“Certain things.” He showed them to me. They were stored in a back room of the stone house, strange things, crystal linkages, wires, boards on which wires and crystals together made patterns full of winking lights which told me nothing. They reminded me of something … something. Suddenly I had it. “Riddle. Long ago—ah, not long ago. About a year. Mertyn sought to protect me from being eaten up in a Game. His servant, Nitch, sewed a thing into my tunic, a thing of wires and beads, a thing like these things. If you would know of them, ask Mertyn.”
“We have done. It was Nitch who knew the doing of it, not Mertyn. Nitch has gone, gone in the night without a word.”
“Vanished? Like the others?”
“No. Simply gone. Have you heard of ‘magicians’?”
Where had I heard of… yes. “Gamesmaster Gervirnse. He said the little blue Gamesmen were made by magicians, west somewhere. I had not heard of magicians before, save as we all have. At Festivals, doing tricks with birds and making flowers appear out of nothing.”
“I do not think a Festival magician made these.” He shut the door upon them and led me back to the table before the fire. I knew he would ask me again. I wanted to refuse. How could I refuse? Oh, Gamelords, in what guise might the spirit of Mandor rise to greet the eidolon of Dorn?
“By Towering Tamor, Riddle, you ask a hard thing.”
“I know. But it is said your Talent is great. I would not ask it, save you come so fortuitously to our need. I thought of it when I saw your mask, at first, and I would not ask not if I thought it endangered you.”
How could I tell him that it did endanger me? It sickened me, yes. Brought nightmares and horrors, but endangerment? Well, I would lose no blood nor flesh over it. Perhaps that was the only endangerment which counted. Riddle’s daughter, Tossa, had lost her life in aiding me. I could not refuse him.
“In the morning,” I begged. “Not at night.”
“Certainly, in the morning,” he agreed. I might just as well have done it in the dark for all the sleep I had.
We went to the pit in the gray dawn. They had not laid Mandor with his ancestors and predecessors in the catacombs beneath the fortress, and I was thankful of that. There the ghosts were as thick as fleas on a lazy dog, and I had no wish to raise a host on this day. No, Mandor lay beneath the sod in a kind of declivity a little to the north of the walls, a place fragrant and grassy, silent except for the sigh of wind in the dark firs which bounded it. Riddle let me go into the place alone, staying well away from me in order that his own, strange “Talent” not impede mine… or Dorn’s. As I left him, he said, “We need to know whence these things came. What their purpose is. By whom made. Can you ask these things?”
I tried to explain. “Riddle, I have not heretofore questioned phantoms to know what knowledge they may have. Those discarnate ones I raised on this land before were ancient, long past human knowledge, only creatures of dust and hunger, fetches to my need.”
“It is said that Necromancers are full of subtlety.”
“I will be as subtle as I can.” Though it would be Dorn being subtle, rather than Peter. I took the little Gamesman into my hand, fingers finding it at once in the pouch as though it had struggled through the crowd to come into my grasp. He came into me like heat, burning my skin at first, then scalding deeper and deeper, nothing wraithy or indistinct about it, rather a man come home into a familiar place. I was not surprised when he greeted me, “Peter.”
“Dorn,” I whispered. Before, I had been fearful. This time I was less so, and perhaps this accounted for my courtesy to him, as though he were my guest. I explained what we were to do, and he became my tutor.