The End of the Game Read Online Free PDF

deep earth and old mold lay in the place, and a green ooze covered the wall. Here the light lay upon the ceiling, reflected upward, wavering, a ghost light, gray and uncertain, lighting only the stone in a ceaseless, agitated motion, without peace.
    I looked at that watery light for a long time before climbing back up to the room where they waited. Murzy nodded to me once more, not failing to notice the stains of slime on my hands, falling into the common folk nursery talk they often used when it suited them.
    “Tha’s been adown the deeps? Nasty down there.”
    “I’ve been discovering window magics, Murzy. It came to me all at once.”
    “Well, if it comes at all, it comes all at once.”
    I sat down at Murzy’s feet, suddenly adrift from the possession of knowing, the certainty of action. I knew, yes, but what was it I knew? “Different,” I said to her, feeling my way. “Different windows. Magic, because they have an out and an in, because they are linkages of different kinds. Because they are built. Because they are dreamed through and looked through. But—something more, I guess ...”
    “Well, there’s actually going through a window, isn’t there? Or calling someone through a window. Or summoning.”
    “Summoning?” I thought about that. Summoning. Through windows. Of course. “If one summoned through a window—if one did—what answered the summons would be different, depending on the window, wouldn’t it?” I wasn’t sure about this, and yet it made a certain kind of sense. I might have summoned something into the dungeon very different from a thing I could summon into this room now.
    “Think of calling to a lover,” said Margaret Foxmitten dreamily, her needle flashing in the sun. “Calling from this room. Think of calling something from the dungeon. Think of summoning a presence. Into this room. Into the dungeon.”
    “Ah,” I said, getting some misty idea of what they were getting at. “If I ... if I wanted to summon something frightening or horrid, I’d call something out of the dungeon through that high, watery window. And I would lead it in again through the open portcullis.”
    “You could do that,” said Bets. “Or you could find the tiny, square window which looks out through an iron grille over the pit where ancient bones were dropped. You might call something in through that window more dreadful still.”
    “But,” said Murzy, ‘suppose you wanted to summon Where Old Gods Are?” Where Old Gods Are was the name of a very powerful spell they had taught me.
    “I would summon through this window, here,” I said, opening the shutters and looking out on the peaceful pastures and the blowing green of leaves.
    “Good,” said Murzy, packing up her work. “Think about that.”
    I thought about it for some time, putting bits and pieces of it in place in my head. Not all of it connected to other things I knew, but some of it did. By that time it was dark, so we returned to Schooltown and the Festival.
    So, came Festival morning and they decked me out like the Festival Horse, all ribbons. Murzy had given me a new blue tunic with a cape to match, and Bets Battereye spent most of the previous evening braiding my hair wet so it would wave. “We want you to be a credit to us,” she said, yanking bits of hair into place. I thought it unlikely I’d be much credit to them bald, which is what it felt like, but I’d learned that uncomplaining silence was best in dealing with the dams. Come morning, the hair was brushed out into a wavy cloud, then they dressed me up and told me to stay in the room and stay clean until they came for me. So I pulled a chair over to the sill, and opened the casements wide. I could see people going by, and it put me in a fever of anticipation, but nothing would hurry them so I spent the time practicing summons and distraints.
    It was a good window for summoning, broad and low, with a wide sill overhanging a fountain-splashed courtyard. Smell of water on the