“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.
“What is Huld up to? You knew him. What do you guess?”
“I guess he is up to gaining power,” I said. I knew this to be true, though I was not sure what power Huld sought in this strange haunt of magicians who seemingly were not magicians at all but merely bad custodians of ancient skills and knowledge.
“Huld is not content to be merely Demon, merely Gamesman. He has no wish, I think, to be willingly followed. It is power he wants, power over the unwilling. He wants to be worshipped, yes, but out of fear and trembling, not out of beguilement. He had that, through Mandor, and it was something, but not enough for him. Still, that is why he hates me. Because I conquered Mandor and held Huld against his will, even for that little time.”
“And he came to this place — how?”
“I think he learned, somehow, how I had been protected in Schooltown, how Mertyn and Nitch had protected me. He could have Read that from me, easy enough, when I was captive there. I think Huld sought Nitch, sought him and found him, perhaps killed him for what he knew. This is only supposition, but I know Huld, and the idea hangs together.” Surprisingly, the idea did hang together, though I had not known until that instant that I had figured it out. “So Huld came here, seeking power, and found Manacle.”
“And Nitch had taken certain books?”
“Perhaps. And perhaps Huld had not thought to Read Nitch concerning books, so perhaps the books are gone forever.”
“Or perhaps they were lost half a thousand years ago.”
“Perhaps.”
“So there may be nothing we can find to tell us about these defenders, nothing we can find to tell us how to restore Himaggery and Windlow and a thousand, thousand more.”
“About the defenders, I know only what I caught from Didir’s mind before she fled me in panic — or before I drove her out in a panic of my own. She knew of the defenders. Originally there were five keys, kept by five persons, one of whom was someone near to Didir. The reason for this was to prevent the defenders being accidentally released. Now Manacle has unlocked all the bonds. Any one who gets into that room needs only press a lever down, and whatever it is the defenders do will occur. The idea of this drove Didir into panic, the others as well, and it burst my head with them. Now I cannot raise them.”
“You locked the door?”
“I locked the door. Manacle has a key. I have no helpful thoughts about that. Let us think of Himaggery and Windlow instead. So far we have failed horribly at everything we tried to do.”
She replied with some asperity. “Who would have thought that rescuing them would have entailed putting them back together? It is difficult to go into a place such as this to set someone free if that person is able to walk and think and assist in the process. I have done that, in one Game or another. It is more difficult if the prisoner is unconscious or wounded, and I have played that Game too, in my time. But to have a prisoner who must be reassembled prior to rescue denies logic and sets all sense awry. I did, however, try to make our process somewhat simpler. I have half of them with me.” And she reached into some interior pocket to bring forth the two blues, Himaggery the Wizard, Windlow the Seer, tiny and impeccable, cold and hard. They were only patterns, as Manacle had said. Patterns of personality. Mavin waved at me to keep them, saying. “I have been thinking all the way back how we might put them together again. It may be that the machine used to separate them is the same machine used to reassemble them. In which case, we need only bring the bodies to that laboratory place.”
I remembered something Manacle had said. “We need not do that. The bodies are to be brought to a machine, Mavin. Not to the laboratory, but to the ‘base’ where the ceremony is held. There will be a machine there, too. They will pretend to use it to restore those who play the part of voyagers. The ship thing is there. Manacle called it a shiptower. At any rate, the bodies will be brought there, and there we should be waiting for them.”
When she asked me where that might be, I shook my head. I could not use Didir to fish for answers. We knew that Manacle would go there, however, and he was easy enough to find — we knew where his quarters were. “Manacle,” commented Mavin, as we went toward his rooms. “The techs hate Manacle. I think some kind of mutiny brews there, my son, an old mutiny.”
I thought of Laggy Nap and his power over the boots. “Perhaps the contrivance which controls the boots has fallen into disrepair. Perhaps, if techs are expected to repair things and techs are also controlled by the boots, they have found a way to disrepair it.”
“As I said,” she murmured, “mutiny. Something brews.” Though I had not seen Huld since he had stormed away from us outside the room of the defenders, I felt his presence still like a weight upon my lungs. Without Didir to protect me, I had to be more sly and secretive than heretofore. Thus, it took a sneaking time to come to Manacle’s place and hear his rumbling whine through the open door. Shear came out, then went in again, several times. Flogshoulder, too, went in and out, bearing garments of some ceremonial type. They emerged together to go to a dining place, from which we later stole food which was of better quality than that given to Tallmen.
“How long until this ceremony?” I muttered. “How long must we lurk in this way?”
“We are so far underground time is without meaning,” she said. “Nonetheless, if Manacle said ‘two days’ when we came into this place, then it cannot be long now. We have blundered about in here for the better part of two days at least. Time grows short, and I am glad of it. I could not bear much more of this.”