The End of the Game

must have been an imposing thing. I’m not sure what kind of thing. Not a d’bor, but something rather like that. Something huge and majestic, solemn and marvelous. Not merely a creature, but a Creature of creatures. As the D’bor Wife had been. As Gobblemole and Flitchhawk had been. Looking on that carved face, I was quite sure it had been a wonderful being. It had the same feel to it as the Wind’s Bones on Bleer. It might have been one of those mighty, ancient creatures as it had appeared when alive. And the statue wasn’t a grave marker. Nothing was buried under the monument. A creature like that may be killed, but it doesn’t just die and it can’t be buried. No, this was a memorial to some mighty and wonderful creature that had reached its end, elsewhere, perhaps far away. I leaned against the monument to feel it pressing into my thighs, solid, like real stone. I scraped a hand across a crumbled place and stared at the palmful of gravel. It didn’t dissolve. I trudged back to where Peter was waiting, notebook in hand, busy with his pen.

“I’ve taken sightings,” he said. “I think we could get out again.” “I’ve been taking bits of things.” I showed him my specimens. “This place is variable. Those monuments are as real as I am. They break and stay broken.”

He shook his head over this anomaly, but there was no point in discussing it. I think we both felt it was  wisest just to go on, gathering experience, learning what we could. So we tried the exit to the temple to be sure it still worked, one step back into the roaring gray space, then one step back into the desert. Both were unchanged. Each time we entered the temple, no matter where we entered from, we got there before the thing fell down.

Back in the desert, we went to the monument. “It feels very sad around here,” I said. “So this is the direction we want to go.” Mutter mutter. He sounded disgusted.

“What?” I asked him. “I didn’t hear you.”

“I was just saying it was an odd direction. Go five paces angry, turn grief-stricken, and take ten paces in a generally sad direction.”

“It may come to that.” He meant it to be funny, but it wasn’t. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Not really. I’ll take your word for it.”

“How come I can feel it and you can’t?”

“Because that’s your Talent. Empathy. That’s how you talk all those beast languages. You empathize and just naturally understand them. This is just another kind of language.” He was feeling around the base of the monument, walking to and away from it, circling away from me to the left. “You understand these things on a nonverbal level. . . .”

He didn’t come around the other side. I waited, carefully not moving. Silence. No Peter. Only the wind. My teeth were clenched so tightly that my jaw ached. I kept telling myself he was all right, had always been all right, would always be all right. There was a small sighing, as of a door swinging open or closed, and in a moment he backed into me. “Found it,” he said, taking me by the hand and tugging me forward once more.

And we came out in the village of Betand as it had been a thousand years before.

Not that I knew that right away. What we saw was so raw and strange that neither of us tried to identify it. We did, however, catalog it as we stared. One street, dirt—mud, rather—deeply rutted and hideously ugly. Two stark wooden buildings with signs saying they sold farm stock. Other wooden stores, some a little grayer, which sold equipment. Small groups of people in the street, families with children, some with a few horses or zeller, most with carts piled high with household goods. A tavern; The Blue Fustigar. Even then I didn’t identify the place.

It wasn’t until I turned to see Vitior Vulpas Queynt emerging from the tavern that I knew where I was. It was Queynt, not one whit different in height and size than when I had seen him last, and yet in some way much younger looking. It was the expression on his face. Dissatisfaction. Annoyance. His expression was less like the Queynt I knew and more like Peter, full of jittery impatience. A much less poised expression than he wore now. “Queynt,” I said.

He did not see us. Did not hear me. He went past us as though we had been smoke. Behind him came a depressed-looking couple with a child, the woman calling, “Sir, sir.”

That’s when I knew where we were. Betand. The beginning of the city of Betand. When man was young upon Lom, scarcely come, and the rolling stars were driving him from the Shadowmarches.

Peter had already figured it out. He was busy stripping leaves from a bush, seeing whether he could make them stay off. He couldn’t. “Newer,” he breathed at me, his eyes unfocused. “This memory is newer. The newer the memory, the less effect we can have on it. What does it have to do with grief?”

“Not grief. Destruction.” I waved at the forests that stretched up the northern hills toward the marches. Everywhere were the stumps of trees in cleared fields. “That’s the common thread, Peter. You said it yourself. You used the word ‘traumatic.’ The world was injured during each of those episodes. Destruction in the temple. Destruction of the monuments on the desert. Destruction of the forests here.” I was right. None of it had really been about dying at all, and I wanted to cry. This wouldn’t lead us where we needed to go.

He must have seen my face. He pulled me close and we stood there for a long, wordless minute, me with my head on his chest, both of us watching Queynt talk to the couple. Then they went away. Queynt went back into the tavern. After a while he