The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper part one

I had spoken too soon. The sound of the animals grew nearer, and we waited, poised to run. As I rose to my feet, I caught the string of my pouch on a stone and it snapped. Some half-dozen of the tiny Gamesmen fell to the floor. I felt for them with my hands, cursing the darkness, gathering them up one by one. I had heard one of them fall to my left, groped for it, found it at last and gripped it tightly just as a beam of light went by the entrance to the tomb chamber out of which our alcove opened. It grew warm in my grasp, wanner, hot. Almost I dropped it, then opened my hand to find it shining in the dark, the tiny Necromancer glowing like a small star on my palm.

I closed my hand to hide the light. It spoke to me. It said, “I am Dorn, Raiser of the Dead, Master of all my kind…”A pattern was there, complex as a tapestry, knotted and interwoven, vast and ramified as root and branch of a mighty tree. It did not wait for me to Read it or take it. It flowed into me and would have done even if I had tried to stop it or dam it away. Silkhands gasped, for the Gamespiece shone between my fingers so that the flesh seemed transparent. Far away was the yammer of voices and animals. I only half heard it as I dropped the piece back into the pouch. It was no longer glowing.

The searchers were returning. They paused at the entrance to the tomb room and began to come inside. I heard Huld calling to them from a distance. “Search every room. Mark every corridor to show you have searched…” They could not fail to see us if they came inside as those obedient forms began to do, long shadows reaching ahead of them in the torchlight. Something within me sighed, deeply.

Between us and the searchers were seven tombs, cubes of marble set with golden crowns. Here lay some past rulers of Bannerwell, some Princes or Kings of time long gone. I sighed once more, the Dorn pattern within me beginning to Read time, back and back again, taking measure from the stone in which the dead Kings lay, back into their lives, taking up their dust, their bones, the rotted threads in which they were clad, making all whole again as though living, to rise up, up from the sepulchre into the air, a shade, a spirit, a ghastly King peering down upon these intruders out of shadowy eyes, speaking with a voice in which the centuries cried like lost children in a barren place, “Who comes, who comes, who comes…”

Beside me Silkhands hid her face and screamed silently into her hands. Before me the searchers drew up, eyes wide, each mouth stretched into a rictus of fear. The fustigars cowered, and the spirit confronted them, “Who comes, who comes, who comes,” as yet another rose beside him, and then one more, and yet again and again.

The searchers fled and the spirit heads began to turn toward the place we hid. Within me came the sigh, and Dorn let them rest once more. Now I knew why Dazzle had so feared the threat of her dead. These had been no dead of mine, and yet I feared, for out of these had come a hungering and a thirst which my life would not have slaked. One who raised these dead raised terror. And yet, even as I knew this, I knew that Dorn could hold them so they did no harm, or loose them, as Dorn would.

I comforted Silkhands, blindly, babbling. “Himaggery told me to keep the Gamespieces safe. To keep them to myself. Well did he say so. I wish I had buried them back once more in the earth.”

“We are alive,” she whispered, practical and fearful at once. “I would rather be alive, even sweating like this. Having seen death, I would rather be alive.”

“I can raise them up again, if we need to…”

“Not now,” she begged. “I am so tired. I have been afraid for so long. Not now.”