Sheri Tepper: Necromancer Nine

I had decided to change myself into a Dragon and go looking for my mother despite all argument to the contrary.

Himaggery the Wizard and old Windlow the Seer were determined otherwise. They had been after me for almost a year, ever since the great battle at Bannerwell. Having seen what I did there, they had decided that my “Talent” could not be wasted, and between them they had thought of at least a dozen things they wanted done with it. I, on the other hand, simply wanted to forget the whole thing. I wanted to forget I had become the owner—can I say “owner” ?—of the Gamesmen of Barish, forget I had ever called upon the terrible Talents of those Gamesmen. I’d only done it to save my life, or so I told myself, and I wanted to forget about it.

Himaggery and Windlow wouldn’t let me.

We were in one of the shining rooms at the Bright Demesne, a room full of the fragrance of blossoms and ubiquitous wisps of mist. Old Windlow was looking at me pathetically, eyes three-quarters buried in delicate wrinkles and mouth turned down in that expression of sweet reproach. Gamelords! One would think he was my mother. No. My own mother would not have been guilty of that expression, not that wildly eccentric person. Himaggery was as bad, stalking the floor as he often did, hands rooting his hair up into devil’s horns, spiky with irritation.

“I don’t understand you, boy,” he said in that plaintive thunder of his. “We’re at the edge of a new age. Change rushes upon us. Great things are about to happen; Justice is to be had at last. We invite you to help, to participate, to plan with us. You won’t. You go hide in the orchards. You mope and slope about like some halfwitted pawn of a groom, and then when I twit you a bit for behaving like a perennial adolescent, you merely say you will change into a Dragon and go off to find Mavin Manyshaped. Why? We need you. Why won’t you help us?”

I readied my answers for the tenth time. I behave as an adolescent, I would say, because I am one—barely sixteen and puzzled over things which would puzzle men twice my age. I mope because I am apprehensive. I hide in orchards because I am tired of argument. I got ready to say these things.

“And why,” he thundered at me unexpectedly, “go as a Dragon?”

The question caught me totally by surprise. “I thought it would be rather fun,” I said, weakly.

“Fun!” He shrugged this away as the trifle it was.

“Well, all right,” I answered with some heat. “Then it would be quick. And likely no one would bother me.”

“Wrong on both counts,” he said. “You go flying off across the purlieus and demesnes as a Dragon, and every stripling Firedrake or baby Armiger able to get three man-heights off the ground will be challenging you to Games of Two. You’ll spend more time dueling than looking for Mavin Manyshaped, and from what your thalan, Mertyn, tells me, she will take a good bit of finding.” He made a gesture of frustrated annoyance, oddly compassionate.

“You have others,” I muttered. “You have thousands of followers here. Armigers ready to fly through the air on your missions. Elators ready to flick themselves across the lands if you raise an eyebrow at them. Demons ready to Read the thoughts of any who come within leagues of the Bright Demesne. You don’t need me. Can’t you let one young person find out something about himself before you eat him up in your plots?”

Windlow said, “If you were just any young person, we’d let you alone, my boy. You aren’t just any young person. You know that. Himaggery knows it. I know it. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t care,” I said, trying not to sound merely contentious.

“You should care. You have a Talent such as any in the world might envy. Talents, I should say. Why, there’s almost nothing you can’t do, or cause, or bring into being.”

“I can’t,” I shouted at them. “Himaggery, Windlow, I can’t. It isn’t me who does all those things.”

I pulled the pouch from my belt and emptied it upon the table between us, the tiny carved Gamesmen rolling out onto the oiled wood in clattering profusion. I set two of them upon their bases, the taller ones, a black Necromancer and a white Queen, Dorn and Trandilar. They sat there, like stone or wood, giving no hint of the powers and wonders which would come from them if I gripped them in my hand. “I tried to give them to you once, Himaggery. Remember? You wouldn’t take them. You said, ‘No, Peter, they came to you. They belong to you, Peter.’ Well, they’re mine, Himaggery, but they aren’t mine. I wish you’d understand.”

“Explain it to me,” he said, blank faced.

I tried. “When I first took the figure of Dorn into my hand, there in the caves under Bannerwell, Dorn came into my mind. He was… is an old man, Himaggery. Very wise. Very powerful. His mind has sharp edges; he has seen strange things, and his mind echoes with them—resonates to them. He can do strange, very marvelous things. It is he who does them. I am only a kind of a…”

“Host,” suggested Windlow. “Housing? Vehicle?”

I laughed without humor. They knew so much but understood so little. “Perhaps. Later, I took Queen Trandilar, Mistress of Beguilement. First of all the Rulers. Younger than Dorn, but still, far older than I am. She had lived… fully. She had understanding I did not of… erotic things. She does wonderful things, too, but it is she who does them.” I pointed to the other Gamesmen on the table. “There are nine other types there. Dealpas, eidolon of Healers. Sorah, mightiest of Seers. Shattnir, most powerful of Sorcerers. I suppose I could take them all into myself, become a kind of… inn, hotel for them. If that is all I am to be. Ever.”

Windlow was looking out the window, his face sad. He began to chant, a child’s rhyme, one used for jump rope. “Night-dark, dust-old, bony Dorn, grave-cold; Flesh-queen, love-star, lust-pale, Trandilar; Shifted, fetched, sent-far, trickiest is Thandbar.” He turned to Himaggery and shook his head slowly, side to side. “Let the boy alone,” he said.

Himaggery met the stare, held it, finally flushed and looked away. “Very well, old man. I have said everything I can say. If Peter will not, he will not. Better he do as he will, if that will content him.”

Windlow tottered over to me and patted my shoulder. He had to reach up to do it. I had been growing rather a lot. “It may be you will make these Talents your own someday, boy. It may be you cannot wield a Talent well unless it is your own. In time, you may make Dorn’s Talent yours, and Trandilar’s as well.”

I did not think that likely, but did not say so.

Himaggery said, “When you go, keep your ears open. Perhaps you can learn something about the disappearances which will help us.”

“What disappearances?” I asked guardedly.

“The ones we have been discussing for a season,” he said. “The disappearances which have been happening for decades now. A vanishment of Wizards. Disappearances of Kings. They go, as into nothing. No one knows how, or where, or why. Among those who go, too many were our allies.”