20-04-2023 - Reformatting of an earlier version

  Quester’s Endgame

  Diadem, Book #9

  Jo Clayton

  DAW BOOKS INC.

  “WELL, WELL, IT’S MUD-FACE. SO YOU SQUIRMED YOUR WAY HERE.”

  Aleytys turned slowly, trying to control the surge of fear and anger that shook her when she heard that deep fluid voice, a voice she’d heard only one time waking, a thousand times since in nightmare.

  “Mud,” he said. “Look at that, all of you. Look at what you want to call Vryhh. I will not, I will not have that slime call itself Vryhh. I will NOT.” Silence from all the Vrya in the dome. “To the death, Mud,” Kell said into that silence. “I declare war between us. I declare that you and any who try to help you, Mud, will die at the hands of me and mine.”

  Mastering her own rage, Aleytys sucked in a breath, let it out. “To the death, cousin,” she said at last ….

  Jo Clayton has written:

  The Diadem Saga

  Diadem From The Stars

  Lamarchos

  Irsud

  Maeve

  Star Hunters

  The Nowhere Hunt

  Ghosthunt

  The Snares Of Ibex

  Quester’s Endgame

  The Duel Of Sorcery Series

  Moongather

  Moonscatter

  Changer’s Moon

  Others

  A Bait Of Dreams

  Drinker Of Souls

  Who’s Who And What’s What

  For old readers of the series who are obviously folk of intelligence and taste but alas not Mento-the-Marvels capable of memorizing telephone books and regurgitating the contents on cue, for new readers who are courageously plunging into the ninth (and last) book about Aleytys and the diadem, here’s a combination orientation and memory jogger.

  ALEYTYS: Born in a mountain valley called the vadi Raqsidan on a world called Jaydugar, raised in an agrarian, preindustrial culture. Psi-empath and translator, healer, flamethrower and worrier. She’s had one child, a son, had him stolen from her before he was a year old, gave him up again when he was about four. She acquired the diadem after she ran from a barbecue where she was going to be the roastee. In her travels from world to world, while she was searching for her mother, she was (among other things) sold as a slave to provide meat for a wasp queen’s egg, then she rode a smuggler’s ship as his bedmate and translator. Finally she got a steady job with Hunters Inc on Wolff. In the bits of time left over from her struggles to survive and go on with her search for her mother, she got to know more about the diadem and the entities trapped within it, acquiring three live-in friends and critics. Sometimes it got very crowded inside her skull.

  DIADEM, the: An artifact from an ancient extinct civilization. Both a trap and an instrument of great flexibility and power. A focus for psi-forces, a prison for the self-aware part of the wearer once the wearer’s body is dead. Gold-wire lilies with jewel hearts set on a chain of flat gold links. Once it’s on someone’s head it can’t be removed until that person’s dead or until it’s temporarily deactivated. It swims easily from reality to reality, invisible until its powers are called on. When Aleytys first acquired it, she had almost no control over it; as she learned to know those within it, her control increased but was never complete.

  HARSKARI: The first to be caught. Jealous of her skills, angry at the breakup of their relationship, an ex-lover constructed the diadem and gave it to Harskari saying it was a peace offering. As soon as she put it on, he killed her and threw her body into a volcano, where it burned to ash. The diadem with her consciousness trapped within was untouched. Her lover’s revenge. In the course of time, the diadem was ejected from the volcano during an eruption, and lay sealed inside a clump of lava for eons until the working of wind and water eroded it loose. All this time Harskari was awake and aware of the nothing around her, hanging on to her sanity by the fingernails she didn’t have. Civilizations rose and fell around her. The sun went nova and ashed the life off the world. And still she was awake, aware. More time passed. A wandering singer happened by, landed to do some repair work on the rusty cobbled-together wreck she was flying world to world. She found the diadem, dusted it off, was enchanted by its loveliness and set it on her head. And Harskari finally had some company.

  SHADITH: Singer and poet, the last of her kind. The second trapped and the second freed. In the early days when Aleytys was still ignorant of any technology more complicated than a water mill, Shadith provided instruction and information and occasionally took control of Aleytys’s body and talents to deal with things that were dangerous mysteries to the mountain girl. Shadith is now installed in the body of a young girl, a hawk rider killed in a skirmish on Ibex. Shadith prodded Aleytys into repairing the body and sliding her into it, stabilizing her in the emptied flesh. She looks about fourteen, a slight energetic girl with cafe-au-lait skin, chocolate eyes, brown-gold hair a riot of tiny curls. In her original body—different appearance, different species—she crashed on a primitive world and lay moldering in the ruins of her ship for several millennia until one of the natives happened on her ship and took the diadem from her crumbling skull.

  SWARDHELD: The third of the trapped entities. Raised in his father’s smithy, meant to follow his father’s trade as swordsmith and armorer. Driven from that by his restless, rebellious nature (a repellent brat, he told Aleytys), he joined a mercenary band so he could eat, rose to be companion and war leader to a shrewd and devious man who managed to put together a small but thriving empire, had to flee when the man was poisoned, discovered the diadem, came back out of the mountains to avenge his friend and commander, became an emperor of sorts himself with the help of the diadem, was poisoned in his turn and joined the other trapped spirits. On a world called Nowhere he was sucked out of the diadem by a floating ghost (a creature that preyed on life force), but when the ghost was distracted by an attack from Aleytys, he broke free of it and slipped into the body of a man just stripped of life. Supported by Aleytys and the others, he managed to spark new life in the abandoned flesh and found himself embodied for the first time in millennia. This accident and its outcome showed Aleytys that it was possible for Harskari and Shadith to acquire bodies of their own if they wanted them and found suitable ones.

  RMOAHL, the: The diadem lay in their treasure vault for generations until it was stolen by Miks Stavver. They are intelligent, un-aggressive, communal, hierarchical, spiderish beings. And very very patient. They are fanatical about their treasures; what they have, they intend to keep. They will go to just about any lengths to regain what is lost, though they avoid causing pain or injury almost as fanatically; their fearsome appearance is to some degree deceptive; though they will fight effectively if driven to it.

  STAVVER, MIKS: According to him, he’s the best thief in known space. A compulsive gambler. Challenged by impossibilities. The only way to steal anything from the RMoahl and make a profit on it was to get rid of it very quickly indeed; the RMoahl hounds would go after the object and forget the thief. His plans went seriously awry, he crashed on Jaydugar, lost the diadem to a trio of local witches who passed it to Aleytys, collected Aleytys and got them both offworld. He was her lover for a while and later, after they parted, played surrogate father to her son when the boy ran away from home. Gambling fever eventually did him in when he wagered money he didn’t have with beings who had no sense of humor.

  SHAREEM: A Vryhh. Aleytys’s mother. Caught in the delirium of a swamp fever, she crashed on Jaydugar; too sick to defend herself, she was enslaved and sold to the Azdar, Aleytys’s father. She recovered from the fever to find herself pregnant. As soon as Aleytys was able to manage without her, she left a letter telling her daughter about her and how to find her, then wangled her way offworld, back to the life she was leading before the disastrous days on Jaydugar.

  KELL: A Vryhh. He loathes the thought of a half-breed Vryhh and has tried before to destroy Aleytys. He maneuvered reactionary, power-seeking Watukuu into secretly rebelling and trying to take over a colony world in order to use it as a base to attack the government of the homeworld; then he maneuvered that homeworld government into hiring Hunters Inc to deal with the rebellion. He played games with the mind of Canyli Heldeen, the director of Hunters Inc, so that she assigned Aleytys to the Hunt. He captured Aleytys and started to torment her, but with the backing of the Three, she defeated him, then let her need to heal dictate her actions, something she was sorry for almost as soon as it was done.

  LINFYAR: Aleytys went to Ibex to find Kenton Esgard; according to the instructions her mother left in that letter, he could put the two of them in touch. When Aleytys arrived, she found his daughter Hana in charge of his house and business while he was roaming over Ibex, driven by his need to extend his life, hunting a place called Sil Evareen where men were supposed to live forever. In her search for him, shortly after Shadith acquired her body, Aleytys came across a small boy running away from home and castration. He had an extraordinarily beautiful soprano voice and his owner wanted to keep it unchanged. He is about nine years old, covered head to toe with short, very soft mottled brown fur. He was born without eyes, only faint furry hollows where they would have been. His mobile pointed faun’s ears can hear sounds far beyond the normal range of mammal ears; he has assorted proximity senses that serve him almost as well as sight, and echo location for more distant objects. He learned very early the arts of surviving in a place where children born visibly mutant were put outside the gates once they
were weaned and left to the whims of weather and the hunger of predators. Aleytys means to send him to University where he can get an education and further training in music. He is not enthusiastic about this idea and keeps poking about for some ways to postpone (preferably forever) such a dreary outcome to his adventures.

  Wolff

  warning bell

  distance and direction obscure

  Aleytys stepped from the cradle lift and shivered in the raw wind. She’d returned to spring mud and damp spring bluster, winter having come and gone while she walked across Ibex. Behind her she heard Linfyar’s complaining chatter as he felt that wind in spite of his fur and the blanket he had wrapped about him, heard Shadith’s impatient replies. Smiling a little, she started for the terminal building across the stained and cracking metacrete. Wolff’s starport was kept deliberately crude and unwelcoming, only a rough field with a few battered cradles for ships and shuttles, a squat mud-colored terminal whose sole grace was a steep roof where dark red tiles rose to a peak; the Wolfflan wanted no outsiders tempted to stay and put pressure on scarce resources.

  When she rounded the corner of the terminal, Aleytys saw Canyli and Tamris Heldeen standing beside a flitter, the icy wind blowing their coats and scarves into a shapeless flurry about them. Grey wasn’t there. Is he still furious with me? She shortened her stride, excitement and anticipation beginning to drain out of her.

  Head’s smile was wide and warm. “There’s a prance in your walk. You found what you wanted.” She held the back door open, stood watching with quiet interest as Shadith herded Linfyar inside and settled beside him. Tamris followed them in and sat beside Shadith.

  Aleytys slipped into the forward seat, wriggled around and sighed as Head took her place at the console. “I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve got another Hunt I can’t refuse,” she said, an amiable weariness in her voice. “I’ve got a visitor coming.”

  “No … um … not a Hunt …”

  Aleytys turned to stare at Head, surprised by the hesitation and uncertainty in the words.

  “You were gone longer than I expected.”

  “Ibex was complicated. Where’s Grey?”

  “Hunt.”

  Aleytys made a soft annoyed sound. “I thought he was done with all that.”

  “He was restless, needed a distraction. And Hagan was needling him. He thought he’d better get out before he lost his temper and made things worse for us.”

  “Hardheaded idiot.” Aleytys moved restlessly. “When is he due back?”

  “Seven months ago.”

  “What?”

  “He’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” It came out scratchy. Her throat was suddenly dry.

  “Wait till we get to your house. The reports are there.”

  “Right.” She looked at her hands, expecting to see them tremble, surprised that they lay still on her thighs. She pressed down hard on the long muscles. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Aleytys slid down in the seat. She couldn’t comprehend it. Seven months. Grey …. She stirred restlessly. “What’s doing with my home share?”

  “Hanging fire.” Head went silent as she edged the flier between two peaks of the angular and austerely beautiful mountains ringing the cup that held the port, mocking the mud and ugliness of the field. “We’ve just finished a fight over Dristig’s seat in the Forsaemal. I wanted Grey on the Hunters board with me and Hagan knew it. He and his toadies started a nasty campaign against Grey. And you.” Head chuckled. “Backfired on him. You weren’t here.” Another chuckle. “Maybe the best thing you ever did for me. Wolfflan don’t like backbiting. He did drive Grey into taking the Hunt, thought he’d won, but we ran Sybille instead. He could handle Grey, make him explode and say things he wouldn’t otherwise, but Sybille tied him in knots, made that snerp Lukkit he was pushing look like a halfwit, couldn’t chew and walk at the same time. She took Dristig’s seat in a sweep.” She was almost cheerful now, talking with an ease missing at the beginning of the flight. “Hagan’s the next to go to the Wolfflan for confirmation.” Her nose twitched. “I’d appreciate it if you were on Hunt when that happens. It’s going to be a bastard of a fight.”

  “Grey?”

  “If he’s back by then. I know I promised not to push you, Lee ….” She took the flitter up over a skim of clouds, shot a questioning half-smile at Aleytys, her thick pewter brows raised over rounded eyes. With a self-mocking shake of her head, she punched in the course for Aleytys’s house. “We’ll have your home share put through by then. Sybille’s working on it.”

  “Thanks.” Aleytys settled her head against the rest and stared up at the flitter’s roof, seeing instead the leggy black orb of the RMoahl ship waiting out beyond Teegah’s limit with that cursed patience, that not quite threat. Wanting their diadem. Stavver was luckier than he knew, getting rid of the thing. She wondered briefly what he and Snarl were doing, expecting to feel the familiar loss and longing as she thought of her son. Nothing. Still numb. She was as detached as if she were a ghost riding her own shoulders watching her body perform, pulling its strings.

  The snow had melted around her house, though droppings of dirty white remained where shade was deepest under the trees. The gardens were mud slopping about struggling plants, and in the field by the stream her horses grazed at withered grass just pushing up new green shoots. Head set the flitter down in the paved patio on the south side of the house.

  A fire crackled briskly, driving the unused chill from the sitting room; a pot of cha waited on a table beside a comfortable leather chair. Aleytys felt the numbness break inside her, pain at loss and pleasure at being home mixing uneasily in her. She dropped into the chair and stared into the flames, quivering all over, fighting to keep control. Tamris poured the tea and passed the cups around. She tapped Aleytys on the shoulder. “Lee?”

  Aleytys sucked in a breath, let it out in a ragged sigh. “Please.” She gulped at the cha, and the warmth spreading through her eased some of the shaking. Tamris filled the cup for her again, and she emptied it as quickly as she had the first, then she set the cup aside and turned to face Canyli Heldeen. “Tell me about it.”

  Head touched the fax sheets in her lap, lifted the top sheet, put it back. “He left three weeks after you did. Told me he’d been a fool, that his head was so scrambled he wasn’t up to dealing with Hagan, so he was going to clear out awhile. A clutch of Pajunggs was here, looking for you, as usual, but willing to settle for any Hunter they could get.” She fingered the fax sheets and sighed. “Simple Hunt, a find-and-snatch. Should have taken Grey a couple of weeks, a month at the outside.” She cleared her throat, held out her cup for her daughter to fill, using the time to examine Aleytys, her shrewd light eyes flicking from face to hands and back.

  Aleytys said nothing, sat gazing at the fire, waiting for her to go on.

  Head cleared her throat again, set the cup down. “I didn’t start worrying about him when he was gone a month—sometimes the simple ones turn wild on you. After three months, it wasn’t a question of worrying. The Pajunggs were getting nervous too; they wanted to know what was happening. I sent Ticutt over to Avosing to find out what Grey was up to. First thing he reported was that Grey had got to Keama Dusta—that’s the only city; it’s a colony planet, sparsely settled, just a part of one continent. Anyway, Grey got that far, spent a few days nosing about, then he vanished. Went into the forest and didn’t come out. You know Ticutt; Methodical’s his middle name. He set up a satellite drop, Grey’s ship, sent coded reports to it every night, and a squealer pulsed them over to us. Then he went into the forest as Grey had. And the reports stopped. That was three months ago. Pajunggs been on my back. Very unhappy. But I waited for you. Hagan’s been exercising his tongue, or was until Sybille asked if he was volunteering.”