Bright the sun burning, Night will come turning, Mothwings go spinning, End and beginning, Eye of the star, Where Old Gods are. Players, take your places! The Land itself calls Game!
"I'll need your help. Come night and the Oracle again, I'm going to try the final couplet." "Jinian," Murzy breathed while Dodie looked white-eyed at me. "Dangerous." "And fatal not to," I said, still smiling at them all... I wove by forest and meadow, branch and leaf. I wove by stream and pool, by river and fall. I wove by cloud and air, by thunder and sunset glow. I wove by depths of the earth, rock and gem, glittering ores and crystals blooming in the dark, old bone and new. Beside me the others wove as well... "And all within sound of my voice or reach of the wind," I cried, thrusting my voice like a Sending, like a magic spear, driving it upward. "And all within sound of my voice or lick of the wave, or all within sound of my voice or stretch of the soil, or all within sound of my voice where green grows and leaf springs up. Named or unnamed, silent or speaking. Let this message be brought, By the Eye of the Star, Where Old Gods Are!"
I am called Jinian Footseer by some. By some, Jinian Star-Eye. And by some, the Wizard Jinian. One or two call me Dervish Daughter. On thinking it over, I decided I had been right all along. Everything I had told Peter was true. All the evidence pointed in one way and one way only. I felt as I had felt so long ago, travelling toward Bleer with Peter, when he put the clues to a mystery in my hands and asked me to make sense of it. Now, as then, all the pieces were in my hands, or my head. The great flitchhawk who had granted me a boon in Chimmerdong, and the d'bor wife, and the gobblemole. The story of Lite Star and the Daylight Bell. The Oracle. The Eesties. Yellow crystals and blue, separated by a thousand years of time. My illness in Chimmerdong, the diagnoses of Bartelmy of the Ban, the Dervish, my mother. All these. No matter how I turned them, there was no other explanation. Could anything be done?
The son of Marvin Manyshaped is back, so let the players of the True Game beware. The giants are stalking, the Shadowpeople gather, and the Wizard's Eleven are trapped in their dreams. The final game begins. "Sheri S. Tepper is a fantasy phenomenon!"--Locus.
In her 35th novel, science fiction master Sheri S. Tepper boldly weaves together the storylines of eleven of her previous works—from King’s Blood Four (1983) to The Waters Rising (2010). In Fish Tails, two of Sheri S. Tepper’s beloved characters—Abasio and Xulai (A Plague of Angels and The Waters Rising)—and their children travel from village to village scattered across the sparsely populated land of Tingawa. They are searching for others who might be interested in adopting their sea-dwelling lifestyle. Along their journey they encounter strange visitors from the far-off world of Lom, characters from Tepper’s nine-book True Game series of novels—Mavin Manyshaped, Jinian Star-eye, and Silkhands the Healer—all of whom have been gathered up by an interfering, time-traveling, rule-breaking do-gooder to do one last good deed on earth before its metamorphosis is complete. For the waters are rising and will soon engulf the entire planet, transforming it utterly and irrevocably.
The machine that controlled all life wouldn't tolerate any interference. People who refused to be regulated had to be disposed of - isolated, driven insane, murdered. A small group of men had dedicated themselves to fighting this Frankenstein of man's technological achievement. Secretly they laid plans to destroy the machine and all its worksincluding the millions of people who had accepted their robot-like existence. Either way, the human race was doomed!
In the lands of the True Game, your lifelong identity will emerge as you play. Prince or Sorcerer, Armiger or Tragamor, Demon or Doyen... Which will it be?
When Marianne's parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America - and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . . Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world - for there is magic in Marianne's blood, and magic in her soul. And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes. Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper's acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.