Shamefaced, I went back to unlock the door. Inside the room the two little girls had settled upon one of the pallets and were engaged in a game of a curious kind. I turned my face away, flushing. Evidently they were not totally mindless. They had been trained to do at least one thing. “What now?” I asked Mavin.
“Now I need to think,” she rasped. I could not understand her anger until she spoke again. “What is he up to, that fustigar vomit? What does he mean saying you were created by the Council? I know better than he how you were created, and it was in the usual way. No Council had part in it save the counsel between man and woman. He seeks to trick these magicians in some way for some reason. What is the reason?
“Who are these people, these magicians who do not like to be called magicians? They say they are ‘faculty’ of a ‘college.’ Well, I know what a college is. It is only another word for school. Windlow had a college. So did Mertyn. What are faculty except schoolmasters. Hm? Except these seem strangely preoccupied with signs and rituals, speaking often of Signtists and Searchers. Is this some kind of religion? Manacle claims himself descended from original Searchers. Well enough. Searchers after what? They hold Gamesmen in contempt. There are no women among them. They seem to admit only four kinds of beings: themselves, monsters, Gamesmen, and pawns.”
“Tallmen,” I offered.
“Only a lesser kind of monster, or perhaps I should say a superior kind of monster. What is this Council that Huld uses to frighten them with, as a nursemaid uses night-bogie to frighten naughty children?”
“Himaggery spoke of a Council. I thought he said it was a group of very powerful Gamesmen¾I think he said Gamesmen. They search out heresy …”
“Some such group has been rumored, yes. But is it that group which Huld speaks of? And meantime we know nothing about Himaggery and Windlow except that they are ‘in the laboratories.’ Where are the ‘laboratories’? What are they? We are rattling around in here like seeds in a dry gourd, making a slithering noise with no sense. Come, son, set a plan for us.”
To hear Mavin say this in such noise and frustration amused me. There was no time to be amused, no time to treasure that moment, but I stored it away to gloat over later. Of such moments are adulthood made. I almost said “manhood,” but thought better of that. “We must not be misled by the puzzle,” I told her. “Whatever the Council is, whatever this place may be, whatever the history of the place or its reasons for existence¾none of these are more important than Himaggery and Windlow. Manacle will meet Huld after tonight’s meeting. So we will go to the meeting and hear what is said. After that we will follow Manacle to his meeting with Huld, and Didir must protect me as best she can. If we are inconspicuous, we will likely pass unnoticed.”
When I said the word, inconspicuous, it made me think of Chance, and for a moment I was overcome with a terrible homesickness for him, for Schooltown, for the known and familiar and sure. I gasped, but Mavin had not noticed.
“I will be inconspicuous,” she growled. “And I will be patient, but this place itches me.”
It itched me, too, as I tried to find the place of the meeting. No mind I sought through knew of the meeting or where it might be held. “An exclusive group,” murmured Mavin, when I told her this. “Do you suppose the room is never cleaned?”
This took me a moment to puzzle out. Then I understood that the room would undoubtedly be cleaned by someone, a pawn. I began to search among pawnish minds, Didir dipping here and there as we moved above the place. On the sixth or seventh try, we found a mind which had once known of the place. We went to it. All of this had taken so much time that we were there only a moment before the magicians began to arrive, only time to find a dark corner in a kind of balcony over the main room where two additional chair-like shapes would go unnoticed. The place was under a duct which brought in heat, and Mavin settled into it with a tired sigh.