Didir and Dorn pushed me deep into the corner, perhaps to avoid touching Huld as he stormed away, followed by the others who were full of twittered commiseration. “Gamesmen!” said Shear. “They have no manners.”
“After all our courtesies to him. Well. He was simply furious to see that we didn’t need his warnings as much as he had thought we would. Dreadful blow to his ego. Full of pride, that one is. Still. He’ll get over it.” Manacle, comfortably full of his own view of his world.
In a moment they were gone. Didir let me come to the surface of myself, drove me to the surface of myself like a volcano exploding within me. I saw shattering lights, felt electric burning and shock, heard her voice, loud, “They are wrong, Peter. Wrong. That is not the way it was. I was there. I was there, I know how it was.” Bits of her memory fled across my mind.
A babble erupted inside me, Dorn and Trandilar, Wafnor’s hearty cheer dimmed in a wild crosstalk which felt like panic, like fury, like fear. Finally Dorn’s voice, dark and heavy as velvet, “Turn the keys back, Peter. Turn the keys back and take them away,” only to hear Didir once more, “No! It must be done in a certain order, a certain order or it goes.”
I trembled with vertigo, sick, thrust this way and that by those inside me, without balance or direction. I screamed silently, “Stop! Stop!” and the interior babble ceased. Then Didir’s voice, thrumming like a tight bowstring, held from panic by her ancient will, “Did you see the order in which the keys were turned, Peter? Did you observe?” At which I laughed. She herself had kept me submerged during all that time. I had only heard what came to my ears. I felt that tight bowstring thrum, thrum, begin to ravel. “Then leave them alone. Can you lock the door into the corridor?” she shrieked at me.
I could do that, and did, before she broke in a shower of fiery sparks which shook every fiber of me, went down every nerve, dropped me to the floor to lie twitching like some maddened or dying thing while I knew what it was that Didir knew. If the lever in that quiet room behind me were pushed down, something huge and horrible would happen¾something final and irretrievable. And Didir believed it would happen to all the place we were in, to the corridors, the mountains, caverns, to all the black-clad magicians and their servants, to their monsters, their machines, and perhaps¾perhaps to the world as well.
* * *
11
Calling Home
* * *
I CONVULSED, there on the floor thrashing like a fresh caught fish. If anyone had come by, they would have found me there in my own shape, naked as an egg and helpless as any fledgling. The presence within which had been Didir became a scattered shower of sparkling half-thoughts, fleeting memories; pictures of herself going to this place or that; pictures of someone else I did not know, tall and dark, gold-decked; premonitions of disaster which unmanned me to leave me gasping without ever making connected sense. Then there was a time, long or short, I never knew, of darkness. When I came to myself again it was to feel the hard, cold floor beneath my wet cheek where I had lain in my own drool.
After a little time, I was more or less myself again. I recognized what had happened¾panic. Through all the confusion, I found myself wondering how one of the Gamesmen of Barish could feel panic. But then, I told myself, they were more than mere constructs. They had reality, though they had to use my head to express it¾a head which was still splitting with an excruciating pain, pain enough to have panicked me and shut down all the places which the Gamesmen had occupied. Didir was gone, but so were Dorn and Trandilar, Shattnir and Wafnor. My head felt empty, vacant and echoing. The pain diminished almost at once, and I lay against the door of that dreadful room, frightened and quite alone. I wondered almost hysterically whether they would come back to me again, so felt for Shattnir because she was the one who was hardest, least vulnerable. Nothing. Her figure lay in my fingers like a doll, wooden, slightly chill. Well, there was no time to experiment or wonder. I had no knowledge of the time which had passed. I had to find Mavin, quickly, and tell her what I knew.