The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper part one

“The shade you have raised remains, Necromancer. Will you not remove it?”

“The shade remains only for a time, Godspeaker. Go to your rest. Come morrow it will be gone.” As it would be. I had no intention of letting them discover the trick.

The Healer followed me, mute, until we drew near the river. I gestured her ahead to the place where Yarrel and Chance waited, a dark blot upon the earth between them. She ran toward them. I tried to say something to her, command her, but my body had gone dead, as though all the energy which had forced me to the ruin and into the masquerade had drained away leaving me empty. I felt horror, breathlessness, an aching void, then fell, hearing as I did so the Healer’s voice crying:

“She is dead, dead.”

* * *

3

The Wizard Himaggery

* * *

I WOKE WITH THE HEALER’S HANDS ON MY CHEST, my heart beating as though within them. Some mysterious message seemed to move between my eyes and hers, shadowed against the dawn sky.

She said, “Well, this one lives, and he is no Necromancer. Nor, I’ll warrant, was it any Wizard’s message which sent you to me. Why did you bring me to her?” She gestured with her chin to the place Tossa lay, tight wrapped in her own cloak, a package, nothing more.

“I could not have healed her even had she been alive when I came. She is an Immutable, not open to healing.”

I struggled away from her hands. “I thought, if we brought her outside their land…”

“No, no,” she said impatiently, with a gesture of tired exasperation which I was to see often. “No. It is something they carry in them, as we carry our talents in us. Not all of them have it, but this one was armored against any such as I.”

“You could tell? Even with her dead?”

“Newly dead. If I had had great strength, and if she had not been what she was¾well, it might have been done. But, she was what she was. And you are what you are, which is not a Necromancer from Himaggery’s Demesne.”

Chance stepped forward to offer her a cup of tea, his old head cocked to one side like that of a disheveled bird, eyes curious as a crow’s. He made explanation and apology. I felt no pride at all in the trick I’d managed, but the Healer seemed slightly amused by it, in a weary way. I would have been amused, perhaps, if it had worked. As it was, I felt only empty.

“What happened to me?” I asked.

“It was as though you had been the girl herself,” the Healer answered. “Arrow shot, heart wounded. But, there was no mark on you. Were you close kin? No, of course not. Stupid of me. She was an Immutable. What was she to you?”

I didn’t answer for I didn’t know. The moment passed. What had Tossa been to me? Chance murmured something by way of identification of her, a guide, a mere acquaintance, daughter of the governor of the Immutables (at which Silkhands drew breath). What had she been to me? I was terrified, for I could remember what she had been but felt nothing at all, nothing. The Healer caught my look and laid her hands upon me. Then it was all back, the agony of loss, the terror of death.

“Will you bear it?” she asked. “Or, shall I heal it?” In that time it seemed an ultimate horror that I could be healed of the pain while Tossa lay unmourned. I said:

“Let me bear it¾if I can.” I was not certain I could. They carried her body back to the edge of the trees, wrapped well against birds and beasts, and buried it under a cairn, leaving a message there to her father for those who would come searching. Chance trembled at the thought of that man’s anger following us; the Immutables were said to be terrible in wrath. We went off to the ruins as I wept and ached and drew breaths like knives into me. She had been a girl, only a girl. She had been. She was not. I could not understand a world in which this could be true and the pain of it so real. I did not know her at all; I was her only mourner. This was more horrible than her death.