Free The End of the Game by Sheri S. Tepper Page B

Valley between our mountains and Tarnost—the Demesne of King Prionde and Valearn the Ogress. I was far enough north not to fear from the Ogress of Tarnost. I thought. It did not occur to me then that she might go elsewhere.
    Well, tic-tac, front or back, dark or bright, left or right, fast or slow, here we go. I picked east. It seemed shorter.
    So warmed, rested, fed, we set out. Though I had never been allowed to have a real horse before, I could mark definite advantages over Misquick. This one didn’t stumble, didn’t fall down, and didn’t stand with his head down refusing to move the way Misquick often did. He looked intelligently at the way we were headed and picked a simple, sure-footed way along it. I thanked him for this, which seemed to please him, and we went sedately along. Which left me free to think about other things.
    I chose to think about the old gods. Prompted by Murzy’s chest tapping, probably. The star-eye was a symbol of one of the old gods, one of the elder people of the world. Not the True Game world, the whole world, which went on beyond the boundaries of the True Game in all directions, to the Southern Sea, the Glistening Sea, the jungles of the north, and even beyond those. Tess Tinder-my-hand had an old, old rhyme:
    Bright the Sun Burning,
    Night Will Come Turning,
    Warm Fire Is Sparkening,
    Sleep Brings a Darkening,
    Bitter Tears Falling,
    Lovers Come Calling,
    Egg in the Hollow,
    Hatching to Follow,
    Mothwings Go Spinning,
    End and Beginning,
    Inward Is Quiet,
    Dream Chains to Tie It,
    Silence and Shadow,
    Music and Meadow,
    Eye of the Star,
    Where Old Gods Are.
    Each line of the verse was a spell. Egg in the Hollow was a hiding spell. Music and Meadow was a summoning of the deep dwellers used in bridge or tree magic sometimes. There were hundreds of couplets if one knew them all. Some weren’t used often. Hatching to Follow was a pregnancy spell, for instance, and it wasn’t often used. Though each line is a spell, there’s more to it than that. It has meaning in groups of lines—if you look at different groups, you can see how they fit together—and as a whole, too. Taken as a whole, Tess said it meant the old gods held it all together, in balance, so that everything had a place: fire, water, life, death, earth, and sky—everything. And everyone. I used to comfort myself with that sometimes at night when everyone had been after me all day and it didn’t seem there was any place for me at all. Then I’d sing, “Silence and Shadow, Music and Meadow, Eye of the Star” to myself until I went to sleep.
    So, I had said, if it had all been so nicely balanced when the old gods were around, where were they now?
    “Lost,” said Sarah, sadly.
    “Betrayed,” said Margaret.
    “Imprisoned,” said Cat. “The deep lookers and far studiers say that. Imprisoned. Locked up. No one knows where.”
    “If I were a god,” I had said to Cat Candleshy, “I would not allow myself to be locked up.”
    “Perhaps they didn’t know what was happening until it was too late,” said Cat. “Perhaps they were great, slow beings who did not imagine that any creature would do such a thing. And perhaps those who did it didn’t know it was gods they were shutting up. Each time they may have thought it was something else, like a hurricane or a thunderstorm or even a plague of gobblemoles. I rather think things like that were the ... the vocabulary of the old gods. As well as being their identity.”
    Cat talked like that sometimes. Margaret said something once about Cat having been a Gamesmistress in a School, though she could not have meant exactly that. One would have to be Gamesman caste to be a Gamesmistress. Perhaps Margaret meant another kind of teacher. When I asked her, though, she refused to discuss it. I did ask Cat about something that confused me, however. “Cat, I’ve never heard anyone speak about old gods except the dams. I never heard anyone in the Demesne speak of it, nor anyone in