“But you speak of expiation ...”
“Yes. Something is trying to kill the oozers that threaten the bridgetowns, or so Thinker says. We know of nothing which could be making that attempt save these whatevers. So. If these creatures, whatever they are, succeed in killing gray oozers, then they will have expiated their guilt at wiping out Lostbridge—Watertight. We will give them ... what is it you give penitents, Priest? Forgiveness? We will give them that. Perhaps it will satisfy them.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Mercald, giving her a narrow and suspicious look. “And do you intend to give them Slysaw Bander and his followers, as well?”
Mavin smiled a slow smile at him, a wicked smile which burrowed into him until he shifted uncomfortably, unable to bear the stare. “Well, Priest. I thought of it, yes. And I decided against it. Can you tell me why?”
He sighed in relief, wiped his forehead which had become beaded with perspiration. “Because you are a messenger of the Boundless, Mavin, and would not judge without proof?”
“No, Priest,” she said in the same wicked tone. “Because I am a pragmatist. I do not want one of these whatevers sliding about in the Bottomlands with Slysaw’s evil brain alive inside it, moving it. It may be we are fortunate that none of those who were eaten on Lostbridge desired power. If they had wanted power or empire, the creatures that ate them might not have stopped with Watertight. If Slysaw Bander had eternal life, clone or no clone, I would not sleep soundly in my hammock anywhere in this chasm or, it may be, in this world. Even though the things seem to have trouble keeping their train of thought, I would not risk it. It may be they merely find language difficult.”
Mercald flushed. “You mock me, Messenger.”
“I instruct you, Priest. Pay heed. When you believe that messengers arrive from God, it is wise to listen to everything they say, not merely when they recite accepted doctrine.” She was ashamed of herself almost immediately. He turned so pale, so wan. Well. It was only as she had suspected from the beginning. Many men had a strong tendency to tell God how to behave, and religious men were more addicted to this habit than most.
“All of which,” she said, changing the subject, “is not relevant to our current need. We need a way to destroy the oozers. The whatevers evidently have not found a way, not yet. It would help if we knew whether the whatevers think at all. Do they think, Thinker?”
He shrugged. “What is thought? No current theories explain it. I suggest you attempt what it is you wish to do and see whether it works. Though I am not an experimentalist, at times one must simply sit back and observe what experimentalist manage to accomplish. In the interest of acquiring data. No other way. Sorry. Sometimes, one simply must.”
“Well, then, Thinker, we are stymied until the wind stops. Whatever they are, they will not come out until midnight. I suggest we sleep until then, keeping watch turn about. Priest, you seem wide awake.”
“I am troubled,” he said with dignity. “I will watch first. It is unlikely I would sleep in any case.”
“I have abused you,” said Mavin, “if only for your own good. So watch then. Wake me when you grow sleepy.”
She curled into a ball on the sandy floor, covering herself with her blanket. Though the gate of the cave was loosely woven, it seemed to be out of the wind, protected on the up-chasm side by a protrusion of the root wall. The wind was cool but it did not feel as cold as it had the night before upon the stair. She drowsed, half dreaming, half remembering.
Near the source of the River Dourt was a town called Mip. It lay in the valley of the Dourt, below the scarps of the Mountains of Breem, far east of the Black Basilisk Demesne of which the people of Mip spoke often, softly, and with some fear. As far to the east as the Black Basilisk lay west was the Demesne of Pouws, and between the desmesnes a state of wary conflict had become a way of life and death. Mip, lying as it did between, strove quietly to be invisible. The people around were small holders, farmers, those to the south raising livestock while those in the river valley grew vegetables and fruits for towns as far away as Vestertown and Xammer in the south or Learner in the north. Thus the town itself was largely devoted to commerce of an agricultural kind, full of wagons and draft animals, makers of harness and plows, seed sellers, animal Healers and minor Gamesmen who would dirty their hands and Talents with ordinary toil.
Mavin had come there, pursuing the white bird, coming south from Landizot, down the rocky shores of the Eastern Sea, past Hawsport, with its harbor full of fishing boats behind the breakwater, down along the mountains to the Black Basilisk Demesne which was mad with celebration over the birth of a boy child named Burmor to the family of the Basilisks. Mavin went quiet there, anonymous, answering fewer questions than she was asked, learning at last that the white bird had been seen. “Ah, yes, stranger. Seen by the Armigers on duty at the dawn watch. Two of them flew off in pursuit of it, losing it in the haze above Breem Mountains. It would have gone to water along the Dourt, no doubt. But that was some time ago. Ask in Mip.”
So she had gone to Mip.
A quiet little town, on both sides of the Dourt, which so early in its flow was little more than a brook, full of inconsequential babble and froggy pools. A town full of trees, planted there, most of them, generations before by the first settlers in the area. “We feed the Basilisks,” she heard whispered. “We feed Pouws. They have no wish to go hungry, so leave us alone.”
And, indeed, there was little sign of Great Game in Mip. No tumbled rocks to show that Tragamors had heaved the landscape about. No piles of bones to show where Gamesmen had pulled the heat from the very bodies of the townsmen to fuel their Talents. An occasional Armiger from the Black Basilisk Demesne high in the western sky, light shattering from his armor; an occasional highly caparisoned Herald from Pouws stopping for beer at the Flag and Branch on his way to or from some other place. Mavin had settled into the town, found a quiet room on the upper floor of the Flag and Branch and moved about to ask questions.
There was a hunter in Mip. “I saw the bird, Gameswoman, in t he marshes. The source of the Dourt lies there in the ready marshes, and the wild fowl throng there between seasons, moving north or south. I did not attempt to take the bird. I do not take the rare ones. Only the common ones, those we may eat without feeling we have eaten the future and so kept it from the lips of our children. It seemed contented there, though without a mate or nest or nestlings to rear. If you go there, likely you will find it, though if you go to harm it, I would beg you to reconsider.”
“I am a Shifter,” Mavin had said. “As is the white bird. My sister.”
At which the hunter had moved away, with some expressions of politeness, his face suddenly hard and unpleasant. It was not the first time Mavin had seen that expression when Shifters were mentioned. Seemingly no other Gamesmen—no, not even Ghouls and Bonedancers, who moved among hosts of the dead to the horror of multitudes—were held in such disrepute. It was fear. Seemingly some pawns did not believe the carefully constructed mythology which Shifters were at considerable effort to put about. Seemingly some pawns believed they had special reason to distrust, to fear the Shifter Talent. It was a reaction Mavin found curious. She promised herself she would learn the cause of it some day.
Come that day when it would come; she took herself off to the swamps at the source of the Dourt. This was high country, much wooded, with little meadows surrounding the streams and the low, marshy places grown up with reeds. It reminded her a little of another forested place, and she was almost contented there, in one shape or another, searching for the white bird.
The streams came down out of many shallow valleys into a myriad meadowlands. Searching was no matter of high flight and sharpened eyes. She had to seek along each separate creek and gully, among each separate set of marshes. It was not until ten days had passed that she caught sight of the bird, the white bird, helplessly beating her wings against the net which held even as the hunter closed in to take her. If it was not the same hard-faced hunter she had left in Mip
, it was his twin, and the anger that was always close to the surface in Mavin boiled up in a fury. Still, she held back, seeing the way he peered about, face sly and full of hating intensity. She knew then what he meant to try. This white bird, a Shifter, was to be bait for another Shifter, herself. The fact that he brought n othing but a net showed his ignorance. He believed, then, only the common knowledge about Shifters, much of it spread by the Shifters themselves. He thought a Shifter could be either human or one other thing—a wolf, a pombi, a fustigar, a bird.
“I am Mavin Manyshaped,” she sang to herself in the treetop from which she watched him. “You have done a foolish thing, Hunter.” Then she followed him as he put the white bird in a cage, a cage too small, painfully too small, and carried it away in a wagon.
Mavin, seeing him through flitchhawk eyes, circling high above him, saw each plodding step of the team.
He did not go far. Only to an open meadow where the white bird would be very visible for a long way, and where he tethered her tightly to a stake driven deep into the ground and set his nets to drop if that stake should be touched.
Mavin, watching him from mountain zeller eyes, merely smiled.
Dusk came, and after that darkness, and the hunter curled beside his dying fire to rest. What did he think? she wondered. Did he believe Shifters could not stay awake at night? Did he think that because one Shifter flew as a bird in the daylight that her sister would also fly only in the day? Foolish man. Her serpent’s eyes saw him clearly by his warmth, even in the dark.
She slid beside the stake, found the thong that bound the white bird’s leg, whispered, “Handbright? Handbright? It is Mavin, your sister.”
There was no whispered answer, only the glare of mindless bird eyes, gleaming a little in the light of the embers. Well and well. It was a thing known to Shifters. Sometimes one took a form too long, too well, and could not leave it again. Well and well, sister, she thought. So you are sister no longer. Still, because of what you were and your protection of me ...
The serpent’s form bound about the white bird, grew little teeth to chew the thong away, slithered away into the night to lead the white bird stumbling in the dark to the forest’s edge as though it had forgotten how to Shift eyes for night vision, only the maddened gleam showing. “Stay,” Mavin murmured, as she would have to some half wild fustigar. “Stay. I will return.”
Then she returned to the stake, began to take on bulk, eating the grass, the leaves of the trees, whatever offered. At last, when she was ready, she trembled the stake and let the nets fell over her howling.
The hunter tumbled out of sleep, half dream-caught yet, snatched up a torch and thrust it into the embers, then held it high, uncertain whether he still dreamed or was awake, to confront the devil eyes within his gauzy net, to see the claws which shredded that net, the fangs which opened in his direction ...
Mavin thought, later, that perhaps he stopped running when he reached Mip, though he might have gone all the way to Hawsport. It had been a good joke.
Too good. The white bird had been no less terrified and had flown. All the search had to begin again, be done again. Still, when next she heard word of the white bird, that word had been clear. The white bird had flown west, over the sea.
Over the sea. To strange lands and far. To this chasm. Outside the wind had dropped. Through the woven gate she could see the glowing lanterns emerging from the root wall. It would not be long before the whatevers sought to fill their strange, manshaped garments once more. She sat up, seeing Mercald’s eyes in the fishlight.
“You didn’t wake me, Priest?”
“I was wakeful enough for both, Mavin. I knew you would be about as soon as the wind dropped. I will sleep in a while, perhaps, while the Thinker keeps watch. If you need me—though I do not suppose you will—call me.”
“Ah,” she thought. “So you are still unhappy with me, Mercald.”
She sidled out through the gate, surrounded at once by a great cloud of blue fish. Across the clearing, one of the flattree garments moved purposefully toward her.
Chapter Nine
“You are not Mirtylon,” she cried.
The balloon dress, twitchy upon its framework, stopped where it was, trembling in indecision.
“You are not Mirtylon,” Mavin cried again, “but that doesn’t matter. You do not have to be Mirtylon to talk to us.”
“Am Mirtylon,” it puffed Ahhm Muhhrtuhhlohhn.
“No.” She moved across the clearing, thrusting her way through a cloud of importunate fishes to stand beside it, almost within touch. “No. You ate Mirtylon. Now that you have eaten Mirtylon, you think Mirtylon. You have his name and can use it if you like. But you are not Mirtylon. What did you name yourself before Mirtylon?”
There was only an edgy silence during which the balloon quaked, shifted, and did not answer. At last an answer came, from another of the forms.
“No name ... had no name ...”
“Ah. Well. If you did not call yourself by human names, what other name would you have?” The Thinker had suggested this line of questioning in an effort to determine whether the things thought at all, whether they could deal with conditional concepts. Everything the creatures had said until now might have been mere stringing together of phrases the humans might have said—or so the Thinker thought. She waited. Silence stretched thin. She could feel the Thinker’s eyes, behind her in the cave, watching every tremor.
“We ... bug ... sticky.”
Mavin’s mouth fell open. What in the name of the Boundless or any other deity was she to make from that? She heard the Thinker hissing from the cave. “See if you can get it to come out of cover! Let us get a look at it.”
“Come out of that shape,” she commanded.
“No.” The word was strong, unequivocal, from several of them at once. “No. Ugly.”
She scratched her head. “Ugly” was a human word and therefore represented a human opinion. Which meant it was possibly what the dwellers of Watertight had thought of these creatures. Which had a great many implications. “Ugly is all right,” she said at last. “Thinker is ugly.” She waved at the cave behind her. “Many things are ugly.”
“Ugly ... things ... are ... bad.” Ahhhr bahhhd.
“Not ... always.” She shook her head, understanding what horror these words conveyed. She could visualize what had happened on Watertight bridge. It would have been night, people would have been asleep, then would have come the invasion of these whatevers, the terror of being eaten alive, consumed, only to find after one had been eaten that thought and personality did not end but went on, and on, and on. Still, there must have been some self-awareness in the creatures before. Otherwise they could not have named themselves at all.
“All things which eat us are ugly-bad. Being eaten is ugly-bad. If you do not eat me, I do not think you are ugly-bad.” There, let them chew on that, she thought, turning to rejoin the Thinker. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “I postulate mentation prior to their having eaten people. However, seemingly they had no visual or symbolic communication. They obviously had some form of language, however, and it may have been in smell. They had a concept of number—the thing said ‘we’. They had a concept of otherness—it said bug. They had a concept of relationship—sticky. It’s possible we’ll find they’re a kind of mobile flypaper.
“However, if the people of Watertight used the phrase ‘sticky-bug’ then these creatures may just be using it because they swallowed it. In that case, all we’re left with is the fact one of them used a plural.”
“All of which means?” sighed Mavin, understanding about one word in five.
“That I can’t say at this point how intelligent they are, leaving aside for the moment that we don’t know what intelligence is. I have always eschewed the biological sciences for exactly that reason; t hey’re unacceptably imprecise.” He peered over her shoulder, eyes suddenly widening.
Mavin turned. Something was flowing out at the bottom of th
e balloon dress, something thick and oleaginous, shiny on the top, puckered here and there as though the substance of it flowed around rigid inclusions. When it stopped flowing, it was an armspan across, ankle high, and it quivered. Out of the centre of it, slowly edging upward as though by terrible effort, came the shape of an ear, a bellows. The ear quivered. The bellows chuffed. “Not ... eating ... you ...” it puffed. “Not ... ugly ...”
While Mavin considered that, trying to think of something constructive to say next, a cloud of small flutterers swept through the clearing. As though by reflex action, the thing that had spoken lifted a flap of itself into their path. Wings drummed and struggled. There was a momentary agitation of small bodies upon the surface of the thing, then the smooth shininess of it closed over the disturbance.
“What did I say?” asked the Thinker, triumphantly. “Mobile flypaper!”
“Not ugly,” said Mavin, firmly, trying not to laugh. “Very neat, very good-looking. Very shiny. You are ... Number One Sticky.”
Across the clearing another puddle of glue thrust up its own ear and bellows. “I ... Number ... Two ... Sticky.”
“Well, that answers a lot of questions,” said the Thinker. “They certainly have self-awareness.”
“And they can count,” commented Mercald. “So, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they ...”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Mavin. “There isn’t time. Whether they are religious or not, Mercald, I don’t want to consider the matter now.”
“Well. So long as you don’t expect them to do anything that would offend against ...”
“I don’t want to hear that, either, Mercald. My understanding of what would offend against the Boundless is at least as good as yours. As you would remember if you reflect upon recent history!” Mercald flushed and fell silent, obviously distressed. Mavin turned to see the ears quivering at full extension, and cursed herself for having yelled. Undoubtly she had confused them. “Pay no attention to the arguments we humans have from time to time. It is our way. Often, it means nothing.”