Sheri Tepper - Wizard’s Eleven

“Well, don’t then,” he said. “But it’d be smart to act as though you do.”

“You know what he was looking for back there.” I made it a statement, not a question.

“For those things you found, I guess. I notice you didn’t offer them to him.”

“The thing I noticed was that he said his grandfather left them there. How came his grandfather by them? And why did Riddle not know of them until recently? For I will bet my lost fur cloak that he did not.”

Chance shrugged, mumbled to himself. Finally, “Would anyone else among those Immutables know? Or is it only Riddle who knows? What about his family?”

“He had only a daughter,” I said. Then there was a long pregnant silence of such a quality that I looked back to find Chance’s eyes upon me, brooding and hot. “Oh, no,” I said. “I will not.”

“She’s buried nearby,” he remarked. “Almost in sight of the ruins.”

“I couldn’t do that,” I said flatly. It was true. I could not even think of raising the ghost of Tossa. It would have made me feel like a Ghoul, and I said as much.

“I didn’t say you should take her with us,” Chance said in mild reproof. “I didn’t say you should drag her around.”

I swallowed bile at the thought. Ghouls did raise certain kinds of recent dead and drag them into a kind of fearful servitude of horror, a thing which no self-respecting Necromancer would think to do. There were others who raised ghosts — Thaumaturges, for example, or Revenants, or Bonedancers. If what old Windlow and Himaggery had told me was true, full half of all Gamesmen would have some Talent at Deadraising. Full half of all Gamesmen would share any one Talent. If so, it was not a Talent generally used in the way Ghouls and Bonedancers used it, and I felt unclean at the thought.

“No,” I said. “She died, Chance, without ever knowing she was dying. Often the dead do not know they are dead until we raise them up.” In that instant I thought of Windlow with a kind of stomach-wrenching panic, then sternly put that thought down. “The ancient dead are only dust; they have forgotten life and possess only a kind of hunger which the act of raising gives them. I do not feel thus about the ancient dead. But the newly dead — ah, Chance, that is a different thing. With Tossa, she would know herself dead, and it would hurt her.”

The memory of Mandor’s ghost was recently with me. I was prepared to be as stubborn as necessary, but Chance only said, “Well, then we’ll have to think up some other way to find out. How about someone dead for eighty years or so?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you think you could raise an Immutable?”

“You’re thinking of Riddle’s grandfather? Riddle said he didn’t die in the ruins.”

“Riddle said a lot of things. Don’t know whether I believe him or not is all.”

So we rode along while I thought about that. Riddle was digging in Dindindaroo. He had recently found out that something lay in the ruins which he needed? Wanted? Someone else wanted? Well, which he cared enough about to go to some trouble over, put it that way. Where had he found out, and when? Perhaps on that northern journey he and I had started to make together, when he had turned off toward the east just above Betand? Or in his own land? Perhaps someone had told him? Who? Or he had found old papers?

After a time Chance interrupted this line of thought to say, “You know, these Immutables are just like the rest of us. They drink a little and they talk. Get a little jolly, they do, and they talk. Pawns travel through their land on business. You and me, we could travel there.”

Which was an answer, of course. We would need to disguise ourselves. Riddle knew me as a Necromancer only, or so I believed. Chance and I had been seen together once before in the Land of the Immutables, but only briefly. So suppose we went into that land as two pawns, traveling on business. What business? I put this to Chance.

“Well, as you left me to my own devices in that town of Xammer, boy, and without a hello, goodbye, how was your dinner. I got into a little game or two.”

“Chance!”

“Now, now. Mustn’t react hasty-like. A quiet game with honest folk is always good fun. Anyhow, I took my winnings in various small bits and pieces. A little gold, some gems, fripperies and foolishness. Thought I might turn a profit, up north.”

“So that’s what’s in your saddlebags. I thought you were heavy loaded for having no pack beast.”

He nodded to himself happily. I never knew what pleased Chance most — winning a game of cards or dice, finding a woman who was a good cook, or locating a wine cellar put together by a master vintner. Whatever else the world offered, he would choose one or more of those three.

He instructed me: “Enough in the bags to make us legitimate, lad. If you can change your face some and get out of those dusty black clothes. Wouldn’t hurt to change horses, too. As may be possible not far from here.”

Which was possible with Chance in charge of the trade. He went away leading my lovely tall black horse and came back with a high-stepping mare of an unusual yellow color with nubby shoes such as they use along the River Dourt, or so Yarrel had once told me. It was not an inconspicuous animal. However, he had obtained a pack beast in the trade and had done something to his own face while away from me, stuffed his cheeks to make them fatter and darkened his hair. He looked a different man, and it was easy to disguise myself as a younger version of the same. When we were done with this switching about we turned west to cross the Boundary River into the Immutables’ own Land. We had decided to be the Smitheries, father and son, and Chance told me to ride one stride behind and mind my manners toward my elder, which so amused him in the saying he almost choked.

So that night I sat in a tavern and learned a lesson in gossip. Chance talked of the sea, and of horses, and of trading in general, and of the goods he had picked up in Xammer, and of the young women in that city and elsewhere, and of how the world had changed not for the better, and of a strange wine he had tasted once in Morninghill beside the Southern Sea, and of an old friend of his in Vestertown, and of a man he had known once who used to live in Dindindaroo.

“Oh, that makes you a liar indeed,” said an oldster, sucking at a glass of rich dark beer which Chance had put into his hand. “If you knew such a one, he was old as a rock. Dindindaroo has been wreck and ruin this hundred year.”

“Not a hundred,” interrupted another. “No, Dindindaroo was wreck and ruin in the time of my mother’s father when my mother was a girl, and that was no hundred year.”

“Oh, you’re old as a rock yourself,” asserted the first. “For all you’re chasing the girlies like a gander after goslings, which you will never catch until the world freezes and Barish comes back. If it were not a hundred, it were near that.”

“Ah, now,” said Chance. “The man I knew was old indeed. Old and gray as a tree in winter. But he said he was there when ruin came down on the place, he said, like the ice, the wind, and the seven devils. Caught a bunch of the people, the ruin did. Or so he said.”

“Oh, it did. Aye, it did. Caught a bunch of ‘em.”

“Caught old Riddle’s grandfather, I heard,” said Chance. “That’s what the fellow told me.”

“Oh, so I’ve heard. Free and safe he was, out of the place, then nothing would do but he go back for something he’d left there, and then the ruin came. That’s the story. Buried in it, they said. Buried in it when the flood came down, and no sign of him and his contrack after that. Oh, a man’ll do strange things, won’t he, when ruin comes.”