“Have you made your stew yet?” She looked at me with incomprehension, forgetting what she had said on the road from Three Knob. “The stew you said you were making up, your hypothesis?”
“Oh,” she said. “That. Why, yes, Peter.”
We went on a way farther.
“Are you going to tell us what it is?” I asked, keeping my voice as pleasant as possible. She was very trying, I thought.
“If you like, though it is only to tell you what you already know.”
“I? I know too little,” I said, sure of it.
“Perhaps. But you know what you are going to find on the top of the Waenbane Mountains. You are going to find Barish’s place, his Keep, his hideaway. You will go to find the bodies matching the blues you carry.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I gloomed. That much seemed unavoidably clear.
“So much we learned from a whirly ghost,” said Chance. “Of that much we may be certain.”
“Is there more?” I asked.
“Some more,” she said. “I believe I know what plan it was that Barish had, what he intended should be the result of all this mystery and expense of time. We shall see if I am right.”
“You think we’ll find Barish then?”
She shook her head. “Everything indicates he was awakened last in the time of Riddle’s grandfather. He left the northlands then, and he did not return. In which case, we will not find Barish himself. Only the eleven. Your Gamesmen.”
“The eleven,” I murmured. “Barish’s eleven. And a machine to resurrect them.” I clutched at the pouch in my pocket. Perhaps, I said to myself, the machine is broken. Perhaps it cannot be used. The other ones, those the magicians had, were broken. If it is there at all, it will be centuries old. Rust and corruption and rot might have spoiled it. The serpent coiled cold upon my heart, and I thought of Windlow.
“Logic says it should be there,” she said. “If it was used to wake Barish at intervals, it will be there, where he was.”
“And what then?” asked Chance, eager for more mystery.
“And then,” she said, serene as the moon in the sky, “we will do whatever it was Barish would have done if he had returned.”
That one struck me silent in wonder at her audacity in saying it, even more at her colossal arrogance in thinking it.
“Barish was a Wizard.” I laughed at her, the laughter fading as she turned cold eyes upon me.
“Well, certainly, Peter,” she said. “But then, so am I.”
* * *
8
Hell’s Maw
* * *
ONE OF THE EARLIEST THINGS they had taught me at Mertyn’s House in Schooltown was that one does not meddle with Wizards. Himaggery was the only one of the breed I had known, and I couldn’t say that I knew or understood him well. Strange are the Talents of Wizards, so we are told, and I could not have told you what they were. Had anyone other than Jinian made claim to Wizardry, I would have laughed to myself, saying “Wizard indeed!” I did not laugh. Jinian did not joke about things. If she said she was a Wizard, then I believed her. Surprisingly, all I could feel was a deep, burning anger at Silkhands that she had not told me and had let me play the fool.
Oh, yes, I had done that right enough. I had said to Jinian that she was very young, that she did not understand. One does not say to a Wizard that the Wizard does not understand. I must have muttered Silkhands’ name, for Jinian interrupted my anger with a peremptory, “Silkhands did not know, Peter. Does not know. I would prefer she not. You keep my secret, I will keep yours.”
“I have none left,” I muttered. “Silkhands has given them all away.”
“I think not,” she said. “Queynt knows what Queynt knows, but not because Silkhands has told him.” Then she smiled me an enigmatic smile and we jogged our way on to Learner.
So, in the time it took me to consider all this, to feel alternately angry and guilty and intrigued, let me stop this following of myself about in favor of telling you what was happening elsewhere. I did not know it at the time, of course, but I learned of it later. What I did not hear of directly, I have imagined. So, leave Silkhands on the wagon seat beside strange Queynt; leave King Kelver and his men trotting along beside, full of courtesies and graceful talk; leave Jinian there upon the road, calm as ice; leave Chance¾Oh, how often I have left Chance; leave Yittleby and Yattleby in their unvarying stride, their murmured krerking. Leave me, and lift up, up into the air as though you were an Armiger to lie upon the wind and fly toward those powers which assembled against us and which we knew nothing of.