I could turn to Riddle with my face almost calm to go with him back to the millhouse. He was no more given to talk than I, and we had a silent breakfast, both of us thinking thoughts of old anguish and, I believe, new understanding.