The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped (19 page)

Then she remembered what Agirul had said. Remembered, stood back from the globe, and cried in a voice which would have broken rock had any been present to be broken, “Aged one. Oh, oho, aged one! I cry for assistance!”

At first there was only an agitation within the globe, as though a bubble of air had burst or some small thing whipped around in its shadowed interior, but then lines began to glow down the sides of it, golden lines, from the apex down the sides, running beneath the globe where it sat on its pillar, glowing, brightly and more brightly until she could see that they were actually lines graven into the globe, pressing down into its mirror-smooth surface. The lines darkened, deepened, turned black with a sudden cracking sound as of breaking glass. Then the sections began to fold outward, five of them, opening like a flower’s petals to the sky, crisp and hard at first, turning soft, beginning to droop over the pillar to disclose what sat within.

Which was a star-shaped mound, one leg drooping over each opened petal, the center pulsating slowly as though breathing, the whole studded with small, ivory projections. As she watched, the thing began to draw itself upright, one limb rising, two more pushing upright, until what faced her was a five-pointed semblance of her own shape, two lower limbs, two upper ones with a protrusion between them containing what might be interpreted as a face. At least it had a slit in it which could be a mouth. Or could equally well be something—anything else.

She waited. Nothing further happened. Taking a stance which she defined in her own mind as attentive, she tried once more. “Aged one. Most honorable and revered aged one. I cry for help.”

The voice formed in her brain, not outside it, a whispery voice, like wind, or the slow gurgle of a stream over stones, without emphasis, constantly changing yet unchanging. “Who calls Ganver for help? Ganver who gives no help? Ganver who does not interfere?”

“I was sent,” she said. “Agirul sent me.” There was no response to this. She tried again. “My name is Mavin. I am a shifter girl, from the world”—she waved vaguely behind her—“out there. The Ghoul Blourbast has stolen Ganver’s Bone.”

There was nothing, nothing. Beyond the pillar she could see another of the little jewel cutters, or perhaps the same one, burrowing into a pile of stones at the side of a branching path. It nibbled and scurried, paying no attention to her or to the star-shaped creature which confronted her. Finally the voice shaped in her mind once more.

“What is a Ghoul?”

“A Ghoul—well, a Ghoul is a person with the Talent of dead raising. Not only that. Most Ghouls eat dead flesh. And they kidnap people and kill them. And Blourbast is particularly horrible, because it is said he fastens live people to the walls of his burrows and leaves them there forever, animating the bones. And ...”

“Such a creature, how did it come by Ganver’s Bone?”

“Proom had the Bone. Do you know Proom? No, probably not. Well, Proom is a shadowperson. It is he who had the—what would you say—the custody of Ganver’s Bone. But someone, someone very powerful, I think perhaps some one of you, that is of the Eesties, sent Proom on a journey, and he didn’t want to take the Bone. So he put it in a safe place—an old, sacred, guarded place. But Blourbast came riding, and he didn’t care whether it was sacred or not, so he took it. And the little people went to sacrifice themselves to get it back, but it didn’t do any good. He won’t give it back. And if he doesn’t they’ll all die of disease. Of ghoul-plague.” She ran out of words, unable to go on without a response. She did not know whether the thing before her had even heard her. Again she waited. Again it was long, long before the voice formed in her head.

“It is not ghoul-plague. It is a disease of the shadowpeople.

“Long before there was any such thing as Ghoul, there were shadowpeople.

“Long before Ghoul ate shadowperson flesh, shadowpeople ate shadowperson flesh. Small creatures, beasts, with such aspirations, such longing for holiness. 

“Ah. Sad. So sad, such longing for holiness. So it was Ganver came to them and made them a bargain. If they would stop eating flesh, Ganver would give them a Bone, a part of Ganver, a thing to call a note from the universal song that they might sing. And holiness would follow. In time. In forever. But you say the sickness is returned.”

“We call it ghoul-plague, because Ghouls get it. Some of the shadowpeople were sick, but not with the plague.”

“So. Then they have kept their bargain. How long? Do you know how long ago I bargained with Proom’s people?”

She tried to think. What had Agirul said, that there had been no plague among the little people for what? A thousand years? More, perhaps? “A thousand years,” she said. “Since Proom’s many times great-grand-father. But they still do eat meat.”

“True,” whispered the voice. “Their bodies require it. But they do not eat each other. That is good. Good. Thank you for coming. I will relish this news of the shadowpeople, for it has been a thousand years or more since I have seen them.”

The petals on the pillar began to harden, to draw upward. Mavin cried out in a voice of outrage: “No. You can’t go. Don’t you understand, the Bone is in Blourbast’s hands. The little people believe they cannot cure the illness without it.”

“They cannot,” said the voice unemotionally. “What matter is that? If they do not eat one another, they will not become sick with it.”

“The Ghoul ate shadowpeople, the Ghoul became sick with it,” she cried. “And he has given the sickness to my brother, a boy, only a child. And others. Others who have done nothing wrong. Innocent people ...”

“We do not interfere,” whispered the voice.

“You did interfere,” she shouted, stamping her foot on the gravel so that it shrieked, kicking at the grass until it wailed beneath her feet. “You gave them the Bone in the first place. That’s interference. If you hadn’t given it to them, they’d all have died. Then they wouldn’t have been around for Blourbast to eat, and he wouldn’t have gotten sick, and Mertyn wouldn’t be lying in Pfarb Durim, dying, my own brother. You did interfere!”

This time there was a long silence. One of the wheel things rolled up to the pillar, lowered itself onto four limbs and polished at the pillar with the fifth before standing up once more and rolling away. As it rolled, it made a whipping sound, like the wings of a crow, receding into the distance.

“It is hard to do good,” the voice whispered.

“Nonsense,” she muttered. “You have only to do it.”

“Shhhh,” the voice hissed, sounding rather like Agirul. “Think. Ganver heard the music of the shadowpeople and saw them dying. Ganver longed to help them. Ganver gave them his Bone. Was that good? At first, perhaps. Then the Bone was stolen, the shadowpeople were sacrificed, now they are in danger of their lives once more—and so is another people who were not even there when the Bone was given. If the Bone had not been given, you have said what would have happened.”

“They would have died,” she said, mourning. “They would all have died then.”

“And their song with them. All their songs. The song of Ganver, the Song of Morning, the Song of Zanbee, the Song of Mavin Manyshaped.”

“But if they die, the songs will die,” she argued. “We must save them. We must save Mertyn.”

“A good thing. Of course. And what evil thing will come of that? Oh, persons of the world, why do you pursue the Eesties? Have we not yet learned to do nothing, not to interfere?”

“It seems to me,” she said, “if you ever interfere at all, you just have to go on. You can’t just say, ‘Well, it isn’t my fault,’ and let it go at that. It is your fault. You admitted it. And aged one or not, you’ve just got to do something about it.”

There was a feeling of sighing, a feeling beside which any other sigh which might ever be felt was only a minor thing, a momentary discomfort. This sigh was the quintessential sigh, the ultimate sigh, and Mavin knew it as she heard it. She had asked more than she had any right to do, and she knew that as well. Gritting her teeth, she confronted the drooping Eesty and said it again.

“It’s up to you to fix it.”

“Tell me,” whispered the voice, “what is to be done.”

So she told, for the manyeth time, what was to be done. The armies of King Frogmott assembled to confront the armies of Blourbast. Blourbast himself led beneath the monuments on the road, settled there with his immediate retinue. The ritual—whatever that might be—conducted by the shadowpeople. The cure wrought—Mavin had no idea how; presumably the Eesty did, since it was the Eesty’s bone which was involved. Then, when the cure was wrought and Blourbast tried to leave, then the shifters would rise up about him from their disguise as stone and tree and earth, rise up and consume him, all but Ganver’s Bone. Which would be returned to the shadowpeople ...

“Which will be returned to me ...” whispered the voice. “I did not intend it to be used in these games of back and forth. I am not a bakklewheep to be used in this way, cast between players in a Game I do not choose. Oh, I have been long asleep, Mavin Manyshaped, but I know of your Game world. Tell me, if I gave you my Bone, would your people cease their Game of eating one another as Proom’s people stopped their own?”

She bowed her head in shame. “I do not know, aged one. Truly I do not know.”

“No,” it said sadly. “You do not know. Perhaps in time. There are some of you who talk with some of us. Perhaps in time. Now I have interfered once, and my holiness is dwindled thereby. I may not take myself away from it all but must continue in the way my foolishness led me. So. We will come to your place of monuments, which is also my place of monuments—for they are my people as well—when the blue star burns in the horns of Zanbee. And later, Mavin Manyshaped, I will regret what I have done, and you must pray peace for me.”

The thing came down from its pillar, all at once, so quickly that she did not see it move. It rolled, as the smaller creatures had rolled, and it made a music in its rolling, a humming series of harmonic chords which caught her up into them so that she could not tell where she was. She felt herself move, or the world move beneath her. It was impossible to tell which. There were stars overhead, and a sound of singing, and she heard Himaggery’s voice crying like a mighty horn.

CHAPTER NINE

It was dark. She could hear Himaggery shouting at someone, his voice carrying fitfully on the shifting wind which whipped her hair into her eyes. There were stars blooming above her, and Zanbee, the crescent moon, sailed upon the western edge of the sky. She searched for the blue star, finding it just below the moon. Soon it would hang upon the moon’s horns, or appear to do so, and she had no idea where the hours had gone since afternoon.

She stared into the dark, making her eyes huge to take in the light, blinding herself at first on the arcing rim of fire which burned at one side until she identified it as the torches of King Frogmott’s army gathered on the high rim about Pfarb Durim, between her and the city. Soon her eyes and mind began to interpret what she saw, and she located the place she stood upon, a small hill just west of the road where the Strange Monuments loomed among lights which moved and darted, hither and thither, and from which the Wizard’s voice seemed to emanate.

“The Agirul says they’ve left the place below. It will take them almost till midnight to get here. Help the shadowpeople with that cauldron. ...”

She couldn’t see enough through the flickering lights to know what was going on. But the closer she came the more confused things became, and when she stood at Himaggery’s side while he fumed over some drawing in the dust, she knew less than she had to begin with. She laid a hand upon his shoulder and was surprised to feel him leap as though he had been burned.

“Mavin,” he shouted at her. “You ... where have you ... they said you might not...” Then as she was about to make soothing sounds, he said more quietly “Sorry. Things have been a bit hectic. I had word that you probably wouldn’t make it back, and that you wouldn’t bring any of your kin to help. Except the fellow who brought the message, of course. Your thalan, is it? Handybast? Nice enough fellow. A bit too apologetic, but then it doesn’t seem that the Battlefox branch of your family has much to recommend it outside himself, so perhaps he has aplenty to apologize for.”

“Plandybast came then,” she said in wonder. “I really didn’t think he would.” She leaned over the dirt where he had been drawing diagrams. “What are we doing? Have you changed the plan?”

“Of course. Not once or twice, but at least six times. At first we couldn’t find a Herald, but then I managed to locate one I knew slightly. Subborned him, I suppose one might say, right out of Frogmott’s array.”

“And you sent him to Blourbast.”

“To the front door. What there is of it. Most of Poffle is underground, as you well know, and what shows above ground isn’t exactly prepossessing. Well, the fellow went off to Blourbast full of Heraldish dignity and made his move, cried challenge on the Ghoul to bring the amulet—that’s what we decided to call it, an amulet. Why let the Ghoul know what he’s holding?—to the Monuments at midnight tonight to assist in preparing a cure for the plague. We didn’t let on that we know he has the disease himself. The Herald just went on about honor and Gamesmanship and all the rest.”

“Was there a reply?”

“Not at first. We thought there’s wasn’t going to be, and I’d started to re-plan the whole thing. Then this woman came out. It must be his sister, the Harpy ...”

“Pantiquod.”

“Right. She came out and gave us a lot of double talk which meant that Blourbast would show up but that he didn’t trust us. So he would come with a retinue. That’s what she called it. A retinue. By that time it was getting on evening, and Proom showed up with the Agirul. Or rather Proom showed up and we found the Agirul hanging in a tree by the side of the road. Fortuitous.”

“Fortuitous,” repeated Mavin, not believing it.

“Among the three of us, we decided that ‘retinue’ probably means the entire army of Hell’s Maw as well as a few close kin and men sworn to the Ghoul. And about that time your thalan arrived to tell us you probably wouldn’t be coming if you weren’t here already. You’d left him a note or something?”