“Arum, ah, oh,” he mumbled, “but that would be a bore for the others.”
“Oh, not a bit of it,” said Chance. “I’ve wanted to know about those rolling stars all the years of my life, ever since my own mother told me tales of them at her knee. Wonderful things they are, and a wonderful tale it is, I’m sure. Tell away, Queynt, and I’ll keep your glass filled.” He muttered a bit, but with us all set against him, he couldn’t refuse. He settled down with a full glass. The rest of us gathered around, and he began.
“It was shortly after I’d put brother Barish to sleep in that cave along with his Gamesmen, most of a thousand years ago, give a hundred or so. He had arranged to be wakened every hundred years, and I was supposed to meet him—supposing I lived that long, which wasn’t at all certain. We’d extended our lives quite a bit by then, but I was doubtful I’d meet him more than once, if that. So, having put all my kith and kin into storage, so you might say, I went looking for something to do with myself.
“There were many stories about the rolling stars. People had seen them, particularly back in certain parts of the Shadowmarches. They were said to be thick there, so thick that the people left their farms. Not just a few people, but many. A veritable flood of people coming out of the north, frightened and hungry.” His voice lost its usual pompous, theatrical tone and fell into the rhythm of the storyteller, dreamy and possessed. We did not interrupt him, listening with our mouths open and glasses largely untouched at our sides. “They said that nothing prospered there ...”
Nothing prospered in the Shadowmarches. Crops withered or were eaten by beasts. Domestic zeller broke the fences and wandered away or went mad and attacked the herdsmen. Rank growths sprang up along the streams, poisoning the water. Noises in the night woke the inhabitants from deep, drugged sleep, and the dawn came through greenish mists with a sharp, chemical smell.
And there were sightings of the rolling stars. Great wheels rolling on the hills, spinning discs down the river valleys, the smell of burned air and hot metal.
Vitior Vulpas Queynt heard all this as rumor in the farm town of Betand, a day’s travel south from the ancient city of Pfarb Durim and as close to nothing as a town could be, a few implement merchants huddled along one dirt street together with one general merchandiser, one farmstock merchant selling both hybrid and thisworld livestock and crops, two inns, and five taverns.
Don’t forget the taverns, said Queynt to himself as he came into the Blue Zeller to stand a moment waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. No matter what world one came to rest on, there were always taverns, and those taverns were always dark. A re-creation of the primeval cave, Queynt thought. Smoky, as from campfires, with rituals as old as time. Probably earliest men crouched in a place not unlike a tavern, fortifying themselves with something brewed or distilled, getting ready for the hunt. Man did not seek to return to the womb, as some alleged. He sought to return to the cave. Drier than a womb. More congenial.
Though not always. The Blue Zeller did not look or sound congenial. The place was almost empty except for a depressed-looking couple against the far wall on either side of a sleepy child.
“Got run out of the Marches,” said the barman, Guire, nodding in the direction of the family. “Lost everything to the rolling stars.”
“I didn’t know it was the stars causing the trouble,” Queynt remarked in his usual uninterested voice. The way some people were feeling lately, it didn’t do to take any position very strongly.
“If not them, then what?” brayed the woman, thin lips drawn back over stained teeth. “You never see anything but them! Them and dead stock. Them and dead crops! You never hear anything but their music—singin’ wild in the hills.”
Queynt commiserated. “Things are better in the south. If you’re set on farming, why don’t you try west of the Gathered Waters. I just came from there.”
“No stock left,” grumbled the man. “Nothing left. Horses died.”
“Horses don’t like it here much anyhow,” Guire remarked, wiping the bar in an immemorial gesture. “And there’s nothing local to cross ‘em to. Still, the animal market says they’ve got a new strain’s more likely to make it.”
“My dad’s dad said it was a damn fool world didn’t have some kind of draft animal on it,” the woman bleated. She did not seem to be able to speak softly. “Nothing but pombis to eat your stock. Nothing but warnets to run you out of your house.”
“If you decide to try south,” Queynt said, “I’d be glad to lend you enough to stock up for the trip.” He did not expect them to thank him, and they did not. Both ignored the statement, peering at each other as though for some confirmation of a closely held suspicion. Queynt did not repeat the offer. They would think it over, and the town was not so large they could lose him in it. He turned back to his beer.
“What about those wild Talents,” the woman shrieked. He wondered if she were deaf, pitching his answer very softly to find out.
“What about them, ma’am?”
“We heard they was profligatin’ down south. More all the time. Traggymores. Flickers. Dragons and all that. Freezin’ out the common folk.” She had heard him. The shriek was simply a harpy’s cry for notice.
“It’s not that bad,” he assured her, lying only a little. It wasn’t bad, quite, though it was getting worse. At first the Talents had been interesting and, if not benign, at least not overtly harmful. Lately, though, there had been more and more births of Gamesmen, the
