Talent Thirteen
THEY CAME, DRAGON AND DRAGON-BACK, Mavin and Himaggery. Behind them came a small host of Armigers, flown not from the Bright Demesne but from some place north of Schooltown. One of Himaggery’s Seers had told him help would be needed long before my message reached them. I began to be a little acid about this until Mavin hushed me.
“The Seer said we would not be needed during the conflict, but afterward. Indeed, look around you. Where are any Gamesmen standing against you? There are none. Not against one of my tricksy line.”
She was right, of course. Somehow the battle had been not merely turned but decisively won. Chance was jogging about saying “Obliterated” over and over. He had observed the battle through his glass from a safe distance. “Obliterated.” The word, I thought, could be applied to a number of things with equal pertinence. There was no time to consider it. Himaggery had to be introduced to Barish and to the Wizard’s Eleven, he so overcome by awe and respect during this process as to lose all his crafty volubility for the space of several hours. When Mertyn arrived, the introductions were repeated, and again at the arrival of Riddle and Quench.
I was very stiff with Riddle. He flushed bright red and almost sank to his knees begging my forgiveness. “My only thought was to learn what I could, Peter. I did not want you to know about it, as it was a matter secret to the Immutables. Quench assured me the cap was perfectly safe, that it could not harm you in any way…” He fell silent beneath my glare.
Jinian, who stood beside me during all this ceremony, saved the situation. “Peter knows that you meant him no harm, Riddle. But a Pursuivant is dead in the forests near Xammer, and whether you meant Peter harm or not, the result was harm to someone.”
“My fault,” asserted Quench. “You must forgive Riddle, young man. I did not understand the complexity of all this Gaming. I did not realize that death often results. I was too many years in that pest hole beneath the mountains. Nothing was real there. All was ritual and repetitions and hierarchy and concern about relative positions in the order of things. Nothing was real. You must forgive him. Hold me responsible, for I am.”
The end result of which was that I offered Riddle my hand, though not smilingly, and accepted his explanation for what it was worth.
“It was a year ago, Peter, that I found some old papers of my grandfather’s. They told of an ancient contract, a promise of honor between our people and Barish. I had never heard of it. My father was only a child when his father died. I was only a child when my father died. So if there had been a contract, this sacred and secret indebtedness, the chain of it had been broken at Dindindaroo. The papers spoke of a certain place in the north. You recall traveling with me a year ago. I left you below Betand to go on to Kiquo and over the high bridge into these wastes. It was all futile. There was no guide, no map, nothing.
“Then, not a season gone, came this fellow Vitior Vulpas Queynt to tell me of this same contract. He was full of hints, full of words and winks and nods. And at that same time, some of our people found Quench here wandering among the mountains to the west. Well, Quench and I put our heads together, and it seemed the only way we would know anything surely was to raise up my grandfather. As I said, we meant no harm.”
“So that is why you were burrowing about in Dindindaroo,” I said. “You had only recently learned of this ancient agreement.”
“Learned of it,” rumbled Quench, “for all the good it did us. I wanted proof the Gamesman Huld was a villain. I wanted to know where Barish had gone, and what this Council business was all about. Our own history spoke of Barish, mind you, and Vulpas too. I wanted to know everything, real things, but you sent us scurrying off to the south on an idiot’s quest. Well. I suppose we deserved being ill led for having led you ill. Let it be past and forgotten.”
“When we returned,” said Riddle, “with empty hands, we went to Himaggery as we should have done in the first place. I knew him to be honorable. We should have gone there first.”
“It would have saved us much thrashing about,” said Himaggery, who had come up to us in the midst of all these revelations and confessions. “We were hunting Quench all over the western reaches from Hawsport south, and we were hunting Huld everywhere but Hell’s Maw. We knew it for a den of horrors, a Ghoul’s nest, but we did not envision Huld as master of the place. He had seemed too proud for such dishonor.”
“I believe,” said Jinian, “that we will find it necessary soon to revise our notions of dishonor.” She squeezed my hand and left me to ruminate upon that while the others continued their explorations into history in a mood of such profound veneration that it almost immobilized them.
Dorn was not among the group. I went off looking for him. He was with Silkhands, Tamor, and King Kelver upon a bit of high ground near Barish’s Keep. Tamor had been healed of his wound, though not of the wound to his pride, for he had been the only one of us to be wounded at all. He bowed himself away after a wink at me, as did Kelver and Silkhands, hand in hand, oblivious of much else in the world. I think I sighed. Dorn gave me a sharp look which I well recognized, though I had not seen it with physical eyes before.
“You had plans concerning her?” he asked.
“No. And yes,” I confessed. “Yes, some time ago. But no, not since Kelver came along.”
“And Jinian came along?”
That was rather more difficult. True, she had said she loved me at some confused point during the last day or two. True, she had told me I was clever and that had proved to be marginally accurate, if the outcome of the battle was any test. True, parts of me stirred at the thought of her, at times. But …
“She says she is a Wizard,” I said.
“Ah,” said Dorn. “That is difficult.”
“I think it is hard to love a Wizard,” I said. “Though it is very good to make alliances with them.”
“Who else knows of this Wizardry?”
“No one. I was not supposed to tell anyone, but you and Didir — well, you are part of me. It is like talking to myself. Oh, Chance knows, for he was there when she told me. But she doesn’t trifle with the truth, Necromancer. If she says she is, she is.”
“Oh, I have no doubt of it. I wonder if you’ve thought what else she is?”
“Another Talent than Wizardry! I didn’t know such was possible.”
He laughed. “Peter, the young are truly amazing. In each of the young, the world is reborn. No, I do not mean that Jinian has any other Talent. What she is, other than a Wizard, is a human person, female, about seventeen years old. In my experience, human persons of that age — and those considerably older also — are much alike. Most of them love, hate, weep, lust, tremble with fear. Most of them fight and forgive and resolve with high courage. May I suggest, if you are resolved upon friendship with Jinian, that it be with the person rather than with the Wizard. Likely the Wizard needs no one — not even Jinian herself. Likely Jinian needs someone during those times that the Wizard is not in residence.” And he patted me very kindly as though I had been some half trained fustigar.
This so gained my attention that I wandered off for several hours and did not talk to anyone during that time.
Chance caught me when I returned. He wanted to talk about the battle, about the great bones, the mightiness of them. “And they went on and on, long after you’d all given up raising them. So Dorn and Queynt say.”