The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper part two

“It probably has something to do with cold,” I mumbled around a mouthful of bread. “In the School Houses, we always kept the blues cold. They have not been cold in my pocket. Perhaps that has something to do with it. Perhaps it is natural for them to recombine, and the machine only aids that process…”

“What does the machine do, Peter?”

“Ahh,” I said, remembering chill wire and hostile casing, the infinite lattices of crystal in which I had lost myself. “It warms the body, warms the blue, scans the blue and Reads it into the mind of the body. Having seen the innards of the machine, I can do part of what the machine does. I can Read the blue, I think, with Didir’s help. And Shattnir can help me warm the place. But I don’t know how to Read the thing back into a body. It seems all a puzzle…”

“I can Read the body,” said Silkhands. “If you will link with me, as they linked in the Bright Demesne when they searched for you. As Tragamors sometimes link to increase their strength.”

I shuddered, remembering that such a linkage was precisely what Mandor and Huld had demanded of me in Bannerwell¾of me, or of Mavin. Still, this was to no evil purpose. It took me a while to work myself up to it, but once we were started it seemed to flow along of its own movement. It was not as simple as that sounds, and yet it was simpler than I would have expected.

First was Shattnir, gathering all the warmth she could from the sun to bring it below and warm the chamber of the Gamesmen. Then was Didir, to set her pattern firmly in my head, telling her what we intended, begging her to stay within and help me, show me the way.

Then I took the blue of Thandbar in my hand and put my arms tight around Silkhands as she laid her hands upon Thandbar’s head. He came into my mind and greeted me with such joy that it burst through me in a wave, a wordless, riotous joy, the rapture of a prisoner released, a caged thing set free. “Only free,” I heard him murmur in my head. “Only free.” I remembered it as one of his names and knew in that instant what innate quality it was had enabled him to escape the cold room and move out across the world. His Shifter’s soul could not have been held, had not been held. I had no time to think of it, for with Didir’s pattern tight in my mind I began to Read him, spark by spark, shivering lattice by lattice, sending my warmth down the chill circuits of his being, following those circuits as Silkhands Read them from me and impressed them once again into the body before her.

Time went, seeming hours of it, days of it. Pictures fled through my head. I saw Schlaizy Noithn, bright in the noon light, where Thandbar walked with a loved one. I saw far mountains as seen from above by the eyes of a mist giant. I heard music, not only the wind song I had heard before but generations of bell and flute in the high, wild lands of the shadowpeople. I became tree, mountain, road, a whole legion of beasts I had never seen and knew nothing of. In Thandbar’s day, they had lived closer to mankind. In the intervening centuries they had fled away.

I saw memories of Barish: Barish lecturing; Barish pounding a table; Barish laughing; Barish cajoling. I felt horror at the things being done by some Gamesmen, revulsion, anger, and felt Barish play upon that horror and revulsion. In Thandbar’s mind, I heard Barish’s voice. “We will accumulate the best, like seed grain. We will plant them in the ground of today, for a mighty harvest in the future,” his voice ringing, passionate. In Thandbar’s mind, I Read belief, then doubt (centuries of doubt), then terror at a conviction of eternal imprisonment. Out of that terror he had fled like mist, to walk the wide world calling for help from his kinsmen.

So the pictures fled across my mind as the blue melted away in my hand, becoming a featureless lump, a sliver, a nothing at all. The body before us stirred, stirred again, until at last its eyes opened, its mouth moved. “I dreamed you, Healer,” it whispered in a voice whiskery with dust and age. “I dreamed you.” The eyes blinked, blinked, tried to focus. I knew they saw only blurs of light, mute shadows. At last they fastened upon me, and the dusty voice said, “Kinsman. Thanks.”