All three volumes of the GAMEARTH Trilogy

Gamearth: It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

Gameplay: It was written in the Rules—Save the World! Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive. And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

Game’s End: It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

The Gamearth Trilogy Omnibus

Kevin J. Anderson

Kindle Omnibus edition by WordFire Press 2011

http://www.wordfire.com

Gamearth Copyright 1989 WordFire, Inc, Originally published by Signet Books 1989

Gameplay Copyright 1989 WordFire, Inc, Originally published by Signet Books 1989

Game’s End Copyright 1990 WordFire, Inc, Originally published by Signet Books 1990

Gamearth

Gameplay

Game’s End

About Kevin J. Anderson

Other eBooks by WordFire Press

GAMEARTH

Book 1 of the GAMEARTH Trilogy

Kevin J. Anderson

Prologue

Sunday night, like every Sunday night, they played the Game.

Melanie carried four glasses of soda to the table, hating the real-world role of hostess. “We can make popcorn later, if you guys want.” She flipped a strand of brown hair behind her ear and stared at the master map on the table. Gamearth, their beautiful fantasy world. . . .

“Forget popcorn—try my dip instead,” Tyrone said. “Black bean and shrimp this week. And I brought some sesame crackers, too.”

David arrived, late as usual. He stuck the keys from his Mustang in the pocket of his denim jacket. His dark hair looked soft, but his eyes were hard. “We ready to play?” he asked, finding a seat at the table. He bent over to frown at the map and did not say hello. Melanie made him get his own glass of soda.

Her parents had found someplace else to go, as they always did when the group met at Melanie’s house. At first her mother and father had stood on the sidelines to watch, curious and condescending. But the concept of a role-playing game seemed beyond them—where it was all pretend and no one really won or lost. The group played the parts of characters through adventure after adventure in a world created from their own imaginations.

The colorful map beckoned from the table. Flat, with precise hexagonal sections of forest, grasslands, mountains, ocean. She touched the smooth paint and thought of the characters they had played, generation after generation after generation. In her father’s study she had used the computer to generate scores and to keep track of all their characters.

Scott cracked his knuckles. “Hey, Tyrone—you know when geese fly south for the winter, how they always fly in a vee formation, right? And one side of the vee is always longer than the other, right? Why do you suppose that is?”

Tyrone pondered and shrugged. “Why don’t you tell us, Mister Science?”

“Because there’s more geese on that side!”

Tyrone coughed on his own dip. Melanie found Tyrone’s reaction more amusing than the joke itself. Scott blinked behind his glasses, looking proud of himself but baffled, as if he hadn’t considered the joke very funny in the first place.

Their group, the same group for two years, had started out playing with hexagonal graph paper, scrawling haphazard terrain markings with colored pencils. They were playing for fun, for something to do. But Melanie spent a month painting and color-coding each hexagon of terrain with bright acrylics to make a permanent master map on wood. She had looked at real maps to develop geography that made sense, deserts where the weather patterns might leave the air dry, forests where the climate should have been hospitable.

“Everybody’s here. Can we start playing then?” David drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Where were we last week?”

Melanie talked as fast as she could, trying to outrun his impatience. “My characters Delrael and Vailret were just about to go into the swamp terrain to rescue Bryl, their half-Sorcerer friend.” Melanie pointed to the map. “He was captured by an ogre, remember?”

“Well, go ahead and play,” David said.

Melanie looked at him, but he kept his expression neutral. His brown eyes contained no emotion, his face showed no smile whatsoever. Something was bothering him. She didn’t know what it could be, but Melanie thought he might try to take it out on the Game.

She gripped the dice in her hand. Twenty-sided. Eight sided. Six-sided. Four-sided. They seemed to exude a kind of power, so much that she almost dropped them in surprise.

Melanie marked on the graph paper where her characters would begin their movement. She threw the dice.

Always remember this: every character on Gamearth was created by the Outsiders. We exist solely for the amusement of those who Play our world. Our ambitions, our concerns mean nothing—everything is determined by the roll of the dice.”

—The Book of Rules

1. Cesspools of Gairoth

“RULE #1: Always have fun.”

—The Book of Rules

As they crossed the thick black line that separated one hexagon of terrain from the next, the forest suddenly became an oozing swamp. Even the fresh woodland smell changed to the festering dampness of decay.

“Bryl is supposed to be lost somewhere in here?” Vailret promptly sank up to the top of his boot in swamp muck.

His burly cousin Delrael strode over the sharp hexagon line into the swamp, heedless of where he put his foot. He walked confidently, ready for anything. “Good thing friendship runs deep—Bryl wasn’t that much of a Sorcerer.”

Vailret searched for a safer place to step, but it all looked the same to him. His eyes were weak from too much reading in dim rooms, though he found the reading much more interesting than questing from hexagon to hexagon.

“He hasn’t had any training, Del. He’s three times our age, but nobody’s ever taught him worthwhile magic.” He scratched through his spiky blond hair and thought of the manuscripts still waiting to be deciphered, chronologies of legends to be worked out. “You of all people know how important training is.”

The thin mud slurped against Vailret’s boot as he took another step. Running from quest to quest, exploring catacombs, searching for monsters and treasure—it struck him as being juvenile. The world had changed since all that. He wished the Outsiders could amuse themselves by playing more sophisticated games, like hexagon-chess.

Delrael slogged ahead. His leather armor covered broad shoulders, but he wore no helmet to protect his head. Vailret saw bits of forest debris clinging to his cousin’s brown hair from sleeping on the ground the night before. Even on an adventure, Delrael wore his gold rings, badges, and especially the silver belt his father had given him.

Delrael sighed. “About time we had another quest together—it’s been, what, six years? The world is settling down too much. I spend all my time down at the game tables or practicing with the trainees at the Stronghold, and you waste away poring over manuscripts. We should find us a good cave to explore, maybe even an ancient dungeon left over from the early days of the Game.”

Vailret squinted into the hazy air, frowning. “Bryl was looking for the Air Stone, not just wandering around for fun.”

“Well, I wish he’d waited for us to give him some reinforcements—whoever heard of going on a quest by yourself?” Delrael shouldered branches and weeds aside, grumbling. “And now we have to rescue him.”

Delrael had plenty of strength, charisma, and endurance for situations like this. Vailret was by no means weak, but he had trouble doing anything graceful with a broadsword or a battle-axe; and with his weak eyesight, he made a poor archer. He could prove his worth if they needed some serious thinking or planning. He had not been born with any Sorcerer blood, so he could not use magic to defend them.

“Next time we’ll have to teach him to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.” Vailret brushed aside a beard of Spanish moss and followed behind his cousin.

Delrael pushed ahead without slowing. “Come on, we should be able to cross another hex or two before nightfall.”

As the swamp thickened and began to drool with humidity, clouds of starving mosquitoes feasted on the two men. The forest sank in on itself, separated by scattered pools of stagnant water the color of tea. Dusty brown butterflies flitted across the ground.

Wide-boled cypress trees dangled branches like fingers and thrust knobby knees upward as if trying to keep their balance in the muck. Huge pitcher plants, large enough to swallow a man, gaped with wide and colorful mouths, exuding a sweet aroma that made Vailret feel dizzy. Curious, he peered down the gullet of one plant and saw partially digested birds and a dead frog. He stumbled away, breathing deeply to clear his head.

“When is this swamp terrain going to end?” Vailret heaved in a lungful of the thick air. Sweat seemed to hang on him. He thought of his own dwelling with the scented candles lit, with the manuscripts of scribbled folktales stacked up, waiting to be read. . . .

Around midmorning they encountered a stench so overpowering that it hit them like a slap on the face. Vailret pushed his nose into the crook of his elbow.

Delrael blinked his watering eyes. “We have to investigate.”

“Don’t you dare, Del!”

“Anything out of the ordinary. You know how to Play the Game. We can’t just ignore it. Besides, I’m a fighter, remember? We might find Bryl.”

Vailret grumbled to himself. “I’d like to have a talk with whoever wrote the damned Rules.”

Thorns lined the rim of a wide cesspool. Decomposing matter and stagnant water had condensed into one horrible battering ram of smell.

More mammoth pitcher plants clustered near the thornbushes, but the cloying narcotic fragrance did little to abate the cesspool’s miasma. The slime-covered surface of the pool stirred, as if something actually lived within it.

“So, now what do we do?” Vailret asked, covering his nostrils. He spoke in a whisper as the sounds of the swamp hummed and faded into the background. He focused his attention. “Wait, I hear something.”

Delrael cocked his head. “What?”

A rhythmic crashing grew louder, nearing the cesspool. Bom bom bom BAM! Delrael stood up and stared into the forest across from the cesspool until Vailret pulled him down to cover. They watched through the tangled peepholes in the thorns.

Something massive stomped toward the pool, rattled a chain, and grumbled, accompanied by splashing sounds. Vailret blinked his eyes, trying to see more details, squinting until he had a headache.

A burly ogre emerged from the trees, wiping gobs of mud from his dirty fur garments. As he strode forward, the ogre knocked his spiked club against the cypress trunks, keeping his beat and smashing against every fourth trunk. Bom bom bom BAM! The wobbly cypress trees shivered with the impact.

The ogre stood nine feet tall, with muscles big enough for him to break rocks. A nose the size of a potato peeped out from between strands of long black hair like hand-drawn wire. One of the ogre’s eye-sockets was empty, and his pockmarked face sported a drooping overhung lip. Garments of brown furs held themselves together with crude stitches that were popping in many places. His big feet squished swamp mud between his toes.

In his free hand the ogre clasped a rusty iron chain that led to a small dragon like a dog on a leash. A bulky iron collar throttled the dragon’s neck, apparently put on years before and never replaced as the creature grew. The dragon panted and wheezed, lolling a purple forked tongue and looking more like an overgrown crocodile than a fearsome fire-breathing reptile. Two stubby wings stuck upward from its body like arthritic elbows. Many of the dragon’s scales had fallen off, and its pointed teeth were brown and cracked.

“Doesn’t look like much of a dragon,” Delrael said. “Nothing we can’t handle. It’ll be fun.”

Vailret squeezed his eyes shut. He felt his heart leap, then grow cold. “The ogres were supposed to have been wiped out in the Scouring.” Vailret breathed in deeply. His stomach churned, and sweat popped out from his pores. “Your father said he killed them all.”

Vailret felt a bitterness in his voice that surprised even him. He kept seeing visions, ghosts from his childhood. He had only been eight years old, but the sight of the ogre brought all of his memories into razor-sharp focus—

He stood just inside the gate of the Stronghold, a little boy with his mother and his Aunt Fielle. His father Cayon had gone hunting with Uncle Drodanis, Delrael’s father. By the first weeks of spring, everyone in the Stronghold got tired of the old stores buried in the cellars, and fresh meat would make a good feast down at Jorte’s gaming hall. They might even dig up an early barrel of spring cider.

Cayon and Drodanis were always competing with each other, in the true Game spirit—dicing, hunting, weaponry contests. They had adventures that were legendary in the Game lore. But this time Drodanis came back alone. Young Vailret watched his uncle plodding up the path of Steep Hill to reach the Stronghold on top. Drodanis had marched in silent grief through the village, bearing Cayon’s body in his arms, letting the villagers’ questions bounce off him unheard. Young Vailret was afraid, but he kept himself quiet. He didn’t understand.

Aunt Fielle shuddered. Vailret’s mother, Siya, watched in horror. Drodanis did not speak until he had met them at the gates, gently placing Cayon’s body on the ground in front of the already-weeping Siya. Drodanis untied a sack from his waist and tossed the bloated head of an ogre to the dirt.

“I’m going to wipe out all of the ogres,” he said.

Drodanis gathered a small party of the Stronghold’s best trainees, including his wife Fielle, and set off eastward. Two months later another slow procession returned with the heads of five ogres Drodanis and his fighters had slain, along with the bodies of two trainees. . . .

Now, though, the one-eyed ogre stopped in front of the cesspool and looked around, unaware of the two men. The dragon strained against its chain, tongue lolling as it tried to reach the cesspool.

Vailret made fists, as if he were trying to strangle his knuckles. He had only a dagger with him. He wished he could cast a spell that would make the ground open up beneath the ogre’s feet, but he was only human.

Delrael reached forward to clasp his cousin’s shoulder. He squeezed, making it more than just an empty gesture. “What if he’s got Bryl?”

Two weeks before, Vailret had been studying in his rooms at the Stronghold. Several candles burned on his table, and he had all the windows open to let in as much light as possible. Otherwise, Siya would nag him about reading in the dimness and ruining his eyesight further. Vailret disliked the candles because the crumbling old manuscripts were highly flammable.

Old Bryl, the half-breed Sorcerer who lived at the Stronghold, came in to bother Vailret, bored from watching Delrael train his students at the chopping posts or the archery targets. “Nobody’s ever going to read a history of Gamearth, Vailret. Why bother with all this work?”

“It’s important to me.” Vailret looked up at him over the candle. “Don’t be so defeatist all the time.”

Bryl was short and frail-looking. Gray hair and a narrow gray beard stuck out from his head and chin. He wore the scarlet hooded cloak his father Qonnar had given him. At one time, Bryl had claimed the slick and shiny fabric had been woven of the threads from caterpillar cocoons, but nobody in the gaming hall believed him.

Vailret touched his fingertips together and explained to Bryl as if he were lecturing to a child. “Someone should set down the events of the Game. To the Outsiders, we’re just an amusement, adventures to free them from their ennui—everything must be too perfect in their world. But to us, that’s our history. The Game is worth nothing if we don’t learn from previous turns.”

Bryl puttered around with the artifacts and manuscripts on Vailret’s table. The young man eyed him, exasperated. “What do you want, Bryl? Go play a game or something.”

The half-Sorcerer shrugged and picked up a worn scrap of sheepskin. On the rough side, tiny letters had been painstakingly scratched into the surface. “What’s this?”

Vailret removed the scrap from Bryl’s fingers. He brushed at smudges the old man had left on the edges. “Please be careful—do you know how much we have to pay Scavengers for any one of these scraps?”

“I’m sorry.” Bryl didn’t seem to care. “Well, what does it say?”

Vailret sighed and put his elbow on the table. “If I tell you, will you leave me in peace for awhile?”

“Of course,” Brylmon looked away, uneasy. He mumbled, “I thought you’d be glad I’m showing interest.”

Vailret scowled, mostly at himself, and tried to cover up his expression by studying the manuscript. “It tells how the four elemental Stones were created as a parting gift from the old Sorcerers before they went on the Transition. They made one Stone with special powers for each element—Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. The ones who stayed behind were supposed to use the Stones as weapons to protect the humans and half-breeds left on Gamearth after the rest of the Sorcerers had gone.”

“Where are the Stones now?” Bryl asked. He reached for one of the other scraps of writing, but Vailret deftly moved it out of his reach.

“Why don’t you pay attention to things like that, Bryl? How many full-blooded Sentinels are left in the world?” He held up three fingers, flaunting them in front of the half-Sorcerer’s face. “Enrod, who lives far to the east in the rebuilt city of Tairé—he holds the Fire Stone. And Sardun keeps the Water Stone in his Ice Palace to the north. He lives with his daughter.”

Bryl narrowed his eyes. “My parents never taught me anything like that—they killed themselves when I was a child. As you’re so quick to point out, there aren’t very many Sentinels left. Who was going to teach me?” He waited in silence for a moment, then pointed to the manuscript. “Well, what about the other two Stones?”

“As near as I can tell,” Vailret considered the scratches on the leather, searching for details, “the Air Stone and the Earth Stone were both lost during the battles. The magic in the Stones helped us wipe out a lot of surviving monsters, but now those Stones are gone.”

He waited for Bryl to remember his promise and leave, but the little half-breed sat watching the dancing flame on the candle. He seemed hypnotized by the trails of wax crawling down the candlestick. Then Bryl snapped his gaze away from the flame and stared eastward with glassy eyes, as if looking through the walls of Vailret’s dwelling.

He said in a distracted voice, “I have to go now.” Muttering something about the Air Stone, he stumbled toward the door. Vailret watched him, baffled, and turned back to his work.

Next morning, Bryl was gone from the Stronghold. He had left a clumsily scrawled note behind. Vailret could imagine the length of time it had taken him to remember how to write all the letters.

“Think I know where AIR STONE is. Vision yesterday while listening to V. tell story. East, 10–12 hexes. Swamp terrain (?). Stone is in eye of skull, on pile of bones. Adventure and treasure. Going to get it.”

Bryl’s father had been a full Sorcerer, and his mother was a half-breed herself, but they had died when he was young, many, many years before, and no other Sorcerer had given Bryl full instruction on how to use his magic. Not that Bryl ever seemed concerned about it. And he had seen a glimpse of where he could find the lost Air Stone. He could have the Sorcerous power immediately, with no hard training. Maybe Bryl thought it would make up for the magic he had never been able to use before. Bryl, a man who couldn’t care less where the Stone came from or what its history was—

Vailret resented the way the Rules excluded him from such revelations. Being only a human, he had to sweat over old manuscripts, sift through folktales and remembrances, cramming his brain with details he hoped would come together. Bryl had such power handed to him on a serving platter. If the half-Sorcerer brought the precious Air Stone back to the Stronghold, Vailret could never use its magic, not even to study it.

Since then, two weeks had passed, and still Bryl did not return. Delrael decided to go find him, and Vailret followed.

At the cesspool the dragon bounded forward, jerking the ogre’s arm and nearly pulling him off his feet. The ogre grumbled and kicked the dragon, catching one of its back ridges with his bare toe.

Unconcerned, the dragon stopped at the brink of the cesspool and waited as the ogre scooped at the surface, exposing fresh bilge water.

“Aww, it shore be hot, Rognoth,” he rumbled at the dragon, wiping his brow with a muddy finger. The ogre bent to scoop up a handful of the thick water, slurping it with satisfaction on his face. Green scum ran between his fingers to plop back into the water.

Vailret winced.

Rognoth the dragon bent to lap up some of the water as the ogre straightened and pointed a proud finger at himself. “Ahhhh! Gairoth knows how to keep his cesspool!” The dragon’s tail twitched like a convulsing python.

“Ogres aren’t supposed to be able to talk!” Vailret whispered.

“Maybe he’s part human,” Delrael said. “A human breeding with an ogre? That’s disgusting.”

Vailret scowled. “The Outsiders have a sick sense of humor sometimes.”

The ogre rubbed his hands together, as if getting down to business. He raised the club over his head, bringing it down with a crash on the edge of the pool. A chain of shock-wave ripples marched across the coated surface of the water. Gairoth slammed his club down again and again, sending thunderclaps through the swamp.

“Wake up, you!” the ogre bellowed at the cesspool. The dragon bolted for the forest, slinking close to the ground, but Gairoth jerked on his chain. Rognoth whined miserably.

The ogre grinned as a translucent, spine-covered tentacle reached up from below the surface. The tentacle coiled in the air, reaching for Gairoth, but the ogre bent back out of the way. The pool stirred again, and more thin tentacles whipped in the air. The body sack of a gigantic jellyfish, hemispherical and milky translucent, broke through the scum. A lumpy ridge crowned the creature, speckled with dots of color. Deep inside the thing’s skin, a splash of scarlet outlined a small human form.

Vailret stiffened, startled. Bryl! He tugged on his cousin’s arm, and Delrael nodded.

The jellyfish churned in the water, waving tentacles. “In you go, Rognoth!” Gairoth caught the dragon as he made one last attempt to flee, then hurled him into the cesspool with a grunt of effort. The dragon paddled frantically back toward the shore.

The tentacled thing ejected the form of Bryl, apparently seeing more interesting prey. Gairoth rubbed his hands together as the jellyfish drifted toward the dragon, then he lumbered toward the other side of the pool where the red-cloaked Bryl floated facedown in the bilge.

Rognoth whimpered as the first thin tentacles wrapped around his tail and lower body, but his patchy scales provided temporary protection from the paralyzing needles. Gairoth waded into the cesspool, fished out the half-Sorcerer, and sloshed back to shore before the jellyfish could notice him.

Finished with his work, Gairoth strode back to the dragon. The ogre dropped the slime-covered burden of Bryl and picked up his club. “Come on, Rognoth. We gots to go home.”

Two more tentacles had coiled around the dragon’s neck. Rognoth floundered in the water. Gairoth gave a sigh of disgust and fished in the pool for the end of the dragon’s chain. He found it and pulled with enough force to stretch Rognoth’s neck out of joint. The dragon ripped free, tearing off three of the jellyfish’s tentacles in the process. Rognoth scrambled to the shore and collapsed, panting and wheezing A laugh belched from Gairoth’s lungs. “Haw! Haw!”

He grabbed Bryl’s pale foot and dragged the half-Sorcerer behind him into the forest. A thin trail of slime trickled along the ground. Rognoth lay on the ground shivering, then got shakily to his feet, following the ogre into the trees.

Delrael sighed. “It’s all part of the Game.”

Vailret’s anger bubbled up within him, but he brought it under control. He had never seen an ogre up close before, and now he wished he could destroy Gairoth and finish the job his uncle Drodanis had begun. Wheels turned in his head as he considered the possibilities. They would have to think of a sophisticated way to fight Gairoth. Vailret’s father had pitted his luck and battle skill against an ogre—and he’d lost. This would take something more. A slow smile grew on his face.

“You’re thinking of something, aren’t you?” Delrael cocked an eyebrow and looked at him. “What are we going to do?”

“I always think of something.” Vailret took a deep breath. “It’s going to be good. Even the Outsiders might enjoy it.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” Delrael shrugged, ready for anything.

Gairoth’s feet had left deep impressions in the soft ground. Following, Delrael bent low, taking one careful step at a time. Vailret tried to imitate him.

Up ahead, Gairoth snapped branches and grumbled curses. After a brief silence, Vailret and Delrael crept closer. Uneasy and afraid of what they would see, they slipped behind a large lichen-encrusted boulder and looked into Gairoth’s encampment.

The ogre sat cross-legged in a small and cluttered clearing, munching on a bone torn from the rotting carcass of what appeared to be a goat with reptilian legs. The dragon drooled and fixed large yellow eyes on the oozing meat, intent on his master’s jaws as they churned up and down. The spiked club lay close beside Gairoth’s leg.

Behind the clearing stood the ogre’s abode—the hollowed-out rib cage of some massive beast. Dried sinews and scattered furs covered the bones to provide some shelter but left plenty of gaps for flies to get in (and out again after they had smelled the stench). A small pile of treasure lay beside the tumbledown dwelling: jewel-studded weapons, gold artifacts, and gaudy ornaments.

Wedged into one of the monster ribs sat a small skull the size of a child’s . . . and inside the skull’s eye-socket shone a fist-sized diamond, triangular-shaped, like a four sided die. It glinted in the hazy swamplight. Though Vailret’s weak eyesight blurred the details, he remembered Bryl’s vision of the diamond. “Stone is in eye of skull, on pile of bones.”

Vailret’s eyes reflected the splashes of sunlight shining through the woven swamp foliage. The Air Stone—he thought of holding something so old, so powerful in his hands. The old Sorcerers had made it before they left Gamearth.

He thought of all the stories he had heard about the Stone, its origin, its history—and the power of illusion it held. It was still the weakest of the four Stones, but it could be used very effectively with a little imagination.

But as far as Vailret was concerned, the Air Stone might as well be just another diamond. Without Sorcerer blood, he could not use the magic.

Bryl never worked at his abilities, nor did he know much about the background of his race. Vailret spent all his time staring at the legends, trying to uncover the reasons, straining his mind to be worthy, all in vain. He gritted his teeth.

Delrael tugged on Vailret’s arm, pointing at a red cloaked and dripping figure strung by his feet to a branch of an overhanging cypress. Vailret saw no signs of life in the half-Sorcerer’s wet and grayish skin.

Gairoth pulled another appendage from the carcass, making a sucking pop as it separated from the rest of the meat. The ogre licked his lips and slurped oozing flesh off the bone. “Ahhh, aged perfect!” Gairoth sucked the last of the juices from the bone. Rognoth sat, entranced with his master’s meal.

“Time for us to split up,” Delrael whispered.

Vailret nodded. “Luck.”

“Luck. We’ll get the job done.” Delrael left his cousin where he was and slipped off into the forest.

Delrael drew a deep breath, heady from the adventure. Vailret’s plan buzzed through his head—everything seemed perfectly clear in his mind. Ah, it made him feel alive again, not stagnating in the interminable training classes that kept all the fighters in practice. The Outsiders had done little in years to make life interesting.

In the clearing, the ogre tossed a thick bone to Rognoth. The dragon snapped it up, cracking the bone open with a yellowed fang and spilling the runny marrow down his throat.

Delrael took five deep breaths, closing his eyes and coiling his muscles. Ready, ready, ready—wish me luck. This was what the Game was all about. With a grin on his mud-spattered face, he stood up and strode into the ogre’s camp.

Rognoth let the bone fall from his mouth, snorting menacing clouds of smoke. His chain clanked as he took one step forward. With the instincts of a fighter, Delrael assessed how long it took for Gairoth’s reflexes to react. The ogre dropped his meat and scrabbled for the club.

The man paid them no heed as he swaggered into the clearing, whistling to himself. He sat down and faced the astonished expressions of both the ogre and the dragon. “Howdy, neighbors.”

Taken aback, Gairoth rubbed his thumb on the wood of his club and took one step forward. “What you be?”

“What you mean?” Delrael blinked his eyes innocently. He lowered his voice, speaking with a gruff and thick-lipped accent.

“Be you human?” The ogre’s face brightened for an instant, then he frowned again. “You plenty bigger than him.” He jerked his thumb over to waterlogged Bryl hanging from the tree.

Delrael laughed. “Naw—me not be human. Me be ogre, like you be.” He smiled broadly, knowing Gairoth could never have seen his own reflection in the scum-covered cesspools. He held his impulses in check—his arms wanted to grab for the sword, lunge forward and hack at the ogre. But he knew his uncle Cayon had failed, and if a fighter like Cayon had not been able to defeat an ogre with his strength, then Delrael had little chance.

Gairoth looked down at his dirty furs, brushing off cakes of dried mud. He scratched his scalp as he glared at the young man’s own mud-stained clothes, the leather armor. Gairoth’s mouth hung open as if he were going to say something but hadn’t found the words yet. Delrael beat him to it.

“Gairoth’s furs better than mine be. Me bonked another human, took his clothes. But don’t worry. Me ogre too. “

The ogre blinked his eyes. “Uh . . .”

Delrael jabbed a finger at himself. “Me be in swamp all these years. Never bothered to say Howdy! Watched you long time, though, Gairoth. Uh, I be—” (Gairoth, Rognoth . . . what’s in a name?) “Delroth.”

The ogre hadn’t moved or relaxed his grip on the club. “How come you talk, Delroth?”

Delrael paused a moment. “Huh?”

“You be no ogre—you talk!”

“Ha!” Delrael felt a cold sweat. “You talk, Gairoth. You be ogre. How come you talk?” Judging from the monster’s expression, Delrael saw he had struck a point of pride.

“Gairoth be an in-tell-ee-gent ogre. My Paw was Sorcerer, but he dead now. Paw give Gairoth smarts—Maw give Gairoth muscles!”

To emphasize his statement, he bashed his club against the dirt.

The stench from the rancid meat made Delrael feel queasy. Vailret had told him once how, near the end of their centuries-long wars, the desperate and dying Sorcerers had interbred with humans, whom they had created, to restore the strength of their race—but Delrael had no idea the Sorcerers had been driven to breed with their other creations, especially something so foul and ugly as a female ogre!

But the laws of probability allowed even the most unlikely dice rolls, given enough turns.

Delrael forced a yawn, trying to appear at ease. He looked at the grayish form of Bryl, hanging from the nearby tree. “What that be, Gairoth? Dessert?”

The ogre spoke around a dripping mouthful of meat. “Naw—he be Sorcerer, too. He teach Gairoth how to use magic Stone.” With his elbow, he indicated the gleaming diamond in the tiny skull’s eye. Delrael saw the diamond and decided that it must be the Air Stone Vailret had gotten so excited about. He looked back at the half-Sorcerer.

“He be dead?” Delrael brushed a fly away from his face.

“Naw. He be awake soon enough.”

“You feeds him to the thing in the cesspool? What for?”

The ogre shrugged. “Keeps him from running away. And makes him skeered of Gairoth.”

“Thing don’t hurt him? Just hold him there?”

Gairoth reached for his club again. “Questions! Talk!” He spat.

Delrael spread his hands. “Gairoth be in-tell-ee-gent ogre. You gots answers.”

That did the trick. “Aaahhh. I dips him into a pitcher plant afore I feeds him to that thing. Jellyfish can’t digest him then.”

Delrael rubbed his hands together. “Real smart. Haw, haw!”

Vailret crouched in the underbrush as close to the half-Sorcerer as he dared to go. The hanging form of Bryl stirred, but Vailret couldn’t risk making a move just yet. He wished Delrael would hurry up. He wanted to go home.

“So, Gairoth,” Delrael leaned forward and lowered his voice. “How you keep treasure pile safe? I be scared someone steal mine. Humans, adventurers, quests—you know how the Game be. I works my fingers to the bone to get jewels, then can’t never leave my camp. Afraid treasure might get stole.”

Hidden in the underbrush, Vailret squirmed and motioned for his cousin to hurry. Delrael didn’t notice him.

“Hey, you wants to see my treasure?” Delrael smiled, open and friendly. “Promise not to steal it? I gots no guards. But I trust Gairoth. You be good neighbor.”

Even from his distant viewpoint, Vailret thought he could see the gleam in the ogre’s eye. Soon . . . soon.

Gairoth stood up, ready to follow Delrael. Then, to Vailret’s dismay, the ogre turned around and plucked the skull with the Air Stone from his dwelling. “Now we go.”

No! I wanted the Stone! Vailret shouted in his mind.

Delrael looked at the pyramid-shaped diamond swallowed up in the ogre’s hand and flicked a glance toward where Vailret hid. Vailret noticed his cousin heave a sigh as he motioned Gairoth to follow him into the swamp. The dragon bounded along, eager.

When the trees blocked them from sight, Vailret emerged from his hiding place, holding a hand to his stiff back. Flies buzzed around his head.

He cautiously went to where the half-Sorcerer hung dripping. Greenish-brown water puddled in the dirt below him. Bryl seemed to be regaining his consciousness and vitality, but too slowly to help. According to the Rules, he would take about a half-day to recover completely. Vailret scowled, knowing he’d have to carry the half-Sorcerer on his back. Bryl’s red cloak and scraggly gray hair reeked like the loathsome cesspools, and the smell would soak into Vailret’s jerkin.

He grumbled at the invisible Outsiders, knowing they would never listen. “Why don’t you go play a game of hexagon-chess? Why don’t you make me a magic user? Why can’t you entertain yourselves and leave us alone?”

Vailret withdrew his knife and cut the rope, catching Bryl as he fell. He hiked the half-Sorcerer across his shoulder blades and stooped as he scuttled forward. Delrael was the one who had the strength score for this type of work, but he was preoccupied at the moment. Bryl stirred, and the smell of spoiled-everything rose into the air.

Vailret sighed. It was nearly over—all the Game adventures had become tedious. Predictable. Vailret would rather be finishing his history of Gamearth—not stuck with these frivolous, familiar quests the Outsiders played all the time.

Grunting with the effort, he shifted Bryl’s bony body to a more comfortable position, then moved away from Gairoth’s encampment toward the cesspool.

“It be gone!” Delrael wailed. “Stole!”

Rognoth nearly collapsed after the wild-goose chase the man had led through the swamp, circling back and forth, getting even the ogre hopelessly lost. But Delrael’s tracker-sense would not let him get confused.

Delrael stared at the clearing they had stumbled upon, pointing an accusatory finger. He gaped at the ogre, incredulous. “Gold, gems—right here! All be gone! Someone stole it!” He switched his own dismayed expression for one of horror. “Oh, no! You be next, Gairoth! Hurry!”

The ogre looked as if he grasped what was going on. “Come on, Rognoth!” Gairoth smacked the dragon with the end of his club. “We gots to get home!”

Delrael crossed his fingers, hoping Vailret had done his part. Everything seemed to be going well, too well for a Game adventure, and he wondered how long the Outsiders would keep making dice rolls in his favor.

He sprinted after the alarmed ogre.

Vailret slogged through the swamp, stumbling with the added weight of the unconscious half-Sorcerer. Bryl hung like a half-full sack of wet flour on his shoulders, and Vailret’s muscles felt as if they wanted to snap. Most of all he ached for not being able to grab the Air Stone. Why had Gairoth taken it? Damned monster! Why hadn’t Bryl managed to get it somehow? And the worst insult of all was that Gairoth—Gairoth!—had Sorcerer blood in him and could use the magic inside the diamond. It seemed ridiculously arbitrary.

The heavy stench made the air difficult to breathe near the cesspool. Vailret’s eyes stung. He found a weed-sheltered place where he could set the half-Sorcerer down. The cesspool seemed quiet now, waiting.

Vailret peeled off Bryl’s sopping scarlet cloak. He removed a blanket from his pack and tossed it on top of the half-Sorcerer.

Bryl snored softly.

In the background of the swamp he could hear Gairoth bellowing. The insect songs fell silent for a moment, then continued.

Vailret crumpled the soggy cloak into a ball before tossing it onto the scum of the pool. Then he sat back to watch the tentacled thing rise to the surface, waving its whiplike appendages and curling around the scarlet fabric. The creature pulled the cloak beneath the scum, like new prey.

Lurching forward as fast as he could, Gairoth reached his camp and smashed the spiked club against a tree trunk. He roared a battle cry that made the air vibrate, holding high the skull with the Air Stone. Rognoth lunged to the end of his chain, snarling.

But they found no one to fight.

Rognoth blinked his eyes. Gairoth came to a full stop, confused. “Haw! We skeered ‘em off! They gots none of my treasure! Haw!” Gairoth mopped his brow.

Breathless, Delrael reached the camp and flashed a glance to the trees. He saw the damp patch on the ground where cesspool water had dribbled from Bryl’s cloak, but the half-Sorcerer was gone.

Rognoth raised his scaly nose in the air, looking around with runny yellow eyes. When he saw the spot where Bryl had been, he snorted clouds of black, oily smoke.

“Shut up, stupid dragon! Nothing be there!” Gairoth snatched up a bone from the ground and bounced it off Rognoth’s head.

“Gairoth, they gots your magic man!” Delrael pointed to the severed rope hanging from the cypress branch.

The ogre let his mouth drop open. Rognoth leaped to his feet, but the chain strangled him and he wheezed. Gairoth turned around in circles, looking for someone to hit with his club.

Delrael saw that the ogre needed help. “Cesspool! But we catch ‘em! Bonk! Quick!” He gave Gairoth a helpful shove in the right direction.

Rognoth galloped down the path as Gairoth stumbled after him, clinging to the iron chain. The ogre clutched the skull in his hand, holding the Air Stone in place with his thumb as he grasped the thick iron chain. But he didn’t seem to know what to do with the diamond. Delrael ran behind.

The dragon reached the edge of the cesspool, with Gairoth fighting to keep his footing. They arrived just in time to see the tentacled creature swallow something bright and scarlet. Rognoth yelped and leaped ahead, not slowing down as he reached the bank.

“Stupid dragon!” Gairoth bellowed. He let go of the chain, but it became tangled around the Air Stone and the skull. Both the dragon and the ogre plunged into the cesspool, vanishing under the scum. Rognoth splashed to the surface, looking around, tongue lolling out. A whine broke from his throat as he realized where he had landed. Clawing at the thick water, he began to swim.

Gairoth emerged, pulling duckweed out of his eye and spitting green sludge from his mouth. Delrael saw with dismay that the skull in the ogre’s hand had broken. The Air Stone had sunk to the bottom of the foul cesspool.

In the water, Gairoth’s gaze settled on the pitiful dragon. His nostrils flared, and the cypress trees trembled as he roared his rage. “Rognoth!”

The dragon gulped as the ogre heaved the spiked club out of the cesspool and sloshed toward him. Threads of green slime dribbled from the club into the water, following Gairoth as he moved. Rognoth ducked under the deep water just as the ogre swung at him with a crashing blow.

Delrael sauntered up to the edge of the pool, chuckling. Vailret emerged from his hiding place, but looked downcast at seeing the Air Stone gone. He watched Gairoth’s struggles in the water without sympathy. Vailret heaved a limp and groggy Bryl to his feet, bringing him into view.

The ogre stopped splashing and glared at them, astonished and betrayed. Delrael couldn’t resist adding a last comment. “Now you’ve gone and lost the Air Stone, you clod. But we’ve got your magic man!”

Gairoth exploded in fury and charged toward the young man, but he stumbled in the mire. The ogre scrambled to his feet again and shook his fist in the air. “Delroth! I gonna bash you!”

Spine-covered tentacles rose up and writhed around him, translucent and glinting in the slanting afternoon light. A tentacle slapped around Gairoth’s neck, and another slimy appendage grabbed his ankle and jerked him under the water.

Rognoth paddled toward the shore, but he could go no farther than his chain allowed.

The bulbous body sack of the jellyfish rose to the surface and burbled; more tentacles emerged, wrapping around Gairoth. The ogre trashed right and left, annoyed and helpless.

Tentacles coiled around the dragon’s tail, but Rognoth whirled and snapped at them, biting deeply into the translucent flesh.

“Time to get going, Vailret,” Delrael said. “How’s Bryl?”

Vailret shrugged but kept looking dejectedly at the cesspool. “Why did Gairoth have to drop the Air Stone? Now we’ve lost it all over again!”

Delrael smiled. “At least we know where it is. Maybe there’s another quest in the offing?”

“It would keep the Outsiders satisfied, I guess.” He picked up his pack and wrapped Bryl in the blanket. “You carry him, Del. Your strength score is a lot higher than mine.”

Gairoth finally yanked his right hand free and with a thick slurping sound pulled the club out of the slime. Dragging himself toward the jellyfish with its own tentacles, the ogre bashed his club into the mass of the creature’s head. More tentacles wrapped around the ogre’s face, and both monsters went under the water thrashing.

Delrael hiked the half-Sorcerer over his shoulder. “Well, do you think the Outsiders enjoyed that one? The whole adventure?”

Vailret frowned at him, puzzled. “Why shouldn’t they? It’s the same type of stuff they’ve always liked.”

They walked off, listening to the bellows and splashings from the cesspool until the sounds vanished into other swamp noises. Soon they would reach the hex-line and be back into forest terrain.

But Vailret kept thinking about Delrael’s question. What if the Outsiders were no longer interested? It felt like a premonition.

Interlude: Outside

David yawned, making sure everybody saw him. Tyrone smiled with delight at the adventure, but Melanie saw Scott fidgeting. He and David seemed . . . disinterested. She couldn’t understand what had changed for them.

David picked at his fingernails.

Tyrone finally asked, “What’s up your butt, David?”

Melanie nodded. “You’ve never been this bad before.”

David looked at her, and suddenly Melanie had a sinking feeling that they had done exactly what he wanted. Now he could always say they had raised the question.

“Since you ask—” David dropped a handful of dice on the table with a loud clatter, “there’s something I’d like to bring up.”

Melanie frowned as he looked at each of them in turn, like Charlie Chan about to announce his pick for the Murderer of the Month.

“I think we should quit playing the Game.”

Even Tyrone, who was usually happy to play anything someone suggested, gasped in surprise.

“But why?” Melanie asked.

“It’s boring. We’ve been at it too long. There’s nothing left to it—it’s not interesting anymore. Is that enough reasons? Look at the adventure we just finished: good, standard stuff. A big bad ogre, some treasure, an exciting chase. Your characters tricked their way out of it, as they always do, Melanie. It’s like watching Star Trek reruns—they’re great for a few years, but it gets old after a while.” He brushed at the sleeve of his denim jacket.

“And aren’t we getting a little old for this stuff, too? Do you know how much crap I take from my parents about our stupid Game every week?”

Melanie stared at him, then at Scott and Tyrone, then at the dice scattered across the table. Anger kept her voice even. “Would you rather go out for sports, David? Be a jock? Or how about hanging around in video arcades turning into a joystick zombie? Would your parents prefer that?

“The Game makes us put ourselves into a world we made up. Think of all we’ve done, all the history we’ve made. That’s a lot more important than bouncing a ball through a hoop.”

Scott looked at her a bit in surprise. “Don’t go overboard, Mel. This is just a game. It’s nothing real.”

“Are New York or the Rocky Mountains real? Have you ever been there? No! Then how do you know they exist? Huh?”

She thought of Gamearth, the villages, the characters. Every one of them seemed to be real to her. Couldn’t the others see it? Or feel it? Scott blinked at her vehemence, which surprised even Melanie. She could feel something going on here, something important.

Since the four of them had equal experience in role-playing, they took turns acting as Game-master. Each of them ruled a particular section of the map and interacted with the other players.

“Why don’t we just go back to exploring dungeons? That was fun,” Tyrone said.

Scott made a rude noise. “Those were boring, Tyrone. Wandering through catacombs gets monotonous really quick. And what do all the monsters eat? What do they do all the time? You can’t say they just stand there waiting for our characters to come along? How am I supposed to have fun if I can’t believe any of it?”

Melanie grabbed at the idea. “But we outgrew the boxed dungeon adventures! We broadened the Game to cover an entire world. Our world. Didn’t you enjoy the old Sorcerer wars, David? You thought of that.”

Tyrone said, “I liked it when the old Sorcerers created all sorts of creatures to do their fighting, not just humans.”

“Oh, you just like monsters,” Scott said.

David used a cracker to scoop up some of Tyrone’s dip. “Yes, and the fighting got boring, too. Battle after battle in a war that was never going to end. What’s the point?

“We had the Sorcerers make peace between themselves. They used the rest of their magic to turn the race into six giant Spirits. The Transition. We should have known enough to end it there.”

“There was more to the story!” Melanie said. Why weren’t Scott and Tyrone helping? “How could you just stop the Game there?”

She began to feel clammy sweat on her back. What if they put Gamearth away to gather dust on a shelf, never to play it again? What about the world? What about the characters?

“I tried,” David sighed.

“But I won. Roll of the dice.”

“Yeah, Melanie,” Scott added, “and we spent the past three months playing the Scouring of Gamearth. The humans and a few leftover Sorcerers hunted down surviving monsters to make the world safe for Mom, democracy, and apple pie. Tyrone had a lot of fun. But the humans are all settled down now. You’ve got your Stronghold established and safe. There’s nothing else to play.”

“I want to quit,” David repeated.

“No.” Melanie tried to glare him down.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Tyrone said. “I thought even the dungeons were fun.”

Scott pursed his lips, putting on his coldly logical “Mr. Science” persona again. “Settle it like we always settle disagreements. Why don’t you two just roll for it instead of arguing?”

Tyrone shifted in his seat. “I’d like to play something tonight—it is Sunday, you know.”

Melanie watched David, and they both reached for the twenty-sided die at the same time. David grabbed it first.

“If I beat you, we stop playing. We think of something else to do, or we stop meeting altogether. We’ve got our lives to live, you know.”

Tyrone and Scott sat up straight. Melanie took a deep breath. David was serious—it meant more to him than she had thought. Something worse than this was bothering him.

But the Game meant even more to her. She wanted to hold onto the world they had created. Gamearth was a part of her and a part of them all. They couldn’t just put it away and forget about it like a game of Monopoly.

David squeezed his hand around the die. He threw it down hard onto the smooth painted surface of the master map. The die bounced, but came to rest before it could fall off the table.

18.

“Eighteen, Melanie. You won’t beat it.”

She picked up the twenty-sided die—the expensive transparent kind from the hobby shop. Each facet looked smooth and perfect, with a number etched in the center.

“But if I win the roll, we keep playing. We stay in Gamearth with all our characters there. No chickening out. “

David bristled at that, but Scott and Tyrone remained silent.

As she leaned forward over the master map, Melanie felt that she could fall into the world. She imagined the mountains, the forests, the islands, the frozen wasteland, vivid against a backdrop of the history they had played.

She closed her eyes, silently asked for help from whom ever else watched over Gamearth, and tossed the twenty sided die onto the table. “Come on!” she whispered. The die skittered and rolled and came to rest against the master map.

The 20 faced up.

“Yowza!” Tyrone clapped his hands.

“There.” Scott sounded businesslike again. “Now can we get started? It’s your turn next isn’t it, David?”

David glared at the twenty-sided die that had betrayed him.

“Come on, David. Don’t be a sore loser.”

He drank from his glass but continued to look at the map. “If we don’t quit, I’m going to destroy Gamearth. I’ll have my turn and I can set things in motion. There won’t be anything left to play in. Then we’ll have to stop. “

“You’ve got to follow the rules,” Scott said.

“I’m going to. But I’ll unleash something so horrible upon this world that nothing can stop it. Your characters can try all they want. It won’t work. I’m going to win.”

Melanie stiffened. Scott and Tyrone seemed to be enjoying the friction. Melanie thought of the Game’s characters, looked at their settlements, their lands, and felt a pang inside her. Something seemed to be calling out to her.

Melanie ran her fingertip over one of the smooth faces of the twenty-sided. She hoped she hadn’t used up her luck for the evening. She wished the characters themselves could help in the fight—if only they knew what the stakes were.

She wanted to warn them somehow.

“The rules work both ways, you know. I can use them to save Gamearth.” Melanie forced a smile, trying to look self-assured and a little wicked. “I’ll beat you, David. You can count on it.”

2. Attack on the Stronghold

“Gamearth has been built around a precise set of Rules. Though we may find them restrictive at times, these Rules can never be broken, lest we invite chaos and anarchy into the world.”

—Preface, The Book of Rules

Making good time, while carrying Bryl, Delrael and Vailret crossed nine hexagons of terrain. They reached the Stronghold by the evening of the third day.

Vailret wished he had remembered to bring map paper with him to mark the terrain and keep his bearings. Delrael claimed to have memorized the colorful mosaic master map inlaid into one wall back at the Stronghold.

The trees were thick and full, the undergrowth colorful and lush. Clear-cut paths wound through thick stands of oak, maple, and pine, leading off to various adventures. But all the terrain had been explored and mapped, all the dungeons uncovered, all the adventures played out and exhausted in days long past.

A clear stream followed the boundary between two hexes of forest terrain. One willow dangled over the bank, like a Medusa washing her hair in the water.

During the bloody Scouring, well-organized human armies and magic-using Sentinels had removed most of the enemy monsters from the map. The Outsiders had not seen fit to create any major new threats for more than a century. The forests had once been inhabited by ogres, sasquatches, packs of intelligent wolves, marauding bands of reptilian Slac—all descendants of monsters that the old Sorcerers had created to fight in their wars. Vailret’s father had been killed by one of the surviving ogres.

Vailret imagined Cayon, a great fighter but hopelessly outclassed by the ogre in the early morning mists. Drodanis, his uncle, had told of awakening to the sounds of battle, seeing the camp fire cold and his brother’s blankets neatly folded. In a clearing he had found Cayon and the ogre—two of Cayon’s arrows protruded from the ogre’s back.

Vailret tried to remember, but somehow he could not picture his father’s face. He recalled only a few rare occasions when Cayon had focused attention on him; how frightening and godlike the great warrior had seemed. The memory of his father eluded him, but the ogre seemed real, vivid to the last wrinkle in his leathery skin.

Drodanis said he had drawn his bow to join in the fight. He thought Cayon had looked impish, as if trying to show off with his sword. Why? Vailret kept wanting to ask him. It was so stupid! Because of that, you were killed! Who were you trying to impress? I was proud of you anyway.

The ogre had swept his club sideways, breaking Cayon’s wrist and knocking the sword from his hand. Drodanis sank an arrow into the ogre’s chest, but the monster still drove at his first victim. Cayon stood ashen gray and tried to stumble backward, out of the way. The ogre smashed the twisted club across Cayon’s chest, spraying blood into the forest. Drodanis roared in rage, sank three more arrows into the monster’s back and neck, and then launched himself upon the wounded ogre, slashing with his sword from behind—

Vailret had heard the story many times from others in the gaming hall. Drodanis had completed his pogrom against the ogres, and then became a recluse behind the walls of the Stronghold. He had never spoken of Cayon’s death after the first time, not once in all the hours he had spent staring at manuscripts with young Vailret. . . .

About an hour after Vailret and Delrael had left the ogre’s cesspool behind, Bryl came back to full consciousness. The half-Sorcerer walked by himself now. He moved a little slowly, but they made better time than when Delrael carried him. Bryl sulked, ashamed and grumbling to himself. “Wish we didn’t have to leave the Air Stone there.”

“It’s at the bottom of the cesspool,” Delrael said, turning around on the path. Vailret had watched Delrael’s impatience with Bryl grow, watched him tense every time the half-Sorcerer said anything, but until now he had been able to stifle his urge to speak out. “Do you want us to take you back so you can dive for it? Or maybe you’d like to ask Gairoth for help?”

Bryl moaned quietly. “I just wanted to have more magic. I don’t know much—it could have helped us all.” Delrael made a rude noise, and the half-Sorcerer turned to him, looking defensive. “Well, you imagine being trapped inside a giant jellyfish, just waiting to be digested—and your only hope of survival is a dim-witted ogre who might not remember to come back before it’s too late.” Bryl sounded indignant. “I was just trying to find the Air Stone. Gairoth tortured me! He made me teach him how to use the Stone!”

Vailret spoke softly but with enough seriousness to make Bryl pay attention. “By showing Gairoth how to unlock the magic, you’ve given an ogre one of the most powerful weapons left on Gamearth. A weapon that was specifically given to humans.” He saw Delrael ball his fists.

Bryl looked broken and upset. “He shouldn’t have been able to use the magic anyway. How was I supposed to know an ogre could have Sorcerer blood?”

Vailret scowled at him, beginning to lose patience himself. “You should have known something was wrong when an ogre could speak.”

“You know I don’t study things like that.”

“Maybe you should consider it.” Vailret sighed, letting his anger drain away. He squinted through the trees to see the boundary of the forest. The light had grown dim in the late afternoon, but he sensed they were near the Stronghold.

Bryl sounded close to despair. “What are we going to do?”

Delrael kept walking, plainly upset. “Good thing the Stronghold can keep Gairoth out if worse comes to worst.” They came upon a cross path and Delrael paused, looking both ways to take his bearings. He turned left and set off. Vailret and Bryl followed.

The sun had set behind them as they crossed from the last hex of forest terrain to the flat agricultural areas. Narrow roads separated the hexagonal fields from the unclaimed areas, but the fields had expanded outward as more and more characters settled around the Stronghold. All the cropland had been reclaimed since the Scouring, and the human foothold had grown stronger as characters worked the land, tending to their own existence rather than questing for treasure or adventure.

Vailret could see the Stronghold perched on the crown of Steep Hill, overlooking the village and surrounding lands like a sleeping watchdog. The double-walled stockade appeared imposing even to Vailret. Just the sight of the structure evoked thoughts of epic adventures in his mind.

At the beginning of the Scouring, the great general Doril had built the Stronghold. He wanted to help protect the poor farmers and miners trying to make a life for themselves against the back-and-forth tides of the wars. Doril had chosen Steep Hill, which stood rugged and unscalable from the rear, cut off to the north by a swift stream, and open to assault only on the south and west sides. An attacking army would break most of its momentum charging up the abominably steep path.

A double wall of pointed logs surrounded the Stronghold proper. The villagers had packed the gaps between the outer and inner walls with dirt, more than doubling the strength of the barricade and making it almost fire proof at the same time. A steep trench encircled the Stronghold walls, as deep as a man stood tall. The trench was filled with pointed rocks and sharp sticks.

The Stronghold had withstood serious attacks during the long Scouring wars. Monstrous Slac armies had besieged it several times, but the Stronghold had never fallen. Now, few of the Slac still existed on Gamearth, and they hid themselves in the mountains to the east, letting humans live in peace. The Stronghold had not seen an enemy in years, and Vailret suspected that many of its defenses were obsolete.

The days of empty questing had faded away, leaving the characters to attend to problems of day-to-day survival. No one bothered to remember the old adventures.

Seven years before, more than half a decade after the death of Cayon, the peaceful times had lulled Drodanis out of his gloomy seclusion. Vailret liked to think that if an enemy had indeed threatened, Delrael’s father would never have left the Stronghold in the hands of his eighteen-year-old son and a couple of old veterans from his early campaigns. Vailret had been only fourteen then, and he had wanted to accompany Drodanis on his self-indulgent quest to find the Rulewoman Melanie. But Drodanis had chosen someone else, leaving Vailret behind.

In the seven years since, Delrael had done little more than train the villagers and miners over and over again, killing time until something adventurous happened. It seemed that the Outsiders took little interest in Gamearth, tired of throwing threats at their hapless characters. This pleased Vailret, though—the characters could worry about their lives, instead of tedious adventures. He could go about writing down the history of the Game. . . .

Dusk had set in as they started along the pathway up Steep Hill. Already Vailret could see Jorte getting his gaming hall ready for the evening, where the villagers would gather for dicing and other amusements. Characters in the village below had seen them return and they’d all want to hear the story of Bryl’s rescue and the adventure with Gairoth. It would be their first quest-telling in a long time.

But Vailret didn’t much like the loud gaming and conversation. He hoped he could talk Delrael into describing the adventure by himself—he only wanted to get back to his work on the old manuscripts. Documenting the quest on paper was as important as telling it. More important, in fact, because his original words could remain unexaggerated in telling after telling.

At the top of the hill they crossed the split-log walkway spanning the trench and passed through the only gate in the Stronghold walls. Heavy wooden mallets hung on ropes next to the walkway, ready to knock out the pegs and sever the walkway in case of an invasion. Directly on the other side of the heavy gate was another hidden pit covered by a second walkway.

Vailret’s mother, Siya, stood outside the main building. Her hair was dusted with early gray, and she wore it pulled back in a tight braid, which stretched her wrinkles tight but left her scowl firmly in place.

“It’s about time,” Siya said, but Vailret thought he saw genuine relief in her eyes.

“This time we beat the ogre, Mother,” Vailret said.

Alarm flashed in her eyes. Delrael cut off any scolding as he offered to help her cook something. “I’m hungry. And I’m going to start heavy training again tomorrow with some of the best fighters.”

Delrael turned to Vailret with a glint in his eyes. “After all, we know where the Air Stone is. We know where a surviving ogre is—at last, we’ve got some questing to do again! Doesn’t it make you feel alive? To have a purpose in life?” He patted his leather armor, the silver belt, the knife and sword at his side. “This is what we were made for.”

Sounds from the gaming hall rang distant but clear in the damp night. At the edge of the trees, the veteran Tarne stood, preferring the silence and the dark. He kept watch in the muffled shadows, looking at the aurora overhead. To him, visions filled the night. He wondered if he would catch another glimpse of the future.

Tarne was one of the surviving warriors from the campaigns with Drodanis and Cayon. In his adventures, he had found more treasure, slain more monsters, explored more trails than any other character save Drodanis and Cayon. Tarne had accompanied Drodanis on his vendetta against the ogres, slaying half a dozen of them himself for the murder of Cayon.

But none of that mattered to him anymore.

Since those bygone days, Tarne had given time to reflecting on his life. Sometimes he reveled in the companionship of others, in the gatherings for the winter tales, telling story after story about the old campaigns. But other times he spent weeks alone in the forests. He had shaved his head to let the thoughts flow unimpeded, exposing all the scars from battle injuries. An ogre’s blow had knocked him unconscious many years before . . . and had opened up his ability to see visions.

After ending his active service as a fighter, Tarne had become the village shearer and weaver. He was big enough to wrestle the sheep for shearing, and he also knew enough woodcraft to find the proper flowers and berries for dyeing the cloth he wove. It was a different life for him, but Gamearth itself had changed. He kept an old set of leather armor hidden in his dwelling along with his most precious possession, an ancient sword from the Sorcerer wars. Sometimes he took the old things out from under his table just to look at them.

Another round of laughter came from the gaming hall. He could discern the clatter of dice on tabletops, the tallying of points. Delrael and Vailret would likely come down to tell of their adventures, but the others had begun their amusements without them.

Tarne considered young Delrael for a moment, admiring him. Seven years before, he would not have guessed the young man could run the Stronghold so well in the absence of his father—but Drodanis had been a recluse for his last few years anyway, before he’d gone off in search of the legendary Rulewoman Melanie.

Even as he thought of Drodanis, Tarne felt an echo of the man’s pain. Barely a year after the slaying of Cayon, Drodanis’s wife Fielle died. A new fever spread its claws through the village, causing the villagers to hide in their homes. Drodanis lay sick for days as Fielle cared for him, nurturing him so closely that she fell ill herself. He recovered; she did not. They had been married fourteen years.

Drodanis had reacted to Fielle’s death more strongly than he had to Cayon’s. He and Fielle had been perfect for each other—only she could beat him in archery, only he could beat her in throwing knives at targets.

Drodanis grew more somber each day, leaving no one to attend the Stronghold duties. Training stopped. Tarne had helped when he could get away from his own shearing work. But for the most part he could only watch Drodanis withdraw into himself.

Drodanis studied the legends of Gamearth. Roving Scavengers—the only characters still actively questing in the world—had found many papers and scrolls left behind by the Sentinels. Young Vailret also took an interest in the legends and spent much time looking over Drodanis’s shoulders. He ran errands and helped decipher faded writing.

Drodanis had come across an obscure tale that fascinated him—a mysterious Rulewoman named Melanie, possibly a manifestation of one of the Outsiders, who watched over the Game and directed the characters that interested her. The legends said she could be found deep in the forests to the south, and whoever found her would know peace for the remainder of his days.

Drodanis became obsessed with the legend. For years he searched for every scrap of knowledge concerning her. He wanted to find the Rulewoman so he could demand an explanation for the misery inflicted in his life. What had he done to offend the Outsiders so deeply?

Finally, when Delrael turned eighteen, Drodanis announced he would embark on a quest to find her. Tarne volunteered to accompany him, as did young Vailret, but Drodanis refused them both.

He took with him only Lellyn, Bryl’s twelve-year-old apprentice. As if the old half-Sorcerer knew enough about magic to teach anything, Tarne thought. Lellyn, a boy from one of the northern mining villages, exhibited strong sorcerous powers, though he bore no trace of Sorcerer blood. Lellyn was a wild-card, a manifestation of magic that should never have occurred. His use of magic broke all the Rules, but somehow Gamearth had allowed it to happen.

Drodanis said he would take only Lellyn with him on his quest because the boy was an anomaly. And if Drodanis was going to find the Rulewoman, he needed to have the help of someone who could break the Rules.

So Drodanis and Lellyn traveled south and disappeared into the deep forests. Seven years had gone by, but they sent no word. Most of the villagers believed them to be dead.

Tarne turned his eyes to the sky again, looking at the shimmering auroral curtains that called to him. The rippling light of Lady Maire’s Wedding Veil painted the summer night in delicate pale colors, swathed across a great portion of the northeastern sky. Tarne stared at the hypnotic patterns that showed him visions of the future.

Like Lellyn, Tarne was an anomaly, too, a Rule-breaker. After his head wound had healed, he found he could sometimes see things in the dance of the Veil. Though his ability was well known in the village, Tarne kept the details of his revelations to himself. He considered them to be private glimpses into the plans of the Outsiders. Only rarely did he weave the visions into special tapestries, which he explained to no one.

He had no Sorcerer blood either. Sometimes it seemed to him that Gamearth had a magic of its own, a magic that knew nothing of the Outsiders’ Rules and acted only to preserve itself.

The Veil held Tarne’s attention now. The revelations didn’t always come, but he felt giddy this night, filled with a fuzzy claustrophobia that made him want to release whatever visions were trapped in his head.

As he watched, Tarne saw a clawlike tendril of greenish light reach from the east and stab into the rosy color of the main aurora. The shrouds of light changed, and the details of the future struck deep into his mind.

Tarne fell to the ground in awed dismay.

Behind his eyelids the truth reeled. He lay against the cold grass for a long moment. He blinked his eyes open, and the Veil was a simple aurora again, lights painted on the sky, reflections from the Outside world. Tarne climbed to his feet, stiff and off-balance, and waited for his emotions to die down. He knew he could not keep this revelation to himself—or else the Stronghold was doomed.

Vailret held the wooden message stick in his hands, afraid that he might damage it. His eyes sparkled with wonder. “This wasn’t here when we left, I swear it.”

Delrael put his hands on his hips, resting thumbs against the silver belt. His hair hung wet and clean, and his face was shaved and scrubbed raw. “It’s got my father’s seal on it?”

“Look for yourself.” Vailret passed the message stick to his cousin. The fireplace in his room burned with a hot new fire. The message stick had been waiting for him, prominent on the tabletop with his other papers.

“And my mother says no one came in here while we were gone.”

“Maybe Drodanis really did find the Rulewoman.” Bryl looked awed and frightened by the short polished stick. “She’s supposed to be an Outsider—she could have found a way to deliver the message stick.”

“The Outsiders can’t communicate directly with us—it’s against their own Rules.” Vailret frowned, more confused now than ever. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”

Delrael shifted the message stick from one hand to the other, staring at it. “When the need is great enough, some people are willing to break the Rules.”

That settled a blanket of silence on them, a few minutes thick.

A message from Drodanis . . . Vailret had spent five years with the older man, growing up as he helped Drodanis study, then deciphering scrolls himself. But when Drodanis left on his quest for the Rulewoman—after working beside Vailret for years, he took Lellyn with him instead. Vailret had begged to go along, but for some reason Drodanis found Bryl’s young apprentice more appropriate. It stung Vailret like an unexpected slap in the face.

The boy Lellyn had no Sorcerer blood, but he was remarkably adept with magic. He had the powers by accident. Vailret resented that, and he wanted to know how the Rules had been bent. It seemed unfair to him, arbitrary. Though seven years had passed, Vailret wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the message stick said.

“Well, are we going to burn it or just look at it?” Bryl fidgeted.

Before Vailret could answer, a pounding on the main door of the Stronghold building distracted him. The veteran Tarne stood in the wide doorway, cocooned in the night. He shielded his eyes as Vailret swung open the door, then eased himself closer to the light. “I’ve been watching the Veil.”

After Vailret had ushered the veteran inside, leading him along a corridor to the firelit chambers, Siya came down the hall, curious. Wax covered her fingertips; she had been dipping candles again. He motioned that everything was all right and closed the door of his room before she could make a fuss.

Tarne stepped forward to stare at the flames, warming his big hands in front of the hearth. The night was cool enough, but Tarne looked chilled to the bone. Vailret could see the map of pale scars on the veteran’s bald head. Tarne rarely said anything about his visions, but Vailret coaxed him now, anxious to get a hint of what had frightened him. “Did you see something tonight?”

Tarne wiped the shine of sweat from his forehead. “The Stronghold is going to be captured. And I don’t believe we can do anything about it.”

“Attacked!” Delrael leaped to his feet. “By whom?”

After a moment of silence, Bryl said, “We’ve had peace for so long!”

Delrael’s eyes went wide. “The Outsiders are probably getting bored with peace.” He slammed one fist into his flat palm.

Vailret looked at the veteran, forcing himself to remain calm, to get the facts and try to come up with a solution. “Any other details, Tarne?”

The veteran shook his head. “The visions aren’t like that. Just a certainty that we are going to be attacked in two days. I don’t know who the enemy is. But the Stronghold will fall for the first time in its history.”

Tarne stared down at his dye-stained hands. “I thought I saw something else to the east, though—terrible and growing, drinking all life in its wake. I feel so helpless! But the danger to the Stronghold is more immediate and drowned everything else out.”

Vailret wished he could know what it felt like to have the power, even unbidden magic like Tarne’s, singing through his body.

“I wonder if that has anything to do with my father’s message?” Delrael held the carved stick up to the fire light. Vailret noted the expression of interest on Tarne’s face.

Delrael took a step toward the fireplace. “We’ll never find out if we don’t get started. Tarne, you’re welcome to stay—we’d like to hear your thoughts.”

The veteran shrugged and remained standing by the table. He seemed uninterested in Vailret’s scrolls and scraps of writing, though he was careful not to touch any of them.

Delrael closed his eyes for a moment, as if making a wish, then he tossed the message stick into the fire.

Vailret held his breath—Drodanis had put his seal on the stick. He had sent a message. Had he reached the end of his quest? Had he found the Rulewoman? Did Drodanis regret taking young Lellyn instead of him?

The flames attacked the wood, peeling away the outer spell and shelling the spoken words, sending them into the fire. The crackle of consumed wood rose to a hiss, then to whispered words. The flames climbed higher, dancing together, forming a memory-image of Drodanis.

Vailret’s eyes glistened as he stared at the flickering silhouette of his uncle. Drodanis appeared older, but he wore the same clothes Vailret remembered him in. Drodanis’s eyes were dim and downturned. He seemed content, not haunted as he had been—but he also seemed dead inside, with nothing left now that his sorrow was gone.

The spectre spoke from the glowing hearth.

“Delrael, Vailret—the Rulewoman Melanie is risking everything to let me send you this warning. She is bending her own Rules, hoping she does not get caught by the other Players.

“Gamearth is doomed—the Outsiders have grown tired of us. One of the Players has set events in motion to destroy our world.

“None of us is real. We exist only for the amusement of the Outsiders. You know that. But now the Outsider named David has planted a monstrous, growing thing far to the east. He wants to end the Game. As his creature sucks up life, it grows ever stronger and it will soon spread across the entire map. That will be the end of everything for us.

“The Outsider David is playing by the Rules. And the Rulewoman Melanie will try to fight him in the same way. But we must help as well. You must find some way to stop the enemy. We are the characters on this world, and we have a stake in it.”

The fire popped and crackled, drowning some of Drodanis’s words. Vailret watched, feeling numb from his uncle’s warning. The image wavered, and Drodanis’s tone changed.

“. . . Stronghold is in danger from an entirely different source. You must ignore that. Do not waste your time and effort trying to regain the Stronghold, should it fall. This is my warning—you must listen. The Outsiders have set up the second threat as a distraction, an adventure to amuse themselves. You know what is more important. The Stronghold will have no significance if Gamearth is destroyed.”

The message stick crackled again. Layers of ash slid off, leaving little of the stick unconsumed. Drodanis’s words became garbled, overwritten with a sound like frying fat.

“The other Outsiders do not know you are aware of their plans. The Rulewoman has slipped this message past them. But be prepared—if they find out, they will do everything to stop you.

“I am begging you to find a way to protect the world. Do not be sidetracked. This is the grandest quest in our history—not for entertainment, but survival.”

The hissing grew louder, and chunks of words drifted up into the chimney. “I am well. Lellyn is . . . gone. Preserve Gamearth.”

The message stick crumbled in a final burst of light. The image of Drodanis scattered and vanished with the flames up the chimney, leaving only the logs and the low fire.

The morning air had a fuzziness to it, erasing sharp details of the forest and the countryside. Tarne kept watch at the Stronghold walls, looking down upon the few villagers who still tried to do field work in the rising midmorning heat. Other defenders moved within the empty Stronghold courtyard, waiting. Waiting.

Tarne could not be specific about the time of attack, nor could he even tell them what enemy they would face. He had gone out again later that night and stared at the aurora for hours. He rubbed his temples, trying to concentrate, willing the clues to come, but the Veil remained closed to him, nothing more than silent green-gray curtains suspended above the world.

After burning the message stick, the four of them had discussed possible solutions. Delrael had seemed upset at his father’s instructions to ignore the threat to the Stronghold.

Tarne stood tall and stared at Delrael. “I will stay here and fight. This is my home. The Veil has given us a brief warning, and I will not waste it.”

Delrael turned to watch the fire. He pounded a fist into his palm. “I hate to leave you, especially if you might have a battle—but you heard the Rulewoman’s message. We have to go and confront the greater enemy, whatever it is.”

“How?” Vailret had said. “We need to cut this thing off somehow, protect ourselves. But we know nothing about our enemy. It’s hard to make a plan when you’re blind-folded and have both hands tied behind your back.”

Bryl hung his head and looked dejected. “If only we had the Air Stone.”

“What about the other Stones?” Tarne asked. “Weren’t there four of them?”

“Yes.” Vailret furrowed his forehead. “The only one we could get to in a few days is the Water Stone. Sardun keeps it in his Ice Palace, north of us. That one controls the weather and water, and Sardun’s a powerful Sorcerer himself.”

Bryl scratched at his ears. “Maybe we should go and ask him for help.”

Delrael looked at Vailret, who shrugged. “It’s a start.”

Tarne had rapped his knuckles on the table, feeling the charisma grow in him again. He remembered fighting with Drodanis, he remembered giving orders on the battlefield. “I will gather up all the fighters from the village. We’ll be ready at dawn.”

He had stared beyond the walls, pondering. “The others may have to leave the village for a time and hide in the forest. But don’t worry—I will take care of them.”

Before dawn Delrael, Bryl, and Vailret set off northward, bearing their standard packs and the weapons they had chosen at random. Vailret’s precious old manuscripts lay in a large buried chest sealed with wax to prevent dampness from getting in. Tarne had no idea when they would return. His world, his adventure focused on protecting the Stronghold.

Now, at dawn, other villagers furtively glanced up at the top of the Hill. The Stronghold had protected their homes for centuries. Tarne realized that most of them hoped his vision would prove false, but he knew better. He had never been so sure.

Each of his picked defenders had been armed, some with relics from the old Sorcerer wars, others with less ornate creations by Derow the blacksmith. Derow had little experience in making weapons and felt ashamed to see his swords next to the elaborate weapons used by the former warlords. But Tarne had seen how well Derow’s blades cut—and little else mattered.

A hush fell over the abandoned Stronghold. Occasionally, the air rang with the distant clink of a hoe striking a rock, or a dissolving snatch of nervous laughter from the villagers far below.

“I thought I heard something,” said the young farmer named Romm.

And suddenly Gairoth, wearing the dazzling Air Stone set in an iron crown on his head, appeared on the Hill, stepping out of thin air and leading Rognoth the dragon—and an army of other ogres. Their combined howl of attack sounded like an avalanche.

In the instant of surprise, one thought shuttled through Tarne’s brain: Ogres don’t work together Flashbacks of his campaign against the ogres came flooding back, hunting down the monsters one by one with Drodanis and the other fighters. Tarne could not imagine that so many of them had survived the Scouring, or that they would band together. But Vailret had already warned him that Gairoth was part Sorcerer himself, and no ordinary ogre.

The ogres roared and lurched up the hill path, gaining momentum in defiance of the steep slope.

“Sever the walkway!” Tarne cried. Romm was already there, picking up one of the dangling mallets and striking out the wooden pins that held the walkway across the stone-filled trench.

The ages-old bridge settled a little, but jammed in its supports. “It won’t drop!”

The ogres had almost reached the top of the path, swinging their clubs in anticipation of wreaking havoc.

“It’ll drop when they come across it! Secure the gates! Quick! Jorte, help him!”

The two men swung the heavy doors shut while others slammed the crossbars into place. A few defenders shot arrows at the oncoming giants. One arrow struck Gairoth’s tree-trunk arm, but he plucked it out without a wince of pain. The monsters kept coming. Tarne had never believed there were so many ogres in the entire world, not even at the beginning of the Scouring.

Gairoth surged like a battering ram across the walkway, and still it did not fall. Rognoth crouched behind his master as the ogre took his club and pummeled the heavy doors. They splintered.

“Ready the trap inside the door. This one better work!”

With one massive final blow, Gairoth blasted the thick doors inward, sending spear-length splinters of wood flying into the courtyard. Arrows struck at him like lightning bolts, but bounced away like raindrops.

“What the hell?” Tarne looked at his bow as if it had betrayed him. “Arrows always worked before.”

With the other attacking ogres behind him and Rognoth at his side, Gairoth strode into the courtyard wearing a smug and triumphant grin.

“Now!” Tarne bellowed, and Derow the blacksmith pulled the lever that would plunge the ogres into the pit inside the gate. With incredible agility for bodies so large, Gairoth and Rognoth simultaneously leaped to the side as the trap fell inward, exposing the deep pit. The other ogres roared, working their way around the trap and into the Stronghold courtyard.

“How can this be happening?” one of the men wailed in shock. Though the defenders launched volley after volley of arrows, not a single ogre appeared to be injured.

“Where is Delroth!” Gairoth bellowed. He leaped into the air and brought his club down on the ground for emphasis.

“We knew it would happen,” Tarne said to the defenders. “And we were foolish enough to think we could prevent it. To the ladders! Everyone out!”

Ogres flooded into the courtyard as the defenders set up rickety wooden ladders against the northeastern wall of the Stronghold. The men scrambled over, dropping to the ground. They made their way through the thick forest toward the caves in the hills, hoping the ogres would not follow.

3. Sardun’s Ice Palace

“RULE #5: The speed at which a character may travel on foot is strictly limited. Characters may traverse no more than three hexagons of grassland, forest, or grassy hill terrain per day; two hexes of forested-hill, swamp, or wasteland; and one hexagon of mountain terrain. Once a party has covered the allowable distance, they must stop at the intervening hex-line.

“Naturally, if characters have access to other modes of travel, such as horses or boats, the allowable distances are modified, as given in Table A-1 . . .”

—The Book of Rules

“Good thing we weren’t there,” Bryl said. “Try not to sulk so much.”

“That was our home, and now Gairoth has it,” Vailret answered. Delrael said nothing.

They had watched from the top of a hill shortly after sunrise. Delrael squinted into the long shadows of dawn, describing details that Vailret could not see. None of them could believe the ogre had won so easily.

Delrael finally shook his head. His eyes, Vailret saw, were heavy and red. “There’s no excuse for how we’ve failed. We brought it on ourselves by being lazy. I wanted my father to be proud of me. What would he say now?”

They talked as they continued northward at a brisk pace. The Rules allowed them to travel three hexes per day in forest terrain and three in grassland. At one point a panoramic view of grassland terrain bordered an abrupt line of forest. The black barrier was sharp and hard as a razor stretching off into the fuzzy distance; lush forest lay on one side of the line, vast grasslands on the other.

“Your father told us not to fight for the Stronghold, Del. He wouldn’t consider you a failure. We’re doing exactly what he wants by focusing on the main threat.”

Delrael shook his head. “It’s not that.” He shifted his hunting bow, rubbing the red spot where the quiver strap had chafed his neck. “I mean we failed in a larger sense—the Outsiders got bored with us. We didn’t perform like we were supposed to. That’s why we were created in the first place—and they found Gamearth so tedious that they want to destroy it.”

He shook his head, avoiding Vailret’s gaze. “We should have gone questing more often, started some wars among ourselves.” He made a distasteful noise. “Farming and training—even I found it boring. No wonder the Outsiders gave up on us.”

Delrael kept moving along the trail. Vailret caught up and put a hand on his shoulder. Delrael seemed uncomfortable at being touched, but Vailret held him there anyway. “The Rulewoman Melanie is fighting on our side, too. Gamearth isn’t a complete failure—she must be enjoying it.”

Delrael didn’t answer and pushed ahead.

For the rest of the day Delrael kept to himself, brooding. Vailret remained busy planning how they might fight the Outsiders’ threat. Bryl complained most of the time, but Vailret found him easy to ignore.

He doubted they could do any serious fighting. Delrael had only a bow and his leather armor; Vailret had only a dagger, and not much battle skill or training to go with it; Bryl never practiced his magic and knew few spells. The half-Sorcerer could work some useful everyday magic such as starting a camp fire and replenishing their packs with food and water, but his only unusual spells were that he could make flowers bloom on demand (a useless talent, Vailret thought) and that he could blunt or sharpen a blade, which might prove valuable in a battle. Bryl had no one to show him new, more powerful spells, and he did not have the ambition to learn them himself.

Vailret had always wanted to be a fighter, like his father Cayon—but he did not have the physical build or the skill in weaponry, and his weak eyesight spoiled him for anything but close combat. Or reading.

He remembered the days of training at the Stronghold. At daybreak, the other villager trainees would leave their homes and trudge up Steep Hill. Visiting trainees from other villages lived within the Stronghold walls and helped with some of the preparations for the day’s instruction. Drodanis and Cayon would send everyone back down Steep Hill to come running up again, to strengthen their leg muscles. They made the trainees carry water up from the stream, whether the Stronghold needed it or not.

But after the deaths of Cayon and Fielle, Drodanis had done little training. Delrael, who was then fifteen, and the old veteran Tarne conducted the necessary exercises. Young Vailret had thought quests were old-fashioned and juvenile, and he spent much time with Drodanis, learning to think and read.

On Vailret’s eleventh birthday—two years after the death of Fielle—Drodanis had led him outside, across the enclosed yard to the small, windowless weapons storehouse in a corner by the double wall. The sky was gray, and Vailret could hear wind whipping in the trees of the hill, but the tall walls of the Stronghold sheltered them. Bryl waited for them at the storehouse door, looking bored.

“Has he agreed?” Bryl asked. “Do you think he’s prepared enough?”

Drodanis shrugged and looked at young Vailret, who felt a touch of fear at the back of his curiosity. “I haven’t even told him what we’re going to do.”

Without looking at Vailret, Drodanis opened the door of the weapons storehouse and stepped inside. Bryl looked at the boy, keeping a grave expression on his face.

Just inside the storehouse, Bryl snapped his fingers to light a single candle. Vailret looked around in the dim orange light. The dark interior of the storehouse seemed to be a haven for shadows and hidden fears. Spears, swords, arrows, and bows—mostly ancient Sorcerer artifacts sold by the Scavengers—lay stockpiled against the walls. Bryl’s face wore a nasty grimace as he gestured the boy inside, then closed the door behind them. Vailret held his head up, trying to keep his composure. He knew Drodanis wouldn’t hurt him.

“This is a role-playing game, Vailret. It is to be a test of your imagination,” Drodanis said. “And also to see how quickly you can think, how adequate your solutions are, how well you react under pressure.”

Bryl blew the candle out. Darkness swallowed all of them. The man’s low voice resonated in the shadows.

“You are imprisoned in a Slac fortress. You have watched as the Slac cut your companions to pieces, one by one, for amusement—you heard the screams from your friends, the laughter from the Slac. You are the only one still alive. Two guards come and drag you out of your dank little cell. What do you do?”

Vailret didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t understand. What am I supposed to do?”

“Pretend you’re in the situation I just described. What would you do? The guards are taking you. Are you going to struggle, or come along peacefully?” “I’ll struggle!” Vailret said. “And then what?” “And then run.”

“Where? Back to your cell, or blindly through the tunnels?”

“Pick a number from one to ten,” Bryl said.

“What?”

“Pick a number. If you guess the right one, I’ll let you break free. If you guess wrong, the Slac keep their grip on you. It’s like rolling dice.”

“Three.”

“Wrong.” Drodanis picked up the story again. “A guard raps you on the side of the head, causing one damage point and knocking you nearly senseless. They laugh. You are being taken to an arena where you will be thrown in with the Akkar, an invisible spine-covered creature that feeds on Slac victims. They want to watch your death convulsions. Any questions?”

Vailret paused only a second. He had begun to feel the game now. He closed his eyes and imagined, seeing himself in the Slac tunnels. “Will I have any weapons to fight with?”

“You are given a small club. That’s all.”

“Do I have the club now?”

“No. When they get to the arena entrance—and you are almost there now—they will throw it into the arena and force you out there.”

“How are the Slac guards armed?”

Drodanis paused. Bryl answered, “With spears.”

“You see the end of the tunnel ahead. It opens into a wide area covered with sand and gravel. All around the pit are jeering Slac, out of reach of the invisible Akkar. One Slac guard tosses your club out into the pit.”

“I’m going to grab for that guard’s spear and dash out into the arena with it. Then I’ll have more than just a club,” Vailret broke in.

Bryl and Drodanis looked at each other. “All right, pick a number between one and fifteen,” Bryl said.

“He has the advantage, Bryl—he’s surprising them,” Drodanis said.

“All right, a number between one and twelve, then.”

“Eight.”

“Got it!” Bryl said, surprised.

Unseen in the blackness, Drodanis chuckled. “The Slac shout in anger, but they’re not about to follow you to get the spear back. You have the spear in your hand. The club is about ten feet in front of you, lying on the bloodstained sand. Behind you the Slac slam shut a heavy door, trapping you in the arena. You can hear a grunting noise, like something running. The sand and gravel is covered with broken bones, but you can see large foot prints appearing as the Akkar charges toward you.”

“I’m going to run and get the club. I’ll pick it up off the ground and hold it in my hand, waiting to throw it as hard as I can at the front of the creature when it gets close to me.” Vailret felt breathless, as if his life was really at stake.

“You get the club and you throw it. Pick a number between one and three.”

“Two. There is only one number between one and three. “

“Hah! Caught me. All right, then. You hit the beast with a loud thump, probably in its head. You can’t see if it did any damage, but you have halted the creature’s charge. For the moment.”

“Now I’m going to try to stick it with my spear. Is it making any noises so I can find it easier?”

“Yes, you hear a snorting, breathing noise.”

“I’m jabbing with my spear.”

“Pick a number between one and seven.”

“Five.”

“Missed.” “I’m jabbing again! And again, until I hit something.”

“You hit it. I’m thinking of four different sections of the creature’s body. Pick numbers one, two, three, or four and I’ll tell you where you hit.”

Vailret paused in the darkness, concentrating. “One.”

“You skewered the monster’s throat! Several points of damage. Blood is gushing out—you can locate the Akkar easily now. But it is angry and charging.”

“I’ll dodge, now that I know where it is. Can I try to get my club again?”

“You can’t get to the club,” Bryl said flatly.

“You said there were lots of bones lying around. I’m going to run and pick up the first big one I find and throw it at the Akkar.”

“All right. After you’ve done so, you see another blotch of blood appear in front of the spear wound—one more point of damage. This time you hit the monster in the head.”

Vailret paused again, considering his next course of action. “Is there one Slac around the pit who looks like a leader, like an overlord?”

Drodanis paused, but he did not ask what Vailret was considering. “Yes, one seems to be dressed more magnificently than the rest. He has a portion of the arena circle to himself.”

“I’m going to steer the Akkar to get near the Slac warlord. I’ll pick up another bone and throw it if I have to.”

“You throw another skull. It misses, but the Akkar is getting cautious. It is still bleeding heavily from its neck wound.”

“I’m up against the wall of the pit below the Slac warlord.”

“The beast sees you cornered and charges.”

“I’ll plant my spear in the sand, bracing the haft and myself against the pit wall, sticking the point directly in front of me so the monster will charge into it.”

“Good,” Drodanis laughed. “Pick a number between one and five.”

Vailret paused a long time, sweating. Two? Four? One? “Five!”

Drodanis laughed again. “The Akkar has impaled itself on your spear!”

In the darkness, Bryl’s voice became serious. “Pick another number. Between one and ten.”

Vailret picked five again.

“You have been gored by one of the many invisible spines on the Akkar in its death throes. Your side is laid open and you are bleeding badly.”

Vailret let out a quiet cry. “Is it bad?”

“Very bad. If it isn’t taken care of, you will soon bleed to death.”

“The Slac will never take care of it, will they? I’m going to pull the spear free from the Akkar’s body. Can I do that?”

“Yes.”

“Remember I’m just below the Slac overlord in the pit. And he’s alone in his own part of the circle, you said. I’m going to throw my spear directly at him to kill him!”

Drodanis apparently found this exciting and let him succeed. “The spear strikes him squarely in the chest! You know it is a mortal wound. The other Slac start shouting and screaming. They begin firing arrows at you.”

“I’m going to take shelter behind the carcass of the Akkar!”

“It helps some, but not enough. You are hit by three arrows. A fourth,” Drodanis said. “You are dead.”

Vailret felt a cold lump form in his stomach.

Bryl lit the candle again, dazzling the three of them. Vailret felt confused but exhilarated. After a long silence, he finally asked the question that had been bothering him. “What should I have done to win?”

Drodanis looked at the boy, hiding a gleam of pride in his eyes; but Vailret saw it there. “Nothing. We left you no way out.”

Vailret frowned, baffled. “Then why did I have to play the game? What did it teach me?”

Drodanis grinned. “It taught you never to let yourself get captured by Slac.”

The three men traveled northward across hex after hex. The fifth day of walking took them over a ridge forming the southern rim of a bowl-shaped plain. They could see mountains on the near horizon. Vailret stopped to stare out across the grassland, but Delrael and Bryl plodded ahead. He hurried to catch up.

Overhead, the sky was clear. They saw no birds, no wildlife. The silence in the air started to bother Vailret as they marched out onto the lake of dry grass. The dead blades whispered against each other as if confiding secrets, but he could detect no breeze. Bryl stopped and spread his arms out in amazement. “Something happened here. I can still feel it.”

Vailret scanned the valley, the mountains to the north, the high grassy hills to the south. He sniffed the air, but smelled only grass and dust. A memory skittered around the back of his mind. Then it came to him, but the hissing sound of the wind in the grass covered his gasp of surprise.

“This is where the Transition took place!” He turned around, eyes wide and mouth open in wonder.

Delrael stopped, baffled. Bryl knelt down and touched his fingers to the ground, then looked up in childish delight. Vailret wondered what the half-Sorcerer could sense, what emanations the spectacular Transition had left behind, an echo that only a magic user could hear.

The valley did look large enough to hold the entire Sorcerer race. Vailret pictured in his mind all the surviving Sorcerers marching there to pool their magic, to transform themselves collectively into . . . something else.

The silence buzzed around them, as if the valley itself was still stunned. Many of the Sorcerers would have been afraid, some of them eager. But they had summoned up all their magic, pooled it—it was something even the Rules did not know how to handle. The Sorcerer race had transformed themselves into six Spirits—three Earthspirits and three Deathspirits—leaving their bodies behind, fallen like scattered wheat.

Only pure-blooded Sorcerers could join in the Transition. A few Sentinels had remained behind because of human or half-breed loved ones. The Sentinels had carried the fallen, dormant bodies into the mountains. They had erected the Ice Palace as a monument to their race.

Vailret shielded his eyes, trying to squint and focus on the high range standing ahead of them. “The Ice Palace must not be far from here.”

Vailret thought he heard voices riding on the cool wind, Sorcerer ghosts trapped in the air and trying to get back into their empty bodies. He felt uneasy. The history fascinated him, but from a distance. He didn’t like this place. Delrael and Bryl seemed uneasy as well. All three of them pushed forward at a faster pace to the mountains.

Sheer peaks stared down at them. At the black line separating the valley floor from the first hexagon of rugged mountain terrain, two statue sentries towered, thirty feel tall, carved from ice. Vailret stared at the monolithic sculptures—gaunt soldiers in full armor, with the insignia of the old Sorcerer race chiseled into their uniforms. They carried glistening icicle spears as weapons.

The silence pounded down on the travelers. The ice sentries stood in front of them, oozing cold, somehow casting crossed shadows on the road.

Slowly, the three men passed between the statues. Vailret looked to his companions. Delrael appeared calm, but Vailret could see tension in the way he walked. Bryl acted as if he were stepping on a giant mousetrap. Vailret tried to ignore his own uneasiness.

As they stepped over the black hex-line, the chill around them grew distinctly worse. The wind itself carried an essence of absolute cold. Vailret’s skin became numb, the feeling in his nerves snuffed out like an extinguished match. Flecks of snow danced in the silent air. Bryl tightened his sky-blue cloak around his shoulders, but he made no complaint.

“Sardun could be doing this with the Water Stone,” Vailret said, uneasy about suggesting the possibility. “It controls the weather, you know.”

“But he’s a Sentinel!” Bryl’s words were muffled around his cloak. “He’s supposed to help people.”

From behind came a loud clattering sound. They turned to see that the monolithic sentries had crossed their icicle spears on the return path. Then only the cold breeze broke the deathly hush.

Claws of wind slashed at the blankets, bleeding warmth away. The stars shone intensely bright in the sky as clear as black glass. The three travelers had stopped for the night, shivering under a sheltered rock overhang, but they found nothing to burn for a fire, nothing to keep them warm. Bryl wasted one of his day’s spells to force a small magical fire, but that did little to warm them. Delrael roused them before dawn. “We should have come more prepared. Come on—we’ll freeze if we don’t keep moving.”

Handfuls of snow had collected in the tiny pockets and notches on the rock faces. Lady Maire’s Veil cast auroral light down on the landscape, enough to see by.

They plodded onward with sore feet and aching legs, but the cold had deadened most of their feeling. Vailret felt giddy and floating. Numbness roared in his ears. At dawn they reached the top of a boulder-strewn rise in the path. Delrael looked northward, then extended his arm. “It’s there! See that glint?”

Vailret could not see anything clearly enough; the peaks in the distance blurred out of focus, but he trusted Delrael’s eyesight. They pushed on at a faster pace, and within an hour even Vailret could discern the gleaming towers of the Ice Palace nestled in the rocks.

Then the sky smeared over with clouds, and sleet pelted down. Vailret’s fingers were sluggish to respond when he tried to curl them inside a fold of his tunic.

Vailret squinted to see the Palace’s structure made of clear blue ice. But the gray sleet kept details hidden. He had seen a few sketches showing the main building, a pyramid flanked by two thin spires capped with onion domes.

The vast Palace was inhabited by only one old Sentinel and his young daughter. They tended the frozen underground crypt that held the husks of Sorcerers who had departed in the Transition centuries before. The other Sentinels and half-breeds had once made pilgrimages to the monument, but as the Game slowly ground to a halt, few made the effort anymore.

Few human characters would appreciate the monument and its treasures, but Vailret felt his own excitement growing. He could now speak with Sardun himself, have access to the original source material, even the Water Stone. Vailret felt optimism creeping up on him again.

Tall cliffs closed in on either side, finally blocking off the sleet-wind. The Ice Palace loomed up in front of them, but it did not match Vailret’s imagined picture at all. “Something’s happened,” Bryl exclaimed.

“Look at it!” Delrael craned his neck upward. Vailret stared, letting his mouth drop open.

The tall crystal spires were warped and drooping, with their decorative pinnacles melted away. A stumpy cascade of icicles ran like tears down the sides of the towers. Motionless frozen streams hung down the walls, stained black with a sooty residue. The structural blocks were now cloudy rather than transparent ice. The top of the main pyramid had been sheared off, blasted inward and leaving ragged, melted edges.

Vailret forced back a strong urge to cry. He felt angry and helpless. “What did this?”

“And what if it’s still here?” Bryl mumbled. His wrinkled skin made him look parched and afraid.

Delrael narrowed his eyes and looked for enemies hiding in the rocks. He broke the astonished silence and nudged them toward the destroyed buildings. “Let’s get out of this cold.” He moved forward, ready with his hunting bow, though his fingers were probably too numb to use it.

The tunnel entrance to the main pyramid gaped like an abandoned trap. The Palace had no gates, no defenses at all.

“The whole point was that anyone could come here, whenever they wished,” Vailret said with a note of despair. “It was a memorial—why would someone destroy it?”

Snow had piled up at the entrance. The ragged wind hooted through the hole. Everything inside lay desolate and untended, empty. Delrael led the way down an uneven, half-melted corridor, deeper into the main pyramid. The rough texture gave them footing on the ice walkway. The main tunnel spiraled around the outer wall of the pyramid, working its way toward the central chambers. Their boots sounded like thunderclaps on the frozen floor.

Refracted light seeping through the prismatic walls made unnatural rainbows, rippling and bathing them in color. Vailret looked from side to side, feeling the loneliness and emptiness gnaw into him.

The sound of the wind soon vanished behind the thick blocks of ice, but the cold itself seemed to focus and deepen as they neared the heart of the Palace. Up ahead, lights danced on the frozen walls, ricocheting and sparkling like tiny meteors. The wind returned, louder, from a source within the central chamber.

Intrigued but uneasy, Vailret pressed close to his cousin as they moved forward. A vaulted arch rose over the corridor, and the three of them emerged into the main reception room.

The entire ceiling of the central pyramid had been blasted away, and frigid air swirled out of the wide hole. Great rivers of ice streamed to the floor like petrified waterfalls. Snow drifted down to settle in a bull’s-eye pattern of ripples in the floor where the ice had been melted and refrozen.

A blocky white throne stood in the center of the room. Encased in tendrils of frost, an old man sat staring mindlessly at the blasted walls.

Sardun the Sentinel looked shriveled, mummified by cold. A long gray mustache hung against the wrinkled folds of his face. Vailret stopped and stared, afraid to make any sound. Delrael looked at him, questioning. Sardun blinked.

“He’s even older than Bryl!” Delrael whispered.

“He’s old enough to be my father,” Bryl said, annoyed.

The old Sentinel had plunged his left arm up to the elbow in the translucent ice of the throne’s armrest, embedding it. Through the murky ice, Vailret could see Sardun’s gnarled hand grasping the sapphire Water Stone. The Stone was a cube with a number etched on each face, shaped like a six-sided die, more powerful than the four-sided Air Stone. Unnatural cold spewed from the gem, swirling up and out into the world. “Sardun!” Vailret called. His voice cracked.

The Sentinel swung his eyes back to focus around him. The wind breathed a ragged gasp and failed as the blue glow in the Water Stone died away.

“Haven’t I been wounded enough?” Sardun’s high pitched voice held a tone of condemnation, then he chuckled a little. Vailret noticed that the old Sentinel lisped. “What’s left for you to destroy? There’s no more damage you can do!”

Sardun heaved the Water Stone out of the frozen armrest of the throne, pulling it up through the solid ice. A few drops of water dripped off his hand and disappeared into the air. The cavity in the armrest filled again and solidified. Sardun glared at the three and leaned forward.

“Look out.” Delrael edged back against the wall. “He’s going to roll it.” Unless Sardun rolled a “1”, his spell would be successful and would grow in power depending on how high he rolled.

The Water Stone sapphire bounced twice on the ice floor. The number “4” came up.

A thin bolt of lightning shot from the Water Stone, striking at the three travelers. But the Sentinel’s aim was skewed. The bolt pinged off the glistening walls several times before it dissipated.

Sardun did not pick up the Stone to roll again. His attack seemed halfhearted.

Vailret stood a moment in turmoil, knowing it might be safer to run away, but then he’d never know what had happened here. Nor could they ask for help to save Gamearth.

Confusion and indignation overcame Vailret’s better judgment. He stepped into view and spoke quickly, hoping the Sentinel would hear his sincerity. “Wait! You’re Sardun! You cherish the history of Gamearth as much as I do. Sentinels aren’t supposed to destroy people!”

Sardun swung his gaze at Vailret and snatched up the Water Stone from the floor to roll it again. Vailret knew he had little chance of avoiding a direct strike. Lightning traced the gray veins under the skin of the Sentinel’s hands.

Delrael shouted at him, but Vailret kept walking. He forced himself to be calm and brave, keeping his voice level. “We are friends, Sardun. You don’t have to hurt us. I know about the old Sorcerers and the Transition. I know about the Sentinels and how you built this Palace as a monument to your race. This was to be a place for pilgrimages, where all interested characters could come and see what had happened during the previous turns.”

He gestured behind him, where Delrael and Bryl remained out of sight. “One of my companions is a half-Sorcerer, son of the Sentinels Qonnar and Tristane. My other companion, Delrael, runs the Stronghold. See, Delrael wears a silver belt that is an ancient Sorcerer relic. He and I are both descendants of the great general Doril, who fought in the Scouring.”

Sardun watched Vailret with narrowed, watery eyes. Still holding his hunting bow in front of him, Delrael stood where he could be seen from the Sentinel’s throne. The wind whistled over the wide opening in the ceiling.

Bryl also peeked around the corner and held his palms out to the Sentinel. Gray-haired and frail-looking, Bryl posed no threat. “You can trust us.”

Sardun sat for a moment, wavering on the edge of consciousness. His eyes seemed half-crazed with grief and desperation, but even that faded into listlessness. The Sentinel had surrendered. He said nothing.

Vailret undid the frozen straps on his pack and with drew a wadded second blanket. Feeling awe at approaching the legendary Sentinel, he delicately wrapped the blanket around Sardun’s shoulders. He looked at the old man’s fur-trimmed gray robe; snowflakes had been embroidered along the shoulders and down his sleeves.

The air in the main chamber had grown warmer. Outside, he could see the sun shining again as the Water Stone released its hold on the storm.

Delrael entered the chamber, looking from side to side with narrowed eyes. Vailret watched him inspect the corners and the openings of other passageways, as if expecting something monstrous to crawl out and attack. Bryl waited, fidgeting in uneasy confusion.

Vailret tucked the blanket around the Sentinel and discovered that his legs were frozen solid, like meat left too long out in the snow, as was his chest and his right arm. For a moment Vailret was appalled that Sardun had been left alone like this, with no one to care for him. Then the other thing that nagged at the back of his mind snapped into place. “Sardun, where is your daughter?”

The old Sentinel was like a fragile clay pot, shattered by Vailret’s question. He fell backward, almost drowning in the ice of his throne. “Tareah!” he said. “She’s gone . . . gone.” Tears ran down Sardun’s face, branching in the network of wrinkles in his skin. As Vailret watched, the tears froze, then evaporated and were gone.

Delrael paused in his inspection of the room and then squinted at a thick, soot-covered icicle that looked like a maggot in the ceiling’s wound. He wrinkled his nose, as if sniffing at a strange taint in the air. Delrael seemed lost in deep thought, then he stood with one word on his thin lips.

“Dragon.”

Vailret looked up at his cousin’s comment. His gaze drifted to the fangs of icicles running straight down toward the floor, at the hole that had been blasted through from the outside. “A dragon did this!” Delrael said.

Confused words spilled out of Sardun’s mouth. “Yes, a dragon! Tryos, from the island of Rokanun, south of the city of Sitnalta, many hexes from here. He flew all the way . . . to steal Tareah! Oh, my Tareah.”

Vailret stared at him, then rubbed the old Sentinel’s shoulder. “You can tell us what happened. We might be able to help.”

Sardun shuddered. “I couldn’t stop him! The Water Stone was no help—dragons are not affected by magic.” He stared down into the flat faces of the sapphire Stone. He rolled it in his hand, looking at the number engraved on each face. “That is why they caused so much destruction in the old Sorcerer wars.”

He swallowed and looked up to meet Vailret’s gaze. “Tryos came, blasted his way in here . . . and took her.”

“But why would a dragon want to do that? Why Tareah?”

Sardun glared at him. “Because dragons collect treasure! Tryos is very old and he is bored with colorful baubles. Gold, gems, silver—he already has enough of those. Now, he collects anything that others place value on, anything precious or beautiful. He has stolen works of art, sculptures from the height of the Sorcerer days, precious relics.

“And now my treasure, my Tareah! I tried to defend her—I really tried. But I am weak. I have been here waiting one hundred and seventy years, tending this museum that no one ever comes to see . . . do I not have an excuse to grow weak?” His lisp grew worse as he became more distraught.

The Sentinel stared at the wall in his silent horror. His lips trembled, but he said nothing else. The three stood numb for several moments before Bryl finally spoke up. “But why would Tryos take your daughter?”

“Idiot! She is everything!” Sardun turned his head sharply, but the gesture was odd and jerky because of his frozen lower body. “She is our future! Tareah is the last full-blooded Sorcerer woman. One day she may be strong enough to awaken all the sleeping Sorcerers in the vault below the Palace. Our race will rise again. She will shepherd them back to us, to make things the way they were. And now Tryos has taken her.”

He hung his head, trapped and paralyzed on his throne. “Oh, why couldn’t I have more strength? I used more magic than the Rules would allow. I sacrificed most of my body.” He swiveled his head to indicate his frozen arm, his lifeless legs. “All for nothing.”

“We might be able to rescue her,” Vailret said softly. He looked at Delrael. His cousin shrugged and nodded slowly. “If you will help us in turn, Sardun.”

The Sentinel looked at him, then turned his gaze to Bryl and Delrael, unimpressed. “Where were you when Tryos attacked? Who stood by my side to fight him? To protect Tareah? How dare you ask me for help!” Sardun’s hand clenched the Water Stone again, ready to roll it and cast another spell.

“Because we have no choice, Sardun,” Vailret said. He laid a hand on the old Sentinel’s rigid shoulder. “The Rulewoman Melanie sent us a message—the Outsiders are trying to destroy Gamearth. They have placed a growing enemy in the east. They will play out turn after turn, putting their own plots into motion. We have to do something to stop them. You are the most powerful Sentinel left alive. We hoped you would have a solution.”

“I am not powerful enough. Tareah is gone. I don’t want to save anything except my daughter.” A winter storm glimmered behind his eyes again. “That’s why I brought the cold. Why should I be the only one to suffer?”

“You can send us on a quest to rescue your daughter. You know that we would be bound by the Rules to complete the quest. But we first need your help to complete our mission.”

Sardun cocked his head at Vailret, helpless and pathetic. “And what would I have to do? How do you plan to stop this outside enemy?”

Vailret smiled and consciously did not look at Delrael and Bryl as he described his idea.

“If our enemy is growing in the east, maybe we can cut it off from at least part of Gamearth. You have the use of the Water Stone, Sardun, and the Ice Palace is near the Northern Sea and the far edge of the map. If you could channel a river from the Northern Sea down to the southern edge of the map, that river could act as a barrier. It would cut off and protect at least half of Gamearth. Make the river so wide that whatever armies or monsters the Outsiders send against us are unable to reach the western side. We’ll be safe.”

Delrael crossed his arms over his damp leather armor, smiling at Vailret.

Byrl scowled, looking terrified at the thought of embarking on an even longer quest. “Think of the damage such a river would cause on its way to the sea. There’d be no way of stopping it.”

The aspect of destruction seemed to intrigue Sardun. The expression in his eyes went far away and he muttered to himself, lisping. “The Northern Sea would come rushing down to the ocean like a battering ram. A wall of water from the frozen seas, crashing through the canyons and mountains and grassland, pounding its way to the ocean. Think of the power, think of the destruction! A Barrier River—a whole hex wide!”

“No other Sentinel has ever left so great a mark on Gamearth,” Vailret whispered to him, afraid he might sound too manipulative. “Tareah would be so proud of her father!”

Sardun’s lips moved, and then he answered louder. “Yesss.”

4. The Barrier River

“RULE #2: The system of quests and adventures is all-important to the Game. Once a group of characters undertakes a quest, they must see it through to completion. Incidental adventures are likely to occur along the way, but the ultimate goal of the quest should always remain foremost in a character’s mind.”

—The Book of Rules

The balcony of the Ice Palace’s tallest tower drooped at a deadly slant, scarred with soot and the marks of dragon claws. A waterfall of icicles poured from the balcony’s edge.

Sardun was alone out in the open air, rooted to the ice and clutching the Water Stone with his one functioning hand. The northern breeze whipped around the tower, but he used the sapphire’s power to surround himself with a pocket of calm, weaving the winds away from his body.

The Sentinel stared across the geometric landscape of Gamearth. The sight of the sprawling hexagons of terrain always filled him with awe. And now that Tareah was gone from him, he just wanted to stare and stare until he faded away into nothingness.

“Sardun, are you sure you’ll be all right?” Vailret called from the balcony doorway. He refused to step out on the slanting ice after he and Delrael had carried the old Sentinel to the top of the tower.

Sardun did not turn to answer him. “I will do what you ask. And you are bound by the Rules to keep your bargain, to go on a quest to find and rescue Tareah.”

“We’ll do it, Sardun,” Delrael said.

Sardun doubted they would succeed. In fact, since they were required to continue the quest, no matter how hopeless it seemed, he felt almost certain he was sending Vailret and his companions to their deaths.

But if there was a chance, if Tareah might be rescued, Sardun had to take the gamble. Too much of Gamearth’s future rested within Tareah. She was the last full-blooded female Sorcerer. And she was his daughter.

Tareah.

“Leave me. I have never controlled this much power before. I would not want you standing in the backlash.” He turned and fixed his eyes on Vailret. “Go—begin the preparations for your journey to Rokanun.”

He turned back to the scene below, not waiting to see if they departed.

To the south, he saw the valley where the Transition had taken place. As a small boy Sardun had been there himself, two centuries before. He had offered his ineffectual help as the adults carried thousands of motionless, bereft Sorcerer bodies—people he had known—up into these mountains in a solemn and seemingly endless procession. They had placed the dormant bodies in a frozen underground tomb in the mountains and protected them.

Years later, when Sardun had full training in the use of his own powers from the elder Sentinels, he had erected the Ice Palace over the tomb as a monument to his race. He made himself the custodian of all their relics so that all of Gamearth would remember the old Sorcerers.

He stood in the cold wind, sensing the crypt deep below, untouched even by the dragon’s attack. The husks of the Sorcerers slept, empty and unchanged over the centuries—while the six powerful Spirits that had arisen from their metamorphosis had vanished from the world, ignoring Gamearth and its problems. Why hadn’t they come to help when Tryos attacked?

He tore his eyes from the landscape and looked down at the sapphire cube in his hand. Within the Water Stone resided magic from the ancient Sorcerer race, magic that—unknown to the Outsiders—was not necessarily bound by the Rules of the Game.

Sardun rolled the Water Stone and came up with only a “2”, but he didn’t need a very high roll to forge a frozen pedestal from the balcony floor. Chips of ice swirled up from the rippled surface, glittering like rainbow fireflies, and wrapped his dead lower body in a cocoon that held him firmly erect on the sloping surface.

“Sardun—thank you.” It was Vailret’s voice, coming from the tower’s doorway.

Sardun continued to stare at the smooth face of the sapphire, clearing his mind for the ordeal, but his chapped lips formed a slight smile.

At first, the other Sentinels had made pilgrimages northward to the Ice Palace, to see their fallen friends, to reminisce about the Golden Age of the Game. They brought with them their own relics, their own memories, and Sardun had collected all of the items.

But as the Sentinels died, so had Gamearth’s interest in its past. During the rampant bloodshed and racial hatred of the Scouring of Gamearth, half-breeds and humans concerned themselves only with their own survival, with fighting and gaming and uncovering treasure. Some characters grew bitter toward the Sorcerer race, who had deserted them in their time of need. The remaining Sentinels vanished one by one as they used magic to end their lives.

The Sentinel Kahleb had been the first to annihilate himself in a burst of Sorcerous glory. Kahleb had remained behind on Gamearth to be with his new human wife—but only a year after the Transition, she had died trying to give birth to a stillborn child. In his anguish, feeling desperately alone and unable to make the Transition without the rest of his race, Kahleb unlocked the depths of his own magic to destroy himself and his wife’s body in a spectacular funeral pyre.

But this release was more than simple destruction: Kahleb had discovered a partial Transition that liberated his own spirit, raising it up to where it could have a life of its own. Over the years, Sardun had watched as other Sentinels imitated this half-Transition, giving up hope and freeing themselves as they grew weary of life.

Tareah’s mother, an old Sentinel woman named Tiarda, came to the Ice Palace one winter to gaze at the tomb of the Sorcerers a final time. She had been beautiful once, but now looked worn and strained. She refused to play games with Sardun, not dice, not even hexagon chess. Sardun never asked why she had forsaken the original Transition, but he devised a desperate plan as she mourned over the dormant bodies in the crypt. Sardun had often gone with her, looking for one body she mourned in particular, but she never pointed out any one.

Sardun was at the peak of his strength, and lonely. Tiarda had no positive emotion left in her. Sardun sifted through Tiarda’s despair and apathy. He asked her to wait. The two of them might make a new hope for the Sorcerers. She reacted passively to Sardun’s romantic advances—she didn’t seem to care one way or another. This hurt him, but he could not let something so important slip away.

Tiarda was old, older even than Sardun, but she conceived a child, and Tareah was born. Sardun had hoped this would restore Tiarda, change her mind, but she refused to wait any longer. Sardun held the baby daughter in his arms as her mother called up the magic, unleashing her spirit in a blinding flash. She seemed to grow younger at the last instant: the gray in her hair ignited and filled with molten gold. Her face held an achingly beatific expression until the light broke through and blurred her features into a brilliant glow that faded into the air, leaving only Sardun and his baby Tareah.

He had not loved Tiarda, but the loss of yet another Sentinel struck him. Only the need to care for his daughter renewed his interest in life. He devoted himself to teaching Tareah her heritage, and her mission. Year after year he showed her the relics in the crypt, told her of the Rules and the Outsiders, taught her the historical accomplishments of the Sorcerer race.

Sardun waited, and hoped, and built his entire world around his daughter.

Then Tryos had stolen her.

Sardun swallowed a mouthful of stale saliva and began to chart the course for the great Barrier River. Bleak, towering mountains surrounded the Ice Palace. He looked to the southeast, toward Rokanun where his daughter had been taken. He seemed to feel her calling him, mourning for him and losing hope that she would ever be free. The gray crags extended, hex upon hex, as far as the eye could see.

The wind stroked his face, and he looked beyond the hexes of mountain terrain to the north, seeing the silvery reflection of the vast frozen sea. The morning sky had been filled with clouds, but he’d sent them away with the Water Stone’s magic. Now sunlight glinted off the snow flecked peaks.

The Barrier River would flow between the mountains, skirt the Ice Palace along its two western hex-lines, then burst into the Transition Valley, perhaps making a lake there. The river would wind through the grassy hills at the lower edge of the valley and plunge southward across the grasslands and swamps, restructuring the landscape, ripping a course through the forests and hills until it finally reached the vast ocean near the edge of the map. Sardun hoped no villages lay in its path.

As he stood out in the cold, very old and very alone, Sardun realized that he was not strong anymore—he had wept too much and had not eaten enough. But this was to rescue Tareah. And he knew where to find the power he required. He did not know what the consequences would be for summoning the sleeping magic, for bending the Rules, but he had passed the point of caring.

When the other Sentinels destroyed themselves in the half-Transition, one by one, they had liberated their spirits to roam Gamearth. Some of these spirits, which were apparently aware of themselves in a murky way, had sought out other Sentinel revenants. Over the years, the congregations of spirits had settled in places still prominent in their fuzzy Sorcerer memories, blending and seeping into the fabric of Gamearth, becoming a wellspring of Sorcerer power called a dayid. The Ice Palace itself harbored one of the largest dayids, the spirits of those Sentinels who most regretted their decision to remain behind from the Transition.

Sardun looked down. The ice pedestal sheathing his lower body made him look like a crystal tree trunk with one arm and a head. He stretched out his arm and touched the Water Stone to the ice wall of the tower. The dayid contained the spirits of many Sorcerers; and the Sorcerers had created the four Stones. He would find the dayid below and tap into it.

His thoughts narrowed to a single focus and shot through the sapphire, plunging to the core of the Palace, to the tomb of the Sorcerers. Sardun’s mind was pulled by a force stronger than gravity as his thoughts dodged the latticework of ice crystals.

Unconsciously, he let his arm fall, breaking contact with the wall as though the Water Stone had grown suddenly heavy—but his consciousness continued to descend. He dropped the Stone on the slanted balcony. It rolled twice and then stopped with the number “6” facing up, the highest he could roll.

Sardun plunged deep into a hot lake of mental fire, encountering the whispered, dazed voices of Sentinels he had known. Even Tiarda was there, if Sardun chose to seek her out.

In an instant he communicated his need and then shot upward again, swelled with the power of the dayid. He released his power, channeling it through the Water Stone and launching it toward the Northern Sea.

Sardun felt the Ice Palace rock under him. The Water Stone itself looked like a blue sun burning into the balcony’s floor.

He pointed his strawlike fingers and traced a winding course for the newborn Barrier River. In his mind he saw the enormous map of Gamearth on the wall in the lower vault, and he formed a line of terrain hexagons, turning each one blue as the river made its way southward to the edge of the map.

Still the power continued to pour into him from the dayid.

A mountain stood partly in the way, but it crumbled to one side; blocks of ice around the sea rim catapulted through the new canyon. Water spewed into its new path, frothing and spraying.

A great wall of water churned past the Ice Palace. It spiraled between the mountains and engulfed the Transition Valley. The Barrier River chewed its way through the grassy-hill terrain, then stampeded southward, seeking a route to the edge of the world and destroying everything in its path. The river would cut off the western half of Gamearth from the unknown danger in the east. No army could cross the wide, raging river—but that also doomed all the people, all the villages on the wrong side of the river.

Sardun saw the mighty passage of water as insignificant when compared to the dayid’s power, a power he fought to contain. With his heightened perceptions, he looked deep into the ice to see the hidden structural flaws, the damage the dragon Tryos had done to the Palace.

More power poured into him. He could not stop it from coming and had to release it somehow before it burst from him. Sardun turned the magic to reconstructing the Ice Palace. As swiftly as he could imagine the restorations, the improvements, the great Palace stood whole and undamaged, dazzling in the sunlight. The floor beneath him bucked and swayed as the balcony regenerated itself. The bent spire straightened.

Sardun then turned his energy inward, recharting his own veins and nerves and muscles, restoring the dead flesh he had sacrificed in his unsuccessful battle to save Tareah.

And after he had finished, the explosive power still would not release him, growing stronger as the dayid itself surged to new awareness after decades of dormancy.

Temptation grew in him, ravenous, demanding that he set himself free after two centuries of waiting. The dayid begged him to set his body ablaze, to annihilate himself in the half-Transition. The voices of the other lost spirits called to him, beseeching. Join us!

But he refused. Not now that he had hope for Tareah.

The Water Stone made the dayid’s link more potent, more difficult to deny. Blue flames licked around the fringes of his body; his newly regenerated cells began to nova as the process of partial Transition began to take hold. The Water Stone added its power, and the reaction grew stronger and stronger. Sardun fought to break free, but the energy fed upon itself, growing.

Screaming inside, Sardun leaped downward again, dragging his consciousness back to the dayid in the crypt. Using all his ability as a living Sorcerer, he severed the link, thrusting the dayid’s power back at it, and then fled to hide inside his own body.

He collapsed like a rotten fruit on the high balcony. The cocoon of ice holding him up had evaporated, leaving his pink, newly healed legs exposed to the wind. The smoking Water Stone had melted itself halfway into the new ice floor.

In the sudden silence, the grinding roar of the newborn Barrier River rose into the air. . . .

These relics are free

for all to see.

My only fee

is that you REMEMBER.

Vailret read the placard above the tunnel leading down to the crypt of the ancient Sorcerers. Bryl waited partway down the sloping tunnel eager, but hesitant to go farther alone.

Sardun lay like a dead man on the throne room floor, wrapped in several blankets. Vailret had hovered over him for hours, looking for any sign of improvement. Delrael had agreed to watch over the Sentinel while Vailret and Bryl explored the underground vault.

“Are you coming, Vailret? Tell me now so I don’t waste any more time waiting,” Bryl called from the tunnel, sounding anxious.

“Don’t be afraid, Bryl. They’re not rotting dead bodies. They’re just . . . empty.”

“I know that—don’t patronize me!”

They carried torches down the winding tunnel. But the outside light somehow reflected through the thick ice, making a refracted blue glow ripple out of the walls.

Vailret felt as if he was deep under water. The air smelled cold and musty. Bryl hovered by his side, curious but cautious.

“Do you think Sardun put any traps in the tunnels? To stop plunderers? Someone might think this is a good dungeon to investigate.”

Vailret sniffed the air, fascinated by the hypnotic light from the walls. “No, I doubt it, Bryl. This museum was supposed to be open for all to see, remember?”

Bryl seemed to take come comfort in that, but he still let Vailret lead the way.

The sloping passage opened into a huge vault bordered by shadows at the far ends of the room. They moved forward. The light from their torches reflected off the hewn ice walls, illuminating a magnificent chamber complete with stalactites of ice. Vailret stared in wonder.

Bryl went to rummage among the relics in delighted fascination. Cases, pedestals, mirror frames—all held some thing Sardun considered relevant to the history of the Sorcerer race. Scrolls and manuscripts had been carefully packed and labeled. An original copy of the Book of Rules stood in a transparent case. Vailret saw weapons—one sword burned and blackened—and garments, jewelry, sculpture, paintings.

Vailret felt overwhelmed as he stopped to inspect each item. His voice rise in pitch. “This is the sword of Stilvess Peacemaker!” He lifted up the blackened sword. “When he ended the wars between the old Sorcerers, the leaders of both factions cast their blades into a bonfire!” He ran his finger along the dull, twisted sword.

“And this shawl was worn by the Lady Maire on her wedding day, before the tournaments took place and fighting broke out among the guests—which was the start of all the wars. And this—ah!” He held his torch down near the faded parchment, afraid to touch it with his fingers, “It’s an original manuscript written by the Sentinel Arken!”

Bryl had found a chest of colored gems and sifted through its contents. He tossed a diamond necklace back onto the pile. “Arken? Who was that?” he asked.

Carried away by his excitement, Vailret scowled at the half-Sorcerer. “Haven’t you paid attention to any of the winter tales?”

“I can remember plenty of things, young man! I’ve seen more history than you will ever read—I know it’s not all glorious wonders as you seem to think. History is a lot of normal time with nothing happening. You have to see the highlights of a century at a time before it gets interesting. Be glad I’m taking an interest.” He paused. “Well, what does it say?”

Vailret looked down at the parchment again with wide eyes. “It’s the story of the Transition, as told by one of the oldest Sentinels. It’s priceless! Come here and read it with me.” He hoped the magnificence of the Ice Palace would awaken a sense of perspective and interest in Bryl. “The language is a little archaic, and some of the ink is faded, but I think we can manage.”

Vailret read Arken’s words, anxious to see what they said but trying to go slow enough for Bryl to keep up. “‘The Council had not argued so much since the wars. Bellan was red-faced and sweating (as usual) as she shouted her opinions, ranting on about how we could raise ourselves, as a race, to a higher level of existence, to escape this world which is not real. She vehemently pointed out (several times, as if she thought repetition might convince us) that this would open up the new doors of power and wisdom we sorely needed. The Transition could make us omnipotent spirits, gods. This was obviously the ultimate destiny of the Sorcerers—obvious to Bellan at least.

“‘We could escape our war-torn past, leaving behind our physical bodies and the scars of the long battles, and make ourselves real. The wars had stopped, the Sorcerer race was weak, questers had no zeal for uncovering new catacombs or seeking out more treasure—what if one day the Outsiders decided to end the Game?

“‘Many of the other Sorcerers agreed with her. Finally, one baffled-looking woman stood and asked why we were even discussing this, wondering if anyone had an argument to the contrary.

“‘I did. I told the Council I had discovered, by close interpretation of the Book of Rules, that none of our half-breed children could come with us. None of our beloved human wives or husbands. None. We would be abandoning them. I told them I would not leave Mika or our children behind. That gave the Council something to think about.

“‘Let it be understood that I did not try to dissuade my people. Not at all. I simply wanted it to be a matter of choice, that some would choose to remain behind, either refusing to orphan their families or simply fearing the unknown aspects of the Transition.

“‘We debated the matter for several years. Bellan pointed out rather harshly that we dissenters could not change our minds. Individually, we would not have the power to make a Transition for ourselves. We would be Sentinels, watching over the world and our children, while the rest of our race went to its destiny.’ “

Vailret took a deep breath, looking at Bryl. “Can you imagine it?”

The half-Sorcerer seemed to be looking down and through the parchment. “Yes, my parents were there, but I hadn’t been born yet. My father was a full-blooded Sorcerer, but my mother was only a half-breed. He stayed behind with her, and decades after the Transition they found themselves at the Stronghold. Your great-great-grandfather Worael ran things then. The battles of the Scouring were still going strong.”

Vailret looked at the old man in a new light, remembering how much Bryl himself had seen. Vailret waited, hoping the half-Sorcerer would continue reminiscing, but Bryl fell silent. After a moment he glanced at Vailret. “Well, does Arken have anything else to say?”

Vailret handed the torch to Bryl and ran his fingers just above the actual parchment. He didn’t want to smear or crumble the paper.

“‘The Sorcerers began the journey northward to the place we had chosen for the final gathering of our race, a broad valley in the north. And I came to watch, to remember. A few humans also came, and other teary eyed Sentinels, watching their dear friends depart and thinking of the ones even more precious for whom they remained behind. They came in small groups or large, some bringing entire families, some coming alone.

“‘All the Sorcerers stood in the valley and watched the sun rise. In the center of the field sat a white canvas tent, rippling with the brisk wind from the north—the five Council members had spent days in close quarters, never leaving the tent, apparently discussing final details. The rest of the Sorcerers were told to stand ready at any moment.

“‘The Transition occurred on the day of the autumn equinox. I remember that as significant—a day of balance, a day and night of equal length, halfway between the start of summer and the start of winter.

“‘Together, my fellow Sorcerers pooled their powers to weave a force so strong—I cannot describe it well in words, but anyone with Sorcerer blood will have some inkling of what I’m saying.’ “

Vailret paused, narrowing his eyes. He could not understand what Arken was trying to describe. He would never feel Sorcerer power or the nuances of magic—

“What’s the matter?” Bryl asked.

Vailret shook his head, searching for where he had stopped.

“‘Sparkling lights erupted from isolated pockets of air, growing intense, like a fireworks display. My people forsook their physical bodies, joining together in a blinding light, a flash of incredible sorcerous beauty. They . . . evolved, they became spirits. The massed ranks of the Sorcerers dropped to the ground. Empty and soulless.

“‘Splotches of color continued to float in front of my eyes. I thought that something had gone wrong, that all the power had been expended, leaving nothing behind. The bodies of the Sorcerers lay slumped against each other on the ground. Everything fell silent, and even the sun seemed to have paused in climbing over the horizon.

“‘Then the wind picked up. I remember how forceful it became, distinct, a rush of wispy voices, quietly mumbling faint words and phrases and whispers of astonishment. The air began to glow just outside my range of vision, taking substance, finally solidifying into six towering figures that loomed over us in the valley. The Spirits all wore hoods which cast their features into shadow. Three shone dazzling and white, while the other three cloaked themselves in darkness and mystery.

“‘Those of us remaining stared in awe, but the Spirits made no move to speak. They seemed indifferent to us and to the thousands of empty bodies lying on the valley floor. The Spirits conferred among themselves briefly, and then they vanished.

“‘To this day, the Spirits have had no contact with our world. This does nothing to allay the regrets of those Sentinels who now wish they had made a different decision. Sometimes I wonder if I had a right to stop so many of them.’ “

Vailret stopped reading. Bryl turned away quickly, as if trying to hide a sheen of tears in his eyes.

Vailret saw a plume of breath as he let out a long sigh. “Do you suppose the old Sorcerers knew something, even back then? That they were so desperate to escape to a new reality where the same Rules don’t apply? Before the Outsiders decided to destroy Gamearth.” He drew in a deep breath, awed. “Then why did the Sentinels stay behind?”

“The Sentinels carried all the Sorcerer bodies here,” Bryl said, muffling his words in his sky-blue cloak.

Vailret squinted ahead. “Look at them all.”

The ceiling of the vast chamber dropped low. The dormant bodies lay in awesome ranks beyond where the torchlight vanished into blue murk from the ice walls. They looked alive, asleep, with a gentle dusting of frost in their hair. Vailret could imagine them being placed here by the Sentinels; he could imagine Sardun spending patient decades rearranging them into restful poses.

The chamber felt very cold. Silence pressed down on Vailret, and he thought he heard breathing, countless lungs being filled at a synchronized but maddeningly slow rate, then an equally slow exhale. The torch sputtered once, making him jump and breaking the spell.

“Come on, Bryl. Let’s get out of here.”

Sardun propped himself up on a shaky forearm and glared at them. “You should not have waited!”

Vailret shrank from the outrage rising behind the old Sentinel’s watery gray eyes, but he eased Sardun back to his blankets. “We had to make sure you were all right.”

The night before, while Sardun still lay comatose, Vailret had crept out on the sparkling balcony to gaze in awe at the Barrier River. Nearly hypnotized, he stared at the vast channel of frigid water zigzagging sharply along the hex-lines, laden with ice chunks and brownish-gray silt. He squinted, but his poor eyesight blurred the details. He had to use his imagination, just as Drodanis had taught him.

Vailret stood in silence as the cold wind blew on him, and listened to the river grinding its channel deeper. The silent stars and the aurora shone overhead.

They had fulfilled the quest Drodanis and the Rulewoman had required. They had protected themselves from whatever the Outsiders had placed in the east. Creating the River might have been more extreme than was necessary to fulfill the vague instructions—but they knew too little about their enemy. They had finished one quest, but now they had promised Sardun another. And the Stronghold was still in the hands of Gairoth.

Vailret liked the old veteran Tarne and trusted him to lead the villagers to safety somewhere in the forests. But Gairoth had the Stronghold, and the Air Stone, and all his ogre comrades. Vailret hated to think of the damage they could be doing.

Sardun had nearly sacrificed himself to create the River, and they were bound by the Rules to go on the quest to rescue his daughter. By the time Vailret returned to the throne room, the old Sentinel had finally awakened.

“Tareah could be dead by now. You must hurry.” Sardun’s voice seemed stronger now, and he sat up again. His lisp seemed more pronounced. “Have you copied the map on the wall—so you know exactly where you’re going?”

“I’ve already memorized it,” Delrael said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Sardun sighed. “Perhaps I kept Tareah too sheltered. She should have been out, seeing Gamearth, learning the world. If she had not been here during the attack, she would still be well.”

“I would like to take a good sword if you have one, Sardun,” Delrael asked. “It would increase our chances.”

“Yes, choose whatever you need from the relics I keep if it will help you rescue Tareah.” The Sentinel spread his hands.

Bryl moved forward, reluctant but extending the shining Water Stone he had removed from where it had frozen into the ice of the balcony. The awe on his face was plain. “Here is your Water Stone, Sardun.”

The Sentinel squirmed away from the sapphire’s touch, twisting his face in an expression of fear and disgust. With a twitch of his gnarled left hand, he knocked the Stone out of Bryl’s hand.

Astonished, the half-Sorcerer chased the sapphire as it skittered across the floor of the throne room. “What’s the matter?”

Sardun slumped into his blankets, and a violent shiver rippled through his body. “When I last used the Water Stone, I forged a link with the dayid below. The other minds in the dayid are lonely. They nearly forced me to make the half-Transition. With the Water Stone it would have been so easy. So easy. So frightening.

“I think the dayid hoped that with me using the Stone and with its own strength, I could liberate enough power to raise us all through a real Transition.”

He sighed. “But I refused. I may regret it in the future as my only chance to make a miracle happen. I am afraid to use the Stone again. The dayid knows I’m here—and I doubt if I could resist that calling a second time.”

Bryl looked down at his blue cloak, flashed a glance at both Delrael and Vailret, then looked at Sardun. “I am a half-Sorcerer. I can use Sorcerer magic. I can use the Water Stone.” He spoke quickly, before anyone could stop him. His eyes were bright. “This could be just the magic I need.

“Gamearth is still infested with monsters that survived the Scouring. Maybe with the Water Stone I can protect us. That would give us a better chance to rescue Tareah.”

The Sentinel closed his eyes. “Yes, take the Water Stone and take it far from here. You will remove the temptation.” Sardun sounded very weary. “Use it to bring Tareah back to me.”

Bryl stared at the deep blue gem in his hand. He smiled, eager and in awe.

Delrael returned holding an ornate but serviceable sword. He strapped it at his side, against the tooled silver belt his father had given him. He straightened, brushed his hands over his leather armor and looked prepared.

“Let’s go.”

Sardun insisted on seeing them off, and they made their way outside with painstaking slowness. Vailret had tried to convince the Sentinel to rest, but he would hear none of it. “You will take me to the gateway!” Sardun said. His long mustache drooped into his mouth, making him look angry and impatient. They walked down curving crystal corridors just beginning to fill with rainbows as the sun rose.

When they reached the front gate of the Palace, Sardun slumped against the repaired doorway. He looked tired, but not quite empty of hope anymore.

“Luck.” Delrael waved as they set off.

“Luck—rescue my daughter!”

The sunlight was much brighter now that the ice walls no longer filtered it. Vailret shaded his eyes against the glare. Some of the snow from Sardun’s unnatural cold still covered the ground, reflecting the light, but the day was warming rapidly.

Melted snow had muddied the ground. The mountain path was much easier now that they didn’t have to battle the weather. The Ice Palace stood whole again, glistening like a diamond.

The three travelers hiked southward, leaving the towers behind. Bryl fingered the sapphire Water Stone in his chest pocket, as if waiting for the moment when he could use it. Vailret looked at their optimism and felt a foreboding—they seemed to have forgotten what they were going to be up against.

At the Ice Palace, without the Water Stone to protect it for the first time in centuries, the tall spires started to succumb to the returning summer heat. Tiny trickles of water ran down the great walls, freezing again before they reached the ground, and then warming once more. The Ice Palace began to melt.

Interlude: Outside

The Players stared at the crystalline twenty-sided die on the table. A perfect “20” faced up.

Melanie rubbed her hands together and smiled at David. David made as if to knock all the dice off the table, but she held up her hands. “You can’t do that, David.”

She could see the anger behind his eyes, the need to beat her, and she worried about the change that had come over him. Oh, he had professed boredom with the Game in the past, but never anything serious . . . just complaining for the sake of complaining. They were used to that from David.

But now the urgency of stopping the Game possessed him—and he couldn’t just leave. The four of them were part of the Game, they had been at it too long. David acted addicted, hating himself for it. Like an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler . . . a compulsive gamer? If he just walked away from the Game and let them continue playing, Melanie knew he would be back. He knew he would be back. And he desperately wanted to remove that option, that carrot in front of his nose.

“I think we should get different dice,” he mumbled. “She’s been rolling too well tonight.”

“Spices things up a bit,” Tyrone said. He rocked back in the chair and drummed his fingertips on his chest. “Hey, anybody want some more dip? I’ll put it in the microwave.”

“Are you suggesting she’s using fake dice, David?” Scott raised his eyebrows. “You know those are the same ones we’ve always been using. Besides, it doesn’t make sense because we’re all using the same ones. If a die’s loaded for her, it’s loaded for us, and we should be rolling twenties, too.”

Melanie stared at the map, at the colored hexagons, and she smiled. “Or maybe it’s just that my characters are helping out.” Her voice had a facetious tone, but David looked at her sharply.

“You’re crazy.”

“Oh, whose turn is it?” Tyrone stood up from his chair, scooped some of his bean dip on a cracker, and offered it to Scott, who refused. “What are you going to do with your roll, Mel?” He shut the microwave door and twisted the timer.

“Sardun succeeded in creating the Barrier River. It cuts off the western half of the map from the east.”

“That won’t be enough,” David said. “It’s just a delaying tactic.”

But Melanie stared at the map. Her eyes widened. She couldn’t believe what was happening. “Look!”

One hexagon of gray mountain terrain below the Northern Sea suddenly winked. It changed color to the enameled blue of the water.

Then the hexagons of grassland terrain below it also turned blue, one at a time, moving downward like a zipper. One after another the hexagons of terrain turned to water in a line that meandered its way around the forested-hill and grassy-hill terrain.

“Wow!” Tyrone leaned across the table and pressed his face close to the map. “Look at it go!”

“Like it’s choosing a logical course!” Scott said. “I don’t believe this.”

The hexagon of a lone village was inundated and changed without a trace. Melanie thought of the villagers, the people, their homes and fields. The River moved on until it emptied into the sea below.

Melanie sat frozen. David turned gray.

Scott jumped up and ran into the kitchen, pulling open drawers until he found the silverware. He came back to the map with a butterknife. He chipped away at one section of the new blue color.

Melanie tried to stop him, but he avoided her. “Wait, we’ve got to check this out. Timed-exposure paint or something? Of course not.” He frowned, deep in thought. “I don’t know what else to make of it.”

“That was wild!” Tyrone said.

Scott squinted down. “The blue goes all the way to the wood!” He looked as if his reality had somersaulted in front of him.

David’s reaction was incredible even to Melanie. She was amazed . . . but David took it in stride.

“I’ll stop your characters. They’ve made a river, but I won’t give them another chance.”

Melanie jabbed a finger at the map. “You’re way over here. You’ve been spending all your time in the mountains and in the east. You can’t get anything to them in time.”

David raised his eyebrows. “We’ve got wandering monsters left over from the Scouring. I can roll up some more. It doesn’t have to be part of any major plot to get rid of your characters.”

“Plenty of wandering monsters in my section,” Tyrone said. He rubbed his hands together. “And catacombs and good stuff. That’s where they’re heading next.”

Scott kept staring at the blue paint. “Don’t you guys realize what just happened?”

David drummed fingertips on the table. “With Tyrone helping me out for the last bunch of turns, we’ve done everything we needed to do in the east and in the mountains. Everything is set, all my wheels are in motion. We can get out now, and on to other things. Consider your characters doomed, Melanie.”

Tyrone forced a laugh. “Sounds like you’re getting personal, David.”

“It is personal. A lot depends on this, you guys. I’m fighting for your lives, too.”

The bright blue streak down the center of the map filled Melanie with awe. “And I’m fighting for theirs.”

5. Cyclops Canyon

“By setting forth the Rules in this book, we have attempted to make sense of the way Gamearth works.

“Characters must follow the Rules—we have no choice. If travelers want to go farther than the allotted number of hexagons per day, or if magic users want to cast more than the allowable number of spells, they cannot. Their feet would refuse to cross the hex-line, their spells would not work.”

—Preface, The Book of Rules

Even with a brisk pace, the Rules said they could cover only one hex of mountain terrain per day. No matter how fast they walked, they never reached a hex-line before nightfall. Vailret wanted to hurry, to end the quest and get back to the Stronghold and his studies, but they would have to overthrow Gairoth first. Vailret hated to be away from home—he had so much else to do besides adventuring.

Delrael seemed to know what he was thinking and raised an eyebrow. “There’s some consolation, Vailret. Just trying to rescue Tareah could help us save Gamearth. If we give them a good show, the Outsiders might stay interested enough to keep Playing a while longer.”

Around him the mountains in the distance were indistinct and blurry. Though many of the plants had died in Sardun’s unnatural winter, he could still see the colors of late spring. “Do you even know where we’re going?” Vailret asked.

“Sure,” Delrael said, nonchalantly. “We need to get across the Spectre Mountains, then follow the mountain terrain line down toward the city of Sitnalta. No problem. “

Vailret looked around. “Invisible ghosts are supposed to inhabit the Spectre Mountains, you know. No character has ever encountered the ghosts and returned alive.” He paused and put a finger on his lips. “But if no one ever returned alive, then how do we know the story?”

Delrael shifted his longbow on his back. The sunlight gleamed on his oiled leather armor. “This section of the map was filled with catacombs and all kinds of wandering monsters. More likely there’s a Slac fortress making off with unwary travelers.”

Vailret remembered his make-believe encounter with Slac in Drodanis’s role-playing game in the weapons storehouse. “Then we’ll need to be even more careful.”

They followed the rocky trail downhill until it disappeared completely at the sharp hex-line against forested-hill terrain. They stopped for the night. Across the line, a mixed forest of oak and pine abruptly replaced the stone crags.

The three sat around the fire sparked by Bryl’s magic. They played a game of dice on a flat patch of rock, but Delrael kept winning and the others grew bored. Vailret tossed a pine cone across the hex-line. It bounced and skittered into the forest debris.

Vailret sighed. “You know, some of the old Sorcerer writings get metaphysical. I remember one that tried to explain how the hex-lines got into the world.”

“How else would you have it?” Delrael shrugged. “If the landscape wasn’t broken into discrete areas of terrain, the world wouldn’t be very orderly, would it? It only makes sense.”

Bryl yawned and looked ready to sleep.

“Well, imagine a chaotic world where grassland and forest and hills and mountains are all intermingled, no boundaries, just a constantly changing confusion.”

“That’s crazy,” Delrael said. “It would never work. It’s too unstable.”

Vailret leaned back and looked at the flickering flames dancing over the wood. He thought of the message stick from Drodanis and the warning from the Rulewoman. “So, who says the Outsiders make sense?”

“Let’s get some sleep,” Delrael said as he stretched out on the rocky ground. Vailret looked longingly at the softer leaf-cushioned earth only a short distance away across the line. But he could not break the Rules and cross into another hex.

Delrael didn’t see the Cyclops until it was almost too late.

They followed a stream that cut itself deeper into a narrow valley; the peaks of the Spectre Mountains remained visible only a hex away. Sandstone walls rose sharp on either side, eaten away by the swift water, dotted with a few valiant pine trees that somehow found rootholds. On the top rim of the gorge the forest grew thicker, dark with pine trees and splashed with the lighter color of oaks. The tall rock walls loomed above them, riddled with notches and caves.

The stream turned into rapids as icy water dashed itself against the strewn boulders. Delrael stopped at the foot of a small waterfall. He tried to follow an individual bead of water as it tripped and crashed against boulders before dropping into space. Bryl leaned forward to splash his fingers in the cool water. Delrael strode back and forth until he found an easy path that led them below the falls.

It all seemed very peaceful, with only ragged birdsong and the sounds of the stream. Delrael’s hunter senses suddenly sent him a dozen alarms. He heard a guttural bellow from somewhere above, but when he craned his neck to look, the lowering sun flashed in his eyes.

“Look out! Heads up there!” a voice called from the opposite rim of the canyon.

Delrael turned his head to the cliff above them. His brown hair whipped into his eyes, but he stared in amazement for a moment. Bryl also saw and pointed frantically.

A thirty-foot-tall hulk emerged from behind a squat outcropping of rock, glaring at them with one wide yellow eye set in the center of his forehead. A horn curved up from his brow, looking like a twisted root yanked out of the ground and sharpened to a deadly point. The Cyclops roared again, exposing a jumbled set of fangs, as if someone had haphazardly hammered the teeth into his mouth.

The Cyclops strained his muscles and heaved a boulder over his head. His fingers ended with obsidian claws that gouged white marks into the stone. Clods of earth crumbled off the bottom of the rock, dusting the monster’s shoulders.

The voice shouted again from the opposite side of the gorge. The Cyclops hurled his boulder across the canyon at the caller, but the rock fell short and plunged into the narrow stream instead.

“Run!” Delrael said, pushing Vailret ahead of him. “Get to some shelter.” He smiled as he ran, though—he felt his heart beating, felt his brain working. He’d wondered when they were going to start having adventures again. This section of the map had more than its share of wandering monsters, treasure-filled catacombs to explore, incidental adventures—just like in the golden age of Gamearth.

As Vailret and Bryl hurried toward the canyon wall, Delrael paused to search for the source of the voice. In the lengthening shadows on the rock face, he could discern another creature, a hybrid man/animal with the body of a panther and the head and upper body of a man. The panther-man held a long sword that seemed to be carved from heavy oak wood and varnished with hardened pine pitch. The panther-man thrust the sword in a scabbard strapped to his back before he started down into the gorge, scrambling for footholds on the knobby sandstone wall.

“Don’t just stand there and gawk!” Vailret shouted back at Delrael. “Find some cover!”

The Cyclops bellowed as he uprooted another boulder.

“Oh, no,” Bryl said.

Vailret’s words startled Delrael, making him realize how unprotected he was on the canyon floor. He charged toward the stream. Delrael didn’t care why the Cyclops had attacked them or why the panther-man was there—this was an incidental adventure on their quest, and they had to play along. It wouldn’t affect their main goal, but it might be amusing along the way.

Another thrown boulder crashed near Delrael. He made a running leap to dive across the stream. His boots slipped on the mud of the opposite bank, and he sprawled flat on his stomach. He struck his head against the bank. The wind gushed out of his lungs. He gasped, trying to take a breath, but his chest seemed to be locked tight.

He saw blood smeared on the palms of his hands, mud down the front of his leather armor. He hoped he had not smashed his hunting bow. He scrambled to his feet, then fell back roughly, in pain. His ankle felt as if it had been twisted full circle. Typical! he thought, ready to curse his luck. His ankle felt like a thunderstorm turned inside out.

The Cyclops had seen, and picked his target.

“Look out!” the panther-man cried from his perch halfway down the canyon wall. With splayed paws, he searched for a way to climb the rest of the way down.

Delrael saw the boulder coming at him. He knew it would hit him. Damn it, had he used all of his luck on dice games the night before? A harsh breath whistled through his teeth as he rolled to escape the rock. He saw Vailret and Bryl, but they were moving too slowly. Too slowly. Delrael thought he could hear thunder up in the sky, the sound of the Outsiders rolling their master dice.

He wrenched his body backward, twisting his chest an extra finger-width out of the path of the boulder. It crashed to the ground, spewing up earth and plowing over Delrael’s left leg instead. A ton of stone crushed down, splintering bone and destroying flesh and muscle.

Delrael screamed, but then his voice fled. Horrible seconds passed before the pain mercifully shut down the connections in his brain. He floated half-conscious in a sea of exploding splotches of color and shrieking nerves. Blood roared in his ears and spilled out of his shattered leg, making thick mud in the turf.

The Cyclops sprawled out on the rock face and lowered himself down, dropping his huge body from one jagged sandstone ledge to the next. As his obsidian claws scraped against the stone, sparks showered into the air.

Vailret and Bryl rushed to Delrael.

The panther-man leaped to the canyon floor from the last ledge and sprinted across the ground. His muscles bunched and rippled as he charged toward the descending monster.

The Cyclops dropped to the floor of the gorge and reeled to get his balance, intent on his fallen prey. The panther-man gave a loud whoop and plunged toward the Cyclops, swinging his wooden sword. Sunlight gleamed from the varnish on the blade’s surface.

The panther-man slashed at his legs, and the Cyclops bellowed loud enough to shake rocks loose from the canyon walls. He fumbled with unwieldy clawed fingers, trying to grab his attacker. The panther-man sprang from side to side, weaving around the monster’s bulky legs.

The brute looked up and fixed his glowing yellow eye on Delrael’s motionless form. He swatted at the panther man and ignored him as he thundered toward his victim.

Vailret knelt down heavily on the muddy ground next to Delrael’s mangled body. His face became the color of old cheese at the sight of all the blood, but then he turned to grab the half-Sorcerer’s shoulders. “Dammit, Bryl—use the Water Stone!”

Bryl was already grabbing the gem. “I know!” He touched the flat blue facets, rubbing his fingers along the surface of the sapphire, and then plunged his mind into the mental keyhole, unlocking the power trapped within.

He rolled the Water Stone on the ground. “Come on!” The gem came to rest with the number “4” facing up. Bryl curled his lips against his teeth. Vailret hoped he really did know how to use the stone.

The Cyclops bellowed as a thick cloud appeared like a glove over his towering head. He tried to dodge it, to run—but the mist followed him, covering his face and blinding him. The tip of his veined horn protruded from the cloud. Groping around in circles, the Cyclops stumbled on boulders and tripped across the stream as he staggered toward the towering sandstone cliff face. He stubbed a cabbage-sized toe on a boulder and howled, but the thickening cloud-stuff muffled the sound.

Bryl glanced at Delrael helpless on the turf with his leg mangled and bleeding. A fury of lightning bolts burst from the hanging cloud. The Cyclops yowled, launching himself forward to flee the storm—ramming headlong into the rock face with a crunch that reverberated through the canyon.

Bryl let the cloud dissolve, and the Cyclops collapsed to the rocky ground. The monster grunted once and lay still.

Vailret stared at Delrael lying on the ground. He trembled, amazed at all the blood. Sweat made Vailret’s blond hair stick to the sides of his head, but his face grew stormy with anger. He bent down to unfasten the ancient sword from Delrael’s side. The injured man whimpered when Vailret moved him.

Vailret pulled the sword out of its scabbard and held it awkwardly. If he tried to use a sword in battle, the odds against him would be so great as to make it not worth the attempt. But this was not battle. The Cyclops lay unconscious. This would just be revenge. He took a determined step toward the monster.

“No. That would be needless killing.” The panther man padded up to him. “I will not let you kill even the Cyclops when it is unnecessary.”

Vailret confronted the panther-man for a long, frozen moment, flicking his eyes from the brute sprawled among the rocks to Delrael lying on the bank of the stream.

The panther-man stared back at him with eyes as green as leaves and moss. A long black braid ran down the length of his human back to rest against his feline fur. A pendant made of pine cones and acorns bound together with pitch dangled in the front of his hairy, naked chest.

“You’re a khelebar,” Vailret said.

The panther-man met the young man’s eyes. “Yes. I am Ydaim Trailwalker.”

Vailret glared at the khelebar. “Why would you help us and then stop before the fight is finished?”

Ydaim seemed puzzled by Vailret’s logic. “When is a fight ever finished?”

Vailret turned away in angry disgust. He threw the sword back down on the canyon floor. “It certainly isn’t finished yet.” He stared with watery eyes at the Cyclops.

Bryl knelt beside Delrael, doing little more than straightening his hair. The man’s skin was a clammy gray and glistening with the diamond dust of sweat. His shallow breaths came from between gritted teeth. Blood poured onto the ground.

Vailret cut a strip from one of the blankets and bound up Delrael’s thigh. He pulled the tourniquet tight, then used a twig to twist it tighter. But the blood continued to flow. “This won’t do much.”

“I don’t know how else to help him,” Bryl said. “Do we just wait here for him to heal? The Water Stone controls the weather—it won’t do anything for Delrael. I never learned any healing spells!”

The khelebar leaned over to touch Delrael’s chest. “My tribe lives in Ledaygen, the forest just above this valley. We can take your friend there.”

Tears streamed from under Delrael’s eyelids. He shuddered violently.

“He has already lost his leg,” Ydaim said. “If we get him to Ledaygen soon, perhaps our healers may be able to save his life.”

We don’t have any other choice.” Vailret tried to make his voice sound firm, as Delrael’s had been. Bryl looked at him, afraid and confused. Together, the two of them carefully lifted the man onto the khelebar’s broad back, where Ydaim held him. Delrael’s left leg fell limp and rubbery, bending in a thousand places where a leg should never bend. Blood dripped down the khelebar’s tan hide, marking a trail down his flank.

Ydaim Trailwalker trotted ahead, but he set each foot fall down with care. “Come! Follow me.”

They jogged after the khelebar, leaving the Cyclops senseless on the floor of the narrow valley.

#

The khelebar climbed steadily up out of the gorge. Ydaim led them directly east into thicker forest, crossing the hex at its narrowest point. He moved with quiet confidence and rarely glanced at the humans.

Bryl acted withdrawn, as if cursing himself for not acting sooner, for not being able to help. Vailret looked down to see the stream below them, a thin ribbon winding over its bed of rocks. But he kept his attention on Delrael sprawled on the panther-man’s back.

He wished Ydaim would stop for just a moment so he could place a blanket over Delrael. But they had no time.

Flecks of blood painted the silver belt made by the old sorcerers Sentinels so many years before. Delrael’s skin was cold and clammy, and sweat pasted the brown hair to his forehead. Vailret couldn’t bear to look at the splinters of bone jutting from the crushed leg.

Adventuring! Rule #1: Always have fun! This was irrational, ridiculous. Vailret resented Drodanis and his message stick that had sent them on this mission. He resented Sardun and his daughter. And most of all he resented the Outsiders, for amusing themselves with brutality to their own characters.

“That Cyclops is going to attack the next adventurers who come peacefully through here, too. And the next, and the next, just like he attacked us. It will never stop, because you don’t believe in ‘needless’ killing.”

Ydaim kept moving ahead, ignoring Vailret’s anger.

“How much destruction does the monster need to cause before killing him becomes necessary?”

The khelebar loped along in silence, without missing a beat. “Do not worry, Vailret Traveler. The healing arts of the khelebar are greater than any other you will find on Gamearth. The dayid of Ledaygen helps us. Our healers may be hard-pressed, but you must have hope.”

“You’re not listening to me! When an ogre killed my father, my uncle Drodanis was so outraged he took a band of men out to exterminate the ogres once and for all. But his anger died too soon, and he returned before finishing the job. Now, the ogres have taken the human Stronghold and destroyed our entire village. If Drodanis had completed the task he started, we would never be in that mess! You’re doing the same thing—who knows what else the Cyclops will ruin? And you will be responsible because you refused to do anything about it.”

Ydaim raised his eyebrows and appeared deep in thought as he continued to lope down the unseen trail. His wide paws whispered through the underbrush that encroached on the fringes of the path. “I find you difficult to understand, but I am trying. Some of our elders will be intrigued by your philosophy.”

His voice held a puzzled tone. “Tell me again how the Cyclops’s death will help your friend. Do you believe your friend will absorb the Cyclops’s life force if you kill the monster?”

Vailret blinked. “No—don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then how can the killing the Cyclops help your friend in any way?”

“I’m not just talking about Delrael! What if other travelers come through here? They’ll be attacked, too.”

“But if no other travelers pass through the gorge, then we would have killed him for naught.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of preventing disasters before they happen?”

The khelebar shrugged. “The Cyclops is our nemesis, yes, but I have never considered killing him just to be rid of the nuisance.” Ydaim was silent again for a long time, managing to keep a good speed along the path with out losing his breath. “We believe the only way to get the Outsiders to stop inflicting these senseless adventures upon us is to face them with complete indifference. One day they will see that we no longer wish to Play, and they will leave us alone.”

Vailret swallowed in his dry throat. “That won’t work.” Bryl stumbled along beside them, silent. The khelebar did not know what was about to happen to Gamearth—and the khelebar were on the eastern side of the Barrier River, the wrong side.

The panther-man ignored Vailret’s comment. “You have strange but valid points. It is not for me to decide. I will take it up with the khelebar council and allow you to speak. But our first priority is to see that your companion is taken to the healers in Ledaygen.”

Thinking he had been rebuked, Vailret silenced himself. The afternoon sun fell toward night. Each time Delrael made a sound, Vailret clenched his fists.

Ydaim brought them across a low grassy rise, and they reached another, more verdant forest, isolated in the depths of the mountains. The khelebar surged forward with new energy.

“Ledaygen! Can you feel the dayid’s presence?” He let out a high-pitched sound and plunged into the forest, bearing Delrael with him. Though exhausted, Vailret and Bryl rushed to follow him.

An enveloping presence folded over Vailret, and a quiet eeriness penetrated even his sense of urgency. He had spent much of his life in the forest, thinking and walking among the trees and seeing the precise details of how the Gamearth wilderness was constructed. Yet, Ledaygen was somehow different.

Overall, the cleanliness amazed him. No lichens or shelf-mushrooms clung to the trees, no dead and rotting branches lay strewn about the forest floor. The trees, almost entirely oak and pine, were tall and straight, healthy, without crippled branches. The forest floor had been covered with an even blanket of dry leaves and mulch, interspersed with frequent and exactly positioned flowers and plants. Vailret saw no choking underbrush, no thick brambles or tangled vines. He drew in a deep breath of the loamy air.

Delrael groaned again. He looked even weaker now, and his skin seemed translucent with pain. Only a hair’s breadth separated him from death.

“Almost there!” Ydaim Trailwalker called in a strong and hopeful voice.

The trees of Ledaygen broke away from them like parting curtains. Ydaim entered a wide, grassy clearing that overlooked a stunning panorama of the Spectre Mountains. Vailret realized they had taken the short way across the forested-hill terrain and had already arrived at the hex-line.

In one of Gamearth’s rare flukes of nature, the line of forested-hill terrain did not exactly match up with the adjoining hex of mountain terrain. The hills rose upward and the slope of the Spectre Mountains plunged downward, resulting in a yawning, mismatched cliff that dropped nearly a thousand feet to the roots of the mountains. One tall, ancient pine stood alone on the verge of the cliff, straight and powerful, with boughs sweeping upward and outward to watch over Ledaygen.

Ydaim looked around the clearing and shouted into the air, “Thilane Healer!” The birds instantly fell silent, and it seemed that the trees carried his words, spreading them throughout the forest. Vailret saw other khelebar emerge from the surrounding trees, responding to the summons. The panther-people stared in horror at the injured man on Ydaim’s back.

“See what your Cyclops has done?” Vailret said, intending to shout, but the forest muffled his words.

The panther-people parted to let a bare-breasted female khelebar come forward. Gray-streaked blond hair cascaded down her naked back in two long braids. Tiny yellow and white flowers had been woven into her hair and draped in a sweet-smelling garland along her neck. Her panther body was a dusty gray, and lines of strain and weariness etched her face.

“Thilane—” Ydaim Trailwalker began, but she motioned him to silence. She flowed forward to inspect Delrael before anyone else could speak. She bent down, reaching out with her fingers but hesitant to touch. Thilane inspected Delrael’s bruised and scraped face, his mangled leg. She brushed a fingertip against a protruding shard of bone and drew her hand away, looking at the blood clinging to her finger.

“Can you heal him?” Bryl whispered, speaking after a long silence. “Do you have that kind of magic?”

The Healer ignored the question and frowned as she continued to inspect Dalrael’s leg, then felt his forehead. “He will live. That is all I promise.” The harshness in her voice startled Vailret. She turned to Ydaim. “I must set to work at once. Give him to me.”

Vailret and three of the khelebar lifted the man’s broken body onto her dusty gray back. She winced as Delrael’s blood flowed down to mat her fur.

Without another word, Thilane bounded into the thick greenness of Ledaygen, where the trees swallowed her up. Vailret set off after her, but Ydaim Trailwalker blocked his way. “She must work alone.”

“I need to be with him,” Vailret insisted.

Ydaim turned to the other khelebar in the clearing. “I will take these two where they may eat and wash and rest. Tell Fiolin Tribeleader that this human, Vailret Traveler, wishes to call a meeting of the council this night!”

Confusion. Throbbing pain. Anger.

The Cyclops stood, felt the smoldering bruise on his forehead. The rock wall. He remembered. Pain. He grew angrier. The clouds had cleared around his head.

He turned in slow circles. Remembered the humans. He had thrown rocks. Hit one of them. Something else. One of the man-animals. The man-animal had shouted, warned the humans. The man-animal had hurt him. The man-animals.

Pain. Fire. Death. Revenge. Pain.

Vague ideas, not real thoughts—but they were good ideas. He knew where the panther-people lived. By the trees. He didn’t like the trees. He preferred rocks, caves, shadows. The trees didn’t like him either. He would burn them all. Fire. It would make a very bright light.

He scraped his flint claws against the stone of the canyon wall. Sparks flew.

Pain. Fire. Bright fire.

6. Khelebar

“Trees and hills and water and sky. What do the Outsiders know of all this? They have created more than they realize.”

—Jorig Falselimb of the khelebar

Thilane Healer followed a path only she could see, gliding among the trees until she reached a room fashioned from the living forest. Trunks and branches had grown together to form walls. A roof canopy of leaves filtered the afternoon sunlight with green; lush weeds, herbs, and flowers dotted the ground. In the center of the clearing jutted a gigantic stump, polished smooth on top like a flat wooden table.

By herself, Thilane removed the unconscious man from her back and placed him on the flat surface of the stump. The concentric age rings glowed brown and gold, drawing her eyes. A splash of blood shattered the beauty of it.

Delrael’s leg flowed like water, bending in too many places. The man’s face writhed in the pain he felt even through his stupor.

Thilane walked around the clearing, touching a tree or staring at a plant. She waited, listening for something.

“This will require the extent of my knowledge, dayid,” she said out loud to the forest. “You make me belittle myself with the scratches and scrapes of the khelebar, but now I must tend the injuries of a human as well? He is not even of Ledaygen.”

Thilane put her hands on the point where her human abdomen joined the sleek panther body. She received no answer. “I want to serve you!” Thilane stopped herself short of clawing the ground in her anger.

The Healer continued to mutter as she touched a young tree that formed part of the woven walls of her room. “I will heal his petty hurts, but I can do nothing for his leg.” She shrugged. “I will not waste my time or the resources of Ledaygen.”

A thin, painful bolt of lightning jumped from the young tree, stinging her fingers. Rebuffed, Thilane gaped in silent wonder, then swallowed twice before she spoke again. “You judge this one significant, dayid?” She glanced over her back at the man lying on the broad stump. “Is this to be a test of my abilities?”

Thilane smiled more with pride than embarrassment. “Well, I am significant, too, and I will make you proud of the abilities you have given me.” The Healer’s emerald green eyes sparkled. “I promise.”

The background sounds of birds and wind soothed her, lulling her as she selected a thin branch from the sapling. Without effort she separated it from the main trunk; the branch detached itself willingly. With her fingers, the Healer massaged the bark, working it like clay and sealing the small wound to remove any scar on the tree. She sniffed the sap end of the severed branch.

Thilane returned to the motionless man and waved the twig over his face. She hummed a quiet song as she passed it over the bruises and scrapes from when he had fallen on the streambank. The superficial blood and mud disappeared from his skin. The bruises faded. The scratches and torn skin healed.

The branch crumpled to torn, oozing pulp in the Healer’s hand.

“That is for appearance only, I know.” She sighed to herself, “But at times appearances can help immensely.”

She turned to pluck a branch of oak leaves from an other tree, stretching up on her hind legs to reach the highest, healthiest bunch. She placed the leaves on the man’s ruined leg, scattering them evenly across the protruding bone splinters. Thilane sang another quiet song, and the leaves withered, turning brown and brittle. She brushed them away, careful not to hurt Delrael, and continued her song without pausing. She laid more leaves on the leg. She sang louder. The leaves died a second time.

“Oak should be stronger than this.” She held up one of the withered leaves, staring at the sunlight through its shriveled veins. Thilane frowned and tried once more, singing in her strong, harsh voice. Her words trailed off as her lungs emptied, but she wheezed out a few more notes.

The leaves still turned black and lifeless. She had taken the pain away and stopped the bleeding—but Thilane could never heal his leg.

The dayid refused to accept her failure.

Delrael muttered to himself, whimpering. His gray eyes fluttered open, but they stared far away. He seemed unable to focus, though he could sense someone beside him. “Am I hurt? I don’t remember.” He sighed, and even his breath trembled. “Vailret?”

Thilane snatched a few pine needles from an overhanging branch. “Sleep!” She crushed them in front of Delrael’s face, letting him breathe the smell of the pine oil. “In sleep the dayid can help restore your wounded spirit.”

She watched the overpowering scent of evergreen engulf him. He melted back into a blissful sleep.

Thilane stared at his unconscious form, scowling at her failure. She pressed her lips together, nodding in silence and knowing that the dayid approved of her decision. Drawing a deep breath to steady herself, she smelled the forest, the power, the vibrant life.

I’ve never done this before. Only once in all our legends has it been successful. She padded over to a sturdy oak tree. The Healer placed her forehead against the tree and wrapped her arms around the wide trunk, pressing her chest against the rough bark.

“Send Noldir Woodcarver to me,” she said, and Ledaygen took her message.

Thilane went back to Delrael again, watching him breathe, hovering over his leg. She waited.

A khelebar man entered her enclosed room so silently that Thilane would not have heard him approach had she not felt the faint tremors of recognition in the dayid. She turned and met his questioning gaze.

Noldir Woodcarver had black hair, unbraided and sheared off in a square mass around his shoulders. An intricate totem hung on his chest, representing a dream Ledaygen had sent him one night; only Noldir understood its symbolism. His arms were heavily muscled, but Thilane knew his hands were nimble and delicate.

She nodded at Delrael lying on the wide stump. Noldir’s eyebrows lifted, but he waited for her to speak. Thilane respected him for that. She had no patience for the others, like Ydaim Trailwalker, who marred the silence of the forest with useless talk.

“The dayid says you must help this man.”

Noldir took a step backward, carefully sidestepping Thilane’s flowers with his large feline paws. “I am always willing to offer my assistance . . .” He let the sentence hang, asking for more of an explanation.

The Healer crossed her arms over her breasts. The spicy smell of the flower garland at her neck made her feel more relaxed, more confident.

“His leg has died. The forest will take it, and the forest must give him a new one in exchange. You will fashion it—from the wood of a kennok tree.”

Noldir Woodcarver bit back a gasp but recovered his composure. Thilane knew how powerful, how rare the kennok wood was, blessed by the dayid and containing many secrets. She was pleased to see how quickly Noldir grasped her intent.

“Are you planning to repeat what was done with Jorig Falselimb? That was many years ago.”

“Yes. The khelebar do not remember how it was done. But I need to try. The dayid will assist me.” Her eyes burned. She wanted to relax in a meadow, look out over the mountains, smell the flowers and trees. Not surround herself with so much pain.

She drew in a deep breath and returned to Delrael’s side. “Study the man’s other limb and make a reproduction from living kennok wood. When will it be ready?”

Noldir bent down, shying from the color and the smell of the man’s blood. He inspected both the whole and the damaged leg. “No sooner than dusk, I think.”

“So long?”

Noldir answered in a tone of voice that convinced her he was making no excuses. “His limb is strange. I have never attempted to carve such an object.”

She sighed and nodded.

“I promise,” he said. “By dusk.”

Thilane impatiently sent him away.

Vailret slurped cold water from the pool, drinking until his teeth throbbed. He splashed the rest on his face, gasped from the chill, then drank again before shaking the wet clumps of straw-colored hair out of his eyes.

It seemed mechanical to him, but he kept following the procedure by habit. He scooped up fine sand from the bottom of the pool and scrubbed himself. Afterward, his body ached but he felt clean at last, and very cold.

“The water comes from underground springs beneath Ledaygen,” Ydaim said. “You will find it refreshing. You may dry yourself by the fire before nightfall.”

Bryl shivered as he sat naked, waiting for his clothes to dry. His wrung-out blue cloak lay spread on a sun-warmed rock. His thin gray beard and wisps of hair sent drips of water down his neck.

“Any word yet?” Vailret asked. “Is Delrael going to be all right?”

The khelebar smiled blithely. “You can trust Thilane. She will do her best.”

He rubbed his hands together and looked from Vailret to Bryl to Vailret again. “Will you tell me where you are from? What is your home like?” The young man found the lush green of Ydaim’s eyes disconcerting; the pupils were oval, catlike.

“The Stronghold. It’s far to the west from here, many hexes away.” Vailret didn’t feel like talking.

“I have not heard of it,” Ydaim said. His expression looked grave and serious.

Vailret shrugged. Bryl coughed twice.

Ydaim stretched out his supple feline body on the long grass beside the pool. “I would like to travel someday, but I do not wish to go far from the dayid. I have wandered the lands around Ledaygen more than any other khelebar. The others are content to do their appointed tasks for the forest. But I like to explore. And the dayid always takes me back home.”

Bryl finally made a rude noise. “I am getting tired of you constantly talking about your dayid.”

The khelebar rolled himself back into a sitting position and brushed a leaf from his shoulder. His face took on a baffled expression. “The dayid cares for us all. The dayid will offer its assistance to Thilane Healer as she strives to save your friend.”

Ydaim didn’t seem to have any conception of what a dayid really was. Vailret considered telling him, but decided to hold those particular loaded dice for later. Instead, he pulled on his still-damp tunic and laced up the front. “So, does the dayid keep your forest so clean all by itself?”

Ydaim spread his arms out to indicate all of Ledaygen. “This is the forest of the khelebar. We keep it clean because that is our covenant with the dayid. We live in peace with Ledaygen. All life is our friend, and we hold it sacred.”

The khelebar fingered the pine cone pendant on his chest.

To Vailret, though, the words sounded flat and memorized. Flashing across his memories, he continued to see the monstrous Cyclops heaving boulders, the obsidian claws scraping sparks against the stone, the boulder smashing Delrael’s leg as he tried to twist himself out of the way. . . .

The Outsiders would consider this just an incidental adventure along the path of their quest.

He looked down and saw that his hands had clenched into fists.

“And how did the khelebar get this miraculous covenant that forces you to hold life so sacred that you can’t even strike back at a monster who attacked us? Some say the Outsiders put the monsters on Gamearth just to kill and be killed.”

Ydaim ignored the sarcasm in Vailret’s voice. “That is exactly why we must not kill the Cyclops. We must bend and twist the Outsiders’ Rules in whatever way we can. We need to show them that we own our lives and that we will do what we wish.”

Ydaim withdrew his long wooden sword and held it in front of his chest. The late afternoon light made the blade’s hardened pitch coating look deeply golden. Splotches of the Cyclops’s blood speckled the flat surface. Ydaim sounded embarrassed when he spoke again.

“Long ago, just after the old Sorcerer wars, the khelebar were violent and warlike. We had no respect for nature. We . . . mistreated the forest. We chopped down trees, letting them crash wherever they happened to fall, maiming the forest. Often we left the hewn trees to rot on the forest floor, useless!”

Ydaim shuddered. “But the force of the dayid was strong in Ledaygen. The trees banded together and the forest retaliated against us. The trees ceased to bear fruit. The wood refused to burn. The branches tangled together and the trunks moved so close that we could not pass among them. The trees shifted their positions regularly, making all the trails disappear. The khelebar sensed that the forest was their enemy, and so my ancestors fought back, chopping down trees and salting the soil. But the trees fell backward, on purpose, crushing the khelebar.”

Vailret looked around, wishing he had some way to write down the legend. He wanted to remember it for his chronicle of Gamearth. Ydaim seemed lost in his words.

“Many trees and khelebar died before the dayid finally spoke through Thessar, the Father Pine. You saw Thessar when we first reached the council clearing, on the verge of the great cliff.”

Vailret nodded.

“Thessar spoke aloud the terms of the dayid’s truce. The khelebar are charged with keeping Ledaygen free of decay and sickness, free of parasites and any animals that might injure the trees. We must remove dead branches wherever they may be and see to it that seedlings grow far enough apart. Ledaygen thrives. In exchange, the forest taught us true wood-magic and how to heal, using arts previously known only to the dayid.”

Vailret finished pulling on his clothes and shook his arms. “Then you should have no trouble at all healing Delrael.”

Ydaim smiled mysteriously. “That we shall see.”

Fire. Sparkling orange, burning bright. Warm fire, hungry fire, reflecting from the glassy yellow of a single staring eye.

The Cyclops stood at the edge of the forest, drawing the smoke into his nostrils. Feeling powerful. The trees were afraid of him, afraid of the fire. He scraped his fingers together, and more sparks flew.

The khelebar had spread a thick carpet of dried leaves on the floor of Ledaygen. The flames grew.

Sparkling orange, burning bright.

“I have finished my carving, Healer.” Noldir Woodcarver pushed his way through the dense trees into Thilane’s chamber.

She looked up at him, groggy and blinking her eyes as she broke her preparatory meditation. She waited a moment, gathering her thoughts as the trees around her flickered into focus.

“Help me, Woodcarver. I must take the man to the kennok tree.” The words scraped out of her vocal cords, sounding harsh.

Noldir slipped his fingers under Delrael’s shoulders, shifting the man to get a better grip. Delrael let out a soft, pain-filled gasp, and Noldir almost dropped him. Delrael’s bleeding had stopped, but he still looked weak and drained, fluttering along the hex-line between life and death. Thilane encouraged Noldir, though, and he lifted the man onto her dusty gray back.

The Healer held him in place with one arm as they set off through the uncharted ways of Ledaygen. Noldir kept pace beside her, watching and helping hold the man. Thilane could feel Delrael’s weight on her back, she could feel his blood on her fur, she could feel echoes of his pain throbbing in her head.

She wanted to drench herself in Ledaygen’s cold spring waters when the ritual was finished, lay in the numbing pool until she could feel cleansed. But she had to succeed first—the dayid held this man in high esteem, enough to ask her for this sacrifice. The risk. The dayid’s demands were not easy, but the chance to work directly with the soul of the forest outweighed everything else.

Noldir led the way to where the lone kennok tree grew. The trees were so rare and precious that few of the khelebar knew their location.

The Woodcarver passed through a thicket of flowers and woven vines to a place where he had left wood chips strewn on the forest floor. Thilane noticed that, in his work, he had heedlessly trampled the grass around the tree.

Then she studied the new limb itself.

Noldir had joined himself to the dayid, working with the wood of the small but ancient trunk of the kennok. He had shaped the wood like clay with the palms of his hands, stroking off the bark and smoothing, bending, reshaping according to the picture in his mind. The roots of the kennok tree still plunged deep into the soil of Ledaygen, tapping into the blood of the dayid itself. But the main part of the trunk was now in the shape of a human leg, poised erect and pointing its toes toward the sky. The golden polished wood glowed with rich coppery whorls of grain, strong but soft, and still alive.

Thilane set her mouth in a satisfied line. She tossed her braids back over her shoulders, where they brushed against the injured man. “I commend you, Woodcarver. Your work honors the dayid.”

Noldir shrugged but looked pleased, as if he had not expected her to give any kind of compliment. “The dayid gives each of us our special talents.”

He brushed some of the wood chips from an area of grass. Thilane knelt, and the two of them slid Delrael’s body from her back, laying him beside the kennok trunk. Noldir tried to make Delrael more comfortable while Thilane stood back, stretching her shoulders and brushing at her fur in distaste. She looked at the sticky red on her fingers.

“He must wake now, just for a moment.”

She plucked one yellow petal from the garland of flowers around her neck and crushed it in front of Delrael’s nose. Noldir stepped back from the acrid odor that sent the man plunging back into consciousness.

Thilane watched Delrael blink. His glassy eyes were strange and gray, different from the emerald green shared by all khelebar. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. She bent down, stroking his hair. He would not know who she was.

Delrael looked startled, and then his face drained back into gray as pain washed over him. Thilane turned his head, directing his gaze to the wooden leg growing up out of the tree stump.

“Behold your new limb, Traveler. Because my own skill was not enough, Ledaygen has offered you a replacement.”

Delrael tilted his head, but then he saw the clotted blood that slicked his leather armor, the bone shards protruding from the remains of his leg. Thilane caught and cradled his head as he swooned back against her.

“Sleep now,” she said.

Delrael’s eyes closed and he breathed deeply as she whispered him back into unconsciousness.

Thilane glanced up at Noldir Woodcarver. He seemed to be struggling to contain an expression of awe and to retain the composure he thought she expected of him.

Then she ignored the Woodcarver as she ran her fingers along the cloth of Delrael’s stained and torn trousers, finding the secret of the foreign fibers in the cloth. They fell away, leaving both of his legs bare.

Thilane drew a deep breath and exhaled as she closed her eyes, humming to herself, floating into the trance she would need. Keeping her eyes closed, she extended an arm to grasp the kennok wood reaching out of the ground. From it she drew strength and deepened her trance.

With her mind she searched for the dayid, plunging deep beneath the soil of Ledaygen, following the network of kennok roots toward the heart of Gamearth itself. She saw the structure, the patterns . . . she learned with awe how the dayid slipped between the cracks, bent under and around the Rules that confined the rest of the world. Still shutting her eyes tight, she could see through the eyes of the forest.

Her hand drifted down the polished kennok wood until she reached the point where the carving ended and the bark began. Thilane extended her index finger and applied gentle pressure horizontally, slicing the artificial leg from the kennok tree.

Eyes closed, she lifted the heavy false limb and carried it on her fingertips until she rested it on the ground beside Delrael’s injured leg. She aligned the two limbs, then climbed back to her feet again. On four feline paws, she padded to one of the towering black pines, then ran the palms of her hands up the trunk, brushing the bark, the rough lumps of pitch, until she encountered a branch thinner than her finger. She plucked it from the trunk, leaving no scar.

Noldir watched in awed silence. He saw that dark red sap had begun to ooze from the severed trunk of the kennok tree.

The Healer’s humming grew louder. Then she sang a song with no words, notes that sounded like running water, chattering birds, blooming flowers. Thilane laid the thin pine branch across Delrael’s thigh, just above his injury.

Her breath hissed through her teeth as she pushed down. She did not hear Noldir gasp as the branch sank into Delrael’s flesh, melting through the heavy bone and severing the leg.

Moving rapidly now, Thilane opened her eyes. The green irises glowed with an unseeing power. She discarded Delrael’s dead limb and switched it for the living kennok leg, pressing it against his stump before the blood could start. The Healer wrapped her fingers along the seam, and her voice broke into a different, more powerful song that resonated in the air. The trees seemed to be singing along with her.

“Melding of flesh and tree. Merging of bone and wood. Joining of sap and blood. Bring the two together as one. Life of tree and man blend together. Meld. Merge. Join. One!”

A flood of energy from the dayid seared through her nerves, leaping across the barrier into the kennok wood.

The Healer gave a sharp cry and stepped back, blinking her eyes and seeing the forest again. Her hands trembled with exhaustion. Noldir Woodcarver stood beside her as she fought to bring her mind back through the murk of the trance. Noldir reached out a hand to steady her, but she pushed him away and bent over Delrael’s motionless form.

She had attached the kennok limb. A sharp line marked the boundary of skin and wood, but that would fade as the man’s body accepted his new leg. She smiled to herself.

Only a small amount of the man’s blood spattered the grass. She ran her fingers along one of the grass blades, straightening it and wiping off the red smear.

Thilane gave the crushed, dead leg to Noldir. “Take this . . . and bury it.”

Delrael fled from bizarre dreams, unable to force himself awake. Something held him imprisoned with his nightmares, but locked him away from his pain. He saw a giant, one-eyed monster hurling boulders. He remembered running. Hybrid man-panthers. The huge rock flying at him. And pain. A great deal of pain.

“Roll the dice again!” He moaned and turned his head. He had better luck than this. “It’s not fair.” His leg felt very strange.

He lifted his eyelids, expecting to see something or someone he recognized. He didn’t. He was in a thick forest somewhere. He could smell it. He could hear the sounds of wind and night birds. Everything seemed to be dark, but he was not cold. In a disorienting moment, he wondered if he had somehow landed in the Rulewoman Melanie’s forest, by her Pool of Peace. He expected to see his own father there, waiting for him.

Then Thilane Healer stood over him. Her garland of yellow flowers swayed, and her face looked lined and weary. Her breasts were tanned and dusty-colored, like her pale fur. He remembered her from somewhere.

Questions ricocheted back and forth in his mind until he remembered everything. The Cyclops, the canyon, the khelebar, the boulder—his leg. He winced with a pain that was not there, but should have been.

“I am Thilane Healer of the khelebar.” She spoke in a quiet yet harsh voice. “Your leg would not heal, so I replaced it.”

Delrael looked down at his left leg—and saw rich yellow wood laced with feathery ripples of copper-colored grains. The Healer held onto his shoulders, squeezing hard enough that her fingernails made impressions in the skin. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, leaning his head back. “It’s not fair.” Overhead, the leaves rustled in the night. “Look at it,” Thilane said.

Delrael felt the words choke in his throat. His real leg was gone, discarded and replaced with something of wood. He was a fighter. He needed his dexterity. He needed to move, to attack, to quest, to explore. If he could do nothing interesting, the Outsiders would erase him from the Game.

“Look at it!” Thilane said again.

He turned his eyes downward, looking at the serpentine wood-grain patterns that seemed to move by themselves. He did not want to think of it as part of him.

The Healer shook her head. She took his kennok leg in her hands, massaging it. “Time. Give it time. I can feel the warmth in the wood.” With one fingernail she tapped against the wooden knee. He heard a light ticking noise. “Can you feel this?”

“No.” He drew in a deep breath. He wanted to go back to his nightmares again. “Of course not.”

“There’s magic in Gamearth. You just need to know how to use it.”

“That spell isn’t in any book. Ask Bryl.” Delrael wasn’t sure, but it seemed right to him.

Thilane crossed her arms, accidentally bruising the yellow flowers around her neck. He smelled the burst of perfume they released. “Gamearth has magic the Outsiders don’t even know about.”

She kneaded his left foot, massaging the wood, working with the toes and bending them slowly at the joints. Delrael watched in wonder as he saw the kennok wood become flexible.

“Trust me,” she said.

Delrael closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing for several minutes. Thilane offered no conversation of her own. “Where is Vailret?” he finally asked.

The Healer stopped her work as she scowled up at him. He was frightened of the stare behind her oval green eyes. “Your friends are gathering a council of the khelebar. Your Vailret is upset because you were attacked by the Cyclops.”

Delrael saw the monster towering on top of the gorge, his brick-red skin gleaming in the sunlight, his one yellow eye like a great torch as he found his target. And hurled the crushing boulder down—

“Why did he attack us?”

Thilane shrugged. “Because that is what he does. The Outsiders put him there as a challenge to us. We refuse to accept it. The dayid gives us other tasks than to amuse childish Players.”

Thilane moved Delrael’s ankle, working patiently until the foot became limber and soft. Her strong hands continued to massage, pushing on the false calf muscles and finally, with a tremendous effort, bending his knee.

Delrael reached forward, tentative. Thilane guided his hand, touching it to the kennok wood. To him, the polished skin seemed hard as oak, yet warm somehow.

“Where are my clothes? My silver belt?”

“Nearby. Enough talk. Now move your toes.”

“I can’t. It’s only wood.”

“It is kennok wood! Now move your toes.”

Delrael stared at his toes, and they seemed to stare back. He closed his eyes and concentrated. But he couldn’t think how to move muscles that were not his.

“The kennok trees have been in this forest since the beginning of the Game. Some say the Outsiders do not know they exist—they are the wellspring of the true magic of our world. But they are rare. And only once before, in all our chanted history, has this ritual been successfully performed—for Jorig Falselimb, a great leader of the khelebar.”

Thilane looked around in the shadowy darkness. “Jorig saved Ledaygen from a blood-mad wolf pack that haunted the Spectre Mountains. A saliva-fever had driven all the wolves into a frenzy—and Jorig stood alone with the dayid to face them.

“The dayid took away Jorig’s individual scent, making him smell like the pines, the oaks, the grass, the woodland flowers. The wolves were confused, but the great black leader of the pack found a part of the scent that was the khelebar, and he attacked that part of Jorig. The wolf bit off Jorig’s arm. The black wolf died in a spasm of his own blood-fever, and the rest of the wolves fled.

“But the dayid was grateful to Jorig, and it showed the khelebar Healers how to make a false limb from the living kennok wood. After he became accustomed to it, Jorig used his wooden fingers to play a flute and to shoot his bow.” She looked up into the night with a dreamy, distant expression on her face.

Then she whirled to shout at him, “Now move your toes!”

Startled, Delrael saw that in reflex his toes had moved. He felt a surge of surprise and relief.

Later, he did not want to sleep. The night went on and on. After an hour of intensive practice, Delrael used his leg clumsily. He could rotate his foot, he could bend his knee and move it. He still could not feel any sensation, but Thilane assured him that even that would come back, in time. Already, the seam where the kennok wood joined his leg had grown less distinct as the elements of tree and man mingled together.

Thilane pulled forth an aged wooden knife with a blade polished and hard as iron. “We shall see if the acceptance is complete.” Delrael watched the edge of the blade and envied its craftsmanship; the sharpness had been honed with infinite patience and devotion. Thilane reversed the knife and tapped the man’s leg with the wooden hilt. A hollow sound rang in the still forest air. “Can you feel this?” Delrael concentrated. “I don’t think so.”

“And this?” Thilane flipped the knife in her hand and chopped the blade down hard into the kennok wood.

“Ow!” Delrael sat up as a slice of pain echoed through his leg.

“Good.” Thilane hid her smile.

Vailret stood in the clearing and watched the night shroud the surrounding hexes of mountain terrain. Thessar, the tall and ancient Father Pine, loomed silent on the verge of the cliff-discontinuity. Over the sound of the wind in the trees, Vailret listened to the forest settle down.

The khelebar began to arrive in the clearing, surrounding a large bare circle where all the plants had been removed. A heap of wood—the dead branches of Ledaygen—lay within the patch of dirt. Flames from a new fire worked their way deeper into the pile.

Ydaim had told him that some of the khelebar were Treescavengers, whose purpose was to find and remove the dead and diseased branches. They used no tools, but somehow they scrambled to the tallest branches and removed the wood. “The dayid guides them,” Ydaim had said.

Vailret had looked with awe around the forest. The aura of Ledaygen seemed to penetrate even to him, and he could sense the magic but he could not touch it.

He just hoped the dayid could help Delrael.

Bryl sat by the fire, shivering and trying to warm himself and his damp clothes. The old half-Sorcerer rubbed the Water Stone, looking distant. Vailret watched him, trying to imagine being able to use the magic himself.

He drew in a deep breath, smelling the cool tang in the air, an aftertaste of smoke from the fire, the spice of pines and the plentiful dried leaves on the forest floor. Delrael might be dying . . . the Outsiders had effectively stopped their quest in its tracks. The khelebar had lived with the threat of the Cyclops for years, and had done nothing about it.

Vailret rehearsed his line of attack as the panther people arrived.

The gathered khelebar looked at Vailret and Bryl, curious. Vailret wasn’t sure what he wanted from them. He knew he was playing into the hands of the Outsiders by fighting back against the Cyclops. This was just an incidental adventure—they should ignore the monster and push on as soon as Delrael had healed.

One of the khelebar, an older male with close-cropped hair streaked with gray, stepped into the pool of firelight and paced back and forth.

Ydaim Trailwalker sat beside the two humans, like a sponsor. He tossed his black braid behind his back and leaned over to whisper in Vailret’s ear, “That is Fiolin Tribeleader. He will hear your arguments.”

The other panther-people tightened their circle like a slipknot around the bonfire. Over the roar of the flames Vailret heard insect sounds in the forest. The bonfire spilled orange light over the cliff.

Fiolin Tribeleader turned to face the rest of the circle, silhouetting himself against the blaze. “Ydaim Trailwalker, you have called us together in council. For what purpose?”

With an excited gleam in his eye, Ydaim raised himself to his feet, broadening his shoulders. He brushed the pine cone pendant before he spoke. “The man Vailret Traveler has not asked for just a council, Tribeleader, but a war council.”

Ydaim held his ground when the other khelebar muttered in astonishment. Fiolin maintained his cool expression, keeping his thoughts hidden. “Against whom will the khelebar go to war, after so many years of peace? And for what cause?”

Ydaim Trailwalker gestured to the two men. Vailret made ready to speak, but Ydaim continued. “The travelers speak against the Cyclops—Pain-Giver, Life-Taker. The black smoke of burning, living trees coats the walls of his cave like dark bloodstains. I have seen it in my wanderings. And he preys upon helpless questers such as the man Delrael, now called Kennoklimb, and these two here.”

Vailret stood up. His elegant speeches melted away, leaving him weaponless to convey his anger to the mellow expressions of the khelebar. They stared back at him from the firelit shadows. Their unblinking emerald eyes made him feel as if he had stumbled into a jungle and was now surrounded by patient wild animals.

He swallowed and spoke. “Obviously, you must do something about the Cyclops.” Bryl watched him. “He is destructive and dangerous. Why have you let him go unpunished for so long? He will keep hurting other characters if you don’t do something.”

“He maims trees,” Ydaim added.

The khelebar remained silent, waiting for their Tribeleader to speak. Fiolin mused for a moment. “The Cyclops has long been our enemy. Do others agree that we should try to drive him away now that he has harmed the man Delrael Kennoklimb?”

Vailret fidgeted. He had hoped they would consider destroying the monster, not just chase him away.

One of the khelebar stood up. She had dark brown hair and a mottled panther pelt. Fiolin nodded to her. “Speak, Stynod Treescavenger.”

She faced the Tribeleader, not looking at Vailret. “The Cyclops is a challenge for the khelebar to face. The Outsiders placed him here. His only purpose is to attack and destroy and eat—we must endure him as best we can.” Her voice grew hoarse and angry. “If we remove him, the Outsiders will only send something worse.”

“And what if the Outsiders lose interest in that?” Bryl asked. Vailret gave the half-Sorcerer an appreciative nod.

“We happen to know the Outsiders are bored with Gamearth. They have already begun the destruction of the world. The Rulewoman Melanie has given us a quest to prevent it if we can.”

One of the other khelebar, Noldir Woodcarver, nodded. “Ah, then that is why the dayid demanded that Thilane Healer save your companion.”

Fiolin brooded a long moment, distracted and troubled. The firelight and the night sounds of the forest insects seemed to speak to him.

“The dayid is uneasy tonight—I can feel it. Perhaps it sees the evil things that may come of this council.”

A gibbous moon hovered over the eastern outline of the Spectre Mountains; Lady Maire’s Veil draped glowing over the north. But Fiolin stared at a hazy orange glow nearby, rising from the treetops at the far fringe of Ledaygen. As he gazed without speaking, the other khelebar also turned to look.

The Tribeleader motioned to a blond-haired khelebar standing near him. The young panther-man was deeply tanned with tigerlike whorls on his fur. Each of his arms bore an armband on the bicep, and a necklace of stones hung at his throat.

“Tayron, my son, go find the cause of that orange glow. It may be a sign from the dayid. Maybe it will help us make our decision.”

“Yes, Father.” The young panther-man turned to bound into the dark mass of surrounding trees, vanishing from sight.

Fiolin Tribeleader stilled the soft mutters around the bonfire. He turned to stare at Vailret. “The khelebar have not harmed a living being since the Scouring of Gamearth.”

“The Cyclops is a killer,” Vailret said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. “By your inaction you caused Delrael to come to harm. You won’t accomplish anything by slapping the monster’s hands and telling him to stay in his cave.”

Vailret stopped, letting the silence hang like a poised sword over the council. The other khelebar waited, watching their Tribeleader. Fiolin avoided looking at Vailret and sat back down in the firelight. “Perhaps we should wait for Tayron Next-Leader to return.”

Vailret pursed his lips in impatience.

A long time later, they heard a khelebar plunging through the forest, reckless and crashing branches and undergrowth. Tayron Next-Leader burst into the cliff clearing, scratched and wild-eyed, gasping for breath.

Vailret had never seen a khelebar out of breath before, nor had he seen such an expression of horror and despair. Tayron gasped, scattering tears instead of words.

Fiolin pounced to his feet. “What is it? What have you seen?”

Tayron sobbed but managed to speak. “The forest! It is on fire! Ledaygen is burning!”

7. A Fire In Ledaygen

“RULE #8: Magic users—i.e., those with Sorcerer blood—may attempt to use only a specific number of spells per day. Table A-3 lists spell allowances, calculated according to the character’s percentage of Sorcerer blood, also taking experience into account.”

—The Book of Rules

The khelebar sat stunned. The heartbeat of the night fell silent, interrupted only by the insects. Vailret could hear the soft crackle of the bonfire and the whisper of a breeze through the interlocked trees.

“Can you not hear me?” Tayron Next-Leader choked on his words, aghast at his own people. “Ledaygen is burning!”

Fiolin broke from his shock and drew himself taller as he pointed to four of the khelebar. “Ydaim Trailwalker, you and three others go scout and tell me the extent of the fire. Quickly! We must know how fast it is spreading.”

Ydaim glanced back at Vailret, then bounded with the others into the mass of trees. The four khelebar became dark ripples in the forest, loping toward the orange glow.

Fiolin Tribeleader continued to motion at the. other panther-people. “Aratok Treetender, Stynod Treescavenger—find everyone else in Ledaygen. Tell them to come here. The khelebar must be alerted!”

Stynod had to shake the other khelebar man out of his shock before they both ran into the forest.

Bryl moved over to Vailret, leaning forward on the damp grass. His eyes were bright in their nest of wrinkles. “I wonder how serious this is.”

Vailret stared into the bonfire, “It’ll be bad enough.” He turned a heavy gaze at the half-Sorcerer as the implications popped one by one into his mind. “Think about it—the Cyclops nearly killed Delrael. Now there’s a forest fire.” He heaved a deep breath, frightened. “I don’t know how we could have hoped to hide it after we made the Barrier River.

“The Outsiders know what we’re doing. And they’re trying to stop us.”

Delrael moved in tight circles, flexing his kennok limb with difficulty. “I can move it.”

Thilane Healer paid no attention to him. Troubled, she paced about the clearing, back and forth. She had been silent for a long while, sniffing the air. Delrael watched her back, the tight skin against her shoulder blades, the muscles wrapped around her sides melding into the panther body.

He limped around the clearing once more and rested on a boulder; the rock felt cool as he sat on it. His kennok limb felt tired. Deep night penetrated Ledaygen, broken only by the moonlight.

“Something is wrong in Ledaygen.” Thilane touched a tree trunk, closed her eyes, then shook her head, as if amazed to be talking to herself.

A few seconds before Delrael heard anything, Thilane glanced up and stared into the trees. Rough sounds of passage came through the forest, too careless to be a khelebar. But Stynod Treescavenger burst into the clearing. Her eyes were wild and her dark braids undone. Flecks of sweat streaked down her face and chest.

Thilane waited in silence as Stynod caught her breath in great gulps. “Ledaygen burns!”

The Healer bit back an outcry. Delrael could see the pain drive like a sword through her side. But he had helped fight grass fires in other villages to the south of the Stronghold. “How far has it spread? What kind of help do you have?” he asked.

The Treescavenger shook her head, motioning them toward the trees. “Go to the council clearing for your answers. I have no time.” She set off into the forest again, moaning to herself. “How can I bear to tell any others?”

She fled the clearing, fueled by her own fear, and vanished into the thickness of the trees.

More khelebar converged on the council clearing, their faces filled with silent horror. Vailret watched them, amazed at how helpless the graceful panther-people now appeared. Left untended, the council bonfire had burned low, turning red as the moon rose higher in the sky.

“Delrael!” Bryl stood up as Thilane Healer led the man out of the trees. Vailret whirled, grinning.

Delrael stopped at the edge of the clearing, sweating and breathless. He placed a hand on Thilane’s dusky back and rested. The Healer didn’t seem to mind.

Vailret and Bryl ran forward. Several khelebar glared at their happy outburst, but Vailret ignored them. Delrael smiled wryly and took another limping step forward. The Healer kept pace with him.

Vailret gave Delrael a careful hug as Bryl hovered next to him, grinning. “You’re all right!”

Delrael lifted his hand from Thilane’s back and steadied himself. “Well, not quite as good as new, but . . . different. It’ll take some getting used to.”

Thilane looked at the three of them in turn. “You can thank the dayid for challenging me to heal him. Kennok wood is rare and precious, but the dayid holds all of you in great value. Perhaps you will save us from this fire?” She snorted and went to join the other khelebar. Around the circle, Tayron Next-Leader described the blaze as they waited for the scouts to return.

“Look.” Delrael lifted part of his mended trouser leg and showed the feathery grain of his kennok leg. “And I can move it.” He puckered his brow in concentration as he bent the knee partway.

“It’s not any kind of magic I’ve ever heard of,” Bryl said. Vailret agreed.

“I need to sit down,” Delrael said. Vailret and Bryl helped him over to the bonfire, away from the other khelebar.

Vailret felt light-headed at having his cousin back. Somehow, he could not worry about the forest fire at the moment. He smiled at his own memories, watching Delrael. “Del, do you remember when we were little? You always picked on me because you were older, and bigger, and stronger.”

“Yes, but you got back at me every time with some practical joke. Molasses on the privy seat in winter. A puddle of water on my chair.”

“Sand in your birthday honey roll. Your father said it was just like when he and my father were young. But it all changed when those outlander villagers tried to beat me up. You saved me.”

Delrael shrugged, but allowed a smile to drift onto his face. “I didn’t want anyone picking on you but me.”

“I was only ten. You were fourteen. And now we’re a team.”

Delrael propped himself up on his elbows, stretching both legs toward the lowering bonfire.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Del?”

“Just give me some time. We’ve got a quest to finish.” He rubbed a hand on his kennok leg.

Bryl cleared his throat, isolated from the conversation. He pointed to the gathered khelebar. “I don’t think they’re all right.”

Vailret looked once again at the Tribeleader’s haggard face. Fiolin looked filled with anguish for his burning trees.

“Maybe we can do something.” Delrael reached out, and Vailret helped him to his feet. Together, they went to where Fiolin stood. His emerald eyes were glassy with tears and visions from his own imagination.

“Ledaygen will be consumed to the soil itself. We have no way to fight fire.”

The Tribeleader closed his eyes, but Vailret touched his shoulder. Fiolin’s eyes snapped open, piercing him with a lost gaze.

“We were going to offer help,” Vailret said. “Bryl can use the Water Stone to make it rain on the fire. Delrael and I have both fought against fires before. Every summer the grassland and grassy-hill terrain to the south and west of the Stronghold gets dry as a match. When the fires start, people of the Stronghold village work to stop them from spreading.”

Delrael agreed. “Last year it got so bad that the Sidonne village nearly burned. But we saved it.”

Fiolin Tribeleader looked unwilling to embrace hope. “What power do you have that can defeat a raging fire?”

“Just common sense,” Vailret said softly. “Fire is deadly, but it is no evil force. It’s just fire.”

One of the logs in the bonfire settled with a crunch, startling Fiolin. Some of the other khelebar now shied away from the fire, as if that too had turned into an enemy.

He squatted on the dirt of the clearing and motioned for the Tribeleader to stand beside him. “Draw me a map of your forest, Fiolin. Del, help me think of some strategy. “

Fiolin hesitated, looking lost. Vailret raised his voice. “Come on! Another tree dies for every minute you waste.”

When the Tribeleader saw that others had gathered to watch, he regained his composure. He sent one of the younger khelebar running for a stick and some ashes. The youth scattered two handfuls of white ash from a dead part of the bonfire, spreading it on the ground to make a smooth surface.

Fiolin took up the thin stick and sketched out the precise hexagon of Ledaygen and the surrounding hexagons of terrain. He indicated the terrain types. “This is our forest.” He handed the stick to Vailret.

Vailret frowned and ran a finger along his lips. He tasted ash and wiped his hand on his trousers. Delrael watched him think. “Okay, any rivers, ravines? Rock outcroppings that might slow the fire?”

Fiolin shook his head. “Ledaygen is forested-hill terrain, but rather flat. The dayid draws water from underground springs that reach the surface in a few places, but we have no rivers.”

Bryl joined them, looking smug. “The dayid always saved you before. Why doesn’t it just stop the fire and protect the forest?”

Fiolin forced a smile, looking pathetic. “The dayid does not work that way. It offers assistance and gives hope, but the khelebar must do everything that needs doing.”

Bryl shook his head, sighing. “Not much of a dayid then, is it?”

Vailret found Bryl’s attitude puzzling. But then he remembered about Bryl’s parents, Qonnar and Tristane, how they had both destroyed themselves in blazing sorcerous fire, a partial Transition, as their young son watched . . . all because they had failed at something. He couldn’t remember much else, and Bryl himself never talked about it.

One of the khelebar began sobbing, as if he felt the burning in the forest itself. “Silence!” Thilane Healer said. “You show disrespect for the forest in its pain.”

Fiolin sniffed the air. His shoulders sagged. “I can smell the smoke already. Already.”

Delrael turned his head. He wet one finger and raised it. “A breeze is blowing this way. It isn’t strong, but it will push the fire along.” He looked to Vailret. “With the help of the khelebar, you might have enough man power to make an effective fire line, cutting down trees and digging trenches. Unless the wind changes, though, we’ll never be able to set a controlled fire back into the first one—”

Fiolin gripped Delrael’s arm, aghast and angry. The lines in his face made his expression look as if it had shattered. “Do not speak of such things! Chopping down trees, digging in the sacred earth of Ledaygen, starting another fire! Is the damage not great enough already? How can you think the khelebar would do this!”

Delrael controlled his own reply and thrust the Tribe leader’s hand back at him.

Vailret made a disappointed noise at Fiolin. “You khelebar may be faithful to your forest, but you are blind to reason. If you’re willing to take these measures now, you may save most of Ledaygen.”

Vailret turned his back from the Tribeleader. Mists rose softly up the side of the gaping discontinuity at the edge of the clearing where the forested-hill terrain dropped off to the mountainous hex below.

The four khelebar scouts led by Ydaim Trailwalker leaped back into the clearing, pouring out of the tree shadows like dun-colored spears. Sweat and tears streaked the scouts’ faces. The other khelebar stood up, anxious.

Ydaim crossed to the Tribeleader in three enormous bounds. He pawed at the bare ground and his tail swished in tension and fear. “The fire is raging!” He paused to swallow a mouthful of dry air, then glanced at Vailret, but his glassy green eyes showed no recognition. “Nothing can stop it.”

“The trees are falling, spraying red coals!” One of the other scouts put a hand to her throat to slow down her throbbing breaths. “The flames move onward and onward!”

Someone moaned, and the sound grew as others joined in an eerie keening sound. Vailret watched them and shuddered.

“Enough!” Fiolin Tribeleader shouted, then blinked his eyes at his own vehemence. “We will not surrender so soon. To abandon hope is to abandon the dayid.” He clenched his teeth and drew a deep breath. Vailret got the sense that he was afraid to speak further, but Fiolin swallowed and continued. “The travelers claim they may know a way to help. It will be painful to us, and to Ledaygen—but I say it is more painful to do nothing as the trees die around us.”

He hung his head. “Perhaps it is a test. Perhaps it is time we show the Outsiders just what we are made of.”

Fiolin drew himself up again and thrust his drawing stick into Ydaim’s hand, pointing to the hexagonal out lines drawn in the ashes. “Here, Trailwalker. You have the best sense of your surroundings. Show us the extent of the fire.”

Ydaim glanced at Vailret and Bryl. He took up the stick and studied the map.

“Ledaygen is a small forest, and the flames are moving rapidly.” He drew a line from one vertex to another across the hexagon, cutting off about a quarter of the enclosed area. “By now, the flames have destroyed this much of Ledaygen. By morning—” He drew a second line over about a third of the hexagon, “The fire will have devoured its way to here.”

The other three scouts nodded their agreement.

Delrael swore. He shifted his hand from his silver belt to the sword given to him by Sardun, to his bow. Nothing seemed a useful weapon.

Vailret shook his head and rested his knuckles against his left temple. “The fire just rushes over your neat carpet of dead leaves on the ground. Then it can burn the trees at its leisure.”

Bryl didn’t seem to know what to do. “We might as well be sitting on the wick of a candle.”

Fiolin hung his head in disbelief. “What you say frightens me. The dayid has told us to tend the forest as we do—and the dayid would never ask us to do something that might harm the trees.”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Vailret said.

“We would rather die than forfeit our bargain with the dayid,” Tayron Next-Leader said, looking around at the other khelebar for support.

“We may well have to.”

The silence held for a moment, then Bryl pulled out the sapphire Water Stone. Firelight glittered off its six smooth facets, but the gem glowed with its own sleeping blue fire. “Let me try to help with the Stone. I could make it rain or I could change the wind. I don’t know what will work, but I’ve got four spells per day.”

Delrael patted him on the back. The half-Sorcerer looked embarrassed.

“Ydaim, will you take me to the fire? We can travel faster if you let me ride on your back. And we need to get there before midnight so I can use my spell allotment for today. After midnight I can try four more times.”

Ydaim Trailwalker did not appear eager to return to the blaze, but he squared his shoulders. “We must hurry to the defense of Ledaygen.” Bryl slid onto Ydaim’s panther back and wrapped his arms around the khelebar’s stomach. He closed his eyes for the ride. “Do you want me to come along, Bryl?” Vailret asked.

The half-Sorcerer shook his head. “Stay with Delrael. And keep convincing them to fight.”

As Ydaim bounded off into the forest again, Fiolin called after them, “You are our hope, Bryl Traveler.”

Several other khelebar followed, chasing fairy-lights of hope.

The shadowy trees of Ledaygen flew past. Ydaim Trailwalker loped through the night, seeing the unexpected obstacles with his green khelebar eyes.

Bryl held the Water Stone in his hand, eager now to have the opportunity to use it, anxious to feel its power. He rubbed his thumb on the slick flat facets. The forest fire offered him a chance to see exactly what the Stone could do.

He did not understand how the Outsiders could ever become bored with all this.

Bryl smelled burning wood long before he could see the orange flames peeling bark from the trees. He had to crouch low to the khelebar’s back because Ydaim had stopped being careful about dodging branches. Ydaim charged forward, shouting his anger at the fire. Bryl heard the crackle of burning underbrush. His eyes stung from the thickening smoke.

They reached the edge of the blaze.

“It is nearer than before. Ah, dayid, help us!”

Bryl stared as Ledaygen’s trees fell into the burning mass, one by one. In his imagination he saw the end of the world, a conflagration caused by the Outsiders, tired of their Game and burning their master maps.

He tightened his fist around the Water Stone. With the power of the old Sorcerers and the dead Sentinels, he would fight back. He would not allow failure to swallow him up, as his parents had.

“Bryl Traveler, do something!” Tears streamed down Ydaim’s cheeks, not caused by the stinging smoke.

The heat of the fire focused Bryl’s thoughts. He stared at the rippling sheets of flame as he slid down from the khelebar’s back. Holding the Water Stone with both hands in front of him, he stepped toward the fire. Tentatively, he sent a thought into the sapphire, focusing it through the crystalline facets and unlocking the Sorcerer power.

“I want it to rain!” He envisioned the storm he wanted, and what he would have to roll to succeed. The higher he rolled, the bigger the storm he could summon. If he rolled a “1”, he forfeited an entire spell for the day.

Kneeling, Bryl tossed the Water Stone to the ground, rolling it on the unburned leaves. The facet showing “4” came to the top.

It began to rain. The crawling black smoke in the air clumped together to form thunderclouds that shone pale gray from the firelight and the night. A violent downpour spilled onto a swath of the flaming forest, but the droplets hissed into steam before they touched the ground.

Slitting his eyes half-closed, he let the rain continue but reached forward to pick up the Stone again. He filled his lungs with the smoky air. He felt larger, stronger.

“This time, I want to turn the wind back.”

Bryl shifted his fingers to a different facet of the Stone, then closed his eyes as he tossed the gem to the ground. A thin line of sweat broke out on his forehead. A “2”. Close . . . but close enough.

The wind died without a whisper. The rain continued to fall. But his manipulation with the Water Stone affected only an area around him. He did not have the strength and training that Sardun had, his Sorcerer blood was not pure—and he had not rolled well. In the rest of Ledaygen, the fire continued to rage.

The rainstorm extinguished the nearby flames, leaving a black and steaming moonscape of soggy charcoaled trees and scorched earth. For a moment, Bryl felt a sense of accomplishment, optimism.

The rain sputtered and stopped as the first spell ended. A few moments later, he felt the other breeze pick up again, brushing his face with the smell of heat and burning. The blaze slowed its march but moved forward, skirting the rain-soaked area. Soon the fire would encircle them.

But he saw in Ydaim Trailwalker’s eyes an adamant refusal to give up. Ydaim would fight for Ledaygen until his heart and lungs burst, and he would expect Bryl to do the same. If the half-Sorcerer succumbed to hopelessness and stopped trying, he knew the other khelebar would probably toss him over the hex-discontinuity as a traitor.

“Come. Let us try a different area with your magic.” Ydaim extended his arm and helped the half-Sorcerer up onto his back. They set off again, racing toward the edge of the flames.

Since he had used one spell already against the Cyclops, Bryl had only one attempt left until midnight, when he would receive another day’s spell allotment. As Ydaim carried him across the reeking wet ground, Bryl fixed his eyes on the flames like blurry hot knives slashing the trees. The forest fire might be something sent by the Outsiders to stop them from finishing their quest or as a prelude to their obliteration of Gamearth. Bryl would show them he was not ready to sit back and Play along.

Before rolling the Water Stone for the last time of the day, he looked at the moon and the stars through the interlocked branches. It would be close—midnight had nearly arrived, and he did not get reimbursed for any spells he did not use in a day.

He successfully rolled for another rainstorm and drove back the flames in a wider section. Ydaim clapped and gave him encouragement. But the fire flanked them again, and Bryl could do nothing to contain it.

After midnight, feeling enthusiastic with four new spells to use, Bryl imagined summoning a larger storm, a “6” storm with the six-sided Water Stone—but he failed. When the “1” came face up on the large sapphire, he had wasted one of his chances.

“Can’t your dayid at least help me make a simple dice roll!” Bryl shouted, feeling cheated and afraid.

“You did not ask for help.” Ydaim shrugged. “The dayid often bends Rules and works around them. Perhaps this is something it could do.”

“Well, tell it to help me then—I’m going to try one more time. Dayid, give me a six!”

The Water Stone came up with a “2”, paused, then kept rolling, one facet at a time, until it stopped with “6” staring skyward.

Rain came down in sheets. A brisk wind pushed at the fire, driving it back. The storm spread out, attacking the blaze.

With the dayid’s help, Bryl abandoned himself into the power of the Stone. He cast his remaining two spells—both sixes—and spent hours in the world bounded by the walls of the cube of sapphire. He enjoyed the release of power. He enjoyed fighting when he no longer felt like the weak contender. With the Stone he could work magic even though no one had bothered to take the time training him.

He watched the flames fall back as they tried to run from the rain. He extinguished the embers, snuffed the little fires. A chunk of Ledaygen smoldered in wreckage, scarred by the fire, wounded and gasping for its life.

When his last spell ended, Bryl blinked dumbly as he came up for air. Dawn shot through the darkness. Orange banners streaked across the sky above the plains in the east. Smoke from Ledaygen rose upward, clotting in the air like a dark pudding. The half-Sorcerer took a deep breath. His body sagged with exhaustion.

Vailret stood beside him, looking red-eyed and tired. “Good job, Bryl. You made a lot of progress.”

Bryl blinked but waited a moment before he felt strong enough to speak. “Progress? That’s all?”

Vailret spread his hands. “You fought back the fire, but it’s still burning.” Ydaim Trailwalker glared into the distance, clenching his fists. Without the influence of the magic, the prevailing breeze had picked up again, stronger now, pushing the fire toward them.

Bryl let his voice drop to a whisper. He held the Water Stone in his grimy hands, but it was just a colored rock to him now. “I can’t do anything else. I’m helpless until tomorrow.”

“Now it’s our turn.” Vailret indicated the other khelebar he had brought with him. “The less thick-headed among them have decided the situation is desperate enough. They’re willing to try something else.”

Bryl saw the other khelebar carrying oar-shaped shovels made from dead branches to beat at the flames and dig at the earth. Ydaim went forward to take one of the shovels. “Noldir Woodcarver shaped these?”

Vailret pulled off his tunic, baring his chest. He looked thin and not strong enough to fight against the fire, but he shook his head, making sweat fly from his hair. “You should have seen him—using his palms to slap off slices of wood from the ends, like it was butter.”

Bryl hauled himself to his feet. His old bones creaked with weariness. Ydaim Trailwalker looked at him, then at the others and at the shovel in his hand. Bryl waved in dismissal. “I’ll find my own way back to Delrael.”

“We have to keep working,” Vailret said. “Thilane wouldn’t let Del come and help.”

The khelebar seemed terrified of the fire, but their fear for the trees outweighed it. They beat at the flames on the forest floor, attacking an enemy.

Before Bryl stumbled off into the forest toward the council clearing, Vailret stopped him. The young man lowered his voice and placed a hand on Bryl’s shoulder. With a nod of his head, he indicated the approaching flames. “You know this won’t do any good, don’t you?”

Bryl shuddered. He had hoped he was wrong, but he had seen through the Water Stone how good a grip the fire had on the heart of Ledaygen. If the Stone could not extinguish the blaze, wooden shovels would not.

“I know. This is all going to be one black hex.”

Vailret took his shovel anyway and went toward the edge of the fire with a show of enthusiasm. “I have to get to work.”

They labored through the morning, exhausted, until they had depleted even their adrenaline. The fire, gaining strength, pushed them steadily back.

Vailret could barely lift his shovel to beat down against smoldering leaves, to dig trenches that the fire leaped across. Dirt and sweat and soot trickled down his raw skin. A dozen glistening welts scored his back from flying coals. His soaked blond hair hung in ropy tangles, powdered with ash.

At noon he saw the despair reach its peak. Gorak Foodgatherer, a slim, sunken-eyed khelebar who had worked closely beside Vailret, paused and stared at the flames. Without warning, he shouted and hurled his blackened shovel deep into the burning forest. Clamping his hands against his ears and temples, he screamed and ran into the blazing mass of trees, plunging through showers of hot coals. He moved like a demon, severing burning trees from their roots with his bare hands, knocking them down with his shoulder. His fur smoldered and caught fire, but he ran faster, lopping at trees and putting them out of their misery.

The other khelebar watched. No one attempted to stop him.

“We can all hear the death screams of the trees,” Ydaim Trailwalker said. “It haunts us from within.”

Gorak Foodgatherer burst into flame, but still he stumbled and knocked down two more doomed trees, positioning himself so the flaming hulk of one oak mercifully fell on top of him.

The khelebar stood in grim silence for a moment, then drowned themselves in work again. Vailret stared in horror, feeling his heart pound.

Ydaim turned to him, listless. “What else can we do?”

Fiolin Tribeleader scratched another line across the hexagonal map in the dirt, leaving less than a quarter of Ledaygen unburned. The fire had looped along the boundary lines, cutting the khelebar off with flames to their faces and the cliff to their backs.

Shaking with exhaustion, Vailret collapsed next to Delrael in the clearing. He glared at Fiolin. “We could have escaped before. You knew we were getting walled in by the fire—is it going to make us martyrs to your dayid?”

The Tribeleader refused to answer.

Helpless and disgusted, Vailret drew a deep breath of the oppressive air. He coughed, and the inside of his nose and throat burned.

The khelebar heard the roar and snap of burning trees. Their terror and helplessness grew, but they could find no outlet for it. Many congregated under the sweeping boughs of Thessar, the ancient Father Pine. They beseeched their dayid for help. Vailret shook his head in sadness.

Bryl cracked his knuckles incessantly, as if trying to loosen the cramps caused by clutching the Water Stone for so many hours. Delrael sat, looking helpless and dismayed, unable to do anything.

Ydaim’s black braids had long since come undone. He had lost his pine cone pendant somewhere in the fire. Other khelebar wandered back into the clearing, looking broken—sweat had plastered soot to their bodies, and their emerald eyes were glazed with the knowledge of their deaths and the death of Ledaygen.

“I don’t suppose you can do anything else with the Water Stone?” Vailret asked Bryl, but did not take his eyes from the flames he saw moving between the trees, coming nearer. He blinked, trying to make his vision clear.

The half-Sorcerer stared at the palms of his hands. “I’ve already used up my spell allotment for today. And even with that I couldn’t stop the fire. If I do anything else before midnight, it would be breaking the Rules. When Sardun did that, he paralyzed almost his entire body . . . and he’s much more powerful than I am.” Bryl stared at the sky, then at his hands again. “I failed, too. This must be how my parents felt when your great-great grandfather Jarriel died of the tumor sickness.”

He shook his head, and Vailret listened to his words.

“They had tried to save him for nearly a year, but Jarriel wasted away and died. I was very young then, but I remember them working, discussing what they should try next. But they failed, and when Jarriel’s wife Galleri married a new husband, Brudane—oh, he was a rough man—they talked as if my mother and father had poisoned Jarriel.

“When my parents learned that, they wallowed in shame at their failure, and went through the half-Transition, disintegrating in flames brighter than any of these—” he waved at the forest, “Right in front of my eyes. They didn’t apologize or even say good-bye. I was ten years old, I think.

“How could they not expect their action to make them appear even more guilty? And they left me to grow up under that shadow. Among people who did not know how to train me or what to expect of my powers—”

Bryl stopped talking, then shook his head. “It is useless to dwell in the past. Drodanis wasted years doing that, before he went off on his quest to find the Rulewoman Melanie.” He brushed at his knees under the soot-smeared blue cloak.

The wind picked up and skimmed over the forest. Smoke rippled across the clearing, stinging Vailret’s eyes. Oddly, he felt no tears there.

Swinging his kennok leg along with him, Delrael walked awkwardly to the edge of the hex-discontinuity and gazed over the cliff. Vailret joined him, and he stared down at the bottom of the mountainous hexagon far below. He squinted, but the details were even more blurred than usual with the smoke making his eyes raw. He saw no ledge, no narrow trail they could use for escape.

The fire glared brighter between the trees now, sweeping toward them, a hungry monster ravenous for a last morsel. The heat increased until the air was thick with it. They had nothing to do but wait.

The fire rushed along the scattered dry leaves. The khelebar stood in grim positions, muttering to the dayid for salvation. But the dayid had fallen silent even to them.

“There’s extreme risk in doing this—” Bryl trembled as he hefted the Water Stone in front of him. He stood up, trying to be steady. “But if we’re going to die anyway—”

“Luck,” Vailret said with all the sincerity he could muster.

“Luck,” Delrael added.

The half-Sorcerer closed his eyes and rolled the sapphire. The Stone came to rest with “1” staring upward and rolled no farther. The dayid had ceased to offer its help.

Bryl let out a cry as if struck by a blow. Eyes closed, he dropped to the trampled ground and lay motionless. His fingers convulsed, clutching the Water Stone. He still breathed. But the fire approached, and Vailret decided it might be better not to wake him.

The khelebar made no sound as the nearest flames skittered across the treetops to land on Thessar, the Father Pine, the last tree. Orange curtains of heat lapped at Thessar’s green needles and the dry, flaking bark oozing with sweet pitch. The air filled with the stench of smoldering evergreen—Thessar seemed to sigh as the heat made sap boil and hiss.

The Father Pine ignited in an instant, exploding into a pillar of brilliance, burning, burning. Some of the khelebar sang their keening wail, but most stood in defeated silence.

Thessar groaned, weakened by the fire as flames weighed down its branches. The ancient pine toppled forward to crash with a horrible noise to the grassy clearing. From Thessar’s boughs, the fire rushed into the grass and slithered toward the khelebar like a gigantic serpent.

Vailret swallowed hard, silent in his own awe. He took a step sideways to be closer to Delrael. His cousin stood white-lipped and staring with clenched fists.

Like a sharp hook had yanked at him, he felt his insides wrenched with pain. An instant of nausea replaced itself with utter despair and total emptiness. His head spun, and he could not understand until he heard the cries of the khelebar.

“The dayid has fled Ledaygen! We are forsaken!”

Some of the khelebar screamed. Vailret lifted his heavy gaze and watched in horror as five of them ran to the edge of the hex-discontinuity and cast themselves over the cliff.

The young Tayron Next-Leader turned red with disgust and pain. He shouted at others moving to the edge of the cliff, “Are you ashamed to die on the soil of Ledaygen? I will stand here as bravely as the trees and resist the fire until it consumes me!”

Delrael snatched up one of the ash-blackened shovels. “Come on, Vailret!” He lurched toward the edge of the fire, furious to do something. “All of you—we can use the shovels to beat out the fire on the grass as it comes toward us!”

Vailret ran with his cousin and began banging at the creeping flames, though his sore arms felt as if they had been skewered with knives.

“What does it matter?” Fiolin turned to him. “Ledaygen is dead. The dayid has left us.”

“Damn Ledaygen!” Delrael shouted back. “I’m talking about us!”

But the khelebar refused to move. Reluctant and apathetic, Ydaim Trailwalker offered some help. They stood, insignificant against the towering flames.

“What about Bryl?” Vailret asked, turning to look at the fallen half-Sorcerer. He stared and the words crumbled in his mouth.

Bryl hauled himself to his knees. His eyes were glassy. He could not focus, but he seemed to be seeing through a million different minds. Power surged from Ledaygen into the Water Stone and ricocheted into his mind. His consciousness expanded outward as if to encompass the whole map of Gamearth in one glance.

He felt like a giant with his new power, towering over the council clearing. His small body shimmered with strength, and the milling panicked khelebar below seemed to be mere specks in the grass. When he saw the smoldering wreckage of his entire forest, he felt anger tighten around him.

In the back of his mind, Bryl felt the magnitude of power that Sardun had used to create the Barrier River. He grew afraid.

The grass in the clearing burned rapidly, and the already dead trees in the forest fell into festering ash as the wave of heat sterilized the soil of Ledaygen. He saw Delrael and Vailret both turn to stare at him in awe—but Bryl ignored all that. He dimly noticed the other khelebar pointing at him, shouting: Their voices seemed so tiny over the roar of the fire and the echoes of his strange strength.

He found it exhilarating.

“The dayid! The dayid has fled to Bryl Traveler!”

Bryl allowed himself only an instant to taste the churning voices of the hundreds of Sentinels whose spirits had collected together to form the dayid: all the tragedy and despair that had caused them to remain behind from the original Transition, the years of waiting through the violent Scouring as Gamearth fought with itself. He felt the grief that had finally driven them to undertake their own partial Transitions that liberated their spirits and sent them here.

The fire swept toward the khelebar, ready to destroy them as it had ruined Ledaygen. Bryl let the thunderous magic pound in his temples and behind his eyes. He knew that the dayid could not allow the khelebar to be destroyed, even if it meant casting the Rules to the wind. The dayid seemed willing to take whatever consequences would come.

Bryl clutched the Water Stone in his hand, shouting in a booming voice. He wondered if the sapphire cube might shatter from the force of his desperate anger.

“Water of the earth, I summon you!” Rippling with waves of energy from the dayid, he sent a thought through the Stone.”Save my khelebar! All water, come to the aid of Ledaygen. Come!”

The Water Stone bucked and writhed with the command. The soil beneath Bryl’s feet became laden with water he summoned from the deep underground springs. Black thunderclouds gorged the sky above, dumping their contents in a heavy downpour.

Water built up in the center of the council clearing, pushing below the turf. A huge geyser of sparkling cold water blasted a pillar of white froth into the air.

Bryl laughed. Power continued to pour from the Water Stone.

The water erupted higher, beginning to whirl, rotating faster until it skipped away from the ground in a tremendous waterspout. The spout veered away from the cliff and plunged into the still-burning forest, spraying water onto the blazing trees, extinguishing the fire without damaging the tree hulks.

More cold water spilled upward from beneath baked rocks, splitting them. Smaller geysers spewed forth, detaching themselves to become cyclones that careened through the smoldering wreckage of Ledaygen until the fire had been vanquished.

The hiss of vanishing steam lingered in the air.

The glowing Water Stone slipped from Bryl’s fingers as he collapsed to the sodden ground. He tried to hold onto the power, but the dissembling spirits fled like the smoke in Ledaygen.

The dayid left him, and died.

8. War Games

“We can defeat the Game if we can succeed in not fighting. The Outsiders must see that we will not Play along. Their amusements do not amuse us.”

—Jorig Falselimb of the khelebar

Fiolin Tribeleader clenched his hand, and the charred wood crumbled to ash. He stared at his fingers in numb helplessness—the black dust had once been a living, vibrant tree. He gazed with reddened eyes at the desolation of Ledaygen, at the black hulks that were the corpses of trees. Steam rose from the ruins of the fire. “It’s . . . all . . . gone.”

Vailret dipped his shirt in a puddle of cool water. He bent over Bryl and mopped the unconscious man’s face. The half-Sorcerer looked as drained as Sardun had after creating the Barrier River.

Delrael bent his kennok limb and sat down beside Vailret. He watched Fiolin and the other khelebar until he finally spoke out loud.

“We’re still alive, Fiolin. You can help the trees grow again. Birds will come. You can plant flowers. In time, Ledaygen will be what it was before.”

“Ledaygen can never be what it was!” Tayron Next Leader said. The rest of the khelebar took no interest in the subject but stood around like character figurines.

Fiolin heaved a sigh and forced himself to look at Delrael and Vailret. “Ledaygen is dead. The dayid is dead. Could you not feel it? Why should the rest of us live? Perhaps I made the wrong decision. Perhaps we should not have fought at all.” He stared up at the skies and shouted to the Outsiders. “What value is life now? Why don’t you change the Rules?”

Tayron Next-Leader glowered at his father, surprising Vailret. “I will not forsake my hope until I have seen that not one tree still stands in Ledaygen. If my heart can bear it, I will scout every inch of this forest.”

Ydaim Trailwalker squared his shoulders. “I will be proud to help you look for life in our ashes, Next-Leader. If a single acorn or pine cone remains unharmed, we will find it.”

Some of the khelebar cheered, but most just stared as the two galloped off into the ashen wasteland.

When Bryl dragged himself back to consciousness, he blinked up at Vailret in astonishment, then stared into the sky. “We’re still alive.” He glanced at his hands, then at the Water Stone. “I remember touching the Stone, and I remember feeling . . . it was the dayid. Ah.” His body shook from jolted nerves, but he said nothing more, though Vailret was anxious to hear.

Much later, Tayron and Ydaim returned, coated with a thin dusting of ash stirred up by their paws. Fiolin’s son blew hard to catch his breath, but he kept his green eyes lowered. The rest of the khelebar stood, fragile and waiting to hear something that would restore their faith. Fiolin padded forward. “What have you found?”

“Five trees still live.” The optimistic tone in Ydaim’s voice sounded artificial.

“But they will soon die. They have given up their lives,” Tayron said. “But . . . but at the edge of the forest, where the fire seems to have started, we found something else—”

Fiolin Tribeleader turned away as if he did not want to hear. Ydaim reached forward to grip Fiolin’s bare shoulders, forcing him to face his son.

“We found the cause of the fire. We found footprints, we found sign. There is no doubt—the Cyclops has done this to our Ledaygen!” Tayron’s green eyes blazed as he glared at the khelebar, then at the burned forest.

The khelebar muttered among themselves. “Didn’t I tell you?” Vailret said, but he did not want to make an issue of it.

“Father, the Cyclops has burned our forest, murdered the dayid!”

The Tribeleader’s expression maintained its mask of duty. He looked at his surviving people, saw the restless anger simmering within them.

Vailret watched his transformation, not sure if it was genuine or simply a role the Tribeleader decided to play. “Tayron, gather up every khelebar whose task has been taken away by the burning of Ledaygen—gather them into a war party. Noldir Woodcarver! Arm every one of them with a bow and with arrows forged from the fallen trees. The dead branches will want their own revenge.”

Fiolin watched their faces, looking uncertain. Tayron raised his fist in the air. “Tomorrow we will march against the Cyclops—Lifetaker, Flesheater, Treeburner!”

Vailret joined in the ragged cheer. Thilane Healer, though, came forward. “Fiolin Tribeleader, we swore to resist the Outsiders by refusing to play their Game. The khelebar have not fought for generations. Have you forgotten the examples Jorig Falselimb taught us? We were at peace with the dayid for as long as any of us can remember.”

Tayron also spoke up. “The Healer is right. We have lost all our arts of war, and if we march blindly against the Cyclops, we will surely fail.”

Thilane turned on him, as if he had twisted her meaning entirely. Fiolin’s expression changed. He shook his head. “We have no other choice.”

“Ah, but we do.” Ydaim’s green eyes glinted with excitement reborn. “Three among us are fresher to the game of war.”

Vailret felt the eyes of Tayron Next-Leader on him. Bryl sat on the ground, leaning against Delrael and still wearing a stunned expression on his face. Delrael moved well on his kennok limb, but he could not go into battle so soon. Vailret shrank back as he watched the others turn to him and come to the same conclusion.

“I can’t lead anyone,” he said, looking at Delrael. “I’m not a fighter. I can’t use magic—I can’t even see very well!”

Delrael shrugged. “But you’ve read about all the old Sorcerer battles. You know their strategy. You’re smart, and you can make decisions quickly. Go along and tell them what to do.”

“Just like that?”

“Pretend it’s a Game.”

Tayron Next-Leader held one of the dark wooden arrows out for the others to see. The gathered khelebar watched as he ground its sharp point into the charred surface of a fallen log. “This,” Tayron showed them its tip blackened with soot, “this is all the poison we need to strike down the Treeburner.”

Each khelebar held a handful of new-made arrows. Noldir Woodcarver had worked his hands raw fashioning the shafts from twisted and burned branches, pulling the wood between his fingers to straighten it.

Following his son’s example, Fiolin Tribeleader blackened the tips of his own arrows. “Ledaygen has provided us with this poison as her last service to us. We shall use it to destroy our enemy.”

The khelebar pressed forward to dip their own arrows in the ashes. Vailret watched in silence, doubting that the ritual would have any real effect. But it served to stir up more anger and frenzy in the long-peaceful khelebar.

“Are you ready to go get him?” Vailret raised his voice. They all yelled their answer.

“I have selected five scouts to spread out ahead of the main party. First, we will find the Cyclops, then we will converge on him, and when he’s trapped, you’ll have your revenge. Give him one arrow for every tree he has destroyed.”

He and Bryl made ready to lead the khelebar warriors. Though still weak, the half-Sorcerer had regained his complement of spells. He stared at the Water Stone as if waiting for an opportunity to touch the power again. He seemed to be stronger inside, tempered by his ordeal.

Vailret looked at the khelebar and tried to remain optimistic. They had been practicing with their bows and arrows. Delrael helped one after another until he, too, was exhausted. But a few hours of training would never make expert archers out of them. Vailret himself couldn’t see well enough to make any long shots.

The Outsiders would probably enjoy this battle immensely.

“Bryl and I will have to ride on your backs just to keep up. We can switch off if the burden gets too great.” Vailret tried to appear confident. “Tayron Next-Leader, I would like you to carry me first, so we can discuss strategy. Ydaim, can you take Bryl?”

“I would be honored, Vailret Traveler.” The other khelebar watched Bryl with a cautious awe: the one who had linked himself with the dayid and saved them all. Bryl seemed to enjoy his position of prestige but acted as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

Vailret and Bryl mounted easily and turned to face Delrael, who stood angry and dejected. Once again, Thilane Healer had refused to let him go, even with his healing leg. He waved halfheartedly. “Luck.”

Thilane seemed upset at their mission and said nothing.

“This is for you, Delrael,” Vailret said. “The khelebar have their own reasons for revenge, and I have mine.”

The khelebar turned and Vailret motioned them forward. They moved into the desolate stand of blackened tree skeletons. Vailret made them pass slowly through the ruins of Ledaygen, trying to forge their despair into hot fury. The twisted and still-smoldering hulks of the once-majestic trees cried out to the hearts of the khelebar.

A brooding sense of relief came over him when they left the burned hexagon of Ledaygen and descended into the narrow gorge where the Cyclops had attacked Delrael. Early afternoon made the canyon bright and green. Vailret’s five chosen scouts broke away from the main party and scattered to the upper walls of the gorge. “Remember, you must only find the Cyclops. Wait for all the khelebar. We will fight together.”

Tayron Next-Leader and Ydaim Trailwalker bore the two humans side by side. Fiolin Tribeleader accompanied them. Ydaim pointed up. “The Cyclops often lurks in the rocks above, but he lives farther down the valley in a cave.”

Water from the narrow stream splattered and dashed itself on the exposed rocks. On the east side of the stream the ground glistened from where the water had surged across the gorge floor, dragged toward the hills of Ledaygen. Vailret looked in awe at the strength of Bryl’s summons through the Water Stone.

The khelebar marched along, moving with the silent care they saved for the forest. Vailret felt like part of a funeral procession rather than a vengeful foray.

The keener ears of the khelebar detected a commotion on the jagged bluffs above. Ydaim reached across to touch Vailret’s shoulder and pointed at the rim of the canyon. The rest of the khelebar stumbled to a halt. Shading their emerald eyes, they peered up at the gorge walls.

One of the scouts, Stynod Treescavenger, burst into view. She flailed her arms at something hidden in the jumbled terrain. Her mottled pelt blended well with the rocks, but her dark hair whipped from side to side as she moved. Stynod snatched her new bow and nocked an arrow. Her shouted challenge drifted on the wind, made faint by distance. Vailret squinted, trying to see what was happening.

The Cyclops emerged from the shadows of an outcropping, crouched like a brick-red behemoth. He tossed his head, brandishing his horn. He glared at the khelebar with his watery yellow eye.

“Treeburner! Lifetaker!” Stynod shouted, letting her arrow fly. The shaft struck the Cyclops in the shoulder. “Let the poison of burned Ledaygen destroy you!”

Vailret made a fist, grinding his teeth together in exasperation. “Idiot! You can’t do any harm by yourself!”

In annoyance, the Cyclops knocked the arrow from his warty skin. He reached forward with flint claws and snatched at Stynod, missing cleanly, though the Tree-scavenger stood her ground. She tried to fit another arrow to her bow. The Cyclops grabbed again, this time raking his claws across her panther ribs. As she fell, the Cyclops snagged her body and picked her up. The monster roared at the khelebar below and hurled Stynod from the bluff face. She did not scream. Her body struck the ground in front of the advancing party.

“I said we all have to attack together! We can’t do anything from here,” Vailret said as he stared at the Treescavenger’s broken body. “Stynod has ruined it for us! Come on!”

He urged Tayron ahead; Bryl and Ydaim followed, but the other khelebar stood motionless, appalled at their dead companion.

The Cyclops picked up a huge rock and raised it over his head. “Move!” Ydaim added his shout to Vailret’s warning.

The first boulder came crashing down, narrowly missing the khelebar. They scattered, looking for shelter. “Stay in single file!” Vailret shouted, realizing the limitations of the Cyclops. “He’s only got one eye—he can’t judge distance! Don’t give him a big target.”

A second boulder came down like thunder, harming no one.

Only Fiolin Tribeleader stood alone, staring and weeping over the body of Stynod. He drew himself up and glared at the monster; for a moment, Vailret thought they made eye contact.

“Lifetaker, Treeburner—I curse you with all the power of the dayid.” Fiolin shouted into the wind. He held a charred arrow in each hand, wielding them like a talisman.

Tayron seemed to know what Fiolin was doing and wheeled around, running toward him. Vailret held on to the Next-Leader’s waist.

The Cyclops also saw the Tribeleader standing alone and unprotected. He found another boulder and cast it down.

Fiolin saw the rock coming at him, but he made no move to avoid it. Vailret watched the older khelebar stand still, waiting.

The giant stone struck Fiolin Tribeleader, crushing him to the earth. Mud and blood sprayed into the air, spattering Tayron Next-Leader as he ran toward his father.

The Cyclops lifted another of his giant stones, but a thin bolt of lightning struck the monster’s head and skittered along his shoulders and chest, leaving a jagged black mark smoking on his skin. He howled in pain and surprise and dropped the boulder on his foot. Smaller rocks bounced off the canyon wall as the boulder rolled to the rim, then fell into the ravine.

Bryl scrambled to pick up the Water Stone. The half Sorcerer’s face seemed as tight as a drum skin over the front of his skull, but flushed with excitement.

Ydaim shouted at the khelebar to regroup. They fired arrows at the Cyclops. Most of the shafts fell short, bouncing off the rock face, but several struck the monster’s legs and side. He ran away, crashing among the rocks until he disappeared behind the edge of the cliffs.

Vailret stumbled off Tayron’s back. The Next-Leader seemed to have forgotten about him. Tayron thrust the boulder away from his father, leaving the older khelebar exposed and mangled on the turf. Fiolin’s emerald eyes filled with tears that oozed down his cheeks. His teeth chattered.

“Father!” Tayron’s words whistled out of his throat. He shouted for two of the other khelebar to come to him. “He still lives—take him to Thilane Healer! She can save him. She has the power—I know it.”

The burning anger in Tayron’s eyes stopped Vailret from voicing his doubts. A male and a female khelebar picked up their Tribeleader between them. Fiolin’s blood slicked their hands.

Tayron grabbed a fistful of arrows. “We shall destroy the Lifetaker!” His voice cracked with emotion. The khelebar rallied around their fallen leader and the body of Stynod Treescavenger.

Fiolin stirred and wheezed through punctured lungs. “No. Enough killing.” But Tayron did not hear, and Vailret chose not to repeat the words for him. The two khelebar tending their dying Tribeleader looked at each other for a moment, then bore him away.

Tayron removed one arrow from his quiver. His jaws ground together so tightly the muscles looked like straining ropes. He ran his fingers along the burned wood of the shaft, then dipped the sharp tip in a pool of his father’s blood on the ground. Before the blood had dried, he thrust the doubly poisoned arrow into his braid of blond hair.

By unspoken agreement, Tayron Next-Leader took command of the war party. Vailret signaled to another of the panther-men and scrambled on his wide back. Tayron charged off down the gorge with the rest of the vengeful khelebar in his wake.

Noldir Woodcarver stared at the toppled hulk of the Father Pine. He paced around the dead tree, pausing, frowning. He inspected the char marks, the rough patches where the intense heat had eaten through to the heartwood.

Delrael watched to distract himself from thinking of the battles the others were now fighting. The pungent odor of wet ashes still hung in the air—”the smell of tree blood,” Thilane called it. The thought made Delrael uncomfortable.

Before the war party departed, Fiolin Tribeleader had summoned Noldir to the council clearing. “You shall make a monument out of Thessar’s remains—the Father Pine will be a memorial for our dead Ledaygen.”

Noldir stared at the fallen tree, seeing into it. His eyes glimmered with determined pride.

“You’ve been just looking at it for hours,” Delrael finally said.

The Woodcarver glanced up at him. “I cannot carve contrary to the desires of Thessar. I must find out what it wishes to be, but it eludes me—ah!”

He clapped his hands. “No wonder I could not see it before. Thessar is practically shouting to me that it is upside down! Delrael Kennoklimb, help me.”

Thilane Healer watched for a moment, then came over to help. The three of them effortlessly rolled the hulk of the ancient Father Pine. Delrael blinked his eyes in wonder—he had felt the new power sparkling through him for an instant. The blackened log seemed eager to move and floated like a dandelion seed until it came back to rest on the scorched grass.

“Look!” Thilane paused, then replaced her excitement with a show of dignity. She nodded at the depression where Thessar had fallen—a small seedling, rumpled and nearly crushed, straightened in the sunlight.

“Thessar knew!” she whispered. “When the Father Pine fell, he sheltered this seedling with a hollow in his trunk!”

Noldir called to the khelebar who had remained be hind. “A tree still lives! A seedling! Ledaygen is not completely lost!”

Thilane turned away though. “The dayid does not live within it.”

Delrael tried to offer comfort. “Maybe when you get enough trees to grow again—”

“Yes,” she said. “And maybe the Outsiders will feel sorry for us and magically make the forest reappear all by itself. I prefer not to count on miracles. If a miracle was going to happen, it should have stopped Ledaygen from burning in the first place.”

Delrael tried to hide his anger. The Woodcarver spoke against Thilane. “But a miracle has happened—Thessar has given us a new seedling.”

Thilane said nothing and plodded back into the burned forest. She and the lesser Healers tended the five dying trees, though they knew their efforts were in vain. She walked away, and Delrael watched her bare, weathered back with its wealth of corded muscles.

Troubled, Noldir turned back to the hulk of Thessar. He plunged his hands up to the wrists into the charred trunk, sculpting a wooden gravestone for Ledaygen.

Delrael watched the Woodcarver, fascinated with his work but impatient to be doing something else, to be continuing their quest southward. He walked into the dead forest to find Thilane.

The skeletal branches of the trees closed over him. The gray ash muffled all sound like tainted snow. He came upon one of the Treescavengers who was methodically removing every twig and scrap of wood from a large area and piling an immense mound of debris near the path. The Treescavenger gathered branches, uprooted tree trunks, picked up the smallest twig.

Delrael watched her work. “Want some help?” His leg no longer bothered him, and he enjoyed feeling it as he moved.

The Treescavenger took no notice of his question. Delrael helped anyway, carrying loads of fallen branches to the growing mound. He wiped a wristful of sweat off his forehead, leaving a charcoal smudge on his skin. “So, why are we carrying all this wood away?”

The khelebar stopped and looked up at him with eyes as blank and empty as the sky. She blinked and fumbled with her words. “That is my work. The dayid made me a Treescavenger, and I must collect whatever dead wood I find.” She went back to her task again, widening the radius of the cleared circle. She faltered, pondering, then she heaved another branch. “That is my work.”

Delrael waited a moment, uncomfortable, and then slipped off into the deeper forest. He knew where Thilane would be working with the two other Healers.

After passing through the wreckage of trees and brush, he reached a place where the ashes had been trampled and the broken branches moved away. Delrael guessed that this was one of the first places where Bryl had used the Water Stone against the fire. Somehow, two trees had survived here. Two Healers stood beside each other, watching Thilane touch one of the burned trees.

The oak was huge and very old, surviving because of its immense size. Delrael looked upward through the dizzying crosswork of black branches. A few areas near the top of the tree appeared undamaged. The other surviving oak was a mere sapling, blackened and scarred—but Thilane insisted it still lived. Delrael didn’t know how she could tell, but the Healer expended most of her effort there.

Thilane looked up from her work, removing her palms from the thin trunk and pressing the side of her head against it, listening to the tree. Her garland had wilted: Ledaygen had no more flowers to offer her.

She pursed her lips when she saw Delrael but continued her ministrations. He waited, hesitant about interrupting. Finally, he asked why she had not seemed excited about Noldir’s discovery of the pine seedling. “At least you have a start now, a tree from Ledaygen.”

The other two Healers heard Delrael mention the pine seedling and looked to Thilane in surprise, but they did not speak. Thilane kept her attention on him.

“Ledaygen was a forest of pine and oak. Both! Because of Thessar the pines may now return—but what of the oaks?”

Delrael fidgeted. “Can’t you heal one of these?”

Thilane shook her head and pointed at the large oak.

“That tree could have survived its fire damage, but it is old and has already surrendered. This one, though,” she ran her fingers along the surviving sapling, “has an extraordinary will to live. How can it cling to life when it has endured more than any of these others? But it, too, has been mortally wounded. It will be dead—dead, like the rest of the forest.”

Delrael looked at the emerald eyes of the other Healers, but they avoided his gaze. He spoke quietly to Thilane. “Why can’t you bring in other trees? Start over?”

“Stop being so stupid and optimistic! If we brought outside trees, our home would be just another forest. It would not be Ledaygen. Better that Ledaygen be dead and remembered than absorbed as part of more forest terrain.” She clamped her wavering lips together and drew herself straight. “And now we shall have only pine.”

Thilane stepped away from the charred sapling and sank to the forest floor. She tucked her great paws beneath her belly, then reached out to run her fingernail along the peeled bark. The other Healers stopped their own work and watched her.

Delrael felt uneasy. Thilane smiled at something he could not see. Tears made tracks through the settled ash on her cheeks. She reached behind her neck and undid the long braid of gray-streaked hair that ran like a mane down her bare back. She turned and hissed at the two Healers, “Yes! “

They both took a half-step backward in surprise.

“It is decided,” Thilane said.

“What is?” Delrael asked.

The Healer turned. Her eerie eyes stared through him, seeming to see the ghosts of the forest. “Ledaygen has a new Father Pine. I can provide a new Father Oak. I must heal this young tree.”

“But you said you couldn’t—”

“I can. You must remember how we Heal.”

Thilane would say no more, but rose and marched around the blackened oak sapling, contemplating. One of the other Healers took Delrael by the shoulder and pulled him away, silencing his questions with a stern gesture. Her eyes glittered with a mixture of dread, enthusiasm, and hope.

You must remember how we Heal.

Delrael watched Thilane, thinking of how she had treated some of the khelebar burns by laying green leaves on the injury; the leaves had turned black and charred.

Noldir Woodcarver had told him how she had treated Delrael’s bruises and smashed muscles with twigs and branches, which had somehow become crushed and mangled in exchange.

She had brought his kennok wood leg to life by exchanging his flesh leg and burying it in the forest.

He frowned. None of it seemed to be “healing” at all—just an exchange of wholeness and injury.

Then he knew what she meant to do.

Thilane leaned up against the hunched sapling, embracing the thin trunk and holding it between her breasts. Her fingers fluttered up the charred bark, reaching toward the top. She began to hum to herself.

“Don’t, Thilane! Please!” Delrael tried to run to her, but the Healers reached out and grabbed him. “She’ll die—she’ll burn like the trees!” he shouted at them.

“That is her choice,” one of the Healers said.

“That is her right,” said the other.

“It is her duty.” The first Healer turned to watch Thilane. “Only she has the power to do this. For Ledaygen.”

Delrael gritted his teeth in despair. He wanted to call out Thilane’s name again, but he just watched her instead.

She swayed against the tree trunk, smearing soot over her skin. She hummed louder, invoking a rite that only she seemed to know. Her lips sang a song in the language of the wind, the language a dying tree might understand.

Sparks flew from her hair as it drifted upward, alive with static like a wreath of gray flames.

Thilane Healer stretched her arms still farther upward, reaching for the lost dayid, and then she let out a low keening. Her body burst into an incinerating white flame, burning from the inside out. She writhed as a living torch for a long, hideous moment until she crumbled to the ground. A dust of fine ash scattered with the wind of her departure.

Delrael fell to his knees, sickened and sobbing. The kennok limb bent easily. He wormed out of the stunned grip of the other two Healers and crawled to where Thilane’s ashes lay. He took the ash in each fist and let it run back out like sand to the forest floor.

He sat stunned, then looked up. The nearly dead sapling, the new Father Oak, now stood fresh and green and explosively alive.

The war party tracked the Cyclops down the gorge, harrying him, firing volleys of arrows. The khelebar remained unfamiliar with their weapons and missed most of the time. At least Noldir Woodcarver had provided them with more arrows than they could possibly use. Vailret rode along, trying to see details in the shadows with his weak eyes.

Tayron Next-Leader went ahead, oblivious to the other khelebar in the party.

Vailret didn’t know how they could kill the monster. The Cyclops had disappeared among the rocky bluffs again. The khelebar could keep pursuing him, and the monster could keep throwing rocks—the chase would go on forever. But he did know that the Outsiders would have set it up properly: They had given the Cyclops countless boulders as weapons, they had provided the incentive to the khelebar, they had provided the battle, and they would also provide the solution. Vailret had to find it.

“We have to drive him back to his lair,” he said to Tayron. The Next-Leader turned to him, but Vailret kept his face firm and confident.

Without questioning, Tayron signaled for four others to locate and flush the Cyclops once more.

Riding Ydaim, Bryl appeared refreshed but still weak. He left the Water Stone in his pocket, not touching it—but he seemed ready. The war party marched on.

The Cyclops roared and leaped over the edge of the gorge, grabbing at the cliff wall to slow himself. His claws scraped on the rock and sparks flew. The monster stumbled but regained his footing.

Tayron launched himself forward with a yell. The Cyclops bounded down the canyon. The other khelebar surged after, recklessly shooting arrows at the monster’s heels.

“He’s leading us there,” Ydaim said.

The gorge branched. The narrow stream continued down the main canyon, but a side ravine went a different direction. The Cyclops splashed across the stream, spraying water onto his brick-red skin, then he lumbered toward a gaping cut in the rock wall of the ravine. A few wisps of steam leaked from inside the cave. In the dim light they could see branchings of the cave as it plunged into the earth, filled with gems and abandoned chests of treasure.

The Cyclops seemed ready to fight at any moment, but every time he turned, a fresh round of arrows pierced his hide and sent him howling in the other direction. The monster ran toward the cave with all the speed his great legs could muster.

“Shoot your arrows!” Tayron shouted. “We will not stop again until he lies dead, to avenge the blood of Ledaygen and the blood of my father!”

The Cyclops reached the dark opening and stood within it, glaring at the attacking khelebar. His horn jutted out, yellowed by the sunlight. His single eye glowed all by itself.

The khelebar shot another volley of arrows, most of which clattered against the stone walls. The Cyclops snarled at them, as if he had thought they would retreat once he had reached his home. Huge boulders lay strewn around the entrance, and he stepped back into the sunlight to pick one up and heave it toward them. “Stay in single file!” Vailret said. The rock fell short. The khelebar shot again. “His eye!” Bryl shouted. “Hit him in the eye!” “They can’t even hit him,” Vailret said.

Then Vailret saw that above the opening to the monster’s cave, the gigantic boulders had fallen together in a jumbled arch. Boulders, just like those the Cyclops threw as weapons, but this time they were stacked against him. A few stray khelebar arrows pinged against the burden of rock, and bits of gravel pattered down to the dry riverbed.

He was about to point this out to the war party when he saw Ydaim Trailwalker taking painful aim with an arrow larger than the rest. Ydaim closed his eyes, exhaled a long breath, and released the arrow.

The Cyclops screamed with an agony that chilled Vailret to the bone. The arrow shaft had sunk deep into the corded skin of his throat. Dark-brown blood gushed down his chest, and the monster ripped open other gashes from clawing at the wound.

The khelebar yelled in triumph and kept shooting arrows. A dozen shafts stuck out of the monster’s rough hide. Bryl slapped Ydaim on the back. “Yes!”

“I was aiming for his heart,” Ydaim muttered.

The Cyclops bashed his fists against the walls of the cave. More stones and dust trickled down from over head. Vailret heard the boulders groan as they settled against each other.

“Bryl, the rocks!” Vailret indicated the jumbled arch. “Use the Water Stone.”

Bryl looked at him with uneasy eyes. “But, I—”

“You’ve still got three spells left.”

The half-Sorcerer took out the sapphire cube and stared at it.

Tayron Next-Leader planted his wide panther feet, scoring the dry ground with his claws. He pulled the arrow from the braid in his hair—the arrow dipped in the ash of Ledaygen and the spilled blood of Fiolin Tribeleader.

“This is poison.” Tayron took three steps closer to the thrashing monster and aimed. “Lifetaker—I will take your life.”

Bryl blew on the Water Stone. “All right, come on!”

Tayron shot his arrow. It struck the Cyclops squarely in the center of his chest.

The Water Stone showed a “3”. Bryl struck down with a massive bolt of lightning onto the precarious archway. Vailret waved a triumphant fist in the air.

The Cyclops touched the arrow protruding from his chest and stiffened as if the life had been ripped from his body. As dead as Ledaygen, he slumped forward. Then tons and tons of collapsing stone tumbled upon him from above.

The rumble and hiss of settling rock drifted toward silence. “We have killed once again,” Ydaim said, standing next to Tayron.

The Next-Leader’s words were amazing in their strength and calmness. “We have always known how to kill. By our inaction for all these centuries, we played a part in the killing of Ledaygen.” He drew a deep breath of the dusty air. “We have failed to see that total peace can be as deadly as total war.”

Some of the khelebar went forward to the rubble, cautious. Tayron undid his long hair and let it fly free. He put one massive paw on a broken boulder and turned to the other khelebar.

“We will plant trees here.”

Tayron rushed the war party back to Ledaygen. His lips were dry and his eyes were glazed and hollow-looking.

Vailret sat astride the Next-Leader’s back again, and he leaned forward to speak to the khelebar. “Thilane helped Delrael, remember?” Tayron did not answer.

They marched toward the remains of the great forest. Some of the khelebar stared with a new pride, some wept as they carried the body of Stynod Treescavenger, some looked stunned and uncertain. But when they passed the black hex-boundary into Ledaygen, Tayron stopped in baffled wonder. The other khelebar looked around, emerald eyes wide and glistening as they talked among themselves. Some of the khelebar ran ahead. Vailret sniffed the air but failed to notice any difference.

“What is it? Why are they so excited?” Bryl asked.

Ydaim Trailwalker beamed at him, amazed. “The dayid! It is a miracle! The presence is faint, but I can feel it.”

Vailret frowned. “I thought you said the dayid died?”

“Nevertheless, it has returned.”

The war party entered the clearing where the other khelebar had gathered. The new Father Oak stood vibrant and green, filled with life. Some of the party saw the tree and stared.

But Delrael sat dejected on a burned log, looking worn and empty. Soot smeared his face, furrowed with the tracks of tears, but he had stopped weeping. Near the reborn oak lay Fiolin, crushed and dying. The two lesser Healers hovered over the Tribeleader, doing what they could.

Tayron Next-Leader saw nothing but his father on the still-warm ash of Ledaygen. He threw his charred arrows to the ground with a clatter, demanding the attention of the Healers. “Where is Thilane Healer? Why is she not tending the Tribeleader?”

The other Healers cringed in surprise, but Delrael stood up, red with anger. The sword from Sardun’s museum hung at his waist beside the silver belt. His leather armor was scuffed and dirty. His bloodied trousers had been washed and carefully mended by the khelebar.

“They’re doing their best,” Delrael said through tight Jaws.

Tayron whirled to confront him. “Kennoklimb, my father will die without Thilane Healer.”

Delrael continued to stare at him. “Thilane is dead—she burned herself to death just to heal a tree. And nobody tried to stop her!” Furious tears rose in his eyes again as he turned to the Healers and then back to Tayron. He hung his head. “She didn’t even know Fiolin was hurt.”

Tayron opened his mouth in surprise, then in despair. The others in the war party muttered to themselves. One of the Healers grasped the new tree. “She gave herself so that a Father Oak might be reborn. Her spirit has become the seed of a new dayid.”

Tayron looked angered and stunned. Vailret pondered the Healer’s words, trying to make sense of them. But only Sentinels could engage in the half-Transition that transformed them into part of a dayid. Was Delrael suggesting that Thilane, a khelebar, had somehow done what only a Sorcerer should have been able to do? That was patently against the Rules—only Sorcerers could use magic. But the dayid of Ledaygen had stretched and broken the Rules before.

Tayron knelt beside Fiolin and said nothing. His lips trembled.

The other Healer flexed her hands, helpless. “We lack the knowledge. We have used all our abilities. just to keep the Tribeleader alive, but his spirit slips away. The new dayid is too weak, and we have no other living trees to aid us!”

Tayron stopped listening. He removed one of his armbands and laid it on the ground next to Fiolin. “You did your best, Father. You were a good Tribeleader.”

Fiolin’s eyes fluttered, but crusted blood held them shut. He seemed to sense Tayron beside him. His jaws ground together, working up a small amount of saliva, and he croaked one word before he died.

“Tribeleader.”

The two Healers snatched at the air as if trying to catch Fiolin’s spirit. Tayron pushed his knuckles against his mouth, shuddering, before he let out a high-pitched moan. Then he fell silent, blinking his eyes several times in surprise.

“Did you feel it?” Ydaim asked him.

Tayron nodded, still staring off into the ashen waste land. “When my father died, the dayid grew stronger.”

“But the trees are gone!” said one of the khelebar, “we have no purpose.”

Tayron Tribeleader stood beside the monument Noldir Woodcarver had made of Thessar, the Father Pine. He drew himself up, fingered his necklace of stones, and worked to restrain his impatient anger. The surviving khelebar had come to hear him speak, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead of them. The dead forest stood defeated and burned; the trees looked like desperate claws grasping at hope.

“If that is your attitude, then perhaps we are not worthy to have Ledaygen returned to us.” He shook his head and turned his bright eyes to stare them down. No one would meet his gaze. “We cannot be content just to tend Ledaygen. We must make it grow once again. We must clear away the dead forest. We must heal the burned soil to prepare for new trees.”

Vailret looked at Noldir’s finished carving, not sure he understood its complexity—but the khelebar stared at it in awe. The dark and polished curves implied grandeur, its intricate tangles hinted at the intermeshed existence of the khelebar and Ledaygen, the bent and twisted portion signified the forest’s pain and death and eventual rebirth. And at the heart of it all stood the stylized figure of a khelebar, holding the rest together. “It seems right somehow,” Vailret said. Noldir nodded.

“We will not mourn my father Fiolin,” Tayron said. “If we mourn for a fallen Tribeleader, then we must mourn for each tree in Ledaygen, which also fought bravely. Above all, we must give our thanks to Thilane Healer, who has made the rebirth of Ledaygen possible.

“We have no time for mourning. The khelebar have too much to do. I will set up new tasks for those who have lost their old ones. We must get to work!”

Delrael brushed at his leather armor and trousers, looking at the tarnished spots on his silver belt. Vailret knew he was getting impatient to move on. His kennok leg responded well, moving at his command. Delrael showed him how the line between flesh and wood was blurring into indistinction.

Ydaim Trailwalker came to them, smiling and ready to see them off. Delrael spoke up. “We have delayed long enough here, Ydaim. We have a dragon to fight, Sardun’s daughter to rescue, and our Stronghold to recapture.”

“If we come back someday,” Vailret said, “I hope we see Ledaygen green again.” He looked around, imagining the forest already growing.

Ydaim said, “Let the khelebar take hope in that.”

The three travelers departed, trudging off through the desolate terrain. The khelebar ceased their work to stand in salute, then turned back to the enormous task ahead of them.

9. Spectres

Gamearth is not real. We are not real. If by chance a character witnessed absolute evidence of his unreality—even if he just laid eyes on a real object—that character would cease to exist.”

—The Sentinel Arken

A narrow line of peaks separated from the main mass of the Spectre Mountains and sprawled westward across their path, forming one more obstacle. The main range continued its southeasterly course before it faded away into foothills near the sea.

Before the dawn of the second day had risen over the crags, the three travelers packed their possessions. Bryl used his normal magic—unglamorous but useful—to replenish their traveling supplies. According to the map, the Spectre range was only two hexes wide here, and Vailret looked forward to finishing the hard traveling. They set off into the last stretch of mountain terrain. Delrael walked slowly on his kennok leg, seeming to be self-conscious of it. But as he forgot to think about it, he moved normally again.

Throughout the day they followed a clear-cut trail over the mountains, passing tumbled rockslides, scrub brush, steep switchbacks. They climbed to an elevation where the air was cold and dry. When they reached the glossy black hex-line at dusk, a block of crags to the west drowned out the remaining sunlight.

They could travel no more than a single hex of mountain terrain, and Vailret was ready to stop for the night. Bryl and Delrael looked exhausted as well. After a full day of travel, Delrael walked with only a slight limp, but the concentration of moving his kennok leg seemed to drain him.

They camped at the hex-line, and Vailret found enough scrub bushes to build a fire. He piled the wood in the center of a sheltered clearing, then left Bryl to start the fire. The old half-Sorcerer had always used a trivial fire starting spell, but this time he rubbed the Water Stone and rolled it on the ground. Bryl laughed as a lightning bolt came down from the sky, striking the scant pile of wood. He controlled the lightning, and the wood became a roaring fire.

“Bryl—it took me an hour to gather all that wood! You just blasted most of it into ashes—now it’ll never last until morning.”

“No matter.” The half-Sorcerer shrugged. “I can adjust the weather to make it warm here. I’ve got three rolls left for today.”

Vailret squatted down close to Bryl, pointing a finger at the half-Sorcerer’s beard. “Now look. Over the past couple of days, you’ve kept rubbing the Stone as if you’re anxious to use it. But let me tell you something—you don’t even know what you did in Ledaygen. When we rode out to get the Cyclops, did you notice that the stream in the gorge had been ripped from its bed and thrown against the rock face?

“You did that by summoning all the water to your aid—you diverted a stream out of its course from a full hex away! That Stone is not a toy—it’s one of the most powerful weapons the old Sorcerers left on Gamearth. I liked it better when you were afraid of it.”

Bryl stared at the young man’s outburst. “I pulled the stream from its course?” He blinked in awe and looked guilty, more so from being caught than from doing anything wrong.

“Think about where the Stone came from and remember how much magic it contains.” Vailret brushed his hands on his trousers.

Delrael started heating their meal of spiced grain mash on the fire. He asked out of the corner of his mouth, “What makes the Stones so powerful anyway?”

Vailret lay back and looked up at the stars. He did not feel ready for sleep. He thought about the possibility of keeping a journal of their quest, for future historians. If Gamearth survived that long.

“Well, once the old Sorcerers had made their minds up, they waited a year before they finally embarked on the Transition. And during that year they thought about the half-breeds and humans the Rules made them leave behind.

“Most of them could see that humans had little chance against the massing Slac armies and the monsters who wanted Gamearth for their own. One more time, Arken spoke to the other Sorcerers—they knew that the Transition would require less than half of their total powers once most of the Sorcerers had joined together. Arken begged them to use that extra energy to create a gift for their children, a weapon the Sentinels could wield against their enemies—something to make future generations remember their departed forefathers.

“So, the Sorcerers worked together to create the four elemental Stones, shaped like dice, each with enormous powers. The two factions that had fought each other in the ancient wars broke apart once more, this time for the good of all. One faction, those who later became the Earthspirits, created the Air and Earth Stones. The other faction, who became the Deathspirits, made the Water and Fire Stones.”

He sat up against the rock and watched Delrael divide up their meal. “Wish we had the Air Stone, too,” Bryl said.

Delrael took the cooking meal away from the fire, frowning skeptically at it. “Well, Gairoth still has it, just like he still has the Stronghold.”

He leaned forward to hand Bryl his portion of the food.

Without a sound, a tall stranger hopped down from a ledge above, landed expertly on a massive boulder, and stepped into the firelight.

In alarm, Delrael flipped the hunting bow off his back and nocked an arrow. Bryl scrambled to his feet and lifted the Water Stone, but paused before using it. Vailret froze, not knowing what to do.

The stranger had no eyes—only crusted, burned sockets.

He wore tattered robes and pointed a bulky, shining staff at each of the travelers. In the head of the staff Vailret stared into a confusing system of glass disks held together by a pale blue glow, shifting and clicking as the lenses focused on different objects. He felt something staring right through him.

The stranger calmly set his staff upright again. “You have finally arrived. Good.” He walked toward the fire, sidestepping a broken rock on the ground. “Come with me, please, or you will be destroyed. The Spectres have been awaiting you . . . and the Water Stone.”

Vailret’s shout overlapped Delrael’s. “Wait a minute!” Delrael put a hand on his sword and spat his words at the blind face of the stranger. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”

“Tell us what you want.” Vailret tried to be calm. They needed to learn what was going on. “You have to give us some answers first.”

The tall man turned his face toward the gap between the travelers. His expression grew serious. “If you resist their request, the Spectres will take away my sight once more. Artificial though it is, I value my eye-staff highly. And they will do worse to you.”

Vailret narrowed his eyes, trying to spot something he might recognize on the stranger’s face. “But who are the Spectres?”

“And who are you, for that matter?” Delrael demanded.

The tall stranger looked odd for a moment, as if he was trying to remember his own name. “I am Paenar. They . . . are Outsiders.”

None of them moved. Vailret spoke slowly and clearly to Delrael. “If he’s telling the truth, we’d better take heed and go. Now.”

They traveled in darkness, trying to follow the blind man’s sure-footed strides over the broken terrain. Paenar seemed no more troubled by the dark than he had been by their firelight. The stranger mumbled a few replies to direct questions, but he held himself tight-lipped and silent most of the time.

“What happened to your eyes?” Delrael asked. Vailret had not been able to find the courage to ask the same question.

Paenar drew to a stop and turned his burned sockets at Delrael. “I was a Scavenger. I looked at the Spectres, just a glance. And it did this.”

He set off again, solemn, working his jaws as if chewing the words and wondering whether to spit them out or just swallow them.

“I scoured the world alone, searching for relics of the Sorcerers, things buried in the ancient battlefields or left in abandoned keeps. Their weapons and jewelry are more sophisticated than what your own craftsmen make, so everything I found was always in great demand. There aren’t many treasure-hunters or dungeon-explorers on Gamearth anymore.”

Paenar fell silent again and kept walking through the night. Vailret tried to encourage him to keep speaking. “Did you ever sell anything to Sardun?”

Paenar paused. “Sardun, in his Ice Palace? Yes, yes, I have gone to him. It was such a little thing . . . but I remember it made him weep with joy. I could see the tears running down his face. Just a sketch of the Earthspirits by someone who had actually seen them—it made him cry. I dropped my price a great deal because of that.” Paenar seemed to be having trouble selecting his words, but he kept talking.

“I spent years sifting the dust on some of the battlefields far to the east, then I searched these mountains. I had success in some of the caves, but most were already empty from quests at the height of the Game. Then I heard that the Slac had all marched eastward, abandoning their fortresses. I didn’t know why at the time, but it was true. I wanted to break into one of their deserted citadels and take whatever they left behind. No other Scavenger had ever dared that before.

“People told stories about the ghosts, the Spectres, that had haunted these peaks since the beginning of the Scouring. I have heard many stories of many things—but I chose to disbelieve the wrong tale. I came to the Slac citadel up here and watched the crumbling fortress. After I had seen no movement in a week, I decided the place was empty.

“I entered through the huge gates. I explored, and then I found the Outsiders—the Spectres—by accident. They had forgotten to make themselves invisible, because they had not realized I was there. I caught a glimpse of them . . . and it blasted my eyes into nothingness.”

“But why?” Delrael asked.

“Because they are real. If I had seen more, it would have annihilated me—I suppose you could say I was lucky.” His sigh sounded like a constrained whimper. “Yes, I am so lucky.”

He stopped and held his staff in his hand like a mace. “They gave me new eyes. I can see.” A blue glow that looked like torchlight steamed from the end of the staff. The lenses in the staff clicked again and again as they continued to focus by themselves.

“But how do they work?” Bryl asked, afraid to move closer. “Is it magic?” The tall stranger let him stare into the end of the staff for a moment, then he snapped it away.

“These mountains divide the rest of the world from the city of Sitnalta. In Sitnalta your magic will not work—science works there instead. The Outsider named Scott has set up a region of Gamearth where characters can duplicate some of the greatest Sorcery by using machines. In this hexagon we are on the border between the domains of magic and technology. My ‘eyes’ are a combination of both: the proper lenses with the correct focal lengths, held together and activated by magic.”

Paenar fondled the end of his eye-staff for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “I can even look at them now. There are two of them—they call themselves David and Tyrone. Perhaps the Outsiders take a strange pleasure in letting me watch their machinations to destroy Gamearth.”

“It’s true then,” Vailret whispered. “Our world is doomed.”

“Yes, and now they need you to help them get back to the Outside world before it all happens.”

A fringe of dawn light set fire to the jagged edges of the Spectre Mountains, leaving the deserted Slac fortress in deep shadow. It stood in an elbow of the peaks, with spiked parapets sticking out above sharp corners. Thin arrow slits were like pockmarks on its weathered surface, and the crumbling arch of the huge gate made it look like a cave that would hide monsters. The path leading to the fortress widened into a road, paved with hexagonal cobblestones whose surface had been worn down by years of marching reptilian feet.

Vailret stared up at the towering, deserted citadel. The air was brisk, and strong winds swirled among the peaks above them. He tried to feel the presence of the Outsiders, but he noticed nothing different.

Paenar did not pause when the wide fortress gate loomed above them. He strode into the tunnel-like entrance. The heel of his eye-staff rang out in the early morning silence. Vailret reached out to run his fingers over the frost-slick blocks. The stone outer walls of the Slac fortress were ten feet thick.

Vailret had been in such a citadel before, in his imagination, when Drodanis had challenged him with the role playing game in the darkened weapons storehouse. He hoped the outcome would be different this time.

In all the years of the Scouring of Gamearth, only one man had emerged alive from such a hell-citadel. General Doril, the original builder of the Stronghold, who had been rescued by his friend the Sentinel Oldahn. According to the legend, Oldahn had brought the mountainside crashing down around them, killing all of Doril’s captured men and losing the Air Stone in the tons of rubble. But even years later, after Doril had erected the Stronghold, he had never described what he had seen while a captive of the Slac.

The blind stranger led them through musty, oppressive corridors in the citadel. The smell of stale air clung to Vailret, and he shuddered. Bryl stumbled along, clutching the Water Stone. Delrael remained silent, keeping his hands close to his weapons and looking from side to side.

The wooden doors were all reinforced with iron. Each had a small window above eye level for a man, barred or ringed with spikes: not because each was a prison cell, but because the Slac seemed to enjoy bars and spikes. Sunlight filtered through chinks in the crumbling ceiling, casting weird shadows. Vailret tried not to imagine the hissing laughter of the Slac or the screams of captives.

After the old Sorcerer wars had ended, the Slac remained in their fortresses, simmering in anger and waiting for the day they could rule Gamearth. When most of the old Sorcerers had departed in the Transition, the Slac came pouring down out of the mountains, howling and thirsty for the blood of men. But the humans fought together with the aid of the Sentinels and won Gamearth, beating the Slac back into the mountains.

Now Paenar said the Slac had all abandoned their mountain citadels and gone east—where the Rulewoman Melanie said the Outsiders were beginning the destruction of the world.

Paenar’s moodiness made Vailret feel cold and terrified. He was about to stand face to face with the Outsiders, who had created Gamearth in their imaginations, who had Played all the major characters in history.

They were here, hiding, invisible. He sniffed the air, and the dank shadows seemed filled with mystery. Were they watching even now? What did they want? His throat felt thick. The back of his neck prickled with sweat. If the Outsiders forced him to look at their real selves, would it blast his eyes from their sockets, like Paenar—or would such a sight annihilate him completely, because he was only imaginary to them anyway?

“Why, exactly, are the Outsiders here?” he asked.

Paenar paused in midstride, as if thankful for an opportunity to delay. “They’ve been here since the Transition, which was supposed to be the climax of their Game. While the Sentinels were gathering themselves together, while the Slac were getting ready to come back and fight for domination of the world, while the men began their Scouring of Gamearth—two of the Outsiders came here to drop off a seed of evil that would engulf the entire map.

“They spawned a thing called Scartaris in the eastern mountains beyond the city of Taire, almost at the edge of the world. It is a blob of energy that grows and sucks the life from the land, engulfing hex after hex.

“Nothing can stop this thing from swallowing the world and ending the Game—the Outsiders don’t intend to give us a chance to win.”

Paenar hung his head. “Even the Outsiders can be sore losers. For almost a century they have been hiding here, working, creating. The Outsiders David and Tyrone are here to watch a spectacular end for their imaginary world.

“Gamearth is doomed. It is already too late.”

Vailret shook his head, staring at the floor. “That means the Barrier River won’t save us, either. Why didn’t the Rulewoman tell us more?”

“But what do the Outsiders want us for?” Bryl asked the blind man. His thin voice echoed in the claustrophobic passageway.

An ironic smile curved on Paenar’s lips. “They don’t want you—they want the Water Stone. They’ve been here so long they can no longer return by themselves. Their ship crumbled when they turned their immense imaginations to other things. They bent and twisted the Rules they created—and now they need Gamearth’s own magic to send them back. They can’t return to the real world unless they use the power in your Water Stone.”

Bryl stood aghast, clutching the sapphire cube. Delrael began to laugh. “After they created this Scartaris thing to destroy us, they expect us to help? Well, if they can’t play nice, we’ll just take our dice and go home.”

Paenar turned to him. “They will not ask your permission. If you are not careful, they will simply destroy you. The Spectres toy with me but do little else. I hate them for blinding me, yet I am dependent on their power for my new eyes.” He stretched out his eye-staff.

“The Outsiders are mere children in their own world, in the real world. All the centuries of our history have been only a few years of gaming to them. And they have tempers like spoiled children as well.

“I cannot give you any better advice, because I have none. They have doomed our world, and I would be happy to see them stranded here to share its fate. But that is not in my power, or yours. They will take what they need, whether you cooperate or not.” He set off again. The foot of his staff rang out on the stone floor.

“We’ll see about that,” Delrael said.

The tunnel spilled out of the hivelike chambers to a wide, barren courtyard where the Slac had apparently conducted battle-training. Wooden posts and crossbars had been erected in the dusty earth; bloodstained manacles dangled from them.

Sprawled across the courtyard were huge twisted girders, coated with rust, that formed the skeletal outline of a metal ship like a dead prehistoric animal. The ship had crumbled into a shadow of its construction, not able to travel anywhere. Vailret stared at it in awe: The Outsiders had constructed it from their imaginations and had used it to carry them from their real world to Gamearth. But over the centuries, which had seemed like days to the Outsiders, they turned their efforts to destroying the world, allowing their fantastic ship to fade.

They needed to use the Water Stone as a catalyst to get themselves off their own maps and back to reality. Vailret found the irony impressive. What possible power could the magic of the Stones have that the Outsiders’ own dice could not work? It wasn’t fair—and fairness was supposed to be one of the cardinal Rules of Gamearth.

They stepped out into the sunlit courtyard, and awe crept up on Vailret again. A tingling in the air, a vibration, told him others were there. He looked around the dusty, barren ground, but he could see no evidence of the Spectres other than the abandoned and disintegrating ship. Vailret stopped with Delrael and Bryl beside him. Paenar stood off to one side, scowling, gripping his eye-staff so hard his knuckles turned white.

“You are here. Now we can go home at last.” The voices boomed out in the silent mountain air, echoing like thunder. They came from different corners of the courtyard. More than one speaker stood hidden on the empty, bloodstained training ground. The words themselves were spoken in a deep, rich tone that sounded like a caricature of someone omnipotent and dangerous—the voice of an angry god. Bryl clutched the sapphire Stone instinctively, protecting it but ready to use it.

“We felt Sardun use the power of the Water Stone to create the Barrier River. We felt you, Bryl, use it to save the khelebar. Now it will set us free of this world, let us go back home before it is too late.”

Delrael shouted, directing his voice at the entire court yard. “Get rid of your Scartaris creature in the east, and then we’ll talk!”

Vailret cringed, wary of the anger of the Spectres. A second voice came from a different corner of the courtyard.

“We want to stop the game. We can do that if we want. What difference does it make—you’re all just part of our imaginations. A roll of the dice.”

“It matters to us!” Delrael said.

Vailret put a hand on his cousin’s arm to restrain him. He made his own voice sound quiet and firm. “You don’t look very real to me, Spectres—I can’t see you, and you can’t even get home. Who’s to say you’re not more make-believe than we are?”

“Shall we drop our invisibility and let you see just how real we are?” the first voice boomed.

Bryl jerked out the cube of the Water Stone and gripped it in both hands, letting it glint and reflect in the bright sun. “Spectres! My mind is linked with the Water Stone right now. If you send us out of existence, I’ll take the Stone with me!”

Vailret clenched his teeth to keep from shouting his enthusiasm.

“Stop!” the Outsider shouted.

“He also has the power to destroy the Water Stone,” Vailret bluffed. He doubted Bryl could bring himself to harm the gem, even if he had the strength. But the half-Sorcerer gave the Outsiders no indication of that.

“You have set in motion the destruction of Gamearth, and now you’re trapped. Either send Scartaris back into nonexistence and let us continue our lives, or remain here and suffer our fate.”

“But we don’t want to play the Game anymore!” the second Spectre said.

“And we don’t want to be wiped from the universe, either,” Delrael retorted. “Regardless of what you say, to us this isn’t imaginary at all!”

Vailret drew a deep breath. Paenar had said the Outsiders were mere children in their own world. How gullible were they? How sure of themselves? Did the Rules have nuances they did not know about?

“In fact, Spectres, we think of ourselves as real,” Vailret ventured, stepping forward. He looked to the side, making sure Bryl kept a firm grip on the Water Stone. “Look at us—we breathe, we eat, we sleep, we love, we hate, we fight. We feel pain, and we dream. How can we possibly be imaginary?”

He spread his hands to indicate the broken rocky landscape. “Look around you. Feel the cold air, see the towering mountains, the sky, the sun. You claim this is just a fantasy world you have created as a Game—but I think you’ve got it backward.

“I think that we concocted you from our imaginations. Maybe we needed someone to blame, some fictitious outside people who make all the misery and pain in our world. That way, we could soothe our collective conscience into believing there was nothing we could do to prevent the wars, no real reason for us to work toward peace, no valid possibility to make our lives better. We needed someone to shake our fists at, someone to curse, rather than at ourselves and our own frailties.

“So we invented an imaginary group of beings who make a Game of our world, playing it as we play our own small games. Until now, no one has ever seen these Outsiders, no one has ever so much as found evidence for their existence.”

Vailret took a deep breath and surged ahead with his challenge. “You say you’re trapped here, but how can that be? If you are all-powerful, then change the Rules—it should be simple for you. How can you be trapped by Rules unless they’re real?”

Delrael raised a fist in the air, grinning. Paenar stood stunned, but perplexed.

“Is there a speck of doubt in your minds? Is there even one whispered thought gnawing at you? It’ll take only a momentary flicker of disbelief—and then you’ll be gone!” He forced himself to laugh loudly.

Bryl held up the Water Stone, looking angry. “If I could see you, Spectres, I’d give you a taste of the power you say does not exist.”

Paenar, standing in silence, rapped his eye-staff on the ground. He gave a secretive smile and pointed the end of the staff off into one corner of the courtyard.

Bryl apparently knew what he meant and rolled the Water Stone in the dust. A bolt of lightning seared through the air to where the blind man had pointed. The bolt struck something, and a mammoth shriek echoed along the stone walls of the citadel. Paenar pointed again, and again. Bryl scrabbled to pick up the sapphire cube and rolled it three more times, missing the spell once but striking the Spectres twice, using his anger to pry more energy from the Stone.

The two Outsiders howled. Vailret shouted after them, “Can you feel that, Outsiders? Is that imaginary power? How can you be hurt by imaginary pain?”

He let his words sink in a moment. “I believe the Water Stone is real. I believe Gamearth is real. I believe I am real.” Vailret dropped his voice and spat out his words, one at a time. “And I do not believe in you!”

“This is not possible!” the dominant Spectre voice bellowed. Then soul-ripping wails filled the courtyard, and a burst of unbearable light, as something tore its way screaming through the air, whisked off to a place not imaginable. Only a brief howl of despair was left behind, quickly fading into the mountain wind.

Vailret found himself knocked backward to the lifeless dirt of the Slac training ground. Beads of sweat dried cool on his forehead. He blinked at spots of color in front of his dazzled eyes.

Delrael whooped. He got to his feet, jumping up and down as if he had forgotten about his kennok leg.

“Are they gone?” Bryl asked. “Are they destroyed, or just sent back to their own world?”

“I don’t know,” Vailret said, but his voice came out as a whisper. “Maybe I freed them from the Rules binding them here after so long. Or maybe they did disbelieve in their own existence enough to . . . to erase themselves. “

Delrael frowned and scratched his head. “Did you believe what you were saying to them? Is it all true?”

Vailret pursed his lips. “I . . . don’t think so.”

The sound of quiet sobbing came from beside them, and they looked to find Paenar squatting on the ground with the knees of his long legs jutting up in the air. He bowed his head into his hands, trying to hold onto his dignity, but spasms rippled through his hunched back.

Bryl saw the blind man’s eye-staff discarded on the ground. The blue glow in the end had died away, and the loose lenses, no longer working, lay scattered in the dry dirt.

Paenar looked up at them, unable to cry because his tear ducts had been blasted away. His blackened eye sockets stared as blind and as lifeless as the cold stone of the fortress around them.

Interlude: Outside

Melanie fluttered her eyelids, trying to chase away the bright spots behind her vision. The dice bounced around on the table by themselves, like popcorn, clattering against the map. The lights in the house dimmed. The dice came to rest, and everything else fell silent.

David climbed back to his feet from where he had fallen off the chair. His skin turned pale and clammy, like old cottage cheese. His eyes looked from one object to another around the room, but remained focused in the imaginary distance. He flexed his hand where an angry red welt like a burn had appeared.

Tyrone’s mouth was wide with astonishment, locked in a combined expression of delight and terror.

Scott held one of the transparent dice up to the light, staring at it. “Impossible.” He frowned, but glared at the dice, the map in challenge. “It’s just a stupid game!”

“Maybe we’ve all got overactive imaginations,” Tyrone said.

“It’s not real,” Scott repeated.

David shook his head and sat back down again. “That’s it. Enough for tonight. I can’t play any more.”

“No!” Scott slammed the dice back down on the table with a vehemence Melanie thought he did not intend. Scott looked at them all, blinking his eyes behind his glasses. “They’re heading into my section next. I’ve had about enough of this magical crap. Things are going to start making sense.”

He closed his eyes. “They have to start making sense.”

10. City of Sitnalta

“We have sent out explorers, we have brought our measuring devices, we have collected data. There can be no doubt: Beyond a certain boundary around our city, the Rules of Physics change. Science may not be the natural order for all of Gamearth. Some characters might believe in magic . . . and in certain cases it may even work for them.”

—Dirac, address to the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers

Vailret found some warm, stagnant water in a cistern at the edge of the courtyard. He tore down a tattered Slac banner, soaked in the gritty cistern, and went to Paenar. He tried to soothe the blind man by dabbing water on his face.

Paenar made it clear that he did not want to be coddled. He stood up, brushing himself off to regain his dignity. The blind man stood for a moment without moving, then reached down with amazing accuracy to pick up his useless eye-staff. Paenar felt the empty end of the staff and stooped, feeling around in the dust from the loose lenses. He rubbed them together in the palm of his hand, making clicking noises like the song of an insect.

With a snarl on his face, Paenar turned and hurled the blind lenses across the courtyard, skittering them against the twisted metal girders of the Spectres’ dead ship.

“You fought back!” Paenar said. “You fought the Outsiders and won! All this time I never even tried to resist them. It wasn’t hopeless after all.”

Bryl crossed his thin arms and put on a defiant expression. “I’m not going to give up. Failure is the easy way out.” The enthusiasm made him look healthier, less old.

Vailret went over to the ruins of the Spectres’ ship. It lay in tumbled parts made of glass, porcelain, and shining metal. Thin wind howled around the girders, making them hum. Nothing seemed workable on the Outsider ship, nor was it obvious how the pieces fit back together.

He picked up Paenar’s scattered lenses from the eye staff and held them up to the light; one had been chipped, but not badly. Vailret tilted it one way and another—then at a certain angle, he stopped, amazed. Through the lens he could see a different world entirely, like a window to the Outside. He saw figures, four of them, three young men and a brown-haired girl, all dressed oddly. They seemed to be arguing with each other. Strange food and drinks were scattered around a smooth table with dice and maps.

The Outsiders?

Had he glimpsed them Playing? And survived? He blinked his eyes and felt a shiver burn through his veins. But before he could shout to the others, he tilted the lens again and lost the angle. Dismayed, he turned the glass in the sunlight, squinting and trying to find the window again—but he had lost it. Frowning, he placed the lenses in a leather pouch at his side.

“What will you do now?” Paenar finally asked.

Bryl put the Water Stone back in his pocket and tossed pebbles against the towering, moss-grown wall of the citadel. Delrael took out his sword and inspected it in the sunlight, then sheathed it with a click against his scabbard. He straightened the bow on his back, and slapped a hand against his leather armor. “We may as well go down with an adventure so grand that the Outsiders will wonder how they ever got bored with Gamearth after all!”

“I am awed by you all. You shame me with my own surrender,” Paenar said. It seemed difficult for him to talk. “May I accompany you at least as far as Sitnalta? Perhaps I can assist you in some way, to repay you for . . . freeing me. I’ll try not to make your journey slower.”

“We can’t very well leave you here.” Vailret looked at the open expression of shame and helplessness on the blind man’s face.

“Before we go, let’s do a quick exploration of this place,” Delrael said. “Come on, Vailret—who knows, there may be other captives in some of the cells far below.”

Vailret stiffened, looking up at the blocky, threatening walls. “What about the Slac? I don’t want any more ‘little adventures’ to slow us down.”

“There aren’t any Slac left, so come on.” Delrael shrugged, then grinned at his cousin. “It just rubs me the wrong way to leave a place like this unexplored.”

Bryl stayed with Paenar out in the sunshine where he could rest, but Vailret remained close by his cousin as they entered the massive fortress. They hurried through the stifling corridors, taking turns poking their heads inside open rooms. The hinges groaned when Vailret and Delrael pulled open heavy doors. “Think we’ll find any food?” Delrael asked.

“Would you want to eat what a Slac eats?”

“I see your point.”

They went down a broad staircase leading underground. Vailret’s uneasiness grew. “Hello!” Delrael shouted. “Is anybody here?” His words pounced on the walls and rattled down the twisted corridors.

“Be quiet!” Vailret whispered. “Let’s go back—I don’t know if I can remember my way out anymore.”

“Of course you can. We’ll go just a little farther.” Vailret hung back and Delrael finally sighed in impatience. “What’s the matter with you?”

Vailret felt defensive, but kept his anger in check. “I’m a little nervous, that’s all.”

Delrael pursed his lips. “With all we’ve been through, Vailret, I know you’re not a coward—what’s so frightening about an old empty fortress?”

Vailret looked at him in surprise but saw only puzzlement. “I thought you would understand. Didn’t you do the role-playing training game at the Stronghold? In the weapons storehouse with your father?”

“Sure—I had to go rescue a jewel from a tribe of worm-men underground. Everybody’s adventure is different.”

Vailret flicked his glance around the confining walls. Sick-looking green moss crawled up from the corners. “I fought to the death in a Slac fortress. Just like this one.”

It took a moment for Delrael to realize the relevance then he shook his head. “That was only a game.”

“All of this is only a Game. Just different players.”

Subdued, they moved forward, entering a drafty dining hall with dozens of splintered boards on skewed wooden trestles. Dust, cobwebs, and cracked wooden plates littered the room. They passed through the hollow-sounding hall and wound their way down another set of steep and chipped stairs. Only a slight unevenness of Delrael’s echoing footsteps gave any hint that one of his legs was not normal.

The doors on either side of the passageway became noticeably bulkier, with heavy bolts on the outsides. This looked familiar to Vailret’s imagination. Delrael threw open a door that had sagged on its hinges and found a fallen bed and some straw that had rotted almost to dust over the passage of time. The next cell contained a skeleton.

“The Slac have been gone too long,” Vailret said. “Even if there were survivors, Paenar would have found them. Can we go now?”

“Let me just see what’s on the other side of the big door at the end of the hall.”

Delrael went down the haphazard flagstones until he reached a tall door blocking their way. He moved smoothly, ready to jump into action. He seemed to have forgotten about his kennok leg.

Vailret kept looking from side to side. Something told him he had been here before; it seemed too familiar. Delrael wrapped his fingers around the door’s studded crossbar and knocked it out of its cradle. He grunted as he tugged on the door. “Vailret, help me here!”

The two men pulled the door open, and a dry, sour smell flooded out. Delrael stood peering inside with his hands on his hips. “Would you look at that!”

Vailret looked over his cousin’s shoulder to see a wide gravel-covered arena. Stone benches ringed the lip of the circular wall around the sunken pit. Skulls and bones were scattered on the gravel.

“See, there’s nothing in here.” Delrael stepped into the arena. He picked up a stone and threw it across the bloodstained gravel. It bounced and pattered, then every thing fell silent again.

“Del, I think you should come out of there. . . .”

“I wonder what they did here?”

They heard a snorting sound and the scraping of gravel, as if something with large, clawed feet were charging toward them—but they could see nothing. Delrael cocked his head to listen as the angry grunts and snorts came closer, swifter. He touched his sword hilt, frowning.

Vailret jerked his cousin back out of the doorway and threw his shoulder at the door. He winced at the shock, but he jammed the crossbar back onto its supports. Then he panted with relief.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Delrael brushed his chest armor, scowling.

Something smashed against the door. A few tendrils of dust leaked through the crumbling roof, but the door held firm. They heard a roar and then another crash. After a moment the creature from the other side gave up and retreated in silence.

Delrael looked at Vailret, astonished. “What was that? How did you know?”

“It’s an Akkar. They’re invisible. And you didn’t listen to me.”

They left the abandoned Slac fortress behind, crossing a hex-line into pleasant forest terrain by late afternoon. Though the forest seemed cluttered and untended after Ledaygen, the air was warm and filled with the scent of trees and plants.

“It’ll be wonderful to sleep in terrain like this!” Delrael said.

Paenar turned his head to listen to the background noises in the forest, to feel the leaves and the air on his face, to smell the wildflowers and evergreens. He still carried his useless eye-staff, but the path was clear and he could follow at a good pace if he kept a hand on someone’s shoulder.

“I was such a fool to remain with the Outsiders so long. Why couldn’t I see this before? Now it’s my fault Gamearth is doomed.”

“The Game isn’t over yet, Paenar,” Vailret said. “The Rulewoman Melanie wouldn’t have told us to fight if there wasn’t a way to win. Watch out for this branch—it’s hanging low.”

“Maybe we just need to find some new way to approach the problem,” Bryl suggested. “Paenar, what were you saying about Sitnalta and how magic won’t work there?”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t work. Nothing on Gamearth is absolute, only a set of high or low probabilities. It is like an imaginary dice roll. But the chances of magic working are drastically reduced in Sitnalta, just as the chances for technology are greatly increased.” Paenar rustled against a branch, but ignored it as he kept talking.

“The Sitnaltans think only of the future, trying to do everything better than they did the day before. When I brought them items from Gamearth’s past, things I had scavenged from the mountains, they told me they had no interest in anything that was so shamefully obsolete.”

Delrael got a twinkle in his eye. “If they are so good with technology, do you think they could fix the Spectres’ ship?” He chuckled to himself. “We could use it to send Scartaris right back to the Outsiders.”

Bryl snickered. “Wouldn’t that be a wonderful surprise!”

Paenar shook his head. “You have seen the condition of the ship—it could never be repaired. Barely anything remains of it.”

Vailret rubbed his lips, pondering. “No . . . but I’d bet the Sitnaltans would love to have a look at it, nevertheless. Maybe we can use that as a bargaining chip if we need anything from them.”

In her tower room on the edge of Sitnalta, a young woman stared at the wide blackboard. Chalkdust from her furious writings and erasures covered the floor, her garments, and her body. She bit her lip, deep in thought, and tasted chalk.

She had patented her inventions in her own name, Mayer, and collaborated on a fifth, though none of them had been particularly useful. But this contraption—a calculating machine—would earn her a name beside the two greatest living characters in Sitnalta, Professors Verne and Frankenstein. If only she could see a trick that would allow her to mechanically solve the equations—

Mayer stared at the blackboard, baring her teeth and demanding of herself why the numbers would not balance. She reached up with her lump of chalk and intuitively altered a variable, replacing it with an equivalent expression. And suddenly everything worked.

“Eureka!” Mayer turned to shake her fists in the air and went to the window, grinning.

She saw the four travelers walking toward the gates of the city. She gawked for a moment and then had the good sense to pick up her “optick-tube”—two mounted lenses that magnified distant objects fivefold. Mayer scrutinized the four characters carefully: One was very young—blond-haired and just past boyishness; the other young man was more muscular, obviously a fighter, wearing leather armor and carrying weapons, but he seemed to be limping. His gleaming silver belt looked rather gaudy.

The other two characters were older. One was thin and white-bearded, smaller in stature than the others, and wearing a blue cloak. But he looked intelligent and shrewd, perhaps even a professor or a great inventor in his own land. The other stood tall and gaunt and seemed to have been blinded in a terrible accident. She was familiar with industrial accidents, since some of the early Sitnaltan steam-engine boilers had exploded—but her father Dirac had developed the pressure-release valve that made steam engines safe for everyday use.

Mayer mentally constructed a detailed analysis, drawing conclusions from the evidence she had seen. Then she reached for the speaking tube, putting the cuplike brass end to her mouth and shouting the news into it. She pronounced her words carefully and kept the sentences short and clipped. Her voice would be muffled as it bounced around inside the speaking tube until it exited the other end, probably awakening the old man who sat at the telegraph station.

Within minutes, all of Sitnalta would be alerted to the visitors.

Mayer replaced the end of the speaking tube on its hook and leaned out over the window sill. The brown-haired fighter looked up at her, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Hello up there!”

Great Maxwell! Had they no better way of announcing themselves?

Mayer picked up her own megaphone and blew some chalkdust from the mouthpiece before she spoke down at the four travelers. “Welcome to Sitnalta. Please wait for the gate to raise completely before entering. Thank you.”

She threw a lever that dropped a counterweight, which turned a gear, which turned a larger gear, which caused the heavy sheet-metal gate to ratchet upward in its tracks. Mayer took one last look at her equations—now that she knew how to solve the problem, she didn’t want to leave. With a sigh, she went down to meet the strangers.

The wall surrounding the city of Sitnalta was made of stone blocks cut in perfect rectangles, equal in size and with sharp corners. Vailret ran his fingers along one of the cracks—it put even the careful work of Skon the stonecutter to shame. Paenar cocked his head at the odd jumble of distant clanging, hissing, and whistling noises from within the city. The air held strange smells.

Delrael leaned heavily on Vailret’s shoulder, barely able to walk on his kennok limb. As they had approached the vicinity of Sitnalta, the kennok magic had begun to fade, leaving the fighter burdened with a cumbersome and rigid wooden leg. Delrael had shown him how the dividing line between flesh and wood now stood dark and distinct again. Vailret didn’t know what to do, other than leave the area as quickly as they could.

After the woman in the tower had called to them, the heavy metal gate clattered upward, opening the city of Sitnalta to their view. Bryl led blind Paenar, and Vailret supported Delrael, thinking how unlikely a fighting team they must appear to be.

But Vailret forgot all that when he passed through the gate into the city.

He and Delrael stood amazed, bombarded by the sights. Even Bryl seemed impressed. Paenar remained aloof and silent.

The main road was paved with colorful hexagon-shaped cobblestones, each formed perfectly and laid in dizzying geometric patterns. Many of the shining buildings were two or even three stories tall. Except for Sardun’s Ice Palace and the Slac citadel, Vailret had never seen such enormous structures, certainly nothing made by humans.

A thin woman stepped out of a tower doorway and walked toward them, looking stiff and businesslike. She had short dark hair, bright fast-moving eyes, and a sharp nose. She wore garments dyed more colorfully than any natural pigment Tarne had ever used in his weaving.

For a moment, Vailret thought of Tarne and hoped the old veteran was keeping the other characters safe while Gairoth held the Stronghold. He wondered how long it would be until he got home again.

“My name is Mayer. I am the daughter of Dirac.” The Sitnaltan woman paused, waiting for something, then she scowled. “My father invented seventy of the greatest inventions of all time.”

“We’re pleased to meet you,” Bryl said as cordially as he could. They introduced themselves.

Mayer swept her arms out to indicate Sitnalta. “We don’t get many visitors here. We like to hear about how far ahead we are of the rest of Gamearth.”

Surprisingly, Paenar snapped at her. His hand clenched Bryl’s cloak, leaving fingermarks. “Or perhaps you need to learn about some of the things you lack.”

Indignant, Mayer glared at him, but looked disconcerted when Paenar’s empty eye-sockets met her gaze. She turned abruptly and motioned for them to follow her. She opened the wide doors of a shed near the gate, sliding the doors along polished tracks. “I can show you more of Sitnalta.”

In the dimness of the shed, Mayer pushed and tugged a large wheeled contraption, a steam-engine car, out onto the hex-cobbled street. When no one moved to assist her, she shouted, “Don’t just gawk at me, you barbarians! Help me get the vehicle out. Great Maxwell! How do you expect us to travel?”

As Vailret helped push, the iron-shod wooden wheels of the vehicle rumbled on the cobblestones. In the full light, Vailret thought the machine looked magnificent. A shining silver boiler took up most of the car’s back, but the chassis rode low to the ground, balanced so that the heavy water-filled boiler did not lift the front wheels up in the air.

Mayer touched the metal of the tank and jerked back her hand, blowing on her fingers. “Good—pressure’s still up, and the fires are burning. Someone must have just used it.” She dumped coal from a bucket into the orange maw of a furnace beneath the water. Steam hissed out of a pressure valve in the back of the boiler.

“Come on, seat yourselves! We’re wasting the pressure buildup.”

Delrael hobbled to the side of the vehicle and swung his stiff leg up into the seat. Paenar climbed in without any assistance after Bryl had led him to the car. Vailret hopped in the back, near the boiler.

Even before they had settled in, Mayer twisted a crank that released steam through the piston chambers, turning the gears. She jerked locking pins out from the wheels, and the car rattled forward over the cobblestones.

Vailret grinned in excitement. Thick white steam belched from the mouth of their smokestack. Mayer pulled a rope that caused a shrill whistle to blast, hurting their ears. The steam-engine car clattered over the streets. Mayer wrestled with two steering levers that pulled the front wheels one way or the other.

“This is marvelous!” Vailret said. “It’s like magic.”

Mayer corrected him sharply. “Not magic—technology.”

The pressure valve in the back of the boiler popped open, shrieking out excess steam, and then closed itself again. Paenar sat in silence, bouncing up and down as the car rumbled along the cobblestones.

The steam-engine vehicle traveled too swiftly for Vailret to take in all the wondrous things around them, but Mayer pointed out the more prominent structures.

“We create all of our materials there, in the manufactories.” She pointed to massive buildings where smoke stacks dumped thick steam and black smoke into the air. “That one makes ingots of steel for us to use in our inventions. We also harvest natural gas from underground, and mine minerals from the sea. You’ll find a great deal of gold used in some inventions, since gold is abundant in the sea water.”

As the car passed by, other Sitnaltans stared at them from the windows of tall buildings. Mayer pointed at the web of wires stretching from house to house, connecting all the buildings together.

“Over those wires, I was able to inform all of Sitnalta of your arrival. Instantly.” Mayer smiled to herself.

“I could do the same thing with a sending or a message stick,” Bryl countered.

“But you would need magic. Our telegraph runs on electricity.”

“And he should be ashamed of using magic?” Vailret said.

“I certainly would not be proud of it. The Sorcerers nearly destroyed Gamearth with century after century of their senseless wars. And then they abandoned us with only a few worthless Sentinel representatives to help out. “

She turned and looked up at the tall buildings. “All you see here in Sitnalta we have done. Human characters—with no help from Sentinels. Magic may be the crutch of the Sorcerers, but we have developed science, we have invented tools and machines to do everything the magic used to do. We have discovered the true scientific Rules by which the world works. We can well be proud.”

Bryl muttered to himself. “I’d like to see her create the Barrier River with a machine!”

But Vailret gazed around in awe. What she said struck him on a sore spot—these were human characters, and they had accomplished much of what he had always thought impossible. Perhaps he could learn from them, study how they worked their miracles and be able to create a different kind of magic by himself. Even without Sorcerer blood.

Mayer pushed down on a pedal at her feet and released another lever, bringing the steam-engine vehicle to rest. Vailret heard a different hissing that had been hidden by the din of their own car. “Look there!” Mayer pointed down another side street. “One of my father’s inventions.”

They saw a three-wheeled contraption with a wide spinning brush under its belly. The machine chugged along, driven by a smaller steam engine, hissing and whistling to itself from its pressure valves. The wide rotating brush scrubbed the cobblestones, devouring all the dirt and grit from between the cracks.

“Sitnalta has ten of those machines to keep our streets clean.”

She released the foot pedal, engaged the gears once more, and they rolled onward.

The vehicle reached a broad rectangular plaza that stood empty in the early afternoon. An ornate fountain spurted in the center of the square, running an elaborate water clock. Mayer pulled the steam-engine car to a halt and squinted at the level of water in the clock. She locked the pins in the wheels and hopped out, running around to the back of the boiler and opening a red valve that spilled the excess steam pressure into the air. The car made a sigh as it shut down, but steam burbled out of the smokestack for several more minutes.

Vailret could think of nothing to say; his mind had been overwhelmed by the marvelous sights and Mayer’s enthusiasm. He climbed out of the car and went to the fountain to see better, staring at the spraying water and at the clock. His ears still rang from the steam engine’s loud noises.

In the pool four large, clumsy-looking mechanical fish puttered around and around in perfect circles. He stuck his hand in the water, but the mechanical fish paid him no heed.

“The leaders of Sitnalta will be here momentarily,” Mayer said.

“The leaders?” Bryl asked. “Who runs the city?”

“The people of Sitnalta decide for themselves what we will do. We are a weighted democracy. Each character has at least one vote, but those who have done the most for Sitnalta have the most votes. It is very fair—the ones who work hard for our city have a significant say in the decisions we make, and those who have done little, say little. In an ordinary democracy, the vote of a vagrant is valued as highly as that of a great inventor. And that just isn’t logical.”

“Why don’t you tell us how you determine these weighted votes?” Paenar seemed to know the answer already.

Mayer looked at him as if he had asked something obvious. “By the number of inventions a character has contributed, of course. My father Dirac has designed seventy new inventions for the betterment of Sitnalta, and therefore he has seventy votes. I have five, soon to be six.”

“But what about the characters who aren’t inventors?” Bryl asked.

Mayer snorted. “Useless people—who cares what they think?”

Paenar smiled to himself.

At some unheard signal, dozens of characters emerged from the doorways of buildings around the square and filed toward the fountain. They stared at the travelers, but talked little among themselves. The other characters wore bright clothes similar to the ones Mayer wore, but some were covered with grease or wore work-smocks. One woman’s hair looked singed; perhaps a new invention had backfired on her.

Mayer smiled and motioned to a rotund man striding toward them. The man had a bald crown and shaggy reddish hair sticking out around his ears. “This is my father, Dirac, who has designed seventy inventions.”

“If she says one more time how many inventions he’s done—” Delrael grumbled.

“You were early, Mayer,” Dirac said, still smiling at the travelers. “Did you run short of things to show our guests?”

“No, Father!” Mayer looked at the water clock for defense, but she said nothing more.

Dirac gazed at them with a distant expression on his face, then he extended his hand to each of them, beaming. “I am pleased you’ve come to Sitnalta. We’ll have time to discuss many things.”

Paenar’s blindness did not trouble Dirac at all; he reached out, guided the blind man’s hand into his own grasp and shook it. Paenar seemed to dislike the Sitnaltan’s touch.

Before they could say anything to him, Dirac turned and waved two other men over to join them. “Allow me to introduce the greatest inventors in all of Sitnalta—Professors Frankenstein and Verne. I cannot begin to tell you the great wonders these men have brought to us.”

Frankenstein was a young, haggard-looking man, with dark brown hair and intense, bloodshot eyes. He nodded cursorily to the guests but went back to brood with his ideas, as if incapable of making light conversation.

Verne, on the other hand, blinked in surprise at being personally introduced to the visitors. Verne had a great bushy beard and tangled gray hair hanging over his ears. He scratched his head and extended a hand to each of the four, smiling politely. A peculiar, haunted quality lay behind the eyes of both professors, as if they had the dreams and nightmares of several lifetimes locked within their skulls.

Verne rubbed his hands together. His voice had a strange accented lilt. “Monsieur Dirac himself is not a trivial personage either. He has—”

“We know,” Delrael interrupted, “seventy inventions to his credit.”

Dirac looked pleased, paying no heed to the sarcasm in Delrael’s comment. “You must be hungry,” he said, interrupting Verne. “We were about to break for our midday meal.”

Both professors slipped away and stood back to observe the crowd. Dirac led the travelers over to stone benches ringing the square. Delrael lurched, nearly unable to walk on his kennok leg. Vailret helped him, but Delrael acted frustrated at himself.

After watching the water clock, everyone turned to face other sets of doors around the square. Wheeled carts shuttled out of the building, bearing individual plates heaped with steaming food.

Dirac sat down on the bench next to Delrael and Vailret, elbowing his way into a place of honor. Delrael absently rubbed his thigh, at the line where the kennok wood joined with flesh. The carts came around, and the Sitnaltans each took a plate and began to eat. As Vailret tried to choose between several different entrees, he noticed how every plate appeared the same, so carefully arranged. But after days of pack food—

They ate in relative silence. The smokestacks of the manufactories had stopped exhaling great gray clouds, and many of the background noises had also fallen silent. Off on another bench and oblivious to the others, Frankenstein and Verne argued over the fine details of some new invention.

Delrael scraped the last remnants of food from his plate into his mouth, finishing well before anyone else. After swallowing his food he spoke to Dirac. “I don’t understand one thing. We arrive at your gates as perfect strangers, your daughter invites us in and gives us the grand tour, now you introduce us to all of Sitnalta and give us a good meal. But nobody’s even asked us why we’re here or where we’re going. Isn’t that a little strange?”

Dirac wiped his mouth and looked flustered. Mayer watched her father, waiting for him to answer. “We assumed you had heard of our great city and came to see its wonders for yourself. That was Mayer’s hypothesis.”

Bryl laughed so suddenly that he choked on his remaining food. Delrael also chuckled, while Vailret looked at the Sitnaltans in surprise. Paenar shook his head.

“Your city is marvelous, but we are on our way to the island of Rokanun,” Vailret said. “We need a passage across the sea.”

The other Sitnaltans muttered. Frankenstein and Verne stopped their discussion to pay attention.

“The dragon Tyros is on Rokanun. You don’t want to go there.” Dirac placed his hands on the table, then smiled at them again. “But don’t worry—you are safe here.”

“You don’t understand,” Bryl said. “We want to find the dragon.”

Dirac shook his head as if to dismiss them. “Not another one of those silly treasure quests? I thought they went out of fashion years and years ago.”

“We have to rescue someone. We promised,” Delrael said.

“But why would you want to go there now?” Dirac frowned, puzzled. “It is only a matter of time before Sitnaltan technology advances enough to destroy Tyros. Why bother risking your lives?”

Paenar stood up, exasperated, and put his fists on his hips. “Are you Sitnaltans so wrapped up in your little world that you see nothing else?” He glared at the gathered characters with his empty eye-sockets.

“All of your inventions will be worthless soon—the Outsiders have decided to end the Game. Our world is about to be destroyed, and I’ll bet you didn’t even know!”

He pointed in the general direction of Delrael, Bryl, and Vailret. “These people are fighting—they did not give up. They will not surrender. But Sitnalta is ignoring the danger.”

Across the table, Mayer bristled and glared at him. Dirac folded his hands on his paunched belly with patronizing interest. “Oh? Please tell us more of this danger.”

Vailret looked at Delrael, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. Vailret set his jaw. “We received a message from the Rulewoman Melanie herself, telling us about some enemy growing in the east. We traveled northward to ask for Sardun’s help, and he created the Barrier River that cut us off from the threat. In exchange, we agreed to rescue his daughter Tareah, who has been kidnapped by the dragon on Rokanun. But now we have learned that Scartaris is not just a normal enemy. Not just an army. I doubt that the Barrier River will be enough to stop the destruction.”

Someone laughed. Other Sitnaltans muttered about “barbarian superstitions.” Professor Verne tugged on his long beard. Professor Frankenstein chewed on his lip.

Mayer rolled her eyes upward. “Do you mean that Sardun, the great Sentinel, could not fight off a dragon?”

“Sitnalta has not been able to destroy Tyros, either,” Paenar pointed out.

Mayer fell silent.

“The Outsiders have decided to end the Game. I know, for I have been with them. They blasted away my eyes when I glimpsed them at their work.” Paenar stared at the gathered Sitnaltans, offering his empty eye-sockets as evidence of his story.

Professor Verne stood up, scratching his head. “This great energy force to the east—what exactly is it? And where, exactly, is it located?”

Paenar turned his head in the direction of the inventor’s voice. “Northeast of here, in the mountains beyond the city of Taire. The Outsiders have named it Scartaris—it will absorb all the energy on Gamearth, breaking the hexes from the map and sending them to drift as barren chunks in the universe.”

Verne scratched his head again and said, “Hmmm.” He looked at Frankenstein, and his younger partner shrugged, then nodded. Professor Verne drew a deep breath. His eyes looked distant and watery.

“We did not announce our recent findings because we had insufficient data to form any conclusions. Some of our monitors have detected a powerful energy anomaly in the extreme northeast of the map. Frankenstein and I were at a loss to explain it—but these travelers offer a hypothesis that fits the data.”

He crossed his arms. “In the absence of evidence to the contrary, good scientific practice suggests that we not scoff at the claims of our guests.”

Dirac fidgeted, but even he did not dare to disagree with the great Professor Verne.

“Well then,” Delrael said, “are you going to help us or not?”

The wind picked up, stretching the tether ropes taut as it tugged at the huge gas-filled balloon. Vailret stood on the ground, looking up at the bottom of the woven basket bobbing in the air. The balloon was constructed of bright red and white cloth, sewn tightly and waterproofed, covered with a mesh of rope that attached to cables leading down to the passenger basket below. Bright white numerals “VI” had been stenciled on the basket.

Verne had explained how simple the concept was: a giant sack filled with a gas even lighter than air. It would float, allowing them to travel through the air. But Vailret wasn’t sure he wanted to trust his life to something so flimsy.

“What does the ‘VI’ mean?” He pointed at the basket.

Verne smiled sheepishly. Frankenstein said, “Our first five attempts did not have sufficient integrity.”

The fighter and the old half-Sorcerer stood in the basket, staring down at the gathered crowd. The basket swayed against the ropes as the two passengers moved about. Even with his uncooperative kennok leg, Delrael had hauled himself up the rope ladder, using his arms and moving from one sagging rung to the next. Bryl scrambled up afterward, glancing down too often and looking ill. He appeared frail and spidery as he climbed into the basket.

From the ground, Vailret raised his hand in a farewell wave. Paenar had instinctively turned to face the proper direction. If Verne’s intuition was right, the great balloon would take Delrael and Bryl over the hexes of ocean to the island of Rokanun. . . .

“We have sent up test balloons,” Verne had said, “small and unmanned, of course. We used detectors in them to measure the prevailing winds, and if you reach the correct altitude, you should be able to go directly to the island. The detectors failed once they’d gone a sufficient distance from Sitnalta, but we did gather enough data to be confident in our results.”

“The detectors failed?” Vailret said in alarm.

“Oh yes, but we saw no evidence that the balloons failed,” Verne added quickly.

“Now don’t get sidetracked, Jules,” Frankenstein said. “It’s important that they understand this. You see, the winds move in different directions, different streams, depending on the altitude.” He nodded to Delrael and Bryl. “You will have to control your altitude by releasing some of the ballast in the sandbags strung along the gondola. I suspect that the time of day will also affect your altitude, as the sun heats up the gas in the bag, causing it to expand.”

Verne nodded. “As the days pass, some of the gas will leak out of the balloon, too. You will have to drop sandbags just to maintain your flying height.” The professor stared up at the colorful balloon. His eyes sparkled.

“I created this balloon for a grand adventure, for a journey of exploration that would change the way Sitnalta thinks.” Verne’s voice sounded wistful. “I dreamed of all we might see and do, all we might learn from such a quest. But I am too old, and the others are too frightened to go far from Sitnalta, where the Rules of Science do not hold true.”

Frankenstein had looked at the four travelers with an intense light in his eyes. “No one would volunteer to test this balloon. We would have no control over its direction of flight, nor could we be sure of getting back. By using data from our regional monitoring devices, we calculated the extent of the technological fringe around our city—a lower limit, you understand, because once we place monitors near the fringe, we cannot rely on the readings they give.”

The younger professor squinted at the balloon. The wind yanked at it, testing the ropes holding it down.

“We do not dare cross the fringe in that balloon. Imagine what would happen if, flying high in the sky, you passed over a hex-line and suddenly the very physical principle that allows the balloon to fly becomes uncertain. The balloon would fall like a stone.”

“That has not been proved!” Verne cried defensively. “This balloon has nothing mechanical in it, no invention or technology that can fail—I say it will work over all the world, and we should not isolate ourselves here when we could be embarking on extraordinary voyages!”

“But no one would test the hypothesis,” Frankenstein said, relating a story instead of arguing. “Until now.”

Delrael had not been able to take his eyes from the towering balloon. He craned his neck upward, looking at the bottom of the basket; he tugged on the sturdy tether ropes.

“We can’t all fit in that,” Bryl observed.

“No,” Frankenstein said. “Only two. Perhaps you can risk three, but then the odds grow worse for you.”

“No!” Verne insisted. “It must be a fair test, under ideal conditions, until we know more parameters. Only two may ride, and two will remain behind. Otherwise, it will influence the results of the experiment—we have to know. An overburdened balloon may crash, regardless of how the technological boundary affects it.”

“I concede your point,” Frankenstein said.

Dirac rubbed his hands together. “You asked for our help, and two of you may take this balloon. The others will be quite safe here.”

Verne fished in his pocket, withdrew a ticking time piece, and handed it to Frankenstein. He pulled out the pair of dice he had been looking for. “If you wish to choose who remains behind, you are welcome to use my dice.” Frankenstein produced a small gadget used for automatically shaking the dice.

Vailret shook his head, putting his hand on Bryl’s wrist to stop him from taking the dice. “Let’s think about this. We have to choose carefully, not by a throw of the dice.”

After a moment of silence, Paenar volunteered. “I wish to remain behind. I must . . . ask something of the Sitnaltans.” He refused to say more.

Delrael stared at the balloon, then looked down at the half-Sorcerer. His gray eyes looked troubled. “Bryl, you have to go. Your Water Stone is the only real weapon we have against the dragon.”

But Vailret watched the way his cousin moved, the pain as he kept rubbing his thigh. “Del, how’s your leg?”

Delrael turned to him, then looked down at his leg. He rapped the kennok wood and it made a hollow, solid sound. “I can’t feel it or bend it at all. There’s no magic here to keep it alive.” His face turned grayish. Vailret suddenly realized that his cousin was genuinely frightened, but had kept it all to himself. “I’m afraid it’s going to fall off.”

“That settles it. You have to get out of these science-ruled hexes—now. I’ll stay behind with Paenar. Maybe I can learn something here.” They had clasped hands, saying goodbye.

Axes came down, severing the tether ropes. The red-and-white balloon shot into the air as if propelled by an invisible bowstring. Delrael and Bryl leaned out over the basket, waving, but then drew back inside, clutching the ropes as the balloon rose higher.

Vailret watched the balloon rise above the city until it became only a blur in his vision. He felt alone in Sitnalta, surrounded by strangers who had an alien perspective on life itself.

But then he saw how sluggish the great colorful balloon was, how it drifted at the mercy of the wind currents. If a fire-breathing dragon saw them approaching, Bryl and Delrael would be helpless. And Professor Verne had warned them that the invisible gas within the balloon was extremely flammable.

11. Paenar’s Eyes

“Everything on Gamearth operates by the Rules of Probability, the roll of the dice. The most unlikely events may conceivably happen, or the most obvious and ordinary things may not happen at all. With sufficient data, we can predict a likely outcome, but we cannot know.”

—Professor Verne, Collected Lectures

Purple twilight welled up, accompanied by a salt-smelling mist from the nearby sea. The mist infiltrated the streets of Sitnalta, creeping around walls and into the clusters of buildings. Vailret stared out the window of his quarters on the second floor of a building. After an evening meal, the Sitnaltans had left him and Paenar alone in their room. Now that the strangers had lost some of their novelty, the city dwellers had other things to attend to.

Below, Vailret could see characters climbing on ladders to light gas streetlights on every corner, racing against the dusk. Weblike patterns of already-glowing lanterns sparkled on the winding streets. Other than the subdued conversation of the lamplighters, he heard none of the industrious din of the daytime. Sitnalta had stopped for the night.

Vailret smelled the sea mist, thinking of Bryl and Delrael soaring away in Professor Verne’s balloon.

Paenar lay brooding on a resilient cot against one wall. The blind man listened, sniffed the air, and paid intense attention to everything. It made Vailret uneasy.

But any character who had gazed upon the Outsiders and survived . . . well, that gave him a right to be a little odd.

“Vailret,” Paenar asked without turning his head. “You seem comfortable with others. Have you always . . . been with people?”

The young man stepped back from the window, closing the shutters against the oncoming night. He considered the question for a moment, wondering what Paenar was driving at. “Well, I grew up in the Stronghold and I played in the village just at the bottom of the hill. Plenty of other characters around.”

Paenar lay motionless on the bed, saying nothing. Vailret became uncomfortable enough with the silence that he spoke again. “Delrael can strike up a conversation with just about anybody, though. He’s got a good charisma score—but I don’t think any of that goes very deep. He doesn’t like to have to depend on people.”

“What about Bryl?” Paenar asked. “You worked well together against the Spectres.”

Vailret shrugged. “Bryl doesn’t open himself up to anybody. I guess he’s a friend, though he is rather strange. But he’s sharp and willing to help out when you force him. Especially now. I think this quest has been good for him, to make him feel useful again.”

Paenar sounded desolate. “I wish I had known people like you. Before.” The blind man sat up, facing Vailret.

“I became a Scavenger because I wanted to be away from people. I wanted to be alone. My father was cruel and forced a family’s worth of work out of me. My mother allowed her children to be beaten as well as herself. Both of my parents were killed when our dwelling burned down—Father was too drunk on spring cider to wake up, and Mother ran back to save him. The other villagers came out to watch my home burn, but no one tried to save it.

“Later, the woman I wished to marry chose a richer man instead—he was an excellent gamer and had won most of his wealth through dicing. She did not love him, but she expected me to understand that simple love could not keep her fed. The others in the village taunted me because of it.”

Vailret fidgeted, not sure he wanted to hear the blind man’s confession, afraid it might forge a bond between them.

“So, I became a hunter and a wanderer. Early on I encountered a band of the Black Falcon Troops. They were perfect examples of how bad human nature can be, aiming to kill every non-human race on Gamearth, even the friendly ones. I was ashamed of my own people—even I did not have such wholesale hatred. I just wanted to be left alone.

“Later, I found I could be useful by uncovering artifacts from the old Sorcerers. I did not need the coins the artifacts brought me . . . but I did need an excuse for my life, a purpose. I wandered along the Spectre Mountains, up to Sardun’s Ice Palace and down to Sitnalta. Then I stumbled upon the deserted Slac fortress and the Spectres. Now my eyes have been taken from me, and our world is doomed, and I am still alone.

“But just watching you, your attitude and your ambition to do something—that stirs things in my heart. It feels strange.”

Vailret fidgeted, embarrassed and awkward that a stranger had opened up to him so much. “So why did you volunteer to stay here in Sitnalta? When we were deciding who would ride in the balloon, you said you needed to ask for something. But you’ve made it quite clear you don’t like these people.”

Paenar stood up from his bed and unerringly strode over to the window. He opened the shutters and breathed the damp air. Vailret could see that mist had swirled down the streets, making the gas lights look like glowing pools of butter.

“I will challenge them to make me new eyes.”

Bryl clutched the edges of the balloon basket so tightly that the wicker bit into his fingers. He didn’t like being so high in the air, especially not when the craft’s own inventors refused to ride in it.

The balloon ropes creaked with the weight of the passengers and the shifting temperatures of the air. If he was going to gamble, Bryl preferred to do it with dice, not his life. The half-Sorcerer kept his fingers crossed, hoping the contraption would hold itself together. He thought he could hear the gas leaking out even now. He knew they were going to fall.

Since the wind pushed them along at its own speed, the air around them was calm. Though they could detect no motion, the three clustered hexagons of Sitnalta’s city terrain soon dropped away. The buildings grew smaller, the people looked like black specks, as the balloon pulled away in smooth silence, moving with a deceptive speed that made Bryl dizzy. He could still hear the clanking sounds of Sitnalta in the still air, snatches of conversation carried up in a pocket of wind, the noise of the manufactories.

Delrael moved from one side of the basket to the other, peering at the world below. The balloon swayed, making Bryl ill, until he begged Delrael to stand still.

Below them the jagged edge of land met the sea, giving way to an interlocked network of blue hexagons of water. In the other direction the island of Rokanun showed plainly against the blue of the sea, three hexes distant.

Bryl had no way of telling whether they continued to rise or not. The sea below seemed so far away that he could no longer tell the difference. Through the holes in the wicker of the basket, he could see the long drop beneath his feet. He tried shutting his eyes, but that didn’t help at all, just left his imagination open to picture worse things. By watching the line of Rokanun, he noticed they had begun to drift in the wrong direction.

“Trial and error, I guess,” Delrael said. “We know we were heading in the right direction a while ago. Maybe if we go up a little higher, we’ll reach an airstream to take us toward the island. Or when the day starts to cool we should drop down again. That’s what Professor Verne said.”

Delrael untied the end of one of the sandbags and let the sand run out. Bryl leaned over to watch the tan grains pouring down, vanishing in the distance before he could see them hit the water. He thought he could feel the balloon jerk upward again.

“Not so much! Be careful.”

Delrael tied the sandbag again.

The afternoon swept on, the sun fell toward the western edge of the map. The towering dead volcano on Rokanun, Mount Antas, jutted up like a festering elbow on the far side of the island. Gulls flew far below them in the still air. Bryl kept an eye out for soaring, fire-breathing, fang-filled, scale-covered—

“Look!” Delrael flexed his kennok limb, climbing on the edge of the basket. “I can move it again!” He seemed so relieved he wanted to dance. But the gondola was crowded with a cumbersome metal tank in the corner. The tank contained enough of the mysterious buoyant gas for their return journey.

The half-Sorcerer widened his eyes. “If the magic in your leg works again, the we must have passed the technological fringe . . . and the balloon isn’t going to fall apart on us!” Bryl wiped his forehead and sat down in relief.

Hours later, Rokanun loomed below and in front of them. The balloon puttered aimlessly in the eddies around the great island. They could not control its course and hung suspended over the first hexes of grass terrain on the shore of Rokanun. With dusk coming on, they began their descent.

Delrael bent to the task of letting the lighter-than-air gas escape from the balloon. He scrambled up the rope mesh around the balloon’s body, using his kennok leg with ease. He opened sealed flaps on opposite sides of the fabric, just as Verne had taught him, allowing the gas to escape and keeping them from going into a spin.

The red-and-white balloon sagged inward, settling toward the ground. Bryl sat in the basket, yelling against the hissing sound and trying to be useful by directing Delrael to adjust the rate of their fall by opening and closing other flaps. Stray winds drove them closer to the shore as they came down.

The basket struck the brown beach grass, knocking Bryl to his knees. The balloon was still buoyant and bounced upward again in a gust of wind. Everything seemed-to be moving so slowly. Bryl grabbed the side of the basket and held on until his fingers cramped. Delrael rode on the fabric of the balloon itself, sliding to the ground as the red-striped bag settled like a giant floating blanket. Bryl crawled out from under the cloth, gasping for breath. He stood up and brushed himself off.

The ocean crashed against tall rocks near the shore of a hex of grassland. The winds were gusty, but the air felt warm. All around them, the island of Rokanun was eerie and empty.

“Help me get the balloon over by that big rock where we can hide it. Sort of. We should be able to move it while there’s still some gas in it.” Delrael grabbed a fold of the waterproofed fabric and tugged with both hands, flashing red with the effort. “And then we’re going to get a good night’s sleep while we still can. “Tomorrow we’ll go rescue Tareah.”

Early the following day, Mayer led Vailret and Paenar back to the central Sitnaltan square. The fountain sent its feathery jet of water into the air. The water clock filled slowly and regularly, marking the exact hour of the morning.

Mayer had arrived at their doorway at sunrise, just as the city began to stir. Vailret had been sound asleep, comfortable in a real bed for the first time in weeks. Paenar had been sitting and thinking on his cot. He opened the door immediately after Mayer’s knock.

“My father has asked that I show you more of our city.” Mayer did not seem pleased with the chore. “Though I have my own calculations to continue.”

“Are you sure we wish to see more?” Paenar asked.

Mayer raised her eyebrows at him. “Yes, I am sure.”

The clanking, industrious sounds of Sitnalta filled the air as the three walked across the hex-cobbled streets. Paenar held onto Vailret’s elbow.

“Let me start by showing you something important.” Mayer pointed to a low building with a massive, ornate doorway that had artificial columns standing on either side. It looked like an ancient Sorcerer villa. “Inside is the one thing that fills all Sitnaltans with pride.”

“What is it? A listing of your father’s seventy inventions?” Vailret remarked.

Mayer glared at him.

They entered the small building with lush draperies and ornate furnishings. Propped on a pedestal against the far wall stood a leather-bound book with yellowed pages. Two curved brass pipes protruded from the wall, jetting blue gas flames that cast a glow on the volume.

“This is the original book, written by the great inventor Maxwell, in which he derived the first set of the Great Rules, the equations dealing with electromagnetism.”

She looked at Vailret, expectant, but he did not know what she meant. Mayer scowled. “It is also Maxwell’s treatise and charter for Sitnalta, with his hypothesis that we cast off magic and superstition because these have brought only pain and destruction to Gamearth. The Outsider Scott changed the Rules in this area of the world, allowing human characters access to technological discoveries. Have you never found it unfair that you could not use magic, just because you weren’t born a Sorcerer? Magic is for the few—technology is for everyone.”

“Technology works only if you live in Sitnalta,” Paenar said.

Vailret pursed his lips, embarrassed, and he did not want to answer. He hated to admit Mayer had a point. “Yes, I have thought that was unfair. I’m not a magic user, but I’ve studied more than most Sorcerers have.”

Mayer smiled at him. Vailret couldn’t tell if she was condescending or not.

“When we adopted Maxwell’s hypothesis, we agreed to focus our efforts on the furtherance of science, the development of technology, and the betterment of the human race. We have chosen to isolate ourselves, to avoid involvement in any wars. Let me tell you a secret—” she lowered her voice. “We are working to develop a way that we can activate our own Transition! Mechanically! Without magic.”

Her eyes glittered. Vailret thought it was a grand dream for human characters. But none of that would take place if Scartaris destroyed Gamearth.

She reached her thin fingers toward the enshrined volume, but did not touch it. “Every person in our city has an annotated copy of Maxwell’s great book. It has been printed time and again, but this is the original manuscript, in the handwriting of Maxwell himself.” Mayer’s voice was filled with reverence.

Vailret smiled at her, chiding. “So you’ve given up superstition, eh? Your attitude toward that old book sure reminds me of religious awe.”

Mayer turned red. “You are confusing reverence and deep respect for a silly superstition.”

“Is there a difference between unquestioning reverence and silly superstition?” Paenar asked.

“Yes, most certainly!” Mayer snapped. “Come with me.”

She hustled them back out into the sunshine. Angry, she continued to talk out of the corner of her mouth.

“We spend our time thinking. Ideas are our greatest product. One of Sitnalta’s scholars has suggested a logical reason for the existence of the hexagon-lines on Gamearth—that they are manifestations of an orderly, crystalline structure in the crust of the world, like the equal angles on a gemstone. Just think of it! The intuition and imagination that went into such a hypothesis, and of course it makes sense.”

Paenar remained silent, but Vailret nodded to himself. “I never thought about it.”

“Well, we did.”

She led them into the main room of another building. Dozens of people stood along tables that stretched from one wall to the other. Shoulder to shoulder, the characters picked up dice and rolled them into individual rectangular wooden bins. After each throw, the Sitnaltan made a meticulous notation of the results on a pad beside his or her station and picked up the dice again for another throw. The rumble and clatter of dice hitting dozens of wooden boxes struck Vailret’s ears like thunder.

“We are gathering data,” Mayer said, raising her voice. “One day, we will learn the true mysteries of the Rules of Probability. Ah, then the world will be in our grasp!”

Mayer put her hands on her waist, kneading her hip bones with her long fingers. “And would you mind telling me why you must see Professor Verne and Professor Frankenstein? They are very busy you know.”

Paenar stood expressionless and immobile. “I prefer to tell them myself.”

Mayer appeared frustrated from their reactions and attitudes throughout her tour. “You must show proper respect for them! We have strong evidence to suspect that the two professors are actually being Played—directly by the Outsider Scott. They are important. Important to us and important to the Game. The professors are not here to answer your every whim—”

“This is important, Mayer,” Vailret decided to intervene. She acted frightened when she spoke of Verne and Frankenstein. “I promise.” He tried to smile at her. She didn’t seem to know how to react.

She turned away and walked off, leaving them to follow.

At one of the doorways, she stopped and lowered her voice. “Since you don’t want to go where I wish to take you, I must not be an adequate guide to our city.” Mayer looked smug. “I have more important work waiting for me. If you have any trouble finding your way back to your quarters, use one of the speaking tubes and call for help.”

She hurried off and turned a corner before Vailret could think of anything to say.

“Typical,” Paenar said.

Vailret frowned, puzzled. “I just think she’s not used to anyone who isn’t amazed by their inventions. I am impressed at the opportunity their technology offers, especially to someone who can’t use magic—like me. But she doesn’t know how to defend herself against any questions we raise. She’s afraid of us.”

“Let us hope we can get something better from the professors.”

Vailret and Paenar stood baffled at the mad confusion in the workshop of Frankenstein and Verne. Incomplete machines lay in piles of gears and sheet metal, half-assembled or half-dismantled, surrounded by the smell of grease. Rambling equations had been written all along the walls, extending beyond the blackboard and onto the bricks themselves.

Professor Frankenstein crouched low over a table under the bright light of a gas lantern, dissecting something on a mounting board. At his side lay an immense open book in which he made meticulous notes. From where he stood, Vailret could see intricate and detailed sketches of parts of the body and the brown stains of dried blood on the paper.

Professor Verne sat on a lab stool away from the worktable, puffing on a pipe and gazing off into space. Coils of gray tobacco smoke floated around his beard, giving the inventor a surreal appearance. He twiddled his thumbs and blinked at the two men as they entered. He stood in surprise. “Welcome, travelers! Forgive me—I was deep in thought.”

Frankenstein glanced up from his dissection, stared a moment, and turned back to his work.

Verne’s eyes sparkled. “Ah, do you bring news of the balloon? So soon?”

Vailret fidgeted. “We came to see you at work.”

Verne spread his hands. “Well, as you can see, Victor and I work well together. We were born with complementary skills. We make machines to mimic living things—he deciphers how the living things work, and I invent gadgets to function on the same principles.”

He scratched at his beard, then set down his pipe on a slanted work surface. It slid down, and Verne tried to catch it but only ended up with a handful of warm tobacco ash. He stared at the pipe, perplexed, then took great care to balance it properly.

“Victor, remind me to invent a pipe stand.”

Frankenstein did not look up from his work. “We already have. It goes before the Council of Patent Givers at the next meeting.”

Verne looked pleased. “Do we have any in production yet?”

Frankenstein shook his head. “Low-priority item.”

“Too bad.” He sighed. “Well, as you see, we have a great many inventions in the mill right now. Some are from Victor and myself brainstorming. Occasionally, though, we cannot take full credit.” He looked sheepish.

“I get ideas from dreams, too—someone, perhaps even the Outsider Scott himself, comes to me as I sleep and puts suggestions in my head. I remember him clearly when I wake—he looks very young, brown hair, and freckles, by Maxwell! Whoever heard of an Outsider having freckles!”

Verne shook his head. “Well, he does have good, workable ideas. In fact, the Outsider Scott suggested how we might make the great balloon your friends are riding and how to obtain the lighter-than-air gas to lift it. We take a large battery, you see, and discharge electricity into sea water. The electrical charge breaks down the water into its most primal forms, two kinds of gas, which—”

He blinked his eyes, then chuckled. “My, my, I do go on, don’t I?”

Paenar interrupted, as if he could wait no longer. “I wish to give you a challenge, to test your talent.”

“Our record of past inventions speaks for itself,” Frankenstein said. “We are not interested in tests.”

Verne raised an eyebrow. “One moment, Victor.” He turned to face Paenar. “What is it you wish?”

Paenar stood glaring at them with his cavernous eye sockets. “I need you to make me a new pair of eyes.”

Frankenstein looked up from his dissection; Verne removed the pipe from his mouth again.

Paenar continued. “When I gazed upon the Spectres, the reality of their existence seared away my eyes. I can do nothing to help save Gamearth if I must be led around by the hand like a child. For the sake of our world’s future, you must help me.”

“It cannot be done,” Frankenstein answered. “The eye is a most complex organ, directly connected to the brain. Creating a mechanical pair of eyes is not possible.”

“I thought you would say so,” Paenar said bitterly. “But the truth is, I have already had a pair of artificial eyes. The Spectres made them for me.” Vailret handed him the leather pouch and he strode forward to the table, careful not to stumble on the clutter on the floor. With a sound like rolling dice, Paenar emptied a handful of glittering lenses onto the wooden surface.

“Made from these. They were arranged in a staff and activated by magic. I was able to see perfectly. Can your technology do this for me, or is simple magic superior?”

Verne pursed his lips, but Frankenstein shook his head. “We lack the time to finish the dozens of inventions we have already designed. We have many more we’d like to work on, ideas to explore. These mechanical eyes would benefit no one but yourself for now. Sitnalta has little demand for them. We must set priorities.”

The blind man stood stiffly. Vailret said what he knew was on Paenar’s mind. “We have our bargaining chip—and it’s rightly yours. Use it.”

The blind man relaxed and spoke to a point in space somewhere between Verne and Frankenstein. “When the Spectres came to Gamearth from the Outside, they traveled in a gigantic ship constructed from their own imaginations. Vailret has also seen the great ship and can vouch for the truth of my statements.

“Their ship is still there. And I know where it is.” He paused to let them think of the implications. Both professors showed expressions of captivated interest.

“The ship does not still function as it once did—but imagine what you could learn just from the structure of such a vessel? You could determine how to build your own model and perhaps rescue the people of Sitnalta. When Gamearth is finally erased, you can gather all the people together in your ship and whisk them off into reality.

“Surely that is worth the price of one man’s eyes?”

Frankenstein and Verne stared at each other for a long moment with a glitter of fascination in their eyes. Without speaking, Professor Verne relit his pipe and took a long puff, lost in thought. Frankenstein flipped the pages of his huge volume of notes, scanning through the diagrams and observations, looking for any work concerning eyes. Both inventors wore feverish smiles.

Vailret did not have to ask their answer.

At dawn, Delrael and Bryl left their sheltered spot in the rocks near the shore and stepped back out into the raw wind. They heard only the background noises of rushing waves and whispering beach grass. Delrael could feel a tension in the air, a subdued fear that kept every thing quiet. The sounds of a few gulls only added to his sense of eerie loneliness, the solitude—he knew that he and Bryl were probably the only two characters on the entire island, except for Sardun’s daughter.

They set off across the first hexagon of grassy terrain. According to their map, the island’s northern shore was bounded by a row of grassland hexes and then forest, except for the cluster of mountain terrain surrounding the towering volcano on the eastern end of the island.

Pushing themselves, they were able to traverse three full hexagons of grassland by nightfall, when the Rules forced them to stop at the black hex-line. On the other side they saw forbidding mountain terrain, jagged and inhospitable. The next day they would climb the side of the volcano, looking for some way inside to the grotto of Tryos the dragon.

The grass was soft and the night warm, but Delrael had trouble sleeping. He could see the looming dark blot of the dead volcano against the skyline, obliterating the scattered stars. He watched the night and the tattered aurora, wondering if the stars were really out there, or if it was just a screen to keep all the characters from seeing the Outside.

Bryl had kept himself uneasily silent for most of the day. Now, he heard the old half-sorcerer tossing on the ground and guessed that Bryl slept as little as he did. All night long Delrael felt the eyes of the dragon hanging over him, waiting for them to draw closer.

The next morning they picked their way among the rock jungle of the volcano’s slope. Monolithic blocks of sharp lava lay scattered like enormous betting chips along the zigzagging path. The rock was gray and lifeless, free even of lichen stains.

At last, Delrael looked up into the bright daylight and saw the sheared-off top of the cone drooping at its lip. He stopped and wiped sweat off his forehead. Despite the protection it gave, his leather armor made him feel hot and stiff. He waited for Bryl to catch his breath.

“We may have to climb all the way to the top to get inside. Tryos probably keeps all his treasure in a lower grotto, and we should find Tareah there.” He sighed and shifted his long hunting bow on his shoulder. “But, then, I would not be surprised if we found a secret passage leading inside to the treasure chamber. The Outsiders seem to enjoy that sort of thing.”

“Let’s hope Sardun’s daughter is waiting for us, and the dragon isn’t!” Bryl waited until Delrael set off again and then followed close behind. He sweated from the exertion, but he did not complain.

Just past noon, they rounded a corner and came upon a narrow cave broken into the wall of the volcano’s cone. Two gray-brown boulders bordered the opening, and Delrael stopped. He felt the cool breeze and smelled the brimstone stench drifting out into the sunshine.

“What did I tell you?” Delrael said, smiling to himself.

He noticed how the rocks around the entrance had been partially melted, turned glasslike from blasts of heat. “I think we should try it. I don’t like being exposed out here on the mountainside.”

Inside the cave, they stumbled over two ancient and burned skeletons lying just out of the light. Melted items of stolen gold were clutched in their blackened hands.

Bryl gulped, but Delrael was unimpressed. “Cute,” he said. “Such a subtle reminder.”

The cave was deep and winding, burrowing all the way into the interior of the volcano. Their footsteps echoed as they worked their way deeper into the catacombs of the dragon.

When he had the afternoon to himself, Vailret went to Mayer’s tower workroom. Verne and Frankenstein had summoned Paenar to their laboratory for some tests of his eyes. Professor Verne had had an inspiration during the night, another sending from the Outsiders, though this time the professor insisted he remembered a woman’s presence instead of the familiar freckled boy.

The Rulewoman Melanie? Vailret wondered. Without giving further regard to Vailret, the two professors had attached probes to Paenar’s arms, his temples, his eye sockets. Frankenstein checked his notes, impatient, as if nothing happened fast enough for him. After a few moments, Vailret slipped out the door.

He strolled by himself through the crowded and impressive streets of Sitnalta, trying to understand how some of the wonders had been accomplished. He sat on one of the stone benches near the fountain and listened to the falling water, staring at the ornate water clock and trying to figure out how to read its gauge.

Finally, Vailret decided to go see Mayer, in part because he enjoyed discussing things with her when she could keep from being too defensive. She would explain things to him, but she did not have the patience to make sure he understood what she said. Vailret had grown to like Paenar more over the past day, but the blind man was still too intense at times.

Since he could see Mayer’s tower on the edge of the city, he had no difficulty making his way through the streets. The tower was blurry in the distance, and he did not have the skill with directions that Delrael had, but he still felt confident as he made his way past the manufactories and tall buildings, pumping stations and generator shacks to the outer wall of Sitnalta.

He stood at the base of the tower. He wondered if he should knock or shout up to the window. He stared at the brass end of the speaking tube dangling beside the door; in the end he decided just to trudge up the stairs and find her.

Mayer stood in the wide, drafty room, staring at her chalkboard. Equations went on in endless lines. He watched her wrestle with something in her mind. Chalkdust covered her hands; a white smear on her cheek and streaks in her short dark hair showed when she had run fingers through her hair in frustration.

A cool breeze gusted through the open tower windows, scattering some papers on the floor. Mayer turned, muttering to herself, and saw Vailret. She jumped in surprise.

“I didn’t mean to startle you like that,” Vailret said.

She scowled and bent to pick up her scattered papers, chasing one around the floor and keeping her face turned away from him.

“I didn’t want to break your train of thought,” Vailret continued. “I just got here. You looked so intent on what you were doing.”

After a pause, Mayer sighed and looked at him again. “I’m frustrated because I can’t solve this. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not stupid, you know. I’ve spent years studying the history of the Gamearth campaigns.”

She frowned. “History doesn’t matter. You don’t make progress with your head turned in the wrong direction.”

“You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. And you can’t know where you are if you have no idea where you’ve been. “ He held up his hand in a truce. “Why don’t you just try to explain what you’re doing.”

“You’ll just criticize it.”

“No. I’d really be interested.”

Her expression softened, but Vailret doubted she believed him. “If this works, it will be a calculating machine. It will take some of the tedium out of long but simple mathematical problems,” she said, and gave many examples, the relevance of which were lost on Vailret. But he kept nodding and listening.

Mayer regarded him for a moment, then turned back to her equations. “I said you wouldn’t understand.”

Vailret stared out the tower window, looking at the path they had traveled from the mountains. “Look, I admit I don’t understand all you just explained. But you have to remember that out there, beyond your technological fringe, none of this stuff works anyway! It would be wasted effort for us to learn it.”

The intensity in her eyes surprised him. “But it would do you good! If you insisted on using technology, then perhaps the Rules would change around your Stronghold as well! The more we Sitnaltans develop science, the farther out the fringe extends. If you want to be proud of your humanity, cast off this dependence on elite Sorcerer magic. Make your own magic, with science!”

Vailret tried to look open and receptive. “We’re too busy trying to survive. We’re now safe from wandering monsters, we have developed hexes of fertile cropland—”

“Well, if you didn’t spend so much time on those meaningless quests to get treasure or exploring catacombs, you might have time to devote to it.”

Vailret sighed and shook his head. “We haven’t done that since the Scouring, and that’s been more than a century. The Game isn’t like that anymore—and that’s part of the problem. The Outsiders got bored with all the run-of-the-mill quests, and then they got bored with our daily life. We can’t win.”

A racket of loud bells clanged from the tops of tall buildings. Others shouted the alarm. Mayer joined him at the tower window, craning her neck to see. “Here it comes,” he said. “You’ll find this interesting.”

A large black shape winged out of the north, skipping over the updrafts. The thing soared toward the city, growing larger and larger.

Vailret recognized the shape from some of the terrified descriptions scrawled by survivors of the old Sorcerer battles. “A dragon?”

“Yes—Tryos, returning to his island. He will probably attempt to attack Sitnalta first.” She shook her head. “He never learns.”

The dragon beat his huge batlike wings and drove forward, circling low over the city. Mayer grabbed her optick-tube and pulled on Vailret’s sleeve. “Come with me and watch.”

They rushed up a winding staircase to a platform on the roof of the tower. The sounds of the streets and the manufactories seemed far away. He could see all three hexagons of the city and took a moment to orient himself with the landmarks he remembered.

Tryos floated over Sitnalta, taking no action. The dragon’s wings creaked in the wind, making a sound like leather stretched taut over a frame.

Mayer tugged on his arm, pointing Vailret’s attention elsewhere. “See that tall ziggurat, the pyramid over in the southeastern hex? Watch.”

Atop the stepped pyramid, Vailret could barely make out the blurry shape of a small device. He squinted, but it did no good. Mayer handed him the optick-tube.

He stared at it, turning it one way and then the other. “What do I do with this?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You look through it.”

Vailret put one end to his eye, but could discern nothing. Mayer snatched it from his hands and turned it around. When he stared through the lens, his perspective shifted in a dizzying jump. The top of the ziggurat leaped out at him, distorted but so close that he almost dropped the tube. He removed the end from his eye and blinked at it. Lifting it, he stared through the tube again, finding the pyramid’s top platform.

In a shelter sat a Sitnaltan woman beside a strange device. It looked like a dish mounted on an axis and pointed to the sky. A box with levers and buttons rested against the pedestal, coming into view as the woman wrestled with the dish to turn it toward the dragon. Then she sat back in a firmly anchored chair. She strapped herself in. The woman flipped one of the switches.

“What is that woman doing?”

“Just watch.” Mayer gave him a confident smile.

The Sitnaltan woman fastened something over her ears before she lifted a microphone to her mouth. A booming voice echoed into the air and through the winding hex cobbled streets. “Tryos of Antas! Depart at Once. You know the consequences.”

Provoked, Tryos wheeled in the air and came flying toward the ziggurat, scooping the air behind his great wings. He thrust his spined head outward, drooling flames down his chin.

Through the optick-tube, Vailret watched the Sitnaltan woman adjust the face of the dish once more. Vailret felt anxious, knowing she could not escape the dragon’s attack.

Tryos swallowed a cavernous mouthful of air, feeding the furnace inside of him. The Sitnaltan woman spoke into the microphone again, appearing calm. “You have been warned, dragon.”

Tryos swooped down for his attack. The woman reached forward to flip a second switch on the control panel.

A destructive explosion of sound erupted outward, a roar of noise that blasted the dragon backward into the air as if he had been hit with a catapulted boulder.

The Sitnaltan woman slammed back against her chair. The pulses of sound continued to hammer forth. Tryos spun in the air in reverse somersaults. He tried to scramble away.

The device stopped itself automatically. Beaten, Tryos limped across the skies, fleeing Sitnalta.

“That is our Dragon Siren, small enough for a single character to lift, and powerful enough to defend our entire city.” She smiled, smug.

“Impressive.”

“The dragon knows he is defeated. He will go back to his island and sulk. We will not be bothered for a time. But he always forgets and comes back.”

Through the optick-tube, Vailret watched the huge monster flap out across the blue glinting hexagon of ocean. Vailret swallowed to himself and handed the optick tube back to Mayer.

“I hope Del and Bryl are ready for him. He’s not in a very good mood.”

12. The Wrath of Tryos

“Creative adventurers use the situation, use the setting, and use their imaginations to solve any crisis. While pitched battles and direct combat techniques are always acceptable, they are sometimes less satisfying than a truly innovative approach to a problem.”

—Preface, The Book of Rules

Delrael moved down the winding lava tube, feeling his way around broken corners. All his senses were alert, waiting for something horrible to spring out at them. The half-Sorcerer had used his own meager magic to make a floating torch, though he hated to waste a precious spell when they were about to enter the dragon’s lair. But magic did not work against dragons anyway. Shadows puddled against the rough walls.

In the old days, such catacombs would have been filled with wandering monsters, treasure, secret doors and passages. Now it was different, though. Delrael just wanted to reach the grotto, find Tareah, and get back to the balloon as fast as possible.

Once away from the entrance, the air became chilly, locked away from any warmth or light. The heels of Delrael’s boots slipped on a patch of ice still preserved in one of the shadowy rock pockets. Delrael reached out and grabbed a knifelike corner of broken lava, cutting his palm.

For hours they wound their way downward toward the heart of the volcano. Delrael did not want to think about how hard it would be to climb back up. Bryl muttered about how his knees ached, how hungry he was getting. They paused for a short rest, then trudged downward again.

The air smelled heavier, damper. Occasionally, Delrael saw a reddish-orange glow bound past the jagged twists and turns of the tunnel. Bryl doused his fire spell.

The reddish light grew brighter ahead of them. Delrael picked up his pace, impatient to get to their destination, to whatever adventure awaited them. He could smell his sweat in the armor, the claustrophobic thickness of the air.

They rounded a corner, and the passageway opened up. Light washed over them, carrying with it a gush of harsh sulfur smell. Despite his own admonition to Bryl, Delrael broke the silence by letting out a gasp of amazement. He stepped into the grotto, wide-eyed.

Half the room in front of him brimmed with mountains of treasure: gold, gems, pearls, coins, jewelry. In a smaller chamber off to the side stood several large statues—two leaning against each other and another on the floor, chipped and in disarray. A beautiful tapestry had been tossed in the corner, snagged on a sharp rock. Delrael saw painted hexagonal tiles, colored pottery, a bust of some forgotten old Sorcerer general.

“Vailret would love it here,” Bryl said.

On the far edge of the treasure vault sunlight shone down from the opening of the cone. They had descended to the level of the hot and smoking lava pool at the bottom of the volcano. The sound of burning and escaping gases filled the air, making Delrael’s ears ring. The huge treasure grotto had been hollowed out just above and beside the simmering lava—Tryos had made a home protected from any human invaders who wanted to steal his treasure. “The dragon doesn’t seem to be home,” Delrael said.

He moved forward, dazed, like a Sitnaltan automaton. Taking treasure wherever it was found had formed part of his way of life, part of the society of Gamearth, for as long as the Outsiders had been Playing. But he had more important things to do now. If times changed, allowing more leisure to quest for treasure, he might come back. Someday.

Delrael hiked his bow up on his shoulders and stepped forward, ignoring Bryl. “Hello!” he shouted. “Tareah?” His voice echoed in the grotto.

Bryl wandered off again toward the Sorcerer artifacts in the separate chamber.

Delrael heard a clinking sound, coins rattling against each other. He froze and eased his bow from his shoulder, holding onto the string and ready to reach for an arrow.

Then he saw the young girl, Tareah, sitting up groggily from an exhausted sleep, lying on the piles of gems and trinkets, the softest bed she could find. The girl half-slid down the mound of treasure in a clatter and jangle of coins. She rubbed her eyes and stared at the man in silent disbelief, saying nothing.

Delrael thought she was the most beautiful little girl he had ever seen—she looked to be about ten years old, but she was Sardun’s daughter and the only full-blooded Sorcerer female left on all of Gamearth. Her brown eyes were dark and wide, captivating, though laced with bloodshot lines and puffy from too many tears.

Fawn-colored hair hung to her shoulders, tangled but once curled. She wore a pale blue gown of some shining material, now dirty and tattered. Apparently bored, Tareah had bedecked her body with jewelry, rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, a circlet around her head. She dropped some of the heavier pieces off when she stood up, still staring at Delrael.

The young girl’s voice was husky. “I knew someone would come. I didn’t expect it to take so long, though. I was beginning to lose hope.”

“Your father sent us here.” Delrael didn’t know what else to say. “We came to rescue you.”

The hissing of the lava drowned out most of the back ground noise. “Bryl, I’ve found Tareah!”

“According to my studies,” Tareah said, “people have stopped questing for the most part, now that the Transition has taken place and the Scouring is over with. My father must have had trouble finding someone to rescue me.” Tareah’s eyes brightened. “Tell me your names. Have I read about your adventures before?”

Something in her manner, a confidence and smoothness in the way she moved, did not hint at the awkwardness of a young girl. Then Delrael remembered that this “young girl” was actually older than he was.

For thirty years Sardun had held his daughter in the body of a child, afraid to let her grow up before the probabilities of Gamearth could spill forth another full blooded Sorcerer male. They had kept waiting and waiting for the Outsiders’ dice to roll in their favor.

“I’m Delrael, and that’s Bryl. We’re from the Stronghold. Your father didn’t seek us out. We went to the Ice Palace to ask him for help. He was . . . in a bad state, but he’s better now. We agreed to try to rescue you.”

Tareah’s eyes became glassy and distant. “He tried to save me. I remember—the dragon blasting his way through the palace walls, clawing through the ice. My father used the Water Stone to fight back, but he was afraid. He didn’t want to harm me.”

“Well, even the Ice Palace is rebuilt, now. And he’s waiting for you to come back.”

Despite everything they had encountered, Delrael had succeeded in reaching Sardun’s daughter. And she was safe. They had nearly finished the quest imposed on them by Sardun. They needed only to get Tareah back to the Ice Palace. And then go fight against Gairoth.

“Bryl! Let’s get out of here before Tryos comes back.”

The half-Sorcerer knelt beside the toppled, chipped Sorcerer statue in the smaller art chamber. Tears streamed down his face. “I remember some of this.”

Tareah turned to Delrael. “That was an original sculpture, created by some Sorcerer lord in the peaceful days before the first wars. Centuries and centuries and centuries ago. Somehow it survived everything intact, all the battles, all the Scavengers, the weather, the years—”

Bryl stood up. “And now Tryos tossed it here like a piece of dirt! These chip marks are fresh.”

“All these treasures should be in the Ice Palace, where they can be appreciated. Where they belong!” Tareah swallowed further words and nodded formally to Bryl. “You are Bryl, son of Qonnar and Tristane, who were in turn the children of Cocker and Hellic, Karril and Junis. I could go further back, if you like.”

Bryl blinked at Tareah. “How do you know all that?”

Delrael eased them both toward the tunnel opening. “The balloon is a day’s journey from here. And we have a long climb.”

Tareah shrugged. “My father made me study all the Sentinel genealogy. We needed to follow every thread of Sorcerer blood. He even considered you for me, but decided you were too old.”

Bryl gasped out a brief chuckle. Delrael took Tareah by the hand.

“Do you know,” she said, “that you’re the first humans I have ever seen? For thirty years I have been alone with my father in the Ice Palace. I have studied a great deal, but I don’t have much practice in social activity. I’d never been away from the north, until the dragon took me. I didn’t try to rescue myself—I had nowhere to go. Besides, I knew you would come. It’s too good of a quest for the Outsiders to ignore it.” She looked back at the artifacts. “If only we could retrieve these works of art. And some of the treasure, too—Tryos should pay for his careless damage.”

“Where is Tryos?” Delrael asked. He felt a greater sense of urgency as they remained in the grotto. His luck was strong, but he did not want to abuse it.

Too late, they noticed the jagged shadow covering the sunshine from the volcano’s opening. A sound like a blacksmith’s bellows thrummed in the air as the shadow descended.

Tryos the dragon had returned to his lair.

Just before absolute terror set in, Bryl realized how foolish he had been. While gawking at the treasure, he had not seen the obvious. For a dragon to have gathered and kept such a hoard, he must be more powerful and more intelligent than any other treasure-seekers, human or otherwise.

The half-Sorcerer turned to run toward the tunnel. The Water Stone seemed worthless now. “Come on, Delrael! We have to hide!”

Delrael grabbed him, though, and held his arm. Bryl struggled, wanting to scream—this was a dragon, one of the creatures that had caused so much havoc in the Sorcerer wars, the dragon that had defeated Sardun—but Delrael held tight, shaking his head. The fighter looked at the open cut on his palm and wiped it against his leather armor. “He’ll know we were here. We’ll have to talk our way out of this.”

Bryl felt cold fear creep under his skin. “What are we going to do?” The dragon’s armor-plated body dropped into view, glittering green and black depending on the light. Immense parchment wings, brown and leathery, slowed his descent above the lava. Bryl smelled dry heat and a reptilian mustiness. Tryos heaved himself into the grotto, using claws and the elbows of his wings, until he stood up in the chamber.

Tareah’s eyes hardened, and Bryl took a close look at her for the first time. “Keep behind me,” she said. “He won’t harm you if he thinks he might damage me, his treasure.”

Tryos took one step forward, thrusting his wings behind him. The size of the dragon was terrifying: Bryl had to stare several seconds just to absorb the entire monster. He felt a gagging fear, and his eyes watered and stung, making Tryos waver in front of him.

The dragon sat back on his haunches and wrinkled his nose ridge. He curled a huge barbed tail behind him. His reptilian eyes tried to adjust to the dimness in the grotto, now that he blocked out the lava light. When Tryos blinked, eyelids as big as barn doors slammed shut and then opened with an audible click.

Tryos snorted, making flames flicker in and out of his nostrils. Smoke blew back into his face, and he sneezed, exploding a great gout of flame onto the smooth rock floor. Bryl did not move or breathe. Tareah stood beside them, crossing her arms.

Then the dragon spoke with words louder than a volcanic eruption. “Who isss here?” Tryos narrowed his eyes and craned his snakelike neck toward them. His voice was thin and nasal; his words were clipped and imperfect from his armored lips.

Bryl held onto Tareah’s shoulders. She flinched. Delrael stood tall like a proud fighter from the ancient wars . . . like General Doril, or his own father Drodanis.

“I sssee you! Ssstealing my treasure!”

“No, not at all,” Delrael said. Bryl marveled at how rich and controlled the fighter managed to keep his voice. But he could see Delrael’s white knuckles and how his hands trembled with well-contained fear. “We don’t want your treasure.”

“Then why are you here!” the dragon demanded, eyes blazing. “Why don’t you run?”

“We, uh, came to see you, Tryos!” Bryl said, his brain trying to function as fast as his mouth. He and Delrael would have to work together now for their lives.

“Yes, we journeyed many hexes just to see you.” Delrael rubbed his leather jerkin and preened himself. Bryl had a terrible fear that they were both tangling themselves deeper and deeper.

“For what purpossse?” Tryos leaned forward to glare at them. Hot and rotten breath swirled the air. “Why sssee me?”

“We needed to ask you something—” Bryl started, but his wits ran dry. He turned to Delrael, pleading. Through the exchange, Tareah held herself quiet, as if afraid that anything she said would be counted against them. She appeared to have perfect confidence in Delrael.

“What? What would you asssk?” The reptilian tail twitched, slamming back down with enough force to crush a human head.

Bryl’s shoulders sagged in defeat. His lips remained dormant, despite his hope that they would speak of their own accord

“Ssspeak up!” Tryos said.

Then Delrael cleared his throat. He slapped his hands together, getting down to business. He took a step forward. The dragon’s eyes shifted to the man, and Bryl felt as if a knife had been taken away from his throat.

“We need your help, Tryos.”

The dragon blinked in surprise, drawing himself back.

“Would you please help us?”

Bryl wanted to pull his wispy hair out in frustration. But Delrael spoke with great force, pretending to know what he intended all along.

“Tryos, you are our last and only hope. An evil ogre and his dragon have captured our Stronghold. You are much larger, much greater—we know you could defeat this enemy dragon!”

He turned around, spreading his hands to indicate the piled treasure. “You obviously understand the joy of personal possessions. Gold, jewels, things of value. That’s what Gamearth is all about, right? Quests and adventure, build up the highest score you can before you die.”

Tryos bobbed his head up and down. “Be bessst. Get ahead. Be Number One dragon. Better than all others. Bessst!”

Delrael nodded. “Will you help us regain what is right fully ours? The ogre has a treasure pile of his own—we’ll give it to you.”

Bryl felt stiff from standing in terror for too long.

Then Tryos snorted, raising one jagged eyebrow ridge. “Ogre? Dragon? Who isss thisss dragon? What isss hisss name?”

“The ogre is Gairoth. He lived by a cesspool in the swamp terrain,” Delrael answered. “The dragon is Rognoth—”

“Rognos! Rognos!” The dragon went into hysterics, launching himself in the air, blasting angry fire at the walls. “He isss my brother! Foul! Bad! Runt of the hatching!”

Bryl cringed, astonished at what Delrael had unleashed. But at least the fury had been deflected away from them.

Tryos brought himself under control, snorting and grinding his fangs together. He settled back to the ground, but his tail pounded an impatient rhythm on the rippled stone floor. His eyes blazed with green fire.

“Rognos isss a disssgrace! Black sheep! Shame to my hatching! Worm! I hate him—Rognos!” Tryos hurled another battering ram of flames at the ceiling.

“Thisss Ssstronghold—bigger than my Rokanun? Rognos have more land than me?”

“Oh, much bigger, I’d say. Hexes and hexes, as far as you can see. And no one to stop him.” Delrael sighed. “It’s a shame.”

Bryl cringed, afraid of what ideas might be tunneling through the dragon’s mind.

“Kill Rognos! He isss bad!” Tryos roared, overpowering both of them. “Show me the way to Ssstronghold!”

Bryl tried to be optimistic, tried and failed. If Tryos came back to the Stronghold with fire and thunder, it might scare off Gairoth’s ogres—they should never have been fighting together anyway. It went against their nature.

That left Bryl and Delrael to contend with Gairoth—and Gairoth had defeated the half-Sorcerer before. The ogre had no doubt mastered the Air Stone by now.

But Bryl had the Water Stone this time.

Even with the wildest of advantages, even if they some how defeated the ogre army and got rid of Gairoth and Rognoth—what if Tryos did decide to make the Stronghold his new home? The problems got worse and worse . . . without even considering that the Outsiders wanted to stop Playing Gamearth.

Tryos flapped his wings and stomped a clawed foot on the hardened lava floor. “I will kill Rognos! Now! Take me to Ssstronghold.”

The dragon crawled forward, slogging his way through the treasure pile, scattering coins and gems. He heaved himself up and curled his tail around to them like a long scaly ramp. Delrael took Tareah’s hand and marched forward, maintaining his confident facade. He led her toward Tryos. She looked skeptical, still not believing that her rescuers had come.

Tryos glared at them with his slitted eyes. “Treasure ssstays here. You sssaid you did not want treasure!”

Delrael covered his expression of shock with a muffled cough. “But we must take—”

“Leave treasure here! Come back later. Now we go kill Rognos!”

Bryl touched the fighter’s arm to keep him from arguing. He turned away from Tareah’s sad face. “We’ll have to come back for her.”

Bryl climbed the dragon’s wide tail, pulling himself up the sharp ridges as if they were steps. He motioned for Delrael. The man turned to Tareah, picked her up and gave her a hug. She looked surprised for an instant, then responded. “We’ll come back for you,” he said into her ear.

“I can’t rescue myself,” Tareah answered. “There’s nowhere to go. I could walk out, but I’d never get off the island.”

Then she spoke quietly to him. Bryl heard most of the words, but over the hissing of the lava pool and the rumbling of his own breathing, the dragon would not have heard.

“One thing to remember—Tryos is vicious if he thinks you’re trying to trick him. But he’s very bad with directions. He goes off on his forays and spends more time trying to find his way back than in treasure-hunting.”

Delrael nodded and turned to scramble up the dragon’s tail. He used his kennok leg without thought. Bryl wondered if they should have told Tareah about the balloon, but he didn’t think any one person could handle the balloon alone.

“Luck!” she called.

Bryl tried to wave, but Tryos shoved his way back to the grotto entrance and spread his wings, making the half-Sorcerer cling to whatever handhold he could find.

“There’s the Stronghold!” Delrael shouted to make himself heard over the rushing cold wind and the heavy beat of the dragon’s wings. He pointed down to where he could make out the fenced-in hexagon of the Stronghold proper and the scattered dwellings in the village. Every thing seemed flat from this height, like a giant map. He had to find Steep Hill by following the outline of the stream that skirted the hill and zigzagged along the village, separating the dwellings from the unclaimed forest terrain.

Delrael stared over the curved edge of the dragon’s wing to look down at the Stronghold. This was worse even than being in the balloon. “Somehow or other, we got here.”

During the night and all the previous day, Delrael and Bryl had taken turns crawling up to Tryos’s ears to tell him he had veered off in the wrong direction again. But now they could see the forested hills, the stream, the grassland, the fields, the village. The jagged shadow of Tryos skimmed over the ground at an angle below them.

For two full days without stopping, Tryos had flown north and west, fueled by his anger and hatred toward Rognoth. They flew higher and faster than Professor Verne’s balloon had gone, and the landscape flowed under them like a mosaic of hexes. The wind numbed Delrael’s ears. “Land isss big!” Tryos said.

“Yes. Too bad it’s all Rognoth’s!” Delrael called back. Tryos narrowed his reptilian eyes and sped forward.

Bryl and Delrael sat on the dragon’s wide back, tucked between two of the great plated ridges along Tryos’s spine. As they had passed over the wide, shining Barrier River, Delrael felt proud of himself and what they had done. He pointed it out to Bryl, a gleaming silver channel a full hex wide, two in some places.

Bryl sat, wind-blown, with haunted-looking eyes. He chewed his nails in fear. They would soon be confronting Gairoth. Delrael was concerned too . . . but he felt the most alive, the most real when he engaged in quests and battles.

They had been gone for nearly a month, but below them Delrael could see that the scattered crops around the village had not suffered severely. Other than a proliferation of weeds, the fields could take care of themselves for a few weeks in the summer. The crops had been tended after all, despite Gairoth’s presence—he thought of the veteran Tarne leading groups of characters out of the forests under the shelter of night, pulling weeds by moonlight. Delrael felt proud of him.

The thatched roofs of the village remained intact, with only a few unrepaired patches where the wind had torn shocks of straw from the frames. Delrael had expected to see all the dwellings burned to the ground by the invading ogres; he wondered what could have kept the ogres so busy that they had had no time to release their destructive tendencies. Did Gairoth rule them with such an iron fist? And, if so, why did they tolerate it instead of simply wandering back to their own homes in the swamps?

Tryos curved his neck and swooped downward. The ogre-infested Stronghold and the deserted village waited for them. Delrael rubbed his father’s silver belt for luck. He wished he had been able to retrieve his old Sorcerer sword—it would do nothing against the dragon, but perhaps against Gairoth . . .

Circling the area, Tryos let out a blood-curdling scream of challenge. Delrael had expected to see the ogre army scattering for cover at the appearance of the enormous dragon, but the Stronghold seemed deserted. Tryos landed within the hexagonal stockade near the center of the training field. Wood shavings and mulched tannery refuse, originally strewn on the ground to cushion the falls of trainees, blew in the air, stirred by the bellows of the dragon’s wings.

Delrael leaped to the ground. How could he have imagined an entrance more grand? It was like the golden age of the Sorcerer wars.

With weak knees, Bryl scrambled off the back of Tryos. He felt very old again. The dragon barely paused, however, and turned to them with his spotlight eyes.

“I go find my brother! Rognos! Kill him!” Blasting fire at the overhanging black pine trees on the hill, Tryos launched himself into the air, flapping his immense wings and stirring up a great breeze behind him. He didn’t even seem tired. “You get Gairos,” he called back.

His horny claws glinted with silver hooks as he pulled his limbs upward and tucked them close to his armored belly. “I’m sure glad he’s on our side,” Delrael said.

“For the time being,” Bryl mumbled.

Delrael took a deep breath and turned. He could feel eyes staring at him from the windows of the outer buildings and the main hall. Everything seemed too quiet, too deserted, like a baited trap.

The Stronghold had suffered from the ogre occupation. The two main storehouses were smashed, and the grain pits under them had been nearly emptied. Siya’s garden plots were trampled and torn. Some of the outer dwellings looked disheveled and poorly used. The weapons storehouse seemed intact, probably because ogres had no use for tiny human weapons. Several of the windows in the main hall hung open with shutters knocked off the walls. Delrael could imagine Gairoth and his ogres ransacking everything to seek other treasures like the Air Stone.

The training area where Tryos had landed was packed and pounded but relatively unharmed; maybe the ogres slept there, sprawled out on the mulched ground, snoring under the starlight. A few of the wooden sword posts had been knocked over in splintered stumps. Both of the hanging sacks had been torn down, and their straw stuffing drifted loose on the ground. The front gate of the Stronghold wall lay smashed on the ground, untouched since Gairoth’s victorious entrance a month before.

Then, suddenly and silently, things stirred in the confines of the main hall. Two dozen ogres, virtually identical, emerged from their hiding places behind the woodpiles, in the ruined storehouses. They glanced at the sky to see if the great dragon would return.

The door to the main hall crashed open. Gairoth emerged.

The wind stopped, but the great ogre said nothing. His bulky iron crown held the pyramid-shaped Air Stone, gleaming with transparent power. The ogre had grown even larger than Delrael remembered him.

Gairoth took a step forward with an ominous slow confidence, and even the ground seemed to shake. His big bare feet dug into the ground of the training area. The low sunlight of the afternoon shaded him, casting odd shadows on the gnarled muscles of his arms. He carried his club like an uprooted tree, ready to smash an entire forest.

When Gairoth emerged into the direct light, Delrael could see his skin was dry and peeling in places. All the ogres looked dejected and uncomfortable. The cultivated land around the Stronghold was much different from their festering swamp terrain. The air held less moisture, the ground was firm, the insects were not as persistent. Gairoth did not look to be in good spirits.

A cold look of hatred poured over the ogre’s face. “Delroth!” He smashed his club on the ground.

Delrael pulled his bow off his shoulder in a flowing motion. It fit nicely into his hands. He nocked an arrow. “Leave the Stronghold now, Gairoth. Enough games—we have important things to do.”

“We’ll call our dragon back!” Bryl said from a safe distance. He removed the Water Stone from where he had hidden it in his sleeve. The half-Sorcerer wrapped his fist around the sapphire, turning his knuckles white and letting a misty blue glow seep between them. It made him feel strong. He was a different person now than when Gairoth had tormented him before. “If I don’t get you first.”

Bryl’s voice became shrill with anger and hatred. Delrael remembered what the ogre had done to the half-Sorcerer in the swamps, feeding him to the giant jellyfish in the cesspool, forcing him to teach how to use the precious Air Stone.

Gairoth turned to stare at him, then his single eye gleamed with excitement. He fumbled with the Air Stone in his crown and pulled down the diamond shaped like a four-sided die.

“More shiny rocks! Do more tricks, Magic Man!” The ogre stumbled forward, panting in his eagerness to snatch at the sapphire.

“This is the Water Stone, Gairoth! More powerful even than the Air Stone you possess.”

The ogre slapped his thigh, leaving a wide red mark on his flaking skin. “Haw! Haw!”

Bryl spoke without his edge of confidence. “I warn you—I am more than half Sorcerer. You are a corrupted bastard child born from a Sorcerer father and a stupid ugly ogre mother!”

Gairoth snarled at him. “You be nice to Maw! She loves Gairoth! Maw be mad if you say nasty things about her!”

Bryl squeezed the Water Stone, making it glow a brilliant, blinding blue. Then he rolled it on the ground. “Come on—give me a three or better!”

The face glowing “3” gleamed on top.

Above them, a massive cloud curdled in the air like black milk. A rip of angry thunder buffeted their ears as a bolt of blue lightning lanced to the ground, blasting in front of Gairoth’s feet. The sand turned to slag, and some of the wood shavings burst into flame. Gairoth howled and lurched backward. All the other ogres jumped in simultaneous surprise, though the lightning had not struck near them.

“Give me the Air Stone, Gairoth. Now!” The thunder head still rumbled over them. “Take your mob of ogres and leave here! Give me the Stone, and I’ll let you leave unharmed. But hurry, before I lose my temper!”

Bryl snatched up the sapphire, sliding his fingertips over the facets as if they were covered with oil. Two more bolts of lightning crashed down on each side of the ogre.

With a roar of fury, Gairoth flung the Air Stone on the ground. It bounced once into the air then dropped to the mulched tannery refuse. He also rolled a “3”.

“Haw!” Gairoth snatched up the Stone and popped it back into the setting of his iron crown. He raised the spiked club over his head, gripping it with both hands, then he smashed it down on the ground.

As the club struck, the Air Stone gleamed like milky ice. Gairoth split into two identical ogres, each mirroring the other. With another roar, both ogres—one real, one illusion—brought their clubs down, splitting a second time and doubling their numbers. Four Gairoths, then eight, then sixteen.

“Haw! Haw!” all sixteen ogres bellowed, echoing their laughter from sixteen throats. The rest of the ogre army stood motionless, watching.

Delrael fidgeted, gripping his bow. Then he remembered how ineffective arrows had been when Tarne and the other villagers tried to defend the Stronghold against the invading ogres. Bryl scowled, bringing his eyebrows together. “You’re not any stronger, Gairoth. Those are just illusions. Except one.”

The mirrored ogres echoed their response. “But you needs to find the right Gairoth! Haw!”

Bryl had only three spells left.

Delrael pulled his bowstring tight and shot an arrow at one of the Gairoths, and the shaft passed through the illusion to strike against the far wall of the Stronghold stockade. He rapidly fired a second arrow, exposing an other false ogre. “I can find the real one, Bryl—all I have to do is hit him. You watch, and then do your stuff!” He bent to fire a third shot.

But the other three dozen ogres let out a battle cry and charged at Delrael, waving their gnarled clubs, spears, and massive swords. Delrael was startled but he ignored them for a moment more, firing a fourth arrow, striking one more imaginary Gairoth.

Delrael turned to face the oncoming ogres. He tried to back closer to the Stronghold wall, casting quick glances behind him to make sure he did not stumble. One of the broken stumps of the wooden sword posts got in his way, but he sidestepped it. He nocked an arrow and shot it at one of the approaching ogres. The shaft plunged into the monster’s chest, but the ogre snapped it off with barely a grimace. The ogre batted away Delrael’s second arrow as well. Delrael reached back into his quiver. He had only a handful of arrows left.

Bryl blasted right and left with lightning bolts, searching for the real Gairoth, but then the thundercloud dissolved and the spell was over. The illusion ogres milled about, making it difficult for him to remember which ones had already been exposed.

“Haw! Haw!” Gairoth could take the half-Sorcerer anytime, but he seemed to be enjoying the game.

Bryl cast the Water Stone again. He rolled a “1” and failed.

Delrael shot another two arrows, striking two different enemy ogres with little effect. The monsters pushed forward, swinging their weapons, moving with deliberate slowness. Some struck the ground with their weapons in a childish threatening gesture. They curled their lips into eager snarls, succeeding in making themselves even uglier.

Delrael bumped into the corner of the weapons storehouse. A shiver went down his spine as he remembered his personal training, the role-playing game, where he had fought against the worm-men to steal one of their sacred earth-gems. In that make-believe game he had died—he didn’t want to die again, not here, or anywhere.

The ogres kept coming.

Sixteen Gairoths lifted their spiked clubs, flexing muscles as strong as pulleys. They let out a volley of hideous, echoing laughter. “Haw! Haw!”

Rognoth heaved himself back out of the smashed wall of the village smokehouse. He ran a purplish forked tongue over his fangs, trying to sandpaper away some of the yellow scum. After snapping down five hams and a dozen or so hanging sausages, he didn’t know how he could feel more satisfied.

Before fleeing the village with the rest of the characters, Lantee the butcher had packed his best cured meats and taken them into the forest retreat. But he had been forced to leave some of the hams, sausages, and sides of bacon in the smokehouse. The butcher and his wife had barred and hammered the door shut.

But in the hot and humid air, the delicate smells of meat drifted to Rognoth’s sensitive nostrils. He had already devoured every edible thing in the Stronghold’s two storage pits. Though he did not particularly care for grains or vegetables, he found them to be tolerable if consumed in massive quantities.

Fed properly for the first time in his life, Rognoth had grown enormously in the month he and his master had inhabited the Stronghold. His body had doubled in size and tripled in girth. When he walked, his belly dragged on the ground. His stubby, arthritic wings spread upward like the straining fingers of a dying man.

The dragon’s neck had swelled enough that the rusty iron collar became a constrictive ring around his throat. Rognoth had been unable to breathe; he stumbled around in a daze, seeing black blotches in front of his eyes. Gairoth had finally wrenched the collar free with his two massive hands. The little dragon could now draw in lungfuls of air, feeding the sputtering furnace in his chest. He could smell the wonders of the world, especially the wonders hidden in the smokehouse.

Rognoth had not bothered with the bolted door, letting his clumsy momentum carry him through the wooden walls. Part of the roof fell down on top of him, and sausages tumbled from their ropes on the ceiling beams.

Two sausages and one ham beyond being comfortably fed, Rognoth lurched out of the shed, blinking his eyes in the afternoon sun.

“Rognos!” a second dragon bellowed. “Come here, you bad boy!”

Tryos soared overhead, beating his thunderous wings against the updrafts, scouting the surface of the ground. He circled the stone-filled trench surrounding the hexagonal stockade wall, then glided down the slope of Steep Hill to skim over the village, dragging razor claws on thatched roofs.

With a whimper of terror and shock, the obese little dragon scuttled back into the smokehouse.

Tryos saw the movement and swooped down. “A-ha, Rognos! You disssgrace!” With a snap of his long neck, Tryos strafed the roof with a gout of flame. Lantee’s smokehouse burst into roaring flames. Rognoth waddled away, urgently dragging himself from the burning wreckage.

“Sssuch a disssappointment! You are no dragon!”

Tryos swung around again with flames gushing from his mouth. Rognoth crashed through the split-rail fence around the butcher’s corral for animals to be slaughtered. He galloped on stubby legs, scraping his belly on stones and weeds, and leaped into the shallow stream just as Tryos struck again. Steam poured into the air and hot mud splattered upward. Some of the scales on the little dragon’s back shattered from the heat.

Rognoth charged through the underbrush on the far side of the stream, into the hex of dense forest terrain. Above the forest, Tryos flew low, rustling branches as he grazed the tree tops. At odd moments Rognoth caught glimpses of Tryos up through the covering of leaves. The large dragon belched a wave of fire, clearing away the trees and leaving Rognoth naked and unprotected. “You should not have ssstayed with Gairos!” Tryos pulled up higher, for the deathblow.

Rognoth yelped and saw his last chance for escape. He pumped his stubby wings and launched his barrel-like body into the air. The little dragon zoomed across the treetops, fueled by the threat of flaming death. Rognoth shot forward with surprising speed, like a giant reptilian bumblebee.

Tryos used his great wings to push himself forward in pursuit. Barely able to fly at all, Rognoth could not perform elaborate evasive maneuvers. He flew northward in a straight line that, he hoped, would take him farther than Tryos was willing to follow. The gigantic vengeful dragon beat his wings but could not close with his little brother.

After more than an hour of dodging in the air, Rognoth was exhausted, but his will to survive kept the wings beating. Gravity tried to pull him crashing to the mattress of leaves and branches below.

Tryos, on the other hand, had been flying without rest for two and a half days, covering the immense distance from Rokanun to the Stronghold.

Panting and wheezing, Rognoth dropped low to the treetops of a hex of forested-hill terrain, trying to hide again. Tryos blasted the trees into cinders, but he had begun to lose his breath, and the flame was weak. Rognoth squealed miserably and forced his wings to fling him forward again, heading inexorably northward, as the hexagons of terrain flashed by under them.

Delrael backed against the splintered wall of the weapons storehouse. The ogres converged on him. He had only six arrows remaining, but they had no effect anyway. He needed to find the way out—Vailret said the Outsiders always made sure a situation had some solution.

But if the Outsiders knew of the quest to stop Scartaris, might they not just remove the troublesome characters once and for all?

Bryl struck another illusion Gairoth with a weak lightning bolt, but the one-eyed ogre guffawed. Bryl’s third spell faded out, leaving him helpless again. He had only one spell remaining, one more roll of the Water Stone.

Delrael screwed up his courage and determination. He was the head of the Stronghold. He was supposed to keep the other characters protected. No matter what his father’s orders said, no matter what the Rulewoman Melanie had told them, Delrael had failed in his most important job of keeping the villagers safe.

He made up his mind then. Gairoth was the main threat, not these other ogres. Without the one-eyed ogre to lead them, the others would never remain together. Within days, they would probably fight and kill each other off. Tarne and the other villagers in the forests might be able to retake the Stronghold.

Bryl had one spell left against Gairoth. He might make the Water Stone count—if he could only identify the real ogre among the illusions. And Delrael had six arrows.

Ignoring the advancing ogres, Delrael shot down the line, one arrow after the other, using the skill he had absorbed from years of training. He struck four illusion Gairoths, watching the arrows pass through them to skid against the dirt of the training ground. Then the fifth arrow stuck in the ogre’s shoulder.

“Oww!” Gairoth howled, and his illusory counterparts flickered.

Bryl’s eyes lit up with a surge of last desperate power. The Water Stone bucked in his hand, and he threw it to the ground. He didn’t even look to see if his roll had been successful.

A ball of pale lightning appeared in the air, glowing and bobbing as it moved across the distance. Gairoth tried to duck, but the ball lightning popped against him, singeing his hair and blistering his skin but causing no real harm. Bryl had rolled only a “2”. The ogre shouted in pain.

Delrael’s wrist flowed as he reached up to snatch an other arrow out of his quiver—his last arrow. The oncoming ogres had hesitated for a second. He needed to deprive Gairoth of the rest of his power.

Delrael shot the last arrow.

The point struck the heavy iron crown with a thunk. The crown dropped to the ground and bounced on the packed earth. The Air Stone popped out of its mounting, gleaming on the ground.

The mirrored Gairoths winked out of existence, leaving the one-eyed ogre standing alone. Gairoth roared with pain and surprise.

Delrael could do nothing more. He cringed, then balled his fists. He waited for the rest of the ogre army to plunge forward to beat him with dozens of clubs, to stab him with spears and swords. . . .

“Come on then!” he said, wishing the tears would stop glinting in his eyes and blurring his vision.

The oncoming ogres faltered, wavered in the warm afternoon air, and dissolved into nonexistence.

Illusions, every one of them.

Bryl dived forward, landing on his chest and scrabbling for the fallen Air Stone. Gairoth lurched at him, trying to grab the diamond for himself. But the old half-Sorcerer’s fingers touched the facets of the diamond first; he snatched it up, tossed it across the field—and he vanished, surrounded in an illusion of invisibility. The Air Stone also winked out of sight.

Delrael blinked in surprise. Only a moment before, he and Bryl had been facing two dozen ogres and sixteen identical Gairoths. Now, in the entire Stronghold, he could see only himself and the one-eyed ogre. And Delrael had only a sword.

Gairoth turned red with anger and frustration. His burned skin, already peeling and cracking from being too long away from the swamps, looked blistered and painful. He swung his club blindly in the air, furious with the world, wanting to strike something, punish something, kill something.

He saw Delrael standing alone by the weapons store house.

“We won, Gairoth. Fair and square. You’d better leave now.” Delrael crossed his arms for emphasis, trying to appear tough.

“Delroth!” Gairoth thundered forward, his eye blazing. He ran forward with his club. His bare feet kicked up the mulched wood shavings. “You be dead meat!”

Delrael had no time to duck inside the storehouse for even another dagger. He stood, wishing he could run, wishing he could just defend himself better. He was a fighter. But he could not use bare fists against Gairoth’s battering-ram club.

Before the ogre could swing his club down on Delrael’s head, another pounding came from outside the stockade wall just behind the weapons storehouse. The pounding reverberated in the air, and Gairoth stopped as a hoarse woman’s voice shrieked his name. “Gairoth! You deserve a spanking, Gairoth!”

The ogre dropped the end of his club, letting it thump against the ground. His mouth hung open, dumbfounded. Delrael was afraid to make a move toward the storehouse.

“Gairoth! Do you hear me, boy?” the harsh female voice demanded.

“Maw?” the ogre asked quietly, astonished.

A crash struck the double-walled barrier, and Delrael stared as the upright logs shuddered with the strain. Another crunch, and the wall buckled inward. The logs splintered, and the cement-hard mud between them sifted down.

A huge female ogre flung the broken logs aside as if they were toothpicks and strode into the Stronghold. One hamlike hand rested on her hip and the other held a flat-ended club that looked like an oar for a warship. She had lumpy eyebrows perched on a jutting forehead, and her skin looked as smooth as gravel. Each breast seemed fully as large as her head, and probably contained as much cerebral matter. Her hair was long and ropelike, tied with an incongruous pink ribbon that looked like centuries-old Sorcerer silk. Her buckteeth bit down on flabby lips.

“There you be!” She cracked the flat end of her club against one leathery palm. Her mouth was huge and yawning when she spoke, making “Maw” seem a terribly appropriate name. “You gonna get a whopping like you can’t imagine! Look at you! Playing high and mighty in a”—she spat the word—”human place like this! Now get on home!”

Gairoth bowed his head and shuffled toward the torn hole in the wall. But his Maw stormed forward, threatening to crack him with her club. “What you be, an animal? Go out through the front door! And to think I raised you! Such a disgrace!”

Sheepishly, the ogre turned instead to the massive gates, which Delrael now saw had never been smashed down at all—yet another facet of Gairoth’s Air Stone illusion. The ogre glared at Delrael, but his Maw smacked him for the delay.

Delrael listened to their stomping footsteps diminish down the hill path. Then he realized he was in total silence, alone in the Stronghold. Everything was over, finished, the final turns taken.

Bryl winked into visibility beside him, grinning so broadly his wispy beard protruded from his chin and his wrinkles folded into themselves. He seemed exhausted but delighted. He held the Water Stone and the Air Stone in his hands.

“I thought you were out of spells,” Delrael said. “You used four.”

Bryl smiled. “When I have two Stones, my spell allowance is determined by a different table in the Book. I get a bonus, five spells each day instead of four. Gairoth didn’t know that.”

Delrael chuckled and clapped a hand on the half Sorcerer’s shoulder. “Good thing Gairoth’s Maw came at just the right time.”

“Let’s give credit where credit is due.” Bryl held up the glittering diamond. He turned to look at the section of the Stronghold wall that the ogre woman had smashed. It stood intact, untouched.

“His ‘Maw’ will follow him most of the way back to the swamps, maybe even make him take a bath in the cesspools. She’ll tell him to be good, because he can never know when she’ll be watching.”

Delrael saw Bryl’s eyes glittering with delight. “Making illusions is easier than I thought.”

Delrael looked down and saw that Gairoth’s iron crown had also been false, just a twined circlet of straw. The attack had never been real, the ogre army had never been real. Ogres don’t work together! It all gave him a headache.

“At least it’s nice to feel completely safe again.”

The arctic winds howled around the mountains, slicing like frozen knives. Tryos’s ears ached. His body felt leaden and sluggish—reptiles weren’t made for cold such as this. Snow splattered against his eyelids, smearing his vision. He felt ready to fall from the skies out of sheer exhaustion.

After more than a full day of breathless pursuit, Rognoth had led him to this land of rocky outcroppings glazed with ice and jutting out of glacial debris. The little dragon had somehow eluded Tryos in the blasting snow and raging wind.

Through his numbed weariness, Tryos thought he caught a glimpse of the fat little dragon behind an ice-clad bluff. He surged forward, blasting his last few breaths of fire. The ice melted away, exposing only naked rock, not Rognoth. Perhaps he had escaped, perhaps he had never been there.

Rognoth was lost in the arctic cold and raging storms—and good riddance to him! The larger dragon shook a coating of ice from his scales, freeing him of some excess weight. He had punished Rognoth once and for all—he’d never be naughty again.

Tryos wheeled around and glided southward again, toward the Stronghold. As he traveled over the landscape, he viewed the terrain with a critical, admiring eye. No longer would he need to be content with a tiny island.

The dragon felt proud as he surveyed the land. His land.

13. Mountain of the Dragon

“Science and magic cannot coexist in the same area. Their Rules are contradictory: Science says you can’t get something for nothing, magic says you can. We have to choose how we want to play the Game.”

—Professor Frankenstein, Published Notes, Selected Excerpts

Vailret leaned forward, squeezing his fingers against Dirac’s polished drafting table. “It’s been six days!”

He stopped himself from making a fist and smoothed out his voice. “Please give us a boat or something. We have to try to rescue them.”

“The time for waiting is past,” Paenar said. “We must do something. We must make a difference!”

Dirac flinched from the stare of Paenar’s new eyes. The two professors had designed a pair of goggles filled with exotic oils and floating lenses sandwiched between two wafers of transparent crystal. A wire connected the goggles to a small galvanic battery that had been surgically implanted at the base of Paenar’s skull.

After the invention of the eyes and a simple operation, the blind man had turned around in awe, staring at the clutter of the professors’ workroom, looking at every corner, every shape, every shadow. Paenar smiled, stretching his arms upward and ready to challenge the world. “Now I don’t feel so helpless!”

But in Dirac’s workroom Vailret felt the helplessness return. Many of the trappings of an inventor remained in Dirac’s laboratory: the chalkboard, the drafting table, the scrawled equations waiting for answers. But everything was too ornate, and too clean, merely for show. The drafting table looked oddly like a desk, and the equations on the chalkboard appeared to have been there for a long time, unaltered. Vailret could not remember having seen chalkdust on Dirac’s fingertips. Mayer had never mentioned how long it had been since her father’s last invention.

“Your companions volunteered to be subjects in a scientific experiment.” Dirac sat on a three-legged stool behind his drafting table. He folded his pudgy fingers together and rested his elbows on the table’s clean surface.

“They were to test Professor Verne’s balloon. Since six days have indeed passed, we can draw only two conclusions—either the balloon failed and they have been killed in its crash into the sea . . . or they reached the island of Rokanun, and Tryos the dragon has destroyed them. Either way, your friends are dead.” He cracked his knuckles and sat up straight.

“I can imagine other scenarios,” Paenar said.

Dirac smiled deprecatingly. “I suppose we cannot expect you to understand the Rule of Occam’s Razor. You see, when more than one hypothesis fits the facts, the simplest solution must be the correct solution.”

Dirac stood up from his stool; it creaked as he lifted himself. He picked up a piece of chalk and walked to the blackboard, studying his equations, but ended up writing a short reminder note to himself instead.

“There.” He blew on his fingers to get rid of the chalkdust, then smiled at Professor Verne, who stood watching by the door. Verne had accompanied Vailret and Paenar, ostensibly to monitor the functioning of the blind man’s mechanical eyes; Verne had known full well what the two men intended to ask. He made it clear, though, that he would not argue for or against them.

Paenar stood cold and motionless, as if he knew his presence made Dirac uncomfortable. “Give us a boat, and we will see for ourselves.”

“You owe us that much,” Vailret said. “Our friends risked their lives to test your invention.”

“The Sitnaltans owe you no debt, young man. You have no contract, no written agreement that requires anything of us. You are our guest—do we demand that you repay us for the food and shelter we have freely given? Do not insult me by making similar demands in return.”

He rubbed his hands together and smiled at them again. “You are welcome to remain in Sitnalta. Perhaps in time you can be taught the rudiments of mathematics. and make yourselves useful to the community.”

“Oh, stuff your platitudes,” Vailret snapped.

“Don’t you understand?” Paenar gripped the sides of the drafting table, making Dirac take refuge behind it. “The Outsiders have already set the wheels in motion! They have thrown Scartaris here to grow and grow, sucking all the life from Gamearth! You can’t just ignore this—it won’t go away!” He hung his head, but the anger returned to his face. “Apathy is the worst of all sins, and you are guilty of it!”

Dirac gave him a self-satisfied smile. “You are extrapolating a great deal from a small amount of data, gentlemen. We have only a few ambiguous measurements from Professor Verne’s apparatus—hardly enough information to concoct such a doom-filled hypothesis. Don’t you agree, Professor?”

Verne remained silent for a moment, tugging on his great gray beard, then he frowned. “You are showing very little scientific objectivity, Dirac,” he said quietly, and turned to go. “But, then, perhaps you are no longer an inventor.”

Before Dirac could reply, Vailret turned his back on him and followed Verne without a word. Paenar looked as if he wanted to shout some more, but he scowled and moved in Vailret’s wake.

Dirac recovered himself and called, “Have a nice day!” as the three men disappeared down the hall.

“Follow me,” Verne said. Vailret blinked when they emerged into the sunlight, and Paenar adjusted his mechanical eyes. The wind had come up, whipping the ocean’s damp scent through the winding alleys.

“Why bother?” Paenar said. “You may as well go and enjoy yourself. Play a game or two. We don’t have much time left.”

Verne stared at Paenar’s artificial eyes. “Follow me,” he repeated and turned to stride down a hex-cobbled street.

The professor stumped away from his workshop at a brisk pace, as if always two steps behind where he wanted to be. Vailret grew curious about what Verne had in mind. Paenar followed, fuming and angry, impotent in the face of the end of the world.

“Dirac is too quick to dismiss theories he does not like,” Verne said. “One of Maxwell’s golden rules says that we must search for the truth, whether it be pleasant or unpleasant.”

He stopped and shrugged. “Besides, my data supports what you have said about Scartaris. If nothing else, I trust my own data.”

Verne led them out to the seawall around Sitnalta. Part of the wall had been battered away by the choppy water, and now many Sitnaltan engineers scurried about designing and constructing a new section of the wall, adding supports. A large spidery apparatus used elaborate systems of weights and counterweights to raise gigantic stone blocks, positioning them in rows along the wall. Puffs of steam and groans of stressed metal drifted into the air against the rumble of the ocean. Vailret could smell the salty, fishy mixture of the sea mixed with oil and smoke from the machinery.

Verne indicated the damaged section, speaking in a tone of amazement. “Several weeks ago the ocean attacked our wall. The day was clear, and the sea was still as glass—but a huge fist of water surged up from the sea, as if . . . called by someone.” He shrugged, “None of our theoreticians can account for it.”

Vailret saw a vision of Bryl, possessed by the dayid of the khelebar forest, calling on all the water in the world to come to their aid. Vailret shuddered, but did not volunteer the information to Professor Verne.

They descended a steep, rime-covered staircase on the seawall, reaching a network of docks that stuck out like insolent tongues into the water. The cold wind blew in their faces. Vailret found it refreshing after Dirac’s stuffy reception.

On the docks two men operated a vibrating generator submerged in the choppy water in an effort to lure fish into complex electronic traps. The fishing engineers soon gave up in disgust, covering their equipment with a canvas, and walked off the docks, leaving Professor Verne alone with his two companions.

Verne led them to the end of one of the docks and pointed to a large mechanical object floating in the water, tied up against the pilings in front of them. He whispered, filling his voice with a childish sense of wonder. “This, gentlemen, is the Nautilus.”

It looked like a huge motionless fish, nightmarish and prehistoric. Jagged ridges ran down its long body, jutting like fins from crucial steering points. Thick gaping windows gleamed translucent at the waterline. Vailret sensed it was some kind of boat, and yet more than a boat. Paenar cast his mechanical eyes over the steel-plated hull and made a satisfied noise.

“Frankenstein studied thousands of fish, trying to figure out how they worked, how they swam, how they submerged themselves, how they remained under water. We used his results to create those frivolous toys in the fountain around our water clock, little mechanical fish that swim around and around, aimlessly. But I took his information one step further and combined the physics of the fish with the practicality of a boat. So this is not just a boat, but an underwater boat for submarine travel!”

Vailret looked at the Nautilus, not anxious to step out on the rocking, spray-covered hull. The round hatchway looked like a lidded eye on the front end of the ship. “Does it work?”

Verne tried to sidestep the question, then faced it squarely. “Yes, Frankenstein and I have taken it for several test runs near the shore. Oh, it is beautiful under the water, a world one does not normally see. My Nautilus will take you out toward Rokanun.” He sighed and turned his eyes away.

“But this is not an exploitation of a simple law of nature, as the balloon was. The Nautilus is pure Sitnaltan technology, rooted in science and conceived through my own inventiveness.”

Paenar understood and turned to Vailret. “He means we will not be able to cross the technological fringe beyond the city.”

“No, I mean you may not be able to cross it,” Verne said. “Nothing is absolute on Gamearth—it depends on the roll of the dice, the Rules of Probability. Once you cross the fringe, the probability that machinery will fail increases exponentially. You always have a chance to make it, if you try enough times.”

Vailret frowned, looking at the gleaming metal fish. “Does this mean you’re giving us permission to take the Nautilus? Why didn’t Dirac say anything about this?”

“I’m not certain if I can give you permission. But I can show you how to pilot her, and I can assure you that I will not be here to stop you if, say, tonight you wished to take her and go.”

“Why are you dancing around your words?” Paenar said.

Verne shoved both hands in his pockets. “I am a prolific inventor—I cannot remember how many certificates I have acquired from the Council of Patent Givers. But I am also a Sitnaltan. Since we rarely encounter strangers, and since none of our devices will function far from the city anyway, the question has never arisen if one of my inventions belongs to me, because I invented it, or if it belongs to the people of Sitnalta, who have constructed it and manufactured the materials.

“So, you see, if I were to ask Dirac about giving you the Nautilus, he would say the ship belongs to the city and not to me.” His eyes sparkled. “However, if I do not ask the question, then the issue will not be raised. And no one will deny you the right to take the boat.”

Vailret digested the logic and grinned. “Admirably devious, Professor. You are shrewd in other ways besides being just a great tinkerer!”

Verne stepped on the narrow deck of the Nautilus. He lifted up the round metal hatch and climbed into the control room. Vailret saw panels filled with switches, dials, and other controls. It all looked exotic and exciting.

The professor paused, looking up at the sun’s position in the sky. He withdrew a ticking timepiece the size of an apple and cracked it open, nodding. “We should have sufficient time. Would you like to learn how to pilot her?”

#

To celebrate the liberation of the Stronghold, Jorte dug up one of the last vats of the previous year’s spring cider outside of his gaming hall and broke open the top. He took a wooden rod and stirred sediment from the bottom before everyone dipped cups into the cool brown liquid. Jorte waddled over to a table to drink and enjoy himself for the first time in a month.

Early in the afternoon, the veteran Tarne and several other villagers had crept out of the sheltering forest. They had seen the dragon in the sky, heard the loud battle inside the stockade fence. But now the Stronghold stood silent and ominous. Tarne hoped the ogres had killed each other. The gates were ajar and somehow intact again. He climbed Steep Hill alone, standing in front of the open gates, not knowing what to do next.

And Delrael rushed out to greet him.

After the word had spread, the other villagers flooded back into their old homes and buildings like a long awaited sigh. Lantee the butcher and his wife stared stricken at their demolished, empty smokehouse. Others were relieved that the destruction had not been greater. Most drifted off to Jorte’s gaming hall, not yet ambitious enough to start the job of putting their lives in order before the harvest.

For two days they assessed the damage to the land and recovered from their shock. After his battle with Gairoth, Bryl seemed to be held in higher esteem by the villagers. Delrael stood with Tarne and Bryl inside the Stronghold fence, looking out over the landscape visible from the top of the hill. Tarne pointed to one of the cleared hexagons of cropland. “Our harvest this season will be poor. We tried to come out at night and do the weeding, but that was risky. The storehouses are empty.

“It’s going to be a hard winter for all of us.”

Delrael looked across the cleared land, past the beginning of the hexagon of forest terrain, but he said nothing.

“If the game lasts that long,” Bryl muttered.

A reptilian shriek sliced through the air. Delrael crouched, letting his fighting instincts take over. Tarne and Bryl looked up to see the huge form of Tryos sailing overhead.

The dragon flapped his wings, splaying his pistonlike legs so that he landed with grace on the flat training area. He beat his wings a final time and folded them across his back, ignoring Tarne and focusing his attention on Bryl and Delrael.

“Finished!” Tryos cried in his high-pitched, clipped voice. “Rognos far from here! Never come back. Never.”

“Very good, Tryos,” Delrael said. “Gairoth is gone, too.”

Tryos blinked his eyes-and bobbed his head up and down. “Isss good! No more Rokanun for me! Ssstay here now! Home of Tryos!”

Tarne stared, but Delrael ignored him. Bryl fell silent, standing back from the discussion.

“No more Rokanun?” Delrael asked, speaking in a slow and careful voice.

“Nah! I have thisss land.”

“Okay,” Delrael fidgeted, looking first at Bryl and then at Tarne. He got no encouragement from their appalled expressions. “But what about your treasure? All those years you worked to gather it, surely you don’t just want to leave it there for robbers?”

Tryos lifted his head, snorted smoke. “They would not dare!”

Delrael crossed his arms over his leather jerkin. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Tryos? If you stay away, it’s a treasure for the taking.”

The dragon turned his blazing eyes away. But Delrael smiled. “You could, of course, bring your treasure here. Look at these big empty storage chambers we have—wouldn’t they make a great start for a new set of catacombs?”

The dragon cocked his head, extending his long reptilian neck into the musty darkness of the storage pit Rognoth had gutted. “Pah! Smellsss like grain!” His voice echoed in the chamber; then he lifted his head back out again, blowing dust from his nose. “But they make good cavesss. I bring my treasure here.”

“We’ll help,” Delrael volunteered. “Can we go right away?”

The dragon turned around in circles, then slumped to the ground, stretching his neck out and plopping his chin on the dirt. “Nah—long flight.” He closed his eyes. “Tired now.”

Within moments, low rumbling sounds of the sleeping dragon drifted into the air, drowning out the faint noises of the villagers still rejoicing in the gaming hall.

In their private room in Sitnalta, Vailret and Paenar discussed everything Verne had showed them. All afternoon the professor had bombarded them with instructions, filling the Nautilus’s control room with his accented voice.

Paenar remained rigid on the edge of his cot, staring at the blank wall. They sat listening to the steam-engine vehicles chugging into storage bays to let their boilers cool until morning. The manufactories had closed down for the night. Vailret waited for the gas streetlights to be lit and for the Sitnaltans to go to sleep.

“Our plan has one big flaw,” Vailret said, disturbing Paenar from his daydreaming. “We have even less to fight with than Del and Bryl did. At least they had the Water Stone.”

“We’ll manage,” Paenar said, but the bulky goggles masked his real expression. Lenses floated in their oils, hypnotic in the shadowy light. Vailret shook his head.

“Against a dragon? How? Neither of us can even fight with a sword or shoot an arrow. Not that it would be terribly effective against Tryos, anyway.”

Paenar spoke slowly in the new silence. “Sitnalta has a weapon that’s effective against the dragon.”

They stole down the steps of the Sitnaltan ziggurat in the darkness, lugging the heavy Dragon Siren between them. Vailret sneaked a glance at the streetlights of the jagged cobblestone streets below them. The sleeping city remained silent, but Vailret felt eyes watching them from the blind windows.

“I’ll go first,” Paenar said, “my eyes can adjust to the dark.”

Vailret obliged, following behind and watching where he put his feet. “It seems like we’re betraying Professor Verne by stealing the Siren.”

“Heroic decisions are always questionable . . . until you win.” Paenar shifted his hold on the Siren. “You’ll never be remembered if you don’t take chances.”

“I’d rather be alive than be remembered, if it comes down to a choice between the two.”

After reaching the base of the ziggurat, they hurried through the deserted streets, dodging puddles of yellow lamplight. They stood on the bank of the seawall, listening to the crash of restive waves below them. They stumbled down the worn steps to the docks below. The metallic dish of the Siren dragged at them, but they gritted their teeth. Out of breath and sweating in the chill air, they reached the swaying hulk of the Nautilus on the docks.

Then Mayer stepped out of the shadows. She had wrapped herself in a thin cloak, and looked cold and blown, as if she had been there waiting a long time. She pressed her lips into a thin line and tried to look haughty.

“First my father turns down your request for a boat, then Professor Verne spends the afternoon showing you the Nautilus. Did you honestly think I could not extrapolate what you intended to do?”

Vailret regained his composure and answered her coolly. “We are trying to help our friends, since you Sitnaltans seem quite willing to ignore the rest of Gamearth. Professor Verne graciously offered us the use of his Nautilus after your father refused to help. We’re not trying to hide.”

Mayer laughed sharply. “Who could suspect you of trying to hide, when you creep to the docks in the dead of night?”

“The tide is at its best point now.” Paenar sounded smug. “Professor Verne told us so.”

“No doubt he ‘graciously offered’ to give you our Dragon Siren as well?” She flashed an angry glare at Paenar. “Or perhaps you barbarians have no moral restrictions against stealing.”

Vailret and Paenar said nothing.

Mayer’s short dark hair whipped about in the wind like the barely seen waves, but the tone of her voice changed. Vailret suspected she was addressing something different entirely. “What is it you know? I can see it in you. Any idiot can recognize that Sitnaltan ways are superior to your primitive life in the outside world—yet you don’t admire our city. It’s almost as if you . . . flaunt our technology. What do you know that we do not?”

She seemed honestly curious. Paenar fidgeted. Vailret pondered on the silent dark dock. “I can see and accept some of the advantages your way of life has—especially since I have no Sorcerer blood. In Sitnalta all humans can use the magic of your technology. But you haven’t even made an effort to see if perhaps we ‘barbarians’ do some things better than you.

“You tinker with your calculating machines and your street-cleaning engines, but when faced with a problem your technology may not be able to solve—Scartaris—you dismiss it as something not to be considered.”

Paenar cleared his throat and placed a large hand on Vailret’s shoulder. “We are going to fight against Tryos, and then against Scartaris—it is not likely we will win. But we are trying anyway. Your science has made you blind to the fact that sometimes you can win the impossible fight. Many dice rolls are not likely, but they are possible.”

She hardened her expression. “If you take the Dragon Siren and lose, then Sitnalta will be defenseless.”

“Or,” Paenar countered, “if we take it and win, you need never fear the dragon again. Then your greatest inventors can start to work on the problem of Scartaris.”

“After we’re gone,” Vailret said, “go and talk to Professor Verne. Let him show you his data and his extrapolations. Be objective. Ask yourself if there isn’t a remote possibility that the threat truly exists. Then scrap your frivolous gadgets and invent something to stop this thing! If we fail, all of Gamearth could be depending on you.”

As if that settled the discussion, Paenar slipped past her and clambered on board the Nautilus, lugging the Dragon Siren down into the control room. Vailret stared at Mayer for a moment in silence, then surprised himself by shaking her hand. He jumped onto the deck of the submarine boat and slipped down the hatch without another word. He closed the hatch above him.

Mayer remained on the dock looking flustered and confused, as if puzzled that the confrontation had not turned out as she had planned.

The Nautilus slipped away from the moorings, churning water into foam behind its propellers. The ship poised for a moment on the surface, nosed out into deeper water, then sank beneath the waves like a giant predatory fish.

#

The next morning Tryos smashed his tail on the packed dirt, let out a yowling yawn, and demanded that Bryl and Delrael “Wake up!”

Delrael had slept in his own creaking bed for the first time in a month, but it seemed as if he hadn’t dozed for more than a few minutes. When Bryl came out into the morning sunshine, red eyed and wrapped in his blue cloak, he seemed too tired even to be afraid of Tryos.

He and Delrael sat on the great dragon’s back and watched the ground drop away with each thundering beat of Tryos’s wings. Tarne stood watching them with a defeated expression on his face.

The journey back to Rokanun took two days. The dragon followed a drunken course, losing and then recovering his path. The island and its tall volcano reared up at them from the mosaic of clear blue hexes of ocean. Tryos made a beeline for the wide crater opening. Heat and fumes from the boiling lake of lava hissed up at them as the dragon swooped into his treasure grotto.

Tryos scraped the hardened lava floor with his claws and moved his head from side to side, loosening up. He folded his wings and stood tall in the grotto, admiring the gleaming hoard. Bryl and Delrael climbed off, stretching and looking around. The dragon strutted among the jewels and gold, crunching treasure under his feet.

“Ahh Good thing I not leave thissss!”

Bryl acted eager for another look at the old Sorcerer objects, but did not want to make Tryos suspicious. Dekael found Tareah in a corner by the shadow of the treasure, trying to remain unobtrusive. She looked frightened, determined, but very weak. She had been feeding herself with supplies from a trivial Sorcerer maintenance spell, like Bryl’s, but she needed more.

“You came back,” she said with a sort of wonder. “Now we can go back home.” Delrael clasped her shoulder and gave her a reassuring hug. He found himself feeling deeply sorry for her—Tareah had been isolated for all three decades of her life, with only Sardun for company. He had no doubt she would be inept in dealing with other people, unpracticed, and not accustomed to being totally alone either. No one came to visit the memories in the Ice Palace anymore. Delrael could imagine her loneliness.

Tryos had blasted his way into her sheltered world, taking her and leaving her with no one on whom to depend. No one on the entire island.

Delrael smiled and felt warm inside, wondering if she would see him as a brave prince come to her aid? Just like in the old days of the Game.

But when he hugged her, Delrael noticed how much Tareah had grown, more than an inch in five days. Delrael blinked and stared at her, doubting that he could be mistaken. He was usually quite good with spatial relationships.

Tareah had filled out, adding a year to her apparent age. Perhaps because she had been far enough away from Sardun’s sorcery for so long, her body was making up for lost time.

Delrael interrupted the dragon’s silent inventory. “You will need to work a long time to move all your treasure, Tryos.”

The dragon bobbed his head. “Many trips!”

“You’ll get done sooner if you start sooner. You’d better take a load and go right away.”

Before Tryos could sputter anything else, Delrael continued. “I know. It will be hard work, but well worth the effort.”

Bryl stood by the fighter. “Delrael and I will stay here to guard your treasure. We promise. Don’t worry.”

Tareah looked at him in disappointed alarm.

Tryos narrowed his eyes and glared at the half-Sorcerer, assessing him with a piercing reptilian stare. “How do I know you not take treasure for yourssselfsss? No tricksss!”

Bryl turned his eyes from the dragon’s horrible stare, cringing, but he looked down at the jewels and gold and reasserted his outward calm. “Did we steal any treasure the first time you caught us? And didn’t we find Rognoth for you so you could punish him? And didn’t we take care of Gairoth, too? And didn’t we find you a big new land to live in?”

Tryos hung his head and fidgeted under Bryl’s high pitched outburst. “Yesss.”

“Trust us.” The half-Sorcerer smiled broadly.

“I come back sssoon—not long! Wait here!”

“Of course.”

Like a monstrous reptilian shovel, Tryos opened his huge mouth and scooped up an indiscriminate mouthful of his hoard. He lifted his head with some effort, straining his muscles against the great weight of treasure. The rippling scales in his serpentine neck glittered rainbows from the reflected gold and jewels. A few scattered gems and odd coins jingled back to the ground through cracks in the dragon’s mouth. Tryos shook his head, letting the last few loose items fall free back to the grotto floor. A pearl necklace snagged on one of his fangs, swaying back and forth in the weird orange light from the lava.

“Don’t hurry back now, Tryos—it’ll be all right.” Bryl waved at the dragon. “We promise.”

Delrael nodded. “You could tire yourself out by flying too fast.”

The dragon tried to say something but could not spit the words past the wadding of treasure in his mouth. He almost choked. Delrael didn’t want to hear the question—he wanted to get rid of Tryos as soon as possible. “Don’t talk now, Tryos. You can ask us next time. Have a good trip.”

Flustered, the dragon stopped trying to talk and strode over to the edge of the grotto. Bryl and Delrael waved, smiling so much their jaws ached, before Tryos spread his wings and launched himself out over the lake of lava.

The dragon fell like a stone, headfirst, dragged down by the immense load of treasure. Delrael’s heart leaped with hope, praying their problem could be ended so simply. Tryos’s reptilian eyes widened in alarm, and he beat his wings frantically, flaring his nostrils. The dragon slowed his plunge and labored his way back up to the top of the cinder cone. He puffed with the effort, flew over the rim and into the distance.

“Let’s get up the tunnel out of here.” Delrael turned and ushered Tareah toward the opening. The hiss and bubbling of the lava added a layer of background noise. “We’ll have to run like mad to the balloon. I counted the hexes—we can do it in a day and a half.”

Bryl tallied on his fingers. “It’ll take Tryos at least four days to get to the Stronghold and back, even without resting. Once we reach the balloon, we’ll need time to inflate it and then two more days to fly back to Sitnalta. Once we’re up in the air, Tareah and I can summon up a good wind with the Water Stone—but the magic might not work once we pass the technological fringe.” He shook his head and sighed. “It’s going to be close, very close.”

Tareah looked dejected and her voice sounded bereft in the empty, echoing grotto. “You promised to stay here and guard the treasure. Why did you have to do that?”

“We’re not honor-bound to keep a promise to an evil dragon,” Bryl said. “Are you crazy?”

Delrael looked at her, puzzled that she needed justification. “Tryos kidnapped you and he nearly killed your father. Look at all the treasure he’s stolen. Do you want to stay here?”

“But you promised. I thought you had a better plan than . . . than cheating!” Tareah looked confused, torn between two loyalties. “My father made me study the Rules, all of them. He hammered into me the ethics of gaming and sportsmanship.” Her eyes glittered with either tears or anger. “When you agree to undertake a quest, the Rules force you to complete it. But isn’t a vow to do a quest just an elaborate promise? By the same token, how can you break your promise to Tryos?”

“You’re very naive,” Bryl said. “The object of the game is winning. Whether by battle or by trickery.”

Delrael took the question seriously, though. Vailret would have been able to make much more convincing arguments. “Tareah, trickery is accepted Game play. I didn’t make up the Rules. A precedent has been set—have you ever played poker? It’s a game played with cards, not dice. Bluffing is a vital part of the play. We bluffed Tryos into believing we would stay here.”

Tareah frowned at Delrael’s reasoning. “Well . . . he did steal the treasures in the first place.”

“Tryos is our opponent. We should be allowed to use every means we have to beat him. Especially when your life is at stake. You don’t feel sorry for a dragon, do you?”

Delrael put his hand on her back and moved forward with her as they entered the dank tunnel and hurried upward. “Come on, your father is waiting for us.”

They entered the tunnel, but Bryl stopped as if struck with a spell. His eyes became glassy and he looked around the piles and piles of gems, gold, treasures. He swallowed hard. “Wait! The Earth Stone! It’s here!” He turned to stare at Delrael. “We have to find it!”

“Why?” Delrael asked, showing more impatience. “You said magic won’t help out against a dragon anyway.”

“It won’t,” Tareah said.

“It was lost for more than a century in one of the first battles of the Scouring. A ten-sided emerald.” Bryl sniffed the air, then looked disappointed. “I lost it now, but I had another vision, like when I found the Air Stone. It’s here somewhere.” The half-Sorcerer’s eyes gleamed with a frightening expression. “We don’t have enough time, Bryl,” Delrael said.

“We have to find it!” the half-Sorcerer insisted. “It might help us against Scartaris. Remember what Vailret said. The Earth Stone is the most powerful of all four Stones.”

Delrael shook his head. “We can’t possibly ransack all of his treasure, not if you don’t know exactly where to find it. Our time is too short.”

Bryl closed his eyes, holding his breath as if trying to squeeze another vision out.

Tareah hardened her expression and took a step away from Delrael. “I won’t go with you if you steal any of the treasure—that’s worse than breaking your promise to guard it. You’re not at all like the heroes in the legends I’ve read. I’d rather stay here with the dragon. At least he plays by the Rules.”

“But he stole the Stone in the first place!” Bryl said.

“He never promised he wouldn’t. You did.”

That decided it for Delrael. Unhappily, Bryl followed as all three of them ducked into the dark lava tunnel, fleeing the dragon’s lair.

Vailret looked out at an underwater wonderland. He pressed his face against the thick glass of the eyelike porthole, watching the Nautilus plunge forward. The ship’s cyclopean headlight stabbed into the ocean’s secrets, signaling that this was more than just a fish. Few of the undersea creatures showed curiosity; most fled into the midnight-blue murk.

Vailret absorbed the strangeness of the darting gleams of color, the fishes, the fronds of pale seaweed drifting like sirens’ hair. A colony of winking lights fluttered around the Nautilus, swirling in hypnotic colorful patterns. Before Vailret could wonder at them, the strange lights vanished like extinguished candle flames.

Paenar glanced out the ports only cursorily, impatient to arrive at Rokanun so he could fight Tryos. He turned to the stolen Dragon Siren, inspecting the simple controls and making certain he knew how to work them.

The sub-marine boat flashed through the water, driven by its churning screws.

Three hours after midnight a huge black wall loomed up through the water, cutting across their path like a guillotine blade. Vailret sat drowsy at the controls, wishing he could rest for awhile. He blinked and saw the black wall moving toward them.

For one sick instant he forgot how to bring the Nautilus to a stop. Professor Verne had shown them, but Vailret had no time to try any of the controls. He let out a cry of despair. Paenar stood up so quickly he hit his head on the low metal ceiling. The other man ignored the pain and lurched toward Vailret. Both saw the black wall and knew they could never stop the boat in time. The Nautilus struck the blackness.

Everything went dark for an instant, and then they were through, traveling as if nothing had happened. Paenar dropped back into his seat; Vailret blinked, dizzy. The air in the Nautilus seemed close and stifling, and he wondered if the air pumps were still working. Perhaps they had passed beyond the technological fringe—

“It was just the hex-line!” Vailret cried. “That’s all! The line probably goes all the way to the sea bottom” He laughed. Paenar stared at him in shocked realization for a moment, and joined Vailret in relieved laughter.

They had traveled the distance of a full hexagon in barely four hours. According to the map, from the Sitnaltan docks to the closest shore of Rokanun was only two hexes if they navigated correctly, but they intended to use the speed of the Nautilus as long as they could, trying to circle half the island to reach the dragon’s lair on the opposite end—if the sub-marine boat continued to function that long.

They cruised through a second hex-line just after morning light turned the dark ocean a murky green. They had altered their course to follow alongside the island, and the ramparts of the rising volcanic ocean floor stood like blocky shadows in the wavering distance off to their right.

“We’d better rise closer to the surface,” Vailret said. “No telling when we’ll pass the technological fringe, or when this machine will stop working.”

Paenar took the controls and brought the Nautilus nearer to the surface at a gentle angle. The sounds of the engines made a stuttering pop, then resumed smoothly.

The Nautilus began to break apart late in the afternoon. Twice during the day the engines had stalled, but the two men managed to start them again after several tries. The sounds of the screws were more sluggish, whining and clunking, but neither Paenar nor Vailret knew anything about the workings of the Sitnaltan engines. The Nautilus labored on the surface of the ocean, crawling forward.

Thick oily smoke oozed around the sealed door of the engine room. At the same instant some of the floor panels split apart, popping rivets and letting harsh seawater squirt up through the deck. The ship lurched sharply to the right, toward the brooding island.

The engines sounded as if they were shredding themselves in howls of torn metal. The hot propellers churned the water around the tail of the Nautilus into a steaming froth.

Sea water gushed through breaches in the hull. Smoke from the dying engines made breathing and seeing impossible.

“This machine has served its purpose,” Paenar shouted over the noise and stood up to unfasten the hatch over their heads. He turned his face to Vailret, peering through the smoke with his mechanical goggle-eyes. “We must swim to shore. By the sound of those engines, the Nautilus might explode.”

Vailret cried out, choking. “—reef!”

As Paenar stuck his head out the hatch, a powerful blow struck the ship, throwing him back to the floor. Vailret half-caught the other man, keeping him from dashing his head against the instrument panel. A black elbow of rock punctured the hull of the ship. The Nautilus groaned to a halt.

Paenar clambered to the hatch again as foamy water spurted into the compartment. He peered outside, wiping sea spray from his goggles. “We’ve caught on a reef. It will be tricky going, but I think we’ll be able to walk to shore.”

Vailret coughed and struggled out of the hatch, dropping to the rugged rocky shelf. Choppy water washed over his boots. Rokanun lay not far from them, but a careless blow from an incoming wave could easily sweep them away.

“The Dragon Siren!” Paenar scrambled back into the ship. Vailret crawled back to the top of the hatch, leaning inside. He urged the other man to hurry and helped him lift the Sitnaltan device out of the hatch. Paenar tossed up a coil of rope, and Vailret caught it, wondering how the other man could be calm enough to think of such details.

Panting, they struck out as fast as they could, dodging the crashing waves on the slippery rock, lugging the Siren between them.

With a small explosion, the engines of the Nautilus started themselves again. The powerful screws drove the armored ship relentlessly forward, ripping open its side against the rough rock and sending it plunging into the deep water again. Vailret turned, watching as gouts of smoke spewed into the air from the open hatch and the breaches in the sides. The heavy hull split wider, and the Nautilus slipped beneath the waves, struggling to right itself, like a dying prehistoric beast. Then it vanished completely from sight, leaving only a circle of froth, like a wound on the water’s surface.

Vailret and Paenar heaved themselves up on the rough and rocky beach, panting. The crashing waves knocked both men to their knees as they tried to scramble out of the surf. They somehow managed not to smash the Dragon Siren.

Vailret shook out his stringy blond hair and looked up at the huge cinder cone looming over them. He coughed and spat warm seawater out of his mouth. “Look how far we’ve come.”

Paenar turned to him, but didn’t quite look at the young man. The expression on his face was plaintive and forlorn. “You’ll have to describe it to me, Vailret.”

He tapped his goggles, but the lenses hung dead in the colorless oils sandwiched between the thin glass. “The Nautilus was not the only mechanical thing here. I’m afraid I am quite blind again.”

Tryos dared not swallow, afraid that he might send one or two gold coins into the furnace in his gullet. He flew steadily, leaving the zigzagged outline of Rokanun far behind and striking out over the honeycombed surface of the world. The dragon kept his eye on the different colors of the hexagons below, trying to match it to his dim memory of the route. But often he forgot.

He struck out over land, flying south until he stumbled upon the ocean shoreline again. He followed the shore until he came upon the mud-choked delta of the Barrier River, frothing and still cutting its channel through the forests and plains of the south. He thought he remembered the river, but the surrounding landscape did not look familiar.

The dragon continued westward. His wings felt tired enough to drop off. Anger and discouragement bubbled up inside his chest. He had tried to ask the little humans for detailed directions before he departed, but they had kept him from speaking. Were they anxious to get rid of him?

Tryos snorted because his laden mouth would not allow him to voice the comments he had in mind. He swung around. He’d just have to ask them for directions again. Though he could not find the Stronghold, he was not lost.

Dragons could always find their way home.

After only five hours of flight, Tryos flew back toward the volcano on Rokanun.

14. Battle on Rokanun

“RULE #13: All monsters were created during the old Sorcerer wars. Each monster has its own set of limitations, its own vulnerabilities. Some may be obvious, some may be well hidden. No monster is invincible, but its weaknesses can be very difficult to find.”

—The Book of Rules

Vailret and Paenar worked their way up the volcano’s steep side. In places they had to crawl on hands and knees over the broken-glass terrain of lava rock, cutting and scraping themselves. Darkness fell, making things worse. The stars scattered tricky light on the uneven ground. The two men climbed higher, hauling the Dragon Siren after them.

Paenar’s mechanical eyes flickered on and off intermittently. “They function only about one fifth of the time, I would guess.” He turned to Vailret, then stopped. “There they go again.”

He set off, taking the lead, but Vailret caught up to him and walked alongside.

“I can see flashes of the landscape. I’m used to it now. I just memorize what I see during that instant and keep going until my eyes flicker back to life again.”

Vailret didn’t know what to say.

“I can endure it, so long as it doesn’t ruin my chances of fighting the dragon.” Paenar shrugged, but did not look at anything. “I have to strike at least a symbolic blow for all those times when I refused to do anything.”

They had traveled two thirds of the way to the lip of the cone when Vailret heard a whooshing sound in the silence of the dark sky. Paenar wedged the Dragon Siren beside a massive outcropping. Both men took cover under the overhang, hiding in the shadows.

Vailret looked up at the star-spattered sky and saw a black shadowy form swoop low over the mountain—immense pointed wings, a long tail, a jagged reptilian head. Orange-tinted smoke from the volcano drifted into the night, swirling when Tryos flew through it and descended into the yawning mouth of the cone. The shape of the dragon ducked out of sight below the rim.

Vailret’s eyes glinted wide in the quiet starlight. “He’s going to be very upset if he finds Delrael and Bryl in there!”

Instead, the dragon was upset because he did not see them.

Tryos sat back, his mouth full of treasure in the dark and humid chamber. He grunted, trying to call to Delrael and Bryl. He sniffed but found the human scent was cold. He plodded deeper into the cavern—the scent of the men disappeared into the narrow tunnel leading up and out of the mountain.

Then he looked frantically around: one of his treasures was missing, the daughter of Sardun, the last remaining Sorcerer woman—more valuable than any of his baubles. Tryos let out a roar of rage and betrayal, spraying the gold jammed into his vast mouth in a molten starburst on the grotto walls.

“Tricked! Tricked!” the dragon roared. In his fury he intentionally set fire to one of the stolen Sorcerer tapestries. He forgot how Delrael and Bryl had led him to Rognoth, he forgot how they had shown him a vast new land. The only thing that mattered was their trickery.

Tryos surged out of the grotto and into the night sky. He wheeled around to the opposite side of the cone, picturing in his mind how he would make the two men writhe as he crisped them with his fire.

Delrael, Bryl, and Tareah traveled two hexes by night fall, when the Rules forced them to stop. They had skirted lava rubble and crossed a hex-line that separated the perimeter of the volcano from the surrounding grassy-hill terrain.

Delrael stayed close beside Tareah as they traveled, seeing to her safety. The wind whipped in his face, fluttering Tareah’s long hair in front of his eyes. Delrael carried his old Sorcerer sword again and his hunting bow, neither of which would help at all against Tryos.

“My bones hurt.” Tareah rubbed her arms and elbows. “I think I’m growing too fast. I don’t know why.”

On the top of a tall rise they stopped to rest. They had crossed a hex of grassy hills and waited on the black edge of thick forest terrain. In half an hour or so it would be midnight, and they could push on for another day’s allotment of distance. Delrael turned back to see the outline of the stark volcano etched in the haze from its inner lake of fire. Then his mouth went dry as a winged and monstrous form flew up against the fiery glow. He heard a distant outraged cry.

“Bryl! Look!” he said.

Tareah fell silent, rigid with her own fear. “Now he’s come back for us.” The dragon came after them, blasting the countryside with his flames. Bright orange pinpoints of fire made him appear distant, but Tryos flew at them fast.

“We have to get out of here!” Bryl turned around in panic.

“We can’t go into the next hex until midnight,” Delrael said, standing in a fighting stance but feeling helpless.

Tareah kept her despair in check, making Delrael proud of her. “You won’t have another chance to talk with him. You tricked him, and he’ll want to blast you to ashes. He’ll be more intent on destroying you than he’ll be on keeping me from harm.”

“I’ll protect you,” Delrael vowed quietly. “I just wish I knew why he came back so soon.”

They searched for a place to hide, a place they could defend . . . although they had nothing to fight with. Tryos moved erratically across the sky, searching. Delrael felt alone and exposed on the clear grassy hills.

“Is it midnight yet?” Delrael stared up at the stars. Bryl stood at the black hex-line, pushing against it—but he could not force his feet to move.

In the distance they heard Tryos roar again. An orange tongue of flame flicked out to destroy a few lone trees.

“What are we gong to do?” Tareah asked. “Have you planned for this?”

Delrael just put a hand on her shoulder. He looked at his hands, at his sword and bow.

Bryl shouted. “Now—now we can go!” He danced on the other side of the hex-line. “Hurry!”

They ran into the dense forest. The black shadow of Tryos had come much closer.

“We can’t outrun him. We’d better look for a place to hide.”

They found an area with a few skewed blocks of stone surrounded by thick trees. They crouched under a smooth overhang of rock. Bryl held his two Stones with sweaty hands, whispering to the gems as if praying.

“Are the Stones going to help?” Delrael asked.

“Not likely.” He sighed.

“The Water Stone belonged to my father,” Tareah said. “He used it to try and save me.” Tareah closed her eyes and mumbled a lesson her father had told her many times. “But the old Sorcerers created dragons to resist magic, so that they could attack and leave the enemy helpless.”

Bryl stared at her, thinking. His eyes were red and watery. “It makes the most sense for me to keep the Stones—if I hold both, then I get a spell bonus. After I’ve used up my five spells, then I’ll give you both Stones and you get the same bonus—that way we’ll have ten spells between us instead of eight. It’s a loophole in the Rules.”

“My father let me use the Water Stone.” Tareah did not take her eyes from the blue facets of the six-sided sapphire . “Once. “

Her answer did not much comfort Delrael.

After only a few minutes of hushed waiting, they heard the coming of the dragon. Tryos rained fire down on indiscriminate patches of the forest as he bellowed roars of rage and challenge.

Bryl rolled the Air Stone on the ground and closed his eyes. “There, we’re invisible now,” he whispered. “Tryos will be able to see through the illusion if he makes the effort and if he knows where to look. But he might pass us by and never know it.”

The wings sounded like the heartbeat of an immense giant, pounding the air. Tryos skimmed over the ground, sharpening his anger against the human characters who had tricked him and stolen his treasure.

Delrael held Tareah, staring up at the night sky in utter silence, too frightened to breathe. Tryos casually belched out a river of fire near them, then flew on into the darkness.

“He passed us by!” Delrael said.

“Maybe . . .” Bryl whispered.

A moment later, when the dragon realized he had lost their scent, he bellowed and wheeled around, backtracking. They heard him returning seconds before he soared back into view.

“Now we’re doomed for sure,” Bryl said. He stared at the blue Stone and the white Stone in his hands.

Tryos backflapped his wings, thundering the air. He hissed at the three crouched under the shelter of the overhang. “Now I sssee you! You tricked me! Ssstole my treasure!”

Bryl winced and tossed the Water Stone at his feet. He rolled a “2”.

The dragon let loose a missile of fire.

The half-Sorcerer used the spell to hurl up a wall of water as a shield, feeding it with his own powers. Steam boiled from the surface of the water wall. The dragon flame struck, spattered outward, and continued to bombard the shield.

Bryl’s protection held until Tryos stopped his assault to draw another breath. The half-Sorcerer sank to his knees. “If I miss a single roll, we’re dead.”

Another gout of dragon fire struck at them, and Bryl barely had time to roll again and get the water wall up before the flames could incinerate them. A puff of super heated air squeezed in, and Delrael felt his eyebrows singe. The water wall strengthened, but Bryl looked drained when the dragon finally backed off again.

“I’ve only got two more spells left—then it’s all up to Tareah.” He panted with exhaustion. “I don’t know if Tryos has any limitations with his fire.”

“Then it’s time for us to take the offensive,” Tareah said. She looked at Delrael and raised her eyebrows. Her color was returning, and vigor had appeared behind her eyes, a quick-thinking intelligence forced upon her now that she had to fight. She had studied so many battles, so many legends. Now she could put it into practice. She plucked the Water Stone from Bryl’s hand and stepped out from the overhang of rock.

The dragon reared back, recognizing his treasure. Delrael wanted to yank her back into the shelter, afraid the dragon might blast her for coming between him and his intended victims. But Tareah did not wait long enough for the dragon to overcome his own surprise. She held the sapphire Water Stone in front of her like an elemental talisman, then she rolled a “6”.

She looked like a powerful Sorcerer queen of ancient days, swelled with magic. Balls of blue static danced in her hair as she summoned the Sorcery her forefathers had left inside the gem.

Tareah called forth a storm, blasting Tryos with gale winds, buffeting his wings and bending them back so that they almost snapped like firewood. The dragon roared, and the force whipped at his sinewy neck, twisting shut his windpipe. He tried to blast fire, but the flames came back in his face. Outraged words were torn from his mouth.

Tareah summoned lightning bolts to skitter over the dragon’s scaled hide, leaving blackened intaglios on his armor. Tryos strained his wings and made a small headway against the hurricane winds. Sardun’s daughter exhausted her reserves of strength. She had been sustaining herself with magic for too long. The storm started to weaken.

Delrael stepped out of the rock shelter and shot three arrows at the dragon, but they proved useless against the reptilian armor.

“Bryl, what about the Air Stone?” he said.

The half-Sorcerer shouted over the howling winds. “What can I do? Tryos will see through any illusion I can make to hide us. Wait!”

Just as Tareah dropped her storm and collapsed, Delrael caught her. He pulled her back to the rock outcropping. Bryl snatched up the sapphire Stone from the ground.

Tryos hovered in the air, stunned at the ferocity of her attack, but then he surged forward with renewed anger.

Suddenly, an illusion Rognoth appeared in the air—fat, with stubby wings, flying clumsily but looking terrified of his vengeful brother. Rognoth spurted past Tryos’s face, and the large dragon’s eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets. “Rognos! You, too!”

Rognoth flapped his little wings and buzzed away. The larger dragon plunged after him, forgetting his other victims.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!” Bryl said.

Tareah seemed groggy and drained from summoning the storm, but she soon regained her strength. Delrael looked at the rock overhang sheltering them. It was bubbly and molten from the dragon fire.

They ran as fast as they could into the forest.

Above them, the sky looked bruised and clotted, choked with the smoke and steam and fragments of Tareah’s storm. Bryl left the weather to repair itself and focused on the ground around them. Taking back the Water Stone, Bryl drew a deep breath and rolled again. “This is my last spell for another full day.”

“Luck, Bryl,” Delrael said.

Thick fog swirled up from the forest floor, seeping out of the earth and blanketing them from view. The vapors rose upward, dank and foul. “Now he can’t see us, or follow our scent.”

Tareah no longer needed to lean on Delrael’s side, but she remained close to him anyway. Her face was ruddy from excitement, fear, and exertion.

“The illusion of Rognoth won’t fool him for long. He’ll see through it once he starts to think.”

Above them they could hear the dragon as he returned for the kill. “Not real Rognos!” Tryos said. “Another trick! Tricksss! Kill you for tricksss!”

Delrael could not see the dragon overhead through the fog. Tryos would be looking down on a cottony bank of mist, a real mist created by the Water Stone, not an illusion.

But the dragon would find them again before long. Tryos jetted flame on the mist, leaving a burning and blasted landscape behind him. He methodically swept over sections of the fog, spewing fire on the mist, searching for them.

Exhausted, scraped, and bruised, Vailret and Paenar pulled themselves to the towering lip of the volcanic cone. Paenar slipped the knotted rope from his shoulders, and they balanced the battered Dragon Siren on the rough ground.

The top of the volcano commanded an incredible view of the entire island. Starlight reflected off the hexes of seawater that hid the wreckage of the Nautilus. Volcanic debris lay all around them where lava had oozed out centuries ago, hardening and crumbling into hexagons of desolate terrain. Tendrils of smoke curled up from the simmering lake of fire; splashes of orange light danced around the interior of the cone, illuminating the opposite rim.

Paenar stood up, scanning the distance. A brisk wind blew the smoke away from his face. “I see a disturbance over there.” He pointed toward the central forests of the island, and then sighed in annoyance. “My sight is gone again. Please look and see. Maybe it was only a mirage through the oils.” His voice was flat and clipped, but quivering with anticipation.

Vailret withdrew the small optick-tube he had taken from the Nautilus’s equipment bunker and turned the magnifying lens to sight on the distant flashes of fire. The telescope still baffled him, but he quelled his dizzy sensations and lined up his field of view. Tryos sprang in front of his eyes, blasting flames.

He cried out in surprise. “Tryos is attacking someone—I think it’s Del and Bryl! I can’t make out the details.”

Vailret turned the dish of the Siren toward the distant dragon. Moving desperately, he reached for the toggle switch that would allow him to call on Tryos in a thunderous voice.

Paenar placed his thin hand on Vailret’s arm, stopping him. The blind mans’ sinews stood out on his wrist, and his bony knuckles were white. “We need to settle this first. You know I must be the one. It makes the most sense. I want to do it.”

“You’ll be killed.”

“So would you, if you took my place. That’s no excuse.” The businesslike, rigid voice melted to a more personal tone. Paenar clasped his hands together, as if to stop himself from begging.

“You must allow me to atone for what I have not done, for allowing the bad things to grow unhindered. It’s the only way my conscience can survive, even if I do not.”

Vailret did not know how to counter the other man’s defense. Normally, he would have argued, stalled for time, but Tryos was attacking his friends. “I won’t let you sacrifice yourself just to show off. Think of how much more you could do in the fight against the Outsiders.”

“Think of how much more I could do? Oh? Even my mechanical eyes have failed. Going blind may be cruel, but less cruel than having sight dangled in front of me, tantalizing, and then snatched away. Twice! The only way I could regain my vision now would be to remain in Sitnalta for the rest of my life. That would help no one. I’d rather die here, fighting. You taught me how to do it. It is my right.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Can you think of any other way? No—I have been trying ever since we left the Nautilus. There is no other way.” He stamped his foot with finality.

“Now summon the dragon, before he destroys your friends as well.”

Feeling sick and defeated, Vailret bent to the switch and flicked it. He switched it on and off three times before the probabilities finally made it work. Vailret spoke, sending his voice out in thundering waves across the island.

Tareah could run no farther. Bryl’s eyes brimmed with tears of fear, despair, and shreds of leftover defiance. Delrael stood beside Sardun’s daughter, trying to look brave and strong. He ran a fingertip along his silver belt. “Maybe someone will remember our adventures.”

They huddled together like captured rats, listening to the dragon’s torch sweep nearer, then drift away, then come back closer still. Bryl handed her both the Water Stone and the Air Stone. “You’ve got four spells left. That’s all we have now.”

Tareah looked as if she had no more strength to give. But she pressed her lips together and took the gems.

For lack of anything else that offered hope, Delrael withdrew his bow. He wondered if he might be able to injure the soft inside of Tryos’s mouth . . . but then he realized that if it could withstand furnace fire pouring out, the mouth would certainly be tough enough to deflect an arrow.

He thought of Vailret and blind Paenar back in Sitnalta, sorry that he could not have a chance to say good-bye.

It would be only a matter of time before Tryos stumbled upon them in his methodical search. Bryl could not maintain the fog much longer. Tryos would be able to see them soon.

See them! Delrael clenched his knuckles on his bow. The memory of Paenar had sparked an idea in his head. Maybe the dragon’s eyes would be vulnerable to arrows. He hesitated. The idea made him uneasy.

But they had no other chance.

Just as Delrael nocked an arrow against the bowstring, Tryos burned away the sheltering fog. Bryl’s spell dissipated, leaving them exposed.

Tryos backflapped his wings and leered down at them. His fangs glistened in the reflected light of scattered fires in the brush. He curled his serpentine neck and drew a deep breath, stoking his internal fires.

Delrael let loose an arrow. He closed his eyes, but the lightheaded feeling told him he had found his mark. Tryos reared back, seeing the shaft approach. His yellow green eyes widened in surprise—and the arrow sank all the way to the feather into his wet pupil. Steaming black blood poured out. The wooden shaft burst into flames.

Shrieking in agony, Tryos vomited fire down at the ground. But Delrael’s success had galvanized Tareah into finding her own strength. She rolled the sapphire die, and the shielding wall of water leaped up around them. Steam boiled away, and the air became thick under the cramped dome.

The dragon’s attack seemed to last forever. Tryos choked on his pain. Tareah let the water wall splash back to the smoking earth. Delrael took his bow again, firing once, then a second time as the dragon filled his lungs.

Tryos gave a moaning cry even before the arrows struck. The first arrow glanced off his horny lower eye lid, falling to the burning ground. But the second struck home in the other eye.

The dragon wailed in pain and dismay, blasting fire aimlessly, flying in circles as if uncertain whether to flee or to continue his attack.

Tareah looked distraught and could not watch the dragon’s flight. “We tricked Tryos. He had a perfect right to be angry with us.”

“We have to get out of here before he can find us again.” Delrael forced himself not to think about what Tareah had said.

But the dragon took less time to recover than they needed. Before they could cover much distance, Tryos swooped down, craning his neck and trying to locate them by their sound, by their scent. His flames were tinted blue, hot enough to melt rock on first contact.

“How much fire can he have, Bryl?” Delrael said, panting. “Don’t the Rules put limits on that?”

“I don’t know—ask Vailret! But you can bet he’s got more than we can withstand.” The half-Sorcerer clamped his mouth shut to absorb a cry of exhausted despair. Tareah whimpered as she tossed the Water Stone to the ground again.

A “1”. Her spell failed.

“Roll it again!” Delrael said.

She grabbed the sapphire and rolled it for the fourth time. The dome of water bloomed around them at the same moment Tryos struck. Bryl cried out. Tareah shuddered, concentrating on the Water Stone, flushed and sweating.

Under the constant barrage of fire, the ground turned a baking red, beginning to bubble. Inside the shelter the air was hot and depleted, filled with steam and empty of oxygen. Delrael had to suck in great mouthfuls of air just to keep his lungs from collapsing. His face felt raw. He clenched his bow in despair.

The ground under their feet grew unbearably hot. Tareah looked as if she would collapse in another moment.

The dragon’s blue fire kept pounding down.

“Tryos! Dragon! Come back to your mountain at once! I command it!”

The words came rippling across the night. Tryos turned away from the shrinking bubble that protected his enemies against even his most venomous fire. The dragon saw only darkness, felt only spears of pain that stabbed through his ruined eyes.

“Tryos, return to your home! Or I shall destroy your treasure!”

With a squeal of rage Tryos flapped about in anger and confusion, not knowing whose voice cut across the night. He could not leave now. His enemies, the characters who played horrible tricks on him, were trapped. His fire had dwindled, but they would be destroyed in moments. He could picture their blackening skin, their faces; his dragon fire would burn their lungs from the inside out as they drew a final breath to scream. They deserved it. They had tricked him.

But his treasure! The voice would destroy his treasure—unless he destroyed the voice first.

With another cry of outrage, Tryos whirled in the air and shot back toward the volcano, to Vailret.

Vailret licked his lips and swallowed, preparing to talk faster than he ever had before. Delrael was the fast talker. Delrael had the charisma score to convince characters to believe him. Not Vailret. But he would have to learn.

Vailret watched through the optick-tube as Tryos flapped across the island, pistoning his wings. The dragon sniffed and swept back and forth, somehow finding his way. Vailret tucked the tube in his pocket and stood next to Paenar, trying to look brave. His heart pounded, sending blood roaring through his head. He didn’t know what he would do if Tryos recognized the Siren from Sitnalta.

The dragon circled around the rim of the volcano, vanishing in the patchy smoke rising from the lava below. Tryos seemed to be searching, sniffing the air, though both men stood unhidden. Then the wind currents changed and Tryos snorted, homing in on their scent.

Seething, the dragon flapped his wings twice and landed on the crater edge. He extended his neck, snuffling. Two charred arrow shafts protruded from his cavernous sockets. Vailret drew back. Black blood smoked as it hardened over the wounds.

“Who are you?” Tryos demanded. “How will you get my treasure?” He breathed with a sound louder than purring Sitnaltan machinery, drowning all other night sounds. “You sssmell like humansss! Bad humansss! Play tricksss on Tryos!”

“Yes, we are humans. Both of us.” Vailret shuffled his feet. “But you will be interested in what we have to say.”

“No! No more tricksss! Humansss trick Tryos! All men bad!”

Vailret let his mouth roll the words as fast as the gleam came into his eye, trying to imitate Delrael’s skill. “Ah, Tryos, all men are not your enemies—we are your friends. Those characters you were attacking? They are our enemies, too! We came here to kill them. My friend Paenar and I want to be your allies.”

“But one man can’t hate another man!”

“All characters are different, Tryos—and some men are very bad men. Surely some dragons must be enemies?”

“Yesss! Rognos isss my enemy!” Tryos grumbled with a vehemence that frightened Vailret.

Rognoth?

“We can work together, Tryos. We can help you destroy those bad men. And we brought a weapon with us, a weapon that will destroy the enemy in a horrible way, much more horrible than simple burning with dragon fire. Those two have no defense against this special weapon—we built it just for this task.”

“Where isss thisss weapon?” Tryos said. He leaned forward to sniff the Dragon Siren. “Thisss kill them? They hurt my eyes. I tired now. No more fire left. But you have weapon!”

“You will take it to them, and Paenar can use it to destroy the enemy.” Vailret crossed his fingers, wishing himself luck. “You can trick them yourself. They don’t know you have the weapon. That’s part of the Game, remember—trick your enemy.”

“Yesss! Trick them! Give weapon to me!”

Vailret turned to Paenar, and the blind man nodded. He stood rigid, his mind made up. The two men lugged the Siren over to the dragon. “To work best, Tryos, this weapon has to be mounted just at the back of your head, behind your ears,” Paenar said.

“Yesss.” Tryos lowered his broad head to the ground. Paenar scrambled up the dragon’s plated body, hesitated suddenly as his mechanical eyes ceased to function again, then picked his way at a much more careful pace.

“Paenar, I’m going to toss up the end of the rope. Try to catch it.” The end of the rope struck the blind man’s chest. Paenar scrabbled for the end but missed, and it fell back to the ground. Vailret tossed it two more times before Paenar caught it and secured a heavy knot around the dragon’s neck.

Together, they hauled the Dragon Siren up on Tryos’s back. The dragon fidgeted. “Hurry up!” he said. “How does weapon work?”

“Paenar will ride on your back and you will fly to our enemies. When it is time, he will switch on the weapon. And then . . . then that will be the end.”

“Good, good! You sssmell funny—afraid? What will happen?”

Vailret swallowed hard. Paenar leaned over to the dragon’s ear. “We’re just anxious to see the end of our enemy at last.”

Paenar lashed the Siren up against the back of the dragon’s skull, knotting the ropes. Vailret watched the blind man tie himself down, secure against a fall. He felt sick inside.

“We go now!” Tryos stomped his foot on the volcano rim.

“Yesss, we go now,” Paenar said with an undertone of sarcasm. He cocked his head down, but from his attitude Vailret could tell Paenar’s eyes were still not working. A blind man riding a blind dragon in the dark of night. Paenar held his hand up in a farewell salute. “Remember Scartaris—for me.”

“I will. I promise. Luck—I wish you all the luck on Gamearth.”

“I am ready, Tryos,” Paenar said.

The dragon launched himself off the rim, rising straight up over the wide mouth of the volcanic cone.

To Paenar, it was a cruel joke for his eyesight to return just as they flew over the wide maw of the volcano. He looked down to see the boiling red lava, the corrosive smoke, the sharp and jagged rocks far below.

Inside him, his guilt and anger burned like molten iron. Since he had met Vailret and had seen the incentive the young man carried in himself, Paenar’s own guilt had been nearly unbearable. He realized that some parts of Gamearth were worth saving, worth fighting for. Now he had a lifetime of apathy to repay, and not much time to do it.

The dragon beneath him was a target for his anger, a symbol of the bad things about Gamearth. By destroying Tryos he could strike a blow against the Outsiders—he could free the city of Sitnalta to work on the problem of Scartaris; he could allow Tareah to return to her father, where she and Sardun could fight Scartaris.

But only if he destroyed the dragon.

His hand strayed to the Dragon Siren. He twisted the dish, aiming it at the back of Tryos’s head so the spear of sound would pierce directly between the two cavernous reptilian ears. Paenar’s mechanical eyes flickered, filled with bursts of random color, then focused again.

So far from Sitnalta and the technological fringe, chances were remote that the device would work the first time . . . but the Siren would work, if he tried enough times.

“Here is my weapon, Tryos,” Paenar said quietly. “Do you remember it?”

He reached forward and touched the switch, stopped, and drew in one more breath. But the stink of sulfur smoke filled the air. “Give me luck,” he said.

His mechanical eyes plunged him into blindness again, so that he could not see the fiery open wound of lava below. Paenar pushed the switch upward.

Nothing happened. He flicked the switch up and down, over and over again. He had to keep trying. By the Rules of Probability, it would work if he tried enough times.

It did.

Sound surrounded him with a hurricane of noise. He jerked backward, but the ropes held him in place. The pulses pounded, penetrating into the dragon’s skull.

Tryos shrieked in horror, pain, and deeper betrayal—he went wild in the air, thrashing, plunging, trying to shake off the murderous Siren. But the tight bindings held it fast. Paenar was thrown back and forth like a puppet in a whirlwind. The ropes kept him on the dragon’s back, but they cut deeply into his skin and broke two of his ribs.

Tryos writhed in the air, screaming, turning somersaults. The Siren pounded on, unrelenting.

The sound stopped for Paenar as his eardrums burst. The faceplate of his mechanical eyes shattered, and the many-colored oils sprayed out from the cracks, kept under pressure to suspend the floating lenses. The lenses spilled out, flying and glittering in the air.

Blind and deaf, Paenar could still feel himself thrown about in the dragon’s fury. Though he could not hear it, the Siren wailed away, pummeling his bones. He felt as if his skull was being crushed within a giant fist.

He lost consciousness when he could endure it no more. . . .

Mad with pain, Tryos soared upward, circled blind, and thrashed about in the air. He made a reckless, unseeing dive and plunged deep into the throat of the volcano.

The dragon, and Paenar, and the Siren were swallowed up by the lake of fire.

Vailret dove for cover as a belching explosion within the volcano spewed a geyser of fire into the air. He stumbled, dizzy from the echoing onslaught of the Dragon Siren. Lava splattered around Vailret, but the scant shelter of a few large boulders protected him.

The Siren stopped as soon as Tryos vanished beneath the flames. The rumble inside the volcano faded away. On the side of the cone, Vailret could see dull red patches of cooling lava. Parts of the distant forest terrain gave off an orange glow as fires burned themselves out.

Vailret stared in silence over the lip of the crater, peering deep within the cone, searching. The molten light shone upward, scattering the shadows. But Vailret saw nothing of Paenar, nothing of the dragon, nothing at all.

15. Sardun’s Daughter

“RULE #18: Remember Rule #1—always have fun.”

—The Book of Rules

The red-and-white balloon drifted off the beach, splashing the bottom of the basket against the choppy waves before it rose into the air like swollen dandelion seed. Water dripped from the gondola, running through the holes in the wicker. The balloon fought a tug of war with gravity, pulling its heavy load of passengers aloft. Delrael removed every one of the sandbags just to get them in the air.

When the metal gas tank had emptied itself into the giant sack, they heaved the empty tank over the side into the sea. Delrael watched it fall. A bright white splash bloomed on the surface of the ocean.

Delrael’s face and hands still appeared raw and blistered from the dragon’s attack. Vailret sat in uncharacteristic silence, looking back at Rokanun as it faded into the distance. The volcano, alone and empty now except for the dragon’s abandoned treasure, stood above the rest of the terrain.

Even without the bulky canister of gas, the gondola offered little room for them to move. Tareah hung close to Delrael. Bryl acted uneasy, as if afraid a careless movement by one of the passengers could knock him out of the basket. Vailret wanted to be left alone, but no one could find privacy while bumping elbows with three other people. They all knew it would be a long journey.

Bryl and Tareah took turns with the Water Stone, not speaking much but keeping a brisk breeze pushing the balloon northward.

They drifted past the zigzagged shoreline where the hexagons of ocean surrendered to forest or grassland terrain. The city of Sitnalta rose on their right, alone and isolated from the rest of Gamearth. Without Sitnalta, they would never have reached the island of Rokanun—not Delrael and Bryl in the balloon, not Paenar and Vailret in the Nautilus. Without the Dragon Siren, they would never have been able to destroy Tryos.

But Vailret could not understand the characters there, and that disturbed him. The Sitnaltans replaced magic with science, then made themselves as elite as the old Sorcerers had.

When they could see the city buildings clearly and recognize the hexagon-cobbled streets, they waved and signaled that they were all right. The bright balloon in the sky would draw the attention of most of the optick tubes in the city, proving to Professor Verne that his balloon worked beyond the technological fringe. Verne must already know that his Nautilus had died.

Vailret leaned over the basket, looking down. “I guess we’re giving the balloon an even more extensive test than they wanted. Do we have any intention of giving it back to Professor Verne?”

“I can’t stop there again,” Delrael said, looking into the distance as he rubbed his kennok limb. “I don’t know what would happen.”

“With the balloon we can return to the Ice Palace much faster.” Bryl reached out to touch Tareah’s shoulder, but she shrugged him away. “That’s most important right now.”

They traveled without slowing. The balloon sailed over uncounted hexes of forest, forested-hill, grassland, and grassy-hill terrain. Drifting on the winds, they were not bound by the same distance limitations the Rules imposed on those traveling on foot. They rose over the craggy barrier of the Spectre Mountains, looking down at where the derelict Outsider ship lay in ruins. Vailret wondered if the Sitnaltans would ever do anything with it.

Air currents swirled over the mountains, but Tareah used the Water Stone to smooth the updrafts. She appeared tired, but hardened somehow within. Bryl curled up against the wall of the basket, snoring in exhausted sleep. He had used his minor replenishment spell several times to refill their packs with food and water.

Night and day passed again and again, and still they did not rest or stop. Nothing could harm them so high in the air. The balloon’s height fluctuated noticeably from day to night, rising and falling. Day after day, too, they could see the red-and-white sack beginning to sag as the invisible gas leaked out of the imperfect seals of the flaps. They drifted northward, but they also drifted downward.

The travelers all felt stiff and cramped, confined in too small a space for too long, but they endured, thinking how much more uncomfortable it would have been to trudge across the map for weeks, sleeping on the ground and then crossing the rugged mountain terrain, vulnerable to whatever wandering monsters lay in wait.

Delrael and Tareah talked together. He told her heroic stories of the quests he had undertaken, the adventures, searching in dungeons for treasure and monsters. Tareah, accustomed to stories of long-dead Sorcerers, was charmed to know someone who had personally done something worthy of retelling.

Listening to Tareah’s intelligent comments, Vailret forced himself to remember that the little girl had lived a decade longer than he himself had.

Tareah continued to grow, though, alarmingly. Her arms stretched out, and her body grew, and her facial features changed, becoming more mature but still retaining an expression of wide-eyed wonder at the world she had never seen. She appeared to be in her early teens, and her body filled out, making her look like a woman instead of a girl. She complained of terrible pains in her limbs and muscles, as if she were being twisted and pulled, forced to catch up with her years. Delrael tried to comfort her when he could; Tareah said it helped, which made him glow inside.

But none of them wanted to guess why Tareah was released from the spell that had held her in the body of a child for decades.

Unless something had happened to Sardun . . .

Vailret hung on the rope netting that held the red-and-white balloon in its spherical shape. Delrael scrambled on the other side, opening some of the flaps to release the remainder of the buoyant gas, enjoying himself. He used his kennok leg with natural ease.

The balloon drifted closer to the ground, skimming over the surface of the wide lake that now filled the haunted Transition Valley. The Barrier River surged through the deep canyons in the mountains, rushing from the Northern Sea along its course.

As the gas escaped, the bag crumpled, sagging inward. The basket bounced on the ground, knocking the travelers to their knees. It rocked back and forth as if it couldn’t decide whether to take to the air again or not, then finally came to rest where the mountain terrain met the valley on the western side of the Barrier River. They brushed themselves off and stood on firm earth again, stretching and blinking.

“We couldn’t have navigated through those mountains, anyway. Not the way the balloon was leaking,” Vailret said. “We can walk to the Ice Palace like we did before.”

“Without Sardun attacking the weather, the trip shouldn’t be too bad.” Delrael looked around and started walking.

“I, for one, would not mind stretching my legs a bit.” Bryl rubbed his knees.

Anxious to get back to her father, Tareah wouldn’t let them rest. She glanced at the northern landscape, trying to recognize the mountain peaks and letting relief mingle with worry on her face.

They set off, abandoning the limp balloon on the cold and soggy ground at the river’s edge. At the black hex line dividing the terrain types, they passed between the two towering ice sentries that guarded the winding road. The wind around them was cold and whispering, making the silence seem deeper.

Moving stiffly, Tareah went forward into the ruins of the Ice Palace, alone. Tears glistened on her cheeks. Delrael tried to speak to her, but his throat went dry. Neither Vailret nor Bryl said anything.

The once-magnificent Palace lay tumbled in pools of motionless water covered with a scum of ice as the sun set and the mountains cooled. Gigantic bluish-clear bricks lay scattered like a child’s building blocks. Delrael remembered the tall shining spires, the gate, the rainbows of light penetrating the blue ice walls. A dusting of snow brushed against the larger blocks; other massive chunks of ice had left deep impressions in the half-frozen mud around the foundation.

“What happened here?” Bryl finally whispered, but no one answered him.

Tareah stared, unmoving. Delrael put a hand on her thin shoulder and stood by her at the crumbling arch of the main gate. She shuddered when he touched her, but he did not let go. The glistening rubble reflected tinges of orange as the afternoon neared sunset. “I have to go inside,” she said.

“There’s nothing left,” Delrael said.

“My father’s in there. Somewhere.”

She stepped through the blind Palace gate, crossing the threshold. A burst of blue light glowed around her, and a vision filled the air: the last moments of Sardun recorded and frozen within the arch.

“Father,” she said.

“It’s just an illusion, a message,” Vailret said. “What happened to Sardun?”

“Tareah,” said the image of the old Sentinel, clothed in his gray robes and looking thin and withdrawn. “You will have returned by now. The dayid has shown me, shown me many things.”

The Sentinel’s throne had melted. In the image the ceiling came down in chunks around him, spraying slush, letting the sunlight penetrate where it had never gone before. The warmth of the northern summer slashed at the Palace like knives to draw cold watery blood.

“The Ice Palace cannot remain intact without the Water Stone. It cannot resist the weather, it cannot stand the heat of the sun.”

Sardun seemed to know everything Delrael, Bryl, and Vailret had done. His voice sounded tired, and his lisp had grown heavy. “But without the Water Stone, you could not have been rescued. I made the right choice.”

The wavering illusion stared at them. “The Ice Palace is melting, and I can do nothing to stop it. Nothing.” Behind him, an avalanche of icicles came tumbling down. Delrael silently urged the old Sentinel to flee the danger. But Sardun’s eyes filled with a far-off gleam, a shining emotion that made him want to shudder.

“The dayid is calling me, clamoring in my mind. The voices have not let me alone since I woke them to create the Barrier River.”

His words dropped to a whisper. “The voices in the dayid want me to join them. With the spirits of the other Sentinels.”

“No!” Tareah said. “Don’t . . .” Her voice sounded very small.

Delrael stood beside her, but he didn’t know what he could say to comfort her. “This already happened, days ago.”

In the image, Sardun drew a ragged breath, blowing steam through his drooping moustache. “I have lived far too long. It is time I leave Gamearth to those who deserve it. You, Tareah, are the last of us. Make the right decisions. Do what is best for yourself and for the memory of our race.

“Give my utmost thanks to those who have rescued you. I can withstand the pull no longer, the urging of the voices. I must join them in their loneliness, and make it better for awhile.”

Sardun’s skin had taken on a translucent, whitish glow. The firm distinction between his skin and the air around him grew fuzzier as the light intensified. Behind him, water poured down the blue walls of the Ice Palace, breaking the bonds that held the ceiling arches together, letting an avalanche of ice boulders come raining down.

But Sardun was consumed in a flash of blinding white fire that swallowed up his flesh, the huge ice blocks, and the vision itself.

The dimness of sunset filled the air again.

Tareah stood motionless for a long moment, and then, slowly, started to cry.

#

“You’ll like the Stronghold. You’ll see,” Delrael said, trying to convince her with the enthusiasm in his own voice. They hiked down out of the mountains, resting and discussing what to do next about Scartaris.

“I’m going to kill that thing,” Vailret said under his breath. “I made a promise.”

Tareah turned against Delrael, craning her neck to look into his eyes. She was tall enough now to stand face to face with him. “I’ll try to like it.” She wore her grief like a half-healed wound. “And I will try to help.”

They crossed a hex-line into new terrain, heading back home.

Epilogue

Melanie stretched her arms and glanced at the clock. Scott yawned loudly.

“We played a long time,” Tyrone said. “That was great.”

Melanie felt delighted. At the climax they had been shouting, rolling dice, cheering, enthralled by the adventure. She tried to see if David’s expression had grown softer.

“Didn’t you have fun, David?” she asked. “That was better than any of the other adventures from before.”

“Yeah,” Tyrone said as he carried the dishes to the sink. “You can lighten up now.”

David shrugged into his denim jacket. He seemed unable to take his eyes from the new line of blue hexagons marking the Barrier River. “I don’t think so.”

Melanie felt disappointment stab through her. David stood up and moved toward the door.

“You don’t understand,” he turned back to them and said. “If we don’t stop now, and stop for good, we’ll never be able to quit. The Game will control us. The Game will be everything and we’ll never get away from it.”

He turned to point at the changed map. “Can’t you see how powerful it’s getting already?”

Then he walked out the door. By the way he moved, he had intended to let it slam, but the door-closer eased it shut against the jamb.

“Well, see you next Sunday,” Tyrone said as he gathered up his things and left. Scott followed him to the door.

Melanie went back to clean up before her parents got home. Of course she wouldn’t say anything about what had happened.

“Yeah. See you next Sunday.”

The End

To Mary

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the members of my writers’ workshop for their many detailed comments and suggestions—Michael C. Berch, Dan’l Danehy-Oakes, Avis Minger, Clare Bell, M. Coleman Easton, and David Belden. And my special gratitude to Ginger LaJeunesse, for her love, her editing, her ideas, and just plain putting up with me during the writing of this book.

GAMEPLAY

Book 2 of the GAMEARTH Trilogy

Kevin J. Anderson

“Always remember this: every character on Gamearth was created by the Outsiders. We exist solely for the amusement of those who Play our world. Our ambitions, our concerns mean nothing—everything is determined by the roll of the dice.”

—The Book of Rules

Prologue

Melanie blew warm breath against the map of Gamearth, trying to make the paint dry faster. She didn’t want the other players to see what she had changed. David would probably call it cheating—but their game would keep playing itself, no matter what they did.

Melanie wanted to win.

A shoebox of acrylic paints lay on the card table in the study. Some of the colors had dried up, with lids cemented by hardened paint. But the bottle of deep forest green had some sluggish drops left at the bottom.

The map’s hexagons of terrain were bright and vivid colors, like some lost Arabian mosaic. They represented mountains, forests, seas, deserts. Melanie pulled a strand of long brown hair behind her left ear and blew again on the wet paint. She looked at where the mysterious “Rulewoman” supposedly lived on the map, in one of the forest-terrain hexes deep in the south. The complexity, the patterns of the map were dizzying.

Gamearth—they had created it as a fantasy world setting for a role-playing game, she and Tyrone, Scott, and David. The four of them played there, embarking on imaginary adventures into imaginary lands every Sunday night for the past two years.

Melanie had painted the map herself, acrylics on a smooth sheet of wood, using rulers and protractors to lay down the precise grid of hex-lines between sections of terrain. No store-bought map kit would do for their world—it had to be something personal, something she created herself. Gamearth needed to be different from all the other worlds available in simple boxed adventures.

Melanie and the others put a great deal of themselves into Gamearth. Perhaps too much.

But times changed, and the Game went on and on. One entire race of characters, the Sorcerers, departed from the world in a magical Transition that turned all of them into six powerful Spirits: three white Earthspirits and three black Deathspirits.

David wanted to end the Game there. He said it wasn’t fun anymore. But Melanie and the others outvoted David, and so they kept playing. David could not leave them. The Game had too much of a hold on all of them. Instead, he made an attempt to destroy the world, but he had been thwarted.

Now, though, David had finally made up his mind—if the others would not let him quit, then he would create a new monster, Scartaris, to devastate the entire map and suck every spark of life dry.

That would end the Game once and for all.

But Melanie planned on stopping him. They both had to play by the rules—but rules could be advantageous, especially if you bent them a little. . . .

Melanie carried the altered map out of her father’s study. She could hardly tell where she had repainted the one hexagon. They would not notice, since she had not changed the terrain type, in which case she could argue—as Scott would—that she hadn’t changed anything relevant anyway. But she had placed something there, under the paint, into the world of Gamearth.

She didn’t know if it would work, if her world could ever have any true connection with the characters inside Gamearth. But this had to be the way, if anything. It had to be.

Somehow during their last gaming session she managed to communicate to her characters about the growing threat of Scartaris in David’s designated section of the map. Her three characters, Delrael the fighter, his scholarly cousin Vailret, and the half-Sorcerer Bryl, had tried to protect their land from Scartaris by creating a giant barrier river that severed the eastern half of the map from the rest.

But now she knew, as did her characters, that the Barrier River would not stop David’s creature. It would only trap half the inhabitants of Gamearth on the wrong side—with the growing threat of Scartaris.

She stared at the blue line of hexagons that indicated the river slicing down the map. It still gave her shivers to think about it. Gamearth showed its own power the previous week, during their last gaming session.

This had become much more than a game to all of them.

In their imaginary adventure, the new river came surging through a channel from the Northern Sea to pour across the plains—and as the four players watched, Melanie’s painted map reflected the change all by itself. Hexagons of forest, grassland, and swamp terrain turned blue, right in front of their eyes. Scott, the “rational” one, had been amazed and terrified, unable to hint at an explanation.

But Melanie knew the explanation. It was so simple. After being steeped in the gaming fantasy as dictated by the rules, Gamearth had developed its own magic.

And Gamearth was not going to accept its destruction without a fight.

If she could do anything to help, even if it meant stretching the rules a bit behind the other players’ backs, then Melanie felt obligated to do so. After all, not many people ever had the opportunity to save a world, not even an imaginary one.

Satisfied that the new paint had dried, Melanie carried the map board out to the kitchen and started to prepare herself for the Game. The future of her world would be in the roll of the dice.

1. Enrod’s Crossing

“Something is terribly wrong here. My own city of Tairé has succumbed. People I have known for years act strangely. At times even I do not know what I have done or where I have been.

“And the untainted lands to the west have cut themselves off from us with a great river. We are trapped and alone. We have been sacrificed. They didn’t even give us a chance.”

—Enrod, Annals of Tairé, final entry

The Sentinel Enrod stood on the eastern shore of the Barrier River. The black hex-line that separated the water from overhanging willows and reeds extended razor sharp as far as he could see, north and south.

Off in the distance, across the impassable expanse of water, he could see the green rolling line of forest terrain, lush and healthy. Farther north Enrod could see the broad expanse of a hexagon of grassland. All green, all growing, safe and protected from the evil to the east.

Enrod gritted his teeth. His hand squeezed the eight-sided ruby, the Fire Stone, he had carried all the way from Tairé. The corners of the gem dug into the skin of his palm. Enrod paid no attention to the pain. He was the last remaining full-blooded Sorcerer male on Gamearth, now that Sardun was gone. Enrod had used his reserves of magic to keep himself healthy and relatively young-looking. But now the haunted weight of too many years shone out from his eyes.

He looked at the green forest terrain across the River. His eyes widened and turned bright. The terrain would not stay green for long. Alien tendrils crept up within him, sliding along his spine, inside his skull, like some invading leech. Visions of fire and sorcerous destruction marched across his imagination.

Enrod’s dark hair had been tangled in the long journey across the map, but he paid no attention to it. Whenever he thought of something else, any other distraction, he felt sharp pain in his head. It would all be better once he brought destruction to the other side of the River, once he showed them what it was like in his city of Tairé.

Threads of Sorcerer blood whipped through his veins like snakes, whispering to him constantly: Use the power! Show the Stronghold that they cannot cut themselves off and leave the rest of Gamearth doomed.

They thought they were so safe, so protected. A human fighter character named Delrael had created the River to keep Enrod out. To keep all the Tairans out. To keep every living thing in the East away from the sanctuary of the untouched forests, the protected lands.

Enrod felt trapped and compelled. It was appalling what they had done. The memory made his thoughts become dark, uncontrolled. He had to destroy the Stronghold. Destroy them. Wash the land in flames. Explosions. Devastation.

He shook his head. The buzzing returned, making it hard for him to concentrate. His feet were blistered and bloodied from the long journey. But he couldn’t quite remember traveling to get there. Days and days seemed like a blur of hex-lines, changing terrain, vast distances.

He kept losing track of time. It used to bother him, but it happened so often now. He would blink and find himself someplace, or realize he had been doing something, that he just didn’t recall. A warm, pulsing blackness filled the empty spots in his memory.

Something was wrong in his city of Tairé, too. He thought of his home, the streets, the buildings, the other people, all they had worked for. Something was wrong!

Something . . . from the east. Dark and full of power, growing, devouring. Something deadly from Outside. Ages ago the same thing had happened, a growing force planted by one of the Outsiders just after the Transition—Gamearth would have ended then, except for the miraculous appearance of the Stranger Unlooked-For who had saved them all.

Now they needed another miracle.

The buzzing in Enrod’s head convinced him that everything could be fixed if he would just devastate the land around the Stronghold. The human characters Delrael and Vailret, and the traitorous half-Sorcerer Bryl, had caused all the problems on Gamearth by creating the Barrier River.

Enrod could not question that thought or the pain and confusion would start again.

Tairé had suffered enough in its history. They build the city in terrain that had endured the worst battles of the Sorcerer wars. The land itself was desolated, hexagon after hexagon turned into wasteland, desert.

The Wars had ended long ago. The two warring factions of Sorcerers made their peace and then embarked on the Transition, turning themselves into six ethereal Spirits who then ignored all the wreckage they had caused.

But young Enrod had not joined the rest of his race in the Transition. An idealist then, he stayed behind because the Sorcerers had done too much damage to Gamearth. They could not simply go away without making amends, without trying to help the other characters survive the aftermath. Enrod vowed to make amends. He lived in Tairé, in the middle of the worst devastation. He wanted to heal the land, to bring it back to what it had been.

The six Spirits held the power to make everything right again with little more than a gesture, if they cared. . .but they too disappointed him. After the Transition, the Spirits vanished completely, gone on to whatever interested them without a thought for everything they left behind. They had not shown themselves in the two centuries since.

Enrod despised them for it. The Spirits had abandoned Gamearth, when they could have been so much help. Perhaps they could even stand against the whims of the Outsiders.

Enrod spent his life in Tairé helping the human characters to build their city, to heal the land. First came small garden plots, nurturing the soil, growing outward, expanding to cover the hills with grass again. Plants sprouted on their own. Stands of trees grew on some of the hills. Living things took another foothold in the desolation. Enrod saw his life’s work coming to fruition.

Though he had the Fire Stone—one of the four most powerful magical items in the Game—Enrod needed it little. He used the power of his own sweat and effort. Characters working together made their own kind of magic. . . .

Then it all changed. The plants withered and died. Enrod began to have nightmares, sensing something terrible growing in the mountains near the eastern edge of the map.

The new-planted forests became skeletal black sticks on the hills. The ground cracked, and the windswept dust scoured the nearby hexagons clean. The characters in Tairé became listless. Their life seemed to drain away from them along with their free will, their hopes. The city fell silent in the midst of its desolation.

Desolation.

As the land across the River would be.

Enrod stepped back away from the edge of the water into the forest. Despite his sense of urgency and the need to unleash his anger, he forced himself to work with care. He selected appropriate trees, all about the same size and thickness.

Holding onto the thin, straight trunk of an oak, he looked at the Fire Stone. Each facet of the ruby showed a number from one through eight. Enrod concentrated, then tossed the Fire Stone on the scattered dead leaves at his feet.

The ruby came to rest against a moss-covered rock. The number “7” faced up. If Enrod had rolled a “1”, his spell would have failed—but instead, he summoned nearly as much magic as the eight-sided Stone could command. He hated to waste so much power on such an insignificant task.

Glowing red spangles filled his hand. The power awakened in him, eager, dancing at his fingertips.

He gestured and sent the sorcerous fire into the earth, incinerating the roots of a tree and severing it neatly from the ground. Smoke and powdered dirt spurted into the air. The smell of burning sap and green wood stung his nostrils.

Enrod contained the fire in his fist and braced himself, pressing the bark against his shoulder. He let the trunk slide down against a larger tree until it thumped against other bushes and came to rest.

Enrod directed the burning spell at the fallen trunk, stripping the side branches away. The curls of flame peeled off the bark, leaving a steaming naked log on the forest floor, blanketed on each side by damp leaves. The spicy scent of charred wood reminded him of more peaceful days in Tairé, as characters gathered around bonfires in the harvested fields. . . .

The birds in the forest fell silent. He could hear the motion of the Barrier River as it poured along its course, bounded by the sharp hex-line.

For a moment Enrod hesitated. What was he doing here? He couldn’t remember. He blinked his eyes and turned to look behind him into the forest terrain.

But then the throbbing power of the Fire Stone in his hand distracted him, and the black buzzing came roaring back into his head, like a storm through his thoughts. The buzzing left only one idea untouched. Destruction. Devastation. Get across the River and make things right. Burn them clean. Start everything new and fresh, after a white-hot cleansing fire. . .

He wrapped his fingers around the corners of the Fire Stone and directed the hot power at another tree, and another, until he had a line of neat logs scattered in the forest, seared clean of bark and branches. Steam and gray smoke made his eyes water. His vision grew blurry.

Night fell.

Dawn came.

Enrod swam up out of a dream sea of hypnotic blackness and chaotic thoughts to see that he was standing barefoot in the rough mud of the riverbank. His hands were raw and bleeding, studded with splinters from the logs, from the vines he had used to lash the logs together to form a raft. He had woven thin green tendrils into strong ropes, then coated them with oozing sap to seal them. After lashing the logs together, he had coated the ropes, the knots, with a thicker layer of pitch and baked it into a glassy varnish with the Fire Stone.

Enrod didn’t remember doing any of it.

He wondered if it had really been only a day. Smears of mud and ash stood out on his tattered white robe. Far from the powerful Sentinel of Tairé, he looked like a man who had been crumpled, badly used, and poked back to life again.

His back cried out with pain as he hauled the heavy raft to the water. Enrod stepped over the black hex-line and sank up to his knees in the cold river. The mud soothed his torn and blistered feet. The hem of his robe soaked up the water.

He rocked the logs of the raft, pulling, dragging. It slid partway over the hex-line and became easier to move. Enrod climbed back onto the shore and used a thin pole to lever the raft over the edge. He hopped onto the smooth logs, picked up the pole again and gave a push that strained his ribs, shoving the raft over the hex-line and into the grip of the river.

Enrod sat down on the raft, smelling the water and letting it carry him downstream. Before long, he stood up again and pushed the pole into the riverbed, gaining leverage and inching the raft across the current.

He had an appointment to keep. He had to destroy the other half of the world.

Fallen trees thrust up from the surface like the fingers of drowning men. The water itself roiled brown and muddy, still cutting its channel and bearing debris from its journey. Beneath the current, Enrod imagined forests, houses, the skeletons of travelers, wandering monsters, all who had been caught in the flood. According to the map of Gamearth, the new course of the Barrier River had swallowed up an entire village.

The current brushing against the sides of his raft seemed to whisper to him, all the dead voices gurgling up from the river bottom begging Enrod for revenge. How could any character dare to do this? What right did they have?

He would lay waste to the land, turn hexagon after hexagon to flames and ash. He would destroy it all, level it.

The raft lurched, as if it struck an unseen bump in the River. Enrod swayed and regained his balance. The brown silty water flattened out like glass in front of him. A streak of light, yellow and searing, shot back and forth beneath the surface. The smell of ozone, like the air after a thunderstorm, drifted up to him.

Everything grew quiet, deathly quiet, but the air seemed charged with crackling power. Enrod tensed, confused.

Deep beneath the water foam bubbled up, disturbing the smooth surface. The churning increased until spray gushed to the sky. Mist appeared from nowhere, swathing the horizon and leaving him isolated in the middle of the River.

Enrod pulled up his wooden staff, holding it in his hands like a weapon. He let the raft drift, but it remained in place, anchored invisibly from below.

The bubbles gushed higher, then opened up like a gigantic mouth, a trap door letting something emerge.

A triple shadow lifted itself from the depths of the water, rising. . .and kept rising, filling Enrod with awe. Three forms, hooded and spectral, clad in black tattered cloaks, pouring upward into the sky. His bones vibrated with thunder beyond the range of his hearing.

The three figures surged with dark power until they towered over the Sentinel, impossibly high. Their attention focused down on him like sharpened spears.

Enrod could not move.

He had seen them once before, two centuries ago, on the field of the Transition. They had not spoken then, but hung in the air surrounded by fallen empty bodies of the Sorcerers and grass and mountains in the distance. In silence, they had departed with their three white counterparts, the Earthspirits. Enrod thought they would never come back. All the characters on Gamearth had given up on them.

The Deathspirits.

The buzzing dark presence suddenly left Enrod’s head, deserting him entirely. Without the driving force, he was disoriented, like a marionette with severed strings. He couldn’t remember anything for a moment. He looked at the Fire Stone in his hand and realized what he had been about to do. He couldn’t understand what had been possessing him.

The ruby Stone leaped out of his hand, wrenched away with such force that its sharp corners sliced his fingers. He felt blood running down his palm, but he could not take his eyes away from the immense Spirits. The Fire Stone rose in the air, spinning and glittering far out of reach.

All three Deathspirits spoke in unison. The words echoed on the wind with such power that Enrod felt his bones humming, his eardrums straining.

“We created the Fire Stone to protect Gamearth and our half-breed children. We cannot allow the Stone to be turned to such destruction.”

Enrod collapsed to his knees, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his ears. He felt on fire, under the intensity of a magnifying lens focused on the sun.

“You would have abused your great power, Enrod. Unforgiveable.

“You will never cross this River.

“You will never go back to your home until the end of the Game.

“You must take this raft back and forth forever, at the mercy of any other character who intends to help the world. Not once to rest, not once to reach shore.”

Enrod could not move. He wanted to hide, he wanted to beg forgiveness, he wanted to jump off the raft and drown himself in the River. But his muscles locked him in place.

“Gamearth faces a threat from Outside that could destroy everything. And so we have returned. Our world may not yet be doomed.

“But you have doomed yourself.”

With a howl of cold wind, the cloaked figures sank beneath the River. The water gurgled, then became glassy smooth. The Fire Stone vanished with a pop into thin air.

Milky mist rose up in front of Enrod, blocking the far shore of the River. He turned, and the opposite shore had also vanished. He stared, wide-eyed in shock and dismay.

I didn’t mean it! I don’t know what happened!

But the Deathspirits were gone. He could not argue with them. He would never be able to argue again.

Enrod’s muscles locked up. His blood turned to ice as the horror struck him, growing from the pit of his stomach until he wanted to crumble and die. All the work he had done for Tairé, for Gamearth—he couldn’t understand what had come over him, what possessed him. Even now he was appalled by what he had thought of doing.

Enrod felt himself drawing deeper and deeper into his own mind, filling the emptiness where the black buzzing had once been. From now on, it would be his only refuge.

His body took control of itself. His arms lifted the pole and thrust it into the water, pushing down and seeking the bottom of the River.

Enrod looked straight ahead. His jaws ground together. His eyes widened. He could not move. He could only push his raft along, moving nowhere.

With aching arms, Enrod began his endless journey.

2. Spirits in the Night

“The six Spirits have gone from Gamearth and they will never return. Why have they abandoned us? Are our lives so trivial to them? How soon they forget everything they once were.”

—Sardun’s memoirs

Delrael plodded to his bedchambers in the main building of the Stronghold. His head ached, his body felt stiff, and he wanted to explode from inactivity.

Once again he and the other characters had resolved nothing—another day wasted, and they still had thought of no way to fight Scartaris, the Outsiders’ evil creature growing in the east.

He hated all this talking and planning. He wanted to go somewhere.

Delrael had returned to the Stronghold two weeks before with Vailret and Bryl, successful in their quest to create a Barrier River and to rescue the Sentinel Sardun’s daughter, Tareah. But then they had learned from blind Paenar that the Barrier River would not stop Scartaris after all. . . .

Every day, Vailret insisted that they meet with other characters to discuss the problem, to brainstorm. There had to be a way, Vailret said, there always had to be a way. He usually knew about things like that. To be fair, the Outsiders had to play by their own Rules, they needed to provide some solution to every problem they posed.

“Or maybe not, in this case,” Delrael said.

No one could suggest a plan of action, not even Tareah. They knew too little about their enemy.

Delrael found it impossible to sit around and wait. He was a fighter trained to action, not discussion. He needed to meet a problem head on, to fight, to explore, go adventuring and, as the primary Rule of Gamearth dictated, have fun. When all else fails, go on a quest.

Finally, he and Vailret came to the conclusion that they should just head east. Maybe they could do something there if they tried. Perhaps Enrod, the full-blooded Sentinel in Tairé, could help them. . . .

Delrael stood in the doorway of his room. It had once been his parents’ master chambers, but that had been many turns before. Fielle, his mother, was dead of a fever, and his father Drodanis had gone away, searching for the mysterious Rulewoman far away in the south.

It was warm for the late summer night, but Vailret’s mother Siya had built a roaring fire in the hearth. Light glittered from chests of gems stacked against his wall, plunder from some of Delrael’s earlier quests. The room smelled clean and resinous from the burning wood. Siya had tossed herbs into the hearth again.

His bed beckoned to him. His body yearned for a good night’s sleep. Worked up and anxious, not knowing what to do, Delrael hadn’t been resting well, frustrated by a problem he could not grasp.

Even his younger cousin Vailret, the thinker and scholar, found himself just as much at a loss.

With a sigh, Delrael loosened his oiled leather jerkin and removed it, stretching his arms. The muscles popped into place. It felt good to relax. While sitting around, he had mended his armor. He needed to work on his archery skills a little more tomorrow.

Someone knocked on the door before he could lie down. Delrael sighed and went to the door.

Siya stood there, small and rigid. “I’ve drawn another hot bath for Tareah. I don’t know how she stands it—I can barely put my hand in the water. But she says it helps her aches. I wonder how much longer this will last.”

Delrael nodded. “Depends how long she keeps on growing.”

The Sentinel Sardun had held his daughter in the body of a child for three decades, not wanting her to grow up before another full-blooded Sorcerer could be born at random by the Rules of Probability. But when Sardun died, his spell was broken. In only weeks Tareah grew at a remarkable rate, catching up with lost time. In the balloon ride back from the island of Rokanun, she looked like ten-year-old girl: now she appeared fully grown.

But her bones and muscles ached from the strain. Hot, hot baths helped, she said. Siya and Delrael tried to make her as comfortable as possible.

Tareah had blossomed into a beautiful woman, though she still felt uncomfortable around groups of characters after the isolation in her father’s Ice Palace. She was making the effort to learn social skills that Delrael took for granted.

“Why don’t you make her some herb tea so she can rest better?” Delrael said. “And if there’s anything I can do for her, tell her to be sure and ask.” He wrapped his hand around the edge of the door.

“But I need to get to sleep now, Aunt Siya. Sooner or later we’re going to leave on a quest again.”

She scowled, but Delrael raised his hand to stop her from saying anything. “We’re not doing it just for fun this time. You know that. We’re trying to save our world.”

But after he closed the door, removed his clothes, and pulled on an airy nightshirt, Delrael closed his eyes in concern. His head kept ringing from too much discussion.

Working together, they had defeated Tryos the dragon and driven away Gairoth the ogre. But if Scartaris was powerful enough to obliterate the map of Gamearth and literally destroy every hexagon of terrain, they would need something more potent than magic Stones and hand-held weapons.

Bending down, Delrael picked up the jewelled silver belt his father had given him. The belt was an ancient relic, crafted by the old Sorcerers before they embarked on the Transition. Delrael had earned it for doing well in his battle training. If only the vanished Sorcerers knew what was becoming of their world now. . . .

At the moment, though, he wanted sleep more than anything. Maybe an idea would come in the night. Still staring at the belt in his hands, Delrael dropped backward onto the bed—

A lightning bolt like ice shot through his body. His heart stopped. His vision turned into the blinding white of a snowstorm.

He landed on his back in the dew-spangled grass of a starlit meadow. The cool air around him was like the shock of falling into a mountain stream.

He paused a second to blink in astonishment before his fighter reflexes took over. Delrael leaped to his feet, crouching in a battle stance—but he was barefoot, clad only in his nightshirt, holding only a silver belt in his hand. He felt helpless and naked as he glanced around, trying to find a branch or something to fight with.

Overhead the greenish aurora, Lady Maire’s Veil, lit the clearing. Through a break in the trees, Delrael could see Steep Hill, on top of which stood the walled-in Stronghold. He had been somehow transported into one of the neighboring forest-terrain hexes. He hadn’t the slightest idea why.

“Who’s there?” Delrael said quietly. Then, squaring his shoulders, he spoke in his loudest battle-commander voice. “I said who’s there!”

After a moment he wondered if he should have said anything at all.

The forest sounds vanished. It made Delrael wonder if all the creatures had some sort of rapport with. . .with whatever had brought him here. The trees stood completely still, then began to sway on the edges of the meadow. The wind picked up. Spangles of light wove in and out of the air, drawing rough shapes that towered impossibly high and yet might not have been there at all.

Delrael blinked his eyes again and again. The outlines grew sharper, taking form as the breeze turned to a roar. The tree branches clattered and scratched against each other. Delrael’s brown hair blew back away from his face.

He squinted into the stinging wind, but the white light grew brighter and brighter until it coalesced into three discrete forms, giant hooded shapes. They stood taller than the trees, stretching up toward the glowing aurora.

“We are the Earthspirits. We have come back to save Gamearth. And you must help us.”

Delrael didn’t know what to say. His jaw dropped. Vailret had told enough stories about the Transition—he knew how powerful the Spirits were. The wind rang in his ears. He thought he was shouting, but his voice felt pitifully small. His words sounded limp and inane even to him. “How can I help? Can you destroy Scartaris?”

The Earthspirits paused at that, then spoke again in unison. “We have been gone too long. We are not aware of what has taken place since we departed.

“We sought a way to escape from the Game, to leave the map behind and seek our own reality. We found ways to avoid the Rules, but we cannot break them entirely. We are bound to Gamearth—its Rules are fundamental to our existence.

“The Deathspirits learned this, too, but they wish to embrace chaos. They would form their own Rules, make their own maps, Play their own new games.

“They were our enemies in the Wars. We have not communicated with them since the Transition.”

Silence hung in the wind for a moment.

“But the Wars are over.” Delrael felt giddy at his own brashness for interrupting. “Scartaris is our enemy now, but we don’t stand any chance against him. Unless you can help.”

Delrael shrugged off his doubts. No character ever won a gamble without first placing a wager.

“Scartaris is. . .unknown to us. We do not know if we will win against him.” The Earthspirits paused a beat. “But if we are to fight, you must take us there.”

Delrael stood straight, brushing the damp folds of his nightshirt. “Take you there? What do you mean? Can’t you just. . .go?”

“We are bound by Rules of travel as are all characters on Gamearth. But it is much more difficult for us to cross hex-lines. We are not substantial enough.

“Also, Scartaris has the power to destroy the map and end the Game any time he wishes. If he knows we are coming for him, he will not wait.”

Delrael felt disappointed and helpless. “Why doesn’t he get it over with, then?”

“The Outsider David is a vindictive one. He wants to make all characters watch the destruction of Gamearth first.

“You must deliver us in secret. The Outsiders are not aware of our return to the world. They can know nothing of this quest. We are beyond them now—Gamearth has its own magic they do not realize.”

Listening to the Earthspirits speak, Delrael began to feel confident again. As the giant forms loomed over him, he sensed their power, their invincibility.

“We will disguise ourselves. A dim part of us remembers the silver belt you carry, remembers creating it as an ornament so long ago.”

Delrael clenched the glittering belt self-consciously, wondering what they would do. Then he cursed his own selfishness.

“Lay it on the ground,” the Earthspirits said. “We will meld ourselves to it, take substance in the metal. We can do little to assist you, though we can shield you from the manipulations of Scartaris once you get closer to him.

“Carry this belt across the map. When you reach Scartaris, we will emerge. We will take him by surprise.”

Silence settled down on the meadow. The white Spirits waited for Delrael.

With trembling hands, he laid the shining belt down on the grass. The light from the Earthspirits glinted off the gems and the polished hexagonal sections of silver. He backed away, stumbling into a fallen tree. But he could not tear his gaze from the Spirits.

The Earthspirits changed. They moved. Their light glittered and swirled in a funnel, pouring down into the metal of the belt. Dazzles of color floated in front of Delrael’s eyes. He shielded them, blinking, as the wind continued to howl, focusing downward. Leaves broke away from branches and swirled around his head.

The Spirits streamed down into the silver links. Delrael tried to imagine how so much power could fit within the belt.

Then the silver swallowed the last glints of white with an audible pop. The wind ceased. Torn leaves and broken twigs settled to the ground, and everything fell silent again.

His ears ringing, Delrael crept forward. His feet were wet, along with the hem of his nightshirt. His eyes were wide and childlike when he touched the belt. For a moment it was blistering hot, then the silver grew bitterly cold before adjusting itself again. Tracings of frost etched across the gems before evaporating into the cool night.

Delrael picked the belt up in his hands. The silver throbbed against his fingers, vibrating with a rhythm that faded toward stillness.

He would have to be careful about what he said to anyone if the Outsiders truly were not aware of this quest. Not even the Rulewoman Melanie could know.

Then Delrael smiled. At last they had their weapon. At last they had a way to win against Scartaris.

He fastened the belt around his damp nightshirt. He didn’t feel tired anymore. He wanted to talk to Vailret and Bryl and Tareah immediately. They needed to set off as soon as possible. No more sitting around and talking.

He looked up through the trees to see the silhouette of Steep Hill and the Stronghold. Delrael realized it would be a long walk barefoot back home.

#

Tareah sat back in the deep wooden tub, drawing her gangly legs up and tucking her knees close to her chin. The legs seemed so long to her, so awkward, as if they belonged to someone else. The rough surface of the wet wood rubbed against the bumps of her spine.

Through half-closed eyes she saw wisps of steam rising from the bath. The warm water soaked into the throbbing in her joints. Old Siya argued with her that the water was too hot, but Tareah found that only this would help. When she climbed out, dripping, to dry herself, her skin would be angry red, but she would feel better, numbed for a while.

Her muscles relaxed under the coaxing of the bath. She let her mind drift, her body drift. She felt painfully lonely, lost and unsure of anything. Her stable and predictable world had been thrown into chaos since Tryos the dragon kidnapped her, since her father died in the destruction of his Ice Palace, since she found out the Outsiders were trying to destroy Gamearth. Tareah’s new adult body was difficult to control, grown too fast. She seemed like a stranger inside herself.

In the deserted bath chamber, after the others bedded down for the night, Tareah listened to quiet sounds, nightbirds and insects in the cooling air. Autumn would arrive soon. On the equinox the characters would celebrate Transition Day, the anniversary of when all her forefathers had transformed themselves into the six Spirits. Delrael had promised her they would make a big celebration in the village this year. He said he would do it for her. She smiled at the thought.

The most important anchor in all her turmoil was the friendship of Delrael and Vailret. They poured so much attention upon her that she felt special again, as when her father Sardun cared for her. Delrael reminded her of the monumental heroes in the old legends of the Game, adventurous, sure of himself, brave and strong. Vailret had all the intelligence and background of a respected scholar—he could talk intensely about many subjects, but he was often self-conscious around her. She sighed and forced a smile.

The open fire on the hearth heated another cauldron of water in case Tareah needed her bath warmed again. The hissing and snapping of the flames soothed her, eased her into a doze. She drifted. She let her eyes sink closed as she smelled the water, the damp wood.

A sharp pain snapped inside her head. Tareah became dislocated, floating, with nothing to hold onto. She felt the Sorcerer blood within her—she knew what it could do, but all at once it didn’t seem strong enough. Tareah blinked her eyes again and stared at the fire. The flames throbbed, running together like melted wax. She grew dizzy. She seemed disembodied.

Without knowing what she was doing, Tareah slipped under the water of her bath.

She opened her eyes, but through the bath water she saw clear images. She didn’t need to breathe, didn’t even think of it. She felt no alarm at all. The water she smelled and saw was not from inside her bath. . .but from the Barrier River. She felt a swaying raft beneath her feet. She saw giant, shadowy shapes, hooded figures, heard booming voices.

A man with wild dark hair and black beard stood on the raft. Like an invisible observer, Tareah felt the anger in his heart, the alien fury that controlled him from far away.

Her Sorcerer blood recognized that this was Enrod, the Sentinel from Tairé.

She heard the Deathspirits pronounce judgement on Enrod, she learned what he had been about to do to the land. In horror she stared at him, but she could feel no sympathy when the Deathspirits stripped him of the Fire Stone.

In her head, she heard the words ringing out, spoken to her:

“The Fire Stone was meant to assist the characters of the Game. As the last full Sorcerer character, you must now receive the Stone. We trust no one else with the decision. Take it and win the Game. Or lose. We have done our part. We care no longer.”

Then the vision left her completely.

As she blinked, Tareah found she was under water, in her own bath, cramped and unable to breathe. She pushed her head up above the surface, sputtering and spraying water from her mouth. She blinked her eyes. Thick brown hair streamed wet down her neck.

Her eyes focused, and she saw something different about the fireplace. The flames curled against the split logs like yellow tatters. Wisps of steam danced up from the surface of the cauldron of heating water. Smoke rose into the chimney, but left the room filled with the smell of burning wood.

Gleaming at the foot of the hearth, among the orange coals, lay the brilliant eight-sided ruby. The Fire Stone, red and pulsing with magic.

#

The musty dampness of the stonecutter’s caves filled Delrael’s nostrils. The torches and lanterns they carried flickered in the drafts of sluggish air, throwing light against the hewn rock walls. The smoke mixed with the heavy smell of stone dust and earth.

Delrael crossed his arms over his leather jerkin, looking at the dim chamber. He brushed dirt off his pants. Vailret followed him in, found a rock outcropping to sit on, and lounged against the wall. He looked thin and gaunt in the uncertain light; but his eyes were bright and intense.

Bryl the old half-Sorcerer sat by himself, glancing around as if frightened by the shadows, the oppressive weight of rock around them. Tareah waited next to Vailret.

In the silent hours before dawn, no one knew they had gone to the caves. They had much to discuss, in private, away from the villagers and—they hoped—away from the prying eyes of the Outsiders.

Vailret coughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “We’ve got half a hilltop of rock over our heads to shield us. Maybe the Outsiders won’t be able to hear us here.”

Bryl cringed at Vailret’s mention of the weight of the rock. Delrael looked at the low ceiling and nodded, but he kept his voice quiet anyway. “The Outsiders must not know anything about this. It’s something we have to decide.”

He didn’t know where to begin. He had already told them in a brief whisper about the Earthspirits. At the same time, Tareah had burst out of the bath chamber, wrapped in a blanket but dripping onto the wooden floor. Wide-eyed, she held the glowing ruby Fire Stone in her hand. . . .

“The Earthspirits promised to help us destroy Scartaris,” Delrael said. “We might have a good chance now, especially if Tareah has the Fire and Water Stones, and Bryl has the Air Stone.”

Bryl fondled the Air Stone, the four-sided diamond that created illusions. Gairoth the ogre had used it to overthrow the Stronghold by making the other characters believe he commanded an indestructible army of other ogres.

Tareah fumbled at her waist to undo the lashings of a small cloth purse. She drew out the sapphire Water Stone, shaped like a cubical six-sided die. For centuries it had been held by Tareah’s father, Sardun the Sentinel. At Vailret’s urging, Sardun had used the Water Stone to create the Barrier River; now, after Sardun’s death, Tareah took the Water Stone herself. She held it next to her new Fire Stone, blue fire in one hand, red fire in the other.

Delrael smiled. “Scartaris is still there, and the Outsider David still wants to destroy us—but we can fight back now. This is our Game, too!”

Vailret rubbed a finger along his lower lip. “We’ve got to be careful about this, though.”

Delrael grimaced—he hated to hear his cousin say that.

“Scartaris must know we’re trying to stop him. It’s rather hard to hide something like the Barrier River, you know. And when we confronted the Outsiders in that deserted Slac fortress, we learned all about each other’s intentions.”

Bryl and Tareah muttered, and Delrael fidgeted in impatience. But Vailret looked at them. “We should assume that the Outsider David is already sending something to kill us, a monster or two. If he wants to end the Game so much, he won’t take any chances. He’ll come to get us directly—and the longer we sit here, the easier a target we make.”

“Not unless he thinks it might liven up the Game,” Delrael said. “Remember what we’re here for. Rule #1—always have fun.”

Vailret snorted. Bryl squirmed, nervous and trying to avoid the issue. Tareah put hands on her hips in an awkward, unsure gesture. “Well, what are we going to do?” she said.

“First and most important, we have to make sure the Outsiders don’t learn about the Earthspirits and their involvement,” Delrael said immediately. “That could be our loaded dice.” He touched his silver belt, but he felt nothing unusual. “I have to carry them to Scartaris—but we need to make it look like we’re just going on a quest to find out more about our enemy.”

“We?” Bryl said. “Who all is going on this quest? We just got back from one!”

Delrael frowned at him. “We’re supposed to enjoy going on quests, Bryl. That’s what we were all created for. It’s just a game.”

“This just might take the Outsiders by surprise.” Vailret smiled. “That’ll teach them to leave loopholes in the Rules!”

“So are the four of us going on this quest?” Tareah asked. Her voice carried an impatience for banter. She had been brought up studying the famous historical quests of the Game. Delrael knew she considered it to be very serious stuff, nothing to be made light of.

“I have to go,” Delrael said, running his fingers along the silver belt, “since I’m carrying the Earthspirits. And Vailret, because you can think fast, and you know things we wouldn’t even consider. That might help. I’d like you to come too, Bryl, so we can use your Sorcerer magic.”

Delrael lowered his voice. “I want you to stay here.” He touched her shoulders, then slid his palms down to hold her arms, hooking his thumbs on the insides of her elbows.

She bristled. “Stay here? But I owe it to Gamearth to fight as much as you! Now that Enrod’s gone, I’m the last full-blooded Sorcerer on the map. I have to come with you!”

Delrael held up one hand to stop her. “Tareah, you’ve been at the Ice Palace all your life—you never gained any experience. Questing isn’t something you learn offhand. It would be too dangerous to you, and to us, to have an inexperienced character in the party. You know the Rules, you know the probabilities.”

Tareah was angry with him. He’d thought about this so much, but when he explained it to her it seemed a weak and simple excuse. He wasn’t good at explaining things. But when Tryos the dragon had kidnapped her, Tareah sat around waiting to be rescued because that’s what she thought she was supposed to do. He didn’t want to count on someone who would play according to what she remembered of distorted legends and cut-and-dried interpretations of the Rules.

He sighed and softened his voice. “Look, I’m not just being over-protective. I need someone powerful to stay and guard the Stronghold while we’re gone. Vailret just said it—there’s no telling what Scartaris might send here. I want somebody at the Stronghold who can fight back. You have the Water Stone and the Fire Stone—you might need them. The characters in the village might need you.”

Tareah still said nothing to Delrael.

“I’m going to speak to Tarne, too—he’s a fighter, an old veteran from the days when my father ran the Stronghold. He kept the characters safe when Gairoth took over. I think the two of you can stand against anything Scartaris has.”

Tareah seemed to be considering what Delrael said; finally, she nodded. “You’re right. That goes along with the other adventures I’ve studied. I’ll stay here.”

Tareah clicked the two gems together in the palm of her hand. “But it doesn’t seem practical for me to have two Stones, if I’m just sitting behind a wall all day long.”

She held out the eight-sided ruby to Bryl. The ruby glowed like a blazing coal. “Take the Fire Stone with you. The Deathspirits told me I should do with it as I see fit. The Water Stone was my father’s. The Fire Stone. . .I don’t feel comfortable with it, not after I know what Enrod was going to do. Not after the anger I felt in his mind.”

Bryl reached out his hands in amazement and took the gem. He stared with twinkling eyes and awe written on his face. “I don’t really want to go on another quest,” he said, “But now I feel a lot safer.”

“None of us is going to be safe,” Vailret said. “Not until this is all over.”

Interlude: Outside

Melanie arrived at Tyrone’s house for the Sunday gaming session. Standing on the doorstep, she watched a trail of her breath rise into the damp air. She tucked the heavy map of Gamearth wrapped in an old blanket under her arm. It had begun to drizzle outside, and she did not want the wood or the paint to get wet.

Melanie was surprised to find herself the last one to show up. Normally David came late just to annoy them, but this time he appeared anxious, as if he knew exactly what he wanted to do. That worried her.

David’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked tired—Melanie wondered if he had been sleeping well, or if he had been plagued by nightmares.

She greeted everyone as Tyrone returned from the refrigerator carrying a round of sourdough bread. The bread’s center had been hollowed out and filled with a white and green coagulated mass.

“Leek, spinach, and feta cheese dip,” Tyrone said.

Scott frowned at the loaf and straightened his glasses. “I thought you were kidding when you told us that.”

Tyrone set down a plate of bread chunks he had cut from the middle of the loaf. “It’s good—try it. Have I ever let you down?”

“Yes,” Melanie and Scott said in unison.

“Oh, just try it.”

David sounded gloomy when he spoke. “Are you sure we want to keep playing?” Melanie caught an undercurrent of hesitation in his voice. She didn’t even feel like speaking to him. He made her frightened and angry at the same time.

She uncovered the map, draping the damp blanket on a chair. The blue line of the Barrier River stood out like a scar, reminding them what had happened the week before.

“What’s going to happen this week?” he asked. “Are you sure you’re not afraid?”

“I’m not afraid,” Melanie said.

Scott could barely keep his eyes off the blue line that had appeared by itself the week before. “I’m not afraid really, either.” He frowned. “But I’m very curious to see if anything else happens.”

“We pretty much finished up Mel’s adventure last week, with the dragon being killed and all,” Tyrone said. “What are we going to start with?”

“There’s more to the adventure than that,” David said.

“A lot more.” Melanie realized she had snapped at him.

“Come on, guys. Make nice.” Scott kept his voice down, then caught himself.

“I’m going to send my characters on a quest to the east,” Melanie said. “Delrael, Vailret, and Bryl—the usual bunch.”

“For what? What are they going to do?” David asked.

“They have to find out about that Scartaris monster you sent against them. No better way than to go there themselves.”

“I’ll squash them. I’ve got so much to put in their way.”

Melanie stiffened. “Yes, but you can’t know they’re coming unless one of your characters encounters them. By the rules. Just because you know what’s going on yourself, David, doesn’t mean your characters will know.”

She tapped her fingers together. “And speaking of that, I want to introduce a new character tonight. It’s a golem.” She looked at the map, but in the bright light over the kitchen table she could not tell which hexagon she had repainted. “I’m going to have him encounter my characters in Tyrone’s section.”

“You can’t just do that!” David stood up.

“Why not? She hasn’t introduced anybody new in a long time.” Tyrone took a sip of his soda. “And we’ve never played a golem character before.”

“I rolled all the details already. Here’s a printout of his statistics.” Melanie passed around a sheet of paper with numbers jotted down in columns. “His name is going to be Journeyman.”

“You should do that when we’re around.” David frowned at the paper, the numbers.

Melanie made a disgusted sound. “Come on, David. I’m just saving us time. You think I’m trying to cheat or something? Look at the scores.”

“I think a golem would be neat,” Tyrone said.

Apparently seeing he wouldn’t win any arguments on the subject, David shrugged. “Doesn’t matter you know. Not against Scartaris.”

“It might,” Melanie said with a slight smile and looked at the map in the light, tracing the line of the Barrier River, the sections of terrain between her characters and David’s ruined portion of Gamearth. She hoped her plan would work.

She distributed new printouts of the log sheets. She kept track of every week’s game in her father’s computer. Over the years she had compiled a three-ring binder, a book-length journal of all their games and adventures.

They glanced at the new pages and shuffled them aside, except Scott stopped, picked up his copy, and stared down at it. “Hey, when did that happen, Mel?”

“What?”

David blinked at his printout and turned pale. He pressed his jaws together.

Tyrone looked at Melanie’s copy as he reached for his dip. “This says that Bryl’s got the Fire Stone. And what’s this? ‘Enrod came to destroy the land with the Fire Stone. He tried to cross the Barrier River on a raft and was stopped by the return of the Deathspirits, who cursed him to journey back and forth across the River forever. They presented his Fire Stone to Tareah, who gave it to Bryl in his quest.’ Interesting, Mel, but. . .well, shouldn’t we have played it?”

Everyone looked at Melanie. She blinked her eyes, baffled. “But. . .this isn’t something I wrote up at all.”

Scott made his mouth a straight line. “Nobody else has access to your Dad’s computer, Melanie.”

David sighed and put both elbows on the table. He looked pale and afraid. “Of course it happened that way! You know it’s right.” He stared at them, then shook his head. “Didn’t you guys dream it? It was so vivid I woke up sweating.

“I could see Enrod. I could hear what he was thinking about blasting all the trees around the Stronghold, and building his raft and crossing the River.” Sweat appeared on his forehead; he brushed it away in impatience. “And those big black hooded things coming up and yelling doom and gloom at him and taking away the Fire Stone. You had to dream the same thing.”

“I don’t remember my dreams,” Scott said.

Tyrone scratched his cheek below his ear. “You know, now that you mention it, I do remember something like that. And it was weird because it wasn’t me in the dream. Yeah, I remember it now.”

Melanie recalled the dream too, like a vivid slap in the face. “There’s more going on here than I thought.” She felt a perplexed hope, but she didn’t know what to do with it. “If the Deathspirits came back, what about the Earthspirits?”

Scott pursed his lips. Melanie watched him; he became very uncomfortable when he didn’t know how to explain things. “Wait a minute—I thought we decided not to play the Spirits. They were gone for good because they were too much for us to handle.”

“The game is starting to play itself,” David insisted. “It’s coming alive. It’s out of control. This is reality—” he slapped a palm on the tabletop. Their glasses of soda and the dice jingled on the table.

“We have to stop it!” The urgency in his voice was frightening. “Let’s all agree, all right?” David’s eyes pleaded with them. “We can try a trivia game or something if you still want to keep meeting on Sunday nights. Let’s just stop this game.”

Melanie swallowed hard and drew herself up. In annoyance, she flicked her hair behind her ear.

“If it’s truly coming alive, David, then it’s a wonderful, magical thing. Something here is greater than we ever dreamed of. We have no right to kill it.”

She snatched the dice on the table. “Let’s get started.”

3. Across the Barrier River

“When embarking on a quest, characters travel primarily on foot, according to the guidelines set forth in Rule #5 and the accompanying tables. However, characters shall be free to use any other available transportation to speed them on their way.”

—The Book of Rules

Though important quests usually started at dawn, Vailret, Delrael, and Bryl set out from the gates of the Stronghold in the dark hours before morning. The near-autumn air carried a cold snap, and the stars shone bright and sharp.

On the crest of Steep Hill, the Stronghold overlooked the terrain all around, the hexagonal fields, the rapid stream that rushed along the hex-line. A double-walled stockade surrounded the main buildings, defenses that had withstood many attacks and fell only once, to Gairoth the ogre.

Vailret stretched his arms back, felt the warmth of his jerkin and the woollen sweater wrapped around it. He had not gotten much sleep, and his muscles ached—but it felt good. Vailret ran his fingers through straw-colored hair, tangled from tossing and turning all night.

Delrael moved about with energy and excitement, obviously eager to be off again. He was a character of action who hated to ponder things until all spontaneity was gone. Of course, he often got himself into trouble because he never thought about what he was doing. He bore a sturdy sword from the weapons storehouse and left the bow and arrows behind this time.

Tareah waited with Vailret’s mother Siya at the main gates to see them off. Beside them stood the old bald veteran Tarne, awake and alert with bright eyes.

When Sardun’s daughter waved good-bye, Vailret felt amazed at how she changed in the month he had known her. They spent a lot of time together, exchanging legends and stories they unearthed, clarifying historical details that Tareah had learned from her father.

But Vailret could see the stars in Delrael’s eyes when he looked at her, and he cared for his cousin too much to risk a potentially difficult situation. And fighter characters spent much more time impressing women than nearsighted scholars did anyway.

Tareah still looked disappointed that she would not be accompanying them, but she drew herself up, proud to have the responsibility of guarding the Stronghold.

Beside her, the big veteran Tarne appeared grim and ready. He had kept the villagers protected in the forests during the months when they needed to hide from Gairoth and his ogres. Now Tarne crossed his arms over his chest and nodded farewell to them.

Siya, though, looked devastated and afraid for them. Her husband Cayon had been killed in a senseless quest. He had been the typical Gamearth fighter character: cocky, talented, living for the moment and adventuring for the fun of it. But Cayon was slain by an ogre on one of his “fun” adventures. It had destroyed Siya.

She was a new type of character on Gamearth. She wanted an end to all of the tedious questing. It was time to settle down and establish their lives, support themselves, grow their crops, take care of the villagers and the other characters. But while she ran the domestic affairs of the Stronghold, she still felt left out, not treated with respect. She was overprotective of Vailret. She tried to do the same to Delrael, but he ignored her.

Vailret knew everything she was thinking—he could see the emotions ripple like changing waves on her face. But Siya held her tongue because she realized how much was at stake this time. Vailret greatly respected her for that.

As they departed, Siya said only, “Luck.” Vailret smiled. The three of them started down the path into the darkness.

The lights in the village below had been doused for the night. Only a dull glow came from the blacksmith’s workshop, where Derow always kept the fires banked. Before dawn seeped into the eastern sky, the questers left the village behind and crossed the first line of hexagonal fields bounding the forest terrain.

Bryl mumbled, “If characters have stopped questing so much, why do I always find myself walking back and forth across the map?”

Vailret’s hands were numb from the chill; he crossed his arms and kept his fingertips under them. He turned to look at Delrael. His cousin’s face was grim, concentrating on the journey.

Delrael’s lost father Drodanis had sent them a spectral message from the Rulewoman Melanie, describing the threat of Scartaris and commanding them to find some way to stop the end of the Game. The three of them had created the Barrier River to protect them for a time.

But Drodanis had sent no other message, provided them with no further suggestions. Together, they were aware of the Earthspirits trapped in Delrael’s silver belt, but they couldn’t speak a word of that out loud. Characters could never know when the Outsiders might be listening.

The quiet between them seemed uncomfortable, strained. Vailret cleared his throat and spoke in a bemused tone. “I wonder if we really grasp what we’re doing. Think about the implications beyond our adventuring to defeat Scartaris.”

He raised his eyebrows. Delrael shook his head, as if tired of thinking.

“Do we really want to save Gamearth if it means rekindling the Wars all over again?”

Bryl wiped his hands on his sky-blue cloak, trying to get rid of some pitch on his palm. “What are you talking about?” He scowled at the pines around him.

“Well, isn’t that what we’re trying to do, get the Outsiders interested again by stirring up as much trouble as we can? Our normal, peaceful existence is so boring to them they want to quit the Game. Maybe the only way we can keep their interest is to start all those endless battles and constant slaughter again.”

Vailret sighed. His half-formed thoughts began to frighten him. “Starting the old Sorcerer Wars was a pretty trivial thing in the first place. We shouldn’t have too much trouble if we want to do it again.”

Delrael adjusted the sword at his side. The silver belt around his waist looked gaudy in contrast with his scuffed and mended leather armor. “I thought nobody knew how the Wars started. It was so many turns ago.”

Vailret shook his head. “Tareah knew the story. It’s sad in one way and stupid in another. Would you believe a wedding party, an athletic contest?”

He shrugged. “Of course, legends make things too simplistic. They ignore all the sociological factors of the characters, how the Sorcerers divided into two camps just waiting for a spark to set them at each others’ throats.

“Our two athletes, one from each faction, were Sesteb and Turik. The Sorcerer Lord Armund had married his Lady Maire. The couple hosted a gala wedding feast at Armund’s lakeside palace, then they began an afternoon of games. Games—” Vailret shook his head. “Fun and games—think of all the trouble they’ve caused us.”

“Think of all the fun we had,” Delrael countered.

“Games were simpler then. The main sport was to see who could throw a stone farthest out onto Lord Armund’s lake, Sesteb or Turik. Turik was muscular, but Sesteb was clever and wiry.

“Lord Armund arranged to have a line of boats strung out on the hexagonal lake, so characters could float a marker where each stone landed. Turik flung his stone first and reached the ring of boats. Nobody believed Sesteb could ever match it.

“But Sesteb picked a small flat stone. He stepped up to the edge of the water and cast it at an angle, skipping it across the surface of the lake. On its last bounce, the stone jumped past the ring of boats.”

Delrael laughed. “Good strategy.”

“Well you can imagine what happened. The other characters had placed high wagers on the game, so of course Turik’s supporters said that Sesteb had cheated, while the others argued that Sesteb’s stone went the farthest and nothing else mattered. Both sides refused to pay their wagers, which led to open hostility before long. It didn’t help that everybody had too much wine at the wedding feast, either.

“Lord Armund demanded that the two groups make peace so they didn’t ruin his wedding celebration. He went to Sesteb’s supporters and asked them to begin the competition all over again—but they killed Armund in their drunken anger and tossed him out of their tent.”

Bryl made a rude noise. “I thought old Sorcerer lords were a little more dignified than that.”

Vailret agreed. “So you might think. When the Lady Maire witnessed the murder of her new husband, she used her sorcery to spawn an ugly, vengeful monster—the first ogre, which then slaughtered the characters that had killed Lord Armund. Turik’s supporters created their own monsters to continue the fight, then Sesteb’s friends made even more powerful ones to defend themselves.”

Delrael and Bryl looked at him as they continued to walk. The path ahead of them zig-zagged clearly through the trees.

Vailret continued. “Sure, some characters called for peace, but the others enjoyed the war games even more.”

“I’ll bet the Outsiders had a hand in that,” Delrael said.

“The saddest part is that Turik and Sesteb were themselves the best of friends and refused to take part in the fighting. But the other characters forced them to engage in a duel to the death. More games. Being a lot stronger, Turik killed Sesteb and then carried his friend’s broken body with him to the lakeshore. Turik walked out until the waves closed over his head.”

“How dramatic,” Bryl said.

Delrael shook his head. “Shows what happens when you play a game without having the rules set down beforehand.”

#

The trees ahead of them parted, and Vailret caught his first close glimpse of the Barrier River. Grayish brown, the River roiled in its pondering progress from the top of the map to the bottom. The water hauled buried debris from what had once been normal terrain.

The bank was a sharp black line where the forest ended and the water began. A transition zone of sticky mud bordered the hex-line, glistening wet. Vailret could hear the water moving, pushing against hidden obstacles. The river carried with it a smell of decay from the rotting remains of woodlands and quiet meadows drowned in the flood. A few birds flew out over the water, hunting for insects.

“And that isn’t going to stop Scartaris?” Delrael shook his head. “I don’t understand what we’re up against.”

Vailret stared across the water. “The River might buy us time if Scartaris sends an attacking army—but we need to prepare for a different type of enemy. Scartaris might have been what turned Enrod against us.”

“Sure looks like an effective barrier to me,” Bryl said. “It’s a full hex wide—how are we going to get across?”

“You’re going to swim, of course. Bring a rope with you,” Delrael answered with a straight face. He probably had not even considered the problem before now.

The half-Sorcerer glared back, but Delrael’s expression showed no humor. Bryl looked away, scowling. He took out the Fire and Air Stones, but the gems could not help them.

Vailret spoke, but he knew they weren’t going to like it. “Tareah said Enrod could carry us. On his raft.”

Delrael and Bryl did a doubletake. Vailret kept himself from smiling, though he enjoyed the astonishment on their faces.

“She told me that when the Deathspirits cursed Enrod to take his raft back and forth, they said he had to assist anyone trying to save the world. Or something like that. We of course have spotlessly pure intentions—” The corner of his mouth turned upward.

Delrael frowned. “Since Enrod tried to destroy us all, maybe Bryl shouldn’t flaunt the Fire Stone too much.”

Bryl stuffed the ruby gem up the sleeve of his blue cloak. “I sure don’t want him angry with me. He’s a full-blooded Sorcerer.”

“We have to figure out how to summon him first.” Vailret squinted at the distance. His eyesight was never terribly good, but he thought he saw a smudge across the water.

“We might not have to worry about that,” Delrael said. “There’s a bank of mist coming—straight toward us.”

The air felt cold and clammy around them as the fog rolled in. They could hear waves lapping against an object in the water, then the silhouette became clear. A raft.

A tormented-looking man used a long pole to haul the raft close to shore, but he remained carefully away from the hex-line. Enrod the Sentinel looked disheveled, once massively built, but now wiry. His black hair and beard showed streaks of gray spreading out around his cheeks and temples. A wild glaze covered his eyes, directing his sight deep inside, where he was trapped with his own thoughts. The Deathspirits had cursed him only a short while ago.

Enrod did not look at the travelers, did not speak a word. He merely worked his pole, turning the raft toward the opposite shore. He paused a moment, then dug the pole into the river mud and pushed. Slow to gain momentum, the raft moved a few more feet away from the shore.

“Wait!” Vailret hurried to jump onto the raft. The lashed logs swayed as he gained his balance. Delrael leaped over to join him. Bryl hesitated at the edge of the River, then jumped across.

Enrod’s raft moved with greater speed, rocking as the Sentinel worked his pole. They drew away from the shore, then mist closed around them in a damp cocoon.

The mist muffled even the noise from the River, and all other sounds fell away. The line of trees on the shore faded into murky skeletal shapes, then vanished altogether.

The hush around them made Vailret afraid to talk, but Bryl finally whispered, “I can’t see where we’re going. How do we know we’re making any progress at all?”

Enrod gave no sign that he even realized the passengers had joined him on the raft. The dirty sleeves of his robe flopped around his wrists as he raised the pole, dripping water and river mud, then pushed down again.

“What if he wants to keep us here?” Bryl whispered again. The half-Sorcerer’s eyes were wide, and he hunched down into his cloak, as if trying to hide. “We’re the ones who created the River. We’re the ones he was coming to blast with the Fire Stone. I don’t see the Deathspirits here to protect us—what if their curse isn’t strong enough?”

Vailret had no answers for him, but Bryl’s fear struck home. After another moment in silence, Delrael said, “Shut up, Bryl. Thanks for pointing that out to him.”

Enrod gave no sign that he had heard.

Vailret stared at the cursed Sentinel. Enrod’s eyes were red and unfocused, possessed. He had been driven into madness somehow, he had wanted to blast all the hexagons into blackened cinders. Did he know that his imagined enemies stood directly beside him? Did he know that Bryl carried his Fire Stone no more than two steps away?

“Enrod? Enrod, can you hear me?” Vailret stood beside him, but the Sentinel did not flinch.

“I’ve heard many legends about you. I know what you attempted to do for Tairé. You remained behind from the Transition to help rebuild the blasted lands. You wanted to atone for all the damage done in the old Sorcerer Wars.”

Enrod fixed his eyes at the blank wall of mist in front of him. He lifted his arms and pushed down on the pole.

“Enrod,” Vailret continued, “we know the Outsiders put something in the east, a monster called Scartaris who’s going to destroy Gamearth. Can you tell us anything about him?”

The dark-haired Sentinel seemed to be in a world of his own. He moved jerkily. His eyes did not blink.

“Enrod, please help us!”

Enrod lifted his pole out of the water.

“The whole Game is at stake!” Vailret clutched at the Sentinel’s tattered white sleeve, trying to yank his attention away from the raft.

In a lightning blur of speed, Enrod snapped backward with his right foot, scooped it behind Vailret’s legs. He slashed with the mud-dripping pole and jabbed with his elbow.

Vailret tumbled, sprawling to the deck of the raft. He skidded and grabbed at the pitch-covered logs to keep from falling into the water.

In a fluid motion, Enrod composed himself again, thrust his pole back into the River, and pushed on.

It all happened so fast that Delrael could do little more than bend over to catch his cousin. Bryl blinked in astonishment.

Enrod acted as if nothing had happened at all.

Vailret coughed and tried to catch his breath, opening and closing his mouth. Then he climbed back to his feet, brushing himself off. He said nothing, but continued to watch Enrod out of the corner of his eye. . . .

Before long, shapes appeared in the mist ahead of them, the dark silhouettes of trees from the far shore. Vailret squinted as they approached closer until the fog around the raft broke open, letting him see the hex-line of the shore.

Enrod moved toward the bank, stopped the raft just before touching, then held it in place with the pole. He turned his neck on sluggish muscles to look at the three passengers, but he made absolutely no sign of recognition. He began to turn the raft around again.

Delrael jumped to the shore, clearing the hex-line and landing on the dry forest soil. Bryl scrambled off, splashed in the mud, and joined the fighter.

Vailret turned again to plead with the Sentinel. “I wish you could help us, Enrod.”

His back turned to Vailret, Enrod hesitated and then pushed the raft away from the bank. Vailret jumped across the widening gap of water and landed beside his two companions.

Vailret shook his head. “He’s so powerful, and the whole map is in such trouble. I wish his magic wasn’t wasted like this!”

“Are you forgetting he was going to blast our entire land?” Bryl said. “He wanted to destroy us all. The end result would be the same as Scartaris.”

As the raft moved away again, the island of mist curled around Enrod and swallowed him up until Vailret could no longer see him or the raft or, after a few moments, the mist itself.

“We’ll never know.”

Delrael rubbed his hands together and turned to face the forest terrain stretching away from the river. “Let’s get going. We’ve got plenty of hexes to travel.”

A strange voice interrupted them from beside the River. “Hold your horses! Play it again, Sam.” The voice was deep and hollow, and did not belong to any of them. A burble of mud from the bank made Vailret look down.

The thick clay opened a hole like a mouth, with lips protruding and moving to form words. But the quality of the voice changed, becoming loud and abrasive. “Listen to me when I’m talking to ya, boy! Now, pay attention!”

Bryl stood to the side, but Delrael leaned over the mouth in the mud. Vailret looked around for a stick, wondering if he should poke at it.

“Where’s the beef?” the mouth continued in a different voice again. “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.”

“This thing isn’t making any sense at all,” Delrael said, glancing at Vailret. “What is it?”

“What’s up, doc?”

A bulge pushed up from the surface of the mud, then became a rounded lump straining harder until it grew into a blockish, clumsily formed head made of clay. It drew a great gulp of air through its mouth, then exhaled with a whistle through the caverns of its nose.

“Ah, how sweet it is!”

The head struggled, then a neck emerged, forming out of the mud as it rose. The shoulders and torso squeezed up as if forced out of a mold from below.

“I want to get out of here,” Bryl said.

The clay man emerged from the bank until it stood as tall and as burly as Delrael. It flexed both arms and blinked empty eye sockets. The clay man bent over the river, splashed some water on its skin and rubbed down a few rough spots with its hands.

“Well surprise, surprise, surprise!” Then he turned to face the three of them. The clay of his lips formed a wide, misshapen smile, showing soft sculpted teeth. “You deserve a break today!”

He patted his clay chest so hard that he made an indentation. Perplexed, he smoothed over the mark. Clay eyelids came down over the empty sockets, then blinked up again.

“G’day, mate! My name is Journeyman, your friendly neighborhood golem. I’m from the government—I’m here to help you. I was sent by the Rulewoman Melanie to join your quest to destroy Scartaris. One for all and all for one!”

4. Slave of the Serpent

“All character races were created by the Sorcerers to fight in their wars: humans, Slac, khelebar, werem, ogres, ylvans. Do not forget, however, that the Sorcerers also created individual monsters according to their imaginations. Many of these monsters still wander the map with no other purpose than to cause havoc. Questing characters should beware of such monsters, as their methods of fighting will be unfamiliar, and their weaknesses will not be known.”

—Preface, The Book of Rules

The veteran Tarne woke in the middle of the night with ice in his stomach and a crawly feeling on his skin. He stared at the unfamiliar ceiling, and he knew the aurora in the sky would speak to him again.

With the silent step of a practiced fighter, he slipped out of his borrowed quarters in the Stronghold’s main building. He stood on the wide open grounds enclosed by the hexagonal stockade walls.

The greenish light of Lady Maire’s Veil swirled and shone down upon him with visions of the future.

Tarne stared upward, heedless of the bunched muscles in his neck. He was able to see things in the aurora ever since his head injury. It had been his last real fight, part of Drodanis’s vengeful ogre hunt after Cayon was killed. . . .

Tarne had been delirious for a while, slow to heal. His scalp felt as if it had been pierced with white-hot needles, visions, ideas of what would come in future turns of the Game. He shaved his head, exposing the network of scars, thin and thick, from the knocks he had taken during other quests. With smooth skin on his head, with nothing to stop the flow of thoughts, everything seemed clearer to him. When he watched the shimmering aurora, sometimes everything fell perfectly into place.

His last vision had shown Gairoth invading the Stronghold with his army of ogres. Tarne foolishly tried to fight against the prediction and led a group of desperate defenders, to no avail. He could never force the visions to come to him—and he could do nothing about what he saw.

Vailret insisted that this kind of magic was fascinating in its own right. Tarne had no Sorcerer blood, and as a pure human character he should have no magical abilities at all.

But anomalies happened. Gamearth operated on the Rules of Probability, where even unlikely things were statistically possible. Tarne had visions of the future. Bryl’s former apprentice Lellyn, also human, could work any imaginable form of sorcery. Even the mighty Earthspirits and Deathspirits, by their very existence, tied the Rules in knots. It seemed that some things were more powerful even than the Outsiders.

Tarne suspected Gamearth had its own kind of magic the Outsiders knew nothing about. And that magic was awakening in these last days of the Game.

The throbbing aurora above confirmed his guess. Then sent him a message.

The green folds of Lady Maire’s Veil made him see images in his head. They made no sense to him, but a part of him understood: Clenching, coiling, preparing to strike. An enemy approaching, evil, death.

The bright white streak of a meteor stitched across the aurora, startling Tarne. Then the shooting star faded and was gone.

Tears ran down the veteran’s face. The chill night breeze made him feel cold tracks on his cheeks. He was very afraid.

He had learned one thing from his visions—fighting against them was useless. The visions showed him only things over which he had no control. But at least he knew what he had to do, what role he must play.

The night was silent and cold. The next day would be the autumn equinox, when Sardun’s daughter Tareah planned to lead the villagers in a celebration of Transition Day. When he thought of that, the veteran felt a pang inside. He went to the gates of the Stronghold and opened them up.

He would tell no one about this. It was better that way.

He walked across the bridge covering the trench and worked his way down Steep Hill in the dark. Tarne thought of too many things, and he tried to empty his mind of thoughts. His entire body was in turmoil. He had no time for any of this. No time at all.

He walked into the silent and darkened village until he reached his own home. He lit a candle. The inside smelled musty, closed-in. He had covered all the windows now that he spent most of his time guarding the Stronghold.

The light from the candle jumped around the walls. He went to a corner of the room and dug his fingernails into the wood of one of the hexagonal floor tiles. He lifted it, then popped up the adjacent tile to uncover a shallow storage area he had dug out beneath the floor.

Tarne paused, sighed, then forced all the memories away. He reached in to pull out a long bundle wrapped in rags. Peeling away the cloth, he stared down at the notched but well-cared-for blade of an ancient sword. The sword had been used centuries before in the old Sorcerer wars; it had been used in previous years when Tarne himself was a fighter. The orange candlelight made it glow with the blood and fire of past victories.

He reached under the floor once more and pulled out his old suit of leather armor. He had oiled it well before wrapping it up for storage. Everything was still intact, mended of scuffs and cuts, studded with chain links for extra protection. He brushed off dust and powdered dirt. He never thought he would need either the sword or the armor again.

Of all the fighters of his generation, Tarne was left here alone. After his injury, he gave up fighting and questing to become the village shearer and weaver. Some of the designs of fate he saw in the aurora he wove into his personal tapestries; no one but himself could understand them.

Tarne slipped on the leather armor and patted it against him. He listened to the chains jingle in the dimness. The armor seemed to grow on him again, become part of his body.

He held onto the sword, gripping the handle. Yes, it felt right. His reflexes and all the old training awakened. On impulse he whirled and slashed at the candle on the table. The flame went out.

#

On her unfamiliar bed, Tareah lay back but couldn’t sleep. The lonely darkness did not comfort her. Her bones and joints ached again; she wondered if it would ever get better.

Back in the Ice Palace, when she couldn’t sleep she got up and wandered the cold rainbow halls, or pick through Sardun’s collection of ancient artifacts, or stand on the balcony of the high tower and look out at the checkerboard of mountains and wasteland terrain.

Tareah climbed out of bed, feeling the cold air on her legs. Many thoughts kept her awake. She missed Delrael and Vailret. It upset her that they hadn’t taken her along, but she was also frightened, overwhelmed that they had left her with the duty of watching over the Stronghold.

Tareah dressed, pulling one of Siya’s warm shawls over her shoulders and tugged her boots on, a pair of Vailret’s old comfortable castoffs. She had plenty of things to do, especially in preparation for tomorrow, the anniversary of Transition Day.

Her father had pounded into her a respect and a wonder at the Game and the accomplishments of her race. The villagers seemed to know nothing about their own heritage—yet human characters had undertaken many of the greatest quests, the most difficult journeys. She was in awe of them for what they had done.

According to what she had seen, though, the characters were drifting away from that way of life. Instead of treasure hunting and fighting monsters, they had become farmers, villagers, peaceful people. Siya said that they were sick to death of the shallow, adventurous life.

Tareah crept into the courtyard. The door moved silently as she opened it. The night air was cold and fresh, warm compared to the nights far in the frozen north.

Transition Day. She grinned with excitement. She would tell the story to all the villagers. They could rejoice and be happy in their heritage, how Gamearth had come to be. And then they would let off the fireworks.

Tareah smiled as she strode across the courtyard to the weapons storehouse against one wall segment. The storehouse held several small clay containers filled with firepowder. Bryl, Vailret, and Derow the blacksmith concocted a powder that would flash and explode in brilliant colors. She wondered what kind of magic the sealed clay containers held—some fire spell rolled up inside a little package? A hand-length of fuse dangled out from the containers. During the celebration they would use an old catapult to fling the containers into the air for the show.

She looked forward to that most of all. Vailret talked about the spectacle, his eyes gleaming. It would be like the meteor shower that came every autumn.

Vailret fascinated her. He knew so many of the same things she did, they could talk for hours. But Delrael kept her in awe. He was so much like the legendary fighter characters she had read about. She adored listening to his adventures and his questing. He was exactly what she expected a fighter character to be.

Bryl, though, she did not know—he was a magic user, yet his attitude was strange to her. She couldn’t understand his bitterness or his reluctance to learn.

Leaving the firepowder where it was, Tareah turned away from the door of the storehouse, then stopped. Under the light of the aurora she could see the training equipment in the yard. The wooden sword posts were monuments by themselves in the shadows, the hanging sacks, the archery targets. They looked like scarecrows in the darkness.

The Stronghold gate stood wide open. Tareah stared at it, wondering how that could be. She heard someone coming up the hill path. She didn’t know if she should sound the alarm or just watch.

A bulky well-muscled man walked through the gate. He stood in shadow for a moment, then closed and secured the gate. It took her a moment to recognize the veteran Tarne—only now he carried a long sword she had never seen him bear before. And he was clothed in leather armor. Metal chains jingled and glinted in the faint light.

But Tarne would never fight unless he had to. What was going on here? The gate was opened, Tarne was armed—treachery? Something none of them knew about?

Tarne had always seemed completely on their side in the Game. But all characters were like puppets on a string if the Outsiders decided to manipulate them. . . .

On the verge of saying something, Tareah paused and looked at the fighter from the shadows of her hiding place. He did not know she was there. She would watch and see.

The veteran walked slowly in his armor, as if under a burden. He seemed. . .afraid, very tense. But he moved with dignity. He walked to the training area and stood still. He rested the sword tip on the ground in front of him, squared his shoulders, and waited for something.

Tracks of sparkling tears ran down his cheeks. Sardun’s daughter felt a shiver dance along her spine. Was he betraying them?

The fighter stood motionless in the darkness. Dawn would come soon. But Tareah felt, as she watched, that something else would come sooner. . . .

The night filled with tension, a buzzing—and then in front of Tarne the air rippled and seemed to tear. The veteran cringed, only for an instant, but he held his ground.

An ear-splitting roar burst from beyond hearing, channeled closer. Tarne remained standing, braced and ready for whatever was coming. He raised his blade, either in salute or defense.

Tareah hid deeper in the shadows by the storehouse.

A hole in space appeared in front of the fighter. The air snapped, and a huge, vague form appeared as a solid shadow, then burst into sharp clarity. A monstrous figure stepped out, hulking forward in long strides.

It was an enormous hairy beast bearing a gigantic snake—Tareah had never seen anything like it, not in all her studies of the fighting monsters from the ancient wars. She wondered why it had come, how Tarne knew it would arrive.

The demon stood fully ten feet tall and three wide, though it walked hunched over, carrying a great burden. A pelt of thick, blackish-brown hair covered its body, but its head and chest plate were reptilian. The head seemed large for its body, almost square, with a gaping mouth out of which lolled a forked tongue.

The monster bore a tremendous serpent entwined around its body, a sickening green with oily, rainbow scales and fiery red pupilless eyes. The scarlet glow shone like embers.

From her hiding place, Tareah felt the hairy demon’s deep-set eyes strike her with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and pity. She blinked to shake away the emotion. She wanted to shout for help, but the other villagers lived too far away. She didn’t have the Water Stone with her, and only Tarne could actually fight the monster.

The serpent reared up upon seeing the armored fighter standing before it. The hairy monster did not move until the serpent coiled and squeezed the demon’s massive ribs, urging it forward. The tree-trunk legs stumbled toward Tarne.

“You are called the Slave of the Serpent,” Tarne said. His voice sounded strong, empty, different. “I have been waiting for you.”

The Serpent hissed, and the scarlet light blazed brighter. “Who are you?”

“Go back to Scartaris. There’s nothing for you here.” Tarne said the words as if he had memorized them, as if they were expected of him.

“Scartaris must have the Fire Stone back. Must destroy fighter named Delrael and any other character who would quest against Scartaris.”

Tarne swallowed. “Then I am Delrael.” He held his sword before him, wavering the tip back and forth. “I’ll take any quests I want if I can save Gamearth.”

Tareah wanted to cheer for him—she could write down the legend of his brave fight to defend the Stronghold.

“Give back the Fire Stone!” the Serpent said, bobbing its head up and down.

“Sorry, we need it right now.”

By the storehouse, Tareah watched with wide eyes, saying nothing. They were about to battle, just like in the old stories. Tarne was a talented fighter, a veteran of many quests and campaigns. He remained silent as he faced the demon and glared at the Serpent.

She didn’t know if she was expected to help fight. But Delrael had called her inexperienced. She would only get in the way, maybe even hurt Tarne’s chances.

The Serpent urged the lumbering Slave forward, nipping it. The fangs dripped foul-smelling venom. The monster heaved itself forward, reluctant to move closer to the fighter.

The Slave halted a moment as its pitiful eyes met the bald veteran’s. But the moment was shattered as the Serpent savagely sank fangs into the Slave’s neck, making it howl in pain and rage.

Tarne leaped in, moving with a smooth grace that belied his age. The chains on his armor reflected starlight and the greenish aurora. He surprised the demon with his attack, feinting, shifting the Slave’s guard, and slashing at its belly. The notched edge of the old blade sliced through the monster’s tough chest plate, but the Slave looked more angry than injured.

It swung a clawed fist at Tarne, but the fighter hacked into the massive paw. The beast roared and swung backward with his other arm, catching the fighter with a glancing blow. Tarne spun, but recovered his balance as the Slave struck again.

The sword from the old Sorcerers flashed up as the Slave tried to maul him but instead impaled its own forearm on the tip of the blade. The monster howled, jerking its injured arm away from the sword, then swatted at the blade with its other paw.

Tarne saw his chance and thrust in at the chest plate, but the Slave’s thick hide protected it from serious harm. It lashed again with a wounded arm, but the monster moved slowly. Tarne dodged and came back in, hacking with two-handed strokes.

He looked up and his eyes met the Serpent’s.

The huge snake began weaving back and forth, swaying and hissing like a rhythmic fire with green wood. The Serpent kept the fighter’s eyes locked to its own. From her hiding place, Tareah could see the veteran becoming entranced by the hypnotic movement, dropping his guard.

Tareah stood up. They didn’t see her. She had to do something, use one of her spells. . . . She couldn’t run and get the Water Stone, and she felt small and defenseless. She could attack with a minor fireball, perhaps, or a bolt of energy—but her aim might not be good enough, since the two opponents stood so close. The bald fighter stared at the swaying Serpent, dazed.

“Tarne!” she finally shouted.

The Slave swung with its deadly claws, using all of its massive muscle power to rake across Tarne’s chest. The fighter sprawled on the ground with part of his armor hanging in tatters and broken chains. The snapped links gleamed bright in contrast to the tarnished older metal.

The armor had protected Tarne, though. He climbed to his feet, gasping and trying to suck air back into his lungs. He blinked, but he looked stunned. He turned to stare in amazement at Tareah. The Slave came at him again.

The fighter met the charge head on, whirling the old sword in a random pattern of cuts and slashes. Tufts of fur and drops of thick yellow blood flew from the demon. With a burst of energy, Tarne drove in so forcefully that the weakened Slave stepped back.

Blood oozed from slashes in its thick skin, running to the ground and leaving viscous, yellow pools. The monster wheezed and panted, making weak attempts to defend itself.

Tarne stopped and took a step back, holding the dripping sword in front of him. The Slave appeared dazed and began to topple backward. The veteran watched with an astonished grin on his face. He flashed a glance back at Tareah.

Abruptly, unexpectedly, the huge Serpent flashed downward, stretching its body longer than seemed possible. Fangs glistened with drops of diamond-like venom. The fighter looked up, and the snake struck. The hollow fangs punctured his armor and sank into his chest, gushing a mouthful of venom into his bloodstream.

Tarne fell.

By the weapons storehouse, Tareah gasped and watched the veteran collapse writhing on the ground. Ready to scream, she stood seething and helpless. She was untrained in using her magic for combat. If her spells failed. . .

The hairy Servant howled something like anguish into the growing light. But the Serpent was blood-maddened, pushing the massive beast back toward the stricken fighter.

That aroused Tareah’s anger enough that she screamed back at it. “Get away from here!”

The demon turned to face her. The Serpent opened its mouth to hiss. More venom dripped smoking onto the ground. The Slave took a step toward her.

Then Tareah remembered the firepowder.

She ducked inside the storehouse and snatched one of the clay casks. The back of her mind nagged at her, that she shouldn’t be using human weapons, that her simple fire-starting spell was far too trivial to be used in any battle that anyone would remember.

The Serpent coiled around the Slave’s neck. The hairy beast spread out its giant arms, splaying its claws and dripping glob of yellow blood down its fur. It roared into the approaching dawn, then strode toward Tareah.

She decided not to worry about fighting tactics. She closed her eyes and summoned up the fire-starting spell. It was a trivial spell, something anyone with a trace of Sorcerer blood could do easily—and Tareah succeeded the first time.

The fuse hissed and sizzled as the spark ate its way down.

The Slave charged at her.

She tossed the cask at the demon. “Catch!”

The firepowder exploded in a brilliant flash of fire and light, spraying the Slave of the Serpent with burning streamers and chunks of clay.

Tareah fell backward against the wall of the storehouse, rubbing her blinded eyes and gasping. Stinging chips of pottery fragments slashed her face.

She saw the smoking demon charge howling around the training yard. It charged into the upright logs of the double wall, sending a shower of the packed dirt trickling down. The monster beat at flames burning on its shoulder, its chest.

On the ground, Tarne still cried out in spasms. Spittle ran down his cheek back to his ear.

The Serpent reared back and glared at her. “Delrael is dead. No more quests! Scartaris will come back for Fire Stone!”

The rip in the air opened up again with a snap, and the howling beast plunged back into it. The Slave of the Serpent was swallowed up by nothing, disappearing.

Panting, Tareah ran to where the veteran lay trembling on the ground. Two blue flames burned from the puncture wounds on his chest, blackening the leather of his armor as the venom coursed through his bloodstream. He grimaced and shuddered, gripping the ancient sword.

He crawled forward, but Tareah stopped him. His eyes were glassy and unseeing. She stroked his cheek, muttering nonsense to him. Her magic could do nothing to stop the burning poison, to bring him back from death’s stranglehold.

Tarne said nothing intelligible, which also confused her: all the legends had led her to expect dying characters to make a final dramatic speech before death.

The veteran stared at the glow of sunlight in the eastern sky rising up toward dawn, as the aurora overhead dimmed. His gray eyes did not close. The fires inside him burned out in a burst of dark energy, and he crumpled to ashes within his ancient and damaged vest of armor.

“Let the Game go on forever, and may your score always increase,” Tareah whispered for him, the accepted farewell for a trusted companion.

Tareah stood up, blinking her eyes. Old Siya hung by the doorway of the main building, then moved mechanically toward the fallen fighter. An expression of complete horror hung on her face. Tareah wondered how long she had been standing there, attracted by the noise of the fight.

Tareah remembered the tears on the fighter’s face, the fear in his eyes; she remembered how he had arrived in armor, waiting. Tarne had known ahead of time. He had deceived the demon into thinking it had slain Delrael. He had known this battle would kill him! And yet he had come anyway.

Tareah realized that she was now completely alone. She had no one to help her fight against whatever else Scartaris would send against them.

The dead fighter’s ashes left a black stain on the ground.

5. Journeyman

“Rule #3: Questing characters may join with any other characters they encounter. Note, though, that the alignment of such newfound companions might not be clear. All characters have their own quests, their own preferred outcome to an adventure.”

—The Book of Rules

Journeyman clapped his clay hands together and stretched his face in a grin. “Well, are we off to see the Wizard?”

Bryl looked at the perplexed expressions on the faces of Vailret and Delrael, relieved to see their skepticism. It was a nice switch, since they usually trusted everything without a thought of caution. Bryl shook his head and scratched at his thinning gray beard. After seeing some of the things Delrael did on impulse, Bryl was surprised the fighter had lived as long as he had.

“Wizard?” Delrael said, “We’re going to find Scartaris, not just some magic user.”

“Merely a figure of speech.” Journeyman strode off into the forest terrain ahead of Delrael and Vailret. Bryl wrung some water out of his blue cloak, sighed, and followed them. The forest grew denser, but the quest-path marking their way shone plain on the ground. The sounds of the Barrier River faded, leaving them in the forest by themselves.

“Why do you always say such strange things, Journeyman?” Vailret asked.

“I don’t know nothin’. I just work here.” the golem said.

“Yeah, like that.”

“Well, I was created by the Rulewoman Melanie, so I have some . . . connection with the Outside. I can see some of the things she sees, know some of the phrases she knows.”

Bryl scowled in exasperation at Vailret and Delrael. They acted as if they believed what the golem said, just on the basis of his own word. When Scartaris was out to destroy the world, how could they trust anything? How could great questers be so naive? If the Outsiders wanted to eliminate their own world, who could trust any other character? Bryl huffed and came up close behind them, looking sidelong at the golem but speaking to Delrael.

“How do we know he’s from the Rulewoman? The Outsider David might have sent him to kill us while we sleep.”

Delrael frowned as if the thought had never occurred to him. Vailret scratched his blond hair and nodded. “He’s got a point, Del.”

Bryl sighed, relieved that they had conceded that much.

Journeyman spread out his hands and splayed his fingers even wider. “Cross my heart and hope to die?” When that didn’t appear to be good enough, the golem drew himself up, swelling his chest and stretching the pliable clay to make his shoulders broader.

“The Rulewoman Melanie commanded me to destroy Scartaris. That is my quest and that must take priority. I would rather join forces, offer my services, and accompany you—but if you don’t trust me, I’ll go alone.”

He tilted his head forward on a rubbery neck. “Delrael, I know your father Drodanis. And I’ve seen Lellyn, Bryl’s apprentice. They both reached the Rulewoman and her Pool.”

Delrael snapped his head up, blinking. Bryl saw a haunted look in the fighter’s brown eyes.

Journeyman nodded. “Your father is well, though he is in a daze most of the time. Drodanis wants to forget. He wants to be without pain, without memories. He wants to stop playing. And on Gamearth when a character wishes to give up the Game, there is nothing left of him.”

Delrael reached out to snap a twig from a branch. His knuckles were white, but he made no comment. Vailret put a hand on the shoulder of his cousin’s armor.

“What about Lellyn?” Bryl asked. The boy had been rather likeable, although an affront to his teacher. A pureblooded human who somehow, through the Rules of Probability, was able to work more magic than Bryl himself could. The boy worked spells intuitively, wielded greater power than his teacher, but Bryl had still taught the boy what little he could, before Drodanis took him along on his quest.

“Lellyn is a rulebreaker in many ways,: Journeyman continued. “He was nearly destroyed by his own doubts. The Rulewoman froze him in a block of forever-ice, sink to the bottom of her Pool, for his own protection.”

“Why would she do that?” Bryl said.

Journeyman tilted his head up again and moved a branch out of the way as they began to walk again. The branch gouged tracks into the soft clay of his arm. Absently, he smoothed his skin back into place.

“None of us is real. We are made-up characters created for the Outsiders’ amusement. You know that. We all know that. But the Rulewoman herself is a manifestation of one of the Outsiders. She is so beautiful, with her long brown hair and her big eyes filled with all the colors of mother-of-pearl. She moves with such grace and power. . .” Journeyman paused, as if daydreaming.

“And when Lellyn saw her, maybe he saw more than he should. Somehow in his mind he knew that she was real and he was not. That doubt grew and grew until, when he completely disbelieved in his own existence, he would have vanished, winked out, annihilated. Reality is a powerful thing, too much for anything on this world to handle.

“In the last instant the Rulewoman froze him to save him from his own doubts. He is still here, but he is not here.”

As Journeyman spoke, Bryl remembered the ruined ship that had carried the Outsiders David and Tyrone into the Spectre Mountains near Sitnalta. That was how the Outsiders had brought Scartaris into the world. He also remembered the Scavenger, Paenar, who had come to the deserted fortress looking for treasure, and found instead the Outsiders. He had taken a brief glimpse of the Outsiders in their real forms, and the sight had blasted his eyes from their sockets. Yes, reality was a powerful thing.

Grudgingly, Bryl decided not to push the argument. They trudged on, crossing a hex-line into another section of forest terrain by mid-afternoon. Journeyman snapped his fingers and sang something about being ‘king of the road.’

Vailret’s eyes gleamed wide with delight. “Journeyman, tell us something about the Outside, since you can see parts of it. What’s it like?”

The golem grinned his huge smile again, puckering flexible lips. “More wonders than you can imagine! Good to the last drop and squeezably soft! Refrigerators that make their own ice cubes, fabric softener that goes into the dryer, microwave ovens, trash bags with handle-ties built right in!”

Most of the words made no sense to Bryl—which was to be expected, since the Outside was such an alien place.

“But the games they have! No wonder they’ve grown bored of Gamearth. They have interactive computer games, role-playing simulators, and video games that hook up to your own television set. And Trivial Pursuit—did you know that King Kong was Adolph Hitler’s favorite movie?” The golem lowered his voice to an awed whisper. “And they have a great Sorcerer named Rubik, who created a colorful enchanted cube that can either enlighten Players or drive them insane!”

Vailret frowned. “You lost me on most of what you just said. That song you were singing a while ago, was that an Outside song?”

Journeyman clapped his hands again with a wet, soft splat. “I’ll bet you I can name that tune in. . .three notes!”

Then he sang a long ballad about a man named Brady with three sons, who met a lovely lady with three daughters, and how they overcame their difficulties and became a single family unit. Journeyman then sang a sea adventure of how five passengers had set sail for a three-hour tour, but a storm shipwrecked them on a deserted shore. Over time they had formed the kingdom of Gilligan’s Island.

Vailret grinned. “When we get back to the Stronghold, please make sure I write those down.”

“What you mean ‘we,’ paleface?” The golem became serious. “I don’t expect to return. My quest doesn’t leave much room for that.”

Before Journeyman could say anything else, a high-pitched whine grew in the air. Delrael stopped and put his hand on his silver belt. His face appeared puzzled, then frightened. The piercing sound drifted louder and stronger until it hurt Bryl’s ears. It seemed to be coming from the silver itself, where the Earthspirits had hidden themselves.

Delrael grabbed at the catch of the belt and yanked it from his waist. The belt vibrated and bucked in his hands like an angry snake, still sending out its shrieking noise. Blue and white sparks skittered along the surfaces of the gems. Delrael dropped the belt to the forest floor. The noise suddenly ceased, and the rush of silence struck them like a whip cracking. The silver belt lay still among the twigs and curling leaves, shining in the forest shadows.

Delrael gawked at his belt in utter shock. Sweat stood out on his forehead. Vailret squinted down, but he offered no explanations.

Journeyman seemed unduly confused, astonished. “What was that? Which way did he go?” The clay eyelids in front of his hollow eyes blinked and blinked.

Delrael flicked his gaze at Vailret, then at Bryl. They couldn’t even talk about it. They couldn’t say anything about the Earthspirits, especially not in front of Journeyman. Delrael could not try to communicate with the Spirits either. The Rulewoman could be watching, and so would the other Outsiders. They had to maintain absolute secrecy about their quest.

But what if something had gone wrong? Was it a signal of some kind, a calling—or did they just hear the death scream of the Earthspirits? Perhaps Scartaris had somehow destroyed the Spirits, and when the companions got to the end of their quest, they might find themselves helpless after all. Bryl tried not to think of such things, but terrible possibilities floated in the back of his mind.

Delrael swallowed and picked up the belt, fastening it with trembling fingers. “Hmmm.” He shrugged, feigning a casual attitude. “Well, it’s stopped—we shouldn’t waste any more time here. We’ve got lots of hexes to travel.”

The day passed, and as darkness fell they reached the edge of their third hexagon for the day. The Rules forbade them to go farther, so they camped beside the black line. Another hexagon of forest terrain waited for them on the other side.

Vailret and Delrael talked with Journeyman. Bryl wondered and worried, trying not to think of what lay ahead or about the implications of the Earthspirits’ scream from the belt.

Journeyman scratched lines on the dirt and taught Delrael and Vailret an Outside game called Tic-Tac-Toe. Bryl always felt left out. Sometimes it made him angry; other times it just depressed him.

He recalled his parents—his father Qonnar, a full-blooded Sorcerer, and his mother Tristane, a half-breed. They had used their magic to try to save Delrael’s ailing great-great grandfather—but he had died anyway of a wasting disease. His widow, Galleri, then married a rough and close-minded human fighter named Brudane. Brudane started rumors that perhaps Bryl’s parents had actually poisoned the old man and not tried to help him.

Qonnar and Tristane grieved deeply for the old man’s death. They felt they had not done enough to save him, and they did little to fight the accusations, which made the rumors grow. Finally, in their guilt and despair, Bryl’s parents underwent the half-Transition on their own, annihilating themselves in sorcerous fire and liberating their spirits to wander the map.

Bryl had been a mere boy then, but he watched in horror. His mother and father did not even say good-bye; they gave him no advice, they ignored him. In the last instant before the blinding light consumed her, Tristane met her son’s eyes—but Bryl saw no recognition there. He was not even part of their lives. Their misery was all-important to them. They didn’t bother to consider what it would be like for Bryl to grow up alone under the shadow of their implied guilt.

At any time it might have been better for Bryl if he had wandered, gone to a different village where they did not know his past or his confused conscience. But he was afraid to leave. Some of the young villagers around the Stronghold taunted him. All characters around him were human—no one was qualified to train him how to use his Sorcerer abilities, and Galleri and Brudane certainly did not concern themselves with the problem. He knew only a few simple spells his parents had taught him in his early years, and a few others he had learned on his own.

In his mind, Bryl knew that he had grown up with his abilities stunted. Had he been properly trained at the right time, he could have been a powerful magic user. Three-fourths of his blood was from the Sorcerer race that ruled Gamearth so many turns ago. But nearly all the Sorcerers had vanished in the Transition, combining themselves into the Earthspirits and the Deathspirits. Few characters on Gamearth could claim to have Sorcerer blood anymore.

Then the human boy Lellyn had come along, flaunting his abilities, his enthusiasm, and his impossible Sorcerer powers that he should never have had. Bryl wanted all those incredible spells, the power that took years and years of effort and struggle and training. But he didn’t have years and years, and he didn’t have the patience.

Tareah had the skills, but Bryl didn’t seek to learn any forgotten spells. The desire to better himself, the challenge, had backfired on him many years before.

That was why he attached so much importance to the Stones: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. He had used the Water Stone and linked with the dayid of the forest to save the panther people in Ledaygen. He had used the Air Stone to trick Gairoth the ogre into leaving the Stronghold. The Stones gave him his power immediately. That was the best way.

“Tic tac toe, I win!” Journeyman said. Delrael grumbled and smoothed the dirt with the flat of his hand before drawing a new grid for another game. “Tomorrow we’re playing with dice instead.”

#

They next morning they set off into the forest terrain. Journeyman looked around and smiled. Bryl hated the way he grinned all the time.

“In this hexagon there’s supposed to be a village of ylvan, the forest people. Maybe we’ll come across it.”

Delrael trudged on. He looked flustered from losing so many games to Journeyman at the campsite. “How do you know that? I don’t recall anything marked on our master map at the Stronghold.”

Vailret looked around in the forest. “An ylvan village is hidden in the trees—you wouldn’t know it was there until you were right under it.” His eyes gleamed. “They’re said to be master woodsmen, like chameleons in the forest.”

“But how do you know it’s there, Journeyman?” Delrael asked.

Journeyman shrugged his shoulders in a ripple of gray-brown clay. “It’s marked on the map the Rulewoman Melanie uses.”

The forest all around them looked the same as always, with tree and shrubs, vines, moss, and the faint but clear trail leading toward the east. But around midday the birds and insects fell silent, replaced with the sounds of a struggle and a chilling, familiar bellow.

“Haw! Haw! Haw! BAM!”

Terror jabbed like an icicle down Bryl’s spine. He knew that sound—Gairoth. He remembered being captured, drugged, placed inside a giant jellyfish in a stinking cesspool in the swamps. The massive ogre had forced Bryl to teach him how to use the Air Stone. . .though an ogre should never have been able to use magic.

Delrael stopped and cocked his head. He looked concerned, then a smile drifted onto his face.

Vailret met his cousin’s eyes. “Be careful, Del. Gairoth almost got you last time.”

Delrael appeared to be intensely aware of everything around him. Bryl had seen him this way before. The fighter motioned the rest of them to silence, then he crept ahead through the underbrush.

Bryl would have been perfectly content to remain where he was, to turn and bypass the ylvan village. But then they heard a thin, angry voice piping out. “Go away and eat rocks, you Loser! Why don’t the rest of you help me?”

Vailret moved ahead to join his cousin, and Journeyman nonchalantly shouldered branches aside. Bryl held the Fire Stone in one hand and the Air Stone in the other—even with all that power, he felt frightened of Gairoth.

They looked through a clearing of branches, dry moss, and some leaves blushing with color from an early autumn frost. Massive trees stood straight and high, crowded together, but the undergrowth in one area had been cleared away. Dangling from the lower and intermediate branches of the great trees hung large globes of woven sticks and grass and leaves, meshed together and sealed with hard golden sap. The sap varnish glistened in the light of a small fire on the ground and the green-filtered sunlight above.

The hanging “nests” were the dwellings of the ylvan. Clumsily mounted pelts hung drying, and rotting, on a few branches. On the ground, four of the little people, about chest-high to Bryl, stood by a smoky fire. Beside them, arranged rocks marked a communal gaming area that looked as if it hadn’t been used in weeks.

The ylvans’ hair was dark reddish brown, their eyes deep-set but dull, as if a milky film of cataracts had crawled over them. The men wore trimmed and pointed beards; the woman’s hair had been tied in green ribbons. The ylvans all wore outfits of leather dyed green and crosshatched with blotches and stripes that would make them invisible as they moved among the tree branches.

The fire had died to embers, untended. Too late, one of the ylvans had added a leafy green branch to the fire, which only made pungent smoke curl up to the sky.

“Master woodsmen?” Delrael whispered to Vailret. “Looks pretty sloppy to me.”

Vailret appeared concerned. “But the ylvan are supposed to be shadows in the trees, expert ambushers. Something’s wrong.”

Near the ylvans in the clearing stood Gairoth the ogre, looking befuddled and angry. His muscles knotted like a twisted tree trunk. His one eye glowered at the four listless and dazed ylvans who stood by their fire and refused to shrink away from him in terror, or even to take notice of the ogre at all.

Fear made Bryl cringe even from his hiding place. Gairoth’s furs were stained, worn, and falling apart; the spikes on his wicked club were pitted and rusty. Gairoth’s eye was bloodshot, underhung with a bag of tired skin. The ogre’s skin was grayish and unhealthy looking, peeling with splotches and rashes. He appeared miserable and furious.

Journeyman had an exaggerated expression of distaste sculpted onto his face. “Gross! Gag me with a spoon!”

Gairoth waved a ham-sized hand of dismissal at the four ylvans by the fire and looked around the rest of the dangling settlement. He strained upward and swung the club to rip out the bottom of one of the low-hanging nest dwellings. Dirt and twigs pattered down onto the ogre’s head, and he snorted in annoyance. But then some ylvan possessions tumbled out: small wood carvings, colorful flowers, pots containing gems and small bits of treasure. Basket-like furniture, a chair perhaps, fell partway through the opening and then caught.

One of the other ylvan picked up a crossbow and turned it around. She paused, as if forgetting what she had been about to do, and then reached for an arrow. The ylvan dropped the arrow, bent over with sleepy slowness and tried three times before she managed to pick it up. When she finally fitted it into the crossbow, she gestured at the ogre and fired. The arrow missed.

Bryl heard a sound inside the torn nest, a sluggish movement. Gairoth hooked the bottom of the gash with the spikes of his club, then pulled it down until he could reach it with his fingers. The branches above creaked.

The ogre pawed around into the opening until he grabbed something. He tugged, and an old ylvan tumbled out to land roughly on the ground with little more than a grunt of surprise.

Gairoth scowled. “Bah—too old.”

The ylvan sat where he was on the dirt. His dark eyes were also covered with a milky dullness. He reached inside his camouflaged tunic, withdrew a knife, and stared at it.

“You leave him alone!” The piping voice came again, and an arrow whizzed through the air to stick in the ogre’s furs. Gairoth roared.

Bryl looked around to see. Finally he spotted another ylvan blending into the tree shadows. This ylvan was younger than the others, with barely a fuzz of beard along his cheeks and chin. He swung around from where he hung halfway up one of the trunks, then slithered down looped ropes set into the side of the tree. He landed on his feet.

“Come on, you big clod!” The ylvan shot another crossbow arrow that nicked Gairoth’s chin, enough to make him roar.

The little man crouched and glanced at the ylvans by the fire, at the old man who had been torn out of his home. Bryl noticed other dull faces peering from openings in the hanging dwellings. Somewhere above, in a long-delayed reaction, a child screamed. No one seemed aware of what was going on. Some moved slowly, half-asleep; others shook their heads, as if to drive away a buzzing that overpowered their thoughts.

Gairoth strode across the clearing. In only three steps he towered over the young forest man who had defied him. The ylvan stood his ground.

The ogre yanked out a sack tucked into his fur garment, popping another of the seams in the shoulder. As the ylvan nocked another arrow, Gairoth scooped him up and pawed him into the sack.

Two of the ylvans by the fire had taken out their own crossbows. One tried to fire without first nocking an arrow.

The young ylvan continued to struggle, but Gairoth twisted the mouth of the sack shut and tossed the bundle over his back. The little man cried out as he struck the ogre’s shoulder blades. The bag squirmed and kicked, venting forth muffled curses, but Gairoth ignored it. He let out a gravelly sigh that sounded like heavy furniture scraped across a stone floor.

Gairoth did not look happy, but resigned. “Fresh meat not good like aged stuff.”

He glared at the other ylvans who stared down at their crossbows and knives, as if struggling to remember what to do with them. Above, the child screamed again. Gairoth looked at the broken nest home, at the dazed old ylvan man on the ground who had finally succeeded in picking himself up.

The ogre sneered and, swinging his club in front of him, he stomped off to the other side of the clearing. Bryl could hear him mutter while he crashed along. Occasionally Gairoth would smash his club against a tree, grumbling “Delroth! BAM! Delroth! BAM!”

Vailret turned to his cousin. “I think he still remembers us. Wasn’t Delroth his name for you?”

Delrael pursed his lips and nodded. “Just no pleasing some people.”

“Well, ah, we should get on with our journey now.” Bryl could not keep his voice firm. He felt obligated to try and make them see sense, to set their priorities. But he knew what they were going to do anyway.

“We have to go rescue him. It’s part of the Game, you know.” Delrael sounded distracted when he answered, already making plans.

“We need to continue our quest and destroy Scartaris.” Bryl tried one more time. “Journeyman, you have to get there, too. We can’t delay.”

Journeyman pondered before answering. “Incidental adventures don’t happen by accident. There’s always something to be gained. Look in The Book of Rules.”

Vailret raised his eyebrows at him. “I thought you didn’t want to go on this quest in the first place, Bryl.”

“I don’t! But I don’t want to face Gairoth again, either. You don’t know what he did to me!”

“Yes we do,” Vailret and Delrael answered together. “You’ve told us enough times.”

“Well, why didn’t we fight back right then, when the other ylvans could help?”

“They didn’t help him,” Delrael said.

Bryl sat down heavily. Branches and leaves cracked beneath him, and he found his seat very uncomfortable. Arguing further would be wasted effort.

He hated questing.

6. Tallin and the Ogre

“The Outsiders do not Play fair. Of all character races, ours is the smallest, the weakest, the fewest. We ylvans have faced more persecution, a greater number of attacks, a higher level of misery. We are the scapegoats of the Game.”

—Kellos, ylvan village leader

Delrael led the others along the path, waiting for the ogre to stop so they could put their plan into action. The air around them smelled damp and muddy.

Gairoth found a hollow where puddles of water stood among sunken trees and mashed leaves. Marks showed where a creek gathered during the rains of the spring. He squatted down on the wet earth, crossed his pale and puffy legs, then wiggled his buttocks into a better position. He contemplated the squirming sack in front of him.

Gairoth had tied the end in a knot, but now he couldn’t get it undone with his clumsy fingers. The ogre worked at it, trying not to tear the sack. He pursed his thick lips and glared at the bundle.

The scrappy ylvan struggled inside the sack. “Let me out of here, you Loser! Your breath smells like a dung heap!” One of the small arrows poked through the cloth and jabbed Gairoth in the palm. The ogre cried out, then slapped at the sack with enough force to roll it over.

Gairoth rose to his feet. Clods of mud and dried leaves stuck to his backside. “Gairoth squash you flat! Be like pudding! Haw! Too hungry to let you age right!” He raised the spiked club over his head to pound the sack.

Delrael prodded Journeyman’s shoulder, but the golem was already in motion, striding through the trees and making no effort to hide himself. He swelled up his clay chest, contorted his facial features into an angry grimace, and cleared his throat. “What’s all this then?”

Gairoth bristled for a moment, stunned. He held the club in front of him.

Journeyman continued with a sigh of impatience. “Are you going to release that young fellow without any trouble, or must we go through the motions of humiliating you with a drawn-out defeat?”

Gairoth hefted the giant club on his shoulder like a baseball bat. “No talk! You trick Gairoth! I kill you!”

Journeyman waved his wide clay hands in a gesture of dismissal. “Go away, boy, you bother me. I’m not trying to trick you. I’m being perfectly up front with what I want. Give us the little man back, that’s all.”

“Bam!” Gairoth lurched one step forward, snarling.

Journeyman stood his ground. The expression on his face became cold and tough. He intoned in a low, threatening voice, “Go ahead, make my day!”

Gairoth swung the club down with all his might—and squashed Journeyman flat with a wet thud. The golem’s head and chest caved in, oozed out to the side. He looked like a giant mud ball someone had stepped on.

Vailret let out a gasp of surprise. Delrael surged to his feet, blinking in shock. So much for the help the Rulewoman Melanie had sent them. He drew his sword and cried out.

“Gairoth!” The fighter charged into the clearing before he could think about what he was doing.

Gairoth stared down at the flattened golem with an expression of disappointment. But when he heard Delrael approach, his jaw dropped, then he grinned with angry glee. “Delroth!”

He pulled his club free of the wet clay with a sucking noise and turned to meet the fighter. “Haw! Haw!”

“Del! What are you doing?” Vailret called.

“Oh no,” Bryl said.

But Delrael paid no attention. He landed with both feet spread, holding the sword out. He seemed pitifully small against the ogre. Vailret’s father must have looked like this, fighting alone against an ogre—and dying.

“Gairoth be hurt by you!” Drool ran down the ogre’s chin. “Cesspools gone, Rognoth gone. Now I kill you! BAM!”

Delrael became acutely aware that he had worked out no plan for this situation. Maybe Vailret had a point in suggesting that characters think things through prior to taking action.

Before Gairoth could make good his threat and swing the club, Delrael lunged in. He slashed sideways and then up, cutting a gash on the inside of the ogre’s thick arm. It was a minor wound, but it must have stung. Delrael skipped back, dodging forest debris.

As expected, Gairoth yowled in pain and swung with all his might, almost overbalancing himself. Delrael jumped out of the way and tried to run behind the ogre for another thrust. Maybe if he could slash Gairoth’s other arm and make him drop the club—but the ogre swung his weapon again and Delrael had to block it directly with his sword. A crash rang through the forest.

Delrael’s arm went numb from fingertips to shoulder. He couldn’t even tell if he still held his sword or not.

Delrael shook his head, stunned. He tripped backward on some of the branches underfoot, rolling as he fell. The sword dropped beside him and he picked it up with his left hand. He didn’t know how to fight with his left hand.

“Haw! Haw!” Gairoth said.

“Are you guys going to help me or what!” Delrael shouted.

Bryl took out the Air Stone and the Fire Stone and shuffled them from one hand to the other. “Do something!” Vailret said.

Bryl said, “Which one should I use?”

“I don’t care!”

Bryl picked up the Fire Stone, looked at it, then closed his eyes. He tossed it on the forest floor, hoping for a high number. He rolled a “1.” His spell failed.

“Wouldn’t you know it?”

“Gairoth, you big dummy!” Vailret cried out as he ran downhill into the hollow. It was an impulsive act, something Delrael might have done. He pulled out his short sword, though he had no idea what good it would do against the ogre. He slipped in the mud but grabbed branches to keep his balance and plunged on.

The ogre looked up, giving Delrael a moment to roll farther away. The rusty spikes on the club looked sharp, and thicker than Delrael’s fingers.

From the sack, the point of an arrow emerged again, opening a gash. Little hands poked through and tore the material, sawing with the arrow tip, until the young ylvan poked his head through. He squirmed with his shoulders until he finally got the sack down about his waist. He didn’t try to climb out, but instead grabbed his crossbow, nocked an arrow, and shot it.

The arrow struck the back of Gairoth’s wide left leg. The ogre released the club with one hand and slapped at the arrow. In doing so, he let the heavy club fall to his side, banging his own knee.

Delrael climbed to his feet, propped on his sword. With his left hand he bent the other arm to raise the blade and block another blow. His shoulders were trembling, and he knew he wouldn’t be strong enough.

But behind Gairoth, the flattened bulk of Journeyman squirmed. The golem rose back up, reforming himself from the soft clay. Without a sound, he pushed his head and shoulders into shape out of the central mass of mud and drew more moisture from the soft forest floor.

His chest and legs rippled, redistributing the clay, flowing most of it into one forearm and fist that became as massive as the golem’s body core itself, one giant hand the size of a heavy boulder.

“Just what the doctor ordered, Gairoth. Have a taste of your own medicine.”

Before the ogre could turn in response, Journeyman slammed his huge fist down on Gairoth’s head. “BAM! See how you like it.”

The ogre’s eye rolled up. His jaw dropped slack, and he tumbled like a falling tree, face first into the mud and leaves. His club fell beside him.

Journeyman slapped his palms together in finality. “How do you spell relief?”

#

They left Gairoth stone cold in the hollow as they hurried down the quest-path in the forest terrain.

“Glory hallelujah!” Journeyman babbled about his adventure. He tucked and nudged pieces of clay back into place. “Oh, what a feeling!”

“Yes, it was a good one, wasn’t it?” Delrael said. He shook his tingling and sore right arm.

The ylvan man brushed off his camouflaged leather suit and took out a sewn cap that sported a red feather. “I’m not much for formalities, but my name is Tallin. Thanks for rescuing me—you did a good job against the big clod! It’s nice not having to fight all by myself for a change.”

“Rule number one, always have fun,” Delrael said, shrugging his shoulders. They introduced themselves according to gaming protocol and each told his areas of expertise.

“Why were you the only one fighting against Gairoth?” Vailret asked. “Was something wrong with the others?”

Tallin strode ahead as if he knew where they were going. Delrael had trouble keeping pace with him.

“They were trying to fight. You saw them, and how sad it was. I didn’t do anything but yell at Gairoth from the trees until he started wrecking things. The old man he pulled out of the nest was Tranor. He tells good stories and he knows more dice games than any character I’ve ever seen.”

Tallin watched the forest floor, and his face bore a bemused expression. He rubbed his fingers together on the tip of his pointed beard.

“Tranor used to tell me stories about the old Sorcerer wars, how the ylvan once were the terrors of the forest, ambushing any enemy that entered our forest terrain. Hah!” Tallin sounded excited. “We could be invisible in the trees, and run up among the branches, shooting down with our arrows. We survived the Scouring, when some of you high-minded human characters decided to wipe out the other races on Gamearth.”

Delrael looked for some resentment in the ylvan’s eyes, but he saw none. After the Sorcerer race departed on their Transition, the remaining character races were left to fight over the map. Human characters rallied with some of the half-breed Sorcerers to defend against the reptilian Slac. Other human fighters, thinking themselves brave, went to extremes and tried to exterminate all other character races. In their fear and fanaticism they struck at even the benign ones, like the ylvan or the panther people, the khelebar.

That was many turns ago, though, and Tallin did not seem to carry a grudge.

“I stayed with my people. Somebody has to take care of them, since they all seem to have knocked their heads against a tree too many times,” Tallin said. “Even though they turned into a bunch of sore Losers even before they went into their daze. They stopped playing games for enjoyment. Kellos, our village leader, turned them sour, made them afraid and suspicious, for all the good it did them. They still succumbed to whatever put them in a daze anyway. They could have been having fun instead of worrying all that time. I’ve been getting food for them, since they don’t seem to have any interest in doing it themselves.”

Vailret repeated his original question. “But what’s wrong with them? Why are they acting like that?”

Tallin knitted his eyebrows and looked at Vailret. “Do I look like someone who sits around and explains things all day? Normally they would have fought like hornets, especially with Kellos stirring them up. Now, though, they’re just sleepwalking—well, you saw. What’s gotten into them? Is it some kind of spell? You tell me. I don’t understand these things.”

Vailret stared ahead, eyes fixed but unfocused on the little man’s green cap. Delrael couldn’t imagine any reason, but then Journeyman spoke up.

“Scartaris has the power to manipulate other characters with his mind, as if he is a Player in his own right. He can control actions, even from this great a distance.”

Tallin looked at them, puzzled. “What’s a Scartaris?” Nobody answered his question.

“Wonderful. . .” Bryl said. “What’s going to stop it from happening to us?”

Delrael thought the Earthspirits in his belt might protect them, if the Spirits were even still alive.

“As a matter of fact,” Bryl continued, “What protected Tallin? He should have been controlled just like the others.”

Journeyman raised his lumpy eyebrows, like two hairless caterpillars arching themselves for battle. “Enquiring minds want to know.”

“Maybe he’s a spy, planted here to join our group and sabotage our quest,” Bryl said. He glared at the little man.

“Bryl, you said that about Journeyman, too.” Delrael frowned at the half-Sorcerer with open skepticism.

“Look, I didn’t ask you to come rescue me.” Tallin flared his nostrils, angry and insulted, but he managed to hold his temper. Delrael admired that. “Are you suggesting I pretended to get captured by Gairoth? You’ve got mud for brains.”

But Vailret’s face carried a doubtful expression. “If your entire village was corrupted by Scartaris, how did you alone stay untouched?”

“Brilliant question. I probably never would have thought of that one myself!” Tallin looked at the rest of them with a haughty expression, and then turned to Delrael for support. “How should I know? I’ve told you the truth.”

Delrael pursed his lips. “If he was working with Scartaris and the Outsiders, he’d make sure he had a good cover story.”

“Good point,” Journeyman said.

“Wait a minute.” Vailret motioned with his hands for them to calm down. “We all know about some of the rulebreakers. Characters like Lellyn, and like Tarne. Maybe certain characters have a natural immunity, something Scartaris can’t touch. It would fit with the Rules of Probability.”

“Maybe this is Gamearth fighting back with flukes of its own, twists in the Game,” Delrael said.

Vailret’s eyes sparkled with the possibility. Delrael could see how intrigued he was by the idea. “And what if the Outsiders don’t know anything about it?”

Delrael clapped the ylvan on the back to get them all moving again. “Can you give me a hint about where we’re going? I don’t waste much time sitting around and planning things, but I wouldn’t mind having the end goal in sight.”

“My feelings exactly!” Delrael said, smiling.

“I take it that means you’re joining our quest?” Vailret asked.

Tallin blinked. “You don’t expect me to go watch the other ylvan stare at trees all day, do you? After they just watched Gairoth carry me off, I don’t feel much attachment to home anymore.”

#

The sun was low in the west, shooting its last rays between the tree trunks, when they neared the edge of the last hexagon they could travel in a day. A cool breeze sprang up from the east, rippling the forest leaves.

Just ahead they could see the sprawling vista of the next hexagon, at last a break from the forest terrain. Flat, unpleasant-looking desolation spread out into the dusk. Delrael took a deep breath of the forest smells, and knew that would all change the next morning when they crossed the black line into the rocky desert.

On their long walk, Delrael had warmed up to Tallin, a companion with whom he could discuss strategy, adventuring, and tactics. He explained about the Outsider David trying to end the Game, and of their quest to find a way to stop Scartaris. He said nothing about the Earthspirits hidden in his belt.

At camp Tallin gathered wood, explaining how to stack it for a better fire. He refused to let Bryl use a spell and started the fire himself with a rough stone and the metal from his belt buckle. Annoyed, Bryl let him have his way.

Upon seeing the pack food his companions intended to eat, the ylvan snorted in disgust. Tallin secured the crossbow on his shoulder and scrambled up the trunk of a tree, finding fingerholds where none appeared visible. He called down from the branches. “This shouldn’t take long.” His mottled green clothes blended into the forest shadows and he vanished in the leaves.

Delrael lost three more games of tic-tac-toe to Journeyman, tied one, and won one. Vailret played idly with his own set of dice. Tallin dropped down into the clearing, holding two quail. “Quite an improvement over standard pack food, especially stuff that’s been replenished by a spell too many times.”

Bryl looked miffed, but the prospect of fresh meat seemed to brighten him. He changed his mind, though, when he was assigned the task of plucking feathers. Tallin spitted the meat and left it to cook above the flames of the campfire, bowed over the heat on thin green branches. The smell was deliciously inviting as the quail sizzled in the smoke. They could hear the meat hissing against the burning wood.

“Is it finger-lickin’ good?” Journeyman asked, watching them eat. They cleaned every bone on the two carcasses. “I can’t believe you ate the whole thing!”

After the meal, Tallin piled wood on the campfire so it would burn all night. Journeyman remained on watch as the others brought out blankets, settling down on the leaves and forest grass to sleep. Bryl brushed branches away and moved three times before he found a comfortable spot. Tallin lay by himself in a light sleep.

Delrael propped his head against the smooth bark of a maple tree. He bent his knees, rubbing the pliable kennok wood of his left leg, and kept his feet warm by the fire as the autumn air cooled down for the night. The taste of the meal remained in his mouth, and he could smell the smoke from the low campfire. He looked at the young ylvan beside them and felt safe and content as he drifted off into sleep.

#

Gairoth listened to the pounding of drums inside his head. Pain made the bones in his skull vibrate. Leaves and dead grass stuck to his face. He pawed them away, smearing his cheeks and skin with muddy markings.

The ogre looked around the hollow. Delroth was gone. The torn, discarded sack showed him that the little ylvan had also fled—and Gairoth’s sack was ruined. He had killed an old traveler for it, though he found little treasure inside. Now he would never find another sack.

Dark, speechless anger bubbled up in him, increasing the pain in his head. He sat up, holding hands against his temples to squeeze the pain back inside.

Rognoth, his pet dragon, was gone, chased far to the north by another dragon brought by Delroth. Bryl the magic user had taken away Gairoth’s shiny diamond Air Stone. All the rest of his treasure was gone, too, after his Maw had chased him away from the Stronghold.

And when he had tried to go home, Gairoth found a giant river right where his cesspools had been. Right where his home had been.

The ogre felt outraged, betrayed, saddened. The ylvan called him a Loser—maybe that was true. But it was all Delroth’s fault. Gairoth pounded both fists into the soft ground, then clenched them in a stranglehold around the end of his club.

The ogre climbed to his feet. He had nothing else to do now.

His teeth hurt. His skin hurt. The inside of his head hurt. All of him hurt. Everything had been so nice before. Before Delroth had come.

Gairoth’s mind fixed on the idea. He would take a quest of his own. It sounded right to him, a straightforward solution, something he could concentrate on and never forget. He would follow Delroth, and find him, and smash him with the club. BAM!

He stood up and, his stomach growling with hunger, he tossed aside the torn and empty sack. It had been a good sack. Gairoth found the footprints of the group along one of the clear quest-paths.

The ogre followed them.

#

Tallin woke the others more than an hour before sunrise. He rubbed his little hands together in the crisp air and blew steam from his mouth. “Come on, let’s get going.” He nudged Bryl on the ground. “We’ve got a hex or two of desolation to cover. I’ve never been out of the forest before.”

Bryl rubbed his eyes. “Whose quest is this, anyway?”

Vailret held his hands over the still-warm embers of the fire. He flexed fingers that were red with cold.

“He’s right.” Delrael got up, stretched, then folded his blanket. “The terrain should be easy to follow.”

Together, the five of them crossed the abrupt line that severed the hexagon of forest terrain from the desolation ahead. The lush health of the forest disappeared entirely, leaving the ground stricken with blight, dying away into a wasteland. The soil became barren and rocky. Stalks of prairie grass stood in brown patches, dotting the ground.

The coming dawn left a curtain of deep shadow on the flat terrain. The dark Spectre Mountains were visible in the distance as a black jagged silhouette blocking the rising sun. A few stars still prickled the deep blue dome of sky.

As they walked deeper into the hexagon, the dead earth became cluttered with oddly identical boulders, as if something had cut them out of the dirt and scattered them across the plain. The flat ground had a strange, patterned look ahead of them.

In the dim light, and with his poor eyesight, Vailret stumbled upon a series of deep hexagonal wells rimmed by a low mound six feet across. He caught himself, called out to the others, and stared down. The sharply defined hole plunged into the blackness of catacombs beneath the terrain.

“I can’t tell what it is,” he said.

Delrael picked up a rock and tossed it down. They heard it strike the bottom a moment later. “Not very deep,” Delrael said. He tossed another stone at an angle. It pinged against the walls, but gave no real hint about the depth of the tunnels.

“Could be just a labyrinth left over from the early days of the Game,” Vailret said. “Back when characters did nothing but wander around in dungeons and catacombs, looking for monsters to fight and treasure to steal.”

Tallin pointed across the desolation as the daylight grew brighter. “Do you see those other openings? I can make out at least a dozen more holes scattered around.”

They moved ahead, and the wells became more and more frequent until they seemed like pores on the surface of the land, connected by an underground network of tunnels. “We’ve got a whole hexagon of this to cover?” Bryl said.

“Now I don’t see why any character would want to leave the forest terrain,” Tallin said.

“All this is starting to make me remember something,” Vailret said. He slowed his pace, taking time to look around.

“Come on, I want to get out of this place,” Bryl said. “Something unpleasant could crawl out of those holes.”

“Don’t worry. Be happy,” Journeyman said.

“We’re stuck anyway,” Delrael said. “According to the map, there’s another hex of desolation after this one, and we can’t go any farther than that today.”

Vailret nodded. “It’s in Rule #5.”

Bryl bit his lip and said nothing. He pulled the folds of his blue cloak tight around him. The orange dawn behind the Spectre Mountains looked like fire across the desolation.

Then, between a cluster of the hexagonal wells, they came across a place where the dusty ground was churned and broken. A glossy dark shape lay half buried in the earth.

Journeyman scooped dirt off the polished black form. “Holy ant farms, Batman!” The golem stood back, showing the uncovered carcass to the others.

Bryl gasped. Vailret squinted down, as if trying to remember something he had read. Delrael and Tallin were hard pressed to remain silent.

They gazed upon the dead hulk of an ant ten feet long. Its antennae appeared broken, but the hard exoskeleton retained its shape like a perfect suit of armor.

“Do you remember stories about the Anteds?” Vailret swallowed hard, “We could be in a lot of trouble here.”

Tallin kicked at the carcass. “This one’s dead enough.”

“Yes, but we’re standing on a whole colony of them.” Vailret turned around, but the growing light was not enough for him to make out anything. “We may be better off running back to the last hex of forest terrain and going around the long way. We’ve got to make up our minds fast.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Journeyman said.

Delrael studied the gleaming black hulk. It wasn’t exactly like an ant, but had stockier legs and more powerful joints to accomodate the increased size. He could kill one or two of the giant insects, given a few advantages, good luck, and time to fight.

But he couldn’t take on an entire colony, not even with the assistance of his companions.

He looked across the desolation and a chill feeling went up his spine. He could see no end to the colony ahead. Every step they took, every movement they made, sent tell-tale vibrations to other Anteds waiting below.

A loud chirp echoed from one of the holes behind them, inviting an answer closer to their left. Another chirp sounded behind them. The travelers drew themselves together, looking around. Tallin nocked an arrow in his crossbow. Delrael pulled out his sword, and Bryl removed his two Stones. Journeyman balled his fists into two battering rams.

“It’s Howdy Doody time,” the golem said.

The Anted chirps grew louder and more frequent, closer to them.

7. Catacombs of the Anteds

“All characters play games: dice games, games of skill, role-playing games. These things are for our amusement. But we also play power games, games for conquest, dominance, and victory—games of life and death.”

—Preface, The Book of Rules

Delrael knew they would never make it across the colony that filled the open, desolate hexagon. They could sense the Anteds out there, coming nearer through the tunnels beneath them.

He pulled out his sword, he bent his knees, he narrowed his eyes. Adrenalin pumped into his bloodstream, and time slowed down. His kennok-wood leg felt completely a part of him, ready to perform. He swallowed in a dry throat, prepared for battle. The excitement of the Game filled him.

“Wonderful,” Tallin said, “I leave my forest to get eaten by bugs.” The ylvan placed a small arrow in his crossbow and stood beside Delrael. His green-splotched forest camouflage made him look conspicuous on the rocky brown ground.

“Bryl, get ready with your Stones,” Delrael said, not looking at the old half-Sorcerer. He swung his blade in the air, loosening his arm.

Bryl bit his lip and said nothing. He clacked the four-sided diamond and the eight-sided ruby together in the palm of his hand. His skin turned pale with fear.

Vailret pulled out his own short sword and stared down at the blade. He sighed and imitated Delrael’s stance. Delrael knew his younger cousin lacked confidence, and interest, in fighting. Maybe that was why Vailret always wanted to plan things so far ahead of time, to minimize conflicts.

Delrael heard a clattering in the holes near them, a strange inhuman sound. A glistening black head rose up, waving antennae like stiff leather whips. Serrated jaws opened and closed like sabers on well-oiled hinges. The ant head swivelled back and forth, as if scanning them.

“Sufferin’ succotash!” Journeyman said.

The Anted used powerful jointed legs to heave itself over the rim of the hexagonal mound. Two more insects climbed out of nearby holes. Orange dawn light flashed on their polished chitin. The insects chirped together with a pounding, grating rhythm. Other Anteds drew nearer.

Acting on his own desperation, Bryl took the Fire Stone, closed his eyes, and rolled it at his feet. “Give me luck this time!”

The eight-sided ruby landed in the soft dirt with the “4” facing up. Bryl clapped his hands and snatched the Fire Stone back, calling up the spell. He surrounded the five of them with a ring of fire that bloomed up from the rocky ground, bright and deadly, sealing them off from the Anteds. The nearest insects chittered and reared back.

“Safe as the Stronghold walls!” Bryl said.

“Would you mind explaining what good it does?” Tallin asked. “The Anteds just have to wait you out.”

Bryl avoided the question. “I’ve got four more spells after this one.”

Delrael paced back and forth, holding his sword. Behind the flames another shape emerged from a tunnel opening, moving among the milling Anted forms. It looked human, or nearly so, and rode on the back of one of the insects. The part-human creature let out a series of guttural noises, poor imitations of the Anted chirps.

“What is that disgusting thing?” Tallin dropped his voice so Delrael could barely hear it over the din of insect chirps and the roar of the flames. “Is it a human character?”

The figure gestured and made more noises, as if barking orders. The bright flames made too many long shadows in the dim morning, masking out details.

Bryl wiped sweat off his forehead. His knuckles whitened as he strained to keep his wall of flames up.

“Looks like we don’t have to wait any more.” Delrael shifted his grip on the sword.

An Anted thrust its head and forelimbs through the rippling wall of fire. Its antennae burned, smoking and writhing. The Anted collapsed with a moan like bending metal as its insides cooked within the black armor. Delrael heard popping and sizzling; a sour stench steamed up from cracks in the insect’s shell.

Another Anted came forward, sacrificing itself next to the first. It tumbled, legs curled into the air. A third Anted died, completing a bridge across the fire.

Bryl squeezed the Fire Stone, trying to push the fire up through the insect bodies, but his spell faded. Bryl fell to his knees, exhausted, curling his lip to keep the fire burning. The flame died away, leaving only black and smoking rocks. He blinked, disoriented for a second, and hung his head. Other Anteds clambered over their fallen comrades.

Vailret turned around, squinting in the smoke and stench, trying to appear threatening with his short sword. Journeyman punched his fist into the palm of his other hand with a loud smacking sound. Delrael touched his sword hilt, ready to die fighting. “Luck,” he said to all of them.

The part-human character rode on the back of one Anted where he could survey the attack. The rider appeared to have been a human once, but was now stunted and twisted. His hair had fallen out in patches, and his eyes bulged wide and unblinking. His skin was pasty pale, as if he had been isolated from sunlight for years—but it also had an oily gleam when the light struck it at a certain angle. He wore plates of black chitin, broken shells from the Anteds, on his back and sides. The chitin looked as if it had grown in, rather than just tied on.

The part-human figure gestured in the air, showing fingers that had fused together. The nails had become solid and grown down over his knuckles in a hooked claw that resembled those of the Anteds.

“Wait!” Vailret called. “What do you want?”

The part-human creature rode his Anted through the other insects, emerging at the front. He cocked his head to look at them. He sniffed the air. His saucer-like eyes did not blink. The other Anteds pressed close beside him, gaping open their sharp jaws.

“Maybe we’d better not fight,” Vailret whispered. He gestured for them to lower their weapons. “Just surrender for now.”

Delrael remembered the role-playing game his father and Bryl had put him through on his eleventh birthday, making him imagine he had been taken captive by a tribe of vicious worm-men. Vailret had a similar role-playing adventure about being captured by the cruel reptilian Slac. “Are you sure you want to be taken alive?”

Vailret looked at him, and Delrael knew what he was thinking. Neither of them had survived their imaginary captivity in the vivid role-playing game.

“Looks like we’re out of luck otherwise.” Tallin rubbed his fingers at the point of his beard. “I wish I was back in the forest terrain. The ylvan were boring, but safe.”

“I’d rather stay alive, if it’s all the same to you,” Bryl said.

Vailret called out again to the part-human creature. “We won’t resist.” He sheathed his short sword, and motioned for Delrael to do the same. Tallin put his crossbow back on his shoulder.

Delrael stood motionless, uneasy. His empty hand fidgeted around the hilt of his sword. He shuffled his feet in the dust. He didn’t like this at all.

“Take us to your leader,” Journeyman said.

The part-human creature made a chuffing, chirping sound from the bottom of his throat. The circle of Anteds grew tighter until one opened its deadly mandibles around Bryl’s waist. The half-Sorcerer fainted, slithering down into the grip of the ebony jaws. The Anted lifted Bryl’s limp form into the air, then marched toward one of the tunnel openings.

Four more insects came forward for the rest of them. The Anteds stopped chirping.

Delrael ground his teeth together, so tense that he felt as if his muscles would snap. He wanted to lash out, to fight to the death—but his feet dangled uselessly below him when the Anted picked him up. He felt the insect’s sharp mandibles even through his leather armor.

The jaws made gouges in the soft clay of the golem’s skin, but Journeyman kept nudging the clay back into place.

The part-human dismounted looked at the dead Anted hulk buried near where they stood. With both hands he lifted up the shell of the insect’s head and, with a snap of his arms, he twisted it off the main body. With his hardened knuckles, he rapped on the chitin. The exoskeleton rang hollow, and dried threadlike debris tumbled to the ground. Satisfied, he tucked the empty head under his arm like a trophy and scrambled back onto his mount.

The other Anteds moved forward and descended into one of the openings.

#

The tunnels slanted downward, twisting deep beneath the surface. Delrael wondered how far they could go before they struck the bottom of the map. The far walls of the tunnel flooded past into murk before and behind him.

The air held a thick musty odor of dust and claustrophobia. The walls were made of fused, gritty sand.

After his eyes became accustomed, Delrael realized the catacombs were not totally dark. Patches of fungus had been smeared on corners and near the curved ceilings, and these glowed with a faint green, barely enough to see by.

The ants covered a great distance in the tangled tunnels before climbing upward again. Delrael was sore and anxious to know what they would find at the end of the journey. The other companions did not speak.

The part-human creature dismounted and scampered ahead, at home in the tunnels. The insects began chirping to each other in a strange chant. The part-human made a loud imitation of the chirps himself, then used his hooked claw-hands to tear at his sides and under his arms. Lines of dried blood marked previous injuries on the stiff skin.

The Anteds carried them into a large sunlit grotto chiseled out of the cementlike walls. Delrael knew before he could blink the bright light out of his eyes that they had entered the queen’s chamber. It was what he expected.

“And now for a word from our sponsor,” Journeyman said.

The Anteds released their captives. Delrael staggered on numb legs and tingling feet. He rubbed his pinched sides to restore feeling. Journeyman smoothed the gouge marks from his clay torso.

A huge Anted spoke from an odd dais carved out of polished gray stone. “Consort, what have you brought your queen?” Her reedy voice was clicking and cumbersome.

The Anted queen’s body was glossy black, but her head was polished liquid-smooth, completely without the many-faceted eyes of the other insects. Her mandibles were smaller, atrophied. Two thin, cellophane wings curled down beside her in a clear amber cloak.

Delrael scanned the throne room, automatically checking options for escape. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Tallin do the same. He felt a rapport with the tough little ylvan.

In the streaming light from the wide opening overhead, many tunnels branched off from the other walls. Dust motes gleamed as they fell through the sunlight toward the floor.

The part-human creature set down the empty Anted head he had been carrying and crept forward. His lower jaw jutted out, and his words had a garbled whistling quality. “Ryx, Ryx, Ryx. . .”

“Are these to be alternative choices for me, Consort?” The queen ant spoke to the part-human creature. “Is that why you brought them?”

“No!” The consort-creature scrabbled forward in fear and awe, but eager. He walked on his hands and legs in a bucking, hunchbacked gait that looked oddly natural for him. Delrael saw wide lumpy ridges along his ribcage, as if another folded set of limbs had begun to grow there.

Consort cooed and made his weird chirping noise as he crawled up to Ryx’s feet. He ran his clawed fingers over her limbs, straightening the bristle hairs on her forelimbs. He nuzzled up, rubbing his hands along her abdomen, stroking her golden wings.

Ryx tilted her eyeless head back. Her small mandibles opened and closed. She emitted a high keening sound.

Consort pushed his face against her chitin plates, leaving a wet streak from his thick, damp tongue. “Ryx. . .Ryx. . . Ryx. . .” he said. His claws scraped on her exoskeleton, then reached between her mandibles with loving gentleness. He probed her mouth parts.

“I can’t give you much more to eat,” the queen said, “You will transform too quickly. I don’t want to risk that. You are my consort—I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

“More, Ryx. . .more. Hungry.” Consort snuffled and whined.

“Just a sip.” She reached out with her forelimbs to stroke the plates implanted in his back and the tattered shreds of hair on his head.

A whitish-gold syrup oozed from a channel in the inside of her mouth. Consort jerked forward, lapping it up. He thrust his head deep into the gap between her mandibles, humming and sighing.

Delrael watched in disgust. Bryl turned his head. The other Anteds stood guard around them, motionless.

“Enough!” Ryx pushed the part-human creature away. Rebuffed, Consort hunkered down in front of her. His clawed hands swayed loosely. “That is your reward. What have you brought me?”

Delrael realized Ryx had her head cocked off to the side, as if seeing through other eyes. Consort stared up at the huge queen ant in admiration, then tilted his head sideways to stare at the travelers with his bulging dry eyes.

“Five characters. Questers. One small, one old, one strong, one medium, and. . .” He looked long at Journeyman, “And one made of mud.”

Consort stood up as straight as he could, swaying his hooked hands around his kneecaps, then turned to face the motionless queen again. He stiffened, and Ryx’s feelers vibrated with intense speed.

Ryx raised her head and continued in her humming voice. “A typical adventuring party. What is your quest?” Her polished head turned toward the wall behind the travelers.

Delrael fumbled in his mind, searching for a viable excuse, but his mind went blank.

Tallin’s response was quicker. “We’re just mercenaries. When the Game slowed down, this blasted peace put us out of work! We heard stories about a battle brewing in the east, and we’re making our way there. Any problems with that?”

Ryx tilted her head toward the ylvan’s voice for a long moment. Tallin stood defiant next to Delrael. Journeyman looked flat and emotionless; Vailret bit his lip; Bryl scrambled up from his daze on the floor, looking around in fear. The queen of the Anteds shifted her blank head toward the half-Sorcerer.

“You are no mercenaries. That one’s afraid of his own reflection.”

Ryx vibrated her antennae again with a thin humming sound. The noise bounced around the walls of the grotto. Delrael felt a strange finger poking at the inside of his mind, ferreting out his private memories. Tallin touched his hands to his forehead.

Ryx squatted back on her polished dais. Delrael didn’t know how to read any emotion on her face, but her voice hinted at laughter. “You intend to destroy Scartaris? Five of you think you can defeat his armies and defenses?”

Delrael flushed in anger. “I didn’t say that!”

“Not only that, but the Earthspirits are hiding in your belt, and you intend to take them secretly to Scartaris, where the Spirits will be unleashed to battle him.”

Delrael clamped his mouth shut. Bryl let out a quiet moan of despair. Journeyman gawked in shock at Delrael, the silver belt, then the queen Anted.

“Scartaris will reward me for this,” Ryx said, tapping her forelegs together. “Consort, remove the belt.”

Delrael drew his sword and crouched, looking from side to side and daring the Anteds to come closer. He stepped away from the consort-creature. The lights grew dim around him as he focused his attention on the sword, on any enemy that might come.

“Try it, Ryx! We’ll cause more damage than your Anteds have ever seen.”

Following Delrael’s lead, Journeyman drew himself up, ready to fight. Vailret and Tallin both pulled out their weapons, and Bryl held the Fire Stone. Nobody looked eager for battle. Three Anteds came forward, clacking their jaws, but hesitating. The air around them crackled with tension.

The queen lifted her featureless head. “Stop! Consort, you stay away from those weapons. Take them all down to the fungus chambers and hold them there. I need to decide what to do with them.”

Consort scampered forward, clutching at Delrael’s arm. The fighter snatched the claw-hand away, sweating and looking at the gathered insects. “Come,” Consort said. “Come.”

The Anted guards backed away from one of the catacomb openings. “You will not resist,” Ryx said in a brittle voice. “You have already stretched my patience to its limits.”

Delrael looked at the queen, at the other Anteds, then sheathed his sword. “We don’t have any choice, again,” he said. “We never get to do anything in this adventure.”

Journeyman restored his swollen fists to normal size. “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”

Consort snatched up the empty shell of the Anted head he had found and swayed forward, walking like an insect. He turned once to see that the others followed him. One of the giant ants entered the passage behind them, keeping watch.

#

Consort capered ahead of them, exuding coiled power and nervous energy. The tunnels wound downhill again until they saw only the dim greenish light from patches of fungus on the wall. Occasionally, an Anted poked its massive head out of side tunnels, watching the captives’ progress. Delrael could sense other insects following in the darkness of the tunnels behind them. Somehow in her great hive mind Ryx watched through all of their eyes.

Delrael kept the directions filed away in his mind. As a questing character he could recall exactly where he had been and how to retrace his steps. He kept his eyes open for any way they might escape or defeat the Anteds, ready to act on it without thinking if an idea came to mind.

They crossed a hex-line etched into the passage, up the walls, and across the ceiling over their heads, as if the Anteds had tunnelled directly through the black mark that went to the base of the map. “That’s half of the desolation hexes,” Tallin said. “Things can start getting better now.”

The green light grew brighter ahead. Consort turned the corner, leading them to the glowing opening of a wide chamber. Light streamed from it.

“In,” he said. He swung his curved hands, gesturing them with his fused fingers. “In, in, in!”

Dripping growths of fungus covered the chamber walls. Mounds of dead things, mulched and unidentifiable, nourished the phosphorescent fungus, food for the Anteds. A wet, rancid smell made the air thick and difficult to breathe.

“What will Ryx do to us?” Bryl asked.

Consort looked up and bobbed his head, grinning. “Eaten. Fresh. Or added here.” He bucked his shoulder to indicate the mounds under the fungus.

Vailret tapped one of the ingrown plates on the part-human’s back. “Consort, what is your real name? Do you remember?” he asked.

“Consort,” the part-human said. “Consort.” He shuffled ahead and did not look back at them.

“No, I mean your name as a human character. Do you remember when you first came to Ryx?”

“Ryx!” Consort lifted his eyes up in a worshipful expression. “Made me Consort. Feeds me.”

“She’s changing you into. . .this,” Vailret said, “with what she’s feeding you.”

“Seems to be wrecking his mind, too,” Tallin snorted.

“I wandered map. Scavenger,” Consort said. “Then found Ryx.” He seemed lost in memory, trying to piece together the scattered dice game of his mind. He raked a curved claw-hand across his scalp, tearing up patchy hair. In the green light, Consort’s skin looked black and glistening, inhuman.

“Do you remember back then?” Vailret said, “Did you play any games?” He took out his set of dice. Something registered in Consort’s eyes when he stared at the dice.

“Games?” Vailret repeated. “Do the Anteds play games with you? Here, let me show you.” He rolled the dice. “You have to guess which number will come up. See?” He rolled again.

“Games. . .” Consort said. His head drifted from side to side, fixing his saucer eyes on the dice.

“Del, come here,” Vailret whispered. The two of them played a dice game. Consort did not join in, but he watched with his full attention.

“Or how about this one?” Using Tallin’s dagger, they sketched a grid on the floor. Delrael and Journeyman played tic-tac-toe.

As Consort watched, old thoughts finally seemed to break through. “Ryx never plays games. Not these.”

“But you used to like to play games, didn’t you?” Vailret said. “All human characters do. Here—roll the dice yourself. Play with us.”

Consort awkwardly held the dice in his cupped claws. As he noticed his fused fingers, another thought seemed to jar loose. He stared down at his hands, as if puzzled at what could have happened to them.

They played a few rounds with the dice. Consort went through the motions, obviously not quite grasping what he was doing, but Vailret and Delrael arranged it so that he won the round. Consort’s excitement grew, and he became more and more interested.

If only they could be sure Ryx was not watching through his eyes, too.

“How’d you like to play another game?” Tallin said, grinning so that his pointed beard jutted out. His forest-patterned clothes had lost all their colors in the green light. He winked at Delrael. “You must have played this one, Consort. It’s fun, and you’ll probably win because you have the advantage.”

“Game?” Consort’s bulging eyes never blinked as he cocked his head from side to side. “Game?”

Tallin flashed a toothy grin. “It’s called hide and seek.”

“Yes,” Delrael picked up the conversation, fixing on the ylvan’s idea. He liked the way Tallin’s mind worked. “It’s more fun than dice. You stay here and give us time to hide. We’ll go out into the catacombs, then you try to find us! Once you find all of us, then you can hide, and we’ll try to find you.”

“Rule number one, you know,” Vailret said, “Always have fun.”

“Hide and seek.” Consort stood up and made his eerie chirping noise again. “Games.”

“All right, stay here and cover your eyes. Wait a long time now, otherwise it won’t be fair. Then you come find us.” Delrael smiled, but turned his head to the side, “Go!”

Consort hunched by the glowing fungus. He tapped his claw-hands on the hard floor, buzzing to himself. He couldn’t close his saucer eyes, but he stared at the wall.

They ran into the dimness, not knowing where they were going. “Head uphill,” Delrael said.

“And be quiet,” Tallin added. “If we don’t bump into any Anteds, Ryx won’t know where we are.”

At each intersection of tunnels, they chose the one tending upward. Delrael ran with sword drawn. “We have to kill any Anteds right away, before they can signal to more.”

They lost their sense of time. Without seeing daylight above, they had no idea how far they had come or how long they had been down in the catacombs. Delrael’s sword felt a part of him. His wooden kennok leg did not tire. The companions pushed on. Their eyes were wide, their lips white, their teeth pressed together in determination.

He knew they would encounter an Anted soon, very soon. He hoped they could find their way to the surface first.

The hazy green light increased the shadows around them, offering too little illumination to see anything sharply. The air was dense and warm, stifling. Delrael couldn’t seem to get enough breath.

His senses were keyed up to a fever pitch. He picked up motion in a tunnel to their right, something trying to move quietly. And then in the dim light he saw the clear outline of an Anted head moving forward, ready to spring—.

Delrael swung his sword and thrust forward as he plunged in faster than he could think. He hoped the sharp point of the old Sorcerers’ blade would break through the chitin and strike something vital in the Anted. The sword plunged home more easily than he had expected, and he twisted the hilt, driving upward. Something was wrong.

“Found you. . .” said Consort, then he made a gurgling sound of delayed pain.

His hollow Anted helmet slipped off his head and clattered to the floor of the catacombs.

Delrael withdrew the blade and released his grip on Consort’s shoulder. The blade caught on one of the implanted armored plates, peeling it from his skin and exposing soft jelly-like tissue. Consort slumped bleeding to the floor.

“Ryx. . .” The breath rattled in his throat, gurgling. He made his inhuman chirping sound again before he died.

Delrael stared down at what he had done. He felt more shaken than he thought he should. His mouth was dry, and it hurt when he tried to swallow.

Tallin reached out to grip Delrael’s wrist. “We have to get out of here. One less spy to deal with.”

“Ryx might know what’s happened,” Vailret said.

They ran, taking less care to remain silent now. They turned a dozen more times, lefts and rights, and finally they came to one passage that sloped sharply upward.

A bright golden-blue light sifted through one of the cross-ventilation holes near the ceiling of the tunnel, just above Delrael’s eye level. He stood on his tiptoes and looked. “I can see a way out on the other side of this wall.”

“No way we can get there.” Vailret scowled up at the light. The hole was less than a foot wide, too small for anyone to worm through. “It doesn’t do us any good.”

“It’s close enough,” Delrael said. “I’m not going to wander around here any more. We can get through this.”

He used the hilt of his sword to pound at the edges of the opening. The fused sand chipped away and broke, crumbling loose as he worked. “Journeyman, help me.”

He moved to one side, allowing room for the golem. Journeyman grasped the edges of the hole and began ripping away chunks of the cementlike sand.

“It might be wide enough for Tallin to squeeze through,” Delrael said.

The ylvan came forward, raising his arms as Delrael lifted him to the hole. “Get away if Ryx comes after us.”

Tallin glanced at him, then worked his shoulders into the narrow opening, squirming through. “No, I’ll wait for you on the other side.” The ylvan pulled himself out. “Just don’t dink around—Hurry up!”

His knees and feet disappeared through the hole, and they heard him drop to the floor. Delrael passed the little man’s quiver and crossbow through to him.

“The opening to the surface is too high for me here. I can’t reach it to climb out. Anybody got a ladder?”

Delrael and Journeyman worked furiously widening the hole. “Your turn, Bryl! You can fit.”

The half-Sorcerer stood up, appearing uneasy. He brushed at the sides of his cloak and straightened his white hair and beard. Delrael wondered why he looked so frightened.

“I don’t like to be separated. Especially not here.”

Delrael urged him to the wall. “We’ll be with you in just a few minutes. Don’t worry.”

With a boost from Journeyman, Bryl crawled through the tunnel, scraping his shoulders and elbows. He fell to the floor on the other side, then scrambled to his feet. Tallin crossed his arms over his chest and watched the work on the other side of the wall. Daylight from the opening overhead gleamed down, blinding and bright after their hours in the green dimness.

Journeyman worked in silence, but the chipping of steel against stone rang out along with Delrael’s grunts of effort. Another noise suddenly joined it. Delrael paused to listen.

Tallin called up through the wall. “The Anteds are coming on this side!”

More sounds echoed from other tunnels, like a melodic battle cry. Twelve deadly black insects emerged from different tunnels in the maze.

“Delrael, hurry up!” Bryl said. “I don’t think my spells will be enough.”

Delrael did not answer them, grunting as he pounded with the hilt of his sword. Sweat streamed down his forehead, and his arm ached. He gritted his teeth and paid no attention.

Tallin slipped his crossbow off his shoulder and nocked an arrow. He removed a dagger from his belt and, without taking his eyes from the Anteds, thrust it hilt-first at Bryl.

“Take this! If you run out of spells, you’ll need something to defend yourself with. I’ll be too busy to worry about you.”

Bryl slipped the dagger up his flowing sleeve. He withdrew the Fire Stone and rolled it at his feet. A “2.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Bryl said. He grabbed up the ruby and held a roaring fireball in the palm of his hand. He waited for the Anteds to make the first move. “I’ve only got three spells left.”

Tallin’s eyes flashed as he crouched. He turned in slow circles, watching the insects.

All twelve Anteds rushed at once. Their claws clicked on the hard floor. Tallin shot at the foremost Anted, sinking his arrow up to the fletching in a faceted eye. The Anted wheezed and collapsed, oozing a green blot of ichor. Bryl hurled the blossoming ball of flames to explode in the face of one of the black creatures. Tallin slipped another arrow into the crossbow and fired, but it struck the hard insect armor at an angle and bounced off.

Bryl managed to summon up a smaller fireball with the remainder of the weak spell, and drove off another Anted.

Tallin flipped a third arrow out of his quiver, trying to fit it into the crossbow. An Anted lunged up behind him and opened its jaws.

“Look out!” Bryl cried.

The ylvan whirled as the mandibles clamped around his waist, lifting him high in the air. “Put me down! Bug-Eyes!” Tallin pounded on the armored head, slapping the curved surfaces of the eyes. The jaws tightened like scissors around him.

#

Alone in the echoing throne room, Ryx stared through the eyes of her Anteds in a choreographed confusion of overlapping images inside her head. She shifted her bulk against the smooth and cold texture of the dais.

The bitter taste of Consort’s death was like bile in her mind. Everything was lost. They had killed Consort. They had killed her chance.

She sent out a command to all the Anteds.

Kill.

#

Tallin squirmed, pulling one of his arrows free, He pointed the tip downward to plunge it into the insect’s head.

But then the jagged mandibles closed together, shearing through flesh and bone.

Tallin’s eyes bulged as the sharp jaws crushed his abdomen. Blood spurted from his mouth.

“Delrael!” he screamed. His crossbow clattered to the floor. Dark red splashed on the Anted’s black armor.

“Tallin! No!” Delrael’s muscles locked from the sick ice at the pit of his stomach. He could do nothing. He wanted to scream and pound his fists against the walls. He strained to see among the swarming masses of black hulks on the other side. “No!”

The Anted shook Tallin’s body back and forth like an alligator would, then it released him. The ylvan hit the curved tunnel wall, sliding down at the head of his own trail of blood.

Another insect sprang up to take Bryl in its jaws.

8. Queen’s Flight

“RULE #11. When a character fails in combat, he or she may die. Death is final in the Game—that character can never play again.”

—The Book of Rules

Bryl could not reach the Fire Stone. He had rolled his spell, but the ruby lay untouched and gleaming on the ground. The Anted squeezed its jaws and lifted him into the air.

In a blur, Bryl’s hand snatched out the dagger Tallin had given him. Without pausing to think he struck down, pushing the blade deep into the Anted’s compound eye.

The insect let out a shrill scream, gaping its mandibles Bryl dropped to the floor on limp legs, holding both elbows against his ribs where blood from torn skin seeped into his blue cloak. A wet stink came from the Anted’s gushing wound. Bryl stumbled backward and grabbed the Fire Stone from the floor.

With more power than he realized he possessed, he blasted the wounded Anted into shards of chitinous armor and dripping tissue. The noise and flash of heat rippled through the tunnels, making him wince and back away.

“Delrael!” he called, but he was so frightened that it made his voice only a hoarse whisper. The other Anteds closed in. He wrung as much out of the spell as he could, roasting another two insects. Burning chitin popped and sputtered.

But Bryl’s spell faded away, leaving him defenseless again. He pressed his back against the curved catacomb wall.

Beside him, Tallin lay in a pool of blood.

#

“Tallin!” Delrael’s scream was hoarse, but he expected no answer. And received none. He heard only the scuffle of clawed feet, the sounds of Bryl’s fire. The stench of burning Anteds came through the wall opening.

Delrael’s shock gave way to rage. Sweat ran into his eyes from his dust-clumped brown hair.

“Journeyman can reshape himself and squeeze through!” Vailret said. “He can help Bryl.”

“Go!” Delrael shouted.

In a quick gesture the golem clapped a supportive hand on Delrael’s shoulder. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Then he elongated himself, stretching the clay into the opening. His feet slithered through and he reshaped himself on the other side, bulging and eager for battle. He balled his clay fists and scrambled into the fray.

Delrael chipped at the wall and listened to the sounds of the fight. Tallin lay dying on the other side.

He smashed the hilt down against the cement-sand, and a thin fracture line appeared. Smaller pieces of the wall flaked off. He could smell his sweat and the dust; his fingers began to sting and bleed. He and Vailret both grasped the rim of the hole and pulled, bumping into each other to get a better grip. A crumbling chunk broke off, falling with the loose sand to the tunnel floor.

“Come on!” Delrael crawled up through the hole. He scraped his elbows against the rough cement-sand, but he pushed his sword in front of him. He hooked his arms over the other side, then heaved himself through, banging his hip and scuffing his leather armor. He dropped beside Bryl with the grace of an acrobat.

He saw Tallin’s twisted body on the floor. The ylvan’s blood looked thick and dark in the harsh light angling through the opening overhead. He should have thought ahead, planned better.

“Tallin,” Delrael said once more, then set his jaw. Holding the sword like a club in front of him, he strode forward at the Anteds. Delrael’s ears pounded with a rushing of blood. He chopped with his sword. Vaguely, he became aware of the golem next to him hammering with his fists.

An Anted lunged at Journeyman, and the golem met it with a tightly clenched fist, splintering the chitin of its head in a rayed pattern like a spiderweb.

“It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!” The Anted flowed to the floor as all six legs went limp. “Hmmm, I guess not.”

Delrael noticed the periphery of the battle with only enough awareness to avoid any unexpected threats. Bryl squeezed his eyes shut and rolled the eight-sided ruby again. Vailret had elbowed his own way through the hole and jumped toward one Anted, stretching his short sword out to lop off the insect’s antennae. Reeling and disoriented, the Anted did not know how to defend itself, leaving it open to Vailret’s stab to the brain.

An Anted lunged at Journeyman, jaws gaping wide like a steel trap. The golem braced himself, catching the pincers with his hands, and he spread the viselike jaws. The insect struggled to back away, but still Journeyman applied his strength. After a loud snapping sound, the golem released his hold to watch the ant fall among the others on the floor.

Delrael searched for another insect as the first ant head tumbled to the floor. The decapitated body struggled awkwardly before crumpling. His mind saw only the red of Tallin’s blood.

Three more fell. Another exploded in flames as Bryl succeeded with his fourth spell for the day.

One insect circled around behind Delrael, opening its jaws. But Journeyman was there, leaping up and straddling the Anted’s back. “Oh, a wise guy, eh? Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!” He grasped the ebony mandibles and pulled backward. His clay muscles rippled, stretching the Anted’s neck grotesquely out of its socket until the pale connecting fibers popped apart.

The last of the chirping noises fell silent. Motionless hulks of the dead insects littered the floor, making it slippery with spattered ooze. No other Anteds appeared.

Delrael pushed his way past the fallen insect bodies.

Tallin.

Bryl was already bent over the ylvan. Delrael kneeled, staring, then he reached forward to brush blood away from Tallin’s mouth. Delrael was shaking. He dropped his sword with a clang on the hard floor.

The ylvan’s eyes trembled, then flickered open. The pupils were dilated, unfocused. Blood welled up inside them from ruptured capillaries, but still they held a glimmer of life. Tallin’s cheeks twitched.

Vailret’s voice came over Delrael’s shoulder, quiet and compassionate, but also practical. “We need to get out of here, Del, before Ryx sends more Anteds.”

Delrael rose to his feet and turned on his cousin with such a terrible expression on his face that Vailret stepped backward, stumbling on the slippery floor. He caught himself against the wall.

Delrael slumped forward, shaking his chest as he contained his words, everything he wanted to say. He’d had many adventures, but he had never faced the death of a companion. Questing had been too much fun to worry about things like that. Rule number one—always have fun! It seemed like such a ridiculous thing now.

His father Drodanis had watched an ogre murder his brother Cayon. Vailret was beside Paenar when the blind Scavenger sacrificed himself at the volcano. But Delrael had never looked at death face to face before, never watched as the Outsiders removed a character from the Game permanently.

Delrael swung his fist in the air at some intangible foe. The Outsiders had to be watching. “What sort of Game are you playing with us! Why? Are you having fun?” His shoulders trembled. “Tallin. . .”

The ylvan’s bloody lips parted, forming words like the last wind from a dying storm. Delrael bent his ear close to Tallin’s mouth.

“Take my crossbow and. . .use it.”

Delrael squeezed Tallin’s shoulder, trying to impart some energy back to the ylvan. He had been near death once himself, when the Cyclops attacked him near Ledaygen; but Thilane Healer of the khelebar had replaced his mangled leg with one made of kennok wood.

But they had no healers here now, nothing to help Tallin.

“Delrael. . .I’m glad I knew. . .you.”

Something like a sigh escaped Tallin’s lips, and Delrael stared intensely into the ylvan’s black eyes. He held onto the camouflaged leather of his jerkin. The cap with the single scarlet feather had fallen off, lying on its side against the wall.

Tallin’s gaze lifted, filled with tears of pain, and his eyes met Delrael’s once before the ylvan departed.

Delrael froze as ice worked its way up from his gut into his veins and muscles. He stared into the ylvan’s lifeless eyes before he lifted his hand to brush Tallin’s cheek. A smear of blood dried on the back of his hand.

Silence rang in his ears. No one said anything to him. Delrael drew a deep breath, trying to calm himself, but it didn’t work. He stood up, brandishing the old Sorcerer sword at anything that could hear him.

“Damn you, Ryx!” He hung his head. “You and all the Outsiders, too.”

His words bounced off the sides of the silent tunnel, vanishing into the distance. Bryl had recovered the Fire Stone and cowered beside Journeyman. The golem stood motionless among the destroyed Anteds, waiting to see what would happen next.

Keeping his eyes lowered to hide his fury from the others, Delrael snatched up Tallin’s fallen crossbow and fumbled in the torn quiver. He found one unbroken arrow.

Delrael withdrew it and held it in his trembling hands, watching as two drops of Tallin’s blood fell to the floor. Sheathing his sword, he tightened his hand around the arrow and took the crossbow with him. “This is all I’ll need to kill Ryx.”

Delrael went back to the hole in the wall from which they had come. Without another word, he pulled himself up.

“What are you doing?” Bryl said. He scrambled to his feet. Vailret looked as if he wanted to grab Delrael and pull him back.

“I’ll have to retrace our steps so I can get back to the throne room.” He vanished into the hole and dropped to the other side. “You can come along or not. I don’t care.”

#

Delrael fixed his gaze straight ahead, not even glancing at any of the side tunnels. His mouth felt dry and raw, but he used that to increase his anger. The others followed without doubting his skill—Delrael had been on enough gaming campaigns that he knew instinctively which tunnels they had taken.

Behind him, he heard the harsh whispers of his companions. Bryl complained about going to certain death, Vailret vowed not to let Delrael face it alone, Journeyman wanted to continue his own quest to Scartaris, but he also knew the way Gamearth adventures were done. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Delrael retraced their convoluted flight through the catacombs. He did not care about escaping. He only wanted Ryx. His revenge had a clear target. Ryx had been the cause of Tallin’s death.

Ryx.

Delrael did not pause when they passed Consort’s stiffening body at the intersection of cross tunnels. Things were different now—he remembered Tallin touching him on the elbow, telling him not to feel guilty about striking down the part-human creature. He listened to his sharp footsteps, steady and determined.

The tunnels sloped upward again, and Delrael strode toward the throne room. His anger had not begun to fade. Tallin’s death sent jabs of pain through his chest. The wound would have to be cauterized—by the death of the queen.

They crossed back over the underground hex-line, but still they encountered no Anteds. It was too easy. Bryl moaned that it was a trap. Delrael knew he was probably right.

When they finally reached the throne room, he did not slow. The others waited where the tunnels opened into the vaulted grotto, but Delrael strode ahead without stopping to think. He didn’t want to think right now. His eyes burned.

He made no attempt to hide himself or to approach quietly. His boots made loud noises on the hardened floor. He curled his lips as he saw the queen Anted alone on her granite dais.

“I’ve come to kill you, Ryx.” Delrael’s voice dripped ice. “For murdering Tallin.”

The queen turned quickly, pivoting her massive eyeless head toward him. She made a thin, warbling noise that Delrael could not interpret.

“After you killed my Consort and sixteen of my Anteds, how can you want revenge?” Her head bobbed in a convulsive motion and her short feelers waved in the air like whips underwater. “You could have escaped hours ago.”

Delrael didn’t flinch. “Without you to control them, Ryx, these Anteds would not have attacked.”

Ryx drew herself up on the throne, leaning forward and extending two claw-tipped legs. “Without me to control them, they would not be able to move! They are all parts of me, controlled by me.”

Ryx turned sharply, quivering her antennae. Sunlight from the opening above dappled her bullet-smooth head. “What? Another intruder? I thought no one went on quests anymore.”

She pulled the bristly hair from her forelimbs through the inner parts of her mouth, cleaning and combing them. She turned her attention back toward Delrael. Ryx hesitated, as if lost in memories and blanketed in her blindness.

“By killing Consort, you destroyed my chances to form another colony. A character race that could have surged across the map and risen to dominance even against Scartaris’s armies. Stronger than human characters, stronger even than the Slac.”

She rocked up from the stone dais. Her golden wings straightened to keep her balance. Ryx’s mandibles opened and emitted a thin hiss. “He was to be my Consort! I was developing him—he could never have changed entirely, but I would have borne him on a mating flight.

“Our colony of children would have had the strength and armor class of the Anteds, but also the intelligence, independence, and agility of humans! Gamearth could have been ours—but you destroyed him!”

The queen tapped her two forelegs together. A group of Anteds emerged in silence from other branching tunnels. As they approached, Ryx relaxed and seemed more aware—she could see now through their eyes. Delrael held Tallin’s crossbow, but did not take his gaze from the winged queen.

“Faster than a speeding bullet!” Journeyman shouted as he charged, swinging his battering-ram fists. He picked up one Anted and threw it at the others, knocking them back. “How do you like them apples?”

But more Anteds came. Journeyman smashed a head, whirling in time to kill another insect. The golem stood within the flood of monsters, flailing both arms, smashing and killing, as the Anteds drove in from all sides.

Vailret ran at those on the edges, slashing away their antennae and leaving them disoriented and blinded.

The insects squealed as a wall of flame erupted within their ranks, exploding their polished black bodies from within. Bryl grasped the Fire Stone, red in the face and sweating with his last spell for the day. But for a moment the Anteds were knocked back out of the queen’s chambers.

Ryx appeared stunned, driven against her chair. She leaned forward and drummed her amber wings. Springing up with her powerful hind legs, the queen launched herself into the air. Her eyeless head turned from side to side, but with no other Anteds in the chamber, she could not see around her.

Her wings thrummed as Ryx rose toward the exit hole in the ceiling. “I thought I would keep one of you as my new Consort, but it would not be the same. He is dead. You killed him.”

No other Anteds had pushed their way into the chamber yet. Delrael felt a calmness inside, a confidence in the approaching victory.

Ryx veered away and winged upward, to escape. She could not defend herself, she could not see. Disoriented and relying on her memory, the queen Anted misjudged the exit hole above. Powerful wings brought her crashing into the jagged ceiling of the grotto. Stunned, Ryx reeled downward.

In the tunnels outside the throne chamber, other approaching Anteds froze in their tracks with no guiding force. They swayed on their feet while Ryx tried to overcome her dizziness. Delrael saw his chance.

Ryx flopped her wings to keep aloft. A thin crack showed in the polished black head. Ryx ascended again, laboring with her wings to circle around the throne room in an uncertain spiral, hoping to stumble upon the way out.

Delrael fitted his blood-tipped arrow into the crossbow.

Disregarding the approaching Anteds, ignoring everything else except for the memory of Tallin and the sight of the ylvan’s death, he lifted the crossbow and pulled at the small trigger. “This is for you, Tallin.”

In her circling flight, Ryx turned to face the fighter without knowing it. She did not see him, or his arrow.

Delrael shot the crossbow.

#

Gairoth covered his ears against the insane chirping and roared in annoyance. Spittle sprayed from his thick lips. He swung his club, breaking one of the attacking Anteds into pieces. Others crawled out of their hexagonal openings and swarmed toward him.

“Go away!” The ogre smashed another, then tripped on one that lay dead at his feet. “Stupid bugs!”

He had followed Delroth’s easy trail across the barren soil, but then the tracks disappeared near one of the holes. Gairoth searched for hours, muttering in frustration. He couldn’t follow the mixed-up insect tracks, and he couldn’t see anything down in the dark holes. He didn’t want to climb down there. He sat down in the dirt and imagined the things he could do to Delroth.

And then the Anteds came.

Gairoth’s club dripped clotting ooze. He pursed his lips and dared the insects to come closer.

The Anteds were unimpressed and took the dare. Gairoth roared his best battle cry and smashed black chitin. Gairoth wished his dragon Rognoth were there to help.

The ogre’s arm began to tire, and he could not knock the Anteds away as quickly as they rushed at him. They swarmed over piles of twitching bodies, pulling him down.

“Stupid bugs!” Gairoth battered at hard chitin with his clumsy hands, but he could not throw the giant creatures off him, could not break the grip of the jaws that wrapped themselves around his thick neck, legs and arms, like scissors ready to cut him to pieces.

#

Delrael watched his arrow as it passed through the air in a perfect arc. Ryx’s mandibles spread wide as if to receive a gift.

The arrow plunged through her mouth, deep into the soft membranes and delicate tissues. The tip embedded itself in the most vital organ, the brain controlling the Anted colony. The small point of the arrow protruded through the chitin at the back of Ryx’s head.

Green blood squirted out of her mouth, mixed with the queen’s whitish-gold jelly. The brittle armor of her body shattered on the rock floor.

The Anteds in the tunnels collapsed in their tracks.

Bryl panted, then slumped down to sit on the floor. He held the Fire Stone in pale, trembling hands. Journeyman stood in front of the ranks of dead Anteds, nudging and smoothing the gouges in his clay skin. Vailret brushed off his tunic, then leaned against a curved wall, propping the blade of his short sword against his leg. He blinked again and again, but his eyes remained wide, unable to believe how he had fought.

Delrael stared at the dead hulk of Ryx lying on the floor like a broken toy, but his eyes saw nothing. “For you, Tallin,” he whispered. Delrael rolled his tongue around his mouth, trying to discover some pleasure in the slaughter. Somehow, this hadn’t held the thrill and fun that adventures were supposed to have. Was he breaking the primary Rule now? Wasn’t this supposed to be fun?

The Game had changed all at once, like a slap in the face. Delrael had always assumed that he would survive, that the Game would go on forever, and the characters would keep playing. He had lived through difficult adventures—against the dragon Tryos, against Gairoth and his illusion army, even against the forest fire and the Cyclops that had destroyed Delrael’s leg.

But Tallin had not survived.

He raised his eyes to the ceiling of the grotto and lifted the empty crossbow in salute. His mouth was a grim line, making the muscles of his neck stand out. Turning, he spat at the queen Anted’s broken body.

#

Delrael stood with a stiff back and rigid limbs beside Tallin’s body. He molded his emotions into a flat mask. Slaughtered Anteds lay as they had fallen, but Delrael paid no attention. A thick, wet smell of death hung in the air.

The others stayed by the wall, watching Delrael. He looked into the ylvan’s motionless, pale face. Blood and Anted grease caked his own clothes and hands. The heavy air made him sick to his stomach.

Delrael drew his sword, scribing a rectangle on the floor. He began chipping away at the fused sand, scooping hunks away into a pile. The sand underneath was a brighter, fresher color than the packed floor.

Vailret came forward. “Can we help?”

Lost in his thoughts, Delrael jumped and stared at him, disoriented, before answering. “No. This is for me to do.”

He went to Tallin’s body, removing the small quiver from the ylvan’s back, and set it with Tallin’s crossbow next to the newly cut grave. He picked up the body, trembling as he touched the cold skin. He laid Tallin in the shallow hole, then straightened his arms and legs.

“He would rather have been buried in a forest somewhere, I think.” Delrael fought back anger and despair once more. He stared a long moment, thinking. He placed the crossbow across Tallin’s chest, then reached for the quiver, removing the two longest arrow fragments.

Tears brimmed on his eyelids, but Delrael had already been through enough sorrow to last him for the rest of the Game. They had a mission to accomplish, a quest to finish.

He turned away without looking at the ylvan again and scooped dirt back into the grave. When he had finished, he patted the hard mound with his hands. He sat still, exhausted and aching both inside and out, before he made himself stand again. He pushed the two broken arrows into the head of the mound, where the arrowheads pointed up at the Gamearth sky.

Delrael turned his back on the mound. The light from the opening above had slanted, showing the approach of sunset. He motioned the others to follow him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Together, they managed to climb through the hexagonal opening. Delrael stood on the lip, reaching down to help the others.

“Beam me up, Scotty!” Journeyman jumped up and stood on the rocky ground, flexing his gray-brown arms. The sky had an orange cast of sunset.

They had been underground an entire day.

#

The sun set behind Gairoth, and his shadow stretched out across the flat terrain, pointing which way he should go. He plodded along, stomping dust with his ponderous bare feet.

The Anteds had stopped attacking him and dropped dead. Gairoth decided he must have frightened the Anteds into surrender. They had all fallen motionless together, leaving him unharmed but buried under them. By the time he crawled out from under the tangle of black bodies and jointed legs, he could find no trace of Delroth.

The ogre began to believe he might have been outsmarted, again. His fingers gripped his club so tightly that the ridges from the wood made marks on his calloused hand.

The ogre looked at the sprawling terrain ahead, then he grinned as far as his thick lips could stretch. Four figures emerged from one of the distant holes and set off toward the next hexagon. They were far from his sight, but at least they were visible. He had the trail again.

“I’ll bash your head in, Delroth! BAM!”

Gairoth charged across the desolation before night could take his quarry from him.

Interlude: Outside

Melanie turned her head to blink her eyes furiously. The tears stung. She walked into Tyrone’s kitchen before anyone could see the wet tracks on her cheeks. She clinked the ice cubes in her glass to emphasize that she was really just going to get more soda.

The others remained quiet, exhausted from the game. No one else seemed to get so close to their characters. David sat flushed from his victory.

Melanie could still feel where the sharp corners of the dice had bit into her palms. Damn!, she kept thinking. All that rolling for combat, engagement after engagement. She had saved four of them.

But Tallin had died.

“Sorry, Mel,” Scott said. She turned around to look at him, reacting a little too quickly. Behind Scott’s glasses she could see concern in his eyes. He alone had not taken part in the Anted battle, preferring to set up the details for his own turn.

“Wow, wasn’t that a great combat!” Tyrone grinned from ear to ear, excited Then he noticed the wounded look on Melanie’s face. “What’s the matter? Don’t be pissed off just because one of your characters got killed.”

Melanie glared at him with such intensity that Tyrone shrugged and lowered his voice. “Well, we could always change the rules if you want. Plenty of game systems let you bring characters back after they’ve been killed once—”

“No!” David snapped. He remained at the table, studying the map and his notes, as if he didn’t want to take a break between turns. “We decided against that a long time ago. We’re not going to change the rules just because she wants to pout. Besides, Tallin was the second character Melanie introduced tonight. It was fair combat, and I won.”

“We won,” Tyrone said. “I played, too.”

“David is right,” Melanie said. Her voice was so quiet she couldn’t believe she was agreeing with him. “I don’t want complete power over life and death. We played by the rules. My character lost his combat rolls.” She swallowed, but found her hands shaking as she filled the glass.

Just because one of your characters got killed, Tyrone had said.

Melanie kept her lips pressed together. That’s all it was to them—disposable characters, names and scores they rolled. Puppets to fight and find treasure and get killed. No wonder David found it boring. He had no emotional stake. He didn’t care about anything but ending the game. Melanie cared about the rest of it.

The death of Tallin was a sharp ache in her.

“At least I learned what Melanie’s trying to do with her characters and her secret quest,” David said. He smiled and leaned back in the chair. “But hiding the Earthspirits in a belt? Don’t know where you came up with that idea, Mel, but it isn’t going to work. I’m not sure we should even allow it.” He took off his black denim jacket and draped it over the arm rest, then reached forward to scoop up more of Tyrone’s dip.

“If it won’t work anyway, then why bother complaining about it?” Scott said with a half smile. “You’re the one who keeps wishing the game would get more interesting—let Mel take a few more risks.”

“Sounds like fun to me,” Tyrone said. David scowled, trapped by his own complaints.

Melanie stopped herself from saying that she had nothing to do with the Earthspirits in Delrael’s belt—any more than she had conjured up the Deathspirits to stop Enrod.

It was the game playing itself again.

That sent a thrill up her spine, pushing aside some of her sadness at Tallin’s death. She knew something strange was happening with Gamearth. They all knew it. The characters were doing things with their lives outside of the Sunday gaming sessions.

Melanie made a smile of her own, hard and businesslike. She sat back down at the table. “Your characters don’t know about the Earthspirits, David, so you can’t do anything about it. Ryx is the only one who knew, and she’s dead.”

“Good point.” Scott joined them, slouching down in his chair.

“In fact, David, you can’t even prepare for my characters, because you officially don’t know about their quest. Because of Tarne, Scartaris thinks Delrael is dead and the Fire Stone is still hidden somewhere at the Stronghold.”

David drummed his fingers on the table. “I have so many armies camped around Scartaris that nothing could ever get through. I’ve gathered all the Slac, I’ve teamed up all the wandering monsters, stirred up some old antagonisms. There’s a larger pool of monster fighters here—” he tapped the painted map over the mountains of Scartaris, “than we ever brought together for the old Sorcerer wars.”

He cracked his knuckles. “Your characters will never get through, Mel. I have no doubt of that.”

Melanie glared at him, but to her surprise Scott was the one who made a comment. “Well, David, we’ll just have to wait and see. We’ve got other characters in this game, you know, not just the ones Melanie’s playing.”

He picked up the dice and pointed at one of the hexagonal map sections near the city of Sitnalta. “I’m starting there. It’s my turn.”

9. The Outsiders’ Ship

“We must continue to learn, continue to study. As Sitnaltans, our quest is to understand everything about the Rules and how they affect our lives. With such an intimate knowledge perhaps we can defeat the Outsiders and free ourselves from this Game.”

—Professor Verne, speech to the

Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers

Mountain air whistled around the empty turrets of the ancient Slac fortress. The sky above the excavation site was clear and cold and painfully blue.

Professor Verne rubbed his hands together and pushed them deep into his pockets as he walked back and forth outside the fortress. The other Sitnaltan engineers worked meticulously on the Outsiders’ ship. When Verne blew steam from his mouth, clumps of frost made his full beard spiky.

Overhead the wide, blind wall of the citadel was dotted with black spikes and narrow windows from which the Slac could fire down on visitors. Moss crept up the walls, brown and green. A pool of stagnant water half filled a pitted cistern.

The bulk of the Outsiders’ vessel lay half buried in the dirt of the courtyard. Boulders and fallen stone blocks from the abandoned fortress had dropped around it.

Vailret and blind Paenar had told Verne and his colleague Professor Frankenstein about the ruined ship. Apparently, the Outsiders David and Tyrone had used it to travel to Gamearth, bringing with them a destructive monster to plant in the east. In exchange for this information, Verne and Frankenstein had constructed new mechanical eyes for Paenar.

“Did you find anything else?” Verne shouted down. He sucked on his lips, making his gray beard protrude. The tip of his nose felt numb in the cold mountain air.

“We don’t know,” Frankenstein called back from below. He cocked his head up at the other professor. “We haven’t figured out what most of this is yet.”

Frankenstein had a flushed face and close-cropped dark hair. His eyes bore a fiery, obsessive look, part of his impatient temperament. But Verne found Frankenstein’s ideas exciting, and the two professors collaborated well together.

The two of them held more patents than any other inventors in Sitnalta’s history. Verne himself didn’t even know the total number anymore—nor did he care. The main point was inventing things, creating things, bettering life for the characters in Sitnalta. Some said the two professors were inspired directly by the Outsider Scott, who watched over the technological city.

In the barren courtyard, the Outsiders’ ship had crumbled after many turns of disuse. Twisted ribs of metal and cross girders outlined the great size of the fallen hulk. The controls and engines were hidden and difficult to decipher, buried deep beneath the ground. Verne urged the other Sitnaltan workers not to experiment with any devices they found around the ship. He didn’t want someone opening up an uncontrolled vortex to reality, where they would all be annihilated in an instant.

Professor Verne brushed off his knees and walked down the path into the wreckage of the ship. Around him, remnants of the hull looked as fragile as an eggshell, but patches of the metal gleamed pure and uncorroded, with rainbow colors that Verne had not seen in any alloy produced in Sitnalta. He stood beside the other professor.

“Some of our analytical machines still won’t work,” Frankenstein snorted. “The electrical ones are the worst.”

“We are standing on the technological fringe, Victor. What else can we expect?” Verne bent over to inspect the place where tiny perfect rivets joined two metal sections together. “I am surprised even the mechanical instruments function as well as they do.”

Verne drummed his fingers on his chest. In Sitnalta the characters had developed science and technology enough to overthrow the Rules of magic that held sway for the rest of Gamearth. As the Sitnaltans used their technology more and more, they expanded the radius in which it worked out to a point where science and magic held each other uneasily at bay. Verne called this point the “technological fringe.”

The Outsiders’ ship lay squarely on the boundary.

A team of three Sitnaltan women in work clothes and lab coats sat concentrating on their sketch pads, measuring and recording detailed portions of the ship. Two other Sitnaltan workers used fine brushes to remove dust and debris from the wreckage.

One burly man, sweating and exhausted, was put to work moving rocks and some of the fallen girders. His face was flushed in the cold air, and he looked put upon because of his strength. Verne smiled encouragement at him.

“Can’t we rig up some pulleys and a winch over here to help this man?” Frankenstein called. “Come on, you’re supposed to be engineers!” Two of the technicians hurried to implement the scheme.

Just the presence of the ship itself awed Verne. So alien, so unlike anything else he had seen before. He always had a sense of wonder at how things worked. But this ship was tangible evidence of a visit from the Outsiders. What they would learn just from the shapes of things, the construction, the way the metal was held together—it would give the characters of Sitnalta many turns of intense study.

If they had many turns left in the Game.

Vailret and his companions had brought news of how the Outsiders planned to end the Game. Most of the other Sitnaltans scoffed at the idea. But Frankenstein and Verne had picked up the energy readings of something powerful, something malignant, growing in the eastern section of the map. Only Vailret had been able to explain this anomaly to the professors’ satisfaction.

Gamearth would be doomed if they did not find some way to destroy this monster from the Outside. The ship was the key, Verne felt. Perhaps with what they learned from it, the Sitnaltans could find some solution, or some escape. Maybe they could develop a weapon with which to fight back, or maybe, if they could discover how the vehicle worked, they could all escape to a different world.

It had always been a Sitnaltan dream to find a way for human characters to make a Transition of their own, as the old Sorcerer race had done with magic. Human characters should be able to do the same thing—with science. Verne had never heard of a spell yet that could not be imitated by properly developed technology.

“Professors! Come here, we’ve found something,” a woman’s voice called. Verne squinted into the shadows of the wreckage and recognized Mayer, the daughter of the Sitnaltan inventor-cum-bureaucrat Dirac. The tone in her voice suggested something important, and Verne and Frankenstein hurried.

They passed through a broken doorway down a tilted metal staircase into a chamber that had been buried in the dirt. Over the past three days, Mayer’s team had excavated the room. Dust and dirt still caked the controls and equipment, but a team of men and women used gloves, trowels, and heavy brushes to clean the area. An older woman technician scrambled past the professors, carrying a bucket filled with debris up the groaning stairs to dump it in the courtyard.

Mayer stood there, her short dark hair mussed. Dirty handprints covered her lab coat, but she indicated a polished bulkhead with gleaming panels of buttons and dials. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched the reactions of the two professors, allowing the discovery to speak for itself for a moment. Then she could restrain herself no longer.

“These are the controls,” she said. Her bright eyes gleamed with awe. “My hypothesis is that this system connects directly to the power source. If you touch the bulkhead, it is still warm after all this time. And there’s another sealed compartment directly underneath.”

Verne opened his eyes wide and went forward. Frankenstein also looked amazed. “This could be it,” he said.

Verne let his imagination wander. He had his best ideas that way. Possibilities sprang into his head, ideas and applications with such an intensity that he wondered if he was indeed inspired by the Outsider Scott.

This ship had an awesome power source, even if it was just imaginary to the Outsiders David and Tyrone, even if they had only created this artificial ship as a prop to act out their games—regardless, it existed here on Gamearth. And it had to do what the Players imagined it would do.

Verne thought of what incredible energies could power such a ship, of the danger and the potential those energies would have if applied in a constructive—or destructive—manner.

“You must be very very careful with it,” Verne said. “Treat it as if it were the most hazardous laboratory substance we have ever investigated.”

“And indeed it is,” Frankenstein added. His dark eyes shone with an unfathomable excitement.

Verne turned to Frankenstein and lowered his voice. “It will take some testing, but this could be the key to the most awesome weapon ever introduced on Gamearth.”

He took a deep breath. “We could stop Scartaris.”

Frankenstein allowed his thin lips to curl up in a smile. “This could be a way for us to prove the superiority of Sitnaltan technology once and for all.”

He and Professor Verne shook hands.

10. The Spectre Mountains

“RULE #4: “Evil” and “Good” are not absolute concepts in the Game. Characters act in their own self-interest. For example, companions on a quest may have the same purpose but for opposing reasons.”

—The Book of Rules

Vailret watched Delrael deal with Tallin’s death, not knowing how he could help. He remembered how blind Paenar had died, but Delrael wasn’t there when Paenar rode the dragon down into the boiling volcano. This type of grief was new to Delrael. It seemed to be a rude awakening for him.

The fighter pushed on across the next hex-line just after midnight, when the Rules allowed them to continue for another day. “I want to get away from this place,” he said under his breath. His footprints were barely visible in the starlight ahead of them. In the cool air Vailret sweated to keep up.

They entered a sweeping hexagon of grassland. The grass hissed around their legs as they walked, but they picked out the quest-path even in the darkness. A few small animals rustled along the ground; night birds swooped around the sky, dropping low as they hunted.

Journeyman remained silent, making none of his inane Outsider comments or observations on reality. The aurora began to fade into the pinkish-yellow of dawn, and the golem finally turned his head and spoke. He talked as if he had been pondering his words for a long time.

“You didn’t tell me about your quest. Or the Earthspirits in the silver belt.”

Vailret didn’t know what to say. Delrael ignored the conversation entirely.

Journeyman stared ahead and puckered his clay face in an expression of consternation. “You accepted me as a true companion. I told you my quest—that the Rulewoman Melanie planted a secret weapon in me, so that when we reach Scartaris I will destroy him. But you told me you were just going to find information. You kept secrets from me.”

The clay frown deepened. “We were supposed to be one for all and all for one, you know? That’s what this questing business is all about. The Three Musketeers, Batman and Robin, Cisco and Pancho, Kirk and Spock, Laurel and Hardy. We’re all a team. At least I thought so.”

Vailret swallowed and took a deep breath to explain. Delrael strode on, keeping himself isolated. Bryl didn’t look as if he wanted to join in the conversation either.

“We swore not to tell any other characters, especially not someone from the Rulewoman, even if she is on our side. The Outsiders knew nothing about our real quest. We didn’t want Scartaris to prepare for us coming.”

Journeyman’s clay eyebrows twitched on his forehead. “Scartaris has already gathered armies of wandering monsters, he already contains enough energy to wipe out Gamearth if he feels threatened. He needs only to go through a rapid metamorphosis, and that will be the end of our world. How much more can he prepare?”

Vailret kept his gaze on the dim path as he continued behind Delrael. “Scartaris must not consider us a big enough threat—yet.”

The golem stretched his flexible lips in an exaggerated pout. “You still should have told me.” Then he shrugged. “I don’t care what kind of weapon you have, or what the Earthspirits can do. It’s my quest to take care of Scartaris, and I intend to do it. By myself if I have to. Hi ho, Silver!”

Vailret patted Journeyman on the shoulder, trying to reassure him. The clay felt soft and sticky. “Doesn’t matter how it gets done—I just don’t want Scartaris to wipe the map clean. I won’t even ask about your weapon.”

“You better not, because I’m not going to tell.”

Vailret rolled his eyes and let the golem go ahead of him.

They continued as the Spectre Mountains in the distance became backlit in orange, then sharply silhouetted with dawn. By morning they crossed into an identical hexagon of grassland.

Delrael remained withdrawn, saying little. In the early afternoon, when they crossed into a lush hex of forest terrain, he appeared even more gloomy. The dense trees seemed to remind him of Tallin. . . .

It took them until early afternoon of the following day to get through the next hexagon of rugged forested-hill terrain. The trees, valleys, and green undergrowth made Vailret think of the khelebar forest of Ledaygen before the fire. They climbed the hills, looking down the steep slopes covered with trees and rock outcroppings. The quest-path guided them back and forth to the top of a ridge.

They trudged on at a steady pace, then stopped early to rest. Vailret and Journeyman played tic-tac-toe on the ground. Delrael watched for a few games, but when they asked him to join in, he declined and went off by himself to sleep.

The quest-path wound ahead of them across the next hex-line into the steep Spectre Mountains. Though the air was cool, Vailret found himself sweating and itching under his jerkin. His legs were tired, but he had settled into a pace that allowed him to keep going. Delrael gained ground ahead of them, then waited, fidgeting, for the others to catch up.

Vailret thought the sheer mountains ahead were like a wall to cut Delrael off from memories of the Anteds. Perhaps by replacing the anger and sorrow with a quest, Delrael would be able to heal his wound. Maybe climbing the rocky slopes would somehow purge him.

Around them stones protruded along the path. Tufts of grass and sturdy scrub brush grew in sheltered crannies. Rock walls lurched upward like battlements, wind-carved and rain-washed into stark peaks and deep gullies. The quest-path was smooth and chalky, like hardened plaster washed down from the cliffs.

The sun spilled over the peaks in late morning. They came to a flat promontory jutting westward from the mountainside. Vailret stumbled to the edge for a rest. His lungs burned as he tried to catch his breath in the chilly air. The wind blew around them, ruffling Vailret’s hair. Bryl joined him, pulling his blue hood over his face like a cowl.

Delrael squatted down to look back across the vast panorama of the Game board. Perfect hexagons of terrain lay immediately below, forested-hill, forest, grassland; in the distance they could see the desolation dotted with tiny pock marks of Anted holes. Other sections of terrain swept in a beautiful mosaic to flat dimness at the far edge of the map.

Vailret squinted, trying to determine what he was seeing. Bryl pointed and stretched his gnarled hand out of the billowing sleeve. “Look at that!”

At the first hex of desolation terrain moved a dense gathering of black static the size of a thunderhead. It moved and slithered forward, scattered and fluttering in a formless clump. Vailret’s eyesight was not sharp enough to catch any details, but he could tell that the others had no idea what they saw either. Where the dark gathering touched the desert, clouds of dust swirled behind it as if a great army, indistinct and enshrouded in black mist, marched across the hexagon.

“What is it?” Vailret asked.

“Something sent by Scartaris maybe?” Bryl said.

“Still too far away.” Delrael stood up, hurling a stone over the edge, and strode off without watching it fall. “We’ll get rid of Scartaris before we need to worry about that thing.”

#

For someone with no coordination whatsoever, Gairoth had incredible luck climbing the narrow quest-path into the Spectre Mountains. His big feet found purchase on the tiny outcrops, and he hauled himself up the steep and crumbling trail. His only thought was to catch Delroth.

He saw a ledge, a shortcut to eliminate one of the tedious switchbacks, and climbed up, sprawling on the rough stone. After a second’s rest, he reached up to grab another handhold and heaved himself to the next ledge. He lay panting. Sweat ran through his ropy hair, leaving a dirty track on his face. He wanted something to eat.

Then he noticed fresh footprints on the quest-path. Delroth’s boots. The ogre pressed his potato-sized nose down to the ground, inhaling deeply in the dirt to see if he could pick up any scent. He grinned. “Haw!”

Huffing and grumbling, Gairoth lurched up the steep path, swinging his club back and forth.

#

By midday the four travelers reached the snow line. Sharp cliffs towered overhead, blocking the sunlight and leaving patches of ice on the ground. The quest-path remained clear, but clumps of snow hung over outcrops of rock.

The main wall leaned over them, sloping backward and pregnant with a heavy load of snow on the cliff edge. A glistening sheet of clean snow stretched toward the tops of the mountains, dotted with stark rock outcroppings.

Delrael led them through a series of tight switchbacks as the quest-path threaded its way eastward. On the other side of the path and the rock outcroppings, the mountain slope was steep and broken with terraced ledges.

He walked along, stomping his boots in the snow. The others followed. Only the ruffle of wind brushing snow along the rocks disturbed the silence.

#

Gairoth pulled himself up another ledge to reach a flat area that intersected the quest-path. He took the straight way up the slope again, but his arms ached from the effort. His nose was red and cold. His ears hurt from the whistling wind. He ate some snow, bit down on a rock, and spat it out.

The ogre stomped up the steep path around disorienting outcrops of stone. Snow turned brown as it melted on his dirty furs. Then he reached a patch where snow had slid down the cliff and drifted across the path. He saw a line of trampled slush, fresh tracks on the quest-path. Very fresh.

“Delroth!” His bellow echoed among the cliffs, causing a tiny patter of dislodged snow from above. Brandishing his club, Gairoth bounded forward.

#

Delrael heard the ogre’s yell and stopped in mid-stride with a disgusted expression on his face. Bryl made a strangled sound of shock. Vailret blinked his eyes to cover his surprise.

“Not tonight, I’ve got a headache,” Journeyman groaned.

Gairoth hurtled around the corner, overbalanced and stumbling on an ice patch. He caught his footing before he could plummet over the edge of the slope. Raising the spiked club, he turned to the fighter.

Delrael pulled his sword free and stood firm on the path, returning the ogre’s glare. “I’m getting sick and tired of you, Gairoth.”

Gairoth lumbered forward, a grin of triumph on his thick lips. “Haw!”

He leaped ahead and swung his club at Delrael’s head, but the fighter skittered backward, slashing sideways with the edge of his sword. Delrael stumbled on the slippery path in mid-swing, and his stroke went wide.

The ogre’s spiked club smashed like a cannonball against the rock wall. The whole mountain seemed to shake. The cramped area on the narrow path did not allow the others room to help. Journeyman flexed his arms, waiting for an opportunity.

Gairoth saw his victim still standing and brought up the club for another blow. Delrael stood motionless, his head cocked and listening to a deep rumble above him. The ogre looked up to see pebbles and white mist pouring down like the whitecap on a tidal wave of roaring snow dislodged from the mountainside.

A firm clay arm encircled Delrael’s waist and jerked him backward. “Heads up!” Journeyman said, bounding away from the avalanche. With elongated hands, Journeyman held Delrael, Bryl, and Vailret under the overhang of rock.

Gairoth gaped at the white wall of snow coming at him like a stampede. He swung his club to knock the avalanche away.

The wave of ice and snow slammed into the trail, blasting upward and knocking the ogre off the ledge like so much flotsam. The white cascade swept him bouncing and jostling down the jagged slope.

“Have a nice day!” Journeyman called after him.

Chunks of snow sprayed the four companions, and an aftermath of cold mist hovered in the air. The rumble faded into the patter of settling snow. The only sound breaking the new silence was a far off roar as the remnants of the snow made its way to the bottom of the canyon. An impassable white barrier of slumped ice and snow blocked quest-path behind them.

“Good thing we wanted to go forward anyway,” Vailret said.

#

The tip of a spiked club broke the surface of the settling snow. A thick arm thrust forward, thrashing around. When Gairoth’s shaggy, ice-encrusted head emerged, he sputtered and flung snow from his eye. He squirmed back and forth in the piled drift and caught his footing.

The ogre knocked the snow away from himself, freeing his arms. He grumbled and stamped his cold feet, looking at the steep slope. It would be a long climb back up. But Delroth was up there.

11. Arken’s Gate

“I stand by my decision not to accompany you on the Transition. I will not abandon our descendants. If other characters need me on Gamearth, then I must remain and help determine the course of the Game.”

—Arken, final address to the Sorcerer council

The quest-path wound along the side of a tall unfurrowed granite face, with sheer rock to their left and a frightening drop on their right. Wind whistled around the rocks, polishing away any snow that clung to tiny cracks.

The companions came around a curve to where the rock wall jutted sideways, as if a great hand had split the cliff and pushed it over to the right, channelling the quest-path through a narrow cut in the mountain.

But a locked gate blocked their way.

Vailret stopped and blinked. The black gate seemed so incongruous in the rocky wilderness. It towered three times their height, protected on the sides by the smooth rock walls. The bars were wrought iron, gilded with curlicues and sharp spikes, forbidding and unscalable. No other signs of life or civilization showed on the barren terrain.

“Verrry interesting,” Journeyman said, curling his voice in a strange accent.

Vailret considered the problem, trying to think of who would place such an obstruction and why. He wondered if it might be a relic left over from the old Sorcerer days, but then some notation should have been made on the master maps at the Stronghold. The locked gate had not been there long.

Delrael made an angry noise and went forward. He looked for a latch, then grabbed the bars, rattling the gate on its hinges. It didn’t budge. Without saying anything, he let the look on his face express his anger and impatience.

“Let me try.” Journeyman wrapped his arms around the bars, looping into the gate. He pulled with enough force that the iron shivered and hummed with the strain. A few bits of rock flaked off the side of the mountain. But the gate held firm.

The golem surrendered and withdrew his arms. He smoothed the indentations on his limbs and stood looking ruffled. “I could reshape myself and squeeze through.”

“That won’t help us,” Bryl said.

Journeyman shrugged. “I’ll go myself if we can’t find any other way. My own quest takes priority, you know.”

“We’re not ready for that yet.” Delrael struck his fist ineffectually against the cliff face. He looked around with narrowed eyes. Vailret could see the emotions struggling in him—until now, Delrael had been using the forced march to cover up his other feelings. Now he had to face them and do something. But he didn’t know what to do.

One of the lumps of rock shifted on the cliff face above. Delrael jumped back out of the way, ready to defend himself against a trap. Vailret looked up, and his neck hurt in the cold air.

The boulder sprouted arms as they watched. A portion of the rock raised itself to form a head. The flat gray stone flowed like hot wax. Joints stretched out as a blocky creature uncurled from its camouflage. Jagged stone wings lifted upward, revealing an ugly sculpted figure, human in shape but molded with a lumpy gray texture. Small ridges ran down its back, and demonic horns sprouted from the center of its forehead.

Delrael looked at it with contempt, ready to fight. But Vailret put a hand on his cousin’s shoulder and squinted up at the cliff face to make sure of what he saw. “A gargoyle?” He took a step forward and addressed the stone figure. “Is that what you are?”

“You are very perceptive,” the creature said.

Vailret had heard references to these creatures in his studies of Gamearth legends. Many of the old Sentinels had destroyed themselves in a final unleashing of sorcerous power, a half-Transition that liberated their spirits into independent wandering entities. Some of these spirits gathered together to form a collective presence, called a dayid. But others, the stronger individual spirits, wandered by themselves and formed crude and temporary bodies of stone.

The gargoyle straightened up and directed his hollow gaze at them. He sighed. “You cannot pass this gate. It’s not my choice, but I have to stop you.”

Journeyman mashed his face into a scowl. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

“We need to get to Tairé,” Delrael said. He placed his hands on his hips and tried a deliberate lie. “My brother is dying. You can’t stop me from seeing him one last time.”

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t care for Tairé anymore. Much has changed since Scartaris.” The gargoyle turned his grotesque stone face up to the sky. “I remember when Enrod wanted to rebuild the lands around the city. Such a shame—all that work, wasted now.”

“Who are you, gargoyle?” Vailret asked.

“That’s a long story. I’ve lived for many turns of the Game, first as a Sorcerer lord and then as one of the Sentinels trying to help human characters. By now the memories are dim. A stone head isn’t made to hold too many thoughts, you know.” He rapped on his forehead with a granite fist. “My name was, is Arken. I wasn’t always so weak—now I’m required to guard this gate so that no characters may pass.”

“Arken?” Vailret said. He blinked his eyes and took two steps forward, lowering his voice. “Arken? That’s incredible! Do you know how much I—”

“Who is controlling you, gargoyle?” Delrael interrupted, silencing his cousin. He stared at the gate as if he could will it to vanish.

Vailret frowned at Delrael, still in shock. In all his readings, Arken had been one of the greatest Sorcerers. Only Arken had spoken out against the Transition, arguing that the surviving Sorcerers should help rebuild Gamearth after their endless wars had laid waste to so much of it. Most of them refused to listen, but some had remained behind as Sentinels to help human characters against the other monsters.

The stone gargoyle turned his head toward Delrael. “Scartaris controls me. He grows more powerful every day. The Outsiders want him to win, I think.”

Vailret mumbled another question. “But you’re Arken—we remember you as the first Sentinel, the greatest defender of Gamearth. How can you possibly be in league with Scartaris?” Vailret let his hands fall to his sides. “Don’t you know what he’s doing? He’s going to end the Game for all of us!”

The gargoyle leaned over the mountain face and walked down, perpendicular to the cliff at an impossible angle. He righted himself on the path and came to stare at them.

The gargoyle shook his demonic stone head. “I am bound by the Rules. Scartaris defeated me, and I have to defend this gate to the best of my ability. It doesn’t matter if I despise what he is trying to do.”

Suddenly Arken’s manner seemed filled with new excitement. He focused his attention at them. “You travelers know who Scartaris is? And you’re on a quest eastward?” He held up a blocky stone hand. “No, don’t tell me anything—Scartaris will hear! I can guess for myself. Let me keep my hopes up. But I still can’t help you.”

“You’re talking to us, though,” Vailret said. “You’re answering our questions.”

“Certainly. And I’ll do everything I can to get around my restrictions.”

“Why can’t you just let us pass and not tell Scartaris?” Bryl asked.

The gargoyle looked at him, annoyed. “I can’t disregard my task for the sake of a whim. The Rules are the Rules, regardless of my feelings.” He hunkered down and put his chin in his blocky stone fist. “Perhaps we can think of a different way I might help you.”

Delrael kicked at a stone on the path. His lips were pressed together into a thin, white line. “Is there another pass we could go through?” he said. “We need to get moving.”

“I doubt it,” Arken said. “Scartaris will have guardians on all the quest-paths over the Spectre Mountains anyway. The other gatekeepers might not be so understanding.”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth, not trying to trick us?” Bryl put his hands on his hips, haughty.

Vailret thought he looked silly. “That’s Arken, Bryl—don’t be ridiculous.”

The gargoyle seemed puzzled by Vailret’s comment. “Well, you don’t know whether I’m telling the truth or not—although I can promise that if I were trying to trick you, I would attempt to be. . .a little more devious.”

“All right, then, here’s a straightforward question.” Delrael stepped forward. “How can we pass? How can we defeat you?”

The stone gargoyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe we can figure out something.”

“Could we play a game of dice, Arken? It’s simple but effective. High roll wins?” Vailret withdrew his own set of dice. “If we win, you let us pass?”

The gargoyle placed his stone chin on his fist. “Remember that I have more than my share of luck.” Arken knelt down to the ground. The cold path and the bleak mountains seemed to have no effect on him. “But if this doesn’t work, we can still try something else.”

He raised his head to look at all of them. “We’ll only be able to use this challenge once, though. It wouldn’t be fair if you kept rolling until you beat me one time.”

“Fair enough.” Vailret held his hand out and raised his eyebrows. “Del, why don’t you roll for us?”

The fighter took the dice and looked at them. “My luck seems to have turned sour lately.”

“Then it’s time to change it. Go ahead and roll.”

Delrael rubbed the two twenty-sided dice between his palms and, without interest, let them fall to the ground. A “10” and a “14.”

“Not bad,” Vailret said.

“Not good,” Delrael countered.

Arken brushed the dice into his palm, using one flat stone hand because the blocky fingers were not dexterous enough to grasp the small objects. He tossed them into the air. One die landed flat on the quest-path; the other struck a rock and bounced sideways, coming to rest a few feet away. A “12” and an “18.”

“I’m sorry,” Arken said. “I told you I had too much luck.”

With a scowl on his pinched face, Bryl took out the Air Stone and Fire Stone. They glinted in the bright mountain sunlight. “I have these. They’re powerful enough. Can I command you with them? Will they work?”

The stone creature straightened and took a step backward in shock. He reached a crudely formed hand toward the diamond and the ruby, but Bryl snatched them away. The gargoyle rocked back on his clublike stone feet. “Are those what I think they are?”

Vailret nodded. “If you’re really Arken, you must remember them.”

The gargoyle drew a deep breath. “You make me feel strange about my past. When I saw that so few Sorcerers would refuse the Transition and remain to help their own half-breed children, I begged them to create the Stones. Do you know where the other two are? It’s been so long. As I recall, one was lost in the Scouring. . . .”

Vailret glanced at Delrael, then decided to answer anyway. “Yes, we know where they are, though the Earth Stone is not readily accessible.”

Bryl had sensed the twenty-sided emerald Stone somewhere in the treasure grotto of Tryos the dragon, but they had no time to search before rescuing Tareah. Vailret wondered how Tareah was faring back at the Stronghold. . . .

“Never bring all four Stones together unless you are prepared for what will happen,” Arken said, pointing a stone finger at them. “It’s like magical synergy. More power resides in the combined Stones than even the six Spirits possess. A character gathering all four Stones could unleash a new Transition for himself. One character should not have such power.”

Arken cocked his grotesque head toward the open sky between the peaks, and his voice took on a wistful tone. The wind whistled around the bars of the gate. “The Transition was an awesome enough thing to do once in the Game.”

Vailret cleared his throat, hoarse with awe at a conversation with one of the greatest Sentinels of legend. “I read your description of the Transition. I found it in Sardun’s Ice Palace.” His voice trembled.

The blocky stone gargoyle turned his head. A long sigh rumbled out of his stone chest. “I remember writing that, but I was too amazed to describe it well. Imagine the Sorcerer race gathered in a shallow valley, waiting. All the characters who were going on the Transition, and some who only wanted to watch.”

“We’ve been to that valley, too.” Vailret watched the crude face and tried to picture what Arken must have looked like as a great Sorcerer spokesman. “It seemed haunted.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Arken answered. “Five of our leaders were inside a counsel tent. Even Stilvess Peacemaker was there, the one who had ended the wars. He was so old he could barely move.

“It was about this time of year, the autumn equinox. The air was cold, and the wind kept flapping the white tent. The other characters waited outside on the plain, ready, in case something should happen. None of them knew what was going on inside. But I did. I was there, their official observer.”

“Well?” Vailret asked. His eyes sparkled and his breath quickened. “How did you manage to break the Rules and succeed in the Transition?”

Arken held up one stone hand. “We broke no Rules! It was difficult what we did, yes—but we broke no Rules. Actions on Gamearth are determined by the roll of the dice. Nothing is impossible if you wait long enough and try enough times.”

“So what were they doing inside the tent?” Vailret repeated. Delrael shuffled his feet; Vailret wondered if he was curious or just impatient.

“The five of them were rolling dice. Twenty-sided dice, made from pure crystal, perfectly balanced, the finest dice ever seen on Gamearth.

“The five Sorcerers rolled their dice, over and over and over. They did not stop, day or night. They were weary. I watched their eyes turn red. All of them looked haggard. Old Stilvess seemed as if he was about to collapse.”

“But what were they trying to do?” Vailret asked.

Arken seemed to ignore Vailret’s question. He spread his stone wings with a grinding sound. “At last, all five of them rolled a twenty on the same roll. A nearly impossible roll—nearly impossible. A perfect, perfect dice roll, unheard of on Gamearth.

“And when they rolled five twenties, five of the greatest living Sorcerers on Gamearth, they unleashed enough power to initiate the Transition.” The stone gargoyle hung his head. “That was when I ran out of the tent.”

Delrael sighed and sounded angry. He rattled the gate again with his hand. “That doesn’t concern us.” He leaned against one of the cold walls of rock. “We have to get past here.”

Arken hunched his shoulders and swiveled the crudely formed blockish head to look at the fighter.

“Can we fight you?” Delrael unsheathed his sword, but it looked ineffective against the blocky stone body of the gargoyle.

Arken shook his head from side to side. “I wouldn’t advise it. Your sword wouldn’t harm me, but I could cause plenty of damage to you.”

“What if you had a better opponent?” Journeyman said. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going! A gargoyle and a golem—we should have an equivalent strength class.”

Journeyman turned to the other travelers. “He can’t really damage me, any more than I can damage him. We could wrestle. If I win, the gate opens and we pass.”

Arken clapped his stone hands with a sharp crack. “It sounds acceptable to me. I must warn you, though, that I am bound to try my utmost to defeat you. I can’t just let you win. It has to be fair.”

Journeyman drew himself up, flexing his soft arms. “Go for all the gusto while you can.”

Arken worked his jaw, as if finding words difficult. “If the golem does win, I wish you the best of luck on your quest. I want to see Scartaris stopped too.”

He faced Journeyman. “Don’t worry about causing damage to me. My spirit isn’t bound to this stone body. As long as Scartaris holds me here, he controls me. But if you. . . break me, then I will be free. For a time, at least.”

Journeyman made the features of his face run flat as he flowed more clay into his shoulders and arms, concentrating his strength. “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”

Delrael, Vailret, and Bryl stood by the locked gate and watched Arken. The massive stone creature stepped to the narrow part of the path and faced Journeyman.

“Luck, Journeyman,” Vailret said.

“Luck,” Bryl and Delrael echoed.

Arken planted his stone feet squarely on the quest-path and opened his arms, ready to grapple with the golem. He surprised them all by wishing Journeyman luck as well.

“You can surrender any time,” Journeyman said.

The grotesque gargoyle straightened his back. “I’ll remember that. Ready?”

“Yes, ready.”

With a slap of clay on stone, Journeyman and Arken grabbed each other around the shoulders. Journeyman’s hands flattened as he pushed against the stone gargoyle’s arms. Arken spread his feet, which seemed to fuse to the rock of the trail.

Neither of the combatants made a sound. They kept their faces neutral. Since they were not human, they did not grunt with the strain, or pant, or show any sign of the exertion they made. The breeze died down, and the cold air retained its claustrophobic silence.

“Irresistible force and immovable object,” Journeyman said. “Did you ever hear about that one, Arken? It’s a riddle from Outside.”

Arken strained and pushed, but his voice sounded curiously neutral. “What is the solution?”

Journeyman’s body seemed distorted and stretched with the effort to maintain himself against the gargoyle. “I don’t believe it has a solution. The Outsiders can be very strange at times.”

The gargoyle lifted one of his blocky stone feet and pivoted, forcing Journeyman to bend and turn his back to the sheer precipice.

“Come on, Journeyman!” Bryl shouted.

Arken’s hunched back bent as he took a small step forward, forcing Journeyman closer to the edge. But the clay golem did not move his feet, stretching his legs instead. He slid his arms to get a better grip on Arken’s smooth shoulders.

“More powerful than a locomotive,” Journeyman said again, but his voice was fainter this time.

Vailret found himself wincing and pressing his fingers into his fists, straining his arm muscles as if that could assist the golem.

Arken’s blocky hands left deep indentations in Journeyman’s body. The stone gargoyle pushed harder and harder.

“Able to leap tall buildings in a single—”

Finally something snapped.

“—bound!” Journeyman let out a strange cry like the release of a too-tight bowstring, and his clay flowed like liquid. He flung himself backward, bending over upon himself in an impossible angle, out of the way.

Arken, thrusting forward with all his might, suddenly had no purchase and nothing to push against.

He went plummeting over Journeyman, off into space.

Vailret and Delrael ran forward as Journeyman straightened himself up, pulled his body back together and rearranged his clay. He stood tall. They all heard a distant thock! as Arken’s stone body crashed into the rocks far below.

Vailret didn’t want to go to the path edge and look.

Journeyman did not appear flustered. His clay mouth twisted in a beaming expression. “That was the big difference between us, you know, a golem and a gargoyle,” he said. “Clay bends, stone doesn’t.”

The black iron bars of Arken’s gate tinkled into nothingness on the rock. A chill wind whistled along the quest-path, motioning the travelers ahead to where the trail was wide and easy.

The shadows of sunset followed them as they passed through the vanished gateway. Just on the other side of the cut waited the black hex-line where they had to stop for the day. The next hexagon of mountain terrain descended gradually, sloping down out of the Spectres, as if saying that any character who passed Arken’s gate deserved easy traveling.

Ahead, the land of Scartaris waited for them.

12. Downfall of the Stronghold

“We must keep the legends alive, the stories of brave quests, the memories of past characters who have become heroes. Though the Outsiders wish only to amuse themselves turn after turn, this is still our history.”

—The Sentinel Sardun, part of the “Lost Records”

buried under the Ice Palace ruins

The villagers gathered in the Stronghold courtyard at sunset to hold a formal ceremony in memory of Tarne. Jagged shadows from the pointed wall crept across the courtyard. The veteran’s ashes had been gathered up and buried in a special area near the Stronghold wall, an honored place where Vailret’s father Cayon was interred, as well as Delrael’s mother Fielle.

Young Tareah rubbed her elbows and knees in the chill air. Her joints still ached, but she listened with rapt attention as the villagers did quest-tellings of Tarne’s greatest adventures.

Jorte, the keeper of the gaming hall, spoke of when Tarne had been one of the companions of Drodanis and Cayon, a great fighter and quester. Others told how Tarne was one of the fighters led by Drodanis against the ogres in revenge for the murder of Cayon. . .how Tarne was wounded in that fight and had since seen visions of future turns of the Game. The young farmer Romm described Tarne’s warning to the other villagers that Gairoth would take over the Stronghold, and how he led a brave defense against the attack; when that failed, Tarne had led them into exile in the deep forest terrain until Delrael returned and vanquished Gairoth.

Tareah herself picked up the hexagonal tile bearing the veteran’s name and placed it on the grave. She remembered the quiet, bald man who seemed to hold so much inside him. A weaver, who wanted no further part in fighting and battles. She stared at the wall, not at the gathered villagers, as she described Tarne’s brave fight, alone in the middle of the night to defend them all against the Slave of the Serpent.

Darkness fell, and young Romm lit several torches in the courtyard. The villagers stood around, not certain what to do after the ceremony. They seemed leaderless and disoriented without the bald veteran. Tareah did not blame them—she was new, she had no experience with quests or adventuring. Why should they trust her to lead them?

She had spent her entire life isolated in the Ice Palace with her father, and when the dragon had kidnaped her, she merely waited for some adventurer to come rescue her. Regardless of her Water Stone or how much magic she could use, Tareah still had much to learn.

Vailret’s mother Siya stood beside her, looking tired and withdrawn. She wore clean but drab clothes highlighted by a flashing emerald brooch. Siya told Tareah that Cayon had given it to her, stolen from a Slac treasure pit he once raided. Now Siya’s face seemed old, and she tied her hair back in a severe bun. Since her son and Delrael had gone on their quest to Scartaris, Siya acted angry and lonely, with nothing more to hold onto.

The stars came out. Night birds made sounds in the forest. Tareah looked up to see the green smear of Lady Maire’s Veil across the sky. That made her think of how Tarne must have seen his own death there—yet, even knowing that, he still went to face the Slave of the Serpent.

The outbuildings stood shadowy and empty now, with Delrael, Vailret, and Bryl gone, and Tarne dead. The main hall of the Stronghold echoed with silence. They had no students at the Stronghold for battle exercises or role-playing games. The place was deserted, big and frightening. It reminded Tareah of the Ice Palace and the empty vaults full of relics, now buried under crumbled ice and snow.

She took her eyes away from the sky and saw Mostem the baker coming toward her. Tareah still had difficulty identifying all the villagers in her mind, but she remembered that Mostem had three daughters. According to Siya, Mostem hoped that either Vailret or Delrael would be interested in pairing with one of them. Tareah had never met the daughters, nor had she tried. She was not sure if she should feel jealous—she had trouble pinpointing her feelings, either about Vailret or Delrael.

Mostem’s eyes moved from Tareah to Siya, then to the ground. From the way the other villagers watched him, Tareah realized that they had all discussed this beforehand. She let a slight frown cross her face.

Mostem looked as if he didn’t know how to begin, and finally he said, “You’re all alone up here now. Are you sure the Stronghold is safe? Do you think you should stay here?”

He didn’t wait long enough for her to say anything. “We were talking, uh, I mean I was thinking that maybe you could come stay with us? Or one of the other villagers. We’re not sure that staying at the Stronghold is a good idea anymore.”

Tareah was surprised at the suggestion and tried to decide how to react to it, what Delrael would want her to do. But Siya drew herself up, indignant. “What, and just abandon the Stronghold? It’s been here intact for generations, and this is my home! I don’t take that lightly.” She crossed her thin arms over her chest. “I will stay here.”

Mostem took a step backward and continued to speak to the ground. “We just thought it might be best if—”

Tareah cut him off. “I promised that I would remain here and do my best to defend the Stronghold.” She stood beside Vailret’s mother. “You know the Rules. I made a vow—I can’t break that. I’m not one of those characters who takes such things lightly.”

She and Delrael had gotten into arguments on that point before. But this time she didn’t think he would object.

“Besides, look around you.” She indicated the double walls topped by sharp points, the weapons storehouse, the heavy gates and the trench around the Stronghold, the Steep Hill path. “This is the most defensible place, the safest spot for hexagons around! And don’t forget I have the Water Stone, too. If we’re not safe here, we certainly won’t be safe anywhere in the village.”

She raised her voice so the others would hear her clearly. “If you’re concerned for our safety, any of you is welcome to stay here and help guard us against attack.”

Mostem cleared his throat and looked to the others to see their reaction. The death of Tarne and the threat of Scartaris was too close on their minds.

But Romm the farmer straightened. His blond hair was mussed, and his skin looked dry from spending too many hours outside in all weather. “That’s a good idea. We should arrange our schedules so some of us can be up here. We were willing to fight against Gairoth, with Tarne—we shouldn’t do any less than that now.”

His words heartened Tareah. She nodded to them all. “We do need a stronger defense, now that Tarne isn’t here to assist me.”

“We can discuss this tomorrow,” Siya said. Her stiff movements showed how much Mostem’s suggestion had upset her. “We’ll roll dice to see who stays up here with us. You all could brush up on your training a little.”

Apparently relieved, the villagers left, going down the hill into the night and back to their homes. Tareah could hear muffled voices as the villagers went along the path.

Siya and Tareah worked together to swing the heavy gate shut. They fastened the solid wooden crossbolts in place. The shadowy empty buildings inside the walls looked spooky enough that Tareah decided to leave the torches burning in the courtyard.

Before going to bed, Siya and Tareah began the ritual of closing up the Stronghold for the night. With the others to help, they always finish quickly before, but it took them longer and longer each night as the evenings grew colder, now that they were the only two to do everything.

They made sure all the windows were shuttered, the cracks stuffed with rags to keep the cold out. They stoked the main fireplaces with enough wood to keep burning all night long, since it was such a tedious task to rebuild the fires the next day. Tareah saw no point in keeping the entire main building heated and tended, but she didn’t countermand Siya’s wishes. Siya seemed to attach a far greater importance on maintaining her routine than on actually thinking about it.

Tareah was exhausted by the time she reached her own quarters and heaped wood on the fire. Her joints would ache if she did not keep her room warm, which seemed odd to her since she had spent so many years in the bright coldness of the Ice Palace. Over the weeks she felt as if the pain had faded somewhat, but her body would take a long time to adjust to the dramatic stretchings and twistings her accelerated growth put it through.

She stripped off the formal dress she had worn for Tarne’s ceremony and pulled on a comfortable shift, then climbed under the blankets. She lay back in the bed and thought of Delrael and Vailret on their quest, all the stories they were adding to the history of the Game. She wished her father Sardun could be here to discuss them.

Tareah kept the Water Stone with her even in bed. She ran her fingers over the cool blue facets. They reminded her of the ice in the rainbow halls and crystal towers. She dozed with that thought.

And woke up some time later. The fire still burned bright, so she couldn’t have been asleep too long. It was just past midnight, she guessed. She blinked her eyes in the dancing firelight. Her nose was cold, but she could smell the aromatic wood.

Tareah heard scratching, scrabbling sounds. The wood in the fireplace settled with a slump and a small shower of sparks. The noises stopped for a moment and began again with renewed intensity. The scrabblings sounded like rats in the walls, clawing their way out.

Tareah rubbed her eyes on the blanket and tried to see in the wavering orange light. Sharp shadows lay in the corners. Then her eyes came to focus on the dark and churning wall beside her bed.

The wood was crawling with small figures, each about the size of her hand. Emerging from cracks in the wood, pushing themselves out between splinters and scrabbling over each other, along the walls, along the floor.

Tareah sat up, flinging tangled hair out of her eyes, and bit back an outcry. Her blankets were covered with the little creatures as well, tiny ratlike animals, but vaguely human in form. They had ear tufts and pointed faces with sharp fangs. On two hind legs they walked upright, and they bore two sets of humanlike arms, one sprouting from their shoulders and another set along their abdomen, giving each creature four hands full of sharp claws.

She snapped her blanket, spraying the creatures off her bed and onto the floor. She grabbed for the Water Stone under her pillow, but some instinct warned her not to show it, not to use it just yet.

The ratlike creatures swarmed over the room as they searched for something. They scurried down the mantle of the fireplace, disassembling the wood splinter by splinter with their sharp claws. Now that Tareah had awakened, they chittered among themselves, making no effort to keep quiet.

She kicked her blankets away and rolled to the edge of her bed. Her voice hitched as she tried to call out—but there was no one to help her. She would have to fight by herself. One of the bedposts groaned and broke free from its joint, torn apart by the creatures. The bedframe cracked and dropped to the floor with a thump.

More rat-creatures scurried to the storage chests and peeled the locks and hinges from the base wood, splintered the sides, and spilled the treasure from Delrael’s past adventurings onto the floor. They searched through the plunder, using four hands to paw and toss away diamonds and gold and silver links as if they were worthless.

“Stop!” Tareah shouted. They hesitated, glaring at her with pupilless red sparks for eyes—empty, as if something had erased the minds behind them. She felt very afraid to look at the hundreds and hundreds of tiny, pointed teeth and sharp claws. Then the creatures fell to ransacking again.

The shelves on the wall crumbled, and Tareah’s possessions crashed to the ground, breaking and clinking on the floor. Every splinter of wood spawned another of the small creatures as they pushed out and added to the army. Above the chittering, rustling din, she heard noises from the other rooms.

Tareah jumped out of bed, stepping on squirming furry bodies and trying to kick them away from her. “What do you want?” she shouted. She drew herself up to look menacing.

The rat-creatures fixed their blank gazes on her. Many of them cleared an empty spot on the floor, and others moved into formation with some kind of intent. Dozens of them aligned themselves to form letters with their own bodies.

On the floor, they spelled out “FIRE STONE.”

Scartaris knew the Deathspirits had stripped the ruby Stone from Enrod and delivered it to the Stronghold. He had sent the rat-creatures to tear everything apart until they found it.

Scartaris knew nothing about Delrael’s quest to bring the Earthspirits across the map—because of Tarne’s ruse, Scartaris thought the Slave of the Serpent had killed Delrael. Perhaps Scartaris knew nothing of her Water Stone either. She clutched the six-sided sapphire in her hand.

“No!” Tareah stamped her foot on the ground, squashing one of the rat-creatures and making the others scurry out of the way. “You can’t have it.” She waited to feel sharp claws and teeth on her bare legs.

One section of the wall slumped down in a shower of broken wood. Flames from the fireplace caught on the kindling. The creatures ran around, dismantling the room.

A few of the rat-creatures on the floor of the room spelled out “WE WILL FIND IT,” forming and dissolving one word after another.

From her own room, Siya screamed—but it was a scream of anger and disgust, not pain. The ceiling groaned above Tareah, and she looked up to see the planks buckling.

In her bare feet, trying not to look where she stepped, Tareah ran to the door and struck it with her shoulder to push it open. She ran down the main hall.

Everywhere she looked, the scrambling creatures emerged from the splintered wall and set about ransacking everything in sight. The structure of the main building groaned and creaked above the insane chittering.

Tareah ran out the broken doorway into the cold night. Two of the courtyard torches had burned out, but the other three flickered in the sharp wind. Small, furious sounds came from all buildings within the Stronghold walls.

“Siya!” she called.

Tareah saw the creatures piled on top of each other in the roof structure, throwing pieces of wood in the air and over the edge in glee, digging and searching. Others tunnelled in the courtyard, uprooting sword posts. The weapons storehouse crashed and toppled to the ground. Other walls in the outbuildings split and collapsed.

Tareah felt outraged, but didn’t know how she could fight against the infestation.

Siya burst out the front door, frantic. She had a broom in her hands, and she flicked it right and left to knock away the creatures in front of her. “Get away!” She whacked them off the walls. “Leave that alone! Stop!”

Her gray hair hung down below her shoulders in broad tresses. Several of the creatures grabbed on and yanked, climbing the strands like ropes. Siya tossed her head and flung them off, then chased after them with a vengeance.

“Get away from the door, Siya!”

Siya ran into the courtyard. Chittering, some of the rat-creatures followed her, but most swarmed over the door jamb, peeling away the wood. Two of the shutters cracked and fell off their hinges. New rat-creatures burst up from the fresh wood, flexing their forearms and bouncing down to the ground.

With scrabbling hands in a blur of motion, they fell upon the wooden walls and kept tearing it apart in chunks. Dust and smoke filled the air from collapsed mantels and the burning fires in the hearths. The main building was on fire.

Tareah took out the Water Stone. “I’ve got to do something.” She rolled it on the ground. The six-sided sapphire landed with a “4” up. She grabbed it again and cast her spell at the main building.

The wind whipped up. The already-cool air dropped below freezing. Biting snow blasted down and, with a snap of cold, ice encrusted the Stronghold, freezing the wood solid. The cold itself shattered some of the shutters; the support beams groaned inside from the weight of snow. She heard a loud pop from somewhere inside.

When the wave of cold struck the rat-creatures, they withered and disappeared. Siya chased others with her broom and left blots of fur and blood on the ground.

The assault seemed to have stopped for a moment, leaving a stillness like a held breath. “Did it work?” Tareah asked.

With squeals of angry chittering and a shower of pale splinters, more creatures burst out of the logs in the double wall surrounding the Stronghold. They dropped to the ground, bristling with patches of brown and gray fur, sharp fangs and fiery blank eyes.

The creatures ignored Tareah and Siya, but scurried toward the ice-encrusted Stronghold to chip their way in. They set upon the main building once more.

Between the upright pointed logs of the stockade wall, more creatures surged out. The dirt insulation between the double walls crumbled and sifted out of the holes. Several logs toppled and fell over to leave gaps in the perimeter.

The brittle casing of ice over the main building split open. The rat-creatures surged inside again, tearing holes out of the walls.

Tareah grabbed the sapphire, angry and ready to roll it. But the rat-creatures swarmed over the ground at her feet, waiting with arms outstretched. They knew what the Stone was now; they wanted her to roll it so they could snatch it away the instant it struck the ground.

Tareah clamped her teeth down on a frustrated scream. She couldn’t even roll the Stone, and none of her minor spells would do anything. She couldn’t fight, and that infuriated her even more.

Tears streaked down Siya’s cheeks. Her face reddened and she panted from her effort. A strange noise came from Siya’s throat as she continued to strike out at the creatures. “What do they want?”

Tareah felt the corners of the Water Stone bite into her palms as she pushed her fists together. “They’re looking for the Fire Stone. Scartaris wants it back, now that he knows how powerful it is.”

Siya blinked and stood with her broom upright. Her face wore an astonished expression. “But the Fire Stone isn’t even here! By now Delrael and the others should be—” She waved her hand at the crumbling walls. “By the mountains or something.”

All of the rat-creatures stopped with their ears cocked. In unison the horde turned to glare at them.

Tareah wanted to scream at Siya in anger and frustration. “You idiot! Scartaris thought Delrael was dead!”

The rat-creatures chittered among themselves—and then they all vanished into the ground, leaving no trace other than the bloodied bodies Siya had killed.

Tareah kept her voice level and cold. “You just increased the danger to Delrael and Vailret. Now Scartaris knows they’re coming, and he can concentrate everything he has on stopping them.”

Siya’s eyes widened as big as plates when the realization sank in. She hung her head. Her shoulder blades jerked as she tried to hold the sobs in.

Tareah looked around at the ravaged Stronghold—Delrael had left her behind to defend it. He had counted on her abilities and her judgement. Grim anger filled her mind—but the collapsing buildings, the ruined wall brought stinging tears in front of her vision.

The fire from the broken hearths had spread into the main building, and smoke poured into the air.

Interlude: Outside

David put his hands behind his head and leaned back against them. His eyes still looked red, but he smiled with satisfaction. Melanie was so angry she wanted to punch his face, or at least dump her cold soda in his lap.

“You destroyed my Stronghold!” she said. Her voice sounded strangled, carrying more emotion than she wanted to display.

The rat-creatures, the dozens of attack rolls, the walls falling, the fire starting. . . She felt Tareah’s helplessness, felt Siya’s loss. If only the characters could have fought back more, helped her more.

David kept his eyes closed. “Now I think we can officially say that Scartaris knows Delrael isn’t dead. And he also knows that the group is coming to get him.”

“And this time her characters don’t know that Scartaris knows. Ha!” Tyrone added. “That’s a switch.”

“Thanks, Tyrone.” Scott scowled at him.

David grinned. “That means Scartaris can now try to stop them.” He shrugged. “Unless I decide to just have him blow up the map, and we can be finished with all this nonsense.” He truly looked as if he was enjoying this. Melanie stood up in anger. Her chair tipped back but did not fall over.

“That wouldn’t be very sporting, now would it?” Scott asked.

“Let’s not let this get personal, guys,” Tyrone said, waving Melanie back into her chair. “It’s just for fun, remember.”

Melanie and David both glared at him. Tyrone went to get another bag of chips from the top of the refrigerator, shaking his head.

“When Delrael and company get through the mountain terrain, that’s when the real fun starts. The city of Tairé is my first serious line of defense.” David rubbed his hands together. “We can probably end this tonight.”

“What’s your hurry, David?” Tyrone asked. “There’s nothing on TV Sunday nights anyway.”

David slapped both hands on the tabletop, startling them all with his outburst. “Because I don’t want to have any more nightmares about Gamearth! I want it done and finished and out of my head!”

He swallowed and blinked, as if amazed at himself. Melanie felt a moment of sympathy for him. The power of Gamearth was frightening to her, too, but the characters, the landscapes, the legends all gave her wondrous dreams, not nightmares. She had to save them, and the characters had to help in their own way.

“Melanie, when your characters get into Tairé they’re playing right into my hands.” He avoided her gaze and looked down at the painted map. She saw that his hands were shaking.

Melanie kept her voice low. “That’s exactly where I want them to be. Shut up and play.”

13. People of a Dead City

“By building this beautiful city in the midst of desolation, we will prove that Gamearth characters can overcome any difficulty so long as we pool our talents and work toward a common goal. We have our magic, and we have the Rules on our side. Nothing can stop us now.”

—Enrod, ceremony at the founding of Tairé

They descended out of the mountains. The hard, cold ground crunched under Delrael’s boots. He felt stronger now, as if he was finally opening his eyes again. Tallin was dead, but the Game went on, turn after turn—unless the Outsider David had his way.

Delrael made his facial muscles stop frowning. He remembered Rule #1. He focused on quests, treasure, action, on getting things done. He did not sit around and ponder everything to death. Death.

Maybe that changed too many things.

His father had sent a message stick with the aid of the Rulewoman Melanie, charging Delrael and Vailret to find some way to stop Scartaris, to keep Gamearth alive and intact. In the cold mountain air, Delrael absently clenched his fist.

The next days passed in a blur. Delrael kept his eyes fixed on the distant horizon toward the crumbled mountain terrain that marked the lair of Scartaris. After another hexagon they crossed over grassy hills and then entered the rocky desolation, scars left from the old Sorcerer wars.

The landscape became flat and barren, like gray ash in a bleak ocean. The ground was strewn with shattered rocks and jutting boulders like broken teeth. The sun seemed hotter here, making everything look blasted and devastated. The desolation rang with silence, leaving only the crunch of their footsteps. The wind had nothing but bare rock to rustle against. No birds or insects made any noise at all.

Journeyman stumped along beside them, but the dry heat made him move more stiffly.

“Did Scartaris cause all this?” Bryl asked.

Vailret looked around, and his eyes were red. “No, that was just reopening an old wound. It’s easy to destroy something that was already knocked to its knees. The final battles laid waste to a huge section of the map, right here.”

He drew a deep breath. “But the Wars ended here, too. The two factions of Sorcerers finally made their peace. Did I ever tell you about Stilvess Peacemaker?”

Delrael forced himself to appear interested, to be part of the group again. “Arken mentioned that name, didn’t he?”

Vailret looked pleased. “By the time the Wars ended, the Sorcerers were almost worn out. Most of them had forgotten why they were fighting in the first place. How could they still be angry about the game of throwing stones at Lady Maire’s wedding celebration, so many turns before?

“Then a self-appointed mediator appeared among the camps. Stilvess. He wandered from one army to the other, refusing to reveal which side he came from—but he made it clear that he wanted no more war. He was an outstanding orator.”

Vailret sighed. “He brought the two sides together like a crashing wave, making them one again. He forced the factions to see they were fighting themselves into extinction.

“Finally, the son of one of the great generals was killed in a skirmish. Instead of allowing that to inflame emotions again, Stilvess used that to show the Sorcerers how much pain their battles were causing. He made the two leaders meet at the funeral pyre of the general’s dead son, and he urged them to cast their ceremonial swords into the hot flames.”

Vailret looked lost in his own memories. “Sardun had one of those burned swords in the museum under his Ice Palace.”

“I think I remember it,” Bryl said.

Delrael looked around the wasteland and imagined the furious battles—Slac regiments, human armies, characters slaughtered, old Sorcerer leaders wielding spells. . .

The hexagon of desolation fell away behind the black dividing line into another section of terrain that should have been lush prairie. But all the grass was brown and dry, scratching together in the breeze like a vast tinderbox. A line of brown grassy-hill terrain blocked their view of further desolation ahead.

“Enrod founded a city out here somewhere. Tairé,” Vailret said. “The characters spent many turns trying to bring life back to the land, where they could be reminded of the scars left by the battles. That’s why I was so shocked to hear Enrod coming to destroy us with the Fire Stone—he was always a rebuilder, not a destroyer.”

Vailret bent over to snap a brittle grass blade. “Looks like the Tairans managed to reclaim these hexes, for a while. Until Scartaris sucked it all dry again. Maybe we’ll find some cropland closer to the city walls.”

Delrael kicked the ground, scuffing up a chunk of dead grass.

They followed the quest-path to the hills and camped at the hex-line that night. When they moved on the next day, Delrael stood at the top of a ridge looking down. The hot wind whipped his hair, but they had gone far enough away from the desolation’s flying dust and grit.

Among the stiff crags of the Spectre Mountains behind them, he saw a misshapen blob of black fog crawling out of the distant mountain terrain, touching the ground and wending its way down the final slope. He recognized it as the dark, shimmering cloud they had seen from the other side of the mountains. As the nebulous mass drove headlong into the grassy hills, dust churned up from its passage. He wondered if the mass was some great force summoned by Scartaris to join his armies. Or perhaps it was following them.

He turned and led the way down the slope, away from the cloud. They had enough problems already.

The city of Tairé lay ahead of them, large enough to cover five hexagons. It seemed gloomy, blanketed in shadows, but it was a sign of life like a bulkhead in the desolation. He wondered why anyone would remain there after Scartaris drained all life away, killed all their work.

Outside the city rose great mounds of broken rock. Apparently, the builders of Tairé had intended to make terraced gardens, but they contented themselves with arranging the shattered boulders in ornate circles. Delrael was impressed that simple characters had done all that work, picked up all those stones and stacked them there, cleared the dead hexes to make them fertile again. In vain.

By noon they reached the black dividing line that marked the beginning of the city. The wall surrounding Tairé was made of gray stone, interlocked blocks without mortar, and marked at precise intervals by tall parapets to provide a better view of the desolation beyond.

Carved into the wall were intricate, stylized friezes depicting scenes from the Game. Vailret squinted his eyes and scanned them with apparent astonishment. His mouth opened and closed, just as it had when he confronted Arken.

Delrael did not recognize many of the scenes, but he could make out Sesteb’s disputed stone throw that started the Wars, the creation of the character races as fighters, the funeral pyre in which Stilvess had the Sorcerer generals cast their swords, the surviving Sorcerers creating the four die-shaped Stones, and finally the six Spirits rising up from the Transition.

Delrael rubbed the silent silver in his belt and thought of the Earthspirits, wishing they would somehow communicate with him. Let him know they were still alive.

The Tairan friezes were crumbling and weathered, caked with blown dust and never cleaned. The city seemed strangely silent, restless and waiting. Delrael saw windows in the towers, but they remained empty, revealing no curious faces to greet the travelers.

“And now for something completely different,” Journeyman mumbled.

Tairé should have contained thousands of characters. Delrael heard no activity, none of the clanking and bustle that had marked Sitnalta from a distance. Instead, Tairé cowered in a hush, comatose from being too close to Scartaris.

The city’s main gate stood tall and open, an ornate framework of wrought iron showing leaves and flowers growing up out of the ground. But the gate sagged on rusted hinges. Wind blew through the spidery ironwork, making it hum. No one greeted—or challenged—them as they entered Tairé.

“Either the Tairans aren’t taking care of anything,” Bryl said, “Or this place is as dead as the land around it.”

“Yoo hoo! Anybody home?” Journeyman called.

The Tairans had made full use of the limited resources of the desolation. The houses were constructed of broken stone blasted up in the upheavals of battle, decorated with frescoes painted into plaster made from crushed limestone. The artists had used natural pigments, ochres and reds found in the rocks, black from soot. Pieces of glistening obsidian were inlaid in game-board patterns.

Some of the flat sides of buildings showed scenes of daily life—not epic battles, but pictures of bountiful harvests, lush forest terrain, large gatherings for group games. History was depicted on the walls outside of Tairé; inside, they looked to the future instead.

The architecture was open, with plenty of space for meetings. Wind whispered through the buildings, weaving through open windows. Delicate metal chimes hung on corners, tinkling at random.

As they travelled deeper into the city, the neglect became more apparent. Many of the spectacular frescoes were chipped and faded, smeared with an oily soot floating in the air. Delrael saw empty troughs under the windows of some buildings, apparently intended to hold flowers.

On several larger buildings, crude doors, bars, and gates had recently been added, looking clumsy and out of place.

The noise of a dripping fountain sounded loud in the Tairan silence. Delrael put out his hand to catch the warm, rust-tinted water, but he did not drink. The sculpture above the fountain was a wrought-iron bell, ornate but silent. The fountain stood at an intersection of two streets with wide stone buildings on either side. He realized that in the middle of the desolation someone must have used magic to summon up water, but now even the fountain had ceased.

Journeyman scooped up some of the puddled water and spread it on his dry clay skin to moisten himself. He smiled in relief.

Vailret and Bryl sat down, but Delrael paced around the fountain, shading his eyes and searching for signs of life. The afternoon sunlight was bright and harsh. “I’m getting tired of this,” he said.

In the shadows of one of the open buildings, he saw a figure standing between two stone columns. Delrael strode toward the building. “Come here!” He didn’t know if the Tairan would hide or come to him.

To his surprise a thin, haggard woman stepped forward. At first she appeared ancient, but he saw that she was not old at all, despite her sunken and shadowed eyes. Dirt stained her tattered gray clothes—but she seemed unaware of all that. She took several jerky steps toward him, as if something else moved her arms and legs.

“Where is everybody?” Delrael asked her. “What’s going on here? This is Tairé—what happened?”

She turned to face Delrael. Her eyes were milky white; the pupils and irises had vanished, leaving a soulless blank expression that sent a shiver up his spine. She never blinked.

Her voice sounded garbled, awkward. Her lower jaw moved up and down, clacking her teeth together, but not in time with the words she tried to form. Her tongue writhed around in her mouth, making sounds by brute force.

“Delrael. You are Delrael.”

The fighter blinked, taken aback. Delrael looked behind him at the others, questioning, before turning back to the woman. “How do you know my name?”

The Tairan woman jerked backward as if her nerves had snapped like broken bowstrings. “Delrael!” She hissed and gurgled in her throat, but she stood with her arms straight at her sides. Spasming muscle tics rippled across her face.

“What’s happening to you?” Delrael shook the Tairan woman by the shoulders, but he might as well have been grabbing an empty sack.

“Something is moving.” Journeyman jerked his head to indicate the empty dwellings.

Delrael released the woman, and she staggered one step backward, then remained where she stood. He saw other forms inside the buildings, lining up at the entrances. A rustle crept into the air, like thousands of furtive footsteps on the cobblestones. He smelled a sharp tang that might have been his own fear-sweat. He narrowed his eyes and felt his heart pumping.

Other Tairans stepped onto the street in a strange lockstep. They moved in unison, stiff, like movable pieces in a complicated war game. All their eyes were blank.

They behaved like the ylvans in Tallin’s village. Delrael winced at the cold memory.

The Tairans stepped forward from the buildings, coming through intersecting streets together. They stood close. Their hands looked torn and infected from hard work. Their faces showed no expression at all.

“They’re completely mindless,” Vailret said.

Journeyman spoke in a gruff voice. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Delrael pulled out his sword. The silence of the city remained, doubly eerie now. The Tairans marched forward, closing in. He felt their synchronous breathing, their hearts beating together as they took one step, then another.

“We can’t fight all these characters,” Vailret said, but he pulled out his short sword anyway.

The golem bent his knees and banged his fists together with a smacking noise. “They’ve blocked off every exit. Bummer.”

The blank faces of the Tairans made Delrael’s skin crawl. They were unarmed. This would not be a battle, it would be a slaughter. . .but the Tairans would win. They outnumbered the travelers by thousands. He didn’t know what to do.

Bryl took out the Fire Stone. “I can blast our way through. It’ll kill a lot of them.”

Delrael blinked back stinging water in his eyes. The sword felt heavy and poisonous in his hand. He thought of how all these characters had been warped by Scartaris. He saw Tallin lying dead in the catacombs of the Anteds. None of this felt like a simple game anymore. He couldn’t just slaughter with impunity. He didn’t want to. It had to be a fair fight.

“Only as a last resort,” he told Bryl. “We have to think of a better way.”

Delrael felt sweat dribble between his shoulderblades. He could smell the Tairans, feel them breathing, sense their body heat. The afternoon sun slanted through the streets. Ripples of warmth rose from the heated stone walls.

“If you want me to use the Fire Stone it better be now, before they get too close.” Bryl rubbed his palms on the eight-sided ruby.

Then a woman’s loud voice broke the attack. Hooves rang out on the cobblestones; they heard the crack of a whip. “Hyah! What are you doing? Get away from there, all you Tairans.” The whip cracked again. “Go on!”

Delrael craned his neck but could not see who had made the noise. He felt his damp grip around the hilt of his sword. His throat had gone dry.

A woman pushed her way forward on a gray horse, squeezing between the Tairans. The horse moved from side to side, nervous around the shuffling people. The woman flicked her whip back and forth, making the Tairans shrug aside. “Go on! I know you’re not deaf. Get out of here!”

Reluctantly, it seemed, the Tairans moved aside. Their sluggish attack dissolved as they drifted toward the buildings. They moved backward, keeping their pupilless gaze on Delrael. He glared back at them.

Delrael drew deep breaths through his nose and let them out between his lips. He watched the woman approach on her horse. She was wiry, clad in a bright green tunic; it looked as if she had made some effort to keep herself clean. At her side hung an unsheathed sword with a rippled edge, like a tongue of flame.

Her hair was long and dark, tied out of the way in a single braid. She moved quickly, as if with an attitude that her every action counted a great deal. Her dark eyes flicked rapidly, alert and intense. A fire of anger burned in her pupils. Pupils—somehow this character had escaped Scartaris’s touch.

“I’m Mindar,” the woman said and dismounted from her horse. She brushed at her legs and stamped her feet, looking flustered. “Did they harm you?”

Delrael glanced at his companions and answered for them. “No, I think we’re all right.”

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Journeyman asked. The others introduced themselves.

“They know who we are,” Vailret said, looking shaken. He flashed an angry glare at Delrael. “They know who we are!”

Mindar led her horse ahead of them down the street. “Let’s get farther away from this place. I never know what Scartaris is going to do.”

She moved ahead with a determined step. Delrael had to hurry to keep up with her. Mindar turned, and Delrael was startled by the viciousness of the grin she flashed at them. “I don’t know who you are, but I haven’t seen the people so awake in a long time. Nobody’s been able to arouse them since Scartaris came.”

She stared at Delrael, letting the question hang in the air. Vailret shuffled his feet, but Delrael wasted no time pondering. He didn’t see the point in hiding it any longer. “We’re on a quest to destroy Scartaris, but he’s found out about us somehow. That makes our task even riskier.”

Vailret nodded. “We understand that Scartaris has the power to end the Game whenever he wants, some kind of metamorphosis. Any time he’s frightened enough of us, he’ll just destroy the map.”

Mindar brushed aside her dark bangs and exposed a lumpy red scar on her forehead, a burning red welt in the shape of an S. “Scartaris will play with you as long as he can. He enjoys that. He does it to me.”

Vailret squinted at her. “What happened to you?”

“Scartaris can’t control me. I don’t know why my mind can resist him when the other characters can’t—do you think that’s a blessing? Look what it did for me.” She spread her hands. The spring-green tunic looked dirty, a pitiful attempt at brightness and cheer in the drab city.

Somehow Tallin had some ability to resist Scartaris, too, a random trait generated by a fluke of a dice roll. Of the thousands of characters in Tairé, Delrael was not surprised that one had the same immunity.

“I wasn’t any important person,” Mindar continued. “I was just another artist, painting some of the frescoes. Two days each week I’d go outside the city walls and help tend the fields, rebuild the irrigation channels, plant trees in the hills.”

She glared at them. “All of this used to be beautiful, you know. My husband worked more than his share of time out there, so I could have extra hours for painting. We had one daughter, Cithany.”

Tears glistened on Mindar’s dark eyes. “The children were the first to. . .to fade. We didn’t know about Scartaris—but all of our crops withered and died. The grass turned brown, the trees became barren. Then our children were lost to us. Scartaris seeped into their minds and played them like puppets. We couldn’t understand. We didn’t know.”

Mindar shook her fist in the air, facing toward the east. “Some characters were stronger, but they lost in the end. You see how they all are, mindless husks. Scartaris enjoys role-playing them, like the Outsiders Play their characters on Gamearth. I was the only one remaining. What could I do, all by myself?”

She lowered her eyes. “At least I had my anger. One afternoon I looked around me and saw that I was no longer part of my own city, that everything else had cut itself off from me. The soul of Tairé was gone. By this time some of us knew about Scartaris—Enrod had found out, but it was too late for him, too.

“So, in my despair, I shouted into the streets, I cursed Scartaris at the top of my lungs.” Her fingers rubbed the S-scar on her forehead. She mumbled her words. “So he cursed me back.

“The people gathered and found me. They grabbed my arms and pinned them behind me, then they carried me to one of the blacksmiths’ shops. I couldn’t break free because there were so many. You saw them. They held me down by an anvil in the dark. I was screaming and I could hardly breathe. I hurt myself trying to struggle.

“They took a hot iron and branded this on my forehead. Then they dunked my head in the water and left me there on the floor.” She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes.

“They were people I knew! They were—” her voice hitched, “my brother and my husband!”

She leaned against a stone wall on which had been painted an ochre sunrise shedding light over lush forest terrain and bountiful fields surrounding the reborn city of Tairé. The paint had faded, dusted with an oily smear.

“This is supposed to mark me as the lowliest character in Scartaris’s domain. I am to be taunted, played with, and, worst of all, ignored. He casts aside and breaks everything I cared for—Scartaris must be laughing as he watches me try to pick up the pieces.”

Mindar trembled with passion. Her hands clutched at the hilt of her rippled sword as if she wanted to damage something. She fought to bring control over herself again.

“Scartaris sent a demon watcher to make sure that I see no peace. The Cailee. It hides in the shadows, watches my thoughts to learn how it may inflict the most pain on me.”

Bryl looked at the shadows of the alleys, widening his eyes. Delrael frowned. “What is the Cailee?”

Mindar straightened and began to walk down the street, leading her horse. Delrael could see nothing but the back of her head as she answered. “The Cailee becomes tangible only at night. It looks like a shadow, featureless and black, in the form of a human. But on the ends of its hands are hooked silver claws, sharp enough to rend—” Her shoulders bunched and rippled. “The characters here are all so helpless now, so helpless.”

Mindar swallowed. “The Cailee shadows me, follows me, waiting until I’m not watching—and then it slaughters!”

She whirled with such anger that her horse skittered two steps sideways. The S-scar on her forehead seemed to throb with a light of its own.

She dropped her voice to a quiet longing tone. “One night the Cailee slit open my husband. And Cithany. And left them to bleed onto the floor of our home. For no other reason than that it would hurt me.”

Delrael felt his heart pounding, thinking again of Tallin and how the Anteds had killed him. Mindar slashed at the air in her passion.

“For that, I’m going to destroy Scartaris. No matter what it takes. If you have a way, then I will join your quest.” Her gaze flicked from Delrael to the others. Delrael felt the heat behind those eyes.

“We have a way,” he answered.

“I have a way, too,” Journeyman said.

“We’ll need all the help we can get,” Delrael said. He held out his hand to her. Something inside of him felt uneasy about Mindar, but he could understand her anger and her obsession. She struck him like a true comrade, someone who had felt the same wounds. He felt close to her.

She flashed a smile, sharp and dangerous, and grasped Delrael’s hand. “My friends, together we can defeat Scartaris.”

Mindar stiffened and turned pale. Her eyes widened, flicking back and forth as if to see something from the corner of her eyes. “What have I done? I called you my friends!”

She grabbed the horse and set off down a side street. The mare’s hooves made loud noises that echoed against the buildings. “You are in grave danger—follow me! It’s almost sundown. The Cailee will come soon.”

She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Deep shadows slanted across the street. The sky turned orange as the sun sank behind the knife-edge of the Spectre Mountains, dappling the stone walls.

Mindar brought them to a wide, squat building and opened the iron front gates. She stopped and held the horse’s head in her hands. She rubbed the gray mare behind the ears.

“There now, you take care of yourself.” She released the horse and clapped her hands. “Go on!” She turned it around and gave it a light kick with her boot. The mare trotted away through the streets.

“Won’t the Cailee get your horse in the middle of the night?” Bryl asked.

Mindar flashed her hard smile again. “No. A horse is not like the people of Tairé—she can defend herself. And she can run. She knows where to hide. Besides, horses are much too valuable for hauling supplies to Scartaris’s armies.

“This building here is one of the old storehouses.” She led them inside. The windows were narrow, and the air smelled musty and empty. Dust filtered into angled shafts of light across the floor.

“Tairé couldn’t raise all its own crops, of course. Sometimes we bought food from the farming villages in the mountain foothills. The half-breeds used magic to replenish our supplies of meats and grains. Mostly it’s all been used up by now.”

Their footsteps echoed across the floor in the empty building. Mindar led them down an open staircase to the basement, cool and dry beneath the ground. Several chambers had been hollowed out. Mindar took them to the door of one.

“I set this up for myself a while ago, when I thought someday I might have to make a stand against the people of Tairé. It’s well defended and well supplied.”

Inside, the room was windowless. Boxes of provisions and drinking water in sealed casks were piled against the wall. Bryl found candles in one of the boxes and took them out.

“The door is secure. It’s heavy wood—and we don’t have much wood here. It should keep us safe against the Cailee.”

Mindar stood up straight, as if something had twisted inside her. She looked frightened and sweating, even more than before. “I forgot to lock the upstairs gate! Be ready to let me in when I come back down!”

Before they could say anything, she squeezed out through the half-shut door. Delrael heard her boots skipping up the stairs, then quick footfalls across the floor above. He looked at Vailret, who shrugged and shook his head.

And then they heard an outcry from above. “Cailee! Stay away!” They heard a clang of iron as the gates slammed, and then a loud crash of torn metal clattering to the floor. “Get out!”

A sharp sound rang out as metal struck stone. Delrael pictured Mindar swinging with her rippled sword, and then he heard frantic steps charging down the stairs.

“Get ready!” Delrael said. Vailret stood with him by the door, waiting to push it shut.

Mindar ran for them, holding the sword in one hand, her whip coiled at her hip. She leaped down the last three stairs. Her boots skittered on the floor, and her dark braid flipped back and forth.

“Close the door behind me! Close the door!”

As she ducked inside, Delrael saw an oily black silhouette creep down the stairs. moving dark and humanlike, but completely without features. A solid black mass that looked like a hole, a cut-out in the shape of a human character, gliding down the stairs, smooth and fast.

On the ends of each finger were gleaming, knifelike claws.

“Close the door!” Mindar cried.

Delrael shoved his shoulder against the door, and it thumped against the jamb. Mindar scrabbled with her hands and pulled the solid wooden crossbeam over the supports.

An instant later they heard a howl as something massive struck the other side of the door. Delrael still had his shoulder against it and felt the wood vibrate.

With another roar, the Cailee struck the door again. Then Delrael heard sharp, splintering sounds of silver claws ripping open the wood.

14. The Woman Cursed by Scartaris

“The Outsiders put their characters through a crucible, forging us with their games, tempering us with agonies or pleasures. Some characters are destroyed by this testing. Others come through it galvanized and stronger than before.”

—Stilvess Peacemaker

The Cailee attacked again.

The door thudded as the monster slammed against the wood, then screeching claws skittered up and down the jamb.

Bryl whimpered.

“That’s more than just a shadow,” Delrael said.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Journeyman said.

Mindar looked at them. The flickering candlelight washed over her face, shining with the sweat of her effort, her fear. The air felt hot and close around them. Delrael took a drink from one of the water skins, but the liquid tasted warm and flat.

Mindar turned away to stare at the door. She ran the braided end of the whip through her calloused hands.

The Cailee struck the door again.

“I’ve tried to hunt it down in the streets,” she whispered. “I went out at night with my sword, but the Cailee always eluded me. It can vanish into any pool of darkness, hide in any corner where the light doesn’t fall. I challenged the Cailee, but it chose to strike behind my back.”

Her fingers clutched at the whip, as if to use it as a garrote. “I ran through the streets. Everything was dark, since no one lit lamps in their homes anymore. I found that the Cailee had torn down the door to my own home.

“I didn’t try to be cautious. It wouldn’t have done any good. When I pushed the torch into the shadows of my house, I could sense the Cailee. I also smelled fresh blood. When I came into the main room, I found—” Mindar choked on her words.

Delrael stiffened and wanted to go to her, comfort her. But he felt that she did not want any comfort. She might be afraid it would weaken her.

“I found my husband and my daughter. Even mindless, they still knew where home was. They lived there. They were both slaughtered by the Cailee. It had thrown their blood in all directions, like it was playing.

“They hadn’t put up any struggle, of course. Scartaris killed their minds long ago. I suppose they didn’t even feel any pain.”

“Mindar. . .” Delrael said.

“I ran outside and found the Cailee. I slashed at it with my sword and scored a blow—then the Cailee tore at me with its silver claws, laying open my side. I fell to the street with a mortal wound, bleeding for hours. But I couldn’t die.

“When I woke up at dawn, I had healed completely. And I found that the Cailee had also slain my brother. The one who had helped brand my forehead.”

On the other side of the door, the Cailee ran one claw down the wood in a long, slow scratching noise that made the skin crawl on Delrael’s back. The Cailee seemed to be mocking them.

Bryl’s face looked the color of sour milk in the dim candlelight. He kneaded his fingers around the ruby Fire Stone. “If the Cailee gets in here, I’m going to blast it.”

Mindar looked at the eight-sided stone with an expression of scorn on her face. Her eyes had a dull despair to them, but suddenly her gaze focused. “How did you get that?” Her voice carried a sharp command, and she sprang to her feet. “Where did you get Enrod’s Fire Stone?”

Delrael stood up beside Bryl. Everything fell into place for him as he remembered. Vailret cleared his throat, but seemed reluctant to start explaining.

“Delrael. . .” Mindar said, rolling the name around her mouth. “You’re the ones who made the Barrier River! Enrod said you cut us off!”

Vailret coughed and turned away, as if avoiding her. “Enrod wasn’t. . .himself, I don’t think. He tried to destroy all the hexagons west of the Barrier River. But the Deathspirits stopped him and cursed him to stay on the River until the end of the Game. They took the Fire Stone away from him and gave it to us.”

He lowered his eyes. “Scartaris must have been manipulating Enrod, but the Deathspirits didn’t care about any reasons, only what he was trying to do.”

Mindar sat back down with slumped shoulders. She undid the braid in her hair and shook her head to loosen the strands. She closed her dark eyes.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I know how upset Enrod was about your River. He had found out about Scartaris and how we’d all have to escape soon. You made our escape impossible. You trapped us on the same side of the map with Scartaris.” She shrugged and ran her fingers through hair that hung long and dark, kinky from the tight braid.

“Enrod was strong, very strong. He resisted longer than most of the Tairans. But he became obsessed about the Barrier River. I watched him. I think Scartaris used that as a hook to trap him, to twist open a weak spot in his mind and drive in the puppet strings.” She sighed. “Still, his fate doesn’t seem fair.”

Vailret pursed his lips. “I don’t suppose the Deathspirits were much willing to compromise.”

The Cailee hit the door, but its efforts seemed to be losing enthusiasm.

“In a way, I’m glad Enrod isn’t here to see what’s happened to his city. He loved it so much.”

She took the water skin from Delrael’s hands and drank a deep gulp. “Scartaris is using the characters here to make weapons, swords and shields for his great battle.” Mindar shuddered and looked at them, but seemed disappointed with their reaction. She scowled.

“You wouldn’t understand how great that defeat is. Remember that Tairé is built on the worst scars of the ancient wars. The mechanics of game battles and personal combat are abhorrent to us. When Enrod founded this city, it was to be progressive and forward-looking. He knew the future of Gamearth lay in the hands of human characters—he wanted to make sure we succeeded without repeating the mistakes of the Sorcerers.”

Vailret lit another candle to replace one of those that burned low. He spoke up. “That’s where Enrod and Sardun had their differences, I think. Sardun wanted to enshrine the memory of the Sorcerers. Enrod wanted to work at keeping human characters alive and safe. Is that right?”

Mindar nodded. She kept her eyes lowered. “By using Tairé to forge swords, Scartaris struck another psychological blow—it makes his victory more fun to him. Imagine, Tairans making weapons!

She sat brooding, thinking. They fell into silence, waiting for the night to pass. The Cailee took to scratching along the stone walls outside their room, then howling in the echoing basement.

“How many more years are we going to have to stay here like this?” Bryl asked.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Journeyman answered.

#

They waited.

They sat in silence, listening to the ticking, random noises of the room. Outside, they heard quiet shuffling, the unknown movements of the Cailee that were even more frightening in their stealth than the occasional violent crashes against the door.

They sat for hours with no way of knowing how much time passed. They heard nothing from the Cailee. Bryl huddled in the blue robe, running his gnarled fingers through his gray beard. Journeyman appeared dormant.

Delrael looked at Vailret and Mindar. “Do you think it’s morning yet?”

Mindar stood up. “We can see if the Cailee is gone. I’ll go out. You watch the door.”

Delrael began to protest, but she cut him off. “No. If I find the Cailee, then I’ll have what I want.” She lifted her sword. “If I don’t find it, then we can go to our work.”

Delrael and Vailret stood close to each other by the door with their own swords drawn. He imagined the edge of the old Sorcerer blade clanging against the slash of silver claws.

Mindar popped up the sturdy crossbar, and Delrael yanked the door open. Mindar slipped through the crack and vanished into the basement. He caught a glimpse of grayish morning light before he and Vailret threw their weight against the door to close it.

They listened, but heard no immediate sounds until Mindar’s quiet steps went up the stairs.

“Cailee!” she cried.

Delrael tensed, ready to yank open the door and run to fight with her, but they heard no scuffle, nothing else.

She came back down the stairs and stopped by the door. “It’s all right. The Cailee is gone.”

They opened the door again. Mindar put her shoulders through. The anger in her eyes was rekindled.

“I saw the Cailee standing in the shadows. It was fading with the dawn light. I ran with my sword, but it was too insubstantial. Now I’ll have to wait for another night.”

She pushed open the door. Delrael breathed the cooler air of the basement, saw the murky light that filtered down from the narrow windows above, bright and clean after their night in the storeroom. They looked at the sturdy wooden door and stopped.

The door had been shredded. Great gouges and splinters were peeled away, torn out by hooked silver claws. The iron pins of the hinges hung loose from the wall, nearly pulled from the stone.

“That’s not going to last another night,” Delrael said. Bryl swayed on his feet, but managed not to faint.

When they got to the open air and bright sunlight, Delrael stood blinking and breathing deeply. He liked to be out where he could do something, where he could fight—not trapped like a victim in a cell.

Mindar looked changed—strengthened. She had a bounce to her step, and her demeanor did not seem so hopeless. “Come. I want to show you something.”

She took Delrael’s elbow and led them through the streets. Nothing stirred. The Tairans seemed to be hiding.

“I painted this back when I was happy and idealistic.” She pointed to one of the frescoes on a building. “It was easy to think up nice things to paint then, of our bright future and how the Game would continue forever. We were going to make ourselves strong and self-sufficient. That’s what we thought the Outsiders wanted! To make lives of our own so we wouldn’t be dependent on them.”

She led them to the side of an old building with a flat expanse of hexagonal stone blocks. “This one I did later.”

A half-finished fresco had been sketched on the blocks, but in the center of the wall the soot-grimed plaster had been scrubbed away and overlaid with a fresh coating. Mindar had drawn a new picture showing the mountains to the east. A great featureless human figure towered over the landscape, holding his arms up in a gesture of victory. But the fresco was finished, not just a sketch. She had drawn the figure without features, but it had a mystique, a power to it.

“It’s the Stranger Unlooked-For,” she said.

Vailret looked at her, frowning as if trying to recall something he had heard. “Who was that?”

“Nobody knows. But he saved Gamearth.” Mindar put her hands on her hips and walked over to the wall, inspecting her artwork. “It was just after the Transition, before Enrod established Tairé, when the rest of the Gamearth characters were fighting each other over who would rule the map.”

“The Scouring,” Vailret said. Mindar ignored him.

“In the middle of the desolation grew something that would have destroyed us all, something a lot like Scartaris.”

Mindar stared up into the sky. “The Outsider David must have tried to end the Game once before, and failed. He failed because the Stranger Unlooked-For came and destroyed his monster. The Stranger used some kind of weapon more powerful than anything ever used in the old Sorcerer wars. Nobody knows who the Stranger was. Nobody knows how he succeeded in killing David’s first monster. But we should all remember him as a hero.”

She took out her rippled sword and rested its tip on the flagstones of the street. “I know one thing, though. We can’t count on the Stranger to return. We’ve got nobody but ourselves to fight Scartaris.”

Shuffling away from the painting, Mindar kept her eyes averted. “Before we go, there’s one thing I want to do. I’ll need your help. I hope you’ll join me.”

Bryl shifted his feet uneasily.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Journeyman said.

Mindar took a deep breath. “Scartaris has one large smithy to fashion swords, and the tannery to make shields. I want to destroy them before we go. Strike a psychological blow back at Scartaris. That’ll teach him not to use Tairé to make his weapons.”

Delrael looked at the deserted streets and saw in his mind the dream that Enrod had, to raise the city out of the desolation, to turn it toward the future. And he saw how Scartaris had twisted that idea.

Yes, he liked the thought of striking a real blow, now that Scartaris knew who they were anyway. They no longer needed to keep their quest secret. It was time to stop hiding—time to start showing that they meant business.

“Yes.” Delrael met Mindar’s eyes. “Let’s do it.”

Mindar smiled, and Delrael felt a thrill, perhaps of fear, run down his spine. She looked beautiful and determined, and more deadly than any weapon he had ever seen. The angry red S-scar marred her forehead.

“Let me find my mare. If we get horses for you too, we can increase our travel allotment, get to Scartaris sooner.”

Mindar led them through the winding streets. Delrael noticed a few Tairans shuffling along doing indecipherable tasks. They took no notice of the travelers. Mindar pointedly did not look at them.

When they reached the stables, Mindar’s gray mare waited for them. Mindar patted the mare on the neck, and Delrael could see a genuine attachment between them. She left the horse outside as she motioned the others in. Only two horses remained in the stable.

“They’ve taken three more.” Mindar shook her head in disgust. “Sometimes Scartaris sends his monsters here to get weapons. Other times he has the Tairans use horses to haul cartloads off to his army. The horses never come back.”

“There aren’t enough horses for us,” Bryl said, although from the tone in his voice, Delrael thought he sounded relieved. Bryl had never ridden a horse, and probably wasn’t thrilled at the idea.

“I don’t need one,” Journeyman said. “I can keep up with any pace you set.”

“Bryl’s light enough.” Vailret stood beside the half-Sorcerer. “He can ride with me. We’ll take one horse. Del, you take the other. Mindar has her own.”

Mindar nodded and turned to the door. “Let’s get going.”

Delrael approached one of the horses skeptically, a mottled brown gelding that appeared calm enough. He ran his palm along the horse’s shoulders and then, trying not to look inexperienced, he scrambled on the gelding’s back. Delrael held onto the mane and swayed, finding his balance. The horse felt warm and vibrant under him, strong and alive.

“Don’t worry,” Mindar said, “You’re a fighter character. You’ll ride easily. It’s natural for you. Part of your characteristics.”

Vailret watched his cousin, then worked his way onto the other horse. Bryl frowned, then Journeyman picked him up bodily and set him in front of Vailret. The horses seemed anxious to leave the stables. Outside in the street again, Mindar mounted her own mare.

She stopped in the square in front of the stables to where an iron bell, embossed with flower patterns, hung over a stone foundation. Four Tairans shuffled from one building to another, keeping their heads down and slouching. Their gray clothes and sunken expressions made it impossible for Delrael to tell if they were even male or female characters.

Mindar removed the whip from around her waist and, holding onto the gray mare’s mane with one hand, she lashed out and struck the bell. A gong echoed through the streets.

The Tairans looked up, gawked at her for a moment, then moved back inside. Mindar struck the bell again with the whip and waited. Nothing stirred in the buildings. Her expression turned dark and stormy. Tears glistened in her dark eyes. She rang the bell twice more, then hung her head.

“Tairé has died,” she said. “That bell should have brought all characters in the city flocking to see what the danger was.” She fastened her whip, then urged the mare forward.

“We’ll give them some danger.”

#

The smithy stood by itself, surrounded by smoke and noise. On three sides, the alleys were broader than usual. One wall of a nearby building had been knocked down to give greater access for raw material to be shipped in, for weapons to be carried away. The rubble lay where it had fallen; white chips and broken brick showed that the wall had been intact not long before.

Smoke curled into the bright, hot sky; feathery black stains smeared the smithy walls. A mound of pig iron lay piled near the door. From the inside came gusts of heat and banging sounds as Tairans worked on swords and shield frames.

“What are we going to do?” Vailret said, squinting his eyes as if deep in thought. “We can’t burn it.”

“I can still cause a lot of damage.” Journeyman smacked his fists together.

“We don’t need to destroy the buildings,” Mindar said. “This is still my city. It won’t do any good to save Tairé if we ruin it in the meantime. We’ll destroy the forge and the hearth—that will ruin things so they can’t be used to make swords.” She stared at the smithy wall with a gaze that seemed to bore through stone. “That’ll be enough for now.”

Delrael climbed down off his horse and steadied himself against the gelding’s back. “Vailret, you and Bryl stay out here and watch the horses. The three of us can handle this.”

“You bet your life!” Journeyman said.

“Funny you should put it that way,” Mindar said.

Inside, the smithy was dark, lit only by orange, smoky fires. Delrael choked on the stench of sulfur and hot iron. The clang of hammers on anvils rang out in the air.

Five Tairan men worked at the anvils, three women tended hot ingots in the forge. Another hauled pig iron from the pile outside. Their tunics had either burned away or torn off. Red welts and black scars on their skin showed where they had been seared by sparks; the untended wounds festered.

Mindar held her sword in front of her. “Stop what you’re doing!” she shouted into the noise.

The Tairans turned to look in unison with blank-eyed stares, then they continued their work, banging against the anvil. She had to yell. “Stop that, I said!”

Delrael strode forward and wrenched the mallet from one of the Tairan’s hands. “Drop your hammers!”

Journeyman came forward and yanked mallets out of the other hands. The mindless men continued to raise and lower their arms for a few moments, then they stood with hands loose at their sides.

“Better move fast, before they figure out what’s going on,” Mindar said.

Delrael started hacking at the bellows with his sword, severing the pulley ropes. Mindar bent to her knees and used the strength in her back and arms to tip over an anvil.

Journeyman, with a huge grin of glee on his face, picked up an anvil and threw it into the stone-rimmed forge. The heavy iron smashed into the chimney bricks and punched a hole through. With another broad clay hand, he grabbed one of the stone support pillars in the center of the room and jerked it free, toppling a portion of the ceiling. The golem sputtered and brushed dust off his arms.

The Tairans stood blinking at them with murky expressions. Mindar swatted one of the workers with the flat of her blade. “Go on, get out of here! You can’t do anything more.”

The three of them herded the Tairans into the street. As a parting effort, Journeyman knocked down the columns in the front of the building, making the facade collapse and closing off the front of the smithy.

Several other Tairans stumbled out of buildings, watching with their unblinking gaze.

“Well, that was exhilarating!” Journeyman said.

Mindar mounted her gray mare. “We have to keep moving before they second-guess us. Scartaris enjoys watching me fail—he won’t put up with this for long.”

She turned the mare around and set off at a trot down the angled street. Delrael tried to figure out how to guide his gelding, but the horse followed Mindar on its own.

Tairé waited in dead silence. Delrael could sense other characters watching through the blind windows, looking at them with the pupilless eyes of Scartaris. . . .

A chemical, rotting stench told him they had reached the tannery. On an adjacent wall Delrael saw a fresco of a dark-haired man he recognized, flowing black beard and fiery eyes—Enrod the Sentinel, wielding the Fire Stone to shine light on the desolation. The optimism in the artist’s conception seemed to mock them all.

Delrael imagined a time when the streets had not been silent: horsecarts taking characters to the reclaimed hexagons for work in the fields. He thought of Tairans talking, doing business, even squabbling with one another. Scartaris had taken all that away.

The tannery was one of the larger buildings in the city, now modified by adding shutters to close off the windows. A gate stood ajar on crude hinges in front of a stained leather curtain that hung over the entrance. Smoke from fires used to cure and dry the stretched leather drifted out of the window openings like fat snakes. Outside the building lay stacked rows of finished shields, varnished leather coverings over a sturdy iron frame. The bad smell forced Delrael to take short, hitching breaths.

“I don’t see why we have to do this,” Bryl said, mumbling his words. He covered his nose with the blue cloak. “If we’ve got the last horses, there’s no more leather for shields anyway.”

Mindar glanced at him with a strange look on her face. Her smile might have been wry if the expression hadn’t been so bleak. “Horses are much too valuable to Scartaris. He would never use them just for leather.”

She blinked her eyes at the piled shields, the pale, discolored leather glinting off the iron frames. Disgust distorted her face.

“But if it’s not horsehide, then—” Bryl began.

“Shut up, Bryl!” Vailret snapped. His face turned greenish.

“We must destroy this place,” Mindar whispered.

She dismounted and drew her sword. “Come on, Delrael. We’ll get the people out, then Bryl can destroy it with the Fire Stone. Enrod would want that, burn it clean.”

Without waiting for him, Mindar strode to the front of the tannery. Delrael took three running steps to catch up to her. She pulled open the iron gate, letting it clang against the far stone wall. She used the tip of her sword to slash across the sewn leather curtain and let it fall to pieces. Her boots stomped it flat as she entered the building.

Delrael followed her into the firelit dimness. The stench hung in the air like foul liquid pressing into his lungs. Irritated tears formed in his eyes, but he blinked them away.

“We won’t fail this time, Scartaris,” Mindar said at the shadows around her.

Delrael’s knuckles whitened around the hilt of his sword. Other Tairans moved in the large, but somehow claustrophobic, room. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he staggered from the grisly sight around him.

Four Tairans grappled with a wooden frame, stretching a skin on a rack. Another woman took a flat knife and began scraping the back of the skin. Entrails, bones, and waste leather lay piled in deep stone vats, dripping in pools of clotting blood.

Against the walls sat basins filled with brine solutions, lime, and tanning chemicals, each stuffed with ragged skins. A covering of ash was scattered on the floor to soak up the blood. Brownish-red footprints left aimless trails in the gray ash.

Racks of drying, treated skins hung from the stone arches, showing vague, distorted shapes of what had once been arms and legs. Piles of finished leather lay stacked in the dim corners, waiting to be mounted on shield frames.

The orange light from torches and braziers flickered with the air coming in now that the leather curtain had been torn down. Mindar let out a strangled cry at the scene, and Delrael closed his eyes with a wince, then forced himself to open them again. He was a fighter, after all. He should have been immune to the sight of gore and carnage.

A mound of human heads, useless for their leather, were piled high in the corner. Their soft jelly eyes stood open in a blank expression of terror. Some of the mouths hung open, dry and black inside.

Then Delrael noticed something that made the nausea surge up inside him. These eyes weren’t the pupilless white of the other empty Tairans—they were normal, terror-stricken, brown irises and blue. Scartaris had given them back their minds an instant before death, letting them know what they had done and what was going to happen to them.

“You bastard!”

Delrael bent over, feeling his chest and stomach muscles spasm. This was foul and unfair. Scartaris did not play the same Game—no glorious combat with heroic deeds. Just slaughter, no honor or challenge or excitement. How could Scartaris enjoy this? Always have fun . . . Such a warped character, even a monster, had to be destroyed.

The dead Tairan eyes stared up from the mound of heads. The pupils seemed dilated in the dim firelight.

He squeezed his eyelids shut and was sick on the ash-covered floor of the tannery. He wheezed and coughed.

The other Tairan workers stopped what they were doing and stood facing them. They all wore identical, broad grins.

Delrael lurched back to his feet, closing his hand around the sword hilt. Stinging tears came to his eyes. Mindar gripped him by the shoulder to be sure he was all right, but he shrugged her off and lunged forward to slash at the drying skins on the racks overhead.

“Let’s get the people out of here so we can bring this place down,” he said. He grabbed one of the motionless Tairan workers and jerked him toward the door. The man stumbled, without cooperating or resisting. Delrael pushed him out the door. He wasted less time shoving the next person out.

Mindar went to the three other workers, but they suddenly moved and grabbed her around the shoulders. Taken by surprise, she lashed out and struggled, but they held onto her arms. The third Tairan went to the cluster of hanging skins, loosened a dangling rope and let two intact bodies fall to the floor, one large and one small. With a thump, they sprawled on their heads, stiff arms and legs cracking into awkward positions. They lay in the blood and ash.

Delrael ran to help Mindar—but the Tairans were not trying to hurt her. One of them grabbed her head and turned it so that she had to look, had to see.

The two bodies were naked, but preserved by the tannery’s processes—a man and a small child, a daughter. Dried blood and claw marks scored their flesh. Both faces held a fixed look of terror and eyes that were not milky-blank, but contained a pupil and dark iris, a mind, a soul.

“No!” With a scream, Mindar threw herself away from the Tairan workers and went wild with her sword, striking down both Tairans who held her. Her rippled blade slashed across the face of the third Tairan, obliterating the empty white eyes. Delrael drew his sword, but Mindar needed no help.

“No, Scartaris. . .” She hunched over the torn bodies of her husband and daughter. Her voice trembled in the silence of the tannery. She reached out to touch Cithany’s stiff shoulder.

Delrael stood behind her. “We have to go.” He placed his hand on her back. “Let’s destroy this place.”

Mindar slid shut the brittle eyelids of her daughter, brushed her fingers over the face of her husband and then closed his eyes as well. “Now you can’t see any more of what Scartaris is doing to our city.”

Delrael took her arm to guide her. Mindar lurched out of the tannery and stumbled on the slippery flagstones. She fell to her knees, retching, then scrambled back to her feet. She held her sword in both hands and lashed back and forth at imaginary demons. Her eyes were clouded and gushing tears. Her lips drew away from her teeth in an angry snarl.

The others stepped back. She screamed and seemed unable to catch her breath. “Scartaris!” Mindar turned around in circles with the sword and then stopped as if grabbed by a giant hand. “You will pay for this.”

She staggered toward Bryl. “Use the Fire Stone. Burn that place! Bring it down!”

“Is there anyone left inside?” Bryl asked.

“Burn it!” Mindar screamed. She reached out and grabbed his blue cloak, pushing him back toward the stone wall of another building. Bryl lost his footing and slipped, but she held onto his cloak and propped him up. “Burn it, I said!”

Her smoldering eyes seemed to cut through him. Delrael took a step forward, then hesitated, afraid to touch her, afraid that Mindar might explode or lash back at him with her rippled sword. He didn’t want to hurt her, and he didn’t think she wanted to hurt him either.

She wanted to hurt Scartaris. That was all for now.

“Do it, Bryl,” he said.

Hands shaking, the half-Sorcerer took out the eight-sided ruby. “Move your feet. Give me some room.”

Bryl stood, brushed himself off, then rolled the ruby. The Fire Stone clacked on the flagstones, showed a “6.”

Mindar whirled to point at the tannery. Bryl grabbed the Fire Stone and launched fireballs with all the strength of his high roll.

Stone splinters from the tannery exploded outward as Bryl hurled crackling spheres of flame. Inside, the doors buckled. Roof shards erupted into the air; smoke belched through the window slits, reeking of burned skin, oily wood, and vats of preserving chemicals.

The tannery collapsed with a long, low rumble. The wide walls of two nearby buildings cracked with the concussion. Smoke curled around the wreckage up into the air again.

The red S-scar on Mindar’s forehead glowed a flaming red with unnatural light. She worked her jaw convulsively and stared to the east. “I curse you, Scartaris. I will use every resource to destroy you.”

Then the Tairans arrived.

Gray-clad, mindless people surged out of the buildings and moved down the streets toward them, shoulder to shoulder, a massed wall of flesh like a living, unthinking vise.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Delrael cried. He grabbed his horse. Mindar stood unable to move. Her eyes looked devastated.

“Show us the way out of here!” Delrael grabbed her by the shoulders, and she seemed to snap out of her confusion. She saw the Tairans coming.

Mindar hustled them down a narrow alley, leading the horses and shouldering aside three Tairans who blocked their way. At the end of the alley, another group of characters moved into place to block off their escape. Mindar stopped and looked at a large pavilion to their left.

“This way. We can cut through here.” Grabbing her mare’s reins, Mindar ran up the steps to the pavilion and into the wide interior. Delrael and the others followed.

The stone roof overhead echoed the sounds of the horses. They passed under lattices strung with decorated clay pots from which hung curtains of dead vines. The vines must have once been lush and cool, but now the brittle strands were like dangling claws trying to scratch down.

“Quick, we can go out the other side!”

They reached the side door where polished steps spilled down onto another street. An obsidian trough that had once served as a reflection pool sat empty, caked with a ring of lime from the evaporated water.

The street in front of them looked deserted. But as they charged down the steps, Tairans moved into the area, crowding at the intersections.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Mindar said. They turned right and ran down the only street still open to them.

“I wish I’d had a chance to study the map of Tairé,” Delrael said, breathing hard. “I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know how to get out of this.”

“I don’t know either,” Mindar said, “But we’re going to find a way.”

The haunted buildings around them stood tall, disorienting. The sun hung straight up in the sky, giving no indication of direction. Delrael followed Mindar, feeling that he could trust her instincts. She fought like he did.

They led the horses, running around one corner, and came abruptly to the tall, smooth stone barrier of the Tairé city walls, blocking them off from the desolation terrain.

“Now what do we do?” Bryl said.

Vailret moved to the wall and put his fingers against the cracks of the hexagonal stone blocks. He looked up, frowning. “We can’t climb this. We can’t get over.”

A wave of Tairans closed in from all sides, moving in a bizarre lock-step, rippling as they pushed forward. Their eyes were all empty, cold and pupilless.

Delrael pulled out his sword. Mindar crouched with her back to the wall, holding the rippled blade in front of her. Delrael could feel her tension, flicking her dark gaze from side to side. They would fight together here, to avenge the ghosts in their pasts.

Without warning, Mindar let out a cry and lunged into the approaching crowd, swinging her sword. Some of the unresisting Tairans staggered from their wounds, but the others continued forward without heeding their injuries. They took no notice of Mindar’s attack. They folded around her and kept pushing toward Delrael and the others.

She took out the whip instead, lashing out. The Tairans moved away from her, but did not stop. Mindar whipped a Tairan woman in the head, leaving a bright streak of blood across her temple.

“Scartaris! I will make you notice me!”

The horses backed and reared, closed in by the stone wall behind them.

“Mindar!” Delrael called.

The Tairans moved slower, as if Scartaris wanted to relish the victory. Mindar fought her way back to the wall. Delrael used the flat of his blade to drive the people away from her. He grabbed Mindar’s arm and yanked her to him.

The Tairans formed a semicircle around them.

Journeyman turned to face the wall, spreading his clay hands out against the stone. His flexible face bore an exaggerated, perplexed frown. “If we can’t go over the wall—” He drew his arm back. The clay flowed, making a giant bulldozer fist. “Why can’t we just go. . .through it?”

With the force of a thunderclap, he smashed his arm into the wall blocks. Dust trickled down. He slammed again, and the blocks, not held together by any mortar, jumbled loose.

The Tairans let out a unanimous hiss of anger and pushed forward.

Journeyman struck one more time and, with a rumble, the blocks toppled outward. “Look out!” he said and reached out to deflect a stone block that would have struck Bryl’s head.

The horses reared.

The Tairans grasped at them. Their fingers bore dirty, broken nails. Many of them gushed blood from wounds made by Mindar’s sword.

The dust from the rupture in the wall stung Delrael’s eyes. He coughed. “Let’s get out of here!” He leaped on the back of his horse. “Come on, Mindar!”

Vailret grabbed Bryl and they both scrambled onto their horse. Journeyman, looking immensely pleased with himself, pushed around the rubble and let out a strange, primitive yell—”Yabba dabba doo!”—and crashed into the Tairans, knocking many over, cracking some ribs. He picked up bodies to fling them against each other.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” he said.

Delrael and Mindar rode side by side through the opening in the wall. Vailret led his horse over the rubble.

They galloped out into the desolation. After a moment, Journeyman leaped after them, bounding with great resilient strides and following them into the desert. “Thank you, come again!” he called back at the city.

The air was hot, and reflected sunlight rippled up from the broken stone and caked dust. The sun had just begun to dip into afternoon.

“We have to ride—get as far away from here as we can.” Mindar’s voice came in gasping, clipped phrases.

Delrael looked at her and saw how torn she was inside. But a great fear seemed to underlie her anger. “I think we’ll be safe now,” he said, trying to be reassuring.

Mindar shook her head. “Until tonight.” The dust in her hair stiffened the kinks from where she had braided it. “Out here we’ll have no protection at all from the Cailee.”

15. The Sitnaltan Weapon

“Our greatest treasure is our ideas. All of the inventors in Sitnalta share them freely, and we reward any visionary with a patent of his or her own. The greatest inventors are elevated to the exalted status of Professors. The free exchange of information has made our city great—not one of us would consider changing this.”

—Dirac, Charter of the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers

The cot creaked beneath him as Professor Verne sat up sharply in the middle of the night. The musty smell of the room and his folded overcoat used as a pillow signalled that he was not in his own quarters back in Sitnalta. He blinked his eyes, astonished. He felt disoriented in the darkness—too many fascinating ideas charged through his brain, clamoring to be put down on paper before he forgot them.

His heart pounded from the dream. The Outsider Scott had sent him another message.

The room was dim and cold. He noticed that the electrical heater had stopped functioning again. Outside, the wind rushed around the walls of the Slac fortress, stirring up drafts. Verne’s eyes grew adjusted to the shadows, and he could see Frankenstein on the other side of the room also sitting on his cot, pulling socks on his feet. Frankenstein flung aside his blankets and began pacing the room.

Verne got up from his cot and wrapped the blankets around his shoulders. On bare feet, he hurried to the corner and flicked the electrical heater on and off, but it was no use. The device had failed again. He wished he had brought slippers along.

A sulfur match flared, and Frankenstein lit a candle. He waved the matchstick in the air until the flame went out, then he set it beside the paraphernalia on his makeshift worktable. Orange candlelight flickered in the room, disturbed by transient drafts.

“Did you dream it, too?” Verne said. Looking at the wide-eyed expression on the other inventor’s face, he didn’t really need to ask.

“What are we going to do about it?” Frankenstein ran his fingers through his dark hair. “How are we going to implement the construction? It’s so complicated.”

“First we must decide even if we should implement it,” Verne said, pondering. He pursed his lips. He picked up the matchstick and relit its end from the candle flame, sucking the flame down into the bowl of his pipe. He puffed absently and kept his voice quiet. “The idea is so awesome. I sensed it might be an incomparable weapon. . .but I never imagined anything so terrible.”

Frankenstein snorted and ruffled through some papers on the table. He flattened a piece of parchment and picked up a scribing pencil. “Can you imagine what a buffoon like Dirac would do with such an idea?”

Verne swallowed. He had not thought of that aspect.

Frankenstein’s voice became grave. “We want to do this one ourselves, Jules. And I don’t think we should leave any blueprints behind. We won’t even apply for a patent on this. Let’s just build the weapon, make it do its task, and hope we never need to construct another one.”

Verne began pacing. “This weapon is so powerful it might be worse than letting Gamearth surrender to its own fate. What if it cracks the map open, destroys us all, and backlashes to the Outside?”

“Then it serves the Outsiders right. Nothing is ever impossible, Jules. You, of all characters, should know that. But when the power is so tremendous, I don’t want to leave hints around so others can try.”

Verne walked from his cot to the table. His feet were numb on the cold stone floor. “You are suggesting that we knowingly withhold scientific information from the people of Sitnalta.”

Frankenstein tapped his teeth with the scribing pencil. “I am suggesting that we build this weapon ourselves, with the tools we have on hand here. Once it has destroyed Scartaris, we will never need to concern ourselves about such a weapon again. It will be an obsolete, useless invention that would serve no further purpose anyway.”

Verne remained withdrawn. Frankenstein pointed to the parchment, impatient. “Come, I need your help. Is this the way you remember it from the dream?”

Within a few moments, Verne had become so caught up in the problem that he forgot about everything else.

#

They crept outside, careful not to wake the technicians asleep by the big fire pit in the Slac dining hall. Some of the workers had commandeered their own quarters in empty chambers, but they left the doors ajar.

The fortress was silent as Verne and Frankenstein slipped into the courtyard. Frost sparkled on the rocks, and smooth ice patches dotted the ground where standing puddles had frozen.

The ruined Outsider ship stood black and skeletal under the starlight. Verne had stuffed candles in his pockets and several sulfur matches. Frankenstein carried two electric illuminators powered by galvanic batteries. He switched them on before the two of them entered the ship’s main hatch.

The illuminators shone circles of yellow light, reflecting from the polished sections of the alien alloys. They walked down the sloping central passage, under the black girders. Wind whistled through holes and cracks in the hull.

Verne saw strange light shining from behind one of the sealed portholes. After a quick inspection, he unfastened a knob holding the metal covering in place, but before he could lift the shade to look through the glass, Frankenstein grabbed his wrist.

“I wouldn’t do that, Jules.” He paused while the metal sections creaked around them. Frosty breath came out of his mouth when he spoke. “We have no idea what those windows look out upon. Remember what we’re dealing with here.”

Verne froze and backed away, apologizing for his own curiosity, his lack of control. Frankenstein was perfectly correct, of course—one glimpse of reality would be enough to blast them all into nonexistence.

It was conceivable that he could simply push a button, energize the motive apparatus, and propel them Outside—some of the knobs and dials in the control room might still be functional. Verne wondered if perhaps he could develop some sort of protective goggles that would let them look upon reality and survive. . . .

Unfortunately, they had other plans for the energy source trapped in its fragile containment below.

When they entered the excavated corridor of the ship and descended the groaning metal staircase to the control room, their electric illuminators both flickered and went out. Frankenstein tapped the lens and tried the switch several times before he set his device on the floor in disgust.

“I hate working on the technological fringe. Nothing functions the way it’s supposed to.”

Verne struck one of his matches against a corroded section of the hull. He lit a candle and passed it to Frankenstein before lighting one of his own. “I never imagined we would assemble a doomsday weapon by candlelight.”

The control panels with their rows of dark indicator lights and color-coded buttons looked like the unblinking eyes of dead men. The air smelled dusty and metallic. Rags spotted with oils and solvents filled a container by the exterior hatch.

Outside, the girders creaked and shifted as wind whistled around the mountains. Verne knew they were alone, but he felt things watching them from the shadows. He recognized it as an irrational fear and tried to ignore it—but then he remembered the Outsiders probably were watching them.

“Come, Jules. We have to get started. Most of the tools we need are already here from the excavation and analysis work.”

Verne blew cold air out of his nose, pondering how to put the pieces together. It all seemed so clear in his mind. “We should be able to lift enough other instrumentation from our devices at hand, especially some of the steam pumps and generator coils.”

Frankenstein bent to the control-panel bulkhead. “Help me lift this cover plate off.”

Working feverishly, Outsider-inspired, Professors Verne and Frankenstein hammered away at their contraption, using pieces of metal taken from the ship’s hull, adapting equipment dismantled from other Sitnaltan apparatus.

They rarely spoke, but worked together, knowing what needed to be done. Verne blew on his numb fingers and searched for another instrument. All the tools felt icy in the still air of the chamber. The candles made exaggerated shadows of their movements against the curved walls.

The delicate part was encapsulating the power source in a makeshift containment vessel. Verne hoped the new rivets would hold and that their sealant goop would keep the valves and control switches in place. Verne found he was trembling, not just from the chill air but from the fear of working with such a dangerous thing.

The candles burned down, one after another, and finally as dawn broke across the sky, Frankenstein rubbed his elbow against a bronze plate at the front of the weapon. He cracked his knuckles and sighed. When Verne looked at him, the other professor’s eyes were bloodshot and weary. Verne knew he must look as haggard himself.

Frankenstein sighed. “With a device so important, I think we should make this official, even if only between ourselves.” He withdrew a black grease pencil and bent over the smooth cylindrical body of the weapon. Pondering a moment with the pencil against his lips, Frankenstein scrawled a number on the silvery-white metal. “17/2.”

“I think this counts as a patentable invention, don’t you, Jules?” He straightened. “Even though we dare not ever tell how we created it.”

Verne forced a smile, trying to lighten the mood. “I will never know how you keep track of all the numbers.”

“A simple matter of concentration. Last month we ran out of certificate numbers from the Council of Patent Givers. We forced them to create a second series, all our own. This weapon is our seventeenth invention in the second series. Such a weapon,” Frankenstein said, letting his voice trail off.

He looked up at Verne with a hard light in his eyes. “It is the most powerful thing ever to come of Sitnaltan technology. But now we have to take it to Scartaris—and detonate it.”

Frankenstein looked at Verne. Their eyes met in the uncertain candlelight, but neither spoke until Verne finally lowered his gaze.

“One of us will have to do it, of course.”

“Yes. We must roll for it.”

Verne reached deep into the folds of his woolen coat and withdrew a hand-held device. In his other hand he found two red dice with painted white numbers. “We’ll use the random generator.”

He placed it on a level surface of the gutted control panel, brushing dust aside. “High roll makes the journey?” He raised his eyebrows. Frankenstein nodded.

Verne inserted the two dice into the opening at the top of the device. “You roll first.”

Frankenstein pushed down the spring-loaded lever on the side. The dice fell, scrambled and bouncing around inside the machine, and then tumbled out the opening in the bottom. A “5” and a “4.”

Verne picked up the dice and tossed them into the top. He reset the lever, then pushed it down. He heard the dice clattering, but he felt a cold hand in his stomach. He knew before the dice rolled out.

Boxcars—two sixes.

Frankenstein put his hands behind his back, blinking. Verne couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

“I will help you load the weapon into one of our steam-engine cars. It will take the two of us to carry it.”

Professor Verne nodded. Frankenstein hesitated a moment and then turned to extend his hand.

“Luck, Jules. Our future rides on this.”

16. Night of the Cailee

“We cannot hide from anything the Outsiders send against us. They know our fears better than we know ourselves. If we are to win this Game, we must face our greatest enemies and hope the dice roll in our favor.”

—Enrod of Tairé

Gairoth did not like the Tairé city walls around him. He sniffed the air, flaring the nostrils in his potato-sized nose. He did not like the tall buildings, he did not like the feel of flagstones under his big bare feet. The buildings were too close, the alleys too narrow as he lumbered down them. The sharp spikes of his club clinked against the street. The smell of the air was dry and bland, too human for him.

Pictures covered the walls. He stared at them but did not understand the rituals depicted, the games, the gatherings of characters all standing side by side.

Gairoth squinted his one eye, baffled at the thought. It was repellent for ogres to work together. When he had been in Delroth’s Stronghold and used the shiny rock to make illusion ogres, he could tolerate them only because he knew they weren’t real. But these pictures showed human characters staying by each other because they wanted to.

One of the crudely drawn figures reminded him of the man Delroth. The ogre made a snarling noise and smacked the end of his club against the plaster. Great chunks of the fresco broke off and pattered onto the flagstones, exposing a jagged blot of fresh white plaster, like a wound.

“Haw!” Gairoth stomped down the zig-zagging streets, satisfied. He had forgotten why he was chasing Delroth, but that didn’t matter.

Everything was so quiet around him. He banged his club against the wall just to keep himself company. He wished Rognoth were there. The stupid little dragon had been a convenient companion, and now he was gone. Another dragon, a big dragon, chased him far away. Gairoth knew Delroth had something to do with that, too.

When he heard the explosion and saw gouts of smoke gush into the sky from the burning tannery, he had to see what was going on. Delroth might be there.

Puffing through his dry, flabby lips, he heaved himself into motion. He got lost in several dead-ends, but with the curling smoke showing the way he could always find his way back to the right path.

Gairoth stumbled upon the wreckage of the tannery. The foul-smelling debris reminded him of his long-lost cesspools, now drowned under the Barrier River. He drew in a deep breath. Milling Tairans stood sluggishly around the burning building, then they moved and drifted away, funnelling down a side street. They didn’t even react to Gairoth.

Being ignored annoyed him, and he stomped after them. The Tairans did not seem uneasy from each others’ presence, from the closeness of their packed bodies. They did not get lost in the winding streets. They led Gairoth to a larger crowd, sluggish like a swarm of smoke-stunned bees. Many Tairans bled from wounds, but they didn’t take care of themselves.

Gairoth elbowed the characters aside, shoving them away as he stormed forward to see the focus of their attention.

A ragged hole had been smashed in the tall Tairan wall. The ogre saw the Tairans looking out at the desolate terrain, but none of them said a word. Gairoth grabbed a man by the front of his tunic. The brownish-gray cloth ripped in the ogre’s fingers, but he lifted the man high enough to stare into his eyes. The man’s feet dangled in the air; his arms went limp. He didn’t struggle. Gairoth shook him a bit, just to make him squirm.

The Tairan blinked and gurgled. His eyes were milky white, without pupils.

“Where is Delroth?” Gairoth demanded.

The Tairan turned his head toward the hole in the wall and the sprawling desert. Gairoth saw fresh tracks, hoofprints plowed up in the dust. His heart leaped. Delroth had been here! He was close!

Gairoth released the Tairan and let him fall. The man’s arms and legs did not react quickly enough, and his knees buckled sideways. He landed on his hip on the flagstones.

The ogre bounded through the opening, bumping his head on one of the stone blocks. He ignored the pain and charged across the flat ground.

#

The blasted terrain flowed like magic under the horses’ hooves. Vailret was amazed at how fast they approached the next hexagon of forested hills. He rode, gripping the mane in front of him because it seemed like the thing to do. He had never traveled so swiftly over land before, except in Professor Verne’s balloon. At any moment he felt as if he was going to fall off and crash on the dusty ground.

The sudden release of tension from their near death at the hands of the Tairans made him feel exhausted. Vailret’s lips were dry and cracked from breathing the dusty air. When he held Bryl’s frail form in front of him, he could feel the old half-Sorcerer’s ribs through his blue cloak. Bryl seemed so frightened he couldn’t say anything.

At the hex-line the forested hills rose in front of them. They had left the quest-path behind for fear of what might be on the road from Tairé to Scartaris. Now the horses picked their way among the haunted-looking slopes.

The thick trees stood black and gnarled in death. They were all relatively young, planted in neat rows in the turns that had passed since Enrod began to rebuild the land. But here the Tairans’ work had come to an end.

The horses stumbled upon a path made by the tree-planters and followed that up the slope. The dead trees scrabbled like arthritic fingers in front of their eyes. The close branches snapped and left black stains on the clothes they touched. The smell of sharp, dry death hung in the air, depressing and stifling.

Mindar rode in the lead, scowling. Her face looked full of anger and determination. The sight of each dead tree seemed like a slap in the face to her.

Vailret thought of the Tairans and their dream of rebuilding the landscape. The half-breeds had magic to renew the terrain, and the human characters used straightforward farming techniques to plant sturdy grass and stands of trees such as these. Then Scartaris came and destroyed everything again—and this time the ancient Tairan hero, the Stranger Unlooked-For, had not reappeared to save them.

The trees thinned as they rose in the hills, letting them look back at Tairé and the surrounding devastation. Squinting, Vailret could still see fading smoke in the air from the destroyed tannery.

Mindar’s face bore a stunned expression. “Delrael, what did you bring upon us?”

“It’s still there!” Bryl cried, pointing.

Vailret couldn’t make out details with his poor eyesight, but he could discern the boiling black mass that crept along the ground, the dark swarm they had seen following them from when they fled the Anteds. The unfocused, milling mass seemed to be skirting Tairé to the south.

Delrael scowled. “We don’t know what it is.”

Vailret felt his stomach tighten. He couldn’t think of anything like this in the legends he had read, the accounts of wandering monsters and methods for dealing with them.

“It’s making good time,” Delrael said. His face was firm and emotionless. “It’s either following us or it’s going to join Scartaris. But we’ll get there before it does.”

He pushed his gelding past Mindar and rode ahead. Feeling an oppressive need to hurry, the others followed at a faster pace. Delrael spoke back to them without turning his head. “We should be to Scartaris in two days, if I remember the map right.” They knew where Scartaris made his lair. Vailret saw Delrael absently brush the silver belt at his waist.

Vailret wondered if Delrael still had his complete faith in the Earthspirits. They had heard no communication to assure them that the Spirits still lived, still intended to destroy Scartaris. Vailret imagined what it would be like if they fought their way to the threshold of Scartaris, only to find they had no weapon after all. . . .

Gamearth was fighting against the Outsiders by using the Earthspirits. But the Rulewoman Melanie had sent Journeyman. Maybe that would be enough.

Though Scartaris knew they were coming, he did not know what they intended to do, how they intended to fight. Since Scartaris could end the Game at any time with his deadly metamorphosis, Vailret hoped they could keep him curious until it was too late.

Mindar urged her gray mare as close beside Delrael as the trees would allow. She seemed to enjoy being by him, and Vailret smiled a little. Her spring-green tunic was marked with black and brown smears from the dead trees.

“Scartaris still has all his armies massed in front of him, ready to march out and destroy Gamearth. And before you can even get that far, he has a demon guardian waiting to stop anything that might be a threat—the Slave of the Serpent. That will be a great challenge for us.”

Delrael’s shoulders rippled as he gripped the horse’s mane. “I’ll defeat him.” Then he paused and turned to look at Mindar. Their eyes met, and his expression turned more apologetic. “We’ll defeat him.”

Mindar smiled.

When they reached the crest of the hills and started down the other side, Journeyman took the lead, knocking sharp branches out of the way. The trees were thinner on the eastern slope, farther from Tairé and closer to Scartaris. The desolation terrain sprawled out in front of them; the sharp mountains of Scartaris thrust up five hexagons away.

A worn white line marked the main quest-path stretching across the wasteland, the road from Tairé to the camps of Scartaris’s armies. Delrael cupped a hand over his eyes and stared. “Something’s moving down the road.”

Vailret couldn’t make out anything so small, but Mindar agreed. “It’s a troop of Slac. They’re heading to Tairé, probably to take Tairan supplies to Scartaris.” She frowned. “They’ll start hunting us once they find out what we’ve done. We’ll have to be careful.”

Delrael’s face remained expressionless. “We’re always careful. It’s how the Game is played.”

The sun approached the Spectre Mountains behind them, casting long shadows across the dead forested hills. As they rode toward nightfall, the skeletal silence worked on Vailret’s nerves. He wished he could hear birds, insects, any kind of life in the trees.

The tension kept them all from talking. Even Journeyman pushed ahead, snapping branches out of the way. “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” he said, seemed to wait for the others to pick up the chant, then gave up.

“I don’t want to confront the Cailee in this place,” Mindar said.

“I don’t want to confront it anywhere!” Bryl mumbled.

Delrael pondered a moment. “I think we should get as much firewood as we can possibly haul, strap it onto the horses. Journeyman, you can carry a lot. Then we’ll go as far out into the desolation as we can. We’ll build a big fire—that might keep the Cailee back.”

Mindar nodded. “Yes, at least it can’t sneak up on us in the flatlands.”

“Um, Del, won’t Scartaris’s armies be able to see the fire?” Vailret asked.

“Scartaris plays only one game at a time,” Mindar said. “He’ll send the Cailee after us tonight. I can feel it. He enjoys manipulating the fears of other characters. The Cailee will be more fun to him. Even Scartaris has to follow Rule #1.”

They gathered firewood.

#

The night was black like a clenched fist around them, driven back by the orange shell of firelight. Vailret didn’t know how long the wood would last, but the bright flames and the crackling sound pushed away the feeling of impending doom, leaving them in an island at the center of a black universe.

They had ridden hard, crossing another hexagon of desolation into the thick dusk until the jagged ground became too treacherous to cross in the dark.

Delrael found a spot that was clear in all directions, where they could huddle together by their fire and make a stand against the Cailee. If they had to.

They ate, speaking little. Journeyman strode around the perimeter of firelight, thrusting out his chest and swinging his fists. The horses stayed together as a group, but Mindar found nothing to tie them to, nothing to hobble them with. She wiped her mouth on her dirty green tunic, then looked out into the darkness.

“Enrod really thought his dream for Tairé would work.” Mindar seemed to be talking to herself. “After the Transition he got most of the half-breeds to settle with him there. Enrod was brash and willing to try anything that might work. He poured himself into the effort and forced the others to do the same.”

She picked up a handful of crumbly dirt and let it stream through her fingers. She cast the rest of it at the fire.

“It was a bitter and difficult life, but the half-breeds turned their magic to practical ends. They used all the spells they could to make crops grow in the desert hexagons. They summoned water up from the ground. They quelled the dust storms—I painted a picture of that once, all the half-Sorcerers standing in line, rolling dice and casting spells to drive back the winds and protect the crops. They used their powers to summon rains and dig canals.”

Mindar forced a bleak smile. “How could it fail? We were united. We put our entire effort into this. But just when things were starting recover, just when the lands around Tairé began to stir—the trees died again. The crops failed. The desolation returned, and nothing any of us could do would stop it.”

She stood up and stared into the fire. “To make things worse, the people didn’t even care. They were all sleep-walking, getting worse every day. Scartaris was taking their minds, playing them like puppets. I watched other characters succumb, and only I could resist. I wish I knew how.”

Then Mindar paused and looked at Delrael, meeting his eyes. Her brow furrowed with puzzlement. “Why are you protected? Do you have the same immunity that I’ve got?” She turned to stare at them all with a mixture of hope and challenge on her face.

Journeyman stepped back into the firelight. “I don’t need it. The Rulewoman Melanie sent me.” He returned to his guard duties.

Vailret widened his eyes. He hadn’t considered the question before, but now a grin stretched across his face. He tried to communicate with Delrael through his expression. The fighter pondered, touched his belt lightly. Vailret nodded, then Delrael smiled as well.

They couldn’t all have the same resistance to Scartaris that Mindar and Tallin had. The Rules of Probability made that highly unlikely. But if the Earthspirits were somehow protecting them, shielding them—that meant the Spirits must still be alive! The screeching sound they’d heard back in the forest had not been a death cry.

But they could say nothing of this to Mindar, especially if Scartaris watched her so closely. Vailret could think of no safe way to answer her question.

But suddenly a sheen of sweat broke out on Mindar’s forehead and around her eyes, making her face look oiled in the firelight. The horses snorted and stamped, making strange, uneasy noises. Vailret didn’t know what that meant—he wasn’t used to horses.

“The Cailee is here,” Mindar whispered. “It’s close, and it’s coming.”

The horses milled about in greater alarm.

Delrael stood up. “How can we hold them?”

Journeyman hurried over. The horses reared up, blowing and snorting. And then they bolted, all three of them.

“Wait! Wait!” Mindar cried.

“They’re gone!” Bryl said.

Above the crackle of the fire, they heard the horses pounding off across the desert.

Mindar stood up and yanked her rippled sword away from her hip. “I’m going after them. You stay here.”

“No!” Delrael said. “I’m going to help you if the Cailee’s out there.”

She whirled. Her jaw was rigid, and her eyes blazed with anger. “No! You have to stay here! The Cailee wants us all to be separated, away from the fire, where it can get you one by one! The Cailee won’t harm me—it wants you. You stay here. Together. By the fire.”

Without another word, she ran off into the darkness. They heard her panting, calling for the horses, growing more distant.

Vailret waited, sitting up straight and listening to the fire burn. He looked at the stars overhead, wishing he could hear the sounds of the Stronghold village, the forest, anything. Wishing he could be by Tareah, discussing old legends. He wondered what she was doing.

Far off in the distance they heard Mindar shout “Cailee!” Then nothing more.

“What should we do?” Bryl asked.

Delrael held his own sword, looking off into the muffling darkness. His eyes were wide and shining with worry. “We’ll wait here, as Mindar said. She’s right. I’m not going to let the Cailee win because it’s smarter than we are.”

“I’d rather have stuffing instead of potatoes,” Journeyman said. He fidgeted and moved to where the horses had been.

Mindar stepped back into the firelight with such suddenness that they all whirled, startled. She looked drained, as if something had been yanked out of her. She took a drink from one of the water skins and sat down next to the warm fire.

“The horses have run off. The Cailee went after them.” She took another drink and said nothing else.

Far off they heard the oddly human screams of horses in the darkness. Vailret felt fear slice down his spine.

Mindar pulled the length of her whip between her fingers, feeling the rough braid. Her eyes were dark pools reflecting the dancing flames.

“The Cailee is there!” She lunged to her feet and pointed at the other side of the fire.

Delrael and the others turned, trying to react. Vailret saw the Cailee silhouetted, a black human shape so dark that it made the night look dim. It moved, flowing and oily, and let out a snarl from an unseen mouth. Silver claws glinted in the firelight. Yellow pupilless pools glowed where the eyes should have been.

The Cailee danced into the light just long enough to throw something heavy and dripping into the bonfire, then it vanished again.

The head of Mindar’s gray mare tumbled through the burning wood, slumping into the coals. The head smoked, and drops of blood sizzled on the embers. The mare’s eyes were rolled up like tiny white plates; the tongue hung partway out of the mouth. The severed end of her neck had been torn by silver claws, the spine snapped in two and twisted off.

The fire cracked and hissed. Sparks swirled up toward the stars.

Mindar stumbled backward, gaping without words. She tripped and fell gracelessly to the dirt, never taking her eyes from the mare’s smoldering head.

“I didn’t even hear the Cailee come!” Journeyman said. He strode out to the edge of the light and came back again. The golem’s gray-brown body absorbed the firelight and shadows. Vailret thought he looked astonished at his lapse, disappointed in himself.

Bryl held onto the Fire Stone with trembling hands. His lips were white, and his eyes glistened with fear.

Mindar’s head snapped up from her grief to scan the perimeter of darkness. “Prepare yourselves!”

Vailret caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and, by some instinct driven into him from all the battle training Drodanis had forced him to endure, he knew to drop and roll. He felt the wind of something moving very fast, the sigh of silver claws whistling past his ear and grazing the back of his neck.

Journeyman leaped in to block the Cailee with a solid clay arm. The claws gouged great troughs in the golem’s skin, but Journeyman slammed sideways with his other arm. He struck the shadow-thing with a soft, wet sound.

Vailret rolled onto his back and kicked his feet against the loose ground to push himself away. It was all happening so fast. Mindar and Delrael were shouting, running with their swords drawn.

An explosion of fire erupted around the perimeter to separate the golem and the Cailee. Journeyman made no sound, though the fire blackened his clay skin. The Cailee shrieked and flung itself back into the darkness.

Bryl sat with the Fire Stone cradled in his hands, biting his lip. He struck out again with the flame spell, though he saw no target. When the fire faded away, Vailret smelled smoke in the air. He heard nothing else, no insects, no footsteps, only his own heavy breathing.

Delrael scowled and used a stick to push the mare’s head out of the fire. The blackened hide smoked with the smell of roasting meat.

Journeyman paced around and remained alert. “A blast of fire and it goes away?” He used his other hand to smooth the gouges and push his clay skin back into place.

“The other Tairans never resisted it before,” Vailret said. He picked himself up and brushed at his skinned elbow.

Mindar shook her head. “The Cailee is still out there. Scartaris isn’t finished with us yet.”

Roaring inhuman rage, the Cailee burst back into the camp, opposite from Delrael. Without an instant of hesitation, Journeyman charged at it, balling both fists.

But the Cailee knew exactly what it wanted. The shadow-thing streaked in the flickering light and reached out its silver talons for Bryl.

Mindar’s whip cracked like the sound of a breaking spine. She crouched and placed herself in front of Bryl. Her gaze locked on the Cailee’s pupilless yellow eyes. The moment seemed to hold for hours. Vailret could see violent emotions surging through Mindar’s mind.

The Cailee laughed silently and tried to dodge sideways to reach Bryl. Bryl scurried backward, bumping into Journeyman. He cried out, but the golem held him firm.

Mindar struck out with the whip again, tearing into the lightless flesh.

A fistful of silver claws exploded forward, hooking into the leather whip, and jerked backward swift as a shadow. The claws shredded the whip into a snowflake of leather tatters, throwing Mindar’s shoulder out of joint.

Though crying out in pain, Mindar was already reaching for her rippled sword with her left hand. She swung clumsily, trying to protect herself, and sank the blade into the dark void of the Cailee’s body. Droplets of night sprayed onto the sand, vanishing into the shadows.

Delrael ran forward with his own sword. Bryl rolled the Fire Stone, scrambling out of the way.

With a roar of pain, the Cailee lunged at Mindar, striking in an arc of silver claws as it tore open her side, breaking through ribs to her heart.

She fell, spewing a red rain of torn flesh and spattering blood

“Mindar!” Delrael screamed.

Bryl touched the Fire Stone again. A wall of flame erupted between the shadow-thing and Mindar, burning both. The Cailee howled, blinded by the blaze, scratching at the air with silver claws.

Delrael stabbed through the flames, probably burning his own hands, blistering his skin. Singed hair curled back away from his forehead. But the old Sorcerer sword struck something solid where the Cailee’s chest should have been.

Bryl let the flames die away. Delrael staggered back, nearly tripping over Mindar on the ground. Vailret went to help him.

The Cailee made a high-pitched moan, then faded as they watched, dissolving away into the night.

Delrael stood trembling in the wake of his attack. He stared at the blade of his sword as if to see how the Cailee had stained the steel, but it seemed untainted.

Bryl whimpered in the firelight. Vailret crawled forward to join him.

Mindar made a choking sound on the ground. Delrael knelt beside her, pushing aside a sharp rock. Her spring-green tunic had been crisped brown by the fire. She shuddered, curling herself into a fetal position.

Together, Delrael and Vailret rolled Mindar on her back. Fresh, dark blood poured out of her torn side. Her face had a wet, gray appearance. Her mouth made a choking, sucking sound as she tried to breathe.

Delrael touched his fingers to her forehead. “It’s gone. We killed it.”

Vailret stared at his cousin, but Delrael would not look up. Mindar had no chance. Vailret was amazed she still could think or speak. He doubted even the khelebar healer Thilane, who had created a new kennok leg for Delrael, could have saved her.

Bryl hunkered down, wide-eyed in his fear. Journeyman appeared disappointed that he had not been able to fight again. Off in the east, behind the lair of Scartaris, dawn light seeped into the sky.

Delrael propped Mindar’s head up and placed it on his knee. He brushed her singed dark hair away from the lumpy S-scar. It reminded Vailret of how Tallin had died in a pool of blood while Delrael held him. Delrael stiffened and seemed to realize the same thing.

“We’ll destroy Scartaris, Mindar.” For a moment his face carried enough anger to rival her own. “And I will have fun doing it.”

The flow of blood from her wound slowed, lacking the force of a heartbeat. The last breath out of her mouth seemed to form one word.

“Luck.”

But she did not die.

Mindar jerked in a convulsion that ripped through her body. She sucked a long hiss of breath through her teeth. Vailret’s eyes were drawn to the livid S-scar on her forehead. The scar throbbed with a red light, like a twisted channel of lava.

Mindar’s skin grew red, also glowing. Heat poured from her body, and Vailret had to step back. Delrael stared down. His jaw hung open in surprise; his face was ashen.

The pools of wet blood on Mindar’s skin smoked, bubbled, and burned away from her form, fading even from her stained clothes. The open gash and splintered ribs clenched themselves in a staccato spasm, like a mouth smacking its lips, until the wound congealed, bound together and sealing the skin without leaving a scar.

Her eyelids jammed shut, and she wheezed a great breath into her lungs. Her chest rose and fell. She jerked.

“She said Scartaris wouldn’t let her die,” Vailret said. He felt as if a great weight hung on his shoulders.

Delrael grabbed Mindar’s shoulder, but she was still too hot and he snatched his hand away.

Mindar twitched her muscles, then rolled over, stumbling to her knees. Tears streamed from between her closed eyelids. The S-scar continued to glow red. She struggled to her feet, then turned to face them.

Mindar stood straight and opened her eyes. She did not move. She made no reaction at all.

Her eyes were blank white, and pupilless. Scartaris’s eyes.

Interlude: Outside

Tyrone shook his head with an expression of naive astonishment.

“Man, this is getting pretty intense. How about we just, uh, take a break for a while? Watch some TV. I’ve got all the Star Trek movies on tape.” He stood up and looked toward the living room where the television sat switched off like a dull gray-green eye.

“Shut up and sit down!” David’s voice had a hollow power to it, an alien sound that caused Melanie to jump.

She frowned and brought her own anger to the surface. David was doing this just to sicken her, just to flaunt his disregard for the people of Gamearth. “How can you you do that to one of your own characters, David? Didn’t you put Mindar through enough already?”

“She’s my character. I can do what I want with her. It’s fun.” In the globe light over the dining room table, his smile looked bright and jagged. “We’re playing this game for fun, remember?”

Melanie stared across the table at him. She felt stronger now, keyed up. It didn’t matter what David did. She had her characters. They were fighting together, she and them. She had given them Journeyman and the secret weapon she had painted into the map; Gamearth had brought back the Earthspirits on its own.

“You’re changing, David. What’s happening to you? Are you playing Scartaris. . .or is he playing you?”

David scowled at her, but didn’t seem to know how to answer. Scott cleared his throat. “It’s getting kind of strange even with you, Melanie. Do you know that when you play different characters your voice changes? You’re even worse than David. Your eyes get sort of. . .funny.”

“Yeah,” Tyrone said, not noticing the thin smear of dip on his chin, “it’s like something out of The Exorcist.”

“When you’re playing your characters, it’s like you’re swallowed up in them. Like you don’t even know what you’re saying.” Scott pursed his lips.

Melanie felt sweat prickle at the back of her neck. She covered it by reaching for some chips and stuffing a handful in her mouth. “That’s crazy. I know exactly what was going on. I remember everything we did, like I was—” She paused and choked a little on her chips. She took a drink from her glass and swallowed before she finished her sentence. “It’s like I was there myself. . . .”

“Do you see?” David said. “Do you see? If we don’t end this tonight, we might never be able to escape from the game! It’s coming out, it’s taking over. We’ve put too much magic in it, and now Gamearth doesn’t need us to play anymore!”

“Maybe it’s fighting back against you—but I’m trying to save Gamearth. I don’t have nightmares. I have nice dreams about the world. I’m not afraid of it. You are. I’m going to fight you to the end in this battle. And I’m going to win. I’m going to save their world, and ours.”

David’s face looked pale and waxen. “What if you’re wrong?”

Melanie shrugged. She saw the deep fear behind David’s false arrogance. “If you’re afraid to lose, you should never have started playing in the first place.”

“I’ll stop you with the Slave of the Serpent.” He cracked his knuckles and looked at the wide black line on the painted map where he had marked the demon’s lair. The map seemed to be cracked there, exactly along the hex-line. Puzzled, Melanie bent over to look at it, but Scott interrupted her.

“She’s not the only one with plans.” He drummed his fingertips on the table, then wiped his glasses on the untucked ends of his shirt. “Hurry up and finish your turn. We don’t have all night.”

17. Fighters

“We must learn how to use the Rules to our advantage in any situation. That means we need to train ourselves with every weapon listed in The Book of Rules. We must study role-playing games to enhance our experience and decision-making capabilities. Gaming doesn’t come easy—it is a lot of work to have fun!”

—Drodanis, speech to trainees at the Stronghold

Tareah held the sapphire Water Stone so that it glinted in the noon light. Her eyes were tired; her body felt exhausted. But the anger and shock had given way to a clarity of thought that made her absolutely sure of what she had to do. She felt brave now.

On top of Steep Hill, in the burned and splintered ruins of the Stronghold, she turned the six-sided gem to show each of its facets to the gathered villagers. The smell of smoke still hung in the air, and the ground at her feet was muddy from the rain she had summoned to quench the flames.

“My father Sardun gave me this Stone.” To her own ears, her voice sounded gruff and old. The villagers listened to her now. “He used it to build and maintain his vast Ice Palace. He used it to control the weather, and to fight against the dragon Tryos.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at the other characters, making sure she held their attention. Tareah had studied the rhetorical techniques used when the ancient Sentinel Arken tried to convince other Sorcerers to renounce the Transition.

“I am the last full-blooded Sorcerer woman on Gamearth. That’s why Tryos found me so valuable and kidnapped me. You all know that story. Maybe I haven’t been trained enough in fighting—” She drew herself tall, widening her eyes. “But I have powers, too. Great powers. I will have to train myself how to use them.”

She sensed a difference within her as she stood before the villagers. Tareah could imagine herself as an old Sorcerer queen, maybe even Lady Maire herself. Her joints no longer ached, and she didn’t feel out of place with the other characters. The destruction of the Stronghold had shaken her, hammered home the new turn the Game had taken.

Tareah was responsible for her actions. Her powers and her abilities would not permit her to remain passive in the coming battles.

She paced around the fallen wall where dirt trickled between toppled logs that had been sharpened on top. The Stronghold buildings were all collapsed, the sword posts knocked over, the gate and the bridge across the trench both crumbled. A crude walkway allowed the other characters to look at the result of Scartaris’s attack.

Tareah ran both hands through her light brown hair. Her eyes had a distant look as she began to speak. The villagers still did not interrupt her—the destruction of the Stronghold awed them too much.

“Many turns ago, at the beginning of the Scouring, the great human general Doril founded this Stronghold. He had just lost all of his fighters as well as the Sentinel Oldahn, his friend, in a Slac fortress. Doril wanted to escape the battles of the Scouring, to live in peace away from the Game.

“He found the characters here innocent and completely unprepared to defend themselves. When he arrived, Doril strode out of the forest terrain to the fields where farmers were working. He told them of the marauding Slac armies in the nearby hexagons, and of the bloodshed in the Scouring. ‘Do you comfort yourselves by thinking the Outsiders would never bring the battles here?’ he asked. ‘Or do you fancy you could defeat a brutal Slac regiment with your rakes and sticks?’”

As she told the story, Tareah put her hands on her hips, imitating the stance she imagined Doril had taken. “So Doril build this Stronghold. It has withstood many attacks and protected the characters in this village for all that time.

“But Scartaris sent the Slave of the Serpent here to slay Tarne. He brought the rat-creatures to destroy the Stronghold itself. Scartaris has brought the battle here. Like those first farmers confronted by Doril, we can no longer live our lives and ignore the rest of the Game. We must be prepared to defend ourselves in any way we know how.”

She stood there watching. The forest terrain around Steep Hill seemed tranquil, filled with quiet sounds of rustling leaves, birdsong and insects. The stream gushing along the hex-line rattled over rocks. The deceptive peacefulness bothered her.

The villagers fidgeted, uneasy. “When is Delrael coming back?” Derow the blacksmith asked, mumbling the words into his full dark beard.

“Yes,” Mostem the baker said, grinning. “Once Delrael destroys Scartaris, we won’t have to worry anymore.”

Tareah felt anger rising within her. “Delrael left me here! He trusted me to watch over the village and the Stronghold. Even if Delrael does destroy Scartaris, how is he going to stop a gigantic army that’s waiting to charge across the map? Think about it! Scartaris has gathered ten times as many fighting monsters as ever engaged in the old Sorcerer wars. Are they just going to sit still even if Scartaris is destroyed? We have to be prepared.”

Siya stood by Tareah. She appeared frightened and confused, with red-rimmed eyes that showed how tired she was. But most of all she looked angry. “The Outsiders won’t leave us alone to live our lives. If they want us to fight, then we should fight them.”

Tareah went forward to the villagers. She walked among them, looking each in the eye as she talked. “None of us is trained. But we’ll have to learn how. We must train ourselves.”

The sun shown down on them, and Tareah felt exposed on top of Steep Hill, as if giant Outside eyes were staring down at her. She pushed the thought out of her head and turned her mind to the job before her.

She directed the villagers to sift through the wreckage of the storehouse, to pick out all the old weapons that could be used or repaired. Tareah helped them, though she grew gloomier as she waded through the splinters and broken walls. Marks from tiny teeth and claws scored every scrap of wood.

Drodanis had conducted all his private role-playing training in the darkness here, surrounded by old weapons. Vailret told her of his imaginary adventure, how real the training had been for him. Now the storehouse lay collapsed. The Stronghold was ruined. It had been her responsibility.

They separated the swords, bows, maces, spears, shields, armor all into separate piles. Tareah found herself wasting too much time staring at the inlaid designs of relics that had been gathered from various treasure hoards. Apparently, Drodanis had been as avid a collector as her father.

Tareah held one of the simple blades, a short sword, up for the blacksmith to see. “From now on, Derow, concentrate on making swords. We’ll need a greater supply if we’re going to gather an army. We’ll send out couriers to gather all the other characters from settlements far and wide.”

Derow shuffled his feet and looked at the sample blade she held up. “My craftsmanship can never match anything like this.” His face turned red with shame. “The old Sorcerer swordsmiths were masters. Look at the skill in even their simplest pieces! I can’t begin to—”

“You’ll do fine, Derow.” Tareah held up her hand. “A sword needs to cut. It doesn’t need to be beautiful.”

The blacksmith still looked at her skeptically, but he set to work gathering and studying the remaining swords.

Tareah clapped her hands and walked among the other villagers, directing some to mount the archery targets, others to erect the sword posts, using logs from the fallen wall if necessary. Others went out into the forest to find straight twigs for arrows, saplings for bows. The children made bird traps to furnish feathers for fletching the arrows.

Siya wandered around, acting busy. Tareah kept too occupied to notice what Siya was doing until the old woman picked up a sword for herself and went over to the section of the wall where they had recently buried Tarne. Siya’s husband Cayon also lay there.

She stood with the sword propped in front of her, its tip stuck in the soft ground. The sun glinted off gems in the hilt. Tareah noticed a strange gleam in her eyes.

“We will train. We will be ready,” Siya said. She took a step forward to stand by Tareah. The other villagers paused to look up at her.

“We will be fighters!”

18. Delrael’s Second Chance

“RULE #10. Combat on Gamearth follows rigid guidelines. The accompanying tables give details on how fighting is commenced according to experience, armor, available weapons, and many other factors. Combat can come in different forms, such as surprise attack, team attack, or single combat.”

—The Book of Rules

Mindar’s blank white eyes stared at them. She did not blink. Her skin was pale and cold. Delrael couldn’t see her breathing, but he knew she remained alive Scartaris had healed her—he wasn’t finished playing with her yet.

Delrael shook her by the shoulders. “Mindar!”

Her head swayed from side to side, then righted itself and stared straight ahead. Delrael gritted his teeth and turned to glare toward the mountains in the east.

“Del—” He jumped when Vailret touched him on the arm. “With the horses gone now, we’ll already be slowed down. Will we take her with us?”

“What if Scartaris is watching us through her eyes?” Bryl asked.

Delrael let go of Mindar. He hunkered down and stared into the embers of the bonfire, trying to decide. Conflicting thoughts churned through his head. He could find no clearcut solution, and he didn’t like it.

The fire burned low and crackled. The tainted wood smelled bitter and unpleasant, but the predawn air seemed clear, empty of the Cailee. They had watched the creature vanish.

He drew a deep breath. “We won’t leave her behind, no matter what Scartaris wants us to do. She has as much at stake as we do. Maybe more. Look what he’s done to her.”

“Maybe she’ll snap out of it,” Vailret said, but his voice sounded weak. Delrael made no other comment.

He stood up and sheathed his sword. He picked up Mindar’s tattered whip lying in the dust and dropped it into the fire where it curled and turned black. Mindar stood stiff and unresponsive when he fastened the rippled sword at her waist.

“There, now you’re ready. Whenever you want to fight, we need your help.” Delrael’s voice was soothing and quiet. “Journeyman can you carry her?”

“Aye aye, Cap’n!”

He frowned. “Does that mean yes?”

“Yes.”

The golem scooped up Mindar in his broad arms. Her limbs to flopped and hung down. She didn’t rearrange herself into a more comfortable position.

Delrael stared at her milky blank eyes and felt sick to his stomach. “Let’s get moving.”

#

By noon they had crossed an entire hexagon. The air was cool and parched, but heated up when the sun rose overhead. They spoke little as they moved. The mountains of Scartaris lay only a few hexagons distant.

But when they reached the hex-line, they stopped short. The black line separated one section of desolate terrain from the next, but instead of the narrow black boundary where hexagons butted against each other, the black line yawned five man-lengths wide. It looked to Delrael as if the Outsiders had snapped the map apart, dividing the sections with a canyon that stretched down through the thickness of the map and out the bottom of the universe itself.

Delrael stared into the deep crevasse. Warm air drifted upward, bringing odd, alien smells. In the blackness below were strange swirling images, maddening shadows of things he did not want to see. He turned away immediately, afraid he might see a deadly glimpse of reality.

“We can’t get across.” Delrael put his hands on his hips, frowning. He felt anger building. He didn’t like to be delayed from his quest.

He held the silver belt at his waist, and the metal seemed to ripple beneath his fingers. He knew the Earthspirits were there, but they couldn’t destroy Scartaris unless he took them there.

“There’ll be a way, Del,” Vailret said, analyzing. “If this is part of the Game, the Outsiders have to give us some way through. They can’t violate their own Rules.”

But as far as they could see in both directions, the chasm seemed unbroken. The wide black line extended for hexagon after hexagon, a broad crack in the map.

“We’ll have to follow it until we find someplace where Scartaris wants us to cross.”

Delrael looked up. Wheeling batlike creatures flew high above. They seemed to be staring down at the travelers, but did not come closer.

“Scartaris is watching us,” Bryl said.

“Let him watch.” Journeyman pushed his clay lips in a snarl. “A little bottomless chasm isn’t going to stop us.”

They moved along the edge, hot and exhausted. Because of the flat terrain, Delrael could see the white line of the main quest-path long before they neared it. The road to Scartaris’s lair approached the zig-zagging chasm, and when Delrael shaded his eyes he could see a bridge, some kind of tunnel spanning the crack in the map.

This would be the perfect spot for Scartaris to ambush travelers, a place for a malevolent guardian to stop any enemies. He pondered and looked at Mindar’s limp, blank-eyed form cradled in Journeyman’s arms.

Mindar had said something about a demon guardian, the Slave of the Serpent.

Delrael took a deep breath of the dry air and blinked his eyes. His skin felt warm and sunburned, flushed. Mindar lay motionless. He had a score to settle with Scartaris. Now more than ever. He set off at a faster pace. His boots left deep, sharp prints in the dusty ground.

When they reached the wide quest-path, Delrael looked at the bridge across the chasm. A dry, unpleasant smell hung at the back of his mouth, like the taste of rusty metal.

The bridge was not just a tunnel, but the gigantic spinal column of some long-dead beast, hanging by itself. Dried strips of sinew held the vertebrae together, leaving wide gaps for the air to blow through with an eerie whistling hum. Tree-sized bones from the creature’s limbs lay sprawled across the dust, a claw here, a bowed rib that had long since been cracked by smaller things that chewed away the marrow and left a hollow shell. A dust-covered mound lay off to the side of the quest-path, near where the ancient monster’s skull should have been. The rest of the bones were not in sight—they had probably fallen down into the chasm.

They would have to walk through the bowed, cavelike bridge of vertebrae draped across the hex-line gap. Smells drifted out of the bridge opening, and a jungle of black shadows flickered as light flitted in and out of the gaps.

Two giant boulders stood propped against the opening. Other bones and dead things lay piled outside, though they could easily have been discarded in the black gulf.

Mindar stared up at the sky. The red S-scar on her forehead throbbed with the beat of her heart. She could not offer any help to them now, couldn’t give them any warning about the Slave of the Serpent.

The golem set her down, straightened her legs, and made sure she had gained her balance before letting go. Mindar stood by herself, but did nothing else.

“Now what do we do?” Vailret asked. “Do we just walk through?”

An ear-splitting roar burst out of the shadows of the sagging tunnel, accompanied by a sandy, grating hiss. The sound echoed in the hollow vertebrae. Something moved in the dim light of the tunnel.

“And now for a really big show!” Journeyman said.

A silhouette appeared, and then the Slave of the Serpent stepped into view. The monster drew in a deep breath and stood reeling, unaccustomed to the bright sunlight.

Delrael flinched. The demon was huge, more massive even than Gairoth the ogre. It was hairy and apelike, but had reptilian features, a chest plate and a flat angular head set low upon its shoulders. The deep-set eyes looked pitiful and filled with immense sorrow shining out from slitted pupils.

Coiled around its body was a huge, oily green snake that raised its head high above the Slave’s shoulders. The Serpent hissed at the travelers with a sound like rain pelting a fire.

The Slave took two lumbering steps forward then stopped, planting its feet to guard the opening of the tunnel bridge. The Serpent spoke.

“So you are Delrael! We went to the Stronghold. We killed a human character who claimed to be Delrael. But he was old and weak. We left him smoking on the ground.”

Delrael felt his heart freeze, wondering if it could be a trick. Did they mean Tarne? If the Serpent claimed to be looking for Delrael, Tarne would have tried to trick them.

The Serpent cocked its head at him. “We came to get the Fire Stone and give it back to Scartaris. Now you have brought the Stone to us—” The Serpent hissed at Bryl. The half-Sorcerer cringed.

Delrael looked back at the others. Vailret appeared weak and frightened with only his short sword; Bryl had the Fire Stone; the golem looked ready to fight.

The Slave stepped forward, and the Serpent spoke again with a note of glee in its voice. “I bind you to the protocol of single combat in Rule #10! Delrael—I challenge you. You must fight me alone.”

Bryl let out a cry of dismay. Journeyman said, “Aww, shucks!”

Delrael stood up in shock, feeling cheated. Though the Serpent had used a loophole, the Rules still constrained all characters. The Slave of the Serpent greatly outclassed Delrael alone, but now the others could not help him. They could not break the Rules. It was unfair. Vailret, Bryl, and Journeyman appeared helpless.

Mindar stood without moving, unaware.

Delrael curled his lip and snarled at the demon. “Don’t underestimate me.”

The Slave made a grumbling bestial noise and tried to turn his head to glare at the Serpent. But the pupilless red eyes of the snake ignored him. The coils squeezed the Slave’s chest, and he lumbered forward to meet his opponent.

“May the Force be with you,” Journeyman called.

Delrael breathed in and out. He felt his heart pumping, the adrenaline flowing. He had fought a thousand mock battles, and some real ones. He had been through his father’s training. He was ready. He had no choice.

Without giving any warning, he surged forward as fast as he could. He held the sword in front of him, howling at the top of his lungs, and swung.

The Slave stumbled back in surprise, leaving deep footprints on the ground. Delrael drove in, pushing his advantage of surprise for a few more moments. He swung, and missed, and struck again with the blade.

The Slave grunted and roared, batting at him with a bearlike paw. Delrael turned his sword sideways and slashed the Slave’s arm. The edge bit into the monster’s fur, but made only a minor wound.

The Serpent’s fangs flashed like glistening swords. Delrael saw the snake strike an instant before it was too late. He dove for the ground, tucking the sword against him to protect it, and rolled.

The Slave bent over to give the Serpent more reach, but the fangs dug into the sand. The Serpent pulled up, hissing and spitting dust out of its mouth. Black pools of smoking slag marked where venom had squirted into the dirt.

Delrael worked his feet under him and stumbled back to a standing position. The Slave could have attacked, but it hesitated, giving Delrael time to compose himself. He wondered what was going on.

He heard Vailret and Journeyman shouting at him, urging him on. Delrael blanked that out for the moment. He needed to concentrate on the fight.

The Slave’s sad eyes struck his heart. This monster didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want to do what he did. The Serpent forced the Slave to do its will. He wanted no part of this. Delrael stared at the eyes. It was a trick. It had to be.

But the Slave’s eyes were not pupilless.

Then the Serpent struck again.

This time, inexplicably, the Slave stepped sideways, deliberately throwing off the snake’s aim.

In anger, the Serpent viciously nipped the bare patch at the back of the Slave’s neck. The monster roared in pain and swatted with its great paws, but the snake bobbed back and forth, weaving away from the clumsy grasp. It ducked in and nipped the Slave again.

“Kill Delrael!” it said.

Wet mucus dripped from the Slave’s eyes, either in pain or sorrow. With a roar, the Slave reached out his huge paws.

Delrael held his ground and lunged, trying to duck under the grasping arms. But the Slave cuffed him on the side of the head. Delrael sprawled on the ground. His vision fuzzed, and his ears rang. He heard Vailret and Journeyman shouting again. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t want to listen to them, but he knew he couldn’t lay there.

He felt vibrations in the sand as the Slave stomped forward. Delrael half-closed his eyes, pretending to be unconscious. When he saw the Slave near him, he snapped open his eyes and grabbed the sword with both hands. He scrambled to his knees and put his chest, his shoulders, all of the muscles in his arms and back into one swing. He aimed for the Slave’s thigh and felt the blade sink in, cutting into the meat of the monster’s leg all the way to the bone.

Viscous yellow blood oozed out, gushing in heavy globs. The monster howled in agony.

Delrael rolled out of the way, but the monster kept staggering forward, propelled by its own momentum and forgetting its pain. Blood spattered to the ground with every step the Slave took. Delrael held the sword against him, smearing the yellow blood across his leather armor. He tried to climb to his feet, but was not fast enough.

The Slave of the Serpent knocked him back to the ground, then wrapped both huge paws around Delrael’s chest and jerked him into the air. The monster shook him and squeezed.

Delrael felt the roar in his head grow louder. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. Loud sounds and darkness echoed at the corner of his eyes. His arm went numb. He couldn’t control his fingers—they went limp, and the sword fell, embedding its point in the sand. The weight of the pommel tipped it over, spraying dirt in the air.

For a moment he thought the Slave would cast him into the yawning black chasm where he might fall through the map and be incinerated by his first glimpse of reality. Then he saw the Serpent rear back. Its blank red eyes blazed fire as if Scartaris himself were looking through the reptilian skull.

The Serpent opened its mouth. The fangs oozed venom like miniature diamonds.

#

Mindar blinked. Her vision snapped back into focus. She stumbled, suddenly regaining her body.

In the back of her mind she heard a mocking voice, Scartaris laughing at her, telling her to watch. Watch him die. You will lose. You will always lose.

She didn’t know where she was, how she had gotten there or what was going on. She remembered nothing beyond the Cailee and the circle of firelight. And the pain, memories sparkling with pain.

Then she saw Delrael in the grip of the Slave of the Serpent. Watch him die. Scartaris had toyed with her, showed his power. Now he would have fun by letting her witness Delrael’s death.

#

The Serpent drew back to strike, and Delrael closed his eyes.

The snake’s head flashed downward as Delrael heard racing footsteps, a swish. It all happened too fast. He opened his eyes and saw the Serpent still descending toward him with its mouth open and fangs bared, but somehow the head had become severed from the body. Squirting blood, the snake’s head continued its arc, struck Delrael in the shoulder and bounced off. It fell on the sand, staring up with dead red eyes.

Mindar regained her balance and swung the rippled sword back through empty air, flinging droplets of the Serpent’s dark blood into the air.

Apparently stunned, the Slave released his grip and let Delrael fall to the ground. His right arm was still numb, but he managed to snatch up his sword as he scrambled out of the way. He heaved in great gasps of air. His ribs ached. Sand crusted the globs of yellow blood sticking to his leather armor.

Mindar stood poised and ready to fight the Slave, wearing a snarl on her lips. Her red S-scar glowed. She had returned. Delrael wanted to go to her.

The Slave pivoted around. Yellow blood drooled down the matted fur of his leg. He seemed to ignore the pain of the wound. He stared at Delrael with his liquid, anguished eyes. Then he gawked in awe at the ragged dripping stump of the Serpent. His face wore an impossible, stupefied expression. When he lifted up the dead Serpent, dark blood ran down his fingers, but the poison did not harm him.

Then he raised his huge paws into the air in a gesture of triumph. “Sadic is free!” The monster’s words were clumsy, as if the flat, plated mouth was not suited for speech. The Slave unwrapped the entwined body of the Serpent as if he were casting off a heavy chain.

Delrael continued to breathe hard. He didn’t know what to think. He saw Mindar raise her eyebrows.

Moving with obvious disgust, the Slave held the snake’s body away from him. Black blood drizzled from the decapitated end, leaving foul pools smoking on the ground. The Slave’s fur had been worn off in pink, raw-looking patches by the Serpent’s scales rubbing against his hide.

“Ring around the collar,” Journeyman mumbled out of the side of his mouth.

The Slave of the Serpent stalked to the edge of the deep crevasse. He raised the Serpent’s body over his head and, with a roar of exhilaration, cast it down into the void. Then he turned back to Delrael and Mindar, dragging his wounded leg behind him along a trail of thick yellow blood.

Delrael grabbed his sword, ready to fight again, though his aching ribs and numb arm protested. Mindar stood glaring at the demon. Journeyman, Vailret, and Bryl all joined them.

The Slave of the Serpent stopped and stared at them, pleading. He spread out his massive flat paws. “Sadic will not hurt you. You freed Sadic. You killed Serpent.”

“Just stay away, big fella,” Journeyman said.

The Slave kept his distance, trying to look harmless. He made no sudden moves. “Sadic will do no more harm.”

Then Mindar turned pale and sick-looking. Her rippled sword fell to the ground. She staggered and dropped to her knees, making strange noises. She covered her face. Delrael heard her sobbing.

He put a hand on her shoulder, hesitant. She didn’t flinch. Then he put both arms around her in a hug. He felt her trembling, the spasms as she tried to control herself.

Mindar choked out words. “I don’t know what happened. All I remember is fighting the Cailee, and then the pain, and blackness. . .”

“The Cailee almost killed you,” Delrael said quietly, soothing. “But Scartaris didn’t let you die. He. . .he controlled you. You were like the other Tairans. Your eyes. . .” He let the words trail off.

“Scartaris released me only so I could watch you die. For fun.” She looked up, and her dark eyes were filled with a complex mix of emotions.

“I saw my daughter, I think. She was like a dream in the darkness, and it’s fading. The more I try to hold onto the memory, the faster it slips away.” Mindar drew a hitching breath and pulled herself to her feet, brushing her singed green tunic. Feeling awkward, Delrael took a step away.

“The first thing I saw was you fighting. And the others were just standing there, not helping you. I knew what I had to do.”

Delrael saw Vailret flinch and shifted his short sword from one hand to the other. “The Serpent bound us with single combat protocol. We couldn’t help.”

Mindar let that sink in for a moment, and then a slow smile crossed her face. “Scartaris wanted to bind you with a strict interpretation of the Rules—and we turned the tables on him, hah! We can find loopholes, too. Since Scartaris kept me unaware of anything that was going on, I didn’t hear the challenge.” Her grin broadened. “I beat Scartaris with his own trick!”

Then her expression fell again and she became serious. “I learned one other thing, though—we’re already too late.

“Scartaris has informed his army that they will march tomorrow night. They will charge across the map, pillaging and laying waste to every hexagon. Even if you destroy Scartaris, there’s no way you can stop the whole army.”

Delrael felt betrayed. He wondered if the Earthspirits knew what Mindar had said, if they knew anything beyond Scartaris. In his belt, the Earthspirits gave no sign, no communication. If Mindar was right, then the quest, Tallin’s death, the first plea in the message stick from Drodanis—everything they had done was for nothing!

“One problem at a time,” Delrael said. At least they were questing and trying to do something. No one had thought of a better way to confront Scartaris.

The Slave made a grunting noise to attract their attention, but remained standing where he was. “Sadic will help.”

Delrael scowled at the hairy, reptilian monster, feeling his aching ribs. The Slave plastered his paw against the deep sword cut in his thigh to slow the bleeding.

“Serpent made Sadic do bad things. Scartaris controlled Serpent. You freed Sadic. Sadic will help. Sadic knows you want to destroy Scartaris.”

Bryl muttered, “Seems just about everyone knows that by now.”

“Remember Rule #3, about taking new companions,” Vailret said. “We could use all the help we can get, especially powerful help like that.”

“The plot thickens,” Journeyman said.

Delrael turned, still feeling weak from the combat. The wide white quest-path stretched across the desolation.

He saw the towering black cloud charging toward them, little more than a hexagon away. He heard an eerie buzzing sound, a cacophony of many noises, like a storm of voices, tormented souls. The cloud itself looked fuzzy and indistinct, rolling along the ground in thousands of frenzied pieces, large and small, looking for something to attack. Huge clouds of dust from its passage bubbled into the air.

“I want to see Scartaris destroyed,” Mindar said.

“Cross tunnel,” the Slave said. “Do not trust Sadic. He will cross by himself.”

Mindar nodded at Delrael. “Three of us should cross, then Sadic, then the last two. Otherwise he might push the tunnel bridge over the edge when we’re all inside it.”

“He looks strong enough to do it,” Delrael agreed.

Sadic hunched his hairy shoulders. “Yes. Go.”

They cast dice in the dust to see who would go first. Delrael, Vailret and Bryl won the rolls and stood at the edge of the foul-smelling opening. They entered the rotting and ancient bridge of vertebrae.

Wind whistled around and through the cracks. The dried sinews stretched taut, and the giant vertebrae swayed and rattled over the gulf. Delrael took the lead and put his boot on the rough, curved surface of the inner bone wall, checking his footing.

The passage was wide and tall. Delrael strode forward. He didn’t want to think about traps, didn’t want to worry. Gaps and holes between the segments of vertebrae showed too plainly the depths of swirling blackness far below, the shadows of things he didn’t want to see.

The sinews were dry and leathery, holding the vertebrae together. Delrael kept telling himself that armies had funnelled through this, that heavy cartloads of supplies and pounding Slac regiments had gone through. The bridge would hold.

They pushed ahead and saw the other side not far away. He listened to Bryl whimper behind him. Then they hurried out of the last segment, anxious to be on solid ground again. Gasping and trembling, they emerged, each trying to cover the look of fear he wore.

Sadic came next. Delrael kept his sword drawn, uneasy. He could see the vertebrae in the tunnel sway as the massive Slave lumbered through and then emerged beside them.

“Sadic will not hurt you,” he said in a low voice, trying to be reassuring.

Mindar and Journeyman rapidly followed. The shadows grew longer around them with late afternoon.

“We should hurry,” Mindar said. “Within another day we’ll be near Scartaris. We have to be ready.”

Delrael swallowed in a dry throat. “We will be.”

They set off across the packed white quest-path.

#

The Serpent’s head lay on the sand. Its eyes remained dead and pupilless, storm-colored jelly. Then the eyes lit up, glowing red again.

Scartaris looked through them at the questers as they set off toward his mountain lair.

19. Professor Verne’s Extraordinary Journey

“I never realized the map was so huge. I never fully conceived of the parameters of Gamearth from one edge to the other. If the Outsiders can create such a world as a Game, then they must be powerful indeed.”

—Professor Verne, Les Voyages Extraordinaires

(unpublished journal)

The steam engine car chugged along, hissing and sputtering. Professor Verne’s ears ring with the racket. The steel-shod wheels rattled along over the uneven and rocky terrain. Harsh sunlight made him sweat and scratch at his gray beard. His forehead and nose stung with sunburn—he didn’t usually sit unprotected in the open air for so long. His legs ached, and his buttocks felt sore from the bouncing ride hour upon hour, day upon day.

Grit and dust puffed into the air behind him, stirred up by the rolling car. Verne’s warm woollen coat lay wadded in the seat beside him, but he would not put it on until the sun fell toward the horizon and the air grew cool again.

The Sitnaltan weapon was secured in the seat behind him. One monitoring gauge stuck out on an elbow of pipe. Polished bronze rivets reflected against the old metal around the chamber that contained the deadly Outside power source. The controls of the weapon consisted only of a timer knob and a detonation button. Angled red fins protruded from the sides for no reason other than that Verne had dreamed it that way.

The vehicle rolled along. The desert sprawled out gray-brown and lifeless in front of him. For a while the sweeping emptiness of hexagon upon hexagon filled Verne with an awe at the sheer size of the Gamearth map. Then it all grew boring until he spent his time daydreaming and working out difficult ideas in his head.

In the pockets of his overcoat Verne had tucked neatly folded sheets of paper on which he scribbled concepts and designs for other inventions. Verne’s handwriting was difficult to read, and the diagrams were shaky—the vehicle jostled him too much as it bounced along. But neatness didn’t count. The ideas did.

The professor also kept track of his progress so he could mathematically deduce the variation in travel allotments while journeying long distances with the steam-engine vehicle. Rule #5 specifically listed walking rates, but the supplementary tables in The Book of Rules made no mention of the Sitnaltan car. Verne came to the conclusion that with the vehicle he could proceed at about three times the pace he could go on foot.

But even as he made the calculation in his head, something made an odd clunking noise inside the boiler of the steam engine. The clean white exhaust belching up from the stack hiccoughed, curled black for a moment, then dissipated entirely. The machine hissed. The vehicle clattered, then slowed, coming to a stop all alone on the dusty rocks. The boiler groaned again, and the pistons locked.

Verne pursed his lips. “Hmmmm,” he said, tugging at his beard. He climbed out and went around to the engine. He removed a toolkit from the sidebox and began to tinker, making sure nothing mechanical had gone wrong. But he had expected this to happen at any time. . . .

At dawn, three days before, Professor Frankenstein had helped him carry the Sitnaltan weapon to the back of the vehicle. Before the Sitnaltan technicians were awake, shivering but ready for another day’s work excavating the Outsider’s ship, Verne and Frankenstein had filled the car’s main boiler and the reserve water tank from the stagnant cistern in the Slac citadel.

The boilers heated the water, raising the temperature and building up steam. Verne and Frankenstein waited, chatting, killing time and making plans. A few of the others stirred and came out into the frost-covered courtyard before the pressure-release valve in the boiler hissed, spitting out its announcement that the car was ready to travel.

Verne climbed aboard and made sure the weapon was safely secured. He waved to all of their puzzled expressions as the vehicle chugged forward, gaining momentum and traveling away from the citadel, out of the mountains.

All that day Verne rolled on without stopping, despite difficult times on the harrowing switchbacks of the forested-hill terrain, and then going through the easier forests or, better still, the hexagons of flat grassland. Black lines marking the sections of terrain passed beneath his wheels.

Verne consulted his own map of Gamearth to make sure he was indeed taking the shortest and most efficient route. He calculated the speeds and estimated travel allowances for the best types of terrain.

He made sure to keep well away from the city of Sitnalta, just in case the weapon detonated prematurely.

The first evening he had pulled up the vehicle and let the boiler fires run low. He found a stream and, handful by handful, he refilled the water tanks for the boiler. “Victor, why didn’t you remind me to bring along a simple bucket?” He sighed. “I hate poor planning.”

Verne lay down in the grass to sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night, cold. He curled up next to the metal of the still-warm boiler and slept again.

The second day he headed due east around sloping grassy hills, around a spur of the Spectre Mountains. When the mountains ended, he turned straight north across grassy hexes. At the end of the day, he entered the first section of desolation. Verne stared at the growing boundary where Scartaris’s influence had drained all life dry. The long-range detectors in Sitnalta had suggested this would occur.

Verne had spent the entire day moving across barren terrain, chewing up dust and sand and rocks. He felt thirsty, but he kept most of the water in reserve for the engine. His lips were cracked, and he felt grit between his teeth. He had covered five hexagons in one day.

But now, far from the Sitnaltan technological fringe, the steam engine had died. He couldn’t complain—the Rules of Probability stated that technological devices would have a smaller and smaller chance of functioning as they moved farther from the city of Sitnalta.

Verne tapped at one of the gleaming bronze piston shafts with a wrench, but it was no use. Unless he got the steam engine moving again, he could not destroy Scartaris, and Verne would be stranded out in the middle of the wasteland with a doomsday weapon powerful enough to blow a hole right through the bottom of the map.

Verne checked and rechecked the steam-engine. He didn’t know what else to do. He could never carry the heavy Sitnaltan weapon by himself. Nothing mechanical was wrong—that much was obvious. Nor was it any surprise. He muttered to himself about the vagaries of Gamearth, and the rigid Rules that dictated everything. He hoped the Outsiders enjoyed making things difficult for him.

After the long day, he decided to reward himself with a precious cup of tea while waiting for the car to function again. He poured a little of the water out of his canteen into a tin cup from the car’s supply case, then used his fingertips to hold the cup over the flames by the boiler. He shifted his grip from one hand to the other as the handle grew hot, but the water began to boil at last. He sprinkled tea leaves into it. They swirled with the heat currents in the water, and sank to the bottom as they let brown coloring seep into the cup. Steam rose from the hot tea.

Then Verne stood up so quickly he sloshed some of the tea onto his pants. “Incredible!” he cried as the idea struck him. This was one of his own ideas, something clearly his own, not inspired by the Outsider Scott at all.

Here, far beyond the Sitnaltan technological fringe, water still boiled, did it not? Steam still rose, did it not?

He set his cup in a depression on the ground and went to the engine of the car. With both hands, he grabbed the pistons and pulled them out, pushed them back in. Yes, the pistons still moved, one cylinder inside the other.

The steam engine was a simple machine. He knew how it worked. Not a thing could go wrong.

It made no sense. Nothing got Verne more frustrated than things that made no sense. He knitted his eyebrows and pursed his lips, pacing around and around the steam-engine car. He grew angry. There was no reason for it! His face grew red with emotion, and he pounded his fist against the side of the boiler.

The Rules he had made a part of his life were completely arbitrary! Yes, he had always accepted that Sitnaltan technology would not function beyond the fringe—but when inspected closely, all technology was based upon fundamental laws of nature. Simple principles.

“It’s not fair!” he shouted up, as if the Outsiders were listening. He hoped they were. He would throw their own arbitrariness back into their faces.

“I am beyond the technological fringe, yes—but what is the reason for this vehicle not working? Water still boils. Steam still rises. A piston will still move up and down. Wheels still turn.

“Everything in this vehicle must work, even on the other side of the fringe! I have used nothing out of the ordinary here. Just boiling water, rising steam, and turning wheels.”

The sky remained silent and empty.

“You had better rethink your rules and restrictions.”

Verne coughed because his throat was dry and caked with dust. In annoyance he kicked the iron-shod wheel of the car with his heel.

The steam engine sputtered and gasped, surging back to life. Startled by the noise, Verne jumped out of the way. The vehicle lurched ahead, rumbling along the quest-path by itself.

Verne blinked and smiled. His tea sat ready on the ground, but he had no time to go get it. The vehicle moved farther away, picking up speed. He ran to catch up with it.

#

By noon the next day the steam-engine car labored up a slope. The rock outcroppings had gotten larger and more jagged. Verne had to devote more attention to steering around sharp boulders and other debris that could cause serious damage to the vehicle.

He began to grow concerned. The water level was going down in the main boiler, and he had already used the auxiliary tank. But according to his calculations, based on data he’d taken from the Sitnaltan detectors, he should be nearing Scartaris. And the doomsday weapon was still intact.

When the steam-engine car came to the crest of the hill, Verne looked down over a vast basin. A hooked line of jagged mountains bordered hexagon upon hexagon of desolation. Ah, he thought, those cliffs would be where Scartaris dwelled.

But in front of him, spread out in encampments, was the greatest horde of monsters he had ever imagined. They seemed unreal to him, all those creatures the Sitnaltans had ignored for turn after turn.

Verne pulled the car to a stop and then coaxed it into the shelter of a broken rock outcropping. The professor dismounted from the car, removed an optick tube from the sidebox, and peered down at the armies.

He saw marching angular-faced Slac covered with scales. He turned the field of view to observe monsters of all kinds, stone gargoyles, hairy brutes, a few ogres, worm-men sloughing through the broken sand in churned paths, green-skinned and pointy-eared goblins in their breeder groups.

On his scraps of paper, Verne noted the main features of each monster he saw, documenting them for future reference. With his interest in biological matters, Victor Frankenstein would probably delight in such first-hand observations.

Then Verne realized that each of these monster soldiers would stand in his way, block his passage to Scartaris. They would want to attack him, capture him, perhaps kill him. He suddenly considered what might happen if these unpleasant creatures managed to possess the powerful Sitnaltan weapon. He and Victor had not thought of that.

“This could cause a problem,” he muttered to himself.

A direct road led to the mountains. He saw a wide but steep path heading directly to a great opening in the flat cliff like a lipless mouth of rock. Strange and oily colors flashed from inside the broad cavern.

As he expected, the Outsiders would make the lair of Scartaris wonderfully obvious. Reaching it, though, would be the primary problem.

He shut off the boilers in the steam engine, remembering that he had to remain hidden. The car would make plenty of noise when he restarted it. When he decided to move, he would have to make all possible speed to his goal and hope he could cover enough terrain, to get to a place where he could detonate the weapon. . .before the monsters got him.

Verne sat with his back against the shaded rock and took out his last clean piece of paper. He jotted down notes to himself, waiting for dark.

20. Shadow Battle

“The Outsiders love to play at warfare with us. They can slaughter characters by the thousands without risking harm to themselves. But this is our Game too, and we must fight back.”

—General Doril, memoirs from the Scouring

Clouds gathered over Scartaris’s mountain, making the sky look like a cooling pool of molten lead. Overhead wheeled several batlike reptilian creatures. Delrael found the air thick and hard to breathe.

The Cailee had not come the night before. Mindar shook her head. “Scartaris wouldn’t resurrect me without bringing back the Cailee,” she said. “He’s just having his fun.”

“I’m not sure who our true enemy is anymore—” Vailret said, “Scartaris, or the Outsider David.”

The Slave of the Serpent limped and dragged his leg beside them. The wound from Delrael’s sword still bled slow and thick, but Sadic did not complain.

At dusk they reached another hex-line. Only one more section of terrain separated them from the end of their quest. The ground grew more broken and jagged, as if Scartaris had tossed chunks of his mountain like giant dice in every direction.

Behind them the monstrous black cloud rose up from the ground, near enough to hear clearly now—a constant buzzing, squawking turmoil. The cloud pushed ahead like a clawed hand scooping them toward Scartaris.

At the top of a rise, Delrael stopped, sheltered by a rock outcropping. The army of Scartaris gathered before them on the great plain. “No wonder Scartaris wasn’t worried about us.” He swallowed in a dry throat.

By the light of dim fires in the camps, hideous demons and reptilian things moved in organized ranks. Tall Slac generals marched about shouting orders. Delrael saw an occasional hulking stone gargoyle, like Arken. Swarms of small goblins, green-skinned and hairless, clustered together in their breeder groups. Guttural grunts and hisses carried out into the still air.

The massive enemy was preparing to march upon Gamearth. Scartaris had grown tired of waiting. The Outsider David wanted to ruin the map without further delay.

One gigantic creature strode through the army, obviously in command. He had a powerful lion’s body, a wicked-looking scorpion-tail that flickered with blue lightning, and a horned head showing distorted human features. Delrael thought he had heard of such a creature in the worst old Sorcerer battles, a monster developed by gamers to be powerful enough to oppose even the great dragons.

“It’s a manticore,” Vailret said. His voice sounded thin with fear.

“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Journeyman said.

Overhead, Lady Maire’s Veil reminded Delrael of green blood spilled across the sky. The mountains of Scartaris looked like a strange, warped creature made of stone, rearing its mighty head. Two symmetrical peaks curved upward from the main mountain, broken and pitted, similar to the horns of a giant bull. On the central rock face was a yawning grotto, a cavelike overhang that stared out of the mountain like a cyclopean eye-socket, black and pupilless.

Delrael had to take the Earthspirits into that cavern. It was obvious. He had gone on enough quests to identify the goal when he saw it. But the entire army of Scartaris stood ready to stop him. He felt his vision go dark and fuzzy; his breathing came short.

“The game ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” Journeyman said. He blinked his clay eyelids.

“Sadic will protect you,” the burly Slave said and stood beside Delrael. “You freed Sadic.”

Delrael felt the silver belt at his waist. All of those monsters, each one intent on destroying Gamearth, on stopping him—how could he ever take the Spirits the final distance? “We’d need an army of our own to get past them.”

“And any time it looks as if we might succeed, Scartaris can go through his metamorphosis and end the Game anyway,” Mindar sighed. “Isn’t this fun?”

Bryl shuffled his feet and kept his head down. “I have an idea.” He flinched when everyone looked at him at once. He ran his gnarled hands through the folds of his cloak and withdrew the Fire Stone and the Air Stone.

“Scartaris knows we have the Fire Stone, since it was Enrod’s,” he said, then thrust the eight-sided ruby back into his hidden pockets. “But I haven’t used the Air Stone yet on this quest. Remember how Gairoth had his army of illusion ogres at the Stronghold? Gairoth has even less training than I do, and his Sorcerer blood is tainted.”

He took a deep breath. “My father Qonnar was a full-blooded Sorcerer; my mother Tristane was a half-breed. I’ve had some training. If I use up all my spells, I can create an army for you. A good one.”

Delrael pondered a moment as possibilities came into his head, then he grinned and clapped a hand on Bryl’s shoulder.

“Whatever it takes,” Journeyman said, “The Rulewoman Melanie is counting on me.”

Bryl seemed small and terrified. “Just remember what I’m going to do, though. It’s easy to think of one or two figures and move them around with my imagination—but I’ll be keeping track of a thousand different faces, different characters, all at the same time. Each one fighting, each one moving around like a real character would.”

He blinked his eyes, looking giddy. “It’ll be like role-playing on a gigantic scale! It must be what the Outsiders do all the time.”

Mindar held her rippled sword and stared at the army below. The expression on her face seemed explosive. “If you make it look like the monsters are being slaughtered, that’ll certainly ruin their morale.”

Delrael saw concern grown on Bryl’s face. “Just remember, my illusions won’t cause any actual damage, though the monsters will think they’re striking something solid. At least it’ll keep them busy while you slip past to Scartaris.”

Bryl huddled between broken boulders in the shelter of an outcropping. “I’ll need a place where I can hide and not be disturbed.” He wiggled small rocks from under him, brushed his hands together, then withdrew the four-sided diamond. It glistened even in the falling darkness.

“I’ll cover myself with an illusion too. But you’d better hurry. With two Stones in my possession, I can use five spells now and another five after midnight—but I don’t know how long that’ll last. It depends on how I roll.”

Mindar’s expression hardened. “We all have to fight to our limits.” She turned to Delrael; her eyes held the burning obsession he had seen there so many times before.

“But it’s time for truth between us, Delrael. If we’re going to fight together against Scartaris, I need to know what weapon you’ve got.” She fidgeted, then looked up. “I want to be sure I’m gambling my life on a good chance.”

Delrael frowned down at the ground. He gazed back at Mindar, her high cheekbones, her deep eyes, the tangled hair that had once been braided behind her head.

“You’re right, Mindar.” He turned away, for some reason not wanting to watch her face as he told his secret. “The Earthspirits want to destroy Scartaris, too. I’m carrying them with me, in my belt. I have to take them there.” He pointed to the jagged mountains. “They can defeat him.”

Journeyman frowned. “It’s not the only weapon we have.”

“Are we going to end this or not?” Bryl said from his hiding place. He stroked the diamond, staring into its facets. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Delrael nodded. “Luck.”

“Luck,” the others echoed.

The Slave stood beside them with shoulders squared, ready for battle. Journeyman went to Bryl and extended a clay hand in a formal gesture. “Live long and prosper.”

Delrael cleared his throat. “We’re ready.”

Bryl took a deep breath and rolled the Air Stone.

The air shimmered with the massive illusion gelling around them. Forms appeared, snapping into sharp clarity.

On the slope overlooking Scartaris’s horde, another army now stood: all human characters, clad in perfect armor, strong and proud, carrying a variety of weapons. With a start, Delrael recognized most of the faces—they were his own or Vailret’s. Some bore moustaches and beards or dark hair, but Bryl had plainly used his own memory. Other soldiers looked like characters from the Stronghold village.

The fighters carried bright shields with the colors of villages hexagons distant from the Stronghold. Their boots showed scuff marks as if they had marched across the map.

“Excellent!” Delrael whispered.

“That would impress even the old Sorcerer warlords,” Vailret said.

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country,” Journeyman added.

Then a loud voice, clear as the tone from a crystal bell, rang out from Delrael’s silver belt. “The Earthspirits are prepared for our final battle. We wish you luck!”

Delrael stood stunned and delighted. The others gawked at him, amazed. He didn’t want to waste time thinking about it—they had to fight. Always have fun. He felt filled with confidence.

Mindar held up her rippled sword. “Let’s go, before we lose our advantage of surprise.” Then she ran forward with a suicidal determination on her face. Vailret and Journeyman moved side by side, and Sadic followed Delrael.

Weapons drawn, armor adjusted, the illusion army surged into motion with a muffled clanking. They kept ranks as they charged down the long slope toward the monster horde, yelling personal battle cries. They left no footprints on the sand.

Delrael let himself be hidden among the illusion soldiers. In true Game spirit he felt he should be at the head of his fighters, leading the point of the charge like a great general in the Sorcerer wars. But calling attention to himself would defeat the entire purpose of creating the illusion army. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Scartaris’s army howled in confused surprise at the sudden appearance of this new force. They dropped all preparations for their charge across Gamearth. The monsters still outnumbered the illusion army—Bryl could only imagine and direct so many soldiers—but it was enough to throw the enemy ranks into turmoil. The two armies met.

Tall Slac troops stormed together, pushing their way through the other monster warriors to the front of the fighting line. Each Slac carried an iron sword and tough shield of Tairan manufacture.

Delrael watched other illusion soldiers struck down and trampled on the battlefield. So many of them looked like him. It made him feel sick inside.

A tall Slac general stood in his path, cloaked in a slick black garment that hung around him, giving the reptilian arms freedom to maneuver. Platelike scales covered the Slac’s head. Its eyes were emerald green, glowing and pupilless. But one of the illusion soldiers engaged the Slac, and Delrael slipped past.

The smell of smoke and blood and churned-up dust bit into his nostrils, masking the lingering stench of the close-pressed monster army.

He watched Mindar dash about, slashing with her rippled sword. Her face was drawn back in a furious expression, savoring her revenge on Scartaris. She struck one pig-snouted monster down and turned to thrash at a swarm of green-skinned goblins. The S-scar on her forehead glowed. The Slac ignored her and concentrated on the advancing army.

Journeyman waded in, swinging his clay fists from side to side and bowling over goblins. Swords bit into his skin, but he repaired the damage by shoving his clay back into place.

Vailret swung his short sword, but didn’t seem to know what to do. He kept himself sheltered and tried to remain by the golem. Since so many of the fighters looked alike, Delrael had to look twice to make sure he had really seen Vailret and not an illusion counterpart.

Near Delrael an illusion fighter—himself, but with black hair and a beard—struck at a hunchbacked demon. The demon grunted without words and swung a jagged pike up into the human fighter’s stomach. Though it was only an illusion, Delrael snarled as the fighter choked, bleeding from his mouth, and fell still grasping the weapon stuck through him.

Delrael jumped in and chopped down on the hunchbacked monster’s neck. The sword bit through the knobbed, leathery skin. The monster tried to turn, but it still thought its pike was stuck in the dead illusion fighter and couldn’t pull it away. Delrael swung again, severing the cords in the monster’s neck and watching the head fall.

Battlefield sounds roared around him. His ears were numb from the screams of monsters and human fighters, the clang of weapons, the garbled shouting of orders from Slac generals, cries of anger and confusion. He heard the booming of drums.

A mass of goblins charged into the fray, scrabbling with sharp fingers. They picked up fallen weapons and broken sticks; two carried burning brands from abandoned campfires. They made a thin jabbering as they piled on their victims, bringing them down with the force of numbers.

Delrael heard a haunting, buzzing sound with growls and cries and squawks that grew louder in an approaching storm of noise. He held his sword out to defend himself and looked behind him, up into the sky—

Poised like an axe over a chopping block, the black cloud began to fall down on the battlefield.

It dissolved before his eyes, breaking into nebulous pieces drifting down as the bottom portion, filled with dim shapes, set upon the confusion of the battleground. He could see that the cloud was not really black at all, but a garbled mass of colors blended together. Thousands of unrelated noises smothered the battlefield din.

Then a bird flashed in front of Delrael’s eyes, darting forward at a hairy monster.

Dozens of biting flies flew ahead of it; beetles hummed by. A cloud of butterflies spattered themselves across the face of a demon. Tiny creatures filled the air. On the ground, larger animals attacked, moving and working together.

The clear, ringing voice of the Earthspirits spoke out from his silver belt. “Our reinforcements have arrived.” The words vibrated through to his bones. “We sent out our own summons to living creatures across the map, but you did not recognize it as such. They will help as best they can.”

Delrael ran forward in delight, remembering the disturbing screech his belt had made in the forest by the Barrier River. “You could have let us know ahead of time.”

The Earthspirits made no reply.

A cloud of wasps and flies fell upon one of the breeder groups of goblins, stinging again and again. A gray wolf and a sharp-antlered stag charged among other demons. Beetles and spiders covered their fur, but the little creatures jumped off and set upon the monsters.

A black bear roared and threw herself on a thin, oily-skinned demon. The bear mauled at the monster with spread claws while the demon defended itself with its own iron sword. The bear ripped the demon’s oily flesh to spill entrails that smoked in the cool air.

Delrael continued forward, setting his jaw. He slashed at several confused goblins, but he concentrated on moving toward Scartaris. The mountain lair rose up across the battlefield, on the other side of a hex-line.

Beside him, a yellow bird took on a towering Slac, darting in and flapping at the monster’s face. The Slac lunged clumsily at it, smashing the air with balled, horny fists. But the bird fluttered away, then flew in again to peck the emerald eyes.

Hundreds of tiny insects swarmed over a spine-covered creature, stinging its eyes, clogging its ears and nostrils and mouth with their dead bodies. A frenzied Slac charged in front of Delrael; its face was a black mass of crawling, biting beetles. It waved its sword wildly in the air, stumbling, until a gray wolf knocked the Slac to the ground and tore out its throat.

Explosions ripped the air, throwing up dirt and flames and chunks of clay. Delrael wondered if Scartaris’s monsters used the same kind of firepowder that Tareah wanted for her Transition Day festivities. Teams of monsters used groaning catapults to lob clay pots of firepowder. The explosions only did more damage to Scartaris’s horde.

Delrael stopped and realized that he had lost track of Vailret and the others. In the chaos around him, all the soldiers looked alike. The animals and the demons fought on every side of him. He couldn’t shout into the din.

For an instant he allowed himself to feel alone and frightened, then he swallowed his fear and worked his way forward. He had to get the Earthspirits to Scartaris. Characters always had to finish their quests, or die trying. It said so in The Book of Rules.

#

Vailret struggled to stay next to Journeyman. The golem charged ahead, smashing monstrous soldiers and intent on his own goal. The illusion fighters moved about, clashing, striking. Many wore an eerie reflection of Vailret’s features. He watched them fall, finding it very disturbing to watch himself die.

He held his sword, but illusion soldiers engaged all monsters that came near him. He felt his mind overloading with the terror of the battle. Sharp swords, knives, clawed hands, spiked armor, terrible weapons—

Vailret looked around, frantic, but he had lost track of the true Delrael. He hoped that one of those slaughtered victims wasn’t his cousin. “Journeyman! I can’t find Del!”

The golem paused and turned. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”

Journeyman knocked a Slac general out of the way, punching the reptilian creature in the stomach, then seizing the stout neck and snapping it sideways. The dead Slac stared at Journeyman with an expression of astonishment.

Vailret hurried after the golem. The mountain lair of Scartaris stood stark and clear; he could only hope Delrael would meet him and Journeyman there.

To the left, monsters lobbed pots of firepowder in bright explosions. The animals and insects massed around Vailret, swarming, but they attacked only the monsters. Animal smells mixed with the stench of the demon army’s long encampment.

Ahead, the manticore stood tall over all the other monsters. With great leaps he charged to the focus of the fighting. Indisciminately, the manticore slashed his own soldiers out of the way. His giant paws mauled half a dozen goblins as he pushed toward the illusion human fighters. The manticore’s scorpion tail flicked back and forth, striking each time with a blue flash and an explosion.

Vailret knew stories about the manticores—it was said they were so powerful that even their old Sorcerers creators could barely control them. And several Sorcerers had died trying.

Vailret caught up with Journeyman just as a stone gargoyle leaped in front of them. The ground thudded as the heavy stone creature landed and spread its feet and jagged wings, holding both cumbersome granite arms up to block their way. Demonic horns curled up from the center of its forehead, but Arken’s crudely formed expression did not change. He had formed the same stone body for himself again.

“Go away, boy, you bother me.” Journeyman tried to pass by.

“Shall we have a rematch, my friends?” Arken said. “Two out of three?”

Journeyman stopped and grinned broadly. “Didn’t you learn your lesson the first time?”

The gargoyle heaved a rumbling sigh. “I learned my lesson, but apparently Scartaris has not. Once again he has brought me back with explicit orders to stop you. Scartaris is angry—he thinks I tricked him.”

Arken seemed to smile with his craggy stone face. “And of course we did. But this time he has given me no freedom to decide for myself. I must stop you. I can’t bargain.”

Journeyman stepped forward. “We’ll see about that.”

Vailret remembered how long and difficult their previous duel had been. He knew he couldn’t defend himself for that long as the howling battle swirled around him.

Then he felt the seed of an idea in his mind and grabbed at it. He stood between Journeyman and Arken. “Wait, Arken! Scartaris gave you explicit, clear orders, correct?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. We’ll make it easy for you. Journeyman—stand still.” Vailret stood beside him, motionless. “There, you’ve stopped us. You have fulfilled your obligation to Scartaris.”

Arken stood up straight, nodding his horned head in delight. “Why didn’t I think of that? He told me to follow his orders exactly. Oh, this is delightful! Scartaris will be even more upset!”

“Now do what you can to help,” Vailret said. “We have to get to Scartaris.”

Journeyman squared his shoulders. “The Rulewoman Melanie is counting on me.”

With another great bound, the huge manticore stormed toward them, striking with his explosive scorpion tail. He used his claws to tear apart illusion human soldiers four and five at a time, stomping over them without a pause. The manticore let out a howling roar, human and bestial at the same time from his distorted manlike face.

Arken turned and flashed his cavernous stone eyes at Vailret. “Here’s a good opportunity. You move on, get to Scartaris. Luck!”

Turning, the gargoyle waded through the other fighting and approached the manticore from the side. Arken slammed a jagged stone fist into the wide ribs of the leonine body before the manticore had even noticed him.

With a roar and an outraged “Ooof!” of pain, the manticore turned on him, favoring cracked ribs. The great monster reared up and scored its claws against the gargoyle, leaving clean white gouges across the granite chest and raking up sparks.

The stone-winged gargoyle scrambled to his feet again and leaped up to grab the hooked bulb at the end of the scorpion tail, trying to break off the stinger. But the manticore whirled and brought the tail up. He lifted Arken off the ground and flung him forward. With another lash, the scorpion tail sparked blue lighting. It struck down with an explosive electric roar that shattered the gargoyle into lifeless stone pieces.

With a long backward glance, Vailret followed Journeyman, who pushed toward the lair of Scartaris with single-minded intent.

#

Delrael closed his mind to anything but moving forward. He could not find the others, but if he failed to reach Scartaris that wouldn’t matter anyway. He had the Earthspirits. He could end the Outsiders’ threat.

Delrael looked ahead, paying only enough attention to keep moving. His sword arm was exhausted; he found breathing difficult—but he had reached a fever pitch of fighting, and nothing else seemed real to him.

Until one loud bellow broke through the din of the battle.

“Delroth!”

He froze and turned with stunned amazement as the one-eyed ogre plowed through the other soldiers. With a slash of his spiked club, Gairoth bowled over a mob of goblins and plodded toward Delrael.

“Haw! Now I kill you!”

Delrael couldn’t believe the ogre had followed them from where they had rescued Tallin, through the Spectre Mountains where he had been swept off the ledge by the avalanche, all the way across the map to here. Somehow the ogre knew which one was the true Delrael, and which ones were just Bryl’s illusions.

Delrael held his sword ready. “You’re starting to bother me, Gairoth.” But despite his show of false bravery, he saw how the huge ogre knocked aside other formidable demon fighters to reach him.

“Come on, then,” Delrael said. He swallowed and felt his throat tighten. He got ready.

Gairoth growled and strode forward, holding his club like a baseball bat.

Then another explosive roar distracted both of them. Goblins and demons were tossed aside like dead leaves in the wind.

The Slave of the Serpent burst into view. His hairy paws dripped with blood of different colors. He grabbed two goblins, smashed their heads together into a pulpy mass. Then he tossed them aside as he strode toward Delrael.

“Sadic will protect you.”

Delrael stepped back, feeling relieved. The Slave stepped beside him like a gigantic bodyguard. “You freed Sadic from Serpent.”

Gairoth bellowed in annoyance as the towering Slave stepped between him and Delrael. Sadic stood a full two feet taller than the ogre and much broader across the shoulders. Globs of blood matted the Slave’s fur from the monsters he had slain. The deep wound in his thigh had reopened and oozed thick yellow blood, making him limp and move stiffly.

But he stood against Gairoth. “You go,” Sadic said to Delrael. “Kill Scartaris.”

A V-formation of hawks swooped down and skimmed past him. They slashed out the eyes of a spine-covered monster, then struck in to tear out its throat with their long claws. Together, they flew off again.

Gairoth snorted and lunged toward Delrael, trying to duck to the side of the Slave. Sadic reached out a giant paw and caught the ogre across the tattered furs on his chest, deflecting Gairoth’s charge and knocking him to the dirt.

Gairoth landed on his backside and howled. He used the club to pry himself to his feet then turned his anger toward Sadic. He swung the club with all his might, and the wicked spikes raked across where the Slave had been. Sadic leaped back but stumbled on his wounded leg, wincing in pain.

Gairoth jumped at the Slave of the Serpent; Sadic met him, grabbing the ogre around the chest. The two grappled with each other, pounding with massive fists, trying to squeeze and crack ribs. Sadic raked his long claws up the peeling skin of Gairoth’s back. The ogre shifted his grip higher on the spiked club to bash at the demon’s fur-covered shoulder until yellow blood oozed out. With loud bestial sounds, both opponents flung themselves away and stood panting and bleeding.

Once more Gairoth tried to scramble around the Slave. Sadic blocked him again, but this time the ogre leered a strange grin as if he had gotten an idea. He lashed out with one of his wide bare feet and kicked as hard as he could, smacking into the deep open wound on the Slave’s leg.

In agony, Sadic buckled over, grabbing his thigh. He staggered.

Gairoth swung the spiked club up and then down, leaping into the air to put all of his weight into the swing. The club crashed down onto the demon’s head, smashing through it like a soft-boiled egg.

Sadic grunted once, then collapsed to the ground.

The shock struck Delrael like a cold knife in his stomach. He had wounded the Slave with his sword, giving Gairoth his chance to play dirty. He felt responsible. Then Delrael realized how foolish he had been for not running when Sadic gave him the chance.

Now Gairoth, panting but angrier than ever, picked up his dripping club and stepped over the Slave’s prone body. He advanced toward Delrael.

Sadic grabbed the ogre’s ankle, driving claws deep into the thick leg and tripping him. Gairoth sprawled out on his face. With a fury greater than a sudden thunderstorm, the ogre jumped back to his feet and pounded the fallen Slave over and over with the club, sending a thick rain of yellow blood into the air.

Bleeding from his ankle now, Gairoth returned all his attention to Delrael. “Haw! Now you die, Delroth!”

Delrael held his sword in front of him. “You’ve said that before, Gairoth. But you keep botching it!” He felt no force behind his words. Hope drained out of him with sick dismay at seeing the death of Sadic.

Gairoth ran forward. Delrael held his ground.

Neither of them saw the shadowy, batlike forms as the reptilian flying creatures swooped down to the battlefield.

Gairoth swung.

Delrael held up his sword to block the blow, though he knew it would do nothing against the ogre’s momentum.

He felt sharp pain in both of his shoulders as if two handfuls of knives had stabbed into him. His neck jerked as something snapped his body into the air. The battlefield dropped away under him, and he heard sounds like great sails rippling over his head.

The bat-creature shrieked from a pointed, fanged mouth and flew up into the sky.

Gairoth spun around when his club struck only air, and dropped to his knees, dizzy. He stared at where Delrael had been, but saw nothing. Only footprints that vanished. A single drop of scarlet blood marked the ground.

“Which way did he go? Awwww!”

Up in the sky, he saw the shadow of a flying creature carrying a man, winging toward the grotto of Scartaris.

#

Professor Verne stoked the steam-engine car and checked its water level. It would function for barely another hour. He took a last drink of water and poured the rest of his flask into the boiler. Every little bit would help. Verne ran the back of his hand across his lips and sighed. Then he sealed the chamber to let the steam pressure build.

The Sitnaltan weapon lay cradled in the car’s seat. It was primed and waiting. Monitor lights blinked on and off.

He had pondered all day about how to get around the monster army. Though the weapon would cause immense havoc when it detonated, he still wanted to get it as close to Scartaris as possible. No sense taking chances, especially far from Sitnalta where the world worked so differently.

Verne jotted down his last thoughts in his journal and tucked the book inside his woollen jacket. He didn’t know if he would ever return to Sitnalta, or if his memoirs would ever be published, but he felt an obligation to to record his thoughts and observations.

He tugged at his full beard and straightened it. He wished he had brought his pipe along—he could use a relaxing smoke right now. He blew through his lips instead. He felt queasy inside. “Great Maxwell, what have I gotten myself into?”

Steam-pressure gauges on the car’s boiler rose. The vehicle was almost ready to move. Darkness had fallen.

When a great roar went up from the monster horde, Verne jumped, startled, and looked to see an army of human characters advancing down the slope a partial hexagon away. Verne blinked his eyes in amazement. He had seen no indications of an approaching army. How could all those fighters appear with no warning at all? No doubt they were that type of Gamearth character who thrived on military campaigns, went on quests. He hoped they wouldn’t be too near the blast when his weapon went off.

He climbed aboard the steam-engine car and sat back in his seat. He could investigate the identity of the army later. For now he would take advantage of the diversion. He made sure the doomsday weapon was firmly strapped in the back seat, safe from any jostling; the timer was ready to be set.

Professor Verne took a deep breath. He straightened his jacket one last time, out of habit, then released the locks on the gears. He held onto the steering levers.

The steam-engine car rattled down the slope toward the mountains of Scartaris.

#

Mindar slashed the air with her rippled sword. Dark blood dripped off its serrated edges. Her hair was tangled. She swept it back away from her eyes, then shouted her outrage at the monster army. “Why won’t you fight me!”

She turned back and forth, but Scartaris’s monsters ignored her. They would not meet her eyes. Mindar charged into a mass of goblins, but they swirled around her and moved on. They did not strike back.

“Fight me!”

Scartaris was doing this to taunt her, to have fun. He knew that the greatest damage he could do to Mindar was to ignore her, to refuse to acknowledge her efforts against him.

She ran at one of the towering Slac fighters and swung her sword, but the Slac lifted a Tairan-made shield and deflected her blow. Then the monster punched her with a balled scaly fist, knocking her out of the way.

She wheezed, felt the pain from her bruised ribs, and stood up. Bryl’s illusion soldiers fought all around her.

Mindar stood up and glared at the jagged lair of Scartaris on the far edge of the battlefield. That was where she could strike her blow. She had lost Delrael and the others, but they were fighting, moving toward Scartaris. She belonged there too.

Mindar strode through the battle, wading into blood and fallen bodies. The other fighters did not turn to face her.

#

The flying creature beat its taut wings with a sound like a man gasping for breath. Delrael felt as though its claws were ripping his shoulders off.

The bat-creature rose higher. Delrael grabbed the sword in his hand, though his fingers grew cold and numb. He still ached from his battle with the Slave of the Serpent two days before, exhausted now from fighting through Scartaris’s army.

Veins laced the wings of the bat-creature, visible through skin as thin as fine fabric, pulsing and rippling in the breeze. The flying thing had deep pits for eyes, blank and pupilless, and a long jagged snout in an arrow-shaped head. Its cry was so high-pitched that Delrael’s ears felt ready to burst.

His feet dangled below him. He felt nothing, only air beneath his boots. The battlefield lay fifty feet below. Distinct sounds drifted up. He saw the swirling fighters, the movements of the ranks, flashes of exploding pots of firepowder. The giant manticore dominated the battle scene.

Delrael squirmed in the grip of the bat-creature. His own blood poured from gashes in his leather armor where the claws sank into him. The pain sent fire through his chest.

Scartaris’s grotto lay closer than ever now. The hex-line broke the last section of desolation from the rocky, mountain terrain.

He didn’t know what was happening, where the creature was taking him. But when it drifted over the sharp air currents when the terrain changed from flatland to mountains, he saw the rocks below like spears pointed up at him.

He felt the bat-creature tighten its knobby claws just for a moment—and then Delrael knew what it intended. The creature had taken him high aloft. . .now it was going to drop him.

Delrael ignored the daggers of pain in his shoulder. He winced, but knew what he had to do. He lunged upward with his free hand, grabbing onto the bat-creature’s leg just as it released its claws. He gripped hard, digging his fingernails into the rough hide. The sharp rocks seemed a long, long drop below.

The bat-creature flapped its wings in surprise and screamed a high-pitched noise. Its claws extended and retracted as it tried to grab onto something to fight back. Delrael would not let go. The bat-creature hissed and bobbed its sharp head down, but the fighter was out of its reach.

Feeling as if he were lifting a gigantic weight, Delrael heaved his sword up with one hand and thrust it through the thin membrane of a wing, ripping a gash. He had to get down. Air whistled through the cut, and the bat-creature flailed but it could not get away.

The flying creature dropped lower. Delrael poked with the sword again. As the creature beat its immense wings, the wind and the air ripped the gash wider.

The ground rushed up at them. He had caused too much damage. They would crash and both be killed.

But then the bat-creature pumped its wings with renewed strength. It spun in a tight circle as one wing drove harder than the other, but still ascended.

Delrael grew dizzy. The ground below him spun with the crazy spiral flight. Hot tears of pain streamed down Delrael’s cheeks. The strain of holding on with one hand, holding his entire weight against the long drop drove nails into the wounds in his shoulders.

He had to get down. He wanted to scream.

Delrael reached up with the sword one more time and chopped at the other wing. The creature dropped again, hissing, but Delrael would not let go. The ground rushed up.

He tried to swing the bat-creature’s body around, to direct it toward a clear spot in the foothills of the mountain terrain, but he didn’t know how. The creature’s fangs glistened in the starlight, and it bore a vicious expression behind the pupilless eyes. Once they struck the ground, it would attack him.

The rocks came closer—Delrael could survive now, though the fall might hurt him. He swung the sword up awkwardly. He hit the main strut of the creature’s wing, chopping at its shoulder.

The rocks came up. He stabbed the creature in the abdomen and then let go, dropping the last ten feet to the ground.

The bat-creature crashed next to him. Delrael heard the dry-wood snap of the bones in its wings as it fell. The creature lay on the rocks, flapping and hissing, trying to get at him. It elbowed forward on the jagged splinters of its wings, but Delrael slipped in past the hissing mouth. He struck the arrow-shaped head with his sword. The creature’s wings flopped and twitched, then lay still.

Blood streamed down Delrael’s shoulders—his own blood—and he took ten steps away from the dead creature, up the path toward the grotto of Scartaris.

Delrael slumped down to rest on a boulder. Everything grew fuzzy. His pain, exhaustion, and hopelessness welled up. He could not find the strength to stand.

The bat-creature had carried him over most of the army. The monster hordes lay below him, fighting against Bryl’s illusion soldiers. Ahead and to the right, a curved spike of rock swept up from the main mountainous mass, one of the horns bracketing Scartaris’s grotto.

Delrael breathed the cool night air and saw mist rising inside the giant mouthlike opening in the mountain. Strange lights flashed, many different colors. It seemed close to him, but now he felt all alone. He didn’t know where Mindar was, or Vailret or Journeyman. He had come this far.

But he couldn’t make the last effort.

“You must move on,” the voice of the Earthspirits said from his belt. He felt a throb of energy creep up his spine, a warmth filling his veins like molten sunshine. The pain in his shoulders lessened.

Delrael stood up, feeling vibrant. He could function now. Then an ominous thought crossed his mind. “I hope you’ll still have enough energy now to defeat Scartaris.”

The long pause made him feel uncomfortable even before the Earthspirits answered. “We have never had enough energy to defeat Scartaris.”

He stumbled backward. His ears burned, and he stared at the turmoil of battle below him. All they had done, the characters who had died. . .Sadic, Tallin, the entire city of Tairé—”What do you mean?”

“Scartaris is too powerful. That is one of the other reasons we had you carry us across the map. Physical travel is. . .difficult for us, now that we are only marginally connected with the map of Gamearth. We can move you, like a player moving a piece on a gameboard. But the hex-lines are great stumbling blocks for us. We are outside the Rules, and yet trapped by them.”

The silver belt felt cold and tingling at his waist. Delrael didn’t want to touch it. The Spirits continued.

“But still, according to those same Rules, when an evil adversary threatens, good characters must do their best to fight. Regardless of their chances. Therefore, we will fight. Though Scartaris is much more powerful, nothing is absolute on Gamearth. We must hold on to that chance.”

“You mean, you hope that Mindar’s Stranger Unlooked-For shows up?” Delrael tried to keep the scorn out of his voice.

“We know nothing of that. We must fight and do our best—as you must, Delrael. And your sworn quest is to take us to Scartaris. Now finish your quest!”

His heart felt like a lead brick inside him, but he plodded toward the grotto. If the Earthspirits couldn’t destroy Scartaris, maybe they could at least weaken him, buy time for the magic of Gamearth to find another way on its own.

Scartaris had few defenses this far behind the ranks, probably to show his overconfidence. Several minor demons wandered among the rocks where they had fled. They fought without enthusiasm, and Delrael defeated them or chased them away. He still felt new energy from the Earthspirits, along with a growing anger at the futility of it all. He stalked toward the opening and the many-colored lights inside.

Rocks crunched under his boots as he climbed up the slope. Jagged boulders stood beside the opening that led deep into the mountain. He could not see the source of the lights, but weird shadows played on the wall and spilled out onto the quest-path.

Weariness crept up on him as he approached the end of the journey. He needed only to get to Scartaris, throw down the silver belt.

Panting, he strode up to the opening and he saw a figure inside, backlit against the grotto. She stood staring, looking devastated. The S-scar on her forehead glowed with its own bloody light. She slumped against one of the tall rocks beside the opening.

“Mindar!” Delrael said. “You’re safe.”

He saw a flicker of happiness when she looked at him, but that too was swallowed by the gulf of despair behind her eyes. “Of course I survived. I had to. Scartaris won’t let me die.” Her misery seemed to be tearing her apart.

“What’s wrong? We’re almost there. We can destroy Scartaris!” The lie came out, but he had to say it for her.

She glared at him with a wasteland of expression. The rippled sword rested against her leg, stained with dark blood. Her entire body trembled. “I’m the only thing left to stop you, Delrael.”

He took a step back; his thoughts churned. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes averted. He couldn’t imagine she would do anything to harm him. “What are you talking about?”

Mindar hung her head. “I lied to you.”

A black shadow-form oozed out of the dark rocks beside the opening and stood silhouetted next to her. Its silver claws gleamed from the reflected light.

“I didn’t know until now, but it’s true,” Mindar said. “I am the Cailee!”

21. Threshold of Scartaris

“Do you enjoy these battles, these Wars? Are they fun? Look what they have cost you!”

—Stilvess Peacemaker

Delrael’s heart stumbled a beat, and his breath came in ragged gasps. He wanted to reach out for Mindar, to take her arm, but he felt stunned.

“Scartaris kept the truth from me. The Cailee is my shadow, a darker part of me than I knew I had,” Mindar said. A sigh hissed through her teeth .

“It splits from me each night to cause its harm. We cannot live without each other. And Scartaris won’t let us die. It was part of his Game. He made me hate the Cailee, despise it—but I was only hating myself! Scartaris thinks of it as fun!”

She bit back an outcry as something forced her to take a lurching step toward the Cailee. The shadow thing moved closer to her, blotting out the flickering light from the grotto. They touched each other, overlapping.

The darkness of the Cailee flooded over Mindar’s body like a blanket of tar. Long silver claws hung down from her fingers, wrapped around the hilt of her rippled sword. Shadows masked her face, but Delrael could see her features silhouetted—the high cheekbones, the angry mouth. Mindar’s eyes became misty yellow and pupilless. The red S-scar burned through.

Delrael stood transfixed. This was too much. The Cailee took one step, powerful and deadly, blocking the way. But it was Mindar, too. When the hybrid woman/shadow spoke, her voice had grown huskier.

“We know of your quest, Delrael. Scartaris is—” Mindar/Cailee tossed her head, as if fighting with herself. Something snapped inside, and she let out a strangled roar, lunging with her rippled sword.

Delrael gave a yelp of surprise and sprang back ward, exhausted but still tense with battle reflexes. Mindar/Cailee slashed at him, rippled sword in one hand and silver claws in the other. He tried to back away, unwilling to fight her, but she struck again. He stumbled on a loose rock and slid away from her blade.

“Mindar!” he said, but her eyes remained pupilless. The Cailee held her entirely now, though Delrael saw flickers of something behind her gaze.

He staggered back to his feet and swung his own sword, but it was only to deflect her. Mindar/Cailee defended herself, and Delrael ran around and pushed past into the uncertain light of Scartaris’s grotto.

Mindar/Cailee bounded after him. Delrael had to stop, panting. His arms and legs ached. He could barely move. She slashed out, and Delrael brought up his blade to block the blow. The force knocked his arm aside, clanging his sword against the rock wall of the cave.

He pleaded with the woman trapped within the Cailee. “Mindar, listen to me! Can’t you see Scartaris wants this?” He wheezed his words, but the angered Cailee drove at him with renewed force.

“Mindar—you’ve turned into the thing you hate the most! You’re a creature of Scartaris!”

Delrael fought against Mindar/Cailee’s growing fury. His arms felt like stone, heavy and unresponsive. He managed to fend off the blows that flashed at him, but his body trembled with exhaustion. He had used up all his adrenaline.

“Mindar, remember your daughter. Remember the tannery. Remember Taire!” His throat was raw.

Delrael gazed into the Cailee’s yellow eyes. Dark pupils flickered on the verge of appearing. Mindar/ Cailee hesitated, wincing her silhouetted features and struggling with herself. “We’re inseparable now,” she gasped. Then the Cailee howled and slashed at the air with a fistful of silver claws. Her pupils faded again.

She struck and slashed in a storm of blows with the rippled sword. Delrael’s arm seared with pain. He stumbled as he fought with the last of his strength. His sword sliced up and nicked Mindar/Cailee’s arm, drawing a strange mixture of shadow-smoke and bright blood.

The Cailee howled and surged back at him with such vehemence that Delrael had no hope of de fending himself. She knocked his arm aside, smashing his wrist against the rock wall. His own sword clattered to the floor.

Mindar/Cailee raised her blade to cleave Delrael’s head.

“Mindar . . . “ he whispered.

Her sword swung down, but Mindar’s pupils flickered back for an instant. In her downstroke, she twisted her wrist sideways and struck him on the head with the flat of the blade.

Bright light exploded behind Delrael’s eyes, then it all turned black. He slid to the floor.

Professor Verne’s steam-engine car clanked down the slope toward Scartaris’s mountain, skirting the

edge of the battlefield. The ratcheting noise was not noticeable over the shouts of fighting monsters and human soldiers.

He stoked the fires under the boiler as high as they would go. The car picked up steam and chugged along faster than a man could run. The hex-line separated him from the rocky terrain, but he also saw the clear path leading up to the grotto.

Verne swallowed and blinked his eyes. He checked to make sure his journal was carefully secured with him. He didn’t know what indignities he would have to bear on his long walk back to Sitnalta. If he survived at all.

He carried one tiny galvanic cell that powered a detector he had mounted next to the car’s steering levers. It was one of the instruments he and Frankenstein had used to detect Scartaris’s presence all the way from Sitnalta.

He switched the device on and saw the needle move, then fall dead, move, then fall dead. He was too far beyond the influence of Sitnaltan technology, regardless of how arbitrary he had proven the concept of the technological fringe to be. But even given the worst of situations, the Rules of Probability made the detector certain to work some of the time. The homing mechanism would need to function only at infrequent intervals to steady the course of the car along the straight path to Scartaris.

Verne knew his weapon was so powerful he needed only to get near the grotto.

For a moment he wondered in terror if the weapon itself might fail to work. But then he brushed that thought aside. The Sitnaltan weapon was powered by the force that had driven the Outsiders’ ship. It would work anywhere on Gamearth—it had to. The Outsiders set up their own exceptions to the Rules, and they would follow them.

But this weapon combined the power of the Outsiders with the resourcefulness of Gamearth. What if he and Frankenstein had forged a destructive power greater than either world had seen before?

As the car chugged along, Verne watched the ground pass under the rattling wheels. He set his mouth in a firm line, thrusting out his beard. This was close enough for him.

He turned to the weapon and found the timer knob as the car jostled over the terrain, steering itself. Verne twisted the timer knob to a red mark on the dial and released it.

A rapid ticking came out of the weapon as the spring-driven timer began its countdown to detonation.

Verne had heard of a prophesied hero from some of the other human settlements outside the fringe, some unknown savior who would come out of no where and rescue them from great peril. They called him the Unseen Stranger, or something like that. Not that Verne put much stock in prophesies, since they had no scientific basis. But after he unexpectedly used his weapon to destroy Scartaris, no doubt the storytellers would make him out to be their Stranger. He clucked his tongue in disapproval.

Suddenly, a gigantic bare-footed ogre bounded away from the battlefield toward the car, drooling down his chin. The ogre tripped twice and regained his feet to stumble after Verne. He limped from a deep wound on his ankle.

Verne had nothing with which to fight this ogre. He felt a flash of fear, but the ogre seemed more intent on the speeding car itself than on its driver. Gairoth hopped forward, clutched the side, and scrambled aboard, heaving himself over the low door. He grabbed Verne by the collar of his woolen coat.

“One moment, monsieur!” Verne stammered.

But Gairoth was not interested in him. “Haw!” he said, spraying spittle in Verne’s face. With an expression of dismissal, he tossed the Professor over the side.

Verne landed in a tumble, bruised and hurt. He stood up, brushed himself off, and scowled. He watched the steam-engine car move on, homing in toward Scartaris.

Gairoth sat in the seat and bounced with delight as the car sped automatically toward the mountain.

“I don’t think you wanted to do that,” Verne muttered.

In the front of the car, the Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick.

Mindar stared at Delrael’s unconscious form against the rocks. Weird lights flashed on and off in the background, bathing him in strange colors. A spot of blood blossomed on his forehead and trickled alongside his nose, into his eyes.

Mindar had forced herself to the front of her mind, but she had to grit her teeth and concentrate, not letting her thoughts lapse for a second. The Cailee gibbered in the back of her head, making her ears ring. Her anger surged, but she had to keep it directed away from the Cailee. She would gain nothing by that.

Scartaris. Scartaris was her enemy.

The Cailee was part of herself. She had to accept it, dominate it, turn it to her own advantage.

Mindar felt blackness slough away from her face and shoulders as she grew stronger. In one arm she held her sword, and curved silver claws stuck out of her other hand—but she could see her own skin appearing in patches through the inky blackness. She was growing stronger. She knew what she could do.

Part of her felt appalled at what she had done to Delrael, but she knew he would forgive her. Mindar would never be able to forgive herself, though, not unless she finished Delrael’s quest for him.

She knelt down, and with the clumsy claws on her hand she worked the silver belt free from around his waist. She stared at it in the light, letting it dangle in front of her. The silver felt cold and slippery, tingling with power.

The Earthspirits lived in the belt. She held them, vulnerable, in her own hand—but they could destroy Scartaris. They could wipe him from the map. She cast her rippled sword on the floor. It clanged on the rock and landed near Delrael’s blade.

“You won’t make me cause any more harm, Scartaris!” The belt glittered in the weird light. “This is all the weapon I need to destroy you.”

Heavy footfalls sounded outside the entrance to the grotto. She turned. Her black form was liquid and cast no shadow of its own.

She saw the blocky form of a huge Slac general. It dragged its feet on the rocks with scattering sounds, and the clank of a chain rattled in the silence. The monster let a needle-spiked ball dangle at its side.

“Scartaris has grown bored with you,” the Slac said in its husky, grating voice. The pupilless pits of its eyes were filled with emerald fire.

Mindar/Cailee coughed out a laugh and held the silver belt as she strode recklessly toward the Slac. She held the belt between her two hands. “I’m bored with him, too. Earthspirits, destroy this thing of Scartaris!”

She squeezed the belt with her shadow-stained hands and held it, waiting for some explosion of power that would whisk the Slac out of the Game entirely.

But instead the Slac lashed down with his heavy spiked ball and smashed one of Mindar’s wrists. She screamed in shock. The wrist bones snapped, and her fingers spread out as blood sprayed in the air. She backed away in agony. The silver belt fell to the floor.

The Cailee’s furious presence clamored in the back of her head and tried to surge into dominance again. She pushed it away. The shadow-stain dripped from her body.

The Slac general said, “Scartaris wants you dead. You’re no fun anymore.”

Wincing the pain away, blind to what she was doing, Mindar/Cailee laughed again. “I can’t die!”

She leaped at the reptilian creature, spreading the claws of her uninjured hand. In the back of her mind, she drove the Cailee further away with her determination and victory. The blackness faded from her arms, and she made a savage slash at the Slac’s throat.

But the long silver claws snapped off and dissolved as she struck. Her hand became her own again—human and weak.

“All characters can die,” the Slac said. He wrapped his spiked ball and chain around her throat, yanking it from one end to strangle her and driving the ball’s spikes into the back of her head. The Slac jerked again, and Mindar’s neck snapped before she felt any more pain.

The Slac let her body unravel from the chain and fall to the floor. Then the monster twirled the spiked ball in the air to clean droplets of blood from his weapon.

Delrael groaned on the floor and stirred.

The Slac general strode to him. The ball clanked at his side. Breath hissed through needle-like teeth as the Slac leaned over Delrael.

“Well, excuuuuuuse me!” Journeyman said from the opening of the grotto.

The Slac general snapped his head up and turned, hissing.

The golem looked at Vailret beside him and grinned with flexible clay lips. “He likes it! Hey Mikey!” Journeyman swaggered in, and the Slac general faced him, dangling the spiked ball.

Vailret saw Delrael’s motionless form and Mindar lying dead. He stood behind and to the right of Journeyman, waiting and anxious. When he saw an opportunity, he slipped around and ran to Delrael.

“This here town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Journeyman said. The Slac’s green eyes blazed brighter.

Vailret cradled Delrael’s head and wiped blood away from his eyes. The fighter mumbled and moaned. The bump on his head looked serious, but far less severe than Vailret had feared.

He glared up at the Slac general facing Journey man. The golem did not appear frightened at all, but Delrael lay injured, Mindar murdered. Delrael’s silver belt lay beside her. Vailret did not know what had happened.

The Slac general stood tall and dark and filled with all the evil of Scartaris.

As he saw the Slac, Vailret remembered the training Drodanis had put him through back at the Strong hold, the role-playing game where Vailret was captured by Slac while his imaginary comrades were tortured and slain. An imaginary general like this one had ordered Vailret’s execution, but Vailret managed to kill the Slac general before other arrows struck him down. It had felt so real to him, the terror, the helplessness, the failure. But it was only a game within the Game; this Slac battle was happening now.

He stood up as anger filled his features. He held his short sword.

The Slac general twirled his spiked ball. Journey man waited for the monster to make the first move.

Instead, Vailret did.

In true Game spirit he should have bellowed out a cry of challenge, but Vailret moved silently as he leaped forward. He jammed his short sword all the way up to its hilt, through the back plates of the Slac, into its kidney, and up into its pulsing heart. The tip of the sword pushed out through the reptilian chest. The Slac general gurgled in surprise and sprayed black blood out of its mouth.

“Stabbing in the back may not be fair,” Vailret said, “but since when have Slac ever fought fair?”

The monster bellowed as it weakened, trying to jab backward with its elbows. But Vailret let go of his sword and stepped away. With a bestial grunt, the Slac fell to its knees. Journeyman bashed a rock-hard fist into its forehead. “Bah, humbug!”

Vailret blinked in shock. The hot Slac blood burned his hands, and he tried to wipe it on his pants and tunic, leaving dark stains there.

Delrael groaned again. Journeyman glanced from him to Vailret, then squared his shoulders. The golem stared down the tunnel to the center of the mountain. “I must go on ahead now,” he said. “Take Delrael and get out of here.”

Vailret looked up. “What are you going to do?”

Journeyman’s lumpy clay brows twitched and knitted together. “I’m going to destroy Scartaris, as I was always meant to do. I’m glad I was created for this purpose. I’m glad I knew you. I will not be coming back.”

“What do you mean? Will it destroy you?”

Journeyman didn’t answer. Distressed, Vailret stood up. Delrael blinked and moved his head. He groaned.

“Wait—let Del take the Earthspirits. They’ll destroy Scartaris and you can stay here. You don’t need to sacrifice yourself.”

The golem squared his shoulders. “It is what I am. I was made for this task. I must sacrifice myself.”

“But it makes no sense!”

Journeyman stared with cavernous eyes. The clay eyelids blinked together, and he answered stiffly. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”

Vailret pulled his short sword from the dead Slac general, but looked at it, not knowing what to do. He couldn’t fight Journeyman.

The golem sighed. “Don’t you know yet who I am?” He cocked his head. “My predecessor was Apprentice, many turns ago. I am Journeyman.” He let the words hang in the air. The lights from deep in the grotto flashed weird patterns on the ceiling.

“I am the Stranger Unlooked-For.”

Gairoth jammed his knees in the cramped seat of Professor Verne’s steam-engine car. The vehicle toiled along up the hill toward Scartaris. He had seen the bat-creature take Delroth toward the mountain. The car moved faster than he could run.

Gairoth let his spiked club dangle outside the vehicle, pinging against rocks that bounced up from the ground. He saw the great cavern on the mountain face and knew that Delroth would have gone there.

“Haw!” he said. His arms were tired. His legs were tired. His feet were sore. He had traveled across the map to get Delroth. He would bash Delroth’s head in for causing him so much trouble.

He shifted his knees, banging against the steering levers, and squirmed. The seat was uncomfortable, soft and human, and the space too confined for his bulky arms and legs.

The vehicle rolled up the slope, paused as if to gather its bearings, and then moved on its preset course.

Beside him, the Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick.

Gairoth bounced up and down, anxious to see any sign of Delroth. But then the steam-engine vehicle caught its wheels against the strewn boulders and stopped halfway up the side of the mountain on a blind switchback. The steam engine hissed and belched curls of gray smoke out its stack, but it could not move forward.

Gairoth fumed and tried to stand up in the cramped front of the car. He banged his knee. He roared in wordless rage and waved his club in the air. He couldn’t even see the cave; one of the curved rock spires blocked his view.

He hopped out and tugged at the wheel, trying to get the vehicle to move on and find Delroth. He hollered at the useless car. When the vehicle made no response, Gairoth lashed out and kicked it with one big, bare foot.

The Sitnaltan weapon jarred on its seat, tipping over against the side of the car. The timer mechanism smashed and jammed. The ticking fell silent only seconds before its detonation was to occur.

Gairoth grumbled at the immobile vehicle and strode up the hill on foot.

Journeyman marched down the low-ceilinged path, heading deep into the mountain where Scartaris controlled his armies. The golem’s soft clay feet slapped on the stone floor. The temperature grew hotter around him.

His quest and his reason for existence had almost reached its end. He knew he would succeed.

“Please,” Journeyman had told Vailret, “I have enjoyed knowing you. I don’t want to overcome you by force. Take Delrael and head for the hills! I . . . don’t know exactly what I’m about to do or what will happen.”

Vailret had finally agreed to take Delrael with him, leaving the golem alone to face Scartaris.

Journeyman felt a buzzing around him, power flickering unseen in the air. His body tingled when he moved ahead. Lights and echoes and frightening images floated around him, as if Scartaris was trying to frighten him away. But nothing could stop him now. He molded a determined expression on his face, squaring his shoulders.

The prospect of fulfilling his purpose brought him to a peak of ecstasy he had not known before. He felt his secret weapon growing inside, pulsing, ready to be released.

The Rulewoman Melanie would be so proud of him.

Ahead, he heard the sound of grinding rock, a restless, awesome force. The passage opened up, and Journeyman emerged onto a ledge overlooking a vast pit, the heart of the mountain.

Below him lay Scartaris.

Immense, huge beyond comprehension, bathed in colors that would have blasted human eyes from their sockets. Fluorescent orange and yellow and burning pink. Scartaris was a swelling, pulsing blob of energy, shaped like a vast brain the size of a small mountain.

The golem sensed vibrations around him. The air itself throbbed and pushed at him as he stepped to the edge. The rock tensed, as if Scartaris could collapse the mountain on a whim, but Journeyman didn’t hesitate. He stood glaring down at the Outsider David’s monster. He planted his balled fists on his hips.

“You know I’m here, Scartaris. But you don’t know enough to be afraid,” he shouted down into the roar. The colors on the blob shifted and moved. Scartaris was listening to him.

He craned his head down on his flexible clay neck. “The Outsider David created you—and the Rulewoman Melanie created me. You show off your power in extravagance. I carry mine hidden. The Rulewoman placed it in me. She knows your vulnerability.”

Scartaris shifted and raised up. Disturbed rocks pattered down from the ceiling. All the air around Journeyman seemed like a bowstring ready to snap, but he continued, spilling his words like a well rehearsed speech.

“We are only imaginary characters created by the Outsiders. We have one great weakness, something none of us can withstand. It’s a simple thing, a speck of dust from Outside, a piece of another world that is so deadly to us.

“The Rulewoman Melanie brought it here, painted it into the map, inside me. It has made me see visions, made me speak of things beyond the boundaries of Gamearth.

“Now it must be released.”

Journeyman ran a finger down the length of his chest, pushing a crease into the soft clay like a long zipper. He plunged his hands into his own skin and split a seam down the middle. He opened himself up where his heart would have been. Out of the cracks spewed a powerful white light, blinding bright.

“Scartaris, behold the power of something you cannot possibly withstand. Gaze upon pure reality!”

The light blasted outward as the golem spread his chest wide, folding back his body to make a great window, showing his core.

“It worked!”

“What did you do, Mel!”

“God, look at that thing!”

“David, you’re sick. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s real! I can’t believe it—it’s real!”

“No, we’re real. And nothing there can stand it.”

Journeyman did not dare look himself, but he listened to the astonished voices. One of them set him trembling, and he recognized the Rulewoman Melanie. He felt the clay dissolving from the inside out as his core of reality poured out.

Scartaris made an agonized wail that ripped through the seams of the map itself and caused all the fighters on the battlefield to stagger on their feet. He lurched back, quivering against the jagged walls of the stone chamber. Journeyman knew he could not get away.

Scartaris could not withstand even the sight of naked reality. He began to wither and shrivel as parts of the great bulk sloughed away into nothing, fading.

Delrael felt his ears ringing with a roar of blood, and he could not focus his eyes. Somehow, Vailret was beside him, pulling him to his feet, dragging him out of the grotto. His vision went dim again, then sharpened around the edges.

Vailret bent over and picked up the silver belt on the floor. The Earthspirits! Pieces fell into place in Delrael’s mind.

“Del, can you hold this? Do you want to carry it?”

He grunted and nodded his head, but that made the rushing sound inside grow louder. The cold air snapped into his eyes, and after several breaths he felt more alert.

“Mindar—” he said. His voice came out in a croak.

“She’s dead,” Vailret answered. “She died de fending you from the Slac, I think. Is that what happened? Is that how you got injured?”

The memories came clear in his head, and Delrael stumbled on the steep path. Vailret caught him and held him up, thinking his cousin still too weak to run. Delrael hurried along—Vailret didn’t know the truth about Mindar. She would have wanted it that way.

“Yes. That’s what happened.”

Vailret led him down a steep, narrow path on the other side of Scartaris’s mountain, down to the black hex-line in front of the battlefield. They ran, and Delrael found his strength coming back. The dizziness drifted away from him. “Journeyman—?”

Vailret hesitated, then tugged on his cousin’s arm. They crossed the hex-line and staggered onto the soft dirt of the desolation terrain. “He’s gone to Scartaris, to use the Rulewoman’s weapon. He told us to run as far as we can.”

The other monsters on the battlefield seemed to have lost their heart for the fight. Delrael turned and looked up at the jagged lair of Scartaris. The strange lights were flashing in wild colors.

Gairoth stood panting in the opening of the grotto as he looked back out at the massed dim soldiers far below. He had climbed half the mountain, it seemed. His feet hurt. The wound in his ankle from the Slave of the Serpent throbbed and made him angry.

He didn’t know what the fighting was about, why the monsters had gathered. He only wanted to find

Delroth. He suspected the fighter had something to do with it all. Delroth always made trouble.

Inside the grotto bright lights flashed different colors from a tunnel at the far end. The sight gave him a headache. On the floor he saw two bodies, one woman and one Slac. He curled his lip.

He squinted his one eye and stared down the tunnel, but he could not make out the source of the flashing lights, the throbbing roar that clutched at the back of his head. Gairoth didn’t want to think about it. He was too tired and too angry.

The burning colors seemed to beckon him. Yes, Delroth must be down there, down in the tunnel. Gairoth stooped under the low ceiling. He would sneak up on Delroth, find him, and bash him. He made sure not to drag his club against the floor as he worked his way forward.

Gairoth thought of his lost dragon Rognoth and of his flooded cesspools. All Delroth’s fault. The ogre snarled and ground his teeth together as he stomped forward, then remembering the need for stealth, tried to move quietly again.

Gairoth squeezed the end of his spiked club. He had followed Delroth across the map, and now he would get his revenge.

But when he moved past the last turn, the ceiling opened up above him into a huge vaulted cavern. - He stopped and wheezed. The light danced in front of his eyes, some of it real, some of it burning reflections on his retinas.

He sensed something was wrong. Something was going on. The bright lights and the heat and the roaring power channelled into the center of the mountain seemed to be screaming, fighting back in ways that Gairoth could not understand.

Then he noticed Journeyman. The golem had his

back turned and stared down into the pit, shining something out of his chest.

The clay man had been with Delroth! Back in the forest, he had smashed Gairoth on the head and helped steal the little ylvan. The ogre frowned. If he could not get Delroth right now, he would at least get this clay man.

He stepped up behind Journeyman on the ledge, raised his club to his shoulder, and belched out a loud “Haw! Now I got you!”

He drew back his club to swing, smiling, peeling his thick lips away from brown teeth.

Startled, the golem turned around, pivoting on a flexible clay waist. Gairoth saw that he had opened up his chest—but his insides seemed to be a bottom less window, an opening shining out into some other place. He gawked at the vision, and for a fraction of a second he saw four humans crouched and staring down at him. Strange objects were scattered around the table along with food and colored dice.

“It’s Gairoth!”

Someone bumped over a glass and scrambled to catch it, spilling soda.

Gairoth gaped his mouth like a dying fish and then the reality of what he was seeing struck him. Bright light washed over him and into him.

He felt a blinding wonder, and despair, as his skin seared away, disintegrating into nothingness. A long, low “Awwwww . . . “ echoed in the air.

With nothing to hold it up, his spiked club dropped clattering to the ledge, bounced once, and pitched over to vanish in the molten blob of Scartaris.

But in the moment that Journeyman turned away, Scartaris seized the opportunity and flexed his remaining power.

He brought the entire mountain down upon Journeyman, sealing the reality beneath uncounted tons of rubble.

The earthquake threw Delrael and Vailret to the ground. Delrael rolled onto his back to watch the mountain collapse. The horned peaks toppled aside in an enormous tremor that shook the heart of the map itself.

The black hex-line split, and sections of terrain rocked and tilted upward at the seams, as if Gamearth were falling apart hexagon by hexagon. Delrael al most lost his grip on the silver belt in his hand.

The roar continued, then slacked off as gray white dust poured up into the darkened sky.

Then, from the broken rubble of the destroyed mountain seeped a glowing brilliant light—pinks and oranges and yellows, sprawled and oozing over the debris. The immense blob crawled out of the rocks and sat pulsing, as if peering down at the gathered army.

“Is that Scartaris?” Vailret gasped beside him, but the words made little sound in the thundering echoes of the air. Every creature on the battlefield stood hushed and staring.

Scartaris moved, looking enormous and frail at the same time, damaged and retaining only enough energy to keep himself alive. He slid and rolled down the rocky slope toward the disrupted hex-line.

Delrael thought for a moment that Scartaris would reach the cracked map and spill through to where he could annihilate the Outsiders. But Scartaris stopped and throbbed, heaving himself up. At the center of the blob Delrael could see glittering lights forming, like diamonds and stars, building up.

“It’s the metamorphosis!” he heard Vailret shout behind him. “Journeyman told us about it! Scartaris is going to end the Game right now!”

“You must take us!” the Earthspirits cried in a metallic voice from inside the belt. “Take us across the last hex-line! Then we will be released.”

The starbursts inside the giant blob grew brighter, fissioning with energy. Once Scartaris released his pent-up energy, he could wash the map clean of all terrain. Scartaris had lost his Game. He and the Outsider David had wanted to savor the victory, to let the vast monster army march across and lay waste to everything, but now Scartaris was forsaking that fun. He would obliterate them all and call himself the Game’s winner.

“Hurry! He is greatly weakened now,” the Earth spirits said. “Perhaps we can defeat him.”

Delrael ran toward the gaping hex-line, but the deep crack in the map cut him off from Scartaris.

From a corner of the broken hex-line, a black wind sprang up, pouring straight into the air. Swirling, it formed into three dark hooded figures. They stood vast and awesome, cavernous hoods covered their heads, shrouding their faces.

Delrael stumbled as he ran. The figures looked familiar and yet unfamiliar. He had never actually seen them, only their white counterparts.

“The Deathspirits will not allow you to end the Game, Scartaris,” the black figures said in unison.

“Play your feeble war games for terrain, but you will not destroy the map. We are bound by the Rules here, too. If you destroy Gamearth, we can not complete our own set of Rules. We are trying to escape from this existence. You may not interfere.”

The Deathspirits hovered tall and black. All the monsters on the battlefield stood in a hush, appalled and uncertain.

But the starburst lights built up further within Scartaris, growing in intensity.

Delrael scrambled ahead, stumbling on the new slope from the tilted hexagon of terrain. He saw himself struggling there, an unknown human fighter from across the map. No one knew he had come, but he appeared where he was needed, bearing the weapon to save Gamearth. Delrael smirked. “Maybe they’ll call me the Stranger Unlooked-For.”

He crawled toward the crack in the map. When he reached its edge, the black lip of desolation sliced down into nothingness, a broad gulf apart from the adjoining mountain terrain. He could not crawl across. He could not jump the void. His body was too exhausted to do more than move.

Scartaris’s internal lights grew blinding at the point of his devastating metamorphosis.

“We cannot cross the hex-line,” the Earthspirits said.

Delrael held the belt. “You’re not very much good, are you?” Then he threw the silver belt crafted by the old Sorcerers, a gift from his father Drodanis.

As it flew through the air across the hex-line, the silver links began to dissolve in white light. The three Earthspirits emerged just as their Deathspirit comrades swooped down upon Scartaris.

22. Stranger

“Let the Game go on forever, and may your score always increase!”

—Gamearth drinking toast

Three dazzling white figures rose into the air, hooded and powerful, billowing in the wind rising from the broken hex-line. They alternated with their dark counterparts.

Vailret stared at the Spirits, all that remained of the ancient race of Sorcerers. He had read so much about them, and now he saw them towering in front of his eyes. Both factions had fought each other for turn after turn in the early days of the Game. Now, the six Spirits had reunited for the first time since the Transition, on the site of their worst battles.

Without a word, they fell upon Scartaris before he could complete his metamorphosis.

The titanic battle was difficult to watch. Vailret squinted, but the intangible fighters became an inferno of power and blazing lights, black and white and colors. The sounds of a storm rang on the air. Chunks of rock and dust blasted into the air in backlashes of power.

Scartaris grew dimmer and smaller in the fray. The starbursts in his body twinkled and faded.

Tension built up like a spring being wound tighter and tighter. The six Spirits combined their power into one final assault.

And Scartaris fell.

A great flare of light blasted into the air, a geyser of luminous power that sprayed outward and then faded on the winds, swirling, as if trying to find some dark corner where it could hide. One high-pitched shriek echoed around the rubble of the mountains; the astonished horror in it sliced through Vailret’s bones.

The silence on the battlefield held back for a moment as the dawn itself seemed to gasp. A sudden cold wind blew by and then died away to nothing.

#

Professor Verne stood on the hillside, perplexed and angry. He rubbed his eyes. The flash from the battle of the Spirits and Scartaris left dancing colors on his vision, but he frowned with disappointment. The outcome of the battle didn’t really matter, though the Spirits seemed to be fighting with magic rather than something more sophisticated.

The Sitnaltan weapon had not worked. Something had gone wrong.

“But it should have been foolproof!” He placed his hands behind his back and paced in front of a boulder. “It had to work. Did I miscalculate something? What did I forget to take into account?”

He muttered to himself, parading ideas in front of his mind. He could imagine nothing that would lead to such a failure. A burning curiosity began to grow. He stared at the crumbled mountain and squinted his eyes, wondering how difficult it would be to locate the steam-engine car in the rubble. He wanted to find the weapon and study it.

As dawn came up and lit the battlefield, Verne saw the monsters milling around, trying to organize themselves. The prime mover seemed to be the awesome manticore marching about, rallying the army of Scartaris.

Verne blew through his lips as he looked at the manticore. “What a hodgepodge,” he thought. “Man’s head, lion’s body, scorpion tail—probably has the brain of a cactus or something.” To him, it showed clearly how little the Outsiders themselves understood the basic precepts of biological sciences.

Scartaris was destroyed. Part of the map was disrupted, and he had no idea what effect such titanic forces would have on Gamearth and the Rules themselves. Perhaps it would allow technology a bit more freedom to operate. Perhaps he could fix the weapon, or dismantle it. He couldn’t just leave it there.

But the growing light reminded him how exposed he was on the barren terrain, with nothing but the monsters to see him. He wondered how he could possibly hide from Scartaris’s entire army.

#

Delrael crawled back toward Vailret, trying to keep his balance on the tilted terrain. Both of them stood panting with exhaustion and the aftereffects of terror.

Around them the stunned monsters wandered about, no longer in the grip of Scartaris. Only the manticore had a purpose, growling orders and trying to terrify the other demons into ranks again.

Delrael wondered how long the relative calm would last. The sky itself was a whirlwind of chaos, overloaded with power dissipating up and out of the map’s boundaries.

Delrael could see no sign of the six Spirits, or of Scartaris.

The illusion army of human fighters shimmered and melted away as Bryl released the Air Stone. Some of the monster soldiers made angry noises, but most didn’t notice in their own confusion.

Hundreds of slaughtered demon fighters lay on the ground, killed by their own weapons and the firepowder bombs. Thousands of dead animals, birds, insects covered the sand, as if a part of the black cloud had settled to the earth. Pools of red mud dried slowly in the dim sunlight.

The surviving animals and birds gathered in a thinner, less-organized black cloud that floated up and drifted off. They struck out across the desolation back to the forest and grassland terrain.

“Scartaris is dead,” Vailret whispered. He grinned and clapped a hand on Delrael’s shoulder. “Scartaris is dead! We finished our quest.”

Delrael looked uneasily at the gathering of monsters that stood angry and leaderless. “I still don’t like this. We’d better find Bryl.”

Vailret nodded, and they hurried back along the edge of the battlefield, trying to escape the notice of Scartaris’s surviving fighters.

Then the air in front of them rippled. Delrael thought that heat shimmers rose up from the warming sands, but white mist swirled above them, condensing until it resolved into the transparent outlines of the three Earthspirits, flickering like a vision on the breeze.

The Spirits looked tenuous and fragile, much less substantial than when they had first appeared to Delrael in the forest. That night seemed so long ago now. That was before he had known Tallin. Before he met Mindar.

The Earthspirits spoke. “Scartaris is destroyed, and we still live. With the aid of the Deathspirits and the Stranger Unlooked-For, we did not need to sacrifice ourselves.

“But we are weak now. We must go dormant for many turns to recover our strength.”

The Spirits wavered, faded for a moment, and then rose up again. The tilted hexagon of terrain settled under Delrael’s feet and he stumbled. The other monsters stood uncertain and afraid of the giant hooded forms.

“By destroying Scartaris and unleashing power of such magnitude, the map has suffered severe damage. As have the Rules themselves. They are twisted and loosened.

“We have proved to the Outsiders that Gamearth is as strong as their own powers. That is a profound victory. Even now, the Deathspirits are using this to their advantage. Perhaps they will mold their own reality.”

Delrael looked across the battlefield to see Bryl running toward them, drawn by the towering forms of the Earthspirits. Delrael waved his hands to show that he had seen him. Vailret squinted up at the Spirits with an expression of awe on his face.

“To show our gratitude, we will twist the Rules even now. The Outsider David is stunned by his defeat. We can do things the other Players will not notice, for now.

“Your quest is over. You have gained experience and won the battle. We will return you to your home. If only we were not so weak, we could do more. . .”

The Slac regiments had pulled themselves together again and rallied around the manticore. Several other monsters rebelled or moved too slowly, but the Slac cut them down with their own weapons.

“Gamearth is ours!” the manticore bellowed.

Then the Earthspirits swept their billowing sleeves through the air. Delrael felt a harsh wind pour into his body, his bones. The air dissolved around him. He felt dislocated and cold—

#

—and the terrain became the path leading up Steep Hill to the Stronghold. The morning around him was deathly quiet. He heard only the sounds from the forest.

The village seemed deserted and silent. All the people were hiding. Something had happened.

Bryl and Vailret appeared beside him. Both stumbled, suddenly finding themselves disoriented on the sloping path. “We’re back home!” Bryl said. He fell to his knees. He looked exhausted

“I wonder where Tareah is.” Vailret looked around him, getting his bearings. He started up the hill.

“Something’s wrong,” Delrael said. He strode up the hill. His body was exhausted, but he felt revitalized just by being back home.

They neared the top of Steep Hill. The forest pressed around them, thick and ready to conceal many things. They still heard no sounds. Delrael felt like a stranger outside his own home.

When he saw what remained of the Stronghold—the burned buildings, the shattered walls—he stopped and felt sick inside. “We shouldn’t have left them,” he whispered. “We shouldn’t have left them all alone. They were defenseless!”

Suddenly, seven other characters, men and women heavily armed, leaped out of the forest terrain, pointing arrows, spears, and swords at them.

Delrael whirled and straightened, yanking free his own notched sword. Then he stared as he recognized, behind the armor and the weapons and the battle-hardened stares, Mostem the baker, young Romm the farmer, and others from the village.

“It’s Delrael!” Tareah cried. “And Vailret! They’re back.”

Other villagers cheered as they emerged from the forest where they had been practicing and lying in ambush. They seemed terrified of an actual fight but ready to defend their homes.

Delrael stared at the wreckage of the Stronghold, at the fighting force Tareah had managed to put together. She walked up to stand next to Vailret. “I missed you.” She glanced at Delrael and answered quickly, “Both of you.”

Bryl shuffled his feet, scowling and looking out of place.

“I’m sorry about the Stronghold. Scartaris destroyed it. Tarne is dead.” She sighed and lifted her chin, showing her new strength. “But we’ve sent messengers to all the other villages. We’re gathering an army. We’re getting ready to fight.”

Delrael saw a proud determined look in her eyes that reminded him of something he had seen in Mindar.

“The Outsiders won’t ever catch us unprepared again,” Tareah said.

Delrael smiled and looked up at the sky, wishing the Outsiders were watching. “If they want to fight against us, I hope they know what they’re getting into.”

Epilogue

Scott grabbed David’s arm and pulled him over to the sink while the others stared in shock. He flipped on the cold water tap and pushed David’s raw hands under the running faucet. David made no sound, but his hands were burned, red and blistered, from when the map had. . .exploded on them.

Scott tended David stiffly, astonished. He went through the motions of first aid as though it could keep him distracted from thinking—from thinking about what had happened at the end of the Game.

Tyrone stuck his head under the table and came back up, eyes wide. “The burn goes all the way through the wood!” he said. “Wow!” Then he paused and swallowed. “What’ll I tell my mom? You’re going to all have to back me up.”

“And say what?” Scott asked. “That we were just playing a game but it fought back at us? They’ll say I made some explosive with my chemistry set or something.” He snorted. Water from the tap splashed on the left lens of his glasses. “I haven’t played with my chemistry set since eighth grade.”

Melanie stared at the map. A great section of the terrain was burned black and broken. A dark, charcoaled blot had burned through the map, through Tyrone’s table. He groaned and got a damp cloth to try and wipe away the dark stain. When Tyrone slid the map board sideways, a couple of hexagons fell loose from the edge like tiles in a mosaic.

But that was impossible too, because Melanie had painted on a smooth piece of wood. She had drawn the hex-lines with a drafting pencil. The map couldn’t fall apart exactly along the lines. . . .

But Melanie found herself feeling elated, smug. “Well, David? Are you ready to give up now? Scartaris is destroyed. You lost. That means we keep on playing.”

Over by the sink David stared at his burned hands and kept them under the water. “I still have my army of monsters. There’s still Verne’s weapon, on my territory now.” He yanked his hands away from Scott and stood dripping on the kitchen floor. “Now your characters are going to have to fight against me.”

David twisted his head to look at her, and Melanie jumped back. For a moment, she swore his eyes were blazing yellow and pupilless. He turned back to dry his hands.

Melanie swallowed, blinking her eyes until she felt confident again. “After this—” she indicated the devastated portion of the map. “I don’t think we need to be afraid of you anymore.

“Gamearth is learning how to fight back.”

The End

To Ginger LaJeunesse

(Charles Dickens said it best . . . )

Acknowledgments

Many people have offered encouragement and comments during the writing of this book. I would like to thank especially the members of my writers workshop for critiquing above and beyond the call of duty: Dan’l Danehy-Oakes, Michael C. Berch, Clare Bell, M. Coleman Easton, Lori Ann White, Gary Shockley, and Avis Minger. I also express my appreciation to Chuck Beason, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Doug Beason . . . for a whole bunch of things.

GAME’S END

Book 3 of the GAMEARTH Trilogy

Kevin J. Anderson

Prologue

David kept watching the clock. As Sunday afternoon ticked toward evening, fear grew inside him, echoes of nightmares and impossible things. Tonight they would play the Game again—or it would play them.

The empty house buzzed with silence. David opened the curtains, showing the gray afternoon and the cold drizzle outside. Every once in a while, a gust of wind rattled the windows. The house felt fragile, as if at any moment some powerful outside being might crush the walls and sweep him away.

As he had done to characters on Gamearth.

David thought of the flat, colorful game-board that Melanie had painted. For the past two years, he and Melanie and Scott and Tyrone had acted out their adventures on Gamearth, following rules they had created and adapted from other game systems. They enjoyed their quests for treasure, their battles, their magic. They had fun. That was the primary rule they all agreed on—to have fun.

But as the four of them poured their imaginations into the world, built generation after generation of characters, backstitched history and made the entire place whole and real in their minds. The players created a synergy with their imagination, a force that had pushed their made-up world into a life of its own.

And Gamearth began to strike back at them.

David saw this sooner than any of the others. He suggested they all stop playing before it went further, before it got out of control. But the other players out-voted him. Scott, with his technical “Mister Science” mind, simply could not believe that anything supernatural would happen. Tyrone, with his delight in the game, noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

Melanie, though, recognized the same thing David did—but she ignored what could happen if Gamearth continued to grow in power, continued to gain its own identity. No, Melanie wanted to nurture it, watch in amazement as the Game took over their lives, breaking free from the restrictions the players placed on it. David had seen her eyes glaze over as Gamearth exerted its survival instinct on her.

David tried to create ways to squelch their creation, and Melanie fought against him with her characters. She placed them in conflict with everything he tried to do to save himself, to save them all. She refused to listen when he tried to explain it to her. David felt a shudder of desperation run through him.

The house felt gloomy from the cold and wet outside. David went to the fireplace and busied himself starting a fire, using some of the fragrant wood they kept in a cardboard box beside the hearth. He thought about turning the stereo on, but decided he would rather think in silence.

He lived with his dad, except for a few weeks in July when he went upstate to stay with his mother in her house trailer. Somehow he had escaped the game last summer, but perhaps Gamearth had not grown strong enough then.

David’s parents had been separated for three years, talking coldly on the phone every few months; but they had never gone through the actual process of getting divorced. Both of his parents kept their feelings so well shuttered from him that David felt isolated even from the conflict. At times he thought he might actually enjoy it if they tried to make him take sides.

But instead, all his mother did was engage him in pleasant, empty conversations about girlfriends and movies; and his father just voiced stern reproofs about David’s falling grades in the last semester—when the Game had started to take over. But David’s father seemed to be saying those things out of an obligation he felt, not from any deep concern.

David sighed and crumpled a few sheets of old newspaper. He piled kindling and other debris from the bottom of the box on top of the paper.

His dad had gone away for the weekend on a business trip, asking David if it was all right to be left alone. His tone left unvoiced the comment that even if David did express an objection, his father wasn’t really willing to change his plans anyway.

But David certainly didn’t mind being alone this night, when they would play the Game. He felt terrified of what might happen, but he didn’t want anyone else there to watch. No other. . . outsiders.

He reached for the long fireplace matches, then he turned on the gas lighter below the logs. Hissing blue flames swirled up to lick against the bark. He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Over the past two weeks, Gamearth had gotten more vicious in its retaliation, going beyond subtle hints and turning instead to blatant displays of its growing power over the real world. Showing how it could defeat them.

Melanie’s characters Delrael and Vailret had gone on a quest to create a vast river as a barrier between the east and west sides of the map. As that had happened, the four outside players watched a blue line suddenly trace across the painted wooden game-board where the flow of water would have gone. Then, in the battle at the end of the evening, the dice started rolling by themselves, bouncing up and down. By magic, the magic they had put into Gamearth.

During the following week, all four players experienced identical dreams, watching other parts of the Game unfold even when they were not playing. The Sorcerer Enrod took the Fire Stone and tried to destroy the land on the other side of the Barrier River, only to be stopped by the Deathspirits. They had never played out that scenario—yet all of them remembered it.

David had planted a creature called Scartaris on the map—a force to absorb the energy from Gamearth, to bring it back to where it was merely a role-playing game, where it was safe: just a painted map and made-up characters, all put together for fun.

But Gamearth reached out and played Melanie like a puppet. She bent and twisted the rules in ways that David had not considered. In secret, she had added a part of their real world into one of her characters, a golem named Journeyman, like another ancient character, the Stranger Unlooked-For, who had ruined David’s first attempt at defeating Gamearth.

But that had been before David got serious about his own mission. And now that he understood some things, he could use the same tactics.

David cleared away the family room floor, made an open spot where they would play that night. It was his turn to host. The fire snapped. The earth-tone carpeting seemed to absorb the warmth. A gust of wind rattled the windows again.

Gamearth was waiting. It was anxious to play, to manipulate them again. And as it became real by itself, Gamearth would no doubt come out to this world, the real world, and begin to Play them. Gamearth would retaliate for all those things that David and the other players had done to their imaginary characters.

He could not let that happen.

David considered simply not showing up. If he didn’t play, then the others couldn’t play—and Gamearth could not go on. It was the four of them, the synergy of the four distinct personalities that came together to play, week after week—that had caused Gamearth to come alive. If he didn’t play, the same ingredients wouldn’t be there.

David frowned, then ran his hands through his dark hair, finding his fingers damp with perspiration. As chilly as it was outside, he still felt sweat from his own fear.

This could be simpler than all his plans to incapacitate Gamearth. His attack with Scartaris had weakened the Game greatly. The map itself was fragile now, and he sensed that Gamearth grew ready to use desperate measures.

If he was here when the others arrived, together they would somehow convince him to keep playing. He knew it. They had always done that before. But if he cancelled the game, claimed that he was sick—not too difficult, since he had been having nightmares all week. Inside his head he envisioned Gamearth characters looking more vivid and solid to him than any of the people he truly knew.

He couldn’t face another night of this.

Before he could change his mind, David stood up and went to the telephone. He would call them all, tell them the Game was off, tell them to stay at home. If it worked, the Game would be off forever. A stalemate, perhaps, but better than an outright defeat. . .and the loser would lose all if they kept playing.

He picked up the phone. It felt hard and clammy against his hand. He would save Melanie for last—she would be the difficult one.

David started to dial Tyrone’s number, but nothing happened. He listened, but got no dial tone. He hung up again and tried punching buttons. He could hear no response; the phone was dead.

Moving stiffly, David went to the other phone in the kitchen. It, too, remained silent. He flicked the cradle up and down several times, but he got no sound on the line.

He felt a shiver up his spine, and he turned to stare out the kitchen window at the slick driveway and the street beyond. In the dimness, orangish streetlights had flickered on. The storm didn’t look very bad, but maybe some falling branch had shorted the phone lines.

Something inside him knew that wasn’t the case.

He pulled on his black denim jacket, grabbed his car keys, and went through the garage to his old car in the driveway. Fine, then—this was going beyond courtesy.

He simply wouldn’t be there when the others showed up. He made sure he had all the lights off in the house, all the doors locked. David would be gone, at a movie somewhere, or maybe just out driving.

When he stepped outside, drizzle spattered his face, making him squint. He grabbed the handle of the driver’s-side door of the red Mustang, got in, and pulled the door shut. The hinges squeaked. But inside the car he felt safe and comfortable. He could smell leftover scents of the rain, candy wrappers on the floor and in the ash tray, the old odor of upholstery—it all seemed reassuring to him. A gust of wind rocked the car frame, like a giant invisible hand of some outside player ready to pick it up and move it.

David slid the key into the ignition and turned it. The starter made a single click as it cranked, but otherwise the car made no other sound. Again and again, he twisted his wrist, jamming the key around. The keys clinked together, and the wind made noises outside. The engine remained dead.

“Come on! Start!” David hissed through his teeth.

But the Mustang refused even to try. David kept it running in perfect condition. It always started for him. This was no coincidence.

With a balled fist, David pounded the cold dash and gritted his teeth. In angry despair, he dropped his head against the steering wheel, then jerked back up as a blast from the horn startled him.

He could walk, he could go somewhere else. He had never tried hitchhiking before. But he knew Gamearth wasn’t going to let him get away. No matter what he tried to do. The Game held him. He had to play.

Blinking back needle-sharp tears, David got out of the car and slammed the door again. Standing in the driveway as the drizzle came down on his cheeks, he felt the wind in his hair, cutting through the denim of his jacket. He growled under his breath, “All right then, damn you! I tried to end this. I tried to cut my losses and yours.”

He sucked in another deep breath. “You better be prepared to win, because this time I’m playing for keeps!”

He waited for some sort of answer, but the rain only whipped up harder and colder.

1. Prisoner of War

“Such monsters I have seen, Victor! It makes me doubt the Outsiders have even the slightest understanding of biological principles. But no matter how fantastical these monsters may seem, they are certainly dangerous, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

—Professor Verne, Les Voyages Extraordinaires

(unpublished journal)

Professor Jules Verne had a difficult time maintaining his self-respect as the Slac guards hustled him forward. He stumbled, and his legs were weak and shaking. The monsters jabbed him in the ribs with their sharp knuckles. They cast him on the flagstoned floor in the main hall of Tairé.

Verne bit back an annoyed retort and allowed himself only a muffled grunt of indignation. Over the past several days his captors had pummeled him with the polished ends of their clubs every time he became too vocal in his complaints. Now he merely thought up extravagant insults instead.

Verne stood up and cleared his throat, still keeping his eyes closed. He brushed at the front of his indigo and brown plaid greatcoat, but the coat would need serious cleaning and pressing before he could feel presentable again.

In front of him in the firelight waited Siryyk the manticore, rumbling deep in his throat.

The leader of all the monsters towered twelve feet above the floor, though he remained seated on his haunches. His huge, maned head showed a smashed and distorted human face, with two curved horns protruding from the forehead. Siryyk’s body was built like a lion’s, but was as massive as an elephant. His front claws glittered like curved knives, and the segmented tail curled around his legs was silvery, wider than a man’s thigh. A wicked stinger tipped its bulbous end, like an enormous scorpion’s. Flickers of blue lightning traced the stinger and the tail, as if the manticore could barely control the power it contained.

The venomous tail flinched when Verne gazed up at Siryyk. Sparks snapped against the flagstones, highlighting other blackened spots from other times the beast had twitched his tail in anger or annoyance.

“I brought you here, human, to give you the honor of assisting me in winning the Game.” Siryyk’s voice was deep and liquid, as if he were gargling with some caustic substance. He reached forward with one forepaw and scraped his claws against the stone.

Verne blinked in shock and cleared his throat. “But that’s not why I came here at all.”

A bright light and an explosion echoed from the floor as the manticore smashed his tail down. “I don’t believe I asked your preference.”

Verne tried to hold his ground, but he felt overwhelmed by everything he had seen and done in the last few turns. Under dreams and guidance from the Outsider named Scott, he and his colleague Professor Frankenstein had constructed a new kind of weapon. Verne had driven a steam-engine car all the way from Sitnalta to where the growing, destructive force of Scartaris appeared ready to destroy Gamearth. The Sitnaltan weapon would surely eliminate Scartaris—but it was also so powerful it might destroy Gamearth as well. That thought had not occurred to Verne until much later.

He had driven his vehicle to the desolate battlefield where Scartaris had gathered his horde. Verne set its detectors on auto-pilot, adjusted the timer for his weapon. But a meddling ogre had appeared out of the battle, intent on something else entirely, and had tossed Verne out of the car. Taking over, the ogre rode the steam-engine vehicle on its way toward Scartaris.

The Sitnaltan weapon had never gone off as expected.

Verne, perhaps too perplexed for his own good, but obsessed with gathering all information he could about the performance of his own device, remained behind. Before returning to Sitnalta in disgrace, he had to discover what had gone wrong.

The following day, he tried to find the steam-engine vehicle in the wreckage of the mountains. After hours of searching, he had found it intact among the broken rocks with the weapon still primed. But before Verne could look at the mechanism and determine anything about the malfunction, other scavenging monsters had captured him.

At times, he felt like kicking himself for his own stupidity, his own naivete. After the giant battle during which the Earthspirits and Deathspirits appeared and defeated Scartaris, Verne had not concerned himself with the remainder of the horde or what they might do if they found him. They seemed of no consequence to him. He couldn’t be bothered with details like that when the question of the failed weapon loomed so large.

Unfortunately, the monsters didn’t see it that way.

A troop of reptilian Slac had surrounded him among the deep shadows and broken rocks, drawing weapons. One of them carried a sputtering torch, and Verne could see their slitted eyes in the light. For an instant, the professor thought they were going to execute him without even attempting to communicate.

Several Slac drew dull black arrows; one pulled out a pronged knife. They hissed and drooled and stepped toward him—all Verne could do was stand, gaping in disbelief. He had not thought his predicament through, and he hated to die while looking so stupid. The Sitnaltans admired his ideas, but some had chuckled, with good reason apparently, at their “absent-minded” professor.

But then the commander of the monster band, a powerful general named Korux, had ordered them to stop their attack.

“All of the other human characters have disappeared. Their army is gone. This is the only one of the enemy we have found.” Korux looked at the Slac while Verne stood frozen, waiting to hear what he would say. “Take him. With minimal damage.”

The Slac general stood staring at Verne and narrowed his yellow yellow eyes. “We must squeeze information out of this one. We can learn what happened here, and learn how we could have been so badly defeated by an army that doesn’t even exist!”

Professor Verne did not resist when they grabbed his arms and prodded his sides with the blunt ends of their weapons. He watched with great dismay as the misshapen creatures grabbed the delicate Sitnaltan weapon—so close to its detonation—and passed it among themselves as the spoils of war.

Korux ordered his underlings to take the steam-engine car. Verne twisted his head to glance back at the once-beautiful red vehicle of Sitnalta, with its cushioned seats, the tattered canopy to shade him from sunlight during long days of driving, the great brass boiler that provided the car’s power. The others pushed the vehicle along the blasted terrain, grunting and struggling against the rocks and broken ground.

So Verne had been taken prisoner, sweating, dirty, and hungry. Bound in rusty chains, he could barely move as his captors hustled him along, treating him like a piece of walking baggage.

The horde had gathered itself together once more under the leadership of the hulking manticore, and they marched westward, away from the dawn and toward the city of Tairé.

Verne spent several days in confusion and despair. His captors forced him to eat the bubbling black porridge they slopped in front of him. It tasted of sulfur and ashes; the water they gave him to drink was warm and brackish. His hands were bound, his legs were shackled.

The professor’s mind remained free, though—a powerful advantage to him. But he had no resources, no way he could invent a means for himself to escape.

Finally, after the monster army reached the city of Tairé, Siryyk the manticore took time in the evening to summon Verne, his prisoner of war.

Without explanation, two hulking creatures with leathery shrivelled skin and pinched faces hauled Verne from where he had been trying to sleep against a broken wall. They dragged him forward, pushing, elbowing, jabbing, forcing him to stumble as fast as his legs would move. He had given up asking questions of his captors—he just watched and waited, cooperating as little as possible, as much as necessary.

His escorts led him into what appeared to be a great banquet hall supported by stone pillars. The walls were painted full of colorful frescoes showing humans at work building a city. All of the pictures had been defaced, by white skittering claw marks or splatters of black tar, smears of ash or excrement.

The hall looked empty and damaged. The vaulted ceiling left skylights open to a cold, star-studded night. Along the rafters hung glazed clay pots, some broken, some holding scraggly dead plants.

Firepits had been built deep in the floor, burning oil-soaked support beams from demolished buildings. Dancing orange flames reflected on the painted wall, making sharp shadows. Verne blinked in the thick, smoky air, trying to clear his vision.

Siryyk the manticore growled down at him, leaning forward and showing his sharp teeth in the firelight. Verne kept his mouth shut. He knew how delicate a line he walked as a prisoner—any time Siryyk liked, he could order Verne’s head sliced off and leave his body for the other monsters to feed on. The other characters in Tairé had not been so fortunate.

Beside the manticore, the Slac general Korux stepped out. He was clothed in a black, oily garment; tassles marked the sleeves, and glints shone from blood-red gems stitched on one breast. Verne got the impression that Korux had risen in rank because of the professor’s successful capture.

Korux spoke from beside the manticore. “We know who you are, Professor Jules Verne of Sitnalta.” The Slac voice sounded thin and rasping after the manticore. “We know why you came here.”

Verne straightened in surprise, trying to keep his expression neutral. Was Korux bluffing? Verne had never spoken about his past—in fact, the monsters had never asked him, or interrogated him in any way. He thrust out his chin, making his gray beard bristle.

Korux raised his left hand and clicked the claws together. Two other Slac appeared from outside the scarred banquet hall, grunting and carrying between them the small but extraordinarily heavy weapon that he and Frankenstein had built. Verne’s eyes widened as he saw the polished cylinder of whitish metal taken from the ruined Outsiders’ ship, a set of red fins, a bullet-shaped brass top with lights and dials and gauges that might tell Verne what had gone wrong with the detonation. And also how many seconds remained on the bomb’s timer.

Scrawled on the side in black grease-pencil stood the number 17/2, the patent number that Professors Verne and Frankenstein would have obtained for their awesome weapon. But they had sworn never to build another one. They had intended for the device to be used only once, only to destroy Scartaris.

The manticore spoke up. “We have found your personal journals, Professor Verne. They are very interesting. Les Voyages Extraordinaires. Is that some kind of code? Everything else is in plain language.”

Korux reached into his slick black garment and removed a battered volume. The cover looked bent; some of the pages were loose and shoved back into the binding—Verne’s own account of his extraordinary journey and the thoughts he had had while traveling across the map to reach Scartaris. It told everything about his mission and about the Sitnaltan weapon.

Verne stared at the journal in astonishment. It had been pounded into him throughout all his years of education that, for the posterity of other characters, he must keep records of all his ponderings, all his ideas, all the inventions that he might envision. The ideas concocted by any Sitnaltan inventor were for the benefit of Gamearth.

It had never occurred to Verne that those ideas might fall into the hands of an evil creature such as Siryyk. He had not imagined the possibility that, even if that happened, the manticore could actually read and comprehend the information!

“I am a fool!” he muttered to himself.

Siryyk was the chosen commander of all the monster troops. He had to be intelligent. Scartaris had selected him to lead the most gigantic army ever to appear on Gamearth. He was not a slavering, brainless beast.

The manticore scratched his claws on the flagstones. “I understand the magnitude of power that this weapon contains. The map of Gamearth holds many things of such power. I want them all, and I will do whatever is necessary to get them.” His distorted face took on a reflective expression.

“You see, when the six Spirits destroyed Scartaris and nearly obliterated themselves as well, all of Gamearth convulsed and broke. Something happened to the Rules. They may not hold as absolutely as they have in the past.

“And if the Outsiders do indeed plan to ruin Gamearth so that it troubles them no more—I intend to have all the protection I can. I do not know what effect your weapon or any of these other things, magical things, might have on the Outside. But if the end of the Game is coming, I will be the one with the best chance to survive.”

Siryyk lowered his head and hunched forward, widening amber eyes that looked the color of honey mixed with acid. Verne winced from the stench of the beast’s breath.

“Listen to me, Professor Verne,” the manticore continued. “The Outsider Scott may come to you in dreams and offer ideas—but I have dreams too. In my dreams, I can see the Outsider David. I know what he intends to do. And I can feel the anger, the desperation he feels toward us. I also know how it is breaking him. I am no longer certain how this is happening, whether he appears in my dreams, or if I appear in his!”

Verne said nothing in his surprise. The other monsters seemed to be listening, but made no move.

“I am doing what I can to thwart the Outsider David’s own plans, though he thinks that I am his ally.”

Verne cleared his throat. “Um, that is very. . .interesting, but I can’t help you. That’s all there is to it. Yes, I did construct the weapon, as you have learned from my own journals—but as you also know, it didn’t work! It malfunctioned, and I don’t know why. Obviously, my idea was wrong. The Sitnaltan weapon is no weapon at all.”

Siryyk stood up, and Verne could see the ripple of muscles running down his sandy leonine back. His huge shadow cast by opposing clusters of firelight rose in tandem against the bright frescoes on the wall, dominating them and swallowing them up.

“General Korux, would you please remove the prisoner’s left shoe.”

Making a husky sound deep in his throat, the Slac general moved forward, flexing his clawed fingers. Verne shrank back, but his two shrivel-skinned monster guards grabbed him by his bruised arms. Korux bent over and held Verne’s black shoe in both reptilian hands. After fumbling unsuccessfully with the laces, the Slac general snorted and used one claw to rip them out of the leather. Tossing the broken laces aside, he peeled off the shoe.

Verne’s foot was cramped and sweaty. He had not been able to change clothes, not even his socks, in days. But he felt no relief to be able to flex his toes now.

The manticore went to one of the firepits and, reaching into the coals with his massive hands, he pulled out a stubby, smoke-blackened dagger. Its blade glowed bright orange from the heat.

The twisted lips on Siryyk’s human face bent upward, exposing overlapping fangs in his mouth. “I am going to play a game with you, Professor Verne. I think you can repair whatever went wrong with this weapon. And if that is not the case, I think you can make another weapon. Something different, a giant destructive toy for me to play with. Judging by your journals, your mind is filled with useful ideas such as that.”

He looked down at the blade and placed his own thickly padded finger against the yellow-hot point. Verne winced as he heard the loud sizzle and smelled the wisp of smoke as the glowing metal ate its way into the manticore’s finger pad. Siryyk withdrew his hand, looked at the wound, and frowned but showed no other sign of discomfort.

“Now then, our game.” Siryyk looked around to the other monsters gathered at the entrance and standing along the walls. The manticore raised his voice.

“Shall we take bets on how many of the Professor’s toes we will have to burn off before he agrees to cooperate with us?”

Verne swooned even as the monsters shouted out their bets.

Interlude: Outside

The other three players arrived together, keeping oddly silent, as if they could all feel the tension, too. David stared at Melanie, Scott, and Tyrone as they entered in one group; the back of his mind kept imagining ways that they had banded together against him. Gamearth had forced them into it. He narrowed his eyes, but Tyrone stepped into the front hallway, grinning as he shucked his damp jacket and laid it on the bench.

“I got it! I passed.”

David looked back at him, completely confused. “What are you talking about?”

“My driver’s license! I passed, just on Friday. I borrowed my dad’s car and picked up Scott and Mel.”

Melanie stood beside Scott. In her hands she held the large wooden map of Gamearth, wrapped in plastic to protect it from the drizzle. Her knuckles were white from her tight grip, as if she thought the map might be in danger.

“Good for you,” David said to him.

“Tyrone kept babbling about it all the way over here,” Scott said. He used the corner of his shirt to wipe the raindrops from his glasses. Melanie mumbled something and went straight into the family room, where she laid the map on the carpet. Her eyes were bright as she unwrapped the wet plastic and stared at the colorful patterns of Gamearth.

It looked as if a truck had run over it. Black stains showed the explosions of the great battle from the previous week, when Melanie’s golem-weapon named Journeyman, as well as Gamearth’s own Earthspirits and Deathspirits, had destroyed David’s greatest creation, Scartaris. Gamearth’s destructive power was plain for anyone to see, its ability to strike back at the outside world.

But the map also showed cracks and splits, jagged splinters at the edges. A few of the hexagonal segments of terrain split loose, like tiles in a mosaic—which was impossible, since they were merely a pattern painted on a smooth surface of wood.

David stood over the map, and Melanie pointedly refused to look at him. He felt sullen, afraid to wait and afraid to move on. As if mechanically, he went into the kitchen and brought out the bags of chips he had opened. Standing beside the stove island, he poured glasses of soda without asking what anyone wanted.

All their conversation felt forced. Everybody seemed as uneasy as he was, except for Tyrone.

Tyrone went back outside to his car, leaving the front door open. David felt a cold gust of wind and stared, annoyed. But Tyrone reappeared, holding a foil-wrapped platter.

“Wait until you guys taste this one! My masterpiece, I think. It’s got that imitation crab stuff, hot mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and sour cream. Goes great on those wheat crackers.”

“You sound like a commercial, Tyrone,” Scott muttered.

Tyrone didn’t seem to know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, so he changed the subject. “Okay, here’s the joke for this week. What goes ‘Ha! Ha! Ha. . .Thump!’?”

David set down another bowl of chips.

“Oh, brother, Tyrone—”

He grinned. “A man laughing his head off!”

Melanie sat cross-legged on the carpet beside her map, holding her soda in one hand. The firelight danced across the room. David left the lights on in the kitchen, but the fire was the only illumination in the family room. It seemed appropriate to play in the firelight.

Melanie tucked her long brown hair behind her ears and drew a deep breath. She looked at David with a petulant expression. “We all dreamed again this week, David. We talked about it in the car. You must have, too.”

“Every night,” Tyrone said. “Better than watching movies.”

“Tyrone, you’re such a dweeb,” Scott said, scowling. “This is real! Start taking it seriously. Even I remembered the dreams this time, and I never have dreams.”

David bristled. He spoke in a low and serious voice. “No, Scott, this is not real. All of you, can’t you understand? It’s just a game—we made it up! It’s not supposed to be real! And when a game goes beyond that, it gets dangerous. It’s time to stop.” He stifled an exasperated laugh. “You should look at yourselves. You guys are like puppets, pawns!”

Tyrone squatted on the floor and dumped their dice out of the suede pouch. Glittering different colors, they fell to the carpet, showing various numbers. Two of them fell next to the wooden game map.

“Well, I’m anxious to see how it all turns out,” Tyrone said. “This has been the absolute most intense game I ever imagined! My parents sure yelled at me for what happened to the kitchen table last week, though. They still can’t figure out what we did.”

David scowled; he could have guessed how Tyrone would react. In fact, after their years of playing together, the four of them had grown so close that they all knew how each other would react. They all knew the world of Gamearth and its characters and the rules of the Game inside and out. That was how they could continue playing with their own unorthodox methods, enjoying their adventures without any godlike game-master arbitrating their moves. Each of them watched over certain sections of the map. It was a strange system, developed for their own group. . .for a very unusual fantasy world.

A fantasy world that was coming alive.

David decided to remain silent, instead of voicing the same old arguments, the same objections. Gamearth had too great a hold on the others, and David would never convince them. Not by arguing.

He would have to use the same tricks Melanie used. He could come up with his own twists in the rules. It was time to play dirty.

He would win the Game in his own way.

2. Combined Forces

“Combat is very important in the Game. A character’s chances for victory are improved by thorough training; an army at large may increase its probability of success simply by being prepared.”

—The Book of Rules

Tareah opened her eyes and uncurled her fingers. The nails had dug into her palms from the strain, and black spots of exhaustion still fluttered in front of her vision.

When she saw the piles of new supplies that had magically appeared from her spell, Tareah let out a sigh of relief. She slumped back against the ruined wooden wall, the only part of the Stronghold still standing.

According to Rule #8, a magic-user character on Gamearth was allowed only three spells a day. But Tareah held three important magical artifacts, which increased the daily allotment of whatever spells she cared to cast. She had been using all those extra spells just to replenish the stockpiles in the Stronghold and the storage sheds in the village. Delrael’s growing army would need all the supplies before they could march out against the enemy; and she felt glad to be doing something to help, rather than just an observer.

Tareah possessed the sapphire Water Stone, whose powers controlled water and the weather; she also had the Fire Stone, an eight-sided ruby that could control fire. The Sentinel Enrod, his mind twisted by Scartaris, had come to the Barrier River to destroy the western land with the Fire Stone’s power; but the Deathspirits had stopped him, cursing him to push his raft back and forth across the river for the rest of the Game. The Spirits stripped him of his gem and gave it to Tareah, the only other full-blooded Sorcerer on all of Gamearth. These two Stones increased her spell allotment from three to five per day.

Finally, she also kept the four-sided Air Stone, the diamond that had been lost many turns before but then found by Gairoth the ogre and his runt dragon Rognoth. Gairoth had used its powers to take over the Stronghold, but Delrael defeated him in battle. Later, with the Air Stone’s powers of illusion, Bryl had created an imaginary army to engage the monster horde of Scartaris.

“My turn,” Bryl said beside her, holding out his hand. Dressed in his blue cloak, the half-Sorcerer looked old and fragile. As soon as Tareah handed him the Stones, Bryl’s spell allotment also would increase to six per day. She enjoyed manipulating the Rules like that; it would have made her father proud.

By the time Delrael had returned to the Stronghold from his quest, telling of the vast army of monsters that would soon march across the map, Tareah had already begun training the villagers. They had seen the threat of Scartaris in their own homes.

Taking charge again, Delrael ordered the manufacture of new weapons. Derow the blacksmith worked himself to exhaustion, hammering out blade after blade; others made spears and arrowheads, bows, shields. The forests around Steep Hill were picked clear of suitable wood.

Couriers went out to the known surrounding villages, spreading the warning and calling all able characters to meet at the Stronghold site for training. Delrael meant to put together an army, a last defense for Gamearth, the greatest rallying of human characters since the epic battles of the Scouring.

War supplies came in from mining villages, smelted iron ore in long rods, ingots of bronze and copper. Many characters rejoiced to see the Game mounting toward a tremendous showdown. Some of them wanted to have fun.

Delrael drilled all the incoming trainees. The top of the Hill—where the Stronghold had once stood tall and undefeated—was cleared of debris from the outbuildings. In its place stood a training field: sword posts and archery targets, single-combat practice grounds, straw dummies for spear thrusts. After the first few days, the noise and constant shouting, the clang of weapons, the outcries of exertion or victory, seemed an unrelenting drone on Tareah’s ears.

Through it, Tareah watched Delrael grow confident, swelling with his new role, as if he had been waiting for this all his life. She thought of how his father Drodanis must have appeared. It gave Tareah a thrill to feel she actually knew someone like that. She had spent so many years reading the legends.

Her father Sardun had kept her trapped in the Ice Palace, holding her in the body of a child for thirty years, hoping that another full-blooded Sorcerer could be born through the vagaries of the Game’s probabilities. She had been alone with the Sorcerer relics, wandering the rainbow corridors of blue ice, looking out at the white wastelands of frozen terrain, with hexagons of mountains in the distance. She had stared out at the mosaic map of Gamearth and wondered what else was happening across the world. She never imagined she would see as much as she already had.

Sardun had at one time even earmarked her for marriage to Enrod of Tairé. But Enrod and Sardun had a great many differences and arguments about the past, about the future, and how the Sorcerer race fit into it all. Tareah had never met Enrod. He never came to the Ice Palace to see the history of the Game that Sardun had collected since the Transition.

Now, beside the broken Stronghold wall, Tareah stood up and brushed at her knees. The joints ached, but not as badly as before. Her body had finally stopped growing. When her father died and the Palace melted into broken chunks of ice, the spell binding her in the shape of a little girl faded away. She began a rapid catch-up with her own body, growing into an adult woman through weeks of wracking pain as her joints and muscles and bones tried to accommodate the drastic growth.

Tareah stood tall and beautiful, with long pale hair and fair skin of the sort meant for colder hexagons of terrain. She knew Delrael found her attractive, and Vailret could barely speak a coherent sentence around her in his charming shyness. She caught sidelong glances from several other male characters, but they were too much in awe of Gamearth’s last surviving Sorcerer female; they could not even approach her.

Tareah felt odd around these human characters. She was with them, yet apart from them. For three decades her father had forced her to study the history of the Game. He made her learn the Rules inside and out, with all their nuances and all their implications. Sardun made her believe that the Game had something special in store for her, that she was not an ordinary person. So Tareah forced herself to remain aloof from the other characters.

Next to her, Bryl muttered something under his breath. She saw him sitting with his eyes squeezed shut and his lips clamped tight, saying a spell to himself. Another pile of supplies winked into existence next to the others.

When Bryl leaned back with a sigh, Tareah said, “I’m going to find Vailret.” She glanced up, and in the failing light of dusk, she saw Delrael striding among the other fighters in the training area, helping one woman with her sword stroke, showing a young man how better to hold his bow. Delrael would be busy here until there was not enough light in the sky to see by.

She left the clamor of practice battles behind and went down the hill path toward the village, moving quickly to keep her balance on the slope. The air had grown chilly already. Winter was coming soon.

In the village below, tents and temporary shelters had been set up for all the new inhabitants of the area. Inside the tent enclosures, flickering light from braziers and candles made moving shadows of the characters within.

New tents appeared every day as trainees and able-bodied helpers arrived at the Stronghold village. Word of Delrael’s rekindled training spread across the western half of the map. Tareah remembered stories of Drodanis and his brother Cayon and their own legendary training sessions. Characters had come from hexagons around to undergo instruction before setting off through catacombs and dungeons in the simple treasure-hunting adventures in the early days of the Game. Drodanis had met Delrael’s mother Fielle among his trainees.

Delrael’s exercises appeared frantic and desperate by comparison, with the fate of the entire map looming over their heads. Delrael brought the characters together, found what they could do, and had them practice with each other. They sharpened skills, traded hints and strategies, anything that might help in a pitched battle or single combat against the army of Scartaris.

Tareah saw light glowing from the home of Mostem, who baked bread and fruit pastries. Mostem was a widower and had three daughters, any one of whom he constantly tried to convince either Delrael or Vailret to marry. Since the destruction of the Stronghold, Vailret and his mother Siya had lived in the village with the baker’s family.

One of Mostem’s daughters opened the door at Tareah’s knock. The three daughters each looked the same; Tareah could tell them apart only by the varying lengths of their dusty-brown hair. All three were squat, with turned-up noses and narrow, dull eyes. Kind enough, the type who would be described in their later years as “sturdy women.” The girl blinked, as if trying to remember what she was supposed to say when guests came to the door.

“I need to see Vailret,” Tareah said. “Is he working in here?”

Mostem’s daughter opened the door wider. Tareah went in, paying her no further attention. The smells of fresh bread and yeast filled the main room, along with warmth from the wall on the other side of which Mostem housed his big ovens.

Vailret looked up at her and grinned, self-consciously brushing back his straw-colored hair. He had a thin nose and bright eyes that squinted too often. “Hello, Tareah!”

“Welcome, Tareah,” Siya said from her seat against the wall. “While you’re talking to my son, I’d appreciate a little help here.” She motioned at a mound of weapons and armor in need of repair beside her.

After watching the Stronghold destroyed before her own eyes, Siya had adopted their cause wholeheartedly. She could wield none of the larger weapons, but Siya adapted her other skills to help administer the growing army after Delrael’s call to arms. It was Siya who kept track of the numbers of trainees and where they came from. Siya managed the food distribution, found lodging for all of them—she kept the practical matters running smoothly.

She spent the rest of her spare time repairing and cleaning the old weapons they had kept at the Stronghold or the relics brought in by trainees. Patched and restitched leather armor lay cleaned and smelling of sweet oil in a separate pile. She polished rust off of blades, sharpening and oiling them. Now, she took a fine metal awl and chipped out hardened dirt and mud from the mechanism of a crossbow.

“Plenty here to do,” she said, indicating the heap again.

“Mother!” Vailret turned to her, scowling. “Tareah’s been using all six of her spells every day to replenish our supplies. That should be enough.” He turned to look at Tareah.

“Well, I have been doing that.” She smiled at him, which seemed to set Vailret all aglow. “But I can still do something while I watch what you’re doing.”

Without looking, Siya picked up an ornate battle-ax and untangled some fresh leather thongs from a pile on the floor. “The handle here needs to be rewrapped. The old lacings got blood on them and started to rot.”

Tareah used a knife blade to scrape the dark old leather from the ax handle and began twisting new thongs along the wood.

Vailret leaned over his table where he had spread out the huge map of Gamearth. He seemed to be showing off for her. Other characters had constructed the big master map over generations of exploring the world and adventuring. It had once been mounted on the Stronghold wall, but the collapse of the main building damaged it. Vailret used some of his own notes and talked to several old characters to reconstruct the details.

The flickering candles around the table made Tareah nervous that they would start the map on fire; a few specks of wax had spattered on the map itself. Siya always insisted that Vailret maintain enough light for his close work, especially with his weak eyesight.

Vailret squinted at two hexagons, trying to brush away smudges on a hex of forested-hill terrain. “After I get all the pieces together, I’m going to make several copies of the map for characters to have when we finally go on the march,” he said. “We need to know where we’re going. That’ll save us lots of time.”

Vailret flashed his gaze at her, as if sharing a secret. “Look here. With all the new characters coming in, we’re learning about dozens of new villages. Either they’re new settlements, or somehow they went undiscovered during all our years of questing!”

Siya snorted at him without looking up from her work. “Characters are settling down, Vailret. Lots of them stopped questing by the time your father was killed. All those characters had to live somewhere. What did you expect?”

Vailret ignored her. “And something else strange is happening, very strange. I’ve only just figured it out. Our couriers were told to move as fast as they could, to explore, to find all the villages and pass along the warning about Scartaris’s army. Most of the couriers traveled their allotted number of hexagons and then stopped, out of habit. But some of them found that there’s no restriction anymore! They can go farther. No matter what the Book of Rules says.”

Tareah stopped her work with the ax handle and looked up at him. She felt a sudden rush of fear.

Vailret dropped his voice to a whisper. “With the Outsiders disrupting the Game, with the Earthspirits and Deathspirits coming back and Scartaris nearly destroying the map, and the great battle, and . . . and with the piece of reality that Journeyman carried—something is going very wrong with Gamearth. Characters are breaking the Rules! For now it’s just travel restrictions that we know about, but maybe you can use more than your number of spells each day.” He raised his eyebrows. “Who knows what else can happen?”

Tareah blinked at him in shock. “That can’t be! The Rules are what hold Gamearth together. Without the Rules, we. . .it would be chaos!”

“Maybe that’s what we’re in for, whether we win or lose.”

Tareah tied off the leather thongs and set the ax on top of the mound of repaired weapons. She looked up to take something else from Siya, but the old woman had packed up her tools and stood up herself. “Come on, Vailret. Time to go,” Siya said. “It’s dark outside, and they’ll be doing the quest-tellings again. You know how much you enjoy those.”

Siya gave him what appeared to be a patronizing look, but Tareah knew that Siya enjoyed the quest-tellings as much as the rest of the villagers, especially now that she had become more interested in the battles. She always liked to hear legends about her husband Cayon and his quests with Drodanis.

Outside in the center of the village, the other characters had gathered around a bonfire made from the split trunks of some of the large trees; all of the smaller branches had already been used for making spears and arrows.

To start things off, one of the women characters from a mining village began telling how in her work underground she had broken into a network of catacombs that appeared ancient and well-traveled. Marveling at her discovery, she armed herself, took supplies, and set off to explore the tunnels, where many of the early quests of the Game must have taken place. She was gone a full day, mapping her progress and moving warily, eyes open for any sort of trap or attack. In the end, she found only a few scattered gems and dusty coins, and one broken skeleton of a misshapen monster. The dungeon was dead and empty, and she had not bothered to return again, though some of the children of her village occasionally played there.

Accompanied by five of his students, Delrael finally came striding into the village, finished with the last details of the day’s training exercises. Tareah saw him, encased in a set of armor, well-muscled, confident in his abilities. He smiled at Tareah, Vailret, and Siya sitting together near the fire.

They shared food and sipped steaming cider from wooden mugs. Delrael looked very tired, but charged with a new kind of energy. After some coaxing from the others, he began telling of his battle with the Cailee, the shadow-thing that was the deadly alter-ego of their companion Mindar from Tairé. As he spoke of how they had locked themselves in an underground storeroom, Tareah could picture them all waiting in darkness as the Cailee prowled just on the other side of the door, scratching at the wood with its long silver claws. Delrael told how the Cailee had attacked them out in the desert the following night, as they sat around their campfire, how it slaughtered Mindar’s horse and thrown its head into the fire—

A commotion among the gathered characters made Delrael pause in his story. Vailret squinted into the night. Tareah turned to see another figure approaching out of the twilight, a man dressed in dark and tattered clothes. He stumbled forward, seeming to emerge from the dark surrounding forests.

He came forward one step at a time, swaying, concentrating on his balance. Several of the trainees leaped up to steady the man, bringing him toward the firelight. His face was scratched and smeared with mud and grime. He looked gaunt and starving, with sunken eyes. Though they brought him close to the fire, the stranger continued to shiver violently.

“Well, get him some water or something!” Delrael shouted. Before he had finished his command, someone thrust a dripping ladle into his hand. Delrael poured it on the haggard man’s mouth, not caring that most of it spilled down the stranger’s chin.

The man gasped and turned to stare at all of them, as if suddenly realizing where he was. He seemed to melt. He looked dark of skin, with tangled black hair and strong calloused hands.

“Tell us your name,” Vailret said, leaning close. “Where did you come from?”

The man’s eyes flashed with alarm and he gawked at the fire as if it would reach out and consume him. “From Tairé.” He drew in a long, sucking breath, then slumped beside the fire.

3. Four Stones

“Yes, if all the Sorcerers depart from Gamearth, we leave behind human fighters to defend it—but we also leave many enemies. We must give humans a greater advantage, a means to fight! We have much magic at our disposal. What are we going to do with it?”

—Arken, proposing that the old Sorcerer Council

create the four Stones

Delrael stood up in the firelight and spread his arms as other characters pushed forward, chattering with each other. The stranger flinched at their sudden reaction. “Stand back!” Delrael shouted to overcome their noise. “Give the man room to breathe!”

The others backed off as the stranger sat slumped and cross-legged in the dirt, shivering despite the fire’s warmth. His drab clothes, dark hair and skin reminded Delrael of Tairé, the city where Scartaris had stolen the minds of all its inhabitants. Tairé was the home of Mindar, the one woman somehow immune to Scartaris’s control; she alone had attacked Scartaris’s installations while the other Tairans unknowingly worked at creating weapons.

But this man had escaped from Tairé. After the destruction of Scartaris, he had somehow made his way here.

Before Delrael could say anything else, Siya squatted down with a mug of steaming cider in her hands. She looked with disdain at the unmoving spectators. “Have him drink this.”

The Tairan man took the mug and held it in both hands, but sat staring down at its surface. The trembling in his body caused tiny ripples to flow across the top, disturbing his reflection. He finally took a sip.

They all sat in silence. Delrael realized they were waiting for him to ask the questions, to find out what had brought the man here.

“The man needs rest,” Delrael said to the other characters. “He’s had a long and terrible journey. We’ll find a place for him to stay. He can talk to us tomorrow.”

“No!” the man said, coughing. He scowled at the cider, then took another drink. “I came this far. I can tell my story. You need to know what’s happened.”

Delrael dropped his voice and tried to sound gentle. “All right then, tell us your name.”

The Tairan blinked, as if unable to understand the relevance of the question. He held one hand out to the fire and visibly began to let exhaustion take hold.

“I am Jathen. You—” And then a flash shot across the stranger’s face. He turned so quickly that some of his cider sloshed out of the mug. “Delrael!” he said in an inhuman whisper that sent shudders down Delrael’s spine.

Delrael remembered all of the Tairans, massing toward him under the direction of Scartaris, ready to tear him and his companions apart with their mob frenzy. In a unison hissing voice they had all screamed his name, Delrael!

Jathen must have been among them.

The Tairan man’s expression fell. “We didn’t mean to do that. None of us could help it. Now I can’t help remembering.”

“It’s all right,” Delrael said. “We know what Scartaris did to you. What happened to your city beyond what we’ve already seen?”

Jathen glanced up with lost eyes. “As if that wasn’t terrible enough.” He shook his head.

“It happened just before dawn a few weeks ago. Scartaris was like a terrible nightmare, and we sleepwalked through it all. But then, all of a sudden, Scartaris vanished from our minds. He was gone, destroyed somehow. We in Tairé were free to face the horror of what we had done, what we had nearly helped him accomplish.

“We were stunned, but we managed to count our losses, learn exactly who had been killed—” He paused, stumbling over his words, and forced himself to continue. “We learned who we had killed.

“Then, we searched for Enrod, who had helped us build Tairé and resurrect it from the desolation. Enrod had been our strength, our guiding force, a true visionary with the best intentions for all human characters. But Enrod had left us. We couldn’t understand what happened.”

Jathen stared around at the faces, as if searching for some explanation. Vailret cleared his throat and turned his gaze away as he answered. “Scartaris twisted Enrod’s mind as well. The Deathspirits trapped him on the Barrier River and sentenced him to take his raft back and forth for the rest of the Game.”

Jathen hung his head. “Enrod deserved better than that after all the good he did.”

Delrael sighed. “The Deathspirits did not seem willing to negotiate.” The bonfire continued to crackle and slump as some of the burning logs collapsed into ashes.

Jathen remained silent, digesting the news about Enrod. Finally, he picked up his story. “We Tairans met with each other. We walked the streets. We looked at our city and saw all the frescoes, the statues, everything we had built. We saw the dried fountains, the gutters, the brittle plants. We went outside the walls and saw our dead crops.

“At first the dead grass and trees in the hills made us despair. All the terrain we had recovered was lost again. But as we continued to look at our city, it became clear to us how much we had already accomplished. We let our pride return. We had built this with our own hands, with our own sweat. We had snatched that land from the worst blight ever seen on the map.

“The Stranger Unlooked-For came and rescued us from destruction once. Then Scartaris grew, and then someone else, another Stranger, destroyed him.”

“Journeyman,” Vailret muttered.

“Now we had a third chance, and we couldn’t just ignore it. We felt at a loss—and yet, it made our commitment stronger. We in Tairé were stronger than the Outside forces of the Game. We would prove ourselves self-sufficient, independent of the whims of the Players. We could defend against anything. We vowed to start work immediately, to clean up the rubble, to restart the forces. To come back better than ever!”

Jathen closed his eyes and continued speaking. “We set to work with such enthusiasm as we had never felt before. We would do it this time. Tairans have always been proud of our optimism in the face of hardship. For all the good it did us.”

Jathen opened his eyes and stared into the firelight, but he seemed to be seeing something else entirely. “And then the monster army came, led by that manticore. They came without warning, and without mercy. And they wiped us out!”

Some of the trainees mumbled to each other. Jathen did not pause to let the noise die down.

“Because of the grassy-hill terrain to the east of the city, we couldn’t see the army until it was only a hexagon away. They came in the darkness. We Tairans had been working all day and all night, taking shifts. But we knew something was wrong at dawn, when a team of workers out repairing an irrigation system failed to return on time.

“As the sun rose and the morning grew brighter, some characters working on the top of our wall spotted the manticore’s army. We sent out a team of emissaries, not knowing what this was. They didn’t return.

“The monster horde marched forward. For the next hour or so, we grew afraid. We had no protection. We had no weapons in Tairé. Scartaris had already taken everything we made, stripped us of all our resources. Even our great wall had been breached.”

Jathen looked at Delrael, then at Vailret. Delrael remembered how the golem Journeyman had used his immense strength to knock down a portion of the wall so they could escape the attack of the Tairan people.

“We built barricades, we made clubs, we. . .improvised weapons. It was all we could do.” He closed his eyes and made a sobbing, laughing sound.

“It was so useless. Oh, we did manage to kill some of the first creatures as they charged in, using their own battering rams to knock down other parts of the wall. They swarmed into the city—there were so many of them. And not very many of us.

“We managed to defend ourselves for a few minutes. And then the monsters broke through, and kept coming. And kept coming! We couldn’t stand against them.

“We ran for our lives, all of us, not just me. Many Tairans barricaded themselves in buildings, fled to hiding places within the city. But I knew that would be useless. The manticore’s army searched from building to building, and they slaughtered any human characters they found. They weren’t quick about the killing either. Those characters who barricaded themselves lasted only a few hours. The monsters had all the advantage in this game.

“A few dozen of us fled the city out into the surrounding terrain. We ran, and there was no shelter for several hexes. Just grassland or flat desolation, no place to hide.

“The monsters came fast. Most of us died out there, in the desolation. Not a good place to die. Several of us made it to the mountain terrain, where we hid among the rocks. We split up to make smaller targets. We kept running westward. I knew you were here, along with other villages of human characters. Some of us went south.

“Siryyk kept sending scouts to hunt us down—I know several of the others were executed that way. I might be the only one who survived. But I knew it was no use to stay and die with the others. It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?” He looked around. “Would it? And I made it here to warn you, because the manticore’s army won’t stop in Tairé for long. They’ll regain some of their supplies, maybe make a few more weapons.”

He turned his dark gaze to the gathered characters listening around the fire. “But they will come. Oh yes, they will come. But will you be ready?”

The listeners gaped at Jathen and his story, at the threat of Siryyk’s horde, now brought closer to home.

Delrael stood up and clenched his fist. He turned to stare down the trainees. He kept his voice low, but powerful. “Yes, we will be ready!”

#

Vailret kept trying to blink the gummy sleep from his eyes as he shuffled along in the cool dampness before dawn. Delrael had asked him, along with Tareah and Bryl, to meet in the training grounds at daybreak. They needed to discuss things among themselves before all the trainees began to work out. Everyone would be looking toward Delrael for a solution, for a grand quest they could embark upon.

Vailret appreciated the fact that his cousin wanted input from the others. Delrael was a better fighter than any other character; he had more experience with questing, with combat. He knew exactly how to deal with battles and strategy. But for planning and discussion, to look into the consequences of his actions, he needed to talk to someone else.

Vailret and Tareah had enough background in the history of the Game, in the Rules, that they could find more subtle things than Delrael would ever imagine. And Bryl, of course, kept them from doing anything too rash.

Vailret plodded on the wet dirt path up Steep Hill, kicking dew off the toes of his boots. The stripped trees in the surrounding forest looked skeletal and frightening in the strawberry-colored light of daybreak. On the training field, he saw silhouettes of the others huddled down, barely distinguishable from the scarecrow shapes of practice dummies and sword posts. He heard their low voices, but otherwise Gamearth was silent and holding its breath.

Delrael crossed his arms and stood up, looking as if he didn’t know what to do on the training field without trainees there.

Bryl saw Vailret coming and raised his voice. “Delrael, you stirred up the trainees last night, and now they’re all anxious for battle. You’ve got the charisma to lead them anywhere—but what are we really going to do? You can’t just go bumbling in and swinging swords! You saw the size of the army against us.”

Delrael shrugged. “We know that the monster horde has marched to the city of Tairé. They’re going to come here sooner or later. So, we have two options: We can either stay here and keep training and waiting, or we can go get them first.”

Vailret blinked in surprise. Bryl cried out. “Go get them? Are you crazy?”

Delrael frowned. “That way we can fight on our terms, not theirs. The monster army knows we’re here. They’ll be ready for us when they get here, they’ll mass at the edge of the Barrier River and figure out how to cross it. They’ll take us by storm. Once they do, there isn’t much left for us.”

Then his eyes began to sparkle. “But think of this—if we launch our army, we can send scouts ahead, find out where the monsters are and what they’re doing. We can find a place to ambush them. We can set a trap. Even if we’re outnumbered, we can win—if we pick the terrain and our attack carefully.

“Picture a trap in the Spectre Mountains where the horde needs to file through a narrow gorge or along a cliff face. It’ll be easy—if we get there first. They won’t know what hit them.” He grinned at Tareah.

“Siryyk thinks we’re just sitting here, dreading the day when he comes. We can turn the tables on him. You saw the trainees after Jathen told his story—our army is ready to fight now. That’ll work to our advantage. We can ambush the manticore, surprise him.”

He shrugged. “And if our first assault doesn’t work, we can do it again and again, hounding him as we fall back. We can use the Barrier River as our last defense, not our first.”

Vailret pursed his lips. “That does make sense, Del.” Bryl looked terrified.

Tareah scowled, thinking about something else entirely. Delrael noticed her expression. “Speak up, Tareah. What is it?”

She fumbled for words, then finally decided what she wanted to say. “What you’re planning is fine, Delrael. But, doesn’t it avoid the main question? You created the Barrier River, but that wasn’t enough. You destroyed Scartaris, but that wasn’t enough. Now the monster army is coming, and even if you defeat them, you know that still won’t be enough. The Outsiders will come up with another way to attack us.” She met Vailret’s eyes. “Won’t they?

“We have to look beyond one battle to the entire war. Siryyk seems to be our main enemy, but in truth it’s the Outsiders. We need to find some way to fight them directly. They want to obliterate Gamearth. We have to escape them, to make Gamearth real on its own, so we no longer need to worry.”

Delrael looked disturbed. He let his hand grasp the end of his sword, and Vailret knew the reason for his uncertainty. Delrael needed to fight a tangible enemy, an opponent he could see and strike at. He needed to understand the combat—and the thought of any direct conflict with the Outsiders was alien to him.

Delrael had once stood mystified in an abandoned Slac fortress while Vailret argued with manifestations of the Outsiders David and Tyrone in their ruined half-imaginary, half-real ship. With assistance from blind Paenar, Bryl had struck out at the Outsiders, driven them back to their own world.

“I concede your point about the Outsiders, Tareah,” he said, “But I don’t understand what we can do about it. How can we make Gamearth real? What kind of weapons do we have that can fight against the Outside? It’s a question with no answer.”

Tareah smiled at him. “But what if I do have an answer?”

Vailret himself was interested. Bryl looked as if he knew he wasn’t going to like it; he seemed too old for all this. Delrael watched her. “I’m listening.”

Tareah cleared her throat in uncharacteristic shyness. “We’ve got the Air Stone, the Water Stone, and the Fire Stone. The Earth Stone is the most powerful of the four, and we know where it is—still buried in the dragon’s treasure hoard on the island of Rokanun. We found it when you and Bryl came to rescue me. Now,” She took a deep breath. “If we bring all four Stones together—well, you remember what happens then.”

Delrael frowned and turned his back to them. “Refresh my memory.”

Tareah sighed at him. Vailret jumped in. “The old Sorcerers created the four Stones just before they turned themselves into the Earthspirits and Deathspirits. They knew the Transition wouldn’t require all their magic—so they used the rest of it to make the Stones.”

Tareah nodded vigorously. Vailret liked the way her pale hair moved in the early morning air. “Yes, and the power in the four gems exceeds the total power of the Spirits. If all four Stones are brought together, the one bearer will hold the entire magic of the Sorcerer race. Enough magic to make a full Transition. This character could become the Allspirit—more powerful than even the six Spirits together. We know it’ll work.”

Vailret whistled. “That should be enough.”

“I propose this,” Tareah said. “While you launch your army eastward to the mountain terrain, dispatch a second party south to Rokanun, to the dragon’s treasure pile. Get the Earth Stone and bring it back to the main army. Then one of us will put all four Stones together and create the Allspirit. It’s the only way.”

Vailret grinned with excitement. “The monsters will be a trivial problem then! The Allspirit should have enough power to break us away from the Outside and hold Gamearth together.”

“But who’s going to do such a thing?” Delrael asked.

“Our choices are rather limited,” she said. “It has to be someone with Sorcerer blood to activate the Stones.”

Vailret was afraid to think that Tareah might be suggesting that she do it herself. It would transform her into a supernatural being, but she would cease to be Tareah forever.

A small voice surprised them all. “It might as well be me,” Bryl said. Vailret looked at him in surprise, and Bryl sounded defensive. The wrinkles around his eyes made complicated patterns. “I used the Water Stone to call the dayid and stop the forest fire. I used the Air Stone to summon the illusion army for your battle against Scartaris. I have proven that I can handle that kind of power.”

Bryl shrugged and huddled down into his blue cloak. “Besides, I’m old. I’ve done enough in the Game. What have I got to lose? You people will just keep dragging me on quests for the rest of my life anyway.”

4. Sitnalta Without Verne

“I don’t know why it is so beneficial to us, but Jules and I will continued to work together. From this day forward, we instruct the Council to issue all of our patents jointly, under both names Verne and Frankenstein. We trust this will be satisfactory.”

—Professor Frankenstein, message to the Sitnaltan

Council of Patent Givers

Professor Frankenstein squinted down at the city of Sitnalta. Cool morning mist from the ocean clung to the cobblestoned streets, giving the buildings a muzzy appearance. Off in one hexagon, he could see the lamplighters still at work, clambering up ladders to extinguish the gas mantles for the morning.

Frankenstein stood atop the central ziggurat, the highest point in Sitnalta. They had once placed their powerful defense here—the Sitnaltan dragon siren, which the city used to fight against Tryos the dragon as he went to and from his island domain across the hexagons of water.

Vailret and blind Paenar had stolen the dragon siren, though, and used the Nautilus designed by Frankenstein and Verne to battle the dragon directly. Luckily they had won, otherwise Sitnalta would have been left defenseless.

Frankenstein curved his lips upward in the closest thing to a smile he ever made. No, Sitnalta was never defenseless—not with powerful inventors like himself and Verne among its inhabitants.

Where the hexagons of ocean met the black line that delineated the shore, Frankenstein watched three pile-driving cranes, operated with weights, counterweights, and electric generators. In the still air he heard the sharp cracks as they worked. He also watched tiny figures of characters in suits with giant cast-metal helmets. The experimental underwater breathing apparatus would have accompanied the Nautilus sub-marine boat. . .but the Nautilus was wrecked now, and he would not want to build another one, not without Verne.

On the streets below he heard a puttering and chugging sound. Leaning over the edge of the ziggurat, he saw someone driving a steam-engine car along a main thoroughfare. Other hissing sounds pointed to where Dirac’s street-cleaning engines swirled along, scrubbing the gutters and polishing clean the cracks in the flagstones. Otherwise, Sitnalta seemed quiet and at peace.

A few weeks before, Frankenstein would have been astonished at his own lassitude. He had too many ideas, too many things to invent, too many principles to investigate. Both he and Verne had notebooks filled with sketchy ideas for inventions. He would never have enough time to patent all of them. Working in collaboration, the two professors had become legends in Sitnalta. They had used up an entire series of patent numbers, and begun another set just for themselves.

But now, by himself, it didn’t seem the same. With Verne gone and sending no word back, Frankenstein no longer had sufficient eagerness for the work. Looking at their stacks of ideas, he felt overwhelmed with the impossibility of it all. After completing the great and terrible weapon, he had no such drive anymore.

The Sitnaltans had led a research expedition to the crashed Outsiders’ ship, to the technological fringe where science grew uncertain. They had dissected the ship, looking at its controls, its molding, the contours, the engines. They had learned enough for a lifetime of analysis.

But at the excavation site, he and Verne had shared the same dream one night, a vision inspired by the Outsider Scott himself. They learned how to remove the ship’s power source, part real from the Outside, and part imaginary from within Gamearth—Frankenstein could not even hypothesize the consequences of such a thing. Their weapon could be used to destroy the evil force of Scartaris. Verne and Frankenstein kept their weapon a secret and rolled dice to determine who would go on the mission to deliver and detonate it. Verne had been the one chosen.

Back in Sitnalta, Frankenstein checked his detectors and found that the force of Scartaris had vanished. But the detectors failed to record any form of detonation, and Frankenstein was sure he would have seen that. They had been afraid the weapon might destroy all of Gamearth.

Then why hadn’t Verne returned?

Frankenstein squatted on top of the ziggurat, looked out over the city, and sulked. Another few days, and he would propose mounting an expedition to search for his partner.

Steam rose from the stacks of the manufactories and metal-processing centers. The city began to come alive for another day of activity.

The characters below moved about in random patterns, going about their individual business and their predetermined tasks. Frankenstein thought of making a random-motion study, sitting up here all day and plotting the paths of characters. It might give him some insights into the societal structures of insect colonies, since from this height the Sitnaltans appeared similar to a nest of ants.

But as he stared, clicking his fingernails together, the randomness changed. Characters shifted in their courses and moved toward one of the large manufactory buildings by the ocean hexagons, as if drawn by a magnet.

He squinted into the bright sunlight and saw other characters coming from different parts of the city. Many Sitnaltans looked confused and watched them, but others moved with a jerky walk. Frankenstein shaded his eyes, frowning.

Below him, one man moved in an exaggerated lock-step. He flailed his arms wildly. Finally, one foot crossed in front of the other—apparently intentionally—and he sprawled to the flagstoned street. “Help me!” he cried out loud.

“What the devil is going on?” Frankenstein said to himself.

But before the man below could shout again, his hand reached out and clapped across his own mouth with a sound loud enough for Frankenstein to hear from the top of the ziggurat. With awkward movements, still holding his own mouth shut, the man rolled onto his knees and jerkily made his way to his feet again; he followed the other Sitnaltans moving toward the big buildings.

“This is insane,” Frankenstein said, scrambling down the ziggurat steps. His hard leather shoes slapped on the stones as he ran down. “This is beyond reason!”

Before he reached the hex-cobbled street, one of the secondary manufactories exploded in an orange fireball. The concussion made Frankenstein’s ears ring. He lost his balance, falling backward to the ziggurat steps. The tall Sitnaltan buildings obscured his view, but he watched flames and black greasy smoke tumble into the air. From his vantage point he could see the explosion had been in the building where metals were stamped and cast into forms designed by the great inventors.

Several streets away, a loud alarm bell began to ring. He heard shouts as he stumbled to his feet and ran down the street, turning sideways into an alley, a shortcut to the shore. The alarm bell abruptly fell silent, as did the other shouts.

A group of Sitnaltans moved down the street in a strange arthritic shuffle. He called out to them. “What is happening? What’s going on?”

The Sitnaltans continued their march. One woman in the back—he saw it was Mayer, daughter of Dirac—swivelled around and stared at him; her expression filled with relief and hope upon recognizing him. But when she saw only confusion on Frankenstein’s face, she showed despair again.

“What is—” Suddenly, Frankenstein’s right foot lurched out from under him, as if yanked from below the knee by an invisible hand. “What?”

He squirmed, but his leg hung at half-step in the air. His foot wavered left and right, as if testing muscles, and then the leg reached forward to step down on the pavement. His left leg yanked up, moved forward, and stepped down.

“Stop!” Frankenstein shouted to the air. He waved his arms.

An invisible grip slammed his posture straight, jerked his hips forward, and made him take four more stumbling steps. He felt absolutely helpless. “This cannot be happening! I refuse to believe—there is no explanation for this.” But his words felt absurd in the situation.

His own right hand reached out in front of his face. He watched his thumb and forefinger close together several times, like snapping pincers. Then he bent forward and gave his own nose a vicious tweak.

His legs made him run to catch up with the other puppet Sitnaltans.

They strode through the streets toward the central manufactory building. Some of the characters had surrendered and moved along willingly, but others continued to make choking, gurgling sounds as they fought to resist, like good Sitnaltans. Frankenstein felt sweat breaking out all over his body, but he could do nothing.

Beside him, Mayer made her face into a stony expression of outrage, but when she tried to ask him a question, her lips clamped themselves together. He could see from her moving jaws that she was still trying to speak.

Beside the manufactory he could see the smoking rubble from the exploded building. He heard the roar of flames, saw the bodies of several Sitnaltans among the wreckage, burned and moaning, but he could not move to help them. His head twisted around, making him stare ahead.

At the great brick arches of the building, the doors stood wide open, knocked loose from their brass hinges. On the cornerstone of the building, engraved words seemed totally ineffectual:

BY ESTABLISHING THIS MANUFACTORY,

THE CITY OF SITNALTA DECLARES

ITS SUPERIORITY AND FREEDOM

FROM MAGIC AND THE WAYS OF THE GAME

As his body lurched, pulling him inside the manufactory, harsh chemical smells made Frankenstein’s nose and eyes burn. A cacophony of banging and hissing sounds beat upon his ears.

Skylights let bright morning light into the open bay. Steam and multi-colored smoke swirled in the air, making it difficult to see. Giant copper and brass vats stood in rows, studded with polished rivets; these were the processing tanks where Sitnaltans pumped and treated seawater, extracting metals and other elements. Other chambers processed or reduced raw ore they took from outlying hexagons. Pipes and valves led into a circulation system, monitored by gauges and pressure-release vents.

The puppet Sitnaltans swarmed to the tanks and scrambled on the piping, using whatever tools they found to damage everything. Some characters opened valves to spew chemical solutions onto the floor; others banged on pipes with the handles of stir-sticks.

One man struck the side of a copper vat with a heavy sledge hammer, wrestling with his arm all the way. He managed to succeed in dropping the hammer, but then his body bent down, his hand picked it up, and he pounded again at the tank. He dropped the hammer a second time, but then his hand came up and struck him across the face. He picked up the sledge one more time, heaving it back and smashing into the dented side of the vat. The polished rivets popped out, and a section of metal gave way, exposing a seam. Hot seawater gushed out, spraying him in the face and knocking him backward.

Frankenstein found himself at one of the compressors, yanking out connections, twisting a gauge. He stared at his hands as they worked of their own accord, and he snarled at them. “Stop this! You are my hands—listen to me!”

But his hand only turned, waggled fingers at his face as if sarcastically waving, and then went back to unscrew the gauge. It popped off, shooting into the air and clanging against a ventilation duct. Shunted high-pressure gas hissed out with a shriek.

Mayer dumped one container of chemicals into another vat, which set off a sputtering, burning reaction that knocked her stumbling away. The reaction continued to build.

Frankenstein strained until he felt his muscles ready to snap, resisting the invisible tugs on his own body. Deep in his throat he let out a disjointed animal cry. At any other time, he would have scoffed at himself for such a futile, barbaric gesture.

Then the invisible force vanished, like strings suddenly severed.

Frankenstein fell forward as his straining body plunged back into control again. Several characters collapsed; others screamed and fled the manufactory. As he got to his knees on the concrete floor, blinking, Frankenstein knew the controlling force had not been defeated—it had left willingly, as if it was just playing a game with them, testing its limits, taunting them.

The chemical reactions continued to bubble in the damaged tanks. Smoke poured from broken equipment. One of the skylights overhead shattered from the rising heat, sending sharp glass shards raining down on the floor.

Frankenstein realized that the fleeing Sitnaltans had the right idea. “Get out of here! Now!” He clapped his hands and shouted to the others standing in a daze. “No telling if this will explode!”

He hurried toward the door. The other characters needed no encouragement and ran for the exits, jostling each other and sloshing through spilled chemicals on the floor, stumbling, some blinded or with burned hands.

A block away from the big building, Frankenstein stopped and watched the manufactory. Colored smoke continued to pour through the broken skylights and out the windows and doors.

Mayer stood beside him with her calloused hands balled into fists. Smoke and grease smeared her face, and her short dark hair had been singed, curled away from one ear. Her voice carried a vicious tone; she seemed to be continuing an argument with herself and spoke out loud only because Frankenstein was listening.

“That was magic, Professor! How dare they!”

She turned and stared at the burning wreckage, squinting her eyes. “How dare they use magic.” She spat out the word. “Magic has no place in Sitnalta. It’s not even supposed to work here. What’s happening?”

Frankenstein felt weak. His muscles trembled, and his thoughts spun with the turmoil. He only half-listened to what Mayer was saying. “What are we going to do, Professor?” she demanded.

He did not look at her, but continued to stare at the smoke. Other Sitnaltans scurried over the rubble of the adjacent manufactory, removing bodies and helping injured characters.

“Our technology is more powerful than magic,” he said. “We have our minds. We have our imaginations. We have all the resources of the Rules of Science.”

He took a deep breath. Verne wasn’t here, and Frankenstein would have to work solo for the first time in many turns. “I vow to use all my talent, all my resources to defeat this abomination.”

He worked his mouth, as if to swallow away a bad taste. “Magic in Sitnalta! The very thought of it!” Frankenstein shook his head. “This is a matter of personal pride now.”

5. River Crossing

“An adventure begins when the journey begins. Characters need not reach the end of their quest before they encounter interesting events.”

—The Book of Rules

Delrael was amazed at how much effort it took to set out with an entire army. On other quests, he and his companions had simply packed up and departed at dawn. Now, though, trainees asked him thousands of questions, they argued among themselves on how do the same tasks, they packed and repacked, studied maps, and worked themselves into a mixture of excitement and dread. If they delayed much longer, that anxiety and aggression would backfire.

Delrael paced up and down, tired and hungry because he had not found enough time to sleep or take meals. He hated to think of so many things at once, so many meaningless details—he wanted to set off and do something. Couldn’t they take care of administrative squabbles along the way? He wasn’t sure he was cut out to be a commander of such a large force.

Yellowed leaves blew through the encampment. The weapon makers had cut down so many of the surrounding trees that debris lay scattered on the hillside, adding dead leaves to those already falling from the end of the season.

Finally, tired of pacing and unable to think of anything else that absolutely had to be done, Delrael whistled and formed up the front ranks, directing them to start off down the quest-path toward the Barrier River. “Enough of this,” he said. “Let’s go!”

A few of the fighters didn’t seem to know whether they were supposed to cheer or not; some did anyway. Delrael stood in his leather armor, listening to the ragged mixture of sounds. The fighters talked to each other and moved about, but they seemed just as happy to be on the move.

Delrael watched them march by, nodding and smiling to any character who met his eyes. His father Drodanis would have been at the front, waving his sword and leading all the fighters. But Delrael’s army would not need a battle commander for a while, and they knew which quest-path to follow.

As the army marched into the forest, Delrael went back to take a last look at his village. In the frosty morning, it stood deserted except for those characters who could not handle the journey, a few old men and women and young children who had come to the Stronghold not to train, but to offer their assistance in the preparations. The open spaces showed the marks of a sprawling encampment, scars from tent stakes, black smears of cooking fires. He saw the broad ash-strewn circle from the central bonfire where they burned their garbage among splintered and knotty wood unsuitable to be made into arrows or other weapons.

Delrael stared at the empty houses, the stripped trees, the Steep Hill on which he could see remnants of the Stronghold defenses and the newly erected training area. He wondered if this was the last time he would ever see his home. Turning his back on that thought, he hurried into the forest to catch up with the rest of the troops. Some commander!, he thought.

As the army journeyed through the morning, Delrael moved among the groups, chatting with characters and maintaining their morale. Jorte, who operated the village gaming hall, and Mostem the baker also kept the trainees talking about their villages and past quests. Vailret helped as well, though he seemed to spend a lot more time with Tareah.

Bryl seemed quiet and withdrawn. Delrael knew how worried he must be with the great responsibility he had undertaken, not to mention the aches in his old bones from the prospect of a prolonged journey. Once the army crossed the Barrier River, Bryl and Vailret would split off on their own quest. Together those two would journey south to Rokanun and secure the Earth Stone.

Delrael wanted to go with them, a reminder of old quests—theirs seemed to be a more enjoyable adventure, especially with all the headaches just to keep his army together. But Delrael was the nominal leader of these fighters, and he had to stay with them. Besides, he could never again go near the city of Sitnalta with its technological fringe, where science worked and magic failed—his left leg was carved of magical kennok wood, and he could use it as well as his real leg. But in Sitnalta, without magic, the leg would refuse to function, perhaps permanently, and Delrael would be a cripple. No, he had to stay with his army.

From their previous expedition to Rokanun, Bryl knew exactly where to find the Earth Stone. But since the two of them would be alone against the hazards of Gamearth, Bryl would also take the Air Stone and the Fire Stone for their protection. Tareah would keep the Water Stone to aid the main army in any skirmishes.

If everything worked out as planned, Vailret and Bryl could hurry back with their prize and join Delrael’s army somewhere in the Spectre Mountains. They could then use the magic in the Stones to fight Siryyk’s horde, or Bryl could transform himself into the Allspirit right there. They hadn’t quite decided that part yet.

Delrael’s fighters traveled over forested-hill, forest, and grassland terrain on their first day. When they bedded down on the edge of another hexagon, Delrael sensed the excitement among the army. That would change as the journey grew longer, but for now they seemed caught up in the adventure. He leaned back against the trunk of a tree, then reached up to touch his fingers to a knob of bark. Sighing, he bent his knees and let his eyes close in a much-appreciated moment of rest.

Siya came by and offered him a blanket, which he waved away. During the previous two days, she had proven herself invaluable, thinking of countless things they had forgotten to do, supplies to be packed, tools, equipment.

Jathen the Tairan muttered a goodnight before trudging off into the shelter of trees, where he would sleep away from the main group. Jathen tossed fitfully in his sleep, in the grip of nightmares, and he chose not to disturb anyone else. From what Delrael himself had seen in Tairé, he could well imagine some of the nightmares that Jathen suffered. . . .

For three days the army continued through hexagons of forested terrain. Delrael had crossed this landscape before, but never with hundreds of characters marching beside him in a group much too wide for the quest-path. They forged through the trees, spreading out and scouting the area. It seemed more like a carnival than a group of fighters on a quest.

The terrain remained easy, causing no troubles—until they reached the Barrier River on the third day.

The vast river stood before them, rushing past with gray water channeled from the Northern Sea. The quest-path stopped abruptly at the hex-line boundary of the river; it would have continued across the terrain, had it not been submerged by the irresistible wall of water down the length of the map.

The Barrier River looked uncrossable, with its swift current a full hex wide. The fighters stared in expressions of awe and disbelief. Delrael stood on the bank in silence, remembering how he had convinced Sardun to create the river, in exchange for their rescuing his daughter Tareah.

The air felt brisk against Delrael’s cheeks as he rested before he faced the problem of crossing. He heard the ripple of water swirling around the sharp hex-line and listened to the rustle of leaves in tall trees above. He could smell the dampness in the air, the cloying wet stink of all the toppled trees and forest debris decomposing beneath the water.

Some of the exhausted characters knelt on the black line and dipped their hands in the water, splashing it on their faces, rubbing their eyes. Delrael did the same, scrubbing his sweaty, itching head in the river.

He listened to the restless sounds of the other characters, shifting packs, sitting down to rest, tromping into the forest. He heard Siya break out their supplies; Tareah and Vailret helped her distribute them.

Delrael stood up and adjusted the chafing leather armor on his chest, when he heard a crunching sound in the trees. The army stirred off to his left; some of the fighters stood up, others looked around.

A big man came into view riding a tall black horse. Delrael used his fingers to spread dripping hair away from his eyes and forehead; he felt a trickle of water behind his ear. The man on the horse rode through the army, as if looking for someone. Delrael stepped forward and introduced himself.

The stranger snapped to attention, then urged his horse forward. The man was very large and muscular, a full hand taller than Delrael. His blond hair streamed back to his shoulderblades, so pale and fine that it looked white. The black horse showed velvety purple shadows on its hide as the muscles rippled. The hooves bore scuffed iron shoes; its saddle, bridle, and reins looked immaculately cared for, with gleaming silver studs.

The stranger wore black leather armor, and a vest with a badge carved on the right breast, showing a white field with the dark silhouette of a bird of prey, wings spread and claws extended to strike. On his back, the man carried a long bow and a quiver bristling with arrows. At his side hung a two-handed sword, and a dagger poked up from his belt.

Yet with all the weapons and armor and black trappings, the man looked beatific, his face unblemished, his eyebrows perfectly curved and thin. A faint flush showed the chill on his pale skin.

“My greetings, Delrael. I’ve heard of your army and your call to arms. My name is Corim. As a representative of the Black Falcon troops, I crossed the river and came to your Stronghold to exchange information and to offer our services. But the Stronghold was in ruins, and some of the characters there told me you had already departed. So I rode hard in the direction I knew you would be taking.”

Black Falcon troops? Delrael thought. He looked around for Vailret, who would probably be able to explain Corim’s group.

“Black Falcons!” Vailret said in a loud voice to the stranger. “Are you planning to do anything useful? Or are you just here to cause havoc as you have in the past?”

Corim surprised Delrael by ignoring Vailret entirely. Delrael looked to his cousin, but wasn’t sure what to think. Offhand, this man appeared to be an awesome warrior. If Corim had troops of similar fighters, how could Delrael turn down the offer of reinforcements? “What are you talking about, Vailret?”

“The Black Falcons, Del!” Vailret seemed surprised when Delrael gave him only a questioning gaze. Vailret made an exasperated expression, but Tareah spoke in a patient voice. Delrael felt embarrassed as she tried not to talk down to him.

“The Black Falcons have been here since the Scouring, but at least there’s not many of them. They go around killing any non-human character they find. They band together and use all their strength to wipe out harmless races, like the ylvans or the khelebar.”

Sarcasm laced her voice. “Apparently for all their strength, they’re too frightened to attack anything dangerous like the Slac or the wandering monsters across the map.”

“That is a lie,” Corim said in a flat voice. “The Black Falcon troops strike at any enemies we find. We’ve slaughtered whole regiments of Slac, we’ve defeated dozens of ogres and individual monsters. And yes, we have also struck against the khelebar, who caused great damage to human characters in the past. If you doubt that, your knowledge of the Game is. . .not accurate.”

Tareah looked ready to blurt out something else, but Corim continued. “When the old Sorcerer race went on their Transition, they gave Gamearth to human characters, the ones formed in their own image. That’s what the Scouring was all about—the enemy character races trying to wipe each other out. Despite our defenses, the Slac nearly succeeded in conquering the entire map. Only by the efforts of the Black Falcon troops, working with other human fighters and the Sentinels, did we turn them back to their mountain fortresses.” Corim stood silent for a moment. His lips were so pale they looked the same color as his skin.

“The map is still infested with threats to human characters. We split no hairs—Gamearth is ours. We have no wish to share it with races that fought against us in the past. They might be peaceful now, but who’s to say they won’t turn against us again? It makes no difference if they’re direct threats such as the Slac, or parasites like the ylvan. They’re equally bad in our eyes.”

He looked at Delrael, then jerked his chin in the direction of Tareah and Vailret. “Who are these people, Delrael?”

Keeping his voice even and his face plain so as not to betray his anger, Delrael nodded to the two of them. “Vailret is my close advisor. Tareah is the daughter of Sardun. She’s one of the most powerful characters left on the map.”

Corim’s eyebrows raised, but he made no comment.

Delrael remembered the gentle but distraught khelebar who had fought so valiantly to save their forest from burning, and the khelebar woman Thilane who had healed his destroyed leg; without her magic of replacing his leg with one made of kennok wood, he would have bled to death. Now, when he disrobed and ran his fingers over the soft, warm surface of the living wood, he could see the grain from the stunted kennok tree—and he could also feel his own touch, he could move his toes, he could do everything with it. He owed his life to the khelebar, whom Corim dismissed as being enemies.

He also thought of Tallin, the tough little forest man they had rescued from Gairoth. Tallin’s entire ylvan village had been numbed by Scartaris, even from a vast distance, which made them easy prey for the ogre. Tallin was a good companion, and a good friend—until the Anteds killed him.

“What is it you’re offering, Corim?” Delrael said.

The Black Falcon rider looked at Delrael’s army, but his face remained expressionless. Delrael thought he detected a hint of scorn, though he saw nothing overt.

“We can offer our help in fighting this monster army marching against Gamearth. Despite what your. . .advisor and your Sorceress say, the Black Falcon troops are devoted beyond anything else. We have been for generations. The survival of the Game is our foremost concern.”

Delrael stood, feeling inadequate with his dripping hair and unkempt appearance in front of this monolith of a man. He thought for just a moment, then answered.

“You’re welcome to join us. We’d be foolish not to accept the assistance of your troops. But are you going to focus your efforts on fighting the monster horde? That’s the only enemy that should concern us. I forbid you to waste any time, any effort, or any resources on attacking friendly character races.”

Corim scowled down from his horse. Delrael could smell the horse and the leather of the saddle, the hint of sweat on Corim’s uniform. He also noted a sour, rotten smell from the bulging saddle bags, and Delrael didn’t want to know what they carried.

“Sometimes you must trim away small roots before you may topple a large tree,” Corim said, keeping his voice low.

“Sometimes,” Vailret interrupted, “you can get so busy trimming those roots that you don’t see the tree about to fall on you.”

Corim yanked on the reins of his horse. When the Black Falcon rider spoke, he seemed to disregard everything they had said. “I don’t have time to share a meal with you, Delrael. I’ll bring your terms to Annik, our leader. We’ll meet again. Perhaps as allies.”

“I hope so,” Delrael said. He wondered if he was starting to sound more like a true commander.

Corim rode the horse directly between Delrael and where Vailret and Tareah stood. Vailret stepped back, exaggerating his reaction to how close the horse had come. The horse charged through the trees and plunged over the black line into the river.

It sank up to the top of its saddle and began to swim across the current, tossing its head but keeping its gaze on the line of the opposite bank. Corim did not turn back. His blond hair glinted in the sunlight. The current yanked the horse at a diagonal across the river, but the Black Falcon rider seemed unconcerned about where they would come to shore.

Delrael turned back around and refused to watch Corim’s receding silhouette against the rushing water. Vailret put his hands on his hips, scowling. “Well, what are we going to do about that, Del?” The other characters were listening.

“We’re not going to do anything about it,” Delrael answered, realizing that his voice had grown testy. “We’ll let them make their move. If they want to fight with us, they can help a lot. But we’ll succeed without them, and I won’t have them in my army if they go slaughtering the khelebar or the ylvans.”

He sighed, then clapped his hands, raising his voice so that the characters would pay attention. “Enough of the show! We’ve got bigger problems to worry about.”

Delrael looked over his shoulder at the river. Corim, small now in the distance, worked his way around a dead tree half-submerged in the current.

“—such as crossing this river.”

Normally, he would have asked Vailret’s help in planning such an operation, but Delrael felt heady with responsibility. He could do it himself. He made it clear in his mind exactly what he wanted to do.

Delrael separated his fighters into different groups for building rafts that would carry them to the opposite bank. He selected teams to scout out nearby trees, others to work at felling them, still others to trim away the main branches and tie the trunks together. The army had enough work to keep busy for several days, but they would cross in a grand procession.

Jathen plunged into his job with enormous stamina, hacking at branches protruding from fallen trunks. His woodworking ax smacked into the wood with the solid sound of a sword connecting one of the practice posts. Chips of bark and sweet white wood sprayed in the air around him. Jathen pulled off his tunic even in the cool air. Dust and dirt smeared his chest, clinging to his sweat. Jathen’s whole world seemed focused on what he was doing, as if to distract him from anything else that might haunt him.

As Delrael watched them fall to their directed tasks, he felt a growing pride—all these scattered fighter characters from villages up and down the map were now mobilized into a real unit, like a Sitnaltan machine where all the pieces worked together.

Delrael’s idea was to construct several rafts the size of barges to haul his fighting force across the water. There, the characters would cover the rafts with brush. If his army was on the run from Siryyk’s horde, if their ambushes and defensive battles failed, they could uncover their rafts and escape down the river, leaving the manticore and all the monsters stranded behind.

As the other characters worked, Tareah wore an atypical scowl. Even in her mended clothes, she still looked beautiful to Delrael, with her long pale hair and the sapphire Water Stone hanging at her neck. He smiled at her, but she only glared at him. He felt crestfallen, wondering what he had done wrong.

Vailret finally spoke with her out of earshot. Tareah said something to him, shaking her head; Vailret looked surprised, rapping his knuckles against his forehead as if to demonstrate his own stupidity. He grabbed her arm, dragging her toward Delrael.

“Del, Tareah’s got—”

“If he wants to ignore my abilities, I’ll let him.” She refused to look at Delrael. “He’s the one paying in sweat and sore muscles, after all.”

He still couldn’t fathom what had upset her. “Tareah, what did I do to make you angry—”

She stood with her hands on her hips. For a moment Delrael saw a reflection of furious Sardun, who had attacked them when they first entered the Ice Palace.

“Why do you keep stopping me from doing anything to help you? I’m one of the most powerful characters on all of Gamearth. You made a point of that to the Black Falcon rider—and yet, when you have to cross this river, why doesn’t it occur to you that I could make an ice bridge with the Water Stone? Would your fighters really rather spend days building rafts by brute force?”

Delrael blinked his eyes in surprise. He felt shocked and stupid. The other characters stood up beside the fallen logs and pressed sweaty hair away from their eyebrows. The forest looked churned up from their efforts; stripped logs lay scattered about.

Delrael felt his cheeks burning. Tareah was right. She could help them cross with a single spell. He always tried to do everything he could to impress her, but in the back of his mind he still remembered her as the little girl who had waited to be rescued on the island of Rokanun, waited for some hero to come because that was how she thought the Game was played.

But she had changed much since then.

The weary characters glared at him, upset that they had done their work for nothing. Jathen stood up, blinking, but impatient: he didn’t seem to mind the work, but just didn’t want to stop.

Delrael stared at the gray, fast-moving river behind them. It looked treacherous even if they were on rafts. He forced himself to meet Tareah’s eyes. “The rafts are a known risk, Tareah,” he said. “And we’ll have them there waiting for our return. Can you be sure your bridge won’t collapse with our army halfway across?”

“If the spell works, it works. You’ll know that as soon as I roll.”

“Even with the Rules breaking?” Vailret said.

Tareah considered the question only long enough to shrug. “If that’s the case, how do you know the rafts will float?”

Delrael knew how long it would take them to complete the rafts and slowly work their way across the current. He could well lose as many characters over the sides.

“Tareah, will you help us cross the river?” he asked.

Looking more relieved than smug, she nodded. “Yes. I will.”

Tareah brushed her cheeks and arms as if preparing herself—her expression looked truly eager to be part of things, to be helping out. Vailret nodded to her in encouragement.

“Get the fighters ready,” Tareah said. Her voice was low and husky. “My father used the Water Stone to maintain the entire Ice Palace, but I don’t want to hold up a bridge any longer than I have to. I’m not quite as confident as he was.”

Delrael called to the other characters. Jathen pulled his tunic on again, tugged the lacings, and stood restless, shuffling his feet. Some fighters dipped their hands in the cold river water, trying to scrub away splinters or chafed skin.

Bryl went beside Tareah. “Need any help?”

She shook her head, then stepped between the trees to stand at the black line at the edge of the Barrier River. Her brown blouse and many-colored skirt had belonged to Delrael’s mother. “Fielle liked this skirt,” Siya had said when she took it out of a storage trunk and gave it to the newly grown Tareah.

Delrael didn’t know what to think about Tareah fitting his mother’s clothes. He rarely thought of his mother any more, not since she had died of a fever years before. Because of that, Delrael’s father had gone into grief-stricken seclusion. He eventually fled the Game entirely, going in search of a legendary Pool of Peace inhabited by the Rulewoman Melanie.

Drodanis had left Delrael to run the Stronghold, without much training and experience. Delrael resented him for that, sometimes—but other times he saw it as a trial by fire that had forced him to grow into a better fighter, a better player in the Game. Drodanis had made no contact with them for years, until he sent a message stick to warn Delrael about the threat of Scartaris. While offering no assistance of his own, he charged Delrael with a quest to find a way to save Gamearth. That message stick had caused Delrael to bring about the Barrier River, to protect them.

And now Tareah gazed at the immense river Sardun had created—she, too, had to live up to the greatness of her father.

Tareah held the gleaming Water Stone in her hands. In silence, Delrael motioned his hands backward, making the other fighter characters step away. He bumped into Vailret’s elbow, startling both of them.

Tareah held her head high, and her pale hair continued to drift back in the river breeze. Delrael remembered her in her little-girl body standing up like a great Sorcerer queen, using the power of the Stones against the dragon.

He heard only the rippling water and the occasional cough and shifting noise of the gathered characters. The army seemed to be holding its breath as Tareah knelt. She rolled the Water Stone on the ground. A smooth sapphire face stared upward into the clear sky, showing a chiseled “4.”

Tareah, staring with half-closed eyes and acting as if she didn’t want to break her concentration, snatched up the sapphire. She planted her feet squarely apart so that her boots dug into the soft mud and rested high on the black hex-line. One of her hands crooked, the fingers moved.

The water of the Barrier River responded, pushing up in a hump and then squeezing forward like clay, frosting and turning solid as it became ice. More water curled up under it, lapping, freezing, and extending the curved surface out.

Tareah moved her other hand, bringing her elbows close to her ribs in a silent pushing gesture. The tongue of ice bucked, widened, and lurched farther out, suspended over the choppy surface of the river.

The magic flowed through Tareah now, and the water churned into froth around the base of the ice bridge. The wide white footpath looped but held firm, rippling and thrusting like someone squeezing dough through a tube.

As the arch rose through the center of the hex-wide river, it began to curve toward the opposite shore. The base in front of Tareah’s spread feet grew thicker and wider. Icicles dribbled down from its sides, growing thicker and plunging into the water as support struts.

Tareah made a coughing sound. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut; her forehead was wrinkled. Delrael wanted to place his hands on her shoulders, to comfort her or to add strength somehow—but he didn’t dare break her concentration and send the ice bridge crumbling into the swirling waters.

The characters began to mutter in appreciation and awe. Jorte, the keeper of the village gaming hall, made an enthusiastic cheer. But Delrael whirled around with a glare and silenced them all.

Tareah clenched both her hands into fists around the Water Stone. She lifted her head up, and it was as if she could see even with her eyes closed. The ribbon of ice fell a hexagon away and struck the opposite shore, completing the link. She relaxed a little. Her shoulders slumped, her fingers remained curled around the sapphire.

The ice continued to thicken and widen as more water flowed up to freeze along the bridge. Its surface became stubbled and rough, with steplike projections on the steepest part of the curve.

Tareah spoke, but kept her face directed across the river. “Send them across. It’ll hold now. But don’t take any longer than necessary.”

Delrael motioned with his left arm. Some of characters acted uneasy; Delrael climbed up onto the bridge first, in his role as their brave leader, moving at a brisk pace. Vailret followed behind, then Jathen. Bryl came up with Siya, and then the other fighters started to march along.

Delrael hurried. He didn’t know how Tareah would come over herself, but he kept moving. The air around the bridge blew bitterly cold. Less than a man-length wide, the ice bridge felt hard and slick under his feet. He had to pay attention to where he set his feet and could not allow himself to be distracted by the gurgling waters against the icicle struts below.

He did peer over the edge and see, submerged in the current, rocks and the murky shadows of toppled trees. Some distance to the south he made out a black line parallel to the bridge, which marked the boundary of the next river hexagon.

The last time he had crossed this river had been on Enrod’s raft, pushed by the cursed Sentinel. Delrael wondered about Enrod now. He could sense Jathen close behind him, and did not want to mention the fallen Sorcerer who had been a hero to the Tairans.

Delrael found it difficult to keep his balance on the downward curve of the opposite side, but managed to set foot on the bank again. Behind him Vailret slipped with the heels of his boots and fell on his backside into the mud. It showed the others to be careful, and Vailret managed to laugh at it; Delrael wondered if he had done the stunt on purpose, to make a point for them all.

Delrael reached out to take Siya’s hand, but she refused. Bryl scowled at her and worked his own careful way down. “You don’t get much help these days. You should take it when it’s offered.”

She snorted. “You might be an invalid, but I’m not yet.”

Vailret turned and squinted toward Tareah waiting on the opposite bank. The line of fighters continued to cross over the walkway. They began milling in the nearby forest terrain to keep from crowding the base of the bridge.

Jathen stood beside the other characters, but remained silent. He looked at the river, then gazed deep into the forest terrain that hid their long journey toward Tairé. Delrael wondered what it had been like for him to take a log and swim across the cold river. No wonder Jathen had been sick and exhausted by the time he reached the Stronghold village.

Scattered around the riverbank, Delrael noticed the burned spots of many different campfires, as if a great number of characters had waited there. Up and down the hex-line, he saw other dead fires spaced equally apart. One still smoldered.

“Here she comes!” Vailret whispered.

The last of the fighters had crossed over. The colorful figure of Tareah climbed up and strode along the ice bridge she had made. He couldn’t quite make out what she was doing until she reached the apex and began to descend toward them.

The delicate icicle bridge melted into silvery trickles of water, pouring back into the river only one step behind her as she moved along. Tareah walked with stiff legs and a shuffling step that showed just how much she concentrated to maintain her spell. As she walked closer, the melt water splashed and drummed into the river like a heavy downpour filled with chunks of ice.

Delrael caught her as she stumbled the last few steps toward the bank. He pulled her off the base of the bridge as it suddenly collapsed into a great wave that smacked back into the silty river. The big splash dumped water and mud on those who stood too close to the hex-line.

Delrael held Tareah a second longer than he absolutely needed to. She pulled away, looking tired but exhilarated. She brushed herself off and tried to smear some of the mud from her sleeve. She gazed back over the river. “I did it!”

Delrael grinned back at her. “I should have known you could.” He avoided her eyes. “—without you needing to remind me.”

He looked at the scattered dead campfires again, then he heard someone moving in the forest behind him. For a moment he thought some of his fighters had gone to gather firewood.

As he turned, Delrael saw a tall powerfully built man walking along the quest-path out of the trees. He had long dark hair and a voluminous black beard; his eyes looked red. His white robe must have once looked magnificent, trimmed in purple, but now it was tattered and stained. Finger-smeared lines of ashes marked a strange pattern on the cloth. The man appeared healthy, though; powerful and confident. He cocked his head from one side to the other, fixing a fiery glare at random tree trunks, then at the human fighters.

Delrael recognized the Sentinel immediately.

Before he could say anything, Jathen brushed past him and stopped two steps away from the man, blinking, his mouth open in astonishment. His usual stunned expression now held hope and excitement. “Enrod!” he cried. “I knew you wouldn’t desert us.”

Enrod the Sentinel stopped and surveyed the army. When he saw Delrael and Vailret and Bryl among the gathered fighters, a flicker of confused recognition passed across his red eyes. Delrael found himself cringing inside, not knowing what would happen. This was the Sorcerer who had tried to destroy them all with the Fire Stone.

“I was. . .wondering when characters would come,” Enrod said. His eyes looked up and off to the side, as if listening to voices in his head. “Waiting for you.”

6. Departures

“All quest-paths lead to adventure, treasure, combat, perhaps death. Which route will you take?”

—The Book of Rules

Vailret felt uneasy watching the dark-haired Sorcerer, wondering how much Enrod remembered. What if Scartaris had damaged his mind so much that he would always be a threat?

With the curious army around him, Enrod stood by the bank of the Barrier River, digging his fingernails into the bark of a tree. He sniffed, then turned his head to one of the still-smoldering fires along the bank. He smiled, then nodded to the gray ash-clumps of other dead fires.

“I can still make fire.” He bent down and smeared his hands in the cold remnants of one fire, pawing about for an ember. He held up a blackened lump of wood, but it held no spark. He dropped it with a disappointed sigh.

By the bank, Vailret looked at where Enrod’s crude raft had washed up against dangling roots. Vailret remembered riding on it with Delrael and Bryl, surrounded by mist. Enrod had poled on, not seeing, only continuing his endless journey as decreed by the Deathspirits. When Vailret tried to snap him out of his trance, Enrod had moved with lightning speed, sending Vailret sprawling against the wet logs. The Sentinel had never spoken a word.

Now Enrod splashed his ash-coated hands in the rushing water, confused by all the characters watching him.

“How long have you been. . .awake again, Enrod?” Vailret asked. Despite his misgivings, Enrod of Tairé would be a great ally if he fought with them against the enemy horde. Delrael stood watching, as if he had not yet made up his mind about the Sentinel.

Enrod continued to stare at his broken raft hung up on the black hex-line. Mud and silt had clogged up under one corner. A broken blade of grass drifted by, bobbing on a ripple, and then continued out of sight downstream.

“Days. Not sure.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. Some of the wet ashes stained his lips.

“Like a dream. The Deathspirits. . .held me. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move. Back and forth across the river.” He stared out at the hexagon-wide current. “Until now. Scartaris is dead, Deathspirits gone. I’m left here on this side. Where do I go?”

He looked at them, turning his head so he might see all the characters there. But his eyes remained unfocused. “Something happened in my city. Scartaris.” He closed his eyes and pushed a hand against the side of his head. “Made me think things. Do things. It still echoes in my head!” His expression snapped into clarity and the words came out with sudden focus. “I always wanted to rebuild Tairé—that was my goal, but I could only think of burning.”

He fixed his stare on Delrael, but it seemed to carry no antagonism. “Because you created this river.”

“We destroyed Scartaris,” Delrael said. “You shouldn’t want to hurt us.”

“Not. . .anymore,” Enrod said.

Vailret bent forward. “The Earthspirits came to fight Scartaris. So did the Deathspirits. They vanished from Gamearth again, gone dormant to rest. Maybe they forgot about you, loosened your curse.”

“Forgot about me.” Enrod made a thin smile. “But I can still make fire.” He kicked at the ashes in a circle by his feet.

“The Deathspirits could have gone off to their other realms, to play Games of their own creation,” Tareah said. “That’s why they made the Transition in the first place.”

“I don’t know. But they’re gone.” Delrael sounded impatient with the discussion. “It’s a good thing you didn’t stop trying to fight against them.” He hesitated. “Are you all right?”

“Never stop trying. Never.” Enrod turned his gaze back to the washed-up raft. “This is no longer part of me. Gone.”

He planted his foot on a corner of the raft and, bracing himself against the tree, he shoved the log. The raft lurched out into the current, leaving a cloud of mud in the water. The raft swerved one way and then curled around the other as it crawled into the current.

“Why I stayed in Tairé for so many turns. In the desolation.” Enrod stared away from the river, back to the east. “Never stop trying.”

Jathen came up beside Enrod. His heavy eyebrows and dark hair hung about him. His eyes glinted bright against the nightmares behind them. “Enrod, you and I are the last survivors of Tairé. When Scartaris sent you away, he made the rest of us Tairans do his work. We had to create weapons and shields for him!”

“Weapons—from Tairé?” Enrod sounded astonished.

“We supplied his horde of monsters. We sweated and worked—” Jathen swallowed and turned his face away. “We gave ourselves. Hundreds of us were skinned for leather, butchered and dried for meat to feed his army—” Jathen looked as if he were about to gag, then he whirled back. All the nightmares had resurfaced.

“That’s the worst part, isn’t it, Enrod?” He stood up straight with his anger. “Yes, we’re free of the control. We can do what we want now. But we’re not free of the memories. Scartaris made us do what he wanted. But he didn’t hold our minds tightly enough to make us unaware of our actions. And now that I can remember what we were doing, it’s burning me up inside. Because if I can remember so clearly, why couldn’t I refuse?”

“It’s not your fault, Jathen,” Delrael said.

But the Tairan turned to him and snapped. “It isn’t? I worked in the tannery. Didn’t I know what I was doing? Was Scartaris so powerful that he could direct every finger that moved? Every step I took? Every. . .cut with the knife? I can see it all in front of me. I spent days there, skinning people, characters that I had known and grown up with, fought with and worked with. But none of that stopped me. Maybe if I’d tried harder I could have resisted. But I didn’t. I took the knife. They stood before me—their eyes were pupilless, focused ahead, unseeing.

“But if I can remember what I was doing, surely they knew what was about to happen to them! Scartaris wouldn’t let them do anything more than stand there and wait as I drove a knife into their throats. At the last minute, did he release them, let them feel their own dying? I wouldn’t doubt it. Why should he bother to waste energy controlling them as they bled out on the floor of the tannery? While I stood waiting for them to stop jerking and writhing so I could skin them more easily and not waste a bit of their leather.”

Enrod interrupted him and spoke in a quiet but piercing voice. Jathen’s words seemed to intensify Enrod, forcing back the maze of shadows in his mind. “If you’re responsible for all that, then I must be responsible for everything that I did.” He paused. “And that’s not a burden I can bear right now. Look ahead, not back.”

“And forget about Tairé?” Jathen asked. His expression looked dumbfounded that his hero, the great Sentinel Enrod, would suggest such a thing.

“No, never forget,” Enrod said. He looked behind him to the clustered trees and the quest-path that wound eastward away from the river. “Go back there.”

Jathen held his breath in anticipation. Vailret could feel the tension in the air. Enrod brought his attention back to Delrael. “I will follow your army. Fight for Tairé.”

Delrael’s voice was gruff. Vailret could see that his cousin wasn’t sure how much to say about their plans. “That’s where we’re going.”

Enrod drew himself up, didn’t quite smile, but tugged a lock of black hair away from his face. Vailret noticed for the first time a thin streaking of white hairs in his beard. “I still have many powers. Spells.” Enrod looked down at his own hands, his tattered robe, as if embarrassed at the level to which he had sunk. “I lost the Fire Stone.”

Delrael appeared about to say something, but Bryl suddenly broke in. Vailret realized that Bryl had covered up his own two Stones as soon as they saw Enrod again. Since Scartaris had used the eight-sided Fire Stone as a conduit to corrupt Enrod, Vailret silently agreed with Bryl’s decision.

“The Fire Stone is—safe,” Bryl said.

#

The following morning, Vailret and Bryl prepared to go down their own quest-path as the remainder of the army broke camp.

“Time to go,” Vailret said, clapping Bryl’s shoulder. He had not been looking forward to this moment, but they had no time to waste. “The Earth Stone is waiting for us.”

“I’ll be sad to see you leave,” Tareah said, smiling at him. Her words made Vailret’s skin tingle with delight. He shuffled his feet.

His mother Siya gave him a brief hug, hesitated, then gave him a much larger one, to his embarrassment. Siya turned with tears in her eyes and snapped at the characters around them. “What are you looking at!”

Vailret felt uncomfortable with the entire ritual. He did not look forward to leaving the protection of the large army. As he stood there, wishing he could just be on his way, he had to wait as Delrael and Jathen bid them luck on their quest, as did other fighters he had come to know during training. It seemed to take forever.

“With all the luck we’re being offered, we shouldn’t have any troubles at all,” Bryl muttered to him.

“No,” Vailret said, “none at all.”

Interlude: Outside

The sheen in Melanie’s eyes made David want to slap her face to shake her out of it. But she would be completely beyond reason; Gamearth held her mind too firmly. David could only hope the others were not as weak—or everything was already lost.

“It’s all or nothing tonight, David.” Melanie’s voice was like the growl of a small dog that wanted to sound threatening. It didn’t seem like her own voice anymore, and it probably wasn’t.

She had won the dice roll when David contested her use of the character Enrod. Enrod had been David’s own character, raised in Tairé, which was his city. He had used Scartaris to send Enrod to attack the Stronghold, to weaken Melanie and stop her desperate schemes to keep the Game going.

But Melanie claimed that since David had abandoned Enrod, the character was up for grabs. So she took him. She beat David by one point in the dice roll.

Something about the way the dice fell made David more concerned. If the powers of the Game could reach out and manipulate them, if it could stop the phone from working, make his car engine refuse to start. . .couldn’t it also alter dice rolls? Couldn’t Gamearth play itself if it wanted, and make sure it won?

But David could not accept that. The very foundation of Gamearth was built on the Rules. The Rules could not be tossed aside so easily. If Gamearth was willing to break those Rules, then the map would go about destroying itself without any help from him.

Tyrone squinted at the map, pressing his face close to the painted hexagons. “I thought we might be able to see it. The ice bridge, you know? Like we could see the Barrier River when we created it.”

David fought back his resentment. Tyrone was so focused on how much fun he had with the growing Game, that he couldn’t conceive of any danger.

“It would have melted already, Tyrone. You should have looked before the round ended,” Scott said. Nothing else, no censure about “being ridiculous.” David had won an important victory with Scott, who always insisted on a rational explanation. At least Scott now realized the seriousness of the Game and how it was affecting all their lives.

The flames continued to crackle in the fireplace. The room got warm enough that David pulled off his sweater. Outside the house, as the dusk grew into night, he could still hear the storm.

“Are you going to bring out any other old characters, Mel?” Tyrone asked.

David wanted to shake Tyrone and shout at him to face the reality of their situation. But Tyrone just didn’t understand.

Melanie glanced at Tyrone, considering, then her eyes lit up. “Any character we’ve introduced before is fair game. David’s not going to pull any punches.” She refused to look at him. “So I’m going to use everything I can think of. David captured Jules Verne and the Sitnaltan weapon. We have to find weapons of our own.”

David resented how she automatically included Scott and Tyrone in her conflict with him—unless Melanie was speaking of her own characters when she said “we.” David couldn’t tell.

“I—” Scott said, then paused. He took off his glasses; his eyes looked small without the thick lenses. He seemed vulnerable and uncertain of what he wanted to say.

“I’ve been thinking about this mix-up with the Game and our world. There’s really no way we can deny it. Not after the Barrier River, and the explosion last week.”

He nodded toward the blue hexagons on the map and the blasted parts around Scartaris’s battlefield. The force released from that struggle had damaged Tyrone’s kitchen table and burned David’s hands.

“So if this is really going on—” Scott said the word ‘this’ as if it encompassed everything. “Then I have to worry about something else. The Sitnaltan Weapon that Verne and Frankenstein built, that I directed them to build. . .they made it from the ship that David and Tyrone created out of their imaginations. The power source they took couldn’t have been totally real. And yet it couldn’t have been totally imaginary either.”

He stopped for a moment, as if waiting for the others to understand the implications.

“If it’s part real and part imaginary, the Sitnaltan weapon may be a lot more devastating than we know.” He swallowed. David could see him struggling with the concept in his own mind. “What if it’s more than enough to destroy Gamearth? What if it can backlash outside the map? What if it’s enough to destroy us too?”

Tyrone groaned comically. “This is boggling my mind!”

David ignored him and felt a shiver up his spine. That fear had been tickling the back of his mind, but he had not faced it until now. He remembered times when he didn’t seem to have complete control over his own characters. If Siryyk the manticore wanted to detonate the weapon now that he had Verne captive, David wasn’t sure he could stop it.

He let his voice fall to a whisper. “I’m beginning to wonder just who created who.”

Melanie looked at him in a rare moment of rapport, but then the defiance returned to her eyes. “Or is it mutual now? Are we and the Game so intertwined that we can’t survive without each other?”

7. Mayer’s Research Expedition

“Once we have finished gathering data, we are by no means finished with our research. In fact, the work has only begun, because then we must discover how to apply that information for our own benefit.”

—Dirac, Charter of the Sitnaltan Council of Patent Givers

Mayer felt sore from riding the bicycle. She wobbled along the path, unsteady on the hard tires but impressed by the distance she had already covered. She still had several hexagons to go before she reached the Outsiders’ ship.

Only a few hours after leaving Sitnalta, Mayer’s legs already ached from the effort of pedaling and steering over the bumpy terrain. Her dark hair streamed with sweat in the sunshine. She had spent too many hours in her tower workroom, pacing back and forth, thinking, scrawling designs in chalk on the dark wall—and not enough time exercising her body.

With determination, Mayer pushed her legs down, applied force to the pedals, which turned the gear, pulling the chain and rotating the wheels, and carried her forward. Simple exhaustion wasn’t going to stop her.

The black bicycle had been welded together from scrap piping, one of several prototypes developed by her father Dirac in his younger days; but the invention never caught on in Sitnalta. Probably, Mayer now thought, because the thing had never been designed with the comfort of its rider in mind. The seat was a flat metal triangle with rounded corners and two rigid springs that made each bump feel like a blow to her buttocks. The minimal padding did little to ease the ride.

But it would take a team of engineers to get a steam-engine car up the winding paths Mayer knew she would be traveling. The initial Sitnaltan research team to the Outsiders’ ship had needed strong characters to hoist and lift their vehicles around sharp corners in the mountain terrain. Mayer could never do that by herself, and so she was left to her own abilities. She could travel faster with the bicycle than by walking.

She rolled across a hex-line from flat grassland into abrupt mountain terrain. Mayer began to puff as the quest-path took a steep upward turn. After only a short while of this, she stopped and dismounted from the bicycle, letting it fall to the dry grass and rocky earth.

Mayer patted her thighs, stamped her feet, and flexed her hands to keep the blood circulating. She blinked and turned to look behind her, across two flat hexagons of grassland sprawling toward the intricate city of Sitnalta.

A bird flew up from the grass, and Mayer squinted her eyes, studying the shape of its wings, the color of its markings. She tried to recall the proper genus and species name, though biology had never been her strongest talent. Professor Frankenstein would have known instantly.

Mayer’s face shrank into a sour expression at the thought of the dark-eyed professor. He had disappointed her and angered her at the same time. After the destruction of the manufactories by the cruel force that seeped up through the Sitnaltan streets, Frankenstein had vowed to find a way of combating the invisible enemy.

Straight-backed and on fire with determination, Mayer went to the professors’ workshop. Here Frankenstein and Verne had created so many inventions that even the Council of Patent Givers could not keep up with them all. She burst through the door without knocking and stood watching the dark inventor.

He continued pacing around the cluttered room without even looking up at her. Mayer saw a thousand different inventions, some disassembled to be repaired, some half-constructed and then abandoned, not because they would not work but because the professors had grown more interested in something else.

Frankenstein had knocked half-finished gadgets to the floor, ignoring any damage he might do to them. He simply needed more table space. Diagrams of human anatomy and large drawings of muscles and joints were pinned up on the walls and lying on the table in stacks. Scattered dissection reports of nervous systems poked out from other piles beside scrawled treatises on how different parts of the body worked.

Professor Frankenstein had always been fascinated with living things and how they worked. He had spent much of his early solo effort in creating mechanical automatons, imitations of living things. Metal fish swam in the fountain pools, moving mechanical arms assembled items in the hazardous areas of the manufactories, claws picked up castings too hot to handle.

In the jumbled workroom, Mayer’s dark eyes were wide and fascinated as she drank in all the details. “I’ve come to help you, Professor.”

He turned, startled into annoyance by the distraction. “I don’t need any help. I didn’t ask for any.”

Mayer leaned with both hands on the edge of Frankenstein’s work table. The sharp windings of a screw stung her palm; she brushed it aside. “You work better with a partner. I know I can help you. Haven’t I proven I can do it? Look at all my own inventions. I’m as angry about this. . .this intrusion as you are—let me contribute.”

Frankenstein’s shoulders slumped, and his face took on a weary expression. “Yes, I did work well with Verne. With Verne. But he’s gone. Now I work alone.”

Anger welled up inside Mayer. She drove herself as hard as any character. She would be a good match for Professor Frankenstein, if only he would let her. “Professor, I must insist—”

Frankenstein picked up a metal plate and tossed it to the floor among the scattered debris there. The crash and clatter startled Mayer; she heard something break, the tinkle of glass shards falling to the floor. The professor glared at her, and she saw how angry he was, how absorbed he had been in his own work.

“Please leave!”

“You vowed to rescue Sitnalta from this invisible force. It’s been happening four times a day. Different buildings, different parts of the city. We’ve got to find a way to stop it.”

“I will,” Frankenstein said, “if you stop bothering me. Don’t you see how difficult this is going to be?”

“Let me help!” Her head pounded with the intensity of her desire, but she felt that she had already lost.

“You can help by going away. If you have a brilliant idea, put it into practice yourself. You’re a good inventor. Right now I’ve got my own idea.”

Pointedly ignoring her further, he sat down on a stool and dragged papers in front of him, rearranging them on the table. He let his face show exhaustion and anguish deeper than anything Mayer expected. “I need to do it this way. This time. Now please—let me work.”

Mayer felt her lips trembling as she tried to contain her disappointment. “It’s something to do with what you and Verne learned at the Outsiders’ ship, isn’t it? The information that you won’t tell anyone.”

He shook his head, but continued to stare at his drawings. “No. It isn’t that.”

Mayer knew otherwise. She thought she could tell when he was lying. She stormed out of the professor’s workroom without another word, but in her mind she made promises to herself. She knew where to go. She would have to do it alone. She would have to hurry, before the invisible force continued to make the Sitnaltans destroy themselves. . . .

It had been chilly that morning when she set out on the bicycle. The sluggish sea mist still crept through the hex-cobbled streets until the dawn grew strong enough to burn it off. Mayer pedaled out through the main gates as Sitnalta began to stir for the morning. Many characters had left their own research projects to help clean up destroyed buildings from the previous day’s manipulations and to begin rebuilding efforts. They did not say to each other that the evil compulsion could make it all wasted effort at any time.

Mayer pedaled off along the quest-path, pushing herself to get to the Outsiders’ ship as fast as possible. She didn’t know how the travel restrictions spelled out in Rule #5 would affect her progress on a bicycle—she would need to keep track and contribute more data to the Sitnaltan collection of information.

As she rested beside her bicycle on the mountain terrain, Mayer felt her leg muscles shaking, her body prickling from sweat. She took a drink from a small water flask and then shrugged the pack off her shoulders.

Crawling out of her warm outer clothing, Mayer felt the breeze cool the sweat on her skin, raising a few goosebumps. Once she started riding uphill again, the effort would keep her warm enough. She tucked the discarded clothing inside her pack without bothering to fold it, cramming it into any pocket of space. With a deep indrawn breath, she shouldered the pack again and righted her clumsy bicycle.

Mayer set off again, puffing and pedaling up the steep slope but making steady progress.

She had marked on her own small map exactly where to find the ruins of the ship, which lay crashed next to an abandoned Slac fortress. The first Sitnaltan expedition had left the excavation site the morning after Professor Verne rode off alone. Frankenstein had declared their mission over and ordered them to pack up and depart immediately, giving no explanation. Not until later, through hints, did the professor tell about his and Verne’s dream from the Outsider Scott, showing them how to create a devastating weapon with what remained in the wreckage in the ship.

After they had finished, Frankenstein used a firepit in the old Slac fortress to burn all their plans and notes, so that no other character might know about the weapon they had developed. Mayer and many others in Sitnalta found this attitude appalling. Professors Verne and Frankenstein had created enormous numbers of inventions—they had always shared every detail, every nuance. Just the thought of them destroying information that was common property, by law, of all characters caused friction with the other inventors.

Frankenstein remained firm, though. He and Verne had made a vow—this was one invention they would not share. Not ever.

Returning to the ship, Mayer would find a way to learn what they had learned, or some other means to fight for Sitnalta. She remembered the words the Vailret had said as he confronted her on the docks at night, just before he and blind Paenar had stolen Verne’s Nautilus sub-marine boat.

“You tinker with your calculating machines and street-cleaning engines, but when faced with a problem your technology may not be able to solve, you dismiss it as something not to be considered,” Vailret had said. “Scrap your frivolous gadgets and invent something to stop this thing! If we fail, all of Gamearth could be depending on you.”

Mayer had no idea if Vailret had been successful on his journey to the island, though the dragon Tryos had not been seen again. She didn’t know what had happened to their greater enemy, Scartaris—but Verne had disappeared with his secret weapon, and even Frankenstein didn’t know what had gone wrong.

The force corrupting Sitnalta might have something to do with Scartaris, or the Outsiders, or the rumored end of the Game. Their own detectors showed nothing, and Mayer had no idea. But she would take Vailret’s challenge and try to invent something to counteract the danger.

Her dark eyes glazed with the effort to keep pushing uphill, focusing only on the quest-path before her. Her skin was flushed, her face set in the obsessive expression she thought might be like the one she saw so often on Professor Frankenstein’s face. He was one of the greatest inventors since Maxwell. But he apparently did not have the same admiration for her, since he spurned her assistance.

In late afternoon she crested a peak and abruptly crossed another hex-line of mountain terrain where the slope changed and the crags spread out before her in a different pattern. The quest-path zig-zagged ahead like a white line carved into the cliffs. The air felt cold, like rough cloth against her face, but so far she had not encountered enough ice and snow to make for treacherous riding.

Some of the peaks on Mayer’s left blocked the setting sun, filling the air with shadows. As she looked ahead, she could discern the stark parapets of the crumbling Slac fortress, the tiny black window slits, the jagged and forbidding spikes. She stopped for a moment, drawing a deep breath.

As the fading light glinted around the cliffs, she saw gleams and reflections of the collapsed metal from the Outsiders’ ship, excavated girders that the Sitnaltan expedition had left exposed.

Mayer pedaled furiously, picking up speed as the quest-path plunged downhill. The narrow tires were awkward on the rough trail, sending her careening against loose rocks as she tried to stop herself. The ship seemed to be waiting for her, a box filled with wonders and ideas, all the things she could discover.

With the incentive burning in her, Mayer felt the need to discover something of tremendous significance to the entire Game. The answer lay buried somewhere in the ruins ahead.

“I’ll show you Professor Frankenstein,” she muttered between teeth clenched with effort and the cold, “and I’ll show you, Vailret.”

8. Pool of Peace

“I shall never return. I am done with the Game, and the Game is done with me.”

—Drodanis, on his departure from the Stronghold

The great still Pool, as smooth and flat as a puddle of quicksilver, began to drain away. It seemed as if a hole had cracked open at the bottom of the map, letting it all pour to the Outside, into nothingness.

Drodanis stood beside the trees, staring down at his reflection. His face shone back at him, but he also saw through the placid water to the depths of the Rulewoman’s Pool.

Near the bottom he glimpsed the boy Lellyn, frozen in a block of forever-ice. The Rulewoman Melanie had encased Lellyn there to protect him from his own destructive doubts. But now as the level of water in the Pool fell visibly, without a sound, Drodanis realized that even her protection could not last.

The Rulewoman had not shown herself to him in many turns. She had come occasionally to speak with Drodanis, to talk of the rest of Gamearth and how it continued without him. Drodanis had been one of her favorite characters, she said. When the Outsider David began his work to destroy the map, she had allowed him to send a warning to his son Delrael, but then she had departed and never returned.

The Rulewoman would be occupied with other concerns, more serious adventures with a bearing on the entire Game, he thought. Drodanis remained in the silent forest, resting . . . existing, but doing nothing else. The past had left its crippling scars on him. His mind had replayed the tragic events of his life so many times that the memories had exhausted themselves—

The death throes of his beloved Fielle, sweating, her skin warm and damp to the touch as Drodanis knelt over her and watched the fever course through her system like a serpent’s venom. He felt weak, barely recovered from the fever himself. . .the fever he had passed on to her while she tended him back to health. Fielle died as he stood there. He watched the milky glaze on her eyes when the delirium faded into a thicker glaze of death. . . .

He saw again the last cocky grin on the face of his brother Cayon while he fought the deadly ogre out in the forests. Cayon: always trying to compete with him, to outdo his older brother, to prove that he could tackle this monster on his own. But he was desperately mismatched, and didn’t even realize it until it was too late. . . .

Again and again those memories had flooded Drodanis’s mind, focusing his thoughts. It had made Drodanis leave his life behind, to come here in search of forgetting, to avoid the responsibilities of questing and amusing the Outsiders.

Here in this peaceful place, the bad memories had replayed themselves so many times—and with each recollection they grew smaller and weaker, like a river eating away a giant wall of rock. By now those memories were withered ghosts, still part of his past, but powerless.

Drodanis stood by the trees, feeling empty. Now that the pain from his past had faded away, it left him only numb. He had nothing else to do, no companions, not the Rulewoman, not young Lellyn who had followed him on his long journey here.

And now the Pool of Peace was draining away before his eyes.

Drodanis stared at the reflection of the old fighter looking up at him from the Pool’s surface, and he asked himself if he really had changed that much. In his own mind he still pictured himself as the brash young quester, the fighter character who had gone out with Cayon on adventures, who had found piles of treasure, slain dozens of monsters.

But now he saw a man whose face looked drawn and slack; his eyes appeared hollow, his expression vacant. This man frightened Drodanis. His rich brown hair, long moustache, and beard were now streaked with gray. He hadn’t cared for his appearance anymore; he had seen no point to it.

Drodanis remembered when Fielle had combed his hair for him and he had braided hers, when he strutted around wearing the jewels and weapons and fine armor he had won through his quests. Now he recognized only a once-brave character who had been badly used and then discarded.

Drodanis drew a deep breath and felt a strange emotion stirring in him, resentment and anger—not directed toward himself, but focused outward, at the Game.

A ripple in the Pool of Peace startled him. The very thought of something marring the surface was so puzzling that he took a moment to realize that the water level had dropped enough that the motionless, encased figure of Lellyn began to protrude. The Pool drained around him, exposing the young boy’s head and shoulders.

Beneath the milky ice, Drodanis could see Lellyn’s expression locked in astonishment, disbelief, and terror at what the boy had just realized. “Ah, Lellyn, what is going to happen to us?” Drodanis said.

But he heard no noise, not even a trickle from the draining water. Tall black pines and oaks and willows shielded the Rulewoman’s Pool from curious characters. No quest-paths led here, and Drodanis had found the place only after long searching.

When Lellyn was still beside him, they had debated with the Rulewoman about the Rules and reality. Lellyn seemed too perceptive for his own good. Lellyn himself was a Rulebreaker—a human character with powerful magical abilities, a contradiction in itself. Lellyn became obsessed with the contradictions. He had queried the Rulewoman too much about reality and about Gamearth’s place and how it had been created.

When in his mind he so firmly grasped the idea that Gamearth was not real, that he was not real. . .when he had locked onto the concept and refused to let go, and in his heart he completely disbelieved in his own existence—then the Rulewoman had stopped him. She froze him in forever-ice and submerged him in the Pool a moment before he could vanish into nothingness.

Now the Pool had nearly drained away, and Drodanis could see the forever-ice melting.

Lellyn’s body stood exposed up to his shins, and the water drained even faster. The boy apprentice had his arms locked in a warding gesture, trying to wave away the realization he was forcing upon himself. His legs were taking a step backward, as if trying to flee.

The remaining water stood out in glistening puddles, like frozen mirrors. The bottom of the Pool showed dark and lumpy, rocks where no plant could take hold in the magical water.

“Rulewoman! What do you want me to do?” Drodanis shouted into the air, breaking the silence. His voice sounded like a roar, and he expected to hear disturbed cries of birds in the forest terrain, but nothing answered him, not even a breeze among the trees. The air felt perfectly warm and still, too comfortable.

The spark of anger in him grew a little brighter.

He heard a crack, and saw that a chunk of the forever-ice fell from Lellyn’s shoulders. Other spidery lines appeared along the filmy coating that masked the boy’s entire body. The forever-ice split and fell off, part melting, part vanishing into sparkles of light in the air.

“Lellyn!” Drodanis cried.

The boy moved, turned his head, keeping his eyes wide. He took one more step backward and waved his hands. “No!” he said—but he was answering a question asked many turns ago. He could not change his thoughts fast enough. “How can I get this out of my mind?” he cried, but his voice turned high and distorted.

Lellyn rippled and faded. “Where am I going?” he managed to say, and just for an instant before he flowed into an uncertain image, Drodanis watched the boy’s expression change to one of wonder.

Lellyn dissolved into the air, leaving behind no more trace than had the water in the Pool.

Drodanis hung his head and squatted down at the rim of the basin. Everything was gone now, his memories, the Pool, Lellyn, the Rulewoman. . .his reasons for existing.

If the map survived, these would be remembered as the greatest times of the entire Game, not simple quests, but battles for survival of Gamearth itself. Drodanis had stepped away from all that, bowing out to let other characters shoulder the burden.

The only small part he had offered to the Game was to send a message—a warning—to Delrael about the need for stopping Scartaris. Delrael had taken the quest, and the younger generation of characters now determined the events of the Game. Drodanis was proud of his son.

He blinked his eyes, and the tears burned there. It felt strange to him. Living too long with comfort and peace had drained him, like the waters from the Pool; it made his life gray instead of filled with the bright colors of happiness and sadness.

He could not compete anymore, this old empty fighter who had not used his training for many turns. He felt useless. He wondered if he had made the right decision so long ago in leaving everything behind.

Drodanis concentrated on the small flame of anger inside, and it seemed to be the only living part in his entire body, the only spot of color in his world. As he thought about what he had done—and what he had failed to do by running away from it all—he watched the spark grow brighter. He felt his senses reawaken.

“No, I am not useless,” he said to himself. “I can still remember how to fight. How to change things.”

Perhaps the Pool had gone away to punish him for going away, to kick him out of his numb surrender and show him that Gamearth still needed Drodanis.

He stood up and went to one of the few remaining puddles at the bottom of the Pool of Peace. He bent over and scooped up the cool water in his hands, splashing it on his face and trying to wash away some of his weariness. But now it was just water after all, and the refreshing strength he gathered came from within himself.

Drodanis stood again, took a deep breath, and felt his muscles: arms that could still swing a sword, eyes that could still spot an enemy and aim an arrow.

Leaving the empty Pool of Peace behind, Drodanis walked out to the trees without turning back, searching for a quest-path that would take him back into the Game. Back into life again.

9. Black Falcon

“Few characters have a mission as clear as ours. Few characters have a responsiblity as great as ours. If humans are to win this Game, then we must be pure in our motivations and we must be decisive in our actions. We answer to no one but ourselves and to the Outsiders.”

—Annik, chief of the Black Falcon troops

When Delrael’s army arrived at the ylvan settlement, the Black Falcon troops had already slaughtered most of the forest people.

The trees stood too dense for Delrael to see the smoke rising up until he could smell it. He heard distant sounds of shouting, some kind of struggle, screams. Delrael sent three characters to run ahead and investigate as he swung the rest of the army toward the disturbance.

He broke into a trot off the quest-path directly through the forest, urging his fighters to greater speed. He wrestled with his own impatience to strike against a tangible enemy rather than continuing a long, tedious journey.

“Prepare for a fight,” he said to Jathen behind him. The other characters passed the message along so that Delrael did not have to raise his voice and alert an enemy. Delrael elbowed branches out of the way, kicking at brambles by his ankles. He drew his own sword. He heard shouts, the crackling of flames, scattered painful screams.

The three scout characters hurried back to Delrael. They looked shaken and gray, their eyes wide with terror. “They’re being slaughtered!” said young Romm, a farmer from the village.

“I can hear what’s happening,” Delrael said, then he broke into a run. When he burst into the clearing, the appalling violence of the scene stunned him enough that he stopped for a moment and had to concentrate to keep from dropping his sword.

Three of the camouflaged ylvan nest dwellings crackled with orange flames that licked up the matted brush. The air smelled of oily smoke and blood. The towering trees all around were stained with soot and white gashes from axes and swords. Ruins of a campfire lay on the ground, stomped and scattered.

One of the blazing dwellings burned through its anchoring rope with a groan and split open at the bottom, dumping smoldering debris. Sticks and ylvan possessions tumbled onto the ground as the nest dwelling toppled after.

Around the clearing rode a dozen burly Black Falcon fighters on their own dark horses, outfitted as Corim had been. One towering woman rested a bloodstained two-handed sword on her shoulder as she pointed and shouted orders. The others charged around in circles, shooting arrows at a few surviving ylvans who tried to flee in the trees above.

In a snapshot second, Delrael saw the splashed blood and the broken bodies of little forest people dressed in greens and browns to camouflage them in the trees. A handful of others lay tied up in a net, struggling to break free.

Several more dangled from trees with their necks in poorly made nooses. Three still squirmed and kicked on the ends of their ropes, though their faces had turned blackish from lack of air. Their tongues stuck out and their eyes rolled up. The ylvans clawed at their throats, trying to tear the nooses apart with bleeding fingernails.

One Black Falcon rider lay motionless with several arrows in his throat, chest, and back. He had been propped against a tree trunk, but he was obviously dead. A riderless horse, apparently belonging to the dead fighter, wandered about.

Delrael made a wordless cry as he crashed into the clearing. His other fighters, still running to keep up with him, paused to gawk at what they saw. Delrael finally managed to form words, shouting “Stop! Stop!”

The Black Falcon troops whirled around at the new characters. After a moment of surprise, they appeared relieved to see humans coming out of the forest and not some other character race.

“Archers! Find your mark!” Delrael shouted. “All of you Black Falcon troops, stop!” Delrael’s other fighters nocked arrows at the black riders, who appeared dumbfounded.

Jathen ran ahead of Delrael, got to the central tree in the settlement and severed the ropes hanging the squirming ylvans. They dropped to the ground. He ripped at the ropes and tried to open the ylvans’ air passages. The skin on their necks was gnarled and puckered from the bite of the rope.

One of the ylvans had already died. Another, unconscious, broke her ankle upon falling to the ground; the pain woke her up, and she gasped in air as Jathen pulled off the noose. The third, a powerful-looking ylvan with a drawn face, dark hair, and pinched mouth, was still alive and aware. As Jathen cut the first woman free, the ylvan man pulled his own noose off. He rolled over to his knees and vomited, trying to wheeze in lungfuls of air and retch at the same time.

The Black Falcon woman on horseback turned her mount and glared at Delrael with a half-bemused expression. “What are you doing? Only enemies of Gamearth would interfere with us.” She turned to her troops. “Ignore them. Go ahead and execute the rest of the parasites.”

Delrael snapped at his own fighters, “If another ylvan dies, kill all the Black Falcon troops. All of them. I’m sick of this.”

One of the Black Falcon riders cried out, and they all whirled to look at him. A small arrow protruded from his shoulder. Several barely seen ylvans scurried through the branches above, concealed by the smoke and fire.

The Black Falcon woman bellowed at the top of her lungs. “Get them! We’re not winners until they’re all killed.”

“I said no!” Delrael stormed forward with his sword in front of him. He stood blocking the woman on her tall horse.

She stared down at him with an icy, amused smile. “Oh, I’m tired of your whining.” She looked behind her. “Corim!”

Out of the forest terrain on the other side of the village emerged a full dozen more Black Falcon riders, each holding a long bow in hand with the string drawn fully back. They aimed their long arrows directly at Delrael. Corim led the group. His face remained dispassionate, with no sign of pity or recognition.

“Your army might outnumber us,” the woman said, “but I guarantee that each Black Falcon will take out ten of your fighters before they fall.”

Jathen stood up beside the still-choking ylvans, red with anger. As Delrael’s army continued to emerge into the clearing, old Siya, and Enrod, and Tareah appeared. “Enrod, do something!” Jathen said.

As the Sentinel from Tairé cocked his head without understanding, Delrael felt all twelve arrows pointing at his heart. The Game paused for a moment. He sensed his heart beating, and he wanted it to continue beating. Tareah took out her Water Stone, but looked uneasy about whether to take the risk or not.

“No,” Delrael said. His voice sounded small to him. “You can’t do anything in time.”

The hanged ylvan man crawled to his feet and screamed in a voice hoarse from a damaged throat. “How dare you! What have we ever done to humans?”

He gaped at the bloodshed, the slaughtered ylvans. Though arely able to stand, the little man carried murder in his eyes. He started to lunge forward with his hands extended, claws ready to tear the Black Falcon woman’s eyes out. Jathen grabbed him by the elbows and held him back.

Delrael stared into the Black Falcon woman’s face. He wished Vailret had stayed with them—Vailret was the talker. He could smooth things over between hostile characters. Delrael swallowed and tried his best, keeping his eyes on the riders. Occasionally he caught the gaze of Corim on the edge of the clearing.

“We’re wasting time here, and wasting effort,” Delrael said to the woman. “Didn’t Corim bring you my message? We wanted you to join us. There’s an enemy worth fighting. You’re just throwing away your talent here. We can’t afford to waste characters at this point in the Game, when everything may depend on the actions of one individual.”

The Black Falcon woman lowered the two-handed sword to her side and climbed off her horse. Even standing in front of Delrael, she towered a head taller than him. Her hair hung in ponytails, long and pale and shot with gray. She had tied each clump of hair with leather thongs and iron ball-bearings that turned brownish-red from exposure to the damp and rain. Her face looked rough, not beautiful, with a haughty expression of distaste. Her arms were bare behind a leather vest that protruded to contain enormous breasts—she did not look at all clumsy, but like a juggernaut.

“I brought your message, Delrael,” Corim said from his position, without relaxing the bowstring, without wavering the pointed tip of his arrow. “But Annik had thoughts of her own.”

The woman, Annik, looked at Corim, scowling for just a moment as if angry at having another character answer for her. She glared at Delrael again, now that she knew who he was. “Corim told us your preposterous suggestions.”

Delrael bristled at that, but Annik launched into her speech, raising her voice among the other sounds of the burning trees, stamping horses, and the moaning of injured ylvans. “Why would we ever want to listen to you? An amateur? We’ve been fighting this battle for generations! Since the Scouring, the Black Falcon troops have been making Gamearth suitable for human characters.

“So, after all this time, you get an idea to go marching and decide that every one of us should drop our own missions and listen to you? We should ignore a lifetime of training, a lifetime of struggle against parasites, wandering monsters, anything that’s made Gamearth unsafe! All of a sudden you want us to become friends with them? You are a child.”

Delrael drew himself up as tall as he could. His hands trembled on the hilt of his sword, but not from fear. “And you, Annik,” he said, “are so stupid I can’t believe you survived in the Game this long.”

The other Black Falcon riders stiffened, rattling their weapons, but Annik looked angry for only a moment. Then she began to laugh, and continued laughing, which made Delrael even angrier.

He continued, “We need your assistance. All of us have to fight together. These ylvans were enough to bring down one of your own fighters—” He indicated the dead man propped against the tree. “They could just as easily bring down one of the monster fighters. But instead you’d rather fight simple, defenseless opponents. Are they worthy adversaries for you?”

He looked at each of the bowmen still aiming at him. “If you kill me, then my fighters will wipe you out. No matter what it takes. Yes, I’m sure your Black Falcon troops will be great in battle, and I’m sure they’ll succeed in murdering some of my fighters before they fall. But they will fall. You’ll all die—for what? What do we gain if all of your troops are slain? What do you gain if my characters are injured or killed against you?”

He rested the tip of his own sword on the ground. “The only one who wins is Siryyk and his army. They suffer no losses if you and I fight. We’ll all be losers—you, my army, and the ylvans. Let them go and join forces with us.” Delrael kept his tone even, though the thought of joining the Black Falcons galled him now.

Annik shook her head with a disturbed smile on her face. The ponytails and ball-bearings swung from side to side like weapons. “You don’t understand much about how the Game is played. Once we get to this situation, we cannot let it just end like that. It’s in the nature of who we are.”

The ylvan man coughed again and struggled to break from Jathen’s grip. He spoke in his harsh voice, snapping at Delrael. “Don’t bargain for us, human. This is our battle—and if we lose, we’ll lose because of our own failings. Not because one human was stronger than another.”

Delrael pursed his lips. “I propose this.” His voice sounded much more reasonable than he felt. He drew a deep breath. “Rule #10 encourages single combat to solve disputes. Annik, have the Black Falcon troops pick their champion, then the ylvans will choose theirs.” He raised his eyebrows at Annik. “Now that method of settling problems is most certainly in our nature.”

Annik looked around at the tiny ylvan, shot a glance at the survivors still hiding somewhere in the trees, and smiled again at Delrael, showing the tips of her teeth.

“Maybe you’re not a fool after all, Delrael. That does sound much more reasonable than wasting our lives. What would be the terms of victory and surrender?”

Delrael frowned, pretending to be thinking, though he had decided already. “Well, if the Black Falcon champion wins, then my army departs and you go do as you like, without any interference from me. If the ylvan champion wins, you cease harassing them and join my army against the real enemy.”

Annik stroked the side of her great horse as she flashed her eyes at the struggling ylvan man again. Some of the other ylvans bound beside the trees moaned in fear at Delrael’s terms.

“That sounds interesting.” She rested the massive sword blade on the ground where its tip dug into the ashes of a scattered ylvan firepit. She held the horn of her saddle. “I’m the champion of the Black Falcon troops. That’s how I gained my position here. But who would the ylvans pick?” She stared at the little dark-haired man, who finally shook off Jathen’s grip and stood tall.

“I am Kellos. This is—this was my village. I will choose my champion.”

The Black Falcon riders chuckled to themselves. Delrael’s army seemed uneasy and confused, not knowing what they should do.

Annik smiled deprecatingly at Kellos. “Take your time, little parasite. We’re not in any hurry, and the battle certainly won’t take long.”

Kellos stared at the wreckage of his settlement. One of the hanging nests continued to burn, and clusters of mud and branches split off and fell to the ground. He looked at the blood of the others, at the ylvan woman groaning beside him from the pain of her broken ankle. The strangled ylvan man sprawled on the ground with a black and swollen face and bulging eyes. A flush came to Kellos’s face, and he glared at the Black Falcons then at Delrael’s army. His expression became pinched with a sudden idea.

He pointed his finger at Delrael himself. “You are the champion I choose, human. You will fight for the lives of the ylvans, and for your own life.”

The fighters in Delrael’s army cried foul, and the Black Falcon troops reacted in surprise. But Delrael remained motionless. He felt relieved inside. He had hoped Kellos would think of this.

He drew himself up, lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes. He looked first from Annik and then back to Kellos. He remembered little Tallin, the ylvan man who had followed them away from his village, who had befriended Delrael. . .who had died in front of Delrael’s eyes as the Anteds attacked them. Delrael hadn’t been able to help the little ylvan then.

“I am honored to be your champion,” he said.

When Annik looked at him she seemed even more pleased. She shifted the giant two-handed sword with her massive arms. Delrael wondered if the single-combat challenge had been such a good idea after all. He did not feel a much better match for her than one of the ylvans would have been.

But Delrael had undergone all the training his father could give him; he had gone on numerous quests; he had fought Gairoth the ogre, the colony of Anteds, Tryos the dragon, the shadow-creature Cailee, and the entire horde of Scartaris’s creatures.

“Well, Delrael.” She let out a small chuckle. “Make your first move.” She raised the sword and held it close to her shoulder.

Delrael turned to Kellos. “I’ll do my best for you.”

The moment he was distracted, Annik lunged forward, sweeping her great sword with both hands. Delrael saw the sudden change of expression on Kellos’s face. At the same moment Jathen spat out a warning.

But he was already diving to the ground. The edge of Annik’s blade made a moaning sound as it scythed across the air. Delrael rolled up and sprang to his feet, watching her recover from the stroke. She twisted her face with concentrated effort to wield the heavy weapon. She had intended to lop his head off before he could even strike back.

Delrael leaped to his feet. The Black Falcon troops snickered among themselves. Corim sat stony-faced on his horse.

Delrael charged in with his sword up to guard himself. His fighting fury seethed through his veins, worse now than just outrage at what the Black Falcons had done to the ylvan village.

He swung and ducked, trying to get close to Annik where she could not use her two-handed sword. But she swept with the point of the blade, low this time. It would have disembowelled him if he had not skipped back.

Delrael’s ears roared with the cheers and cries of ylvans, his own army, the Black Falcons. He thought he heard Tareah wishing him luck. He knew old Siya would be watching in horror, remembering another battle that had slain her husband.

Delrael felt his muscles sing with the energy. This was fighting, this was doing something, this was the way the Game should be played. But it should be fought against a worthy enemy, not a misguided fool.

Delrael forced himself to pause for one heartbeat as he recentered his thoughts. He looked at Annik, trying to drive back the emotion, focusing on how to defeat her rather than on how to get revenge. Revenge would only distort his thoughts.

Delrael gripped the hilt of his sword with both hands and reached up to block Annik’s swing. When the blades struck, the clang of metal rang out in the forest air. Delrael felt his arms shake in their sockets—it reminded him of trying to battle against Gairoth’s spiked club. But Gairoth had been stupid; Annik and the Black Falcon troops were not stupid.

He kept his eyes on her blade locked against his, but a movement of her arm distracted him. Annik took one hand from her sword and moved it to her waist, where she slid out a long dagger. The massive sword in her right hand dipped toward the ground as she concentrated on the dagger, thrusting it forward and up.

Delrael squirmed away, but the edge sliced along his leather armor, gashing it open in a stinging line along his ribcage.

He struck up with his sword, trying to knock Annik’s knife hand away. Then he noticed, too late for him to act, that even with only one hand Annik brought her great sword around, low to the ground because she couldn’t lift it high enough for a lethal blow. Her face grimaced with the effort.

The wide blade smashed into Delrael’s unprotected left leg below the knee. He heard a loud thwock.

White lights and thunderous pain exploded up his leg and popped into his brain. Delrael screamed and fell over backward, unable to think, unable to move.

He heard vague echoes of his army crying out in dismay. He thought he heard ylvan voices among them. He tried to blink the swimming black blotches away from his vision. As his sight finally cleared, he attempted to somehow defend himself. But a sickening feeling greater than the pain told him he had lost, that he would never fight against Siryyk’s army and save Gamearth. He would fall here, the victim of another human fighter.

Annik stood over him, broadsword upraised in two hands. Her dagger lay behind her on the ground where she had dropped it. Annik obviously intended to lop off his head on the forest floor among the ashes of old ylvan campfires.

But her expression transformed into one of horror. Her ponytails, weighted with the iron balls, hung in front of her face like reaching tentacles. She gawked down at the wound at his leg, at the lack of blood.

He squirmed up, seeing only a white gash, the chewed notch in the kennok wood that had been carved into the shape of a human leg by the khelebar.

Delrael felt the pain, but the injury would not be crippling. Thilane Healer had shown him how to repair the magic leg.

The Black Falcon troops stood around with astounded expressions. Annik looked appalled. “You’re not even human!” she said, working the words out of her mouth one at a time.

Delrael, still holding onto his sword, gathered up his own energy, ignoring the artificial pain in his leg. He croaked, “Are you?”

He moved his body, coiling at his waist, bunching his shoulders. He lunged upward at Annik standing over him. The tip of his sword pierced into her stomach, struck something hard and deep—her spine—slid sideways, and then poked out between ribs and her back. The black leather vest folded like puckering lips around the protruding blade.

Blood gushed up and ran down her dark leather armor. Annik’s eyes bulged, filled with red as they hemorrhaged from inside. She choked, coughing blood, and hung balanced on Delrael’s sword until her weight drove his own arms down. She slumped farther onto the blade, collapsing on top of him.

Annik lay over him like a smothering weight. Delrael couldn’t hear anything but her dying gasps and gurgles. Her body spasmed as she tried to move. But it was just reflex. Annik had already died.

Delrael pulled himself out. Jathen helped him up. “You won,” he said.

Delrael took a deep breath. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Help me stand.”

The Tairan pulled Delrael’s arm over his shoulder and hauled him to his feet. Delrael left his sword in Annik’s body and used his free hand to wipe at the blood on his chest. He succeeded only in smearing it into dark streaks that soaked into his leather armor. He looked down at his injured leg and saw that a large chunk of the wood had been hacked out, as if a woodsman had struck him with an ax.

Delrael ignored that. The pain still surged through him, but he could stand it. Trying to keep his breathing in check, he looked at the upset and confused Black Falcon riders.

“I’ve won in single combat,” he gasped. “According to the Rules. You must now leave the ylvans alone and join us in our fight against the manticore.”

Anger flared in the Black Falcon riders, but Corim held up his hand. He urged his mount to take two steps forward, then turned his dispassionate expression toward the dead form of Annik lying face-down in the dirt. Blood pooled under her. The end of Delrael’s sword protruded from her back, gleaming bright as the stain ran off of it.

“Annik fought you,” Corim said, “but I never heard her agree to your terms.” The other riders grunted their assent. One laughed.

“Therefore, you had no agreement. We don’t feel bound by that bargain.”

Delrael’s army made sounds of their own anger, and the ylvans shouted. But Corim continued, “However, if you offer protection to the ylvans, I don’t think it’s very wise for the Black Falcons to keep preying on them. But we will never join your army—there’s too much difference between us.”

Corim swung his bow and mounted it back on his shoulder. “Though you might not agree, Gamearth’s enemies are our enemies too. We may fight with you someday if we see you battling a worthy enemy and need our assistance.”

Corim motioned at two of the Black Falcon riders. “We’ll take our dead, Delrael, and let you do as you wish.”

Other riders dismounted and went to the dead fighter against the tree. Lifting him, they spread his body across the back of his horse, sideways on the saddle. The Black Falcons plucked the ylvan arrows from the corpse and threw them to the ground in disgust.

Corim himself rolled Annik’s body over and removed Delrael’s sword. With no expression on his face, he handed the blade back to Delrael. Jathen took it, glared at the Black Falcon man, but Delrael kept staring at Corim.

The Black Falcon troops completed their preparations without speaking a word to Delrael or his army or the ylvans. Delrael motioned for his fighters not to interfere.

Corim bent under the horse and tied Annik’s hands beneath the saddle so her body would not slide off. The horses appeared upset by the blood and dead bodies. The Black Falcon riders mounted up again.

Kellos stared at them like a weapon ready to explode. Delrael had trouble keeping his voice steady as the pain pounded in his leg. He turned to the little man. “Gather your survivors. Free the others and go find the rest of your people. The ylvans will come with us.”

Corim looked back once at Delrael, met his gaze, but said nothing. Without a word, the Black Falcon troops rode into the forest.

Then Delrael allowed himself to pass out.

10. Unwelcome Guests in Sitnalta

“We cannot blame the Outsiders for everything that happens to us. Characters are responsible for their own actions. No one can take that away from us.”

—Dirac, city leader of Sitnalta

The quest-path reeled out in a pale line across the flat grassy terrain. Vailret squinted ahead. The walls of Sitnalta rose tall, visible from a long distance.

“I’m actually relieved to see that place,” Bryl said, “though we didn’t have much fun there last time.” Vailret murmured his agreement. It was the first group of human characters they had seen since splitting off from the main army.

His feet felt sore and his body ached, but he walked with exhilaration as well as exhaustion. Though Bryl complained about aching joints and the cold of sleeping outside, and how he was too old to keep doing this, he managed to keep up with Vailret.

Their journey had been smooth and uneventful, but Vailret felt anxious to get the Earth Stone and return to the protection of the main army. He had spent too much time studying legends instead of swinging swords; he could not defeat many opponents if it came to a battle. Vailret didn’t know how well Bryl could defend them, even with the Stones as weapons.

The observation parapets on the Sitnaltan walls looked out at the surrounding terrain. Vailret shaded his eyes and threw his hair back. He could see no human faces in the tiny windows.

Vailret remembered approaching the city the first time, with Delrael limping on his stiffening kennok leg; its khelebar magic had begun to fade inside the technological fringe. Delrael could never return to Sitnalta, because it would leave him crippled again. Mayer had come out to meet them from the tower.

“Hello the tower!” Bryl shouted, then lowered his voice. “At least they’ll give us hot food.”

Vailret waited for an answer, but no one came to the dark windows. “We need the Sitnaltans to help us cross the ocean hexagons. A boat or another balloon or something. That’s more important than food.”

“I am not riding in a balloon again!” Bryl said. “I prefer keeping my feet on the ground.” He stamped on the quest-path for emphasis.

“Well unless you can find some way to walk across the water hexagons to Rokanun, you’re going to have to put up with it.”

Bryl huffed and looked toward the city. “The gate’s open. Let’s just walk inside.”

They entered Sitnalta, and Vailret looked around, puzzling at how it had changed. The sky remained clear of belching smoke and steam from the large manufactories. The air carried only normal noises: people and activities, not the bustle and frantic pace Sitnalta had shown before. Vailret and Bryl stopped and stared, standing on the clean streets cobbled with hexagon-shaped tiles.

A little old man hurried out of an annex building beside the observation tower. “You don’t want to stay here!” the old man said, waving his hands to shoo them back out the gate.

“Yes we do,” Bryl said. “We’ve been here before.”

“No, no!” the old man insisted. He had dark brown eyes deep within sockets haloed by wrinkles. His gray-flecked eyebrows protruded from his forehead like bottle-brushes. He looked older and more intense than Bryl. “Get away before it notices you! If you wait too long, you might never be able to leave.”

Vailret bent down to the old man’s height. “We need your help. We don’t have any choice.”

The old man appeared distressed, and Vailret spread his hands to look as diplomatic as possible. “Can you call Mayer, or Professor Verne? Or even Dirac—they’ll speak for us.”

Bryl frowned at the mention of Dirac, the bureaucratic city leader who had created many inventions—seventy of them, as his daughter Mayer had said over and over—but Dirac had refused them any assistance in their first quest.

“Do you have some way of communicating with them?” Bryl said.

The old man’s eyes lit up. “But of course! The best communication system on all of Gamearth. I’m Professor Morse—I developed it myself. Installed through all the streets of the city, direct and instantaneous communication via electrical impulse. Amazing, amazing—I wonder at it myself sometimes, and I invented the thing! Amazing, indeed.”

He paused and put a finger to his shriveled lips. “But some of the lines are down. The wires snapped, you know, when the buildings toppled. I’m. . .who was it you wanted to contact again?”

“Mayer. Professor Verne. Professor Frankenstein even, or Dirac.” Vailret ticked off the names, hoping Morse could reach at least one of them.

Morse counted on his fingers. “Well, Professor Verne left a long time ago. Something to do with the destruction of the world, I believe. I didn’t pay much attention. Mayer’s gone too—she disappeared just a day or two ago. Back to that Outsider ship. Got it into her head that she’d find some way to rescue the city of Sitnalta from our dreadful plight.” Professor Morse flashed another broad smile. “When you sit by the communications systems you get to hear all sorts of little tidbits.” He chuckled.

“Professor Frankenstein is very busy, I’m afraid, and I’d rather not disturb him.” Then he held up one finger by itself. “Ah, but Dirac! He’ll find the time. We have lots of work rebuilding what we’ve destroyed, but I don’t think he bothers with any of it.”

Morse ducked inside his small building. Vailret and Bryl peered inside as the old man flipped switches on an apparatus. He began tapping on a gadget that sent clicks along a wire. After a moment, he scowled down at it, frowned, and adjusted a dial.

“No, that won’t work.” He tapped his fingernails against the desk. “Alternate routes, alternate routes. With the complexity of our system here, there are always alternate routes.”

Morse began tapping and clicking again, and this time he beamed. “Ah yes, that’s done it. Now, we just wait.” He flicked the machine again.

“What are we waiting for?” Bryl asked.

Two thick prongs of a metallic gadget began wobbling together like chattering teeth. “That!” Professor Morse cocked his ear, slitting his eyes half closed. He seemed to be keeping track of something on his fingers.

“What are you—” Vailret began.

“Shhh!” Morse continued to mark invisible letters on the palm of his hand, then sat up. “It’s a code you know. I have to pay attention. Yes, Dirac is coming right over.”

“What is this dreadful plight you keep talking about?” Vailret asked. “What’s happened in Sitnalta?”

Morse turned red with contained anger. “It’s a curse, I say! But that’s not very scientific, so I don’t say it often. But until proven otherwise, I’ll continue to call it a curse.”

“So what is it?” Bryl asked.

Morse pursed his lips and hummed, as if trying to construct an acceptable explanation. “You know how the Outsiders supposedly Play us? Make their characters do whatever they want? The Outsiders do it well, because we all operate under the illusion that our actions are our own. When you move your arm up and down—” Morse waved his arm from side to side. “It doesn’t seem to be any idea but your own. Although we know otherwise.”

Vailret tapped his fingers against the wall.

“Some force has suddenly taken on the role of doing that more directly, like a controller making us move, yanking our arms and legs like little automatons, forcing us to do things that aren’t in our own heads. Four times a day, every day! It’s made us demolish the manufactories and wreck some of our facilities. Why, we even did without street lights for a while because the gas conduits had been broken.”

“What’s causing it?” Vailret asked. He cocked his head, listening for the approach of Dirac’s vehicle.

Morse shook his head. “None of us has formulated an acceptable hypothesis. Although Dirac has offered a prize for the character who does it—a genuine patent certificate and an engraved metal plaque on a building.”

“Oh boy,” Bryl muttered.

Morse turned toward the open door. Vailret heard a faint chugging noise. “That must be Dirac himself.” Morse glanced at a timepiece propped against the wall, then tilted his head so he could see the correct time. “Yes, it’s been long enough.”

They stepped outside and saw a blue steam-engine car coming around the corner. Pennants and flags poked up from either side, red and gold and green, each bearing the stylized crest of Sitnalta. The colors waved in the breeze as the vehicle rattled across the cobblestones. The pennants flipped away from the clouds of steam gushing out the stack.

The car rolled along, grinding its own gears. In front, Dirac sat alone in the seat. A portly man, with reddish-brown hair curled around ears that looked like tiny plates. His lower lip protruded pink against his florid skin. Dirac’s fingers were short, like sausages wrapped around the steering levers.

His eyes looked wide and wild, though. As he approached, Dirac drew back his lips and clenched his teeth. A line of spittle trickled into his puffy beard.

“What’s wrong with him?” Vailret asked, looking to Professor Morse.

“Oh no!” Morse said. “How does it always know?”

The boiler in the back of the steam-engine car glowed a cherry red, much hotter than it should have been. The rivets holding the metal seams together appeared even hotter, a whitish yellow.

Dirac stopped at the far end of the street, pointing the car directly at them. His arm moved, jerking, then gripped the acceleration lever; he disengaged the clutch. The blue car sprang forward on its narrow wheels. Dirac waved his other arm, trying to frighten them away.

“What’s he doing!” Vailret said.

He and Bryl ran to one side of the street. Morse backed against the door of his communications annex. As Vailret and Bryl dashed toward a side alley, Dirac yanked the steering lever to one side after them. A strange sound came from his throat.

“Split up!” Vailret shouted.

Bryl ran one way, and he dodged the other. Dirac yanked the steering lever back and forth, as if wrestling with himself. The car weaved, kicking up the planted cobblestones and leaving smears of black tire on the street.

The car continued to pick up speed, faster than it should have gone. The bottom of the boiler flared orange. Black smoke mixed with the steam gushing up. Dirac squeezed his eyes shut. The car charged toward the end of the street.

Morse stood by the communications building and waved his arms. “No! Not here—no!”

Dirac tried to roll off the seat. But his arm moved of its own accord to grab one of the handles and pushed his body back, forcing him to remain an occupant of the car.

Vailret turned and shielded his eyes as Professor Morse leaped away from the door of the communications annex.

The steam-engine car crashed into the side of the building. Dirac gave the first note of a scream, then the car struck the walls.

The boiler exploded in gouts of flame and steam and flying metal. One of the towers teetered and crumbled. The side wall sloughed away from the explosion, burying the car, Dirac, and Professor Morse’s communications center.

Morse scrambled to the rubble. He hunkered down to his knees and began to sob. “Do you see what I told you? Do you see? If this isn’t a curse, then I’m no scientist!” He sat up, blinking at the contradiction of what he had just said.

Vailret stood horrified. Bryl came up to him, greenish and ready to gag. Other Sitnaltans ran over to the scene, looking distraught and angry. They didn’t need to ask questions.

Morse stared at them. “Now all our communications are down,” he said. “And I suppose we’ll need to pick a new city leader too.”

He pursed his lips. “Did you two have any. . . suggestions when you came here? We’re always interested in new ideas. Maybe you have a solution to our problem.”

Vailret gaped at him. No one even seemed distressed at Dirac’s death. He felt deep grief, if only because Mayer had lost her father. Bryl gave him an elbow in the ribs.

“Uh, we’ll offer any ideas we can think of,” Vailret said. “But we were hoping to ask you for help. We need passage across the water terrain.”

Morse stood up and brushed dust from his hands. A smear of blood ran down one palm. The other Sitnaltans tossed rocks and bricks away from the main pile.

Vailret didn’t want to be there when they uncovered Dirac’s smashed body.

“Go to the center of the city, then,” Morse said, pointing. “We’ve got plenty of construction projects going on. We need to rebuild faster than the curse makes us tear things down. See Professor Frankenstein. Yes, new ideas. Perhaps that’s the only thing that can save us.”

Vailret and Bryl hurried through the streets, feeling a strange oppression on them. Vailret squinted up at the tall buildings, but didn’t understand what he had seen happen. “It’s like Tairé and Scartaris all over again,” Bryl said. “Mindless characters being manipulated.”

Vailret stared at one of the chugging street-cleaning gadgets that scoured along the gutters; he remembered Mayer telling him that Dirac had first patented the invention. He shook his head. “No, not like Scartaris. These characters know what they’re doing—they just can’t control their own bodies. It seems more limited than Scartaris.”

Bryl blinked his eyes. “Like a spell of some kind.”

Vailret stopped at the thought. “A spell in Sitnalta? But we’re inside the technological fringe.”

“Do you think the Rules have weakened that much?”

Sounds from around the corner led them into a broad square. Characters gathered in front of a tall building with all the windows smashed and columns yanked out. Yet the Sitnaltans had rigged up scaffolding, ropes, and pulleys. New construction materials lay around: pallets of bricks and mortar, wood hauled from forest terrain, stone blocks, newly poured foundations.

The characters swarmed over the front of the building. From the bright newness of one entire wall, Vailret could see how much they had rebuilt already—and it all appeared to have been done in a single day.

Some of the characters looked down at him, but they moved too quickly, wrapped in their own business. They seemed afraid to stop for even a moment.

A rope creaked, and a new pane of glass swung up, slewing sideways, then hung down straight as four characters cranked a winch, hauling it up to the second story where a large window had been smashed out.

“Excuse us!” Vailret called. “This is very important.”

Every single one of the characters working on the reconstruction stopped, like Sitnaltan automatons that had been switched off. Vailret couldn’t imagine how he had commanded such instant response, but then the Sitnaltans groaned in unison, crying out in anger. Some muttered, “Stop! Not again!”

Two women cranking the winch that raised the pane of glass stepped back. One kicked the release, and the rope hummed as the winch twirled. The glass hurtled down to the cobblestones in an explosion of sharp fragments.

All the while cursing and growling in disbelief, the Sitnaltans yanked at the scaffolding, at the support struts. Metal crowbars came out and smashed into the new brick and the still-soft mortar. Characters threw wooden boards through glass panes, watching themselves with horrified expressions.

One man sawed the rope of a scaffold, sending himself and four others tumbling head first down to the street. The heavy scaffold and its load of bricks and stone toppled after them.

Nine Sitnaltans used levers and pulleys to rig up a complex system with heavy grappling hooks; using it, they ripped free half of the entire facade. In a group, they moaned in dismay as the front of the building crumbled to the ground.

Vailret now realized where they stood. In the center of the square stood a stagnant fountain. In the greenish water, slime-covered mechanical fish puttered around in slow circles; several had sunk to the bottom, where algae grew on them.

Across the plaza stood the rebuilt shrine building, the museum that contained original writings of the great inventor Maxwell, whom Sitnaltans revered as the founder of their city. The first time Vailret had stayed in Sitnalta, the shrine building started on fire. He had charged in to rescue their precious documents when none of the Sitnaltans proved willing to take the risk.

Now the struggling characters scrambled over the wreckage of the other building they had just demolished. Lining up in straight lines, they marched across the square, curling around the dead fountain where Bryl and Vailret stared at them. The Sitnaltans aimed straight at the rebuilt shrine building.

The Sitnaltans themselves saw what the controlling force was driving them to do, and they fought back with redoubled urgency. One stout woman managed to trip herself and tumble in front of two columns of the other Sitnaltans.

The first three tripped over her, and then the others kept walking, stepping on her body. She cried out, but she could not roll away.

Vailret ran forward, using his shoulders to knock characters aside. He pulled the woman away; Bryl grabbed her other arm and helped drag her across the cobblestones. She gasped but seemed unconcerned with her own pain.

“Not me—if you can move, stop them! They’ll destroy the Charter of Sitnalta.”

More than a score of Sitnaltans went toward their target. Vailret looked at Bryl—the two of them couldn’t possibly fight against so many. Even if the Sitnaltans themselves didn’t wish them any harm, the controlling force would have no such qualms.

“Bryl, use the Air Stone!” Vailret said. “Confuse them.”

Bryl pulled out the four-sided diamond and stared at it. “But this is Sitnalta. Magic won’t work here.”

“Try it anyway,” Vailret said. “There’s a chance.”

Bryl closed his eyes and tossed the pointed diamond to the ground. A “3” showed up. Vailret smacked his fist into his palm.

“How did that happen?” Bryl gaped. “I’m not supposed to roll anything but a 1 here.” But after a moment he snatched up the diamond and concentrated on his illusion.

Around the scrolled and columned building, a thick maze of pedestal-wide brambles sprang up. They twirled and tangled with needle-sharp thorns as long as daggers.

Bryl held the Air Stone with both hands, closing his eyes. The Sitnaltans stopped, gawking in amazement. A few moved around the edges of the brambles, but could see no way in. They stopped, as if gathering strength. Vailret feared what they would do.

Then one column plunged forward face-first into the brambles.

Vailret did not know if they simply disregarded the illusion and pushed ahead, denying what their eyes told them. Or if the controlling force had accepted the sacrifice of a few characters and urged them forward anyway.

The illusion could not maintain solidity. The Sitnaltan column marched through the brambles unscathed. As they succeeded, the other Sitnaltans mobilized and pushed forward.

“It isn’t working,” Bryl mumbled. He let go of the diamond, and the illusion dissolved.

“Time to be more decisive then,” Vailret said. “You’ve got the Fire Stone. See what that does.”

Bryl took out the ruby. “If the Air Stone was just a fluke, there’s no chance this one will work. The odds are—”

“Just try it!”

Bryl rolled the eight-sided ruby, and it landed with the “5” showing up. Another success.

This time a tall ring of fire surrounded the building, feeding off nothing but the cobblestones. The Sitnaltans gathered around, pushing close enough to the fire that the hair singed away from their foreheads and eyebrows. Smoke smudged their faces. If they tried to plunge through the fire, they would die.

“You’d better watch, Bryl. I don’t want to slaughter them. I’d rather let them rip up their damned documents.”

But then the Sitnaltans wavered in their step, paused, and collapsed, as if suddenly dropped from a great height, set free from an invisible grip.

The moment the characters struck the ground, most scrambled back to their feet, tense and ready to pounce on any enemy they could see. Some remained cross-legged on the ground, sobbing and shaking.

“It is like a spell,” Vailret said. “You were right.”

The Sitnaltans appeared baffled as they turned. Some stared in relief at the intact, though smoke-stained, museum. Others gawked at the building they had just torn down.

“Maybe we should just swim across the water terrain,” Bryl said. “I’ll even give up a hot meal and a good bed to get out of here. Professor Morse was right.” He shivered, tucking his hands into the folds of his blue cloak. He looked very old. “If that controller gets hold of us, we might never be able to get away.”

“If that controller makes you use the Fire Stone against your will, you could bring down this entire city in a single day.” Vailret looked around. He didn’t particularly want to speak with the stunned Sitnaltans. “Let’s go find Professor Frankenstein before anything else happens.”

Bryl had never been to the workroom of Professors Verne and Frankenstein; but Vailret remembered asking the professors to invent a new pair of mechanical eyes for Paenar, since his magical eye-staff refused to function in Sitnalta.

Oriented by the fountain and Maxwell’s museum, Vailret recalled the other places Mayer had shown him in his tour of the city, the thinking lounges, the great room where characters rolled dice and kept track of the scores to discern some pattern to the Rules of Probability.

“Frankenstein is just down this street,” he said, trudging ahead. With each step, he feared that the invisible manipulation would sink claws into his mind and drive his body to do terrible things—especially now that they had called attention to themselves by using the Stones. If the force indeed used magic to control characters, maybe it would want the Stones for itself.

The doorways and facades marked the Sitnaltan homes and research establishments in a confused jumble of designs. Mayer had pointed out details as they walked, and now Vailret tried to remember the important parts. Mayer had been upset when he and Paenar asked to see the professors, rather than continuing their tour with her. She stopped at the appropriate doorway, then stalked off, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Vailret stopped. “This one.”

An engraved plaque on the door announced:

Profs. Frankenstein and Verne

Inventors At Large

PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB

It looked as if a piece of tape had obscured Verne’s name, but someone had peeled it away again.

“We’re going inside,” Vailret said. He pounded on the door, then winced as he struck the ornate carving with the side of his hand.

Loud curses and a clatter of toppling books and equipment came from inside. Footsteps moved toward the door, accompanied by continued mutterings. Vailret took a half step backward and put himself behind Bryl. “You can stand in front.”

Someone yanked the door open from inside, and a gaunt man thrust his head out. His dark hair had been mussed, grease stains twirled across his cheeks, and his eyes looked glazed. His voice carried a thick overtone of anger.

“I’m doing important work here! If you want—” He stopped, blinking at Vailret and then turned down at Bryl. After a moment of confusion, Frankenstein recognized them and, surprising them both, his face lit up with delight.

“Ah, magic!” He grabbed Bryl’s arm and yanked him inside. “I need you to tell me some things!”

Vailret had to hurry through the door before Frankenstein slammed it, then threw the bolt from inside.

11. Verne’s Cannon

“RULE #9. Weapons on Gamearth can range from simple improvised sticks and rocks to complicated seige machines. Clever characters will find weapons anywhere. The character with the best weapons and the most weapons has the greatest chance of winning the Game.”

—The Book of Rules

Two hairy, misshapen creatures grunted and strained at the giant handles, turning an enormous crucible to pour whitish-orange iron into its mold. Droplets of fire gushed into the air.

Jules Verne shielded his eyes, blinking tears and sweat away from his raw face. He wiped soot across his cheek. His lips were chapped, his mouth dry. His body felt weak.

“Enough, enough!” the Slac general Korux cried as the hairy creatures kept pouring even after the mold brimmed. Splatters of molten metal flew into the air, scorching one of the creatures. Its matted hair smoldered, sending greasy smoke into the stifling air. The creature shrieked, released its end of the handle, and beat at its smoldering back.

Tilted, the crucible sloshed sideways, letting liquid metal drool over the rim. The second creature planted both feet and grimaced as it tried to keep the crucible from overturning.

Verne, feeling dizzy, stumbled back on his painful bandaged foot. He leaned against the smoke-smeared wall. One burly Slac continued to pump the bellows, keeping the fire hot enough to maintain the iron at its melting temperature.

“Don’t stop now!” Korux bellowed into the rumbling background noises. “We need to fill the other half of the mold!”

Several of Siryyk’s monster fighters slinked toward the door. Korux pointed a clawed hand at one. “You! Take the place of that idiot! And get him out of here. Tend to his injury, ease the pain, and then kill him.”

The burned creature snarled and scrambled to his feet, hunching into a defensive posture as several armed beasts came toward him. Korux paid little attention. Out of the corner of his brittle mouth, Korux said, “Or just kill him first if he doesn’t want the medical attention.”

Three squat gray-skinned monsters lifted and slid the first mold out of the way, scooping ashes around it to even out the cooling. They pushed second mold under the crucible.

“If this new weapon of yours doesn’t work, human—” Korux jerked his angled head at the glowing crucible. “We’ll give you a bath in that.”

Verne looked, but felt no increase in his constant state of terror. “No you won’t,” he muttered under his breath, but made sure the Slac general couldn’t hear him over the hissing of the forges. “Siryyk needs me to make more weapons.”

The most difficult part had been fabricating anything at all complicated under the primitive conditions of Tairé. The old city had raw materials and some facilities, a few tools, but none of the technology Verne used in Sitnalta. Tairé depended on manual labor and hand-held tools.

To stall for time, he had redesigned parts of the existing Tairan forges and casting furnaces. He delayed as long as he could, but he knew Siryyk had to see some results, or Verne would lose more toes.

The professor had drawn up a sketch of his new cannon, with several parts deliberately designed wrong so the weapon would fail, requiring that Verne take more time to fix it. But the manticore, whose paw was as massive as the sheet of plans, stared down with his slitted eyes. He curled his lips back and extended one claw to poke a hole through the paper.

“This part will not work.” The manticore looked up with his squarish, distorted face. The curved horns protruding from the forehead looked deadly. His bestial eyes met Verne’s. “You seem to have made a mistake, Professor. See that it does not happen again.”

So Verne had redesigned the cannon, fixing his deliberate errors and beginning production of a prototype model. In his own mind, he knew it would work. He could no longer depend on defects he introduced himself. Of course, he never had any guarantee that his inventions would work anyway—other faults occurred through legitimate misunderstandings of the Rules of physics or flaws in construction or engineering that he could never anticipate.

But a sick feeling in his stomach told him this invention would work just as intended.

But at least the cannon would be far less devastating than the Sitnaltan weapon. By giving Siryyk a new toy, perhaps Verne could hold off other catastrophes. He wondered what Frankenstein would think of his decision.

A gurgling howl broke through the background noises. Verne turned to see the burned hairy creature suddenly stabbed from three sides with barbed spears.

Beside Verne, General Korux smiled as best he could with hard reptilian lips.

#

Siryyk the manticore rumbled in his sleep, churned by nightmares of the Outside.

An explosion of power and falling rocks brought him away from his dreams. He raised his massive shaggy head, clearing his throat with a liquid cough. His scorpion tail still throbbed from the detonation.

In his nightmare he must have tossed and lashed out, striking one of the rock columns in the open ampitheater. Blocks of stone collapsed on his lion’s body—each of the blocks was large enough to squash a human character into a smear of blood and meat, but they only bruised him.

It reminded Siryyk of the blow the treacherous stone gargoyle Arken had struck against him during the battle on the threshold of Scartaris.

Smoldering blazes in the firepits lit everything with an orange glow. Siryyk blinked his eyes as he sat up. Slac guards stood around shivering, fearing what the manticore had seen in his nightmares.

Siryyk heaved himself to his four feet and shook his head. He looked again at the broken column and the swath of stars overhead he had exposed by collapsing part of the criss-crossed ceiling.

He had dreamed of the Players again. Outside, sitting in their cozy dwelling, they looked down at the map and manipulated Gamearth. Siryyk felt himself moving within the Outsider David’s mind—David was young and weak, with trivial thoughts and concerns overlapping with images of giant hands and puppet strings. Whimsical decisions—and growing fear.

Siryyk knew he was just a creation of these weaklings. But the Outsider David had begun to suspect how powerful an opponent he had created. The manticore was supposed to be David’s ally, but Siryyk had thoughts of his own.

Siryyk had fun with the battles on Gamearth, as the Outsiders expected all monsters to do, to gather forces and strike across the map. Scartaris had intended that. The Outsider David meant to devastate Gamearth, leaving nothing for the others to Play.

And when Siryyk marched with his armies, David would think the manticore warlord cooperated with him. But Sirryk had Verne’s Sitnaltan weapon now, and the professor would create other gadgets for him. The army would strike at the human Stronghold and get back the great Fire Stone lost by Enrod when he went to attack the other side of the map. Siryyk had learned of other Stones—a total of four, three of which were already held by the human character Delrael.

Siryyk would strike against Delrael’s forces. But not because the Rules of Gamearth demanded it. Not because the Outsider David wanted that to happen. But because Sirryk desired the Stones. With the Stones, and with the Sitnaltan weapon, he would have enough power to strike back against the Outsiders. He would make them notice.

#

The morning sky hung blue and transparent enough that when Verne stared up, he thought he might be able to see the edge of Outside.

Off to the west, dust clouds churned in the ruins of the map by the final battlefield against Scartaris. No one dared venture there anymore, not after hexagons had fallen away into nothingness. The map itself had been damaged all the way through, leaving a great void, jagged edges, and broken Rules.

No one knew what happened there. No one dared to go near.

Twenty three muscular Slac, garbed in clinging black robes, worked together as they hauled Verne’s cannon through the collapsed section of Tairan wall and out into the desolation terrain where they would test-fire it.

The cannon would have been functional two days before, but Verne had insisted on polishing the exterior and mounting bronze handles—”support struts” he called them, but they served no purpose other than as decoration. Korux had melted down one of the bronze Tairan statues for the metal.

The great cylinder rode on metal-shod wheels as tall as Verne himself. The cannon was long, the bore smooth on the inside, black and shiny on its surface. Several goblins kept busy using pumice daily to remove any oxidation.

The wheels of the cannon left deep grooves in the ashen desolation as the team of Slac rolled it away from the city. Their own footprints left puckering indentations on the ground.

Verne limped along, accompanied—no, guarded—by Korux and two other Slac. The manticore strode into the daylight, taking ponderous yet agile steps. He looked as big as a small dwelling. Siryyk kept his slitted eyes turned up at the sky, then down at the cannon. He appeared pleased, which meant Verne would survive a little longer.

Siryyk carried the huge cannonball himself; both Verne and Frankenstein together could barely have lifted it. The manticore’s scorpion tail stood erect behind him and ready to strike. All the monsters knew to stay well away from him, in case he had an accidental twitch.

Verne had commandeered dozens of the exploding firepots from the monster army, scraping out all the firepowder, which he would use to propel the projectile from the cannon. General Korux had objected to losing some of his valuable bombs, but Siryyk ordered the firepowder to be released. If the professor’s cannon worked properly, he said, it would outdo any number of exploding pots.

The 23 Slac stopped hauling the cannon out and then turned it around, back toward Tairé. On the side of a tall building, they had used ash and grease to paint a broad target. Standing behind the cannon, one of the Slac swivelled and cranked the bore so that the barrel pointed toward the bullseye.

Verne had no doubt the cannonball would smash and collapse any building it struck.

Korux carried a torch and stood at attention as the monsters dumped firepowder into the cannon and took the ball from Siryyk’s paws. Verne watched them do everything properly. He knew it would work. This time he did not feel the joy he always experienced upon watching an invention tested for the first time.

“Now we shall see, Professor Verne,” Siryyk said and took the torch from Korux.

But as the manticore stepped behind the cannon and stared toward the target on the building, he hesitated and looked overhead again. His face twisted in what seemed to be either a grimace or a smile.

Siryyk used his other front paw to push down on the back end of the cannon. The handle of the altitude-adjustment crank spun around as the gears turned. The manticore kept pushing until the end of the barrel pointed toward the sky.

“We can destroy buildings ourselves any time we wish,” he said. “Let’s show the Outsiders just what we can do.”

With a deep bass growl, Siryyk touched the torch to the fuse of the cannon. The Slac, Professor Verne, and the other monsters took a step backward. But the manticore remained behind the weapon, without flinching.

The fuse hissed for just a second, then an enormous explosion rang through the still air. Verne cringed and then looked up.

Belching smoke curled from the end of the cannon, as expected. But the metal cannonball sailed high into the air, where it disappeared against the glass-blue sky.

Verne squeezed his eyes shut and refused to watch where it landed.

Interlude: Outside

The Game continued without apparent complications.

David sat back, tight lipped, and watched as the adventures went ahead, the characters moved on their quests. Tyrone looked just as possessed as Melanie, but in a different way. To him the Game seemed like a drug, and his eyes shone with the depth of his delighted smile. Scott had relaxed. They were all playing together—this reminded them of old times, when Gamearth had been just a simple game.

But it was more than that now. And David couldn’t keep pretending.

Between turns, Scott went into the kitchen and pulled open a new bag of chips. With a rattling sound he dumped them into a bowl. “You guys want anything else to drink?”

David stared into the fire, watching the flames dance like sharp broken edges of heat. He heard the crackle. He felt a sharp claw tickle his spine.

As his eyes blanked, he saw not the fire in the family room but a smoky blaze in the firepits of a dark ampitheater. He saw soot stains on the wall, defaced paintings, friezes chiselled into stone columns.

David blinked his eyes, and he felt huge lids come down and up again. His chest filled with rumbling breaths. As he moved he sensed something incredibly massive, bunched muscles like steel rope, an enormous body. He turned his head, expecting to see claws the size of pencils. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Go away!” He said the words in the back of his throat, keeping his mouth shut so no one would hear. The alien thoughts poked around in his head, playing, exploring.

It was Siryyk. David had set up his own schemes to destroy Gamearth, adventures to be played out to the end—the monsters would devastate the map or just wipe out Melanie’s characters, he didn’t care. And the thing he had planted in the southeast, much as Melanie had created her golem character Journeyman, would keep her other team of questers from helping. Together it would be enough to stop Gamearth.

But his own characters were no longer willing puppets. He had given too much power to the manticore, too sharp a mind, and now the monster had crawled outside, into David’s thoughts. He didn’t know if he could resist long enough for his complicated plans to come together. He wondered if this possession had happened with the other players as well.

He saw how they were paying little attention to him.

The fire continued to burn, warming the room.

It struck him that it would be so simple. Enough of this weekly arguing and suffering through nightmares, trying to fight in subtle ways against the Game. Gamearth was never subtle.

David would take his own action.

“What are you going to do next, Mel?” Tyrone asked, hunkering down beside her.

When she had her head turned away, David rolled to his knees and snatched up the painted map on the floor. He lunged to his feet. Dice clattered off the hard surface of the map and plopped to the carpet. He twisted, yanking the map away as Melanie reached out to grab it.

“Hey, Dave—!” Tyrone said.

Scott came out of the kitchen.

David jumped to the fireplace with the big map in his hands. He had to get the glass hearth doors open—if only he could shove the map into the flames, the wood would burn, the paint would bubble and blacken, destroying the hexagons. He had to hold the others off for only a few minutes.

“No!” Melanie screamed.

She grabbed his arm. He gave her an elbow in the jaw and heard her teeth click together. But she grabbed onto the map and pulled. He heard a splintering sound, and a handful of bright blue hexagons fell off, pattering to the stones around the fireplace.

David kept silent, wrestling with her for the map. Tyrone pulled on his shoulder. He squirmed.

He had gotten the fireplace door open now. The flames seemed to flare up, eager for new food. The heat blasted him. He was going to do it.

Gamearth would end once and for all.

In the kitchen the telephone began to ring in one long steady bell, like an alarm. But David knew the phone was dead—Gamearth was just trying to distract him.

“David, what are you doing!” Scott stopped, holding glasses of soda in his hands.

David’s eyes glistened with tears from the strain as he fought. He stared down into the dizzying kaleidoscopic colors of terrain on the map. He seemed to be falling down into it. He let out a cry of terror as the map tilted.

With one last push he attempted to hurl it into the flames, but Melanie and Tyrone both had their hands on it now.

A flash of light came from one of the brown hexagons of desolation terrain, a puff of smoke and a barely heard sound. A jolt of pain sliced across David’s cheek, just under his eye.

Crying out, he cast himself away from the map. He stumbled aside, holding his hand to his face. Blood dribbled between his fingers.

Melanie grabbed the map to herself, hugging it, and took it back to where the dice lay on the floor.

Stunned and defeated, David bowed over. Scott and Tyrone both saw the blood. “Hey man, what happened?” Tyrone said. “Are you nuts or something?”

David glared up at him. Blood dripped from his fingers.

“You got a bad cut there, David,” Scott said. “What did you hit?”

“I didn’t hit anything,” he answered. “Gamearth shot back at me.”

“You mean Verne’s cannon! Wow!” Tyrone came close to look at David’s wound.

Scott gave him a wadded handful of napkins, which David pressed under his eye. Blood seeped into it, but he held it there. The stinging pain made him focus his anger. He had failed.

“That’s cheating, David, if you’re trying to end the Game,” Scott said to him. “I thought you knew better by now.”

He stared into David’s eyes. Scott’s glasses had slid down on his nose. “I don’t even want to think what might happen if we throw away the rules. Because when you start breaking them yourself, Gamearth can too. It’s bad enough when we know what the Game’s limitations are.”

David stared at him and understood what Scott meant.

Down by the fireplace, he saw a dozen broken hexagons scattered like colored tiles on the floor.

12. Night Reconnaissance

“I cannot imagine how I would ever grow weary of seeing the streets of Tairé. Or the characters standing high and proud, defying the desolation on which it sits. Tairé is a monument of all that is hopeful on Gamearth.”

—Enrod the Sentinel

Jathen squatted down, resting his back against the sharp edges of rock. He drew his knees up and folded his numb hands around them, staring down the eastern side of the Spectre Mountains.

He sat apart from the others in Delrael’s army, but he felt comfortable with that now. As night deepened in the mountain terrain, he gazed across the sprawling map.

The rest of Delrael’s army made exhausted noises as they set up camp, handing around blankets and builing small fires in the shelter of rocks. Old Siya wandered about, muttering that they should have taken more blankets along, that they should have brought warmer clothing.

Jathen shivered once, but he clenched his teeth together. He cleared his mind, washing the cold from his thoughts. He had survived other things; he had been through worse than this. Much worse.

The army had trudged across the map for days, crossing hexagon after hexagon, through forest and hills and finally the last two days of difficult winding mountain paths. They traversed snow and narrow tracks through the ice, but the fighters had crossed the pass and looked down on the opposite side, where Scartaris had reigned only a short time ago—and where Siryyk’s monster army still lay encamped.

Jathen remembered crossing that distance with other survivors who had fled Tairé, running from the monsters, closing their ears to the echoing screams of all the characters trapped there.

Jathen squeezed his eyes shut, then shook his head slightly, feeling the pain against the stiff muscles in his neck. He tried to find the blank spot in his thoughts again, the place he had emptied of memories.

Delrael came up beside him, crossing his arms over his chest. His brown hair blew back in the brisk wind; it had already tangled at one side, and his cheeks looked spotted with a red flush from the cold. Steam came out of his mouth as he spoke.

“We can see the fires of Tairé from here.” He pointed with his chin. “Siryyk is still encamped in the city.”

Jathen had already seen the orange glow marking the city terrain. Cooking fires, encampments, perhaps even a burning building or two. He didn’t know. They didn’t know why the monsters had remained in Tairé for so long.

Jathen said nothing, nor did he stand up. He felt just uncomfortable enough where he was.

Delrael continued, “We thought the manticore would only pause there before marching across the map. But if they made a permanent settlement in Tairé, maybe we’ve got more time. Maybe they decided not to march against us.”

Jathen scowled at the thought. Delrael kept talking.

“Now I don’t know what to do. We don’t have enough characters to fight them all down there. I’ve sent scouts to look for likely ambush places in the passes we crossed in the last few days.”

Jathen continued to stare at the dull glow of his city. Off to the side, he saw Enrod standing on a rock, not even chilled in his thin white robe. His dark bushy hair lay matted and unmoving in the breeze as he also gazed down at Tairé. Jathen had no idea what confused images passed through Enrod’s mind.

“Then send scouts into Tairé to see what’s happening.” Jathen kept his voice low, but he knew Delrael heard him.

Delrael frowned. “Too dangerous. I wouldn’t ask any character to do that.”

Jathen couldn’t tell if Delrael was simply being coy, or if the idea truly hadn’t occurred to him. “I’ll go, of course. And I wouldn’t doubt that Enrod will want to come with.” He finally stood and turned to face the distant firelit hexagons. “That was our home.”

In Jathen’s mind, the mountain wind hooting around the rocks sounded like the moans of all those Tairans who had died because of Scartaris, those who had fallen by Jathen’s own hand in the tannery. He tried to find the empty, peaceful spot in his thoughts again, but somehow it was all filled up.

#

Enrod responded with as much enthusiasm as Jathen had expected. The Sentinel stood by one of the large campfires, fixing his gaze on the bright flames. He didn’t even blink his eyes.

“He and I can survive there. We know Tairé. We will learn—” The fire popped, apparently breaking his train of thought. After a moment of silence, Enrod finished his sentence. “—what Siryyk is doing.”

He lowered his voice and turned his dark eyes toward the distant heaxagons of Tairé. “I built that city.”

Jathen stood next to Enrod. “If we leave now, we can cover the first hexagons, lie low during the day, and reach the hills by nightfall tomorrow. We can get into the city after dark and look around when we’d be least likely to be spotted.”

Enrod nodded, and kept nodding. Jathen felt thrilled to be a partner to the Sorcerer who had created the city where Jathen grew up. The Sentinel would strike a blow for Tairé. Enrod could win. Enrod could make it right again.

Delrael nodded. “Go when you’re ready.”

#

Siya prepared packages of food for them, from which Jathen and Enrod ate sparingly through the rest of the night. They stumbled down the winding quest-path into the growing dawn.

The two moved in silence for the most part. Enrod seemed swallowed by his own thoughts; at times he rubbed his hands together and stared at the skin. Jathen felt too much in awe of him to start small conversation.

Finally, as the morning grew bright and a line of grassy hills blocked their view of the city, Enrod turned to him and said, “Your last memory of Tairé. After Scartaris. Tell me what I should expect.”

“Imagine the worst you possibly can,” Jathen answered. His throat felt thick, clogged with too many screams he had never dared to utter. He closed his eyes. “And then double it.”

Thoughts of his own work in the tannery, with the gray-skinned and gray-clad Tairans shuffling up and down the streets, mindless because of Scartaris.

“Tairans were put to work making weapons. Our blacksmiths forged swords and spear heads. Our tannery made shields and armor. You knew that already. We emptied our storage bins to provide supplies to Scartaris. He took all our horses.”

Jathen took a deep breath. “Scartaris didn’t slaughter characters just to amuse himself, though. He killed them when he needed their bodies more than he needed their lives. Siryyk the manticore killed everyone just because they were in his way.”

Enrod shook his head and kept walking. “Wish I could remember.”

Jathen turned away. “I wish I could forget.”

#

When darkness had fallen and the orange flames glowed behind the city walls, Enrod and Jathen stared at a Tairé that had become a complete stranger, a dark and broken whisper of itself.

Several of the side gates stood unguarded; other parts of the wall had been torn down, with broken stones strewn on the barren ground. The two of them slipped through the narrow Tairan streets, avoiding all noises.

Keeping their backs to the walls and sinking into the shadows of deep-cut friezes, they moved deeper into Tairé. The buildings showed black windows filled with shadows on the inside. Jathen had never thought his city looked so sinister before.

Enrod appeared too appalled even to utter a comment. His dark eyes looked like wide black holes in his face. He seemed most disturbed by the malicious defacing of buildings and artwork. “Why?” he muttered. “Why?”

They stood in front of the broad fresco showing the powerful but faceless image of the Stranger Unlooked-For who had once rescued the land around Tairé. Some of the monsters had drawn a cruel, distorted visage on it; Jathen took a moment to recognize that the scrawled mane and horns were meant to indicate Siryyk the manticore. Siryyk, replacing the savior of Tairé.

Around another corner they stumbled upon a pile of bones, some picked clean, others glistening with gelatinous lines of red and yellow. Skulls poked out from the refuse. Jathen slapped a grimy hand over his nose to prevent the smell from making him retch.

Moving ahead, they came as close as they dared to a group of monsters around a blazing bonfire. The creatures ate shapeless lumps of meat or scooped steaming black gruel out of bowls with their fingers. Others talked and roared and made strange sounds. Many of the gathered creatures appeared relaxed. Weapons lay next to discarded and uncomfortable pieces of armor.

Siryyk’s soldiers played dice games and threw sticks at a target on the wall. In the center of a ring of spectators, two hunchbacked beasts with great curling tusks crouched down and glared at each other, weaving back and forth until, at some invisible signal, they lunged forward into each other, butting heads with a sound like two bricks clacking together. The other monsters roared and threw down wagers.

“They don’t seem to be mobilizing,” Jathen said.

Enrod shook his head. “Can’t let them stay. Not in my city.”

“We have to get back and tell Delrael,” Jathen said. “This will change his plans.”

But when they turned, they saw seven tall Slac, each carrying a spiked mace. The Slac stood in silence and glaring at them, battle ready, and blocking their way.

#

Jathen had never seen the manticore up close until the Slac guards dragged him into the ampitheater. Slac clutched his arms so tightly that their claws tore into his skin. He stopped struggling because that only deepened the wounds.

This ampitheater had once been used as a meeting place for characters to discuss the future of Tairé. Jathen remembered from the time he was a little boy how Enrod had stood on the platform, speaking his great visions for a reborn land. Enrod had been full of charismatic words then, calling for a flourishing Tairé, for all the human characters to heal the scars that the Sorcerer Wars had left across the map. Enrod himself had made the first strokes on the large mural depicted around the ampitheater wall. The mural was now chipped away by thrown stones and smeared by soot and filth. Enrod stood beside him, another helpless captive.

The manticore arched his lumpy eyebrows as he drew in a long breath of surprise. “What are these? More guests?” With a low growl, he looked at the monster soldiers. “I thought we had evicted all humans from the city and surrounding hexagons.”

“We captured them,” one of the Slac said. “But we have not yet interrogated them. We thought you might like that pleasure.”

The manticore padded three steps closer, crouched down to glare at the two captives, and then suddenly he slashed across the air with a paw filled with razor claws. Siryyk missed laying open Jathen’s chest by the thickness of a piece of cloth. Jathen stumbled backward, but the Slac guards stood like trees, still holding onto his arms.

“Now,” Siryyk said, “Tell me who you are. I don’t want to play games just yet.”

Jathen saw no point in refusing this at least, especially when he could make a reasonable lie. “My name is Jathen. I ran into the mountains when you attacked Tairé and killed all my people. I managed to escape, I managed to flee from your monsters sent to hunt us down. They were clumsy, and they didn’t try very hard. Many of us escaped.”

Jathen tried to keep himself from smiling as Siryyk raised himself up, bristling from the shoulders down. He snarled at the gathered Slac.

“Find who was in charge of that operation! I want to hear from him. Briefly.”

Then Siryyk swivelled his huge head. Jathen thought he could hear the muscles creaking. The manticore let his torchlike yellow eyes fall on Enrod.

“You are Enrod the Sentinel, a powerful magic user. Scartaris sent you with the Fire Stone to destroy Delrael. And, because you failed, Scartaris didn’t succeed in conquering Gamearth!”

Jathen saw Enrod concentrating on the words. He made no answer. Jathen wondered if Siryyk would just kill them for Enrod’s failure. Then the manticore laughed.

“I’m glad Scartaris didn’t succeed. Otherwise we’d all be annihilated now.” He raised his voice to a roar. “But you lost the Fire Stone! Now Delrael has it to fight against me. And he has two other Stones, each as great as the weapon I possess.”

Siryyk hunkered down again. “Tell me, Enrod, what do you know of the end of the Game? You’re a great Sentinel. Explain to me what the Outsiders intend to do when they stop Playing. How can we protect ourselves?”

Enrod tilted his head, as if listening to the distant voices again. His lips curved upward in a secret smile, but he said nothing.

The manticore continued. “Is it true that if I gather all the Stones I can create my own Transition? Where is the fourth Stone? I want them all. If I have that power, along with the Sitnaltan weapon, that might be enough for me to escape the map and continue an existence of my own—even when the Rules have gone away and Gamearth is no longer part of any universe. It will certainly be enough for the Outsiders to notice.”

Siryyk leaned forward. His eyes blazed. “Tell me, Enrod—what can I do to save myself from the end of the Game?”

Enrod asked, “Do the Outsiders speak to me?” He seemed to be asking a serious question. His eyebrows raised. Jathen couldn’t understand what Enrod was doing. He hoped the Sentinel had some kind of plan.

Siryyk let out a long, bubbling sigh, and closed his eyes, as if knowing that further discussion would be useless. “Then it’s time to play a game of our own. The moment you decide to answer my questions, we can stop.”

The manticore grunted at the troops crouched around a firepit. “Bring me my little pins,” he said. “The ones I put in jars.”

Two of the creatures grumbled to themselves and then elbowed a smooth-skinned goblin, who scurried out a low door in a side wall. Jathen wondered what amusements a manticore would enjoy playing.

Then a large Slac in a finer uniform than the others strode into the ampitheater. The nails on his squarish feet clicked on the flagstones. “Siryyk! Professor Verne has escaped!”

“What!” the manticore roared. Blue lightning played on the tip of his scorpion tail as he held it erect. “How?”

“He created some sort of mechanism that chewed through the stone wall. He must have palmed a caustic substance that ate through his manacles. He is not there.”

“Find him again! He must be inside the city somewhere. And Korux—do a better job than you did capturing the Tairan escapees!”

Korux didn’t seem to know what the manticore was talking about until he noticed the captives. Siryyk continued before the general could ask a question. “See that no harm comes to him. Verne has much more work to do for me.”

“Bring out the car!” Korux turned around and shouted into the night. His flowing black robes flapped behind him. He clapped his scaled hands like the crack of a stick against a stone wall.

Outside in the darkness, Jathen watched as four other Slac pushed a battered red vehicle of some sort. He had never seen anything like it before: four wheels and a torn canopy, protruding levers, along with seats for several characters. Steam poured out of a stack on the top. Acting very excited, Korux crawled into the seat and played with the levers.

The other Slac turned the vehicle around, pushing it from behind. Great gouts of steam belched from the stack, and the car began to move by itself. Korux played with the steering levers, making the vehicle veer left and then right as it chugged off into the shadows.

The goblin returned, cradling jars filled with different-colored liquids. The goblin hunched in front of Siryyk and placed the vials by the manticore’s paws. One of the jars tipped over with a clink, but the goblin snatched and righted it before Siryyk could react. Then he scurried away.

The manticore reached forward to hold one of the vials up to the light. “These jars contain liquids. Three are harmless, three are slow-acting poisons. Two contain a venom that I squeezed from the jaws of one of our deadliest monster fighters. Though this poison kills instantly, the pain appears to be excruciating enough to make it seem a long, long time.”

Siryyk used the tips of his huge fingers to claw at a long, jewel-studded golden needle that rested inside the vial. “These are hair pins. We plucked them from some of the dead Tairan women who weren’t burned too badly.”

Jathen felt his insides squirm as his mind brought him too-vivid pictures of the slaughter.

“Now, you will select one of the vials, and we will pierce you with the needle.”

Siryyk pulled the golden pin out so that one droplet hung at the end like a tiny blue sapphire, dancing and reflecting the light from firepits.

“I refuse!” Jathen snapped.

Siryyk gave a minimal shrug. “Then I’ll be forced to choose the first needle for you.”

“Pick,” Enrod said to him. “No choice.”

Jathen felt astonished, betrayed—or did Enrod have a trick up his sleeve? Enrod, the great Sentinel, certainly would fight somehow. Jathen had to trust in Enrod’s ability.

“Give me the amber-colored one,” he said, then closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath between his teeth.

One of the Slac came forward to pick up the indicated vial, then withdrew a long pin with an emerald mounted at the top. Jathen remembered seeing similar pins in the piled hair of women at celebration dances marking the anniversary of Tairé.

The Slac shuffled forward, holding the needle in front of him so that Jathen could see the thick golden droplet hanging from its tip. Jathen didn’t know how to read the fire in the narrow green eyes that stared at him. The Slac stood in front of him and raised the sharp pin. It slowly moved to the left, then to the right, like some serpent trying to lull its prey.

Jathen tried to calculate his chances. Three of the liquids were harmless, out of eight vials. Less than one in two, but still not terrible odds.

“If you have anything to say to me, you could pause this game,” Siryyk said.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Jathen said. “Nothing you’d want to hear.”

Siryyk was not impressed. He nodded to the Slac.

The creature moved behind Jathen. Jathen didn’t turn. He kept staring ahead, staring at the manticore, waiting. At any moment he expected the sting.

Beside him, Enrod squeezed his eyes shut and mumbled incoherently. Jathen couldn’t tell if the Sentinel was just talking to himself. He turned his eyes as far to the side as he could, attempting to see the Slac.

He heard a quick rustle of fabric, then felt a stab as the needle plunged into his shoulder. Jathen made only a tiny sound before he cut off his cry of pain. The gold needle felt like fire, and then the Slac jerked it back out again.

Jathen waited for venomous lava to eat him from inside. But after a moment he still felt nothing more than the sharp sting.

“Enrod, it is your turn.”

As if distracted, Enrod selected the blue liquid that Siryyk had used as his example. Jathen wondered if the monster’s corrupt touch alone could be enough to transmute an innocuous liquid into poison.

Enrod winced when the needle stuck his arm, but he survived as well. “It burns,” he said.

Six vials remained.

Trying to stall, wondering what Enrod intended to do with his magic, Jathen took a long time to make his next choice. “The orange one,” he said, then swallowed as his throat became dry. This time he had only one chance in six, assuming that they had both chosen a harmless liquid the first time around.

The Slac wasted no time withdrawing the needle and jabbing him in the arm. Jathen felt a greater stinging, but nothing more. In Jathen’s mind, he considered himself already dead from the moment the monsters had captured him.

“Choose, Enrod.”

Enrod stared at the glowing firepits next to the wall. He didn’t seem to be paying attention. Just when the manticore reached for one of the vials of his own choosing, Jathen interrupted. He couldn’t just stand by any longer.

“All right, Siryyk! Let me tell you this much. Delrael carries all four Stones now. He has already found the Earth Stone. But he can’t use them, because he’s a human character. He needs a strong magic user.”

Enrod shook his head, then nodded instead. He picked up Jathen’s story. “Doesn’t trust me. I came to destroy his land.”

Jathen raised his voice. “Delrael will never let you take the Stones. His army may be untrained, but they’ll fight to the death.”

Siryyk made a grunting chuckle deep in his chest. “That’s how I like it. He can’t keep the Stones from me if I want them.”

Enrod continued to glare at Siryyk. At his side, his hands clenched and unclenched. His lips trembled, and his eyes had a vacant look, as if only partially distracted by the manticore.

“Very well,” Siryyk said, “For that information—” He picked up one bottle filled with a diamond-clear liquid. “We’ll remove this one. It contains one of the deadly venoms. Your odds are slightly better. Now choose.”

“Green,” Enrod said. His body went rigid. If only three vials had contained harmless liquids then, even with the best of luck, the next one contained poison.

The Slac soldier moved forward, extending the long needle. One droplet fell to the flagstone. Jathen looked to see if the liquid sizzled on the floor; it left only a wet spot.

When the creature tried to prick the base of Enrod’s neck, the metal hissed and dripped molten down the white robe. Enrod clenched his eyes shut, and his entire body shuddered, turning red. Tears streamed down his cheeks and puffed into steam as his skin-glow brightened.

Enrod drew his lips back away from his teeth. Waves of heat baked off of his body. The Slac stumbled back with a grunt of astonishment. The manticore rose up. “What is this?”

With an outcry from the effort, Enrod smashed his fists together. His entire form blazed with heat and light, shimmering so that Jathen could see only the Sentinel’s blazing silhouette.

“Eyes and mouth!” Enrod hissed to Jathen. “Cover them!”

As if hurling something heavy but invisible, Enrod motioned his arms to the vials on the floor. All the bottles shattered in the gust of heat. The mixed liquids erupted in flames. Two of the vials burst into greenish-black smoke that rose thick into the air; the other poisons sizzled on the floor.

The manticore roared and clawed at his eyes as the corrosive vapors curled into his misshapen face. Smoke filled the amphitheater. The monsters choked and coughed.

“Run!” Enrod hissed, and hurried out the front of the amphitheater. Jathen stumbled after, holding his breath and covering his stinging eyes.

Slac guards rushed to assist the manticore. Five of them lay already dead from the poison. The other monsters ran around, making inhuman sounds of anger and surprise.

Jathen burst into the cool night air. Enrod remained at the entrance of Siryyk’s headquarters. Jathen saw an expression of pained dismay through the shimmering roar around Enrod’s body. Then the Sentinel smashed his arm into the archway. Stone columns crumbled with a roar, blocking off the main entrance.

Then all the heat ran out of Enrod, pouring down his body like warm oil until he stood panting.

“We have to run, Enrod,” Jathen said, afraid to touch his arm and pull him along. “We have to get out of the city.”

Enrod followed, and Jathen continued jabbering. “I knew you were going to do something! I was waiting. They’ll be scattered now. The monsters won’t know what to do with Siryyk injured and their Slac general out hunting down that professor.”

Enrod heaved a deep breath, but couldn’t make words come out.

“What took you so long? I was worried!” Jathen talked fast. “I waited for you to do something. I was afraid you really had surrendered.”

Enrod leaned against a building deep in the shadows. In the distance they could hear monsters running pell-mell around the city, but Jathen had no doubt the two of them would be able to escape now.

“First spell failed.” Enrod sighed and looked up at Jathen. “First spell. To turn poison into water. It didn’t work.”

Jathen felt his heart thump, rising up and then falling. Enrod had tried to protect him from the poison, but it had failed. “We’ll just have to trust to luck, then. That neither of us got the slow poison.”

“Yes,” Enrod said. “Luck.”

#

Jathen began to stumble midway through the following morning as they crept behind the grassy hills west of Tairé. At first Enrod thought it was merely weariness, because he was greatly tired, too. But the unhealthy flush in Jathen’s skin and the strange disfocus of his eyes led Enrod to believe otherwise.

The sun pounded down on them, and Enrod felt the focused rays heating his skin. It seemed much weaker than the heat he had made the night before. His own confusion was getting worse.

They were both parched. The monsters had stripped Siya’s food from them, so they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Enrod had no way to ease Jathen’s growing misery as the slow poison ate its way into his body.

“Keep going,” Enrod said. “Back to army by night.”

Jathen broke out in a clammy sweat, but he said nothing and kept moving with Enrod. They plodded through the grass, avoiding the direct quest-path.

They had escaped the monsters indeed, for all the good it would do Jathen. Enrod had used his fire. They crossed the hex-line into mountain terrain in the mid-afternoon, but as the path became steeper Jathen worsened rapidly.

“I wonder which one it was,” Jathen said. His lips seemed loose, and he mumbled his words. “The first needle, or the second one. It seems you got lucky.”

Enrod shook his head. “Burned any poison from my body. Fire inside my skin.” He turned ahead, not wanting to pursue the conversation. “Come on.”

He moved ahead, but Jathen stumbled so slowly up the rugged path that rocks skittered behind him and rolled down the slope. Enrod paused and put one of Jathen’s arms over his shoulder to help him along. Even that wasn’t enough.

When Jathen finally collapsed an hour later, Enrod took him to an overhang of rock. The setting sun cast long shadows from the mountains, like black hands reaching across the hexagons toward Tairé.

Jathen’s legs started to spasm, and his feet jittered against the ground. His teeth chattered. He had retched several times, pulling up nothing from his empty stomach.

Enrod positioned him comfortably, where Jathen could look across the landscape, toward the great desolation and the distant city walls.

“If I’m going to die here anyway,” Jathen said, wheezing great breaths of mountain air, “then I wish I had just died in Tairé.”

Enrod sat next to him and placed a broad hand on his shoulder. His mind became sharp and clear for a moment. “Can’t choose when and where we die. Not part of the Game.”

“I don’t care about the Game anymore,” Jathen said. Enrod could think of no way to answer him.

Enrod looked out, and with his sharp eyes he could see Tairé. Masses of figures poured out from the ruined gates. He sat up straight. As he hoped, Enrod had provoked the manticore to march out before he was ready.

Jathen coughed, but he couldn’t see. “Do you think we defeated them?”

“Sure of it,” Enrod answered. Without further words, he stared down at the desolation, where he could see Siryyk’s immense army pouring out, mobilized and heading toward them. . . .

Enrod waited there until full darkness had come. By that time, Jathen died.

Enrod did the best he could to pile scrub wood around the body, a mound of brush and twigs and stunted branches. “I can still make fire,” he said.

With a simple, powerful spell, he turned the pile into a blazing funeral pyre for Jathen. He stood, holding his hands up to the flames and feeling the heat.

With a last glance behind him at the advancing monster horde, Enrod moved upward to rejoin Delrael’s army. Jathen’s funeral pyre crackled in the night.

13. Frankenstein’s Drone

“As our enemies find better ways of fighting us, so we must develop better ways to strike back. Is there any character in Sitnalta who is not willing to meet this challenge?”

—Professor Frankenstein, in a guest lecture to beginning inventors

Frankenstein pulled Bryl toward the back of the cluttered workroom. The professor’s fingers left greasy marks on his blue cloak.

Vailret blinked in the dim light shining through cobweb-covered skylights. If anything, the workroom looked more chaotic than he remembered it from the first time he had visited there. He tripped on a stack of half-opened books, sheaves of paper, and scrawled drawings.

“Hurry, if you please,” Frankenstein said over his shoulder. “It’s most disquieting to be so vulnerable out here.”

In the back of the room, the professor heaved open a trapdoor, then let it thud onto the floor. Bright chips of wood showed where the heavy trap had gouged marks from repeated openings.

“Down you go!” Frankenstein practically stuffed Bryl into the hole.

“Wait! I—” Bryl said, but the professor lifted his foot and pushed down on the half-Sorcerer’s shoulder.

“Professor, why don’t you just explain yourself?” Vailret said.

Frankenstein climbed into the trapdoor as well. He turned with his shoulders above the floor. “You may follow us if you like, or not. I can’t stay out where the invisible force might get me. I have too much at stake.”

He continued to descend. Vailret could hear Bryl’s footsteps clicking on a metal staircase. Frankenstein reached up to grasp the handle of the trapdoor. “Are you coming or not?”

Vailret squeezed past the professor and worked his way down the twisting stairs. Frankenstein used both hands to swing the trapdoor over his head and ducked as the heavy door crashed into place. “Ah, much better,” he said. Frankenstein closed his eyes and sighed.

The bottom of the trapdoor, along with the walls, ceiling, and floor of the entire underground room, had been covered with plates of dull, dark metal.

Bryl stood at the bottom, waiting for them. Frankenstein descended the narrow stairs while Vailret squinted around the broad chamber. Serving trays, dirty plates, and half-eaten food lay piled near the stairs. The professor had obviously spent a great deal of time down here.

“Professor Verne and I constructed this underground workroom years ago. Every inch of it is covered with lead shielding.” He ran his fingers along the wall.

“The lead prevents even the Outsiders from detecting what we do down here. We use this place for our most secret investigations into certain topics. We didn’t want the Outsiders to know that such ideas had even occurred to us.”

He made a thin-lipped smile. “With that invisible force attacking four times a day, I took refuge here. The force can’t penetrate the lead. That has been proven time and again.” Frankenstein strode into the chamber. “Here I can work alone and undisturbed to develop some means to rescue Sitnalta.”

The entire chamber was piled with tools and raw materials: metal piping, pulleys, gears, glass spheres, switches, wiring, sheet metal. Boxes crammed full of rivets and screws lay stacked on top of each other. Wrenches, screwdrivers, and soldering irons rested beside half-assembled pieces of machinery.

Vailret could make out little among the chaos. Bryl poked among the coiled wires on a table.

“Don’t touch anything,” Frankenstein said.

In the center of the room, propped up on solid blocks, stood a large squarish frame in which Frankenstein had hung a network of cables and pulleys. Wires protruded from the corners of the frame.

Vailret stepped forward to peer at another object on one of the long worktables. Five curved cylinders as long and as thick as his leg protruded upward and bent in the middle. Vailret cocked his head, then stopped as the skewed perspective finally came into focus. The metal framework and the five cylinders looked like a giant hand as large as his own body.

“What is all this?” he said, staring at the enormous central frame, the other scattered cylinders and gears. In his mind, a picture began to come clear.

Frankenstein patted the “thumb” of the metal hand and picked up a long roll of paper. He tacked the top against a cork board he had mounted on the wall, unrolled the paper, then pinned down the bottom. The corners curled up, and the professor swiped with his hand, trying to get them to lie flat. Finally, he stuck the corners down with two other pins.

He stepped back to display a sketch of a burly manlike machine, an automaton the size of ten characters. “I will call it my Drone,” Frankenstein said. “My servant, like a worker bee.” He paused a moment, as if for them to appreciate his work.

“I have analyzed that magical force coming from below. It plays living characters just like a game master, but has no effect on Sitnaltan machines. If the controller could manipulate our machines, the entire city would have been leveled long ago.”

Frankenstein turned away from the sketch to look at Vailret and Bryl. “I spent my life discovering the way living creatures work. Professor Verne and I constructed small automatons, playthings like the mechanical fish in the fountains, or character-sized robots that played games against solitary characters.” Frankenstein’s eyes looked wistful. “A tremendous success, that. Our automated dicing companion never cheats, you know.”

Then he dismissed his nostalgia. “But those were just practice inventions. This is my crowning achievement. Drone will seek out and destroy the perpetrator of this vile force.” He paused, turning his gaze away. “Verne was always good at implementing the mechanical manifestations. I just studied the life forms, explained them to him, and he made similar machines. Unfortunately, Drone has been an entirely solo effort.”

He pointed to the top of the drawing, snapping out of his distraction. “The human brain is far too complex for me to understand, much less imitate. I have dissected several brains and tried to discover how they work, but such organs are fairly difficult to come by these days.”

Frankenstein sighed, as if distressed at having to admit his failure. “So, since I’m unable to construct an adequate mechanical substitute, I will act as the brain of Drone. I’ll construct a control chamber, also lined with lead, so that I can ride along with the machine to hunt out our enemy.”

Vailret watched him, listened to the speech, and had the odd impression that Frankenstein had taken on this task as a challenge to his problem-solving ability, rather than to stop the terrible manipulations from happening.

“Dirac is dead,” Vailret said. Maybe that would shake him out of it. “We thought you should know.”

Frankenstein continued to stare at his drawing, tracing a finger along a nested diagram of gears. Old oil and grease left a dark curve under his fingernail. “What?” He looked up.

“I said Dirac is dead. The invisible force made him come after us in a steam-engine car. Dirac tried to kill us, but instead he crashed into your communications facility.”

“Oh, no,” Frankenstein said. “Is it destroyed?”

“Dirac is dead. There was a big explosion.”

Frankenstein made an impatient wave. “No, the communications facility. All of Morse’s wires.”

Bryl blinked. “Aren’t you listening? Your city leader is dead.”

Frankenstein frowned, and his voice grew hard-edged. “Plenty of greater characters than Dirac have already fallen. I choose not to tear my hair out in grief because of it. I’ve got too much to do.” He looked at them in defiance. “Jules never returned from his mission—he’s probably dead, and I’d certainly mourn him sooner than I would shed a tear for Dirac.”

He plucked the bottom pins out of the drawing, which rolled back up into a loose cylinder. “If Dirac hadn’t quashed the idea years ago that we Sitnaltans should attempt our own Transition through technology, we wouldn’t be in this trouble right now. We might all be in a far better place. Dirac’s own daughter Mayer was very disappointed with him about that.”

“Mayer?” Vailret interrupted. “How is she?”

“Rather high tempered about this whole mess. Her heart is in the right place, but she’s too bull-headed about the challenge. She will charge and meet it head-on, no doubt. But sometimes it doesn’t help to charge into a brick wall. It’s better to find a door. Fewer headaches that way.”

Bryl picked among the scattered dishes on the floor, as if looking for something still worth eating. “But what do you want with me, Professor? You dragged me in here.”

Frankenstein put a finger to his lips and raised his eyes. “Ah, yes! I can’t find any explanation for this force other than that it must be caused by some evil sorcery. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about magic.

“If the Rules have indeed been damaged, and magic can operate even here in Sitnalta—then I’d better learn about it. You see, I was able to discover exactly how the old Sorcerers succeeded in their Transition spell. Oh, it took a while to track down the records and everything, but when I did I found something amazing.”

He looked to Vailret, who felt a sudden keen interest. The stone gargoyle Arken had told his own memories of the grand event, but Frankenstein, with his strange technical perspective, would have a different assessment.

“The probability of the exact dice roll the old Sorcerers needed—even though it took them day after day of constantly rolling the dice in the attempt—defies common sense. To get five ‘20s’ in the same roll should happen only once in three million two hundred thousand times! Some sort of magic must have had its hand in that.

“Therefore, if Sitnalta is depending on me to combat a magic-driven enemy, I need to understand how best to strike back.” He turned to Bryl. “Spend a few hours here with me, explaining spells and magic. Tell me what are the limitations, tell me how a spell works. What is it that you say to invoke the magic? It’s very important.”

“We have a favor to ask as well, Professor,” Vailret said, but Frankenstein waved his hand in dismissal, as if that were a trivial problem.

Bryl finally found a half-eaten piece of cake. He brushed off part of it, flicked crumbs from his fingertips, then pushed the piece into his mouth. He spoke as he chewed.

“At least here it’s safe.”

14. Role Playing

“The merit of any sacrifice, small or large, can be judged by no one but the character who makes it. Small sacrifices gravely made may outweigh great deeds that are done without forethought.”

—The Book of Rules

By the time General Korux and the marauding creatures had scoured the ruins of Tairé for the escaped professor, Verne had already crossed his second hexagon of desolation terrain at a dead run.

The night was cool and clear. He wheezed in the dry air, but continued to forge eastward. Wherever possible, he stepped on rocks to hide his trail. It would likely be mid-morning or so before Korux began to investigate beyond the city walls.

Before dawn, though, Verne wanted to be on the other side of the forested-hill terrain. The hills stood tall and covered with grasping skeletal trees. The thin branches were so long dead that they looked fossilized in the baking dry climate.

While languishing in his miserable cell, Verne had calculated that eastward would be the least-expected direction for his escape. He could have gone south, back toward Sitnalta. He could have gone west, where the mountains and the forest terrain would make it easier for him to hide. But Verne had no hunting or forest skills, and any of Siryyk’s creatures would no doubt succeed in tracking him down. If they looked in the right place.

His best chance lay in avoiding pursuit for as long as possible. He aimed for the awful forbidden zone of terrain where the climactic battle with Scartaris had broken the map.

Everything would be strange there—or so he had heard. The monsters were terrified of that place. No character would go there intentionally—which was why Verne considered it a safe bet. And, though he didn’t want to admit it, the sheer anomaly of the bizarre area had piqued his natural curiosity.

Verne felt weak. He had nothing to drink, and had eaten little for weeks. But after Siryyk forced him to create the cannon, Verne knew he could not remain a captive any longer. Knowing the manticore also possessed the Sitnaltan weapon made things even worse.

The weapon contained the power source from the Outsiders’ ship—a hybrid of reality and the imagination. If it was deadly to Gamearth, it might be just as deadly to the Players. The Outsider Scott had created a bigger stick than he bargained for. And the manticore wanted to use it.

Verne cursed himself for not being able to dismantle the weapon or sabotage it in some way before his flight. But Siryyk kept the weapon under very close guard.

He had verified that the device itself remained undamaged, and he hoped that the manticore would not discover how to reset its timing mechanism. But Verne held little hope of that; Siryyk had already shown himself to be highly intelligent.

He wondered what Frankenstein would have done. He wondered what Frankenstein was doing now. Detectors would have shown that the weapon never detonated. Did Frankenstein think him dead? What did Victor think of him and his failure?

Verne had no way to send a message. He had no way to fight. Simply by taking all his undeveloped inventions away from Siryyk’s army, he would strike a severe blow.

Verne limped across a hex-line where the desolation butted against an adjoining section of forested-hill. Verne chose to continue along the desolation, heading northward to steer away from the sharp eyes of any pursuers.

Though he stood low on the desolation, by late afternoon he saw the first distorted hexagons of broken terrain. The hexes had been pried up from the map and tilted at the wrong angles. In the center he discerned a misty void, shapeless and colorless, like a death wound for Gamearth, growing larger.

Scouring dusts gusted up from the desolation, staining the sky. Verne’s throat felt as if he had swallowed hot dry rags rolled in sand. His legs shook. His woolen greatcoat felt hot and sticky, but he could not leave it as a flag for any following creatures.

He plowed ahead. He didn’t know what he would do in the destroyed zone, but his mind had focused on that one goal, and he continued in that direction.

Behind him, Verne heard a faint puttering sound that grew louder. He turned and saw a tiny black form. The sun lowered toward the distant mountain terrain and shone in his eyes. Verne squinted, wishing he had brought an optick tube. But even without enhancements, he could make out a Sitnaltan steam-engine car coming for him.

He thought he had become delirious. Professor Frankenstein had come to rescue him, somehow knowing where Verne would be. His heart lifted with elation. Finally, signs of civilization! Yes, Frankenstein’s detectors must have seen the terrible anomaly with this portion of the map, and he had come to investigate.

Two large figures accompanied the steam-engine car, much taller than any human character could be. They loped along with great strides that allowed them to match speed with the vehicle.

Verne waved his arms, trying to draw their attention. His voice came out hoarse and raspy. “I’m over here, Victor!”

The vehicle veered and came toward him. Gouts of steam showed that the driver had jammed the acceleration lever all the way forward. Verne dropped his arms down to his side. He blinked his red and sore eyes. “Oh, dear,” he said.

He recognized the hulking monsters bounding beside the car. The reptilian form of Korux sat behind the steering levers. “Oh, dear!” he said again.

Somehow pulling new energy from the marrow of his bones, Verne ran blindly toward the broken hexagons. He didn’t know what he would find there, but he did know what would happen if Korux captured him. Siryyk wanted Verne alive, but the Slac general could cause a great deal of pain and maiming before he endangered the professor’s life.

Verne stumbled on the rocky soil and kept running. The sound of the steam-engine car grew louder, chugging and puttering. Up ahead he saw the first broken hex-line, a small lip half a man high where the terrain had shifted.

Verne pushed himself toward it. The car could not go over the shelf. They would have to leave their vehicle behind. They would be on foot, just as he was. But the giant creatures could catch him in no time.

He chose not to think of that and fell to his knees when he reached the uplifted hex-line. It felt hard and glossy, thrust up from the surface of the desolation terrain. He scrambled over it and rolled.

The desolation lay canted at an angle, as if the entire hexagon was ready to collapse. He ran, tripping faster as the slope increased. Ahead he saw the gray maw of static, mist, and black stars from the other side of the map, a void—the Outside. Verne knew it would be certain death to fall there.

The giant monsters scrambled over the line and plunged after him, shouting. They would capture him, or he would die.

A calmness poured up from the core of Verne’s body. What better way for a great inventor to die than this? What more perfect end for one of the most profound thinkers of Sitnalta than to perish while plunging head-first into the greatest mystery of all?

A swirling stormcloud of dust rushed by as the wind picked up. His cheeks and eyes stung from the sand flying at him. Verne lurched forward, his mind firmly made up.

He heard a loud whuffing from behind, and a ten-foot-tall shaggy creature grabbed him by the coat, clutching his shoulders.

Verne cried out and strained ahead. He popped out of his greatcoat, letting the inside-out sleeves dangle behind him. He fell to the ground. The monster ripped the coat to shreds, yanking the sleeves off, and bounded forward again to grab Verne.

Then the ground started to shake and lurch beneath the map. The surface of the desolation terrain bucked and tilted one way, then the other. The entire hexagon wobbled loose, creaking. A rumbling roar seemed to split from the sky itself.

As the angle of the terrain steepened, the giant beast holding Verne threw itself back toward the hex-line, scrambling and grunting. It tucked the professor under his arm like a heavy log. Verne struggled. The monster smelled rank, like all the bile of all the sickness in the world boiled down to a thick jelly.

Ahead on the other side of the black line, Korux waited beside the Sitnaltan car. The second hairy creature bounded down to take Verne from its companion. The first giant took a large step just as the hexagon rumbled and bucked again.

The second monster sprawled flat, facing uphill. The other creature tripped face-first into the sand. It rolled, kicking dust and rocks, picking up speed as it plunged downward. Its roars became shrill with fear; ahead, it could see the great void.

Verne scrambled out of the second giant’s grip and crawled toward the stable black hex-line. At the front of his mind, he tried to convince himself to stop. Intellectually, he kept insisting that he wanted to die, that he wanted to fall down there, that he didn’t dare be recaptured. But his traitorous body moved with its own survival instinct.

He reached the line just as he felt the ground sink like a rug snatched out from under his feet. He grabbed out with elbows and hands, snatching the edge as he heard a tremendous tearing snap. Then wind and a gush of strange-smelling air poured up. The hexagon fell away.

He turned for just a glance as the section of terrain—flat brown, with two specks showing the hairy giants—fell away, growing smaller. All around it swirled a cosmic nothingness.

He gritted his teeth, jamming his elbows and hands into the rough surface of the desolation. His feet dangled below him, touching nothing. He wanted to let go, to drop, to see—if only for the tiniest instant—what awaited down there.

But instead, he worked his shoulder muscles to get up. He heard a grating hiss and tilted his head, grinding his beard among the rocks and dirt on the edge of the world.

Verne saw the silhouetted form of General Korux bending over. He thought that the Slac would kick him over the side—and he hoped for that in the back of his mind, but he knew it would never happen. Korux would forfeit his own life if he lost the captive.

“I hope you’ve learned not to play games with us.” The Slac reached down, grabbed his arm, and hurled Verne up over the edge, sprawling him onto the stable terrain.

Far below, off in the void, Verne heard a long rumble like distant thunder.

Korux tossed him into the still-chugging car and released the braking lock after he climbed in beside his captive.

“Siryyk has ordered all the monster armies to march. We’re on the attack now,” Korux said. “We have no time for this.”

15. Allies

“We played our games. We had our fun. But the Rules have changed, and now we face a different game—one of survival.”

—Tayron Tribeleader of the khelebar

Delrael’s army had found its stride. Over the days of marching they learned how to work with each other, how to function as one vast unit.

After travelling this far, they had passed through the stages Delrael expected to see—initial excitement at approaching unknown adventures, which gave way to sore weariness from walking across hexagon after hexagon, then the misery of camping under poor conditions and eating bland food for too many days. Finally, as they retreated northward along the spine of the Spectre Mountains, they had hardened to the routine.

Delrael sent scouts ahead and to the side to seek possible obstacles and likely places for ambushing Siryyk’s horde; rear scouts reported regularly on the progress of the monsters.

The manticore’s troops had spread out on the rugged mountain terrain, with a long vanguard of footsoldiers in front, marching ahead of the main group. Siryyk still didn’t know an entire human army remained only one step ahead in the mountain terrain.

Delrael gave permission for teams to dig traps and to set obstacles. These proved a nuisance to Siryyk but caused no real damage, nor did it suggest to the manticore that anything more than a few isolated characters were harassing them. But Delrael knew it would keep the horde angry and marching.

Delrael sent his fighters marching well before dawn. In the darkness they tramped along the quest-path, bearing torches when the terrain proved too treacherous in the dark.

By the time sunrise lit their way, the young man Romm came back from ahead to report. “The next hexagon is forested hills, as we knew from the map. I went with two other scouts.” He seemed uneasy. “We sensed other characters around us. You know how it gets when you’re alone in a dense forest. You can feel when someone’s watching you.”

Delrael nodded, but let a smile creep across his face. He knew exactly where they were. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with the khelebar. Don’t worry.”

Romm looked at him as if to ask a question, but he decided not to. He went back through the lines to get some food from the supply packs.

Delrael withdrew one of the small maps Vailret had copied back in the Stronghold village. It would be interesting to see how Ledaygen had fared after the forest fire.

#

Upon approaching the forested-hill terrain, the surviving ylvans seemed elated. Delrael knew from his memories of Tallin how much they hated to be away from the trees. The ylvans grew up in the protection of the forest, camouflaged, learning their woodcraft so they could become deadly fighters.

But when the army crossed the hex-line to leave the bleak mountain terrain behind, the ylvans became uneasy again.

Delrael himself stood astonished among the close-packed trees, sure that he had misjudged their position. Ledaygen, an entire hexagon of trees, had burned to the ground. He had expected, even with the meticulous work of all the panther-people, to find no more than barren hillsides cleared of dead tree hulks, fertile ash sifted across the soil, and possibly rows of dusty-green seedlings of oaks and pines. It had been only a few turns.

But Ledaygen stood tall and bristling with thick branches. Delrael wondered if this could be the result of some backwash of magic from the dayid, the congregation of spirits that had lived in the forest. Bryl had worked with the dayid to quench the forest fire—but Ledaygen had died, leaving little to salvage.

Now the forest stood lush . . . but wrong somehow.

Kellos, the ylvan leader, came up to him. Kellos squeezed his mouth into a tight shape. Dark circles under his flinty eyes made him look exhausted from the burden of bearing so much anger inside himself. The purple bruise from the noose looked like a bandanna at his throat; when he spoke, his voice remained scratchy and harsh. In the days since their rescue from the Black Falcons, Kellos had never once called Delrael by name.

“Something’s wrong with this forest.” Kellos jerked his head up at the trees. “It’s like a blow to the stomach. Can’t you feel it? They’re all screaming. This forest is in pain.”

Delrael continued to lead his fighters ahead anyway. “I can see that.”

Scowling, Kellos dropped back.

The trees themselves were thin and unbalanced. Their branches reached like claws. Each joint swelled with large knobs, like the fingers of a starving man. The force of the trees stretching upward, trying to grow as fast as they could, made the air taut with energy.

It reminded Delrael of the blackened tree plantations on the hills outside of Tairé. He wondered if Jathen would have made that comparison. Enrod stumbled along, looking disturbed. He had acted even more disoriented since Jathen’s death.

The human army continued through the trees. The forest seemed close and oppressive. Delrael knew they should stop for a meal and a rest, but none of the fighters seemed anxious for that.

Kellos came up to him again. “Characters are watching us from out there in the trees. They’re very good woodsmen. Even I can barely detect them. But they’re here, now, very close to us.” He looked around, ready to pull his crossbow and arm it.

Delrael signalled his fighters to stop. A few moments later, when all the characters had ground to a halt, he stepped in front, alone and vulnerable. He looked out into the trees.

“I know you’re there, khelebar. I am Delrael, called kennoklimb. Your Healer Thilane gave me a new leg. Noldir Woodcarver made it for me.”

He peeled up his trouser leg to expose the grain of the golden wood and the choppy white gash from where Annik had struck him. “Call Tayron Tribeleader. He knows who I am.”

The silence bothered Delrael; suspicion and uneasiness did not fit with his memories of the khelebar at all. But he had been injured that first time, followed by only two companions. Now, he brought an entire army.

Delrael waited and blinked his eyes. In that moment a khelebar man emerged from the trees directly in front of him.

His hair was dark and cropped close to his head. His broad shoulders remained bare. His chest showed no ornament. The bottom half of his body was that of a panther, with four powerful clawed legs, dusty fur, and rippling muscles. His panther tail twitched as he stepped forward.

“We remember you, kennoklimb. I see that much has changed.” The khelebar man looked around the thick forest. “Much has changed here as well. Do you remember me?”

Delrael looked at him, but he recalled a man with long hair hanging in black braids down his back and an ornate pine-cone pendant at his throat.

“Of course I remember you, Ydaim Trailwalker.”

The khelebar man smiled at him. “Since you remember me, I have no choice but to welcome you.”

#

Tayron Tribeleader padded about on the council clearing where the khelebar made bonfires and told tales. Delrael remembered the war councils the panther-people had held during the forest fire and in planning their assault against the Cyclops.

Delrael sat cross-legged on the ash-covered clearing, waiting for Tayron to continue. He looked across at the hex-discontinuity, where the forested-hill terrain met the adjacent hexagon of mountains; but the terrains did not match up correctly and left a sheer cliff. Many khelebar had thrown themselves over the edge in the last moments of the fire.

Near the center of the clearing stood a pine seedling, about as tall as Delrael’s knee. This, he remembered, was the one pine tree that survived from the old Ledaygen, protected from the flames by the fall of the towering Father Pine in the clearing. The seedling looked normal and alive, the only truly healthy tree Delrael had seen in the entire hexagon. Somewhere deep in the hex should be a similarly healthy oak tree, one brought back to life through the sacrifice of Thilane Healer.

Beside the pine seedling stood a complex symbolic monument for the forest. Noldir Woodcarver had fashioned it from the scorched hulk of the Father Pine.

Tayron’s dusty blond hair had also been cut short, as had all of the khelebar Delrael had seen. Ydaim explained it to him. “We will not allow our hair to grow until Ledaygen has grown to its former glory.”

Tayron stopped is pacing, and the sunlight played across his dappled back. He finally spoke again. “Few khelebar remain here. Most could not stand the enormous task of resurrecting the forest. They could not bear the scars they saw, and they have gone to lesser forests to form their own groups. Only I and Ydaim and a few dozen others do all this work.

“But the blood of Ledaygen has made the soil magic. You see how fast the trees have returned. Our work has paid off. We will never leave our home.”

Delrael turned his gaze away and pursed his lips. Until now, Tayron had not asked about the human army or its purpose; but Delrael could no longer avoid the issue.

“Tayron, I have to tell you why we’re here. A gigantic monster horde follows us, only a day or two behind. Their purpose is to destroy the map. They will flood through here like a storm, and they’ll cause as much destruction as the fire did. I know of no way you can avoid them. They are coming.”

Ydaim melted out of the forest to stand by the clearing. His face bore a shocked expression. Delrael thought he saw shadows of other khelebar between the trees. Tayron stared at him with wide, devastated eyes.

“You are bringing the evil creatures here! To destroy our work? How could you do this?” His voice cracked as it grew shrill. “You know what Ledaygen has already suffered—why couldn’t you choose another route and protect us?”

This time frustration began to bubble up within Delrael. He thought of Vailret and Bryl taking their risk as they went alone to get the Earth Stone. He thought of how Jathen had been murdered by the manticore, and all the Tairan characters slaughtered in Siryyk’s attack. He drew himself to his feet and felt his hands trembling.

“The end of the Game is near, Tayron, and this could be the final battle. All characters are in play. We can’t afford to shelter one place or one group. Everything counts now.” He scowled. “I’m sorry for your forest, but we are fighting for all of Gamearth. If we win this one struggle, then we determine our fate for the Outsiders. We will always have peace.”

“A war to end all wars?” Ydaim said, interrupting from where he stood. His face wore a cynical expression. “I’m not sure I believe in the idea.”

Delrael turned to him, but then three human figures appeared among the trees. “Delrael!” Romm shouted, and all three marched into the clearing.

Between Romm and another scout stood a tall human fighter, heavily muscled and wearing old but well-tended armor. He moved with a slow grace that disregarded the presence of his two escorts. Each step was careful and precise. His hair hung long, streaked with gray, and thinning on top. A full beard made his massive face look larger. His eyes were narrow and dark.

Despite his apparent determination, he seemed to have an underlying aura of calmness about him. He carried an unsheathed broadsword in his right hand. When he stepped forward, the fighter looked as if he would make no compromises.

“He came right through the army,” Romm said. “He won’t tell anyone who he is. Just wanted to see you.”

Tayron and Ydaim fell silent in the clearing, as if sensing the import of the moment.

Delrael felt amazement stab through him like blue-cold steel. Part of him grew surprised that Romm hadn’t recognized the fighter, but it had been many years.

“Father!” Delrael’s voice came out in a whisper.

Drodanis took two steps forward and rested the flat of his sword on his shoulder. “I’ve come to help. Could you use another fighter?”

Delrael stood stricken for a moment, and then ran forward as both of them burst into huge grins.

#

The campfire crackled, shedding warmth into the night. Above, stars showed through patchy clouds and the tangled ceiling of branches.

Delrael and Drodanis sat near each other. The rest of the army rested by their own fires with strict instructions not to harm any trees or to wander from the well-marked paths. They left Delrael and his father to catch up on years of conversation left behind.

“I was very angry when you left,” Delrael said. “I wasn’t ready for the responsibility you gave me. I had my training, but you suddenly placed me in command of the Stronghold while you ran off. You gave up! A great fighter like you shouldn’t surrender!”

Drodanis stared into the flames and made no comment.

“I had companions die too—” Their faces welled up in Delrael’s memory, but he blinked them away. “But I continued the Game. I didn’t let my grief poison me. You ran away and left me.”

Delrael took a deep breath. “And then you sent that message stick from the Rulewoman, giving me the responsibility of saving Gamearth. You told me to find a way to stop Scartaris—while you sat and wallowed in self-pity for turn after turn!”

Drodanis accepted all the comments Delrael flung at him, and he turned tired eyes at his son. Delrael saw the firelight reflected in them. “Everything you say is true. I did give up. I was wrong—that’s the loser’s way out. We weren’t created for that kind of response. That’s why I came back to rejoin the Game, to make amends.”

“I wish you’d come back sooner,” Delrael said. The campfire snapped and popped over his words.

“Yes,” Drodanis said. “We forgot our purpose here on Gamearth. We allowed ourselves to get too wrapped up in dull activities and day-to-day life. Our whole purpose on Gamearth is to amuse the Outsiders. We are here to have adventures, and the Outsiders are not at all interested in our chores, in our bland home lives.

“When we stopped questing, when we stopped searching for treasure and exploring catacombs and battling monsters for the sake of having fun and nothing else, that’s when we lost the Outsiders. We can only hope that this struggle against Siryyk is exciting enough that we rekindle the Outsiders’ interests. They can save us all.”

Delrael frowned with distaste. He poked a branch into the fire, stirring the flames. “My purpose in life is not to amuse someone else. I’m responsible for this army, for the characters in the Stronghold village. I’m working to save the map from destruction. And I’m doing that because it must be done, not because I hope the Outsiders are going to enjoy watching my efforts. If they find my tasks entertaining, then so be it. But that is not the only reason I’m here.”

Drodanis looked at his son as if he had just uttered blasphemy. “Are you forgetting Rule #1 Delrael? With the end of the Game, our purpose in life goes away. If that happens, it doesn’t matter if the map survives. If the Outsiders no longer play, then we have no reason to be here at all.”

Delrael shook his head. “Rule #1 has taken on a whole different meaning. Rule #1 is to survive, not just to have fun.”

Drodanis closed his eyes with a disturbed sigh. He lay back on the ground, ready to sleep. “So much has changed, Delrael. So much has changed. This isn’t my Gamearth anymore.”

Delrael tried to sleep, though his mind continued to swim with conflicting thoughts. “But that’s the Gamearth we’re fighting for.”

#

Tayron Tribeleader walked among the dark passages in the regrown Ledaygen. The trees rose tall around him. The branches appeared black and oily, lit by the gleams of stars.

His pawed feet moved silently among the ashes on the ground. He let his fingertips touch the trunks as he passed them.

Tayron tried to remember what Ledaygen had been like before, but it was so long now. He had spent many turns convincing himself that this was natural, that the forest had suffered no fundamental change. He forced himself to ignore the pain in the trees. He remembered the horror of the fire. He remembered his father Fiolin crushed under a great slab of rock hurled by the Cyclops. That had left him as Tribeleader.

Tayron passed two sleeping human fighters curled up near the base of a tree. They didn’t move as he passed.

The decision weighed heavily on him, caused by the fear and uneasiness at admitting his basic failure.

Tayron wondered if he would ever be considered a great leader of the khelebar. Would he ever be compared to Jorig Falselimb and his great courage as he faced the slavering wolves and drove them from Ledaygen?

He plucked a curved twig from the end of a branch and held it up. The twig looked like a long sharp hook. When he brought the broken end to his nose, the sap smelled sour and rotten.

Tayron squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the tears to run sideways down his cheeks.

This was not Ledaygen. It would never be Ledaygen. He fooled himself, as did all the khelebar. All their effort had merely been to distract them from grief. They should have accepted the loss, healed, and moved on. Ledaygen was gone; it had been gone since the fire.

#

Delrael’s army completed their preparations several hours before the vanguard of Siryyk’s horde arrived. Most of the fighters had moved into position on the far side of the hexagon.

Many fighters walked about, eager for battle. They had marched long and trained hard; knowing that the monsters were so near made them enthusiastic for a fight. But Delrael refused, telling them that they had no need to tip their hand yet, or to risk lives.

Tayron Tribeleader’s ambush plan required none of that.

Kellos and seventeen ylvans waited on the leading edge of Ledaygen, watching as the vanguard approached. They hid behind trees, camouflaged in their splotched uniforms. Kellos crouched close to one of the trunks, but avoided touching the bark. The wrongness of all the trees made his skin crawl.

He looked behind him, making sure he could find the tiny marks on the ash-strewn forest floor. The other ylvans also noted their positions, making sure they could locate the subtle signs even in the frenzy of retreat.

The front line of monsters approached under the hot afternoon sun. They plodded along at a steady pace. The creatures on the flanks seemed uneasy; they had been harried enough by scattered attacks and traps that they walked with heightened awareness.

A regiment of Slac formed the rigid front lines with locked shields made of greenish-tan leather. They held various pointed weapons, spiked balls, barbed spears, and jagged swords. Behind them followed ranks of demons with exagerrated claws and fangs and spined armor. They did not slow as they reached the hex-line into the forest terrain.

Kellos made a crackling noise with saliva in his mouth. It sounded like branches clicking together overhead, but the ylvans withdrew their crossbows. As soon as Kellos coughed, all seventeen leaped away from their hiding places, shouting as they launched forth a full attack with crossbows. They fired over and over again. The tiny bolts made whistling sounds in the air.

As the monster army reacted with a roar, fourteen of the front Slac toppled with crossbow bolts in their eyes and throats. Predictably, the rest of the army lunged forward, brandishing weapons and charging into the trees.

Kellos paused for two seconds longer and let off another pair of crossbow bolts, bringing down one more enemy. Then he gave the signal for retreat, and the ylvans turned and fled deeper into the trees, stepping only on their marks.

When the front wave of the vanguard crashed into the forest terrain, suddenly the ground vanished beneath their feet with a puff of gray ash. Twenty monster fighters plunged face-first into long trenches filled with spikes.

The second wave of booby-traps sprung as the ylvans brushed past them, and a line of trees toppled backward into the monster army. All the topmost branches had been sharpened into wooden stakes.

Laughing, Kellos and his ylvans continued to flee, still avoiding any touch from the warped trees of Ledaygen.

Siryyk’s vanguard howled behind them, negotiating the obstacles and struggling deeper into the forest, deeper into the trap.

#

Delrael waited as the ylvans burst back to the hex-line where his own army stood prepared. The little forest people looked flushed, smeared with ashes and scratched from their rapid flight. Even Kellos bore an expression of stormy delight at the destruction he had caused.

Tayron clapped his hands for the attention of the other khelebar. “You know your positions. You know what you must do.”

The panther-people stood uneasy. Ydaim turned to the Tribeleader. “Are you certain, Tayron? You can’t change your mind once we go.”

“My decision has already been set in motion,” Tayron answered. “We must hold the memory of Ledaygen true, not waste our efforts with a distorted imitation. We’ve worked hard, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. But now we must do what the Game calls for. The true Ledaygen vanished in the first fire.”

One of the khelebar groaned, but Tayron whirled. “We will have no more despairing! We are strong. Now go. . .” Despite his words, his own voice caught as he spoke the command. “Go, and burn Ledaygen.”

The khelebar, bearing torches, loped off to their positions around the hexagon, where they would flank the monster vanguard. Their torches flickered like beacons as they vanished among the doomed trees.

#

A sharp breeze whipped up and over the hex-discontinuity, whistling around Noldir’s carving. The hole where Tayron Tribeleader had dug up the pine seedling looked like a dark wound.

Tareah waited in the trees on the far side of the council clearing. She heard the sounds of the approaching monster army long before they actually arrived. She got ready.

Across from her, Enrod stood in his tattered robes, preparing his own spells. He held his hands out under the bright sunshine, staring at the warm light on his skin.

Delrael had at first forbidden them to take part in the attack. “Not necessary,” he said. “And I don’t want to risk you.” But Tareah had looked at him with a thread of anger behind her eyes, and Delrael stumbled on his words. “Well, only if you think it’s safe. And I mean that!”

Tareah had smiled. He seemed afraid of repeating his own mistakes over again. “We can strike from a distance and cause some damage, then we’ll leave before they can find us.”

Delrael had dispatched several scouts to keep an eye on her. But that didn’t bother Tareah; she found his concern touching, as long as he let her participate in the adventure.

The vanguard of the monster horde had lost all semblance of rank and order when they charged into the clearing. Tareah wasted no time and rolled the Water Stone. She grabbed it up again; power surged into her.

Thick storm clouds congealed in the sky, swirling and scraping masses of air and sending many-pronged spears of lightning. The bolts struck, blasting chunks of dirt and monster fighters into the air. The creatures screamed at the sudden attack.

Tareah rolled the sapphire again, using more than a single spell at once. This time she summoned an enormous wind that caused the running monsters to stagger. She caught a group of demons near the edge of the hex-discontinuity and, jutting her chin with an imaginary push, flung them over the edge. Then she struck again with the lightning.

The vanguard swirled about, not knowing where to run or where the attack was coming from.

Enrod made a fist and looked up with glazed eyes. The weapons held by the creatures suddenly turned cherry red. They dropped their steel, hissing with burned hands. Four black-robed Slac erupted into flames from the insides of their bodies; blue fire spurted from their eyeballs and ears with a popping sound. They didn’t even scream. Enrod let out a shuddering sigh of ecstasy.

“Enough!” Tareah called among the screams. She wanted to roll the sapphire again, but she had agreed. Together, they turned and ran back through the forest before the monsters could find them.

#

Delrael watched the smoke from the advancing fires. The khelebar had laid out careful kindling paths so that the inferno would inward, leaving the monsters with no escape.

“Let’s move out of here,” Delrael said.

“That soil is thirsty for blood,” Tayron said. “It has acquired a taste for it.”

The Tribeleader carried a deep wooden container that bore the seedling of the one healthy pine. “We are not destroying Ledaygen. Ledaygen died long ago. We are merely making it impossible for an abomination to thrive.”

As they drew farther away from the hexagon, Ydaim and the other khelebar returned. Tareah and Enrod stared behind him, toward the edges of the forest.

Great curls of smoke poured up from the entire hexagon. Dozens of individual blazes reached out and encircled the trapped monsters.

Ledaygen burned.

16. The View from the Volcano

“What lies beyond the edge of Gamearth? An ancient map fragment bore the notation Here Be Monsters. But we have monsters aplenty on Gamearth itself. Does the edge hold something even worse?”

—The Book of Rules

Professor Frankenstein walked with a hunched back from the enormous weight of the lead helmet on his head. He plodded with each step, grimacing as his legs hauled their extra burden.

“How do you know that helmet will even work?” Vailret asked.

Frankenstein shrugged, but the gesture made his head tip forward off balance, about to roll off his shoulders. “I don’t know it’ll work. But I must do anything I can to decrease the risk. If the invisible force is controlling our minds, then I must shield my brain.”

“Whatever you say,” Vailret said.

They kept pace with Frankenstein as he took quick, tiny steps. They reached a tall building near the ocean hexagons.

“We destroyed the manufactories up and down this thoroughfare with our own hands, under direction of the evil controller,” the professor said. “But this warehouse hasn’t been a target yet. We use it only for storage.”

From his belt, Frankenstein removed a ring that jingled with many keys. He started to bend over, but grasped the brick wall for balance. “Please look down at the bottom brick,” he said. “There should be a code number chiselled in it.”

Bryl knelt down. “It’s a long one—R124C 41+.”

Careful not to tilt his head, Frankenstein held the key ring up to his eye level and flipped through the keys until he found an identical number stamped along one shaft. He opened the padlock in front of the door and then, wavering on his feet, he stepped back to let Vailret and Bryl pull the doors open.

The warehouse proved to be one large hangar. Light shone from cracks in the roof slats, and dust motes fell like gold flecks through the sunlight. Inside, near the front, Vailret saw a leather-trimmed basket—the gondola of a balloon just like the first one they had taken from Sitnalta. Tucked inside it and draped along the back lay the voluminous folds of the balloon itself, with bright splashes of red and white.

Frankenstein stood with his elbow against the wall. His hand propped up the back of his head to take the weight of the lead helmet from his neck.

“You recall that when we first gave you experimental balloon number VI, we weren’t sure it would work. We had never found a Sitnaltan volunteer to test it.

“But after you proved it to be a complete success, Jules and I enlisted the aid of other inventors to construct this larger model, which can comfortably carry several passengers. Otherwise, all the details are the same, even down to the red-and-white color scheme, on the chance that the heat-absorption properties of specific colors made some small but significant change in its performance.” He ran his fingers along the folds of the bright balloon lying limp in the basket.

“But we grew engrossed in other things. Investigating the Outsiders’ ship, which you told us about, occupied most of our time.” Frankenstein turned his head and winced at the strain on his neck muscles. “We never got a chance to go exploring with this balloon.”

Vailret looked off to one side, deeper in the dusty shadows, and saw another large machine. This one was bright green with a wooden framework and several stretched batlike wings extending from the sides of a waspish body. Two propellers protruded, one from the rear and one from its top. Other wires and rudders connected to steering levers, and two fragile seats sat just behind sets of pedals.

“What’s this?” Vailret said.

“We’re not interested,” Bryl said.

#

Frankenstein turned to look, and his dark eyes took on a distant expression. “Oh, that’s another flying contraption, called a ‘pedal-kite,’ I believe. It was invented by Professor Wright and his brother Professor Wright. It’s got a very light construction, good for updrafts once you reach a certain height. By pedaling with your feet, the propellers turn and provide lift for the entire vehicle, which then can glide a short distance. It’s aerodynamically sound and based on solid scientific Rules, everything a good invention should be.

“But it does have one drawback. You see, if you stop pedaling, the entire vehicle crashes.” He frowned. “Not good for long journeys, I’m afraid.”

“We’ll take the balloon,” Vailret said.

“I thought you would.”

Bryl helped Vailret drag the gondola across the concrete floor of the hangar and out into the middle of the street. Frankenstein watched them, breathing heavily. “Blast this helmet!” he muttered to himself.

Vailret and Bryl pulled out the balloon and spread it on the cobblestones. Other Sitnaltan characters watched what they were doing. Vailret began to feel a sense of urgency, afraid the invisible force might decide to make the Sitnaltans attack them.

They used the ropes to attach the balloon to its basket, straightening tangles and doublechecking fastenings. Frankenstein muttered encouragement and offered instructions when they became confused.

Inside the warehouse, Vailret found four cannisters of the lighter-than-air gas broken down from sea water in the Sitnaltan manufactories. He and Bryl linked two cannisters to the open end of the balloon and twisted the valves to bleed out the gas.

They tucked the folds, watching the great sack fill sluggishly. It seemed to take a long time for any noticeable change. Vailret cranked the valves farther; the hissing gas sounded like the roar of a fire.

When the balloon finally swelled like a limp overripe fruit, Vailret and Bryl climbed into the gondola. Bryl moved slowly on his stiff old legs. Frankenstein waved at them. They called farewell to him, but the professor turned and staggered away, holding onto his helmet with both hands.

The gondola skipped and bounced on the hex-cobbled streets, dragged forward by the half-inflated balloon as the intermittent breezes through the alleys picked up and slacked off. They moved again, rising, this time skimming a hand’s-width off the ground.

“Isn’t there any way we can steer this?” Vailret said.

“Just push against buildings.”

Then the invisible controller struck again. The Sitnaltans began to approach, moving with a lockstep that Vailret had seen before. They carried sharp fragments of brick, sticks, and pointed shards of glass that cut their fingers.

“Uh oh,” Vailret said.

The balloon skipped against a building and rose higher, picking up speed as a breeze gusted. The Sitnaltans unsuccessfully tried to counteract their own actions, but they continued to stumble forward, brandishing their weapons.

“Should I use the Fire Stone to blast them away?” Bryl said. “An illusion won’t do us any good.”

“No!” Vailret said. “Remember what Verne told us before. The gas is flammable. One spark and this whole thing goes up in a giant fireball.”

They rose another foot off the ground as the cannisters continued to hiss into the balloon sack.

“Pull in the ropes, quick! We don’t want them to grab hold.” They yanked up the ropes, but the balloon still rode low enough that the Sitnaltans could clutch the bottom of the basket itself.

Vailret could see their anguished expressions as they tried not to continue. But the invisible role-player directed their actions. One of the pointed sticks jabbed through the bottom of the gondola, snagging on Bryl’s blue cloak.

“We’ve got to make this lighter!” Vailret cried.

“We have nothing to spare,” Bryl said, putting his hands on his cheeks.

“Here, help me throw one of these half-empty canisters over.” He disconnected the nozzle from the end of the balloon.

“We won’t have enough gas to get back!”

“If we never get there in the first place, we won’t have to worry about getting back.”

Bryl didn’t argue. Together, they heaved the bulky cannister over the side. It clanged and thudded to the cobblestones, leaving a smashed dent in the street.

Immediately, the balloon lurched another full ten feet in the air. They began to drift away from the city. The Sitnaltans gathered below, growing smaller, with loud shouts that sounded more like cheers than cries of anger.

Vailret stared down at the receding city terrain. In the late afternoon they soared out toward the broad hexagons of water. Off in the distance lay the murky terrain of the island of Rokanun.

#

The balloon floated along in the darkness. They heard no night sounds other than the ripple of waves far below. Not even the wind made noise as they drifted along. They felt no rocking, no gentle motion—just a constant peace that made Vailret sleepy.

Vailret leaned back against the criss-crossed wicker of the gondola, trying to get comfortable. Bryl seemed uneasy and afraid to doze. “We should get the Earth Stone in another day or two,” Vailret said. “Are you afraid about what you’re going to do? The Allspirit, I mean. It’s not a trivial task.”

Bryl took a long time to answer. “Vailret, I’m old. I remember Delrael running the Stronghold, and before that Drodanis, and all the way back to your great-great grandfather Jarriel.

“Every day my joints hurt, and my body feels stiffer than it should be. When I had a warm room at the Stronghold I could hide it, but this constant traveling makes everything worse. My hair is falling out, I’m tired all the time, I always feel cold.

“And then I remember how I felt when I used to Water Stone to link up the the dayid in Ledaygen. It was so. . .wonderful. The power gave me an entirely new perspective. I can’t describe it to you. I remember how Sardun looked when he used all his magic to create the Barrier River.

“I’ve touched that much power before, enough to know that I’m not afraid of it. I’m anxious for it. I’m eager to do what I can.” He stopped and swallowed.

“Crashing in this balloon, though—now that frightens me!”

#

They landed just after dawn on the western side of Rokanun.

Vailret let out the bouyant gas from the balloon, and they dropped. This time, at least, they did not have to worry about hiding from the dragon Tryos.

As they came down, the wind currents around the island brushed them with updrafts and downdrafts, swirling them around. Vailret readied the tie ropes.

“When we get close enough, I’m going to drop over the side and hang on with the rope. If we get where I can tie off the balloon without letting out all the gas, our one cannister may be enough to get us back across the water.”

“You’ve been to Sitnalta too many times,” Bryl said. “Coming up with hare-brained solutions to things.”

“Look, do you want to get back or not?” Vailret asked.

The balloon dropped low over forest terrain. He hoped they wouldn’t crash into the jagged treetops. Then they passed over the next hexagon, sweeping closer to the rocks of the volcano.

Vailret crawled over the edge of the gondola and let himself down as the rope dragged along the ground, catching among chunks of hardened lava. A large boulder approached in his path, ready to smash his knees; but Vailret bent his legs, kicked up over the top, and dropped down again.

Above, in the basket, Bryl called down, “Well do something! Tie it somewhere.”

Vailret let his feet touch the ground and stumble-ran after the balloon, refusing to let go. Finally, he managed to jam the rope in the crack between two large boulders. The balloon’s own motion wedged it tight.

“Throw down the other ropes!” he called. A moment later they came snaking down, one after the other. As he tied a second rope around the rocks, a third struck him on the back of the neck.

“That’s all of them,” Bryl said.

“Thanks a lot.” Vailret flexed his stiff fingers and his raw palms. Then he looked at the steep side of the volcano. “This is going to be easy. We’re already halfway up.”

A few hours later, when the lava rocks still held pockets of frost in the mountain’s shadow, they trudged up the steep quest-path, panting. Vailret stopped counting switchbacks just to keep his sanity. He remembered doing the same climb with blind Paenar, guiding him around corners because his technological Sitnaltan eyes no longer functioned.

The climb took them all day. In the hot afternoon sun, they began to wish for the morning chill. Sweat drenched the back of Vailret’s tunic.

“It didn’t seem this bad when I climbed up here with Delrael,” Bryl said.

“You’re older now. You said that yourself.”

“That’s part of it.” Bryl stopped around a corner by a rockfall and let out a groan of despair. Vailret looked at the jumbled rocks and couldn’t see what the half-Sorcerer meant.

“There,” Bryl said. “It was the passage Delrael and I took inside the volcano. A short-cut. It must have collapsed in the eruption when Tryos died.”

Vailret kept plodding up the path, not wanting to lose his momentum. “That means we’ll just have to go all the way to the top.”

“If the Outsiders think all this is fun,” Bryl muttered, “I’d like to drag one of them up here.”

The sky had taken on a purple pallor of dusk as they hauled themselves over the lip of the volcano and rested at the highest point. Vailret remembered standing here when he used the Sitnaltan Dragon Siren to summon Tryos.

The air remained silent except for the wind. The western sky was shot with red and gold fingers of cloud extending from sunset. Far below he could see the small colorful sack of their balloon, partially deflated like a squashed ball.

Bryl stopped and put his hands on his hips. His cloak blew behind him. Vailret heard his sharp indrawn gasp of breath. Instead of gazing down into the mouth of the crater they would descend, Vailret turned to follow Bryl’s line of sight out across the ocean.

Far out across the flat panorama of the map, giant blue hexagons of water terrain lay spread out, butted against each other and delineated by a webwork of black hex-lines. But off in the distance toward the edge of the world, he saw something that struck terror through his heart.

The black hex-lines had widened, and the most distant sections showed great cracks as the map itself broke apart. Between the fissures he could see an enormous gulf of blackness spattered with stars from a sky that did not mirror Gamearth’s.

Off to his right, at the nearer edge of the map, he saw places where entire hexagons had broken away and fallen into the void, leaving a jagged nothingness.

Even from this great distance, they could hear a cosmic rumble as the farthest section of ocean snapped and drifted away, lifting up and floating off to vanish into the maw of emptiness.

“It’s true!” Bryl said. “It’s really true! The map is falling apart.”

“We don’t have any time to lose,” Vailret said. “We have to get the Earth Stone and take it back to Delrael. We need the Allspirit—now—to hold the map together before we lose any more hexagons.”

He turned toward the sloping inner wall of the crater. Rough black splotches showed where lava had spattered. “We can’t wait until morning to get down into the crater.”

Bryl stared at the inky shadows in the mouth of the volcano, but even those seemed less frightening to him than to watch Gamearth fall apart.

#

Vailret’s boots echoed on the rock floor of the dragon’s treasure vault. The fireball in Bryl’s hand lit the grotto with jittering flashes of light, while simmering lava in the center of the volcano cast a steady orange glow and waves of baking heat.

Running splatters of gold covered the walls of the treasure grotto, destroyed in Tryos’s rage when he learned how the human characters had betrayed him. Heat from the volcano’s eruption had caused golden chalices and silver figurines to slump and droop. Some gold coins had baked together into lumps.

“I don’t like it in here,” Vailret said. “It’s too quiet.”

Contradicting him, the lava lake bubbled and hissed as it belched out exhaust gases into a flickering lobe of flame that died away. “Relatively speaking, I mean.” He looked around. “Can you find the Earth Stone?”

Bryl walked among the treasure heaps with a puzzled expression that turned to distress. He pawed among the piles of gold, casting metal chits aside.

“What’s wrong, Bryl?”

“Look around here,” he said. “Do you see any jewels at all? Any gems? Look at all this gold and silver. Back in the alcove you’ll even find some blackened statues and ruined tapestries from the height of the old Sorcerer days. But no gems! There used to be rubies and diamonds, emeralds, sapphires.”

“I don’t care about them. What about the Earth Stone?”

Bryl looked at him with panicked eyes. He set his fireball hovering in the air above his shoulder, and he bent to dig his fingers deep into the piled gold. He closed his eyes in concentration. He remained silent for a long time, but his lips trembled. When he stopped, his jaw hung open.

He turned back to Vailret. “That’s what I mean! The Earth Stone is not here. It’s gone!”

17. Siryyk’s Game

“Single combat against a talented opponent requires skill and speed. However, a large-scale battle is choreography of vast groups of characters, requiring much effort, planning, and strategy. It is perhaps the most difficult game any of us will ever attempt.”

—Drodanis, to trainees at the Stronghold

Delrael’s army moved at a rapid pace northward, charged with elation from their victory in Ledaygen. Rear scouts estimated that a third of the horde had been killed in the fire. Siryyk’s remaining army had drawn together, not spread so thinly along the terrain. But the monsters still outnumbered them four to one.

When Romm and the other scouts returned that afternoon to report, Delrael sat back and listened. They knew from the maps that mountain terrain lay along their path. But they did not know the characteristics of each hexagon, or how they could use it to their advantage.

“The mountains are particularly rugged in the next hex,” Romm said. He sat down on a lichen-spattered boulder and brushed a few sweat-clumped strands of hair away from his forehead. His long face had been sunburned from the altitude, and his lips were chapped. Delrael gave him a flask of water, and Romm dutifully took a sip, but he seemed more preoccupied with making his report.

“We found a few places where we might set up an effective attack. In particular there’s one path along a cliff in a narrow canyon. Our numbers could really work to our advantage there.”

“One other thing,” the second scout said. She was a wiry woman with short brown hair; she came from one of the mining villages northwest of the Stronghold. Delrael could not remember her name. “We saw Black Falcon riders in the mountains, but they didn’t notice us.”

Delrael frowned. “Corim said they might shadow us. We can only hope he chooses a better enemy than Annik did.”

He saw his father sitting by himself and sharpening his sword. Drodanis had watched and complimented his son’s work on the ambush in Ledaygen. Most of the other characters shied away from the old war leader, in awe of all they had heard about his legendary quests and adventures.

“Father!” Delrael called. Drodanis looked up and tossed his flat stone to the ground. “Come here. I’d like you to help plan strategy for our next attack.”

Delrael felt warm as he saw his father’s face light up with sudden interest. “I would be honored to offer my thoughts.”

#

Tayron Tribeleader went alone off the quest-path into the steep rocks. The rest of the army didn’t see him leave. A few of the khelebar watched; they made solemn nods.

Using his agile panther body, Tayron climbed into a sheltered place, a kind of ampitheater he had found. Shallow soil and some grasses stood in the middle of a ring of rocks, a place where water trickled down, where the winds did not blast too fiercely—where the new Father Pine could have a home.

He placed the wooden pot beside him on a flat rock and bent down to scoop a depression in the soil.

“It will be a hard life for you here,” he said to the tree, “But a hard life makes us strong. You are the last survivor of Ledaygen. I know you have the power within you.”

He planted the tree and patted the damp soil back into place. The tree would live.

“No one knows you are here,” he said. “That may protect you.”

Tayron climbed out of the ampitheater of rocks and stood looking down at the tiny pine. “Perhaps one day we shall return and find that this entire hex has become a great forest.”

#

Drodanis waited until Siya and some of the older characters from the village had finished serving the midday meal before he came up to her to get his own rations.

He remembered some characters from his days at the Stronghold—Sitael the thin, grumpy tanner; Mostem, the overweight baker. It pained him to see how much they had changed, and it made Drodanis wonder if he had changed as much in their eyes.

Siya seemed worst of all. She had always been somewhat stern and humorless. Drodanis couldn’t understand what Cayon found so endearing about her, but Cayon probably considered it a challenge to win the heart of someone so totally unlike himself. Siya had always disliked Drodanis, or so he thought, and she had not spoken to him since he returned to Delrael’s army.

“Are you avoiding me, Siya?” he asked as she gave him a plateful of potatoes and stewed dried meat. She plopped a hard biscuit on top.

Siya took a deep breath and faced him squarely. Her gaze looked very sharp. “Drodanis, you remind me of things I’d rather not think about. When Cayon and Fielle both died, you ran away from it all. Some of us chose to remain with our lives and move ahead as best we could.” She put her hands on her narrow hips.

“When I see Vailret march out on quests and adventures, I can’t help but remember how Cayon died on that foolish errand with you. Why couldn’t you have gone ogre hunting by yourself?”

Drodanis could understand her attitude. He had thought similar things himself. “Siya, I’ve found it’s better to remember the good times and hold them close to your heart, rather than relive the pain over and over. It took me a long time to understand that.”

Siya served herself from the remaining food but did not taste any of it. She kept watching Drodanis. The other characters had backed away, leaving them to their discussion.

“Thinking of the good times only intensifies the pain of what I lost.”

But Drodanis couldn’t help himself from smiling. “Oh, Siya! Don’t you remember that archery tournament we held when Cayon was courting you? He and I had equal scores, and in the last round he lost by a single point because he was too busy showing off for you rather than paying attention to his aim? Or how about the time when we explored the abandoned mine shafts in the western hills? And that Slac treasure pit Cayon found, and that special emerald brooch he gave you—it might have been from an old Sorcerer queen, Lady Maire perhaps.”

Drodanis laughed at his memories. “Remember that cursed opal he found! It turned his skin bright blue, and didn’t go away for more than a month! Just think of all the treasure we brought back, all the monsters we slew, all the adventures we had.”

He drew a deep breath and felt his eyes sparkling. He seemed so alive just remembering these things. “Ah, those were the good days.”

She took her plate and went off by herself. “No,” she said over her shoulder, “they were not.”

#

Before the army could break camp and march ahead, hoofbeats rang out on the mountain path. A Black Falcon rider came around the overhang of rocks and approached Delrael.

He stood up, waiting to see what the rider wanted. The nearby fighters tensed. Some put their hands on weapons, but Delrael waved them down.

As the rider came near, Delrael recognized Corim. The large blond man looked weary, scraped and bruised. Nicks and tatters scored his armor. His scabbard was gone, leaving only frayed leather thongs on the saddle of his black horse. The sword’s blade was notched and stained with dried blood, as if Corim had made no effort to clean it. The horse itself bore many wounds; foam flecked back from its lips.

“Delrael, I must speak with you,” he said.

Before Delrael could say anything, he heard a click and then a whistle of something flying through the air.

A crossbow bolt suddenly sprouted in the base of Corim’s throat, just below the larynx. The rider’s eyes widened. He kept one hand on the reins of his horse as he reached up to claw at his neck. Blood gushed from his skin, dribbling down into the black armor.

With his fingers still clenched around the reins, Corim opened his mouth wide and tried to suck in a breath. His horse snorted and bucked backward.

Corim tilted sideways and slid off the saddle like melting wax. He coughed as he struck the rocks on the ground. His horse backed away.

Delrael ran toward him, as did several other fighters.

Three men grabbed Kellos and yanked him into the air, yanking his crossbow away. The ylvan flailed. “Who denies me the right? Who denies me!” Kellos shouted. His voice remained hoarse and high pitched.

Corim coughed, and blood came out of his mouth. His eyes stared upward without seeing, but apparently he knew Delrael stood beside him.

“Was coming to offer help,” the Black Falcon man whispered without using his voice. “Join forces.”

The fighters brought the struggling Kellos over to Delrael. The black horse backed away farther until it stood against the rock wall. Delrael snarled at the ylvan leader, “I should throw you over a cliff!”

Kellos broke free of the fighters’ grip. “He killed fifty of my people!”

“And Siryyk’s army just might kill the rest of them,” Delrael snapped back. “We could have used help from the Black Falcons.”

Corim’s hand snatched out to grab the ylvan’s thin arm in a death spasm. The Black Falcon clenched his hand. Kellos tried to squirm away, but he could not break the man’s grasp. Corim shuddered. The blood pouring from his throat slowed and glistened in the sun.

Kellos struggled and finally drew a dagger from his belt and used the blade to pry up Corim’s dead fingers.

Delrael turned to see that other Black Falcon riders had arrived and stared in anger at their dead leader. They muttered and drew their weapons. One man pointed at the ylvan. “We claim vengeance!”

Delrael balled his fists, feeling as if he had lost control of everything. His own army tensed, drawing their weapons but not certain which side to take. The other Black Falcon riders looked as battered and injured as Corim had: one woman carried her arm bound in a sling; a man had blood-soaked rags tied over one eye.

“No,” he said, “I’ve had enough of this. Kellos claimed his own vengeance. This feud is now over. We have a real enemy to worry about.”

He glared at the Black Falcon riders, daring them to question him. “Corim’s last words to me were about joining forces, not gaining revenge. Will you listen to him or not?”

The Black Falcon Troops sat rigid on their mounts, waiting for someone to make the first move. Finally, the woman with the injured arm said, “Only twenty of us remain. You were right when you described the threat of this demon army. The Black Falcon troops attacked them.” She hung her head, then fell silent.

The man with the bloody eyepatch continued for her. “They defeated us. We had to flee. We took a great toll on them, but they were too many. An enemy like this demands different tactics than the Black Falcons generally use. We argued among ourselves, but Corim insisted that we join forces with you. That your army is large enough to have a significant impact on the horde.”

Kellos bristled. “How do we know they won’t just cut the throats of my people at night? And the khelebar, too?”

Delrael looked at the ylvan man. “How do we know you won’t do the same to them? I said enough of this! We have a battle to worry about.”

“We have no leader,” said the woman with the sling.

“Delrael,” Drodanis spoke softly, but the words carried without raising his voice. When he stood, the massive fighter looked the match of any of the Black Falcon riders. “I command no troops of my own. If these brave fighters will have me, I swear I’ll lead them to a victory greater than any of my other quests.”

The Black Falcon riders looked at Drodanis with unreadable expressions. Drodanis snatched the mane of Corim’s black horse. Delrael knew his father would make good on the promise.

#

In the deep night, the horses of the Black Falcon troops grew restless after waiting in the same spot. They snorted and stamped their feet in the cold mountain air.

“Keep them quiet!” Drodanis hissed.

Other Black Falcon riders tried to shush their animals. Drodanis sat back against the rough granite and stared up at the stars, waiting. He always hated this part of battle. The waiting, the ambush.

The narrow quest-path wound along a treacherous ledge. The sheer cliff dropped into a jagged canyon where, during the day, they had watched a frothy mountain stream churning over boulders and rock falls. Now, in the darkness, they could only hear the whisper of distant water echoing up in the canyon.

At the mouth of the gorge, on a wide plateau, Drodanis could see fires burning in Siryyk’s encampment. Many of the monsters who had survived the trap in Ledaygen probably never wanted to see fire again. They would shiver in the cold instead, demoralized from their defeat in the forest.

Drodanis stood up to flex his legs and fingers. He felt cold to the bone, but he had endured much worse in other campaigns. “Everybody get ready,” he said.

The Black Falcon riders snapped to their positions. These fighters impressed Drodanis. They would be a good team for his quick, vicious assault.

“We’ll charge in, light our arrows from their own fires, and ride through, setting the tents and their food ablaze. Kill whoever stands in your way—but remember, our object is to destroy their supplies, not to engage the monsters.” He paused.

“In case you don’t think that’s a worthy target, remember they have a large army, but no magic users to replenish their supplies, as we do. They can’t find enough other food in mountain terrain. This will be a very severe blow to them. Finally—” He smiled, but in the starlight he realized that few of them could see anything other than his silhouette. “The point is to lure them out where the rest of our army can take care of them.”

He mounted up on Corim’s horse. He made sure he had securely fastened his rag-wrapped spears to the side of his saddle. He withdrew his long sword and held it in his right hand. Steadying himself on the horse, he looked back and saw that all twenty of the Black Falcon riders waited for him to signal them.

“Remember Rule #1!” he said, then urged his horse into motion. “Go!”

The twenty-one horses thundered along in single file on the quest-path. They split up at their designated branches on the trail, then rode hard along the sides of the plateau, appearing over the lip just as the monsters heard them approach.

Drodanis and the three riders behind him galloped past the first line of scrambling monsters, directly toward a small campfire. Drodanis kept the horse on track with pressure from his knees as he swung with the sword in one hand and pulled out the two spears in his other.

The creatures shouted among themselves, not certain what was happening.

Drodanis jammed the ends of his two cloth-wrapped spears into the fire and circled the blaze, keeping the tips buried in the embers until the spears flared up like torches. He jerked both shafts high. In a reflex action, he slashed with his sword at a Slac who staggered toward him with reptilian claws extended. The tip of Drodanis’s blade caught the hollow under its scaled chin and ripped the bottom of the monster’s jaw off.

Without slowing, Drodanis turned his horse toward the supply tents. He heard shouts and saw other Black Falcon riders appearing on different parts of the plateau. They charged up, yelling their own cries of challenge and victory.

Flaming arrows thunked into some of the piled sacks. Drodanis threw his own spears into a patched oil-stained tent. Flames crackled and ate up the side of the enclosure; the stains on the cloth flared brighter than the rest.

He saw five Slac converge on one Black Falcon rider, the woman with her arm in a sling. She bore a flaming spear and jabbed it at them. Without both arms, she could not use a bow. She flailed the torch in the creatures’ faces.

Drodanis urged his horse to come to her aid, but before he could close half the distance, the Slac had grabbed her. They hacked the legs of her horse, causing it to tumble. She fell on the ground, and they surrounded her. All Drodanis could see was a blur of Slac weapons, blood, and nothing of the fallen rider.

The tents blazed brighter. He saw in the center of the camp a gigantic form, the manticore stirring. Drodanis felt fear crawl down his spine. The monster stood immense, ten times the size of the ogre that had killed his brother Cayon. To destroy such an opponent, Drodanis thought, would be the greatest challenge any fighter could have.

But he had no hope of doing that now. Battling Siryyk himself would have to wait for another time.

“Riders, turn about!” Drodanis cried. “Back!” He charged toward the edge of the plateau, to the quest-paths marking their route back. He looked at the sky and saw a tinge of dawn light just breaking there. He had timed it perfectly.

One of the smaller pavilions burned and then exploded with an enormous concussion. Flames belched out, knocking the nearby monsters flat. Others ran about, beating at fire on their garments. The Black Falcons had destroyed part of the supply of firepowder as well. Drodanis grinned—an unexpected plus.

“Ride!” he shouted again.

His horse, deafened by the explosions, obliged easily and charged toward the rocky path. Drodanis let the horse lead itself because the flames had dazzled his own eyes.

The other riders jumped back out, striking and slashing as the monster horde scurried into motion. The creatures gathered their weapons and ran after the attackers.

Drodanis didn’t look back. He saw four Black Falcons ahead of him galloping down the quest-path. He heard other riders behind, mixed with the snarls and shouts of pursuing monsters. They rode long and hard, knowing their horses could easily outdistance most of Siryyk’s fighters.

The dawn grew brighter, but the narrow trail forced them to pick their path with care. Below, still in deep shadow, gurgled the rushing stream; the sheer cliffs forced them to continue in single file. The monsters might be able to catch up, but the riders could battle well on this narrow path.

Drodanis didn’t gain distance too rapidly. He wanted Siryyk to see exactly where they had come from. Seeing only a few riders, the manticore would suspect vengeance-seeking survivors from their earlier skirmish with the Black Falcons—and would follow straight into the waiting arms of Delrael’s army hidden on top of the bluffs.

Drodanis looked ahead and behind as they moved along. He counted eighteen. “We lost two, then,” he said.

The rider ahead turned back and nodded. “Acceptable losses.”

Drodanis watched the still-burning fires in Siryyk’s encampment. Not many of the monsters seemed to be following them. They were probably getting together for a massive march. Just as Drodanis had hoped.

He felt exuberant. He wondered how he could have stayed away from the Game for so long. He felt more important now than he had since before Fielle and Cayon had died. He’d forgotten why he was a character on Gamearth. Now he remembered what it was all about.

Blood spattered his face, and his arms ached from the effort of the fight, but Drodanis grinned. He would not have traded this night for anything.

#

Siryyk the manticore stood with his lips peeled back. Anger made a deep gurgle in his throat as he tried, but failed, to find words that expressed his outrage. Whoever kept attacking them seemed to have only a few fighters—but still Siryyk’s army continued to fail.

A third of his fighters burned to death in a forest fire, then seventy three monsters killed by a group of black-clad human riders. After the human riders had fled, Siryyk himself had counted the fallen enemy. Ten humans! They had killed seventy three monsters and lost only ten of their own!

Now all of Siryyk’s supplies were burning after another attack.

His scorpion tail blazed blue. He padded forward to a blazing tent and clawed away the fabric that sheltered their meat and grain. The fire burned his fingers, but he didn’t feel it. He winced as he attempted to hurl smoking sacks away from the blaze.

His head ached and burned, and the vision in one eye seemed milky. Siryyk knew that his entire face swelled and festered from the venomous smoke Enrod had blasted into his eyes. Another twenty of Siryyk’s fighters had died then.

Scartaris had controlled all their minds when he assembled the tremendous horde—but Scartaris had apparently not deemed it necessary to create an army of fighters with minimal skill or intelligence.

General Korux came up to him. “Siryyk, we have located the ones who attacked us. We can see them on a quest-path going across the cliff. Do you wish us to follow them?”

The manticore whirled. Other monsters leaped out of the way of his swinging electric tail. “Of course!” But then he stopped. “No, show me.”

Korux led him to the edge of the plateau, where he looked into the growing dawn to see tiny figures working their way along the sheer rock wall. “Bring me Professor Verne instead. Have a Slac team bring the cannon around to the edge. Do we have any firepowder left?”

“We lost half of it, but I made sure it was not all stored together. Just in case of such an incident.” He rubbed his rough hands together as if congratulating himself. “We still have enough to fire the cannon several times.”

“Do it, then.”

Siryyk paced and watched as the huge black cylinder trimmed with frilly bronze “stabilizing struts” rolled forward on its tall wheels. The Slac steered it and tilted its barrel toward the black figures fleeing along the cliff wall.

Korux came up with his scaled hand warpped into the folds of Professor Verne’s torn shirt. The professor shivered and struggled. His hands were bound behind him and bled at the wrists. Since his escape attempt, they had kept Verne bound and hidden most of the time. Siryyk flared his nostrils. How ironic it would have been if the human fighters had burned the tent and killed the professor.

“I thought you might like to watch,” the manticore said. “We’re going to test your cannon on a real target.”

Verne saw the escaping riders and stammered, but he apparently could think of nothing to say.

“Why are they moving so slowly?” Siryyk asked. He felt suspicion growing in him.

“Gives us time to load the cannon,” Korux said. He gestured at the Slac who were already pouring firepowder into the breech and hoisting up one of the huge cannonballs.

“Aim high,” Siryyk said. “It’s a long distance. And we must strike the right place to cause the most damage.”

The Slac team took turns sighting along the barrel, adjusting and readjusting. Korux finally stood behind the cannon, nodded, and went back to one of the scattered campfires. He returned carrying a burning brand in his hand.

“It’s ready, Siryyk.”

“Any advice, Professor?” the manticore asked.

Verne mumbled, and then shrugged. “Fire the cannon if you like, but it will fail. Your powder is damp and cold. You could damage the cannon by using it now.”

Siryyk laughed. “A nice try, Professor. But ridiculous. Korux—you may fire!”

The Slac general brought the end of his brand to the touch-hole, then dropped it and leaped backward, covering his ears. A huge explosion knocked the cannon backward a full ten feet, rolling over one of the Slac and crushing his legs.

Siryyk decided he would have to remember to chock the wheels with stones next time.

He stared across the gorge with his one good eye. It would take a second or two for the ball to find its target. The time stretched out, longer and longer. He saw the distant explosion well before he heard the crack and rumble of impact.

Directly above the line of human fighters, the cannonball struck the overhanging rock. The rock splintered and, with a slow rumble, an entire side of the cliff came down in an avalanche.

Some of the monsters cheered. Korux clapped his hands. The smoke and rock continued to slide downward into the gorge below. The entire ledge broke away, sloughing down as it gathered momentum. The grinding avalanche knocked away every single character on the path, crushing them, sweeping them toward the foaming river far below. Dust clouds swirled and sank downward.

The manticore turned, grinning a twisted smile at Professor Verne. Verne stood with his jaw hanging open, eyes wide, and his face completely ashen.

“Your cannon is not very sporting, Professor,” Siryyk said. “But it’s quite fun nevertheless.”

Interlude: Outside

Tyrone rattled the knob on the front door, then fiddled with the lock and tried again. “Your door’s stuck, David.”

David remained sitting on the floor with his back against the easy chair. He drew his knees up against his chest. Even with his sweater back on, he felt cold, and the fire did nothing to warm him. He didn’t look at Tyrone.

Tyrone yanked and tugged at the door, banging it with his fist. “I just wanted to get some cookies out of the car. What did you do, David?”

“I didn’t do anything.” His voice remained low enough to vanish in the noise from the fire.

Scott looked at him strangely, then stood up from the carpet. He walked through the kitchen to the door that led into the garage. Yes, David thought, Scott knows. He’s figured it out.

Melanie remained hunched protectively by the map, making sure David stayed away from it. He sat off to the side like a pariah. His cheek still stung, though the bandage had stopped all the bleeding.

Scott rattled the door to the garage, but it too was locked. He hurried to the patio door, but couldn’t open the latch.

“The Game won’t let you out of here until it’s finished,” David said. But Scott went through all the motions anyway. David felt tired and defeated, still angry at the Game and at his companions.

“We’re locked in!” Scott finally said.

Tyrone appeared astonished, but not quite afraid. “How did the doors get locked? We were all sitting right here.”

Scott went to pick up the phone. He hesitated with it in his hand, as if afraid to lift it to his ear.

“The line’s dead,” David said.

Scott listened into the phone, shook the receiver and put it to his ear a second time. He refused to hang it up. His eyes grew wider.

“Tyrone,” he suggested, “why don’t you turn on the TV?”

“What for? Shouldn’t we get back to the game?”

“Just turn on the television!”

Tyrone shrugged and walked across the family room. He found the remote control and stepped back, looking to find the power switch. He pushed it. With a buzz, the television came on, but they heard no sound. In a moment, a colorful picture appeared, a test pattern made up of bright hexagons.

“This is really getting wild!” Tyrone whispered.

Melanie glanced at the television, then looked back at the map.

“What did you expect?” David asked.

“Shut it off, Tyrone.”

Instead, Tyrone flicked through the channels, but the same pattern showed on each one.

On the last channel, though, the pattern dissolved into static. As they watched, a vague figure of a young man snapped in and out of focus, as if from a signal very far away. Through the roaring distortion, David heard faint words. “Where am I? Let me go back! Is all this real?”

Melanie crept forward on her knees, but seemed afraid to touch the picture. “Oh no,” she whispered.

“Are you the Rulewoman?” the image said, then it vanished, leaving only a featureless image of multicolored electrical snow.

Scott put the phone to his ear again, listened, and his eyes fairly bugged out of their sockets. “My god, it’s Lellyn!” Scott slammed the phone back down and unclipped the cord from the wall.

Then he grabbed the TV remote out of Tyrone’s hands and punched the power button off.

David let his eyes fall closed and tried to picture other times when he had been away from the Game, when he went to stay with his mother in the summer and the group had to postpone their weekly adventures. The times he had spent with his father along the beach or going into the city, or tagging along at some of his dad’s business picnics.

His mom always wanted to play cards or cribbage with him. His dad, trying to make him into the stereotypical version of the all-American boy, insisted that he play baseball or football or just plain catch. His father disliked David’s obsession with role-playing games, as if that wasn’t an “acceptable” thing to play.

But this game had gone far beyond any of that.

Tyrone held up his half-empty plate of dip, extending it toward Scott. “You want some more dip while we figure this out?”

“No, dammit!” Scott smacked the plate out of Tyrone’s hands, and it toppled onto the carpet. “Can’t you get it through your thick head what’s going on here? This is serious, man!”

Tyrone looked shocked and upset. His big brown eyes swam with a turmoil of emotions, fighting back tears.

David got to his knees and crawled toward the map. Melanie stiffened into a defensive position. She splayed her hands out like protective claws, but David ignored her.

Tyrone got some paper towels from the kitchen and cleaned up the mess on the carpet, glaring at Scott. “Just leave it,” David said. “We’ve got more important things to do.”

Scott and Tyrone both stared at him. David brought his voice back to a normal level. “We have to play this through to the end.”

He picked up the dice from the carpet and extended them toward Scott. “Now it’s clear exactly what the stakes are.”

18. Broken Rules

“We all carry the greatest power on Gamearth. We have our minds, we have our imaginations. With these tools we can accomplish anything.”

—handwritten note found in abandoned

quarters of Mayer, daughter of Dirac

Throughout the night, the gusty mountain wind lifted a metal flange and banged it against the Outsider’s ship, sending echoes and screeches through the corridors. Mayer attempted to track down the source, furious at the annoyance. But the sound traveled through the bulkheads, distorted and magnified by the thin walls, and she could not find where the noise came from.

Finally, without the energy to go farther, she curled up in a sheltered corner where the air remained still but cold. Her nose was red and numb. She tried to rest with her fingers curled together and fists under her chest to keep warm. The air inside the ship seemed frigid enough to be brittle.

Mayer sniffled and closed her eyes. She concentrated on keeping her teeth from chattering. “I can endure this,” she said. “Other characters do it.”

She cursed herself for not having worn warmer clothes, for not having brought some sort of heater (which might or might not have worked here anyway). She hadn’t the slightest idea how to start a fire from scratch, without matches or a galvanic igniter. She had been too wrapped up in the solving Sitnalta’s crisis, and she had ignored the mundane matters of preparation and survival.

After a long time, her body warmed the floor enough that she did not feel completely uncomfortable. Mayer fell asleep.

For the past several nights she had done the same, while during the day she continued her excavation work. Each time the sun set and darkness fell like a dropped curtain over the mountain terrain, the warmth leaked away into the night.

The brooding Slac citadel loomed over the ruined ship. Mayer could have found shelter there, but she felt more comfortable away from the claustrophobic chambers with spikes on the doors and windows. Not that stories of ancient Slac and their torturings of human characters frightened her. But she preferred the tarnished metal, the indecipherable angles and controls, and the winding corridors of the ship. It seemed more like Sitnalta.

When daylight leaked through the cracks of the hull, Mayer blinked her eyes and felt the stiff aches of her body. The wind outside had died down with dawn, and the persistent flange ceased its squeaking rhythm.

She stood up, cracking the stiffness from her joints and spine. Her eyes had gummed shut, and she blinked several times, pawing at her face. Mayer didn’t admit to herself how miserable she felt. None of that mattered. She had work to do.

The first Sitnaltan team had left the ship before they finished their work. Though Mayer was only one character, one pair of hands and one set of crude tools that she had managed to improvise from among the debris, she would find the answer in here somewhere. She could still save her city.

Sitnalta held the future for all of Gamearth. Human characters imagined progressive ways to solve their problems without relying on magic and superstition. Mayer knew their ultimate destiny, though many Sitnaltans did not understand it yet, not even her own father.

Several years before, Mayer had proposed an idea that she felt would mark Sitnalta’s mission on Gamearth. She was young, with a handful of inventions already to her credit. Because she was the daughter of Dirac, he succeeded in getting her a hearing before the Council of Patent Givers.

When she stood before the gathered professors, she felt nervousness wheedle its way into her stomach. Seated men and women carried storming ideas behind their eyes; just the sight of them filled her with awe. She had always imagined herself someday being part of this auspicious body. Now she had to make a good first impression.

Dirac stood at his podium and smiled, fluttering his hands. He looked foolish, but that was his personality and his manner. Everyone understood that.

“My daughter proposes a topic for debate,” Dirac said. “I don’t know what it is myself, but she assures me it is of great importance.” He smiled and drummed his short fingers on the podium. “Very well, Mayer, let us hear it.”

Mayer drew herself up and tossed her head. Her short dark hair fell neatly into place. She maintained a serious expression, controlling her emotions. She wanted to emulate the fire she saw in Professor Frankenstein’s eyes, the passion he had for his ideas. She stepped forward.

“Remember to clear your throat!” Dirac whispered as he brushed past her. “Or they won’t take you seriously!”

She cleared her throat, then began her speech. She had rehearsed it a dozen times already.

“Distinguished inventors of Sitnalta, let me begin by telling you a story you already know. The race of old Sorcerers ruled Gamearth with magic’s iron hand. After they had brought destruction to the map, they gathered their remaining magic together and forced themselves to. . .to evolve. They transformed their collective consciousness into a set of enormous gestalt beings, the Earthspirits and Deathspirits. They called this magical process the ‘Transition’—a rather technical term for a very unscientific process.”

She stopped and looked around the tiered chamber. Some of the professors shifted restlessly. Sitnaltans rarely paid heed to tales of uninteresting events of the past. Magical deeds, whether failures or successes, simply had no pertinence to their lives.

“Now,” Mayer continued, “we Sitnaltans pride ourselves in establishing that anything the primitive magic users could accomplish, we can do equally well or better with our own inventions. No need for hands waving and gibberish-mumbling spells. We can do it with science.

“I believe that we of Sitnalta should focus our efforts into finding a way, through the Rules of science, to create such a Transition for us, for human characters. It will free our minds from the bonds of the map and launch us forward into the future. It is a destiny that all human characters should hold proud. Imagine the challenge!”

Mayer raised her head a little and half-closed her eyes in reverence as she finished. The other professors murmured among themselves. She felt relieved for that at least: her greatest fear had been that the Council of Patent Givers would greet her proposal with total silence. She had at least sparked a debate.

Professor Darwin rapped his palm on the polished railing in front of him, signalling that he wished to make a comment. “What Mayer suggests is interesting. The characters best equipped to survive on Gamearth will indeed survive. But I am a bit skeptical of this drastic path, since evolution must be a gradual process to adapt and change. This sudden ‘transition’ may be to rapid for any of us to endure.”

Mayer looked to see her father’s reaction, and in surprise she saw that he knitted his eyebrows, trying to fight back a scowl.

“Mayer, you must remember,” he said, “that we know nearly nothing about this Transition the old Sorcerers inflicted upon themselves. In order for us to create an improved technological substitute, we must know all the details about the process we are trying to emulate. None of us has wasted our time studying the way mumbo-jumbo spells operate on the rest of the map. Our efforts are focused toward driving the stain of magic away! What you suggest smacks a little too much of sorcery and gobbledegook to me. I’m not sure our technology is fitted to this purpose.”

Professor Clarke cleared his throat and stood up. He was a tall man with an broad face and thick black spectacles. “You are splitting hairs, Dirac,” he said. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The other Council members broke into a hubbub of discussion. Dirac allowed this to continue for a few moments, then rapped his hands on the podium again.

“My daughter had given us an interesting theoretical idea to ponder. At the moment it is eminently impractical, for we do not know enough about the Rules or about magic to implement it.”

Then he smiled at her, and she hated him for it. “But it does show good imagination, and many of us had worse ideas as our first experience with the Council. She is still young, but I think she shows promise.”

He began to clap for her. Mayer’s skin flushed as she turned away. The scattered applause in the Council of Patent Givers seemed like mocking laughter to her ears.

She is still young.

She would show them.

Mayer spent that day digging out a half-buried corridor deep beneath the ground where the ship had come to rest. The other cabins she uncovered bore nothing but small items of furniture and nonfunctional gadgets she could not decipher. As she worked, she hummed and mumbled to herself.

Gamearth had begun to fall apart. If she found a way for the characters of Sitnalta to emulate the Transition, Mayer could free them from much more than just the invisible manipulator beneath the city.

She thought of the Outsiders playing their games, creating a race of characters, the old Sorcerers, who used their magic in the Transition. The Spirits then supposedly went off to create their own worlds and play their own games.

Something about that idea disturbed Mayer, tickled the back of her mind. But then she drove down into the caked dust with her digging implement and heard a clang where no wall should have been.

Mayer stopped as the echo died away, muffled in the dirt and debris. She smiled, suspecting she had encountered something significant. . .exactly what she had been hoping to find. Mayer wanted to use both hands and claw the dirt away as fast as she could, but she forced herself to be calm, to be patient. She didn’t want to damage any part of what she found. The anticipation felt delicious.

Mayer uncovered the great hinge of a heavy bulkhead door with a round locking valve set in the center like a steering wheel. As she brushed the dirt away, she saw that the door was a dull brownish red—it had probably been bright as an alarm once. Her thrill grew.

During the first expedition, she had uncovered the ship’s control room. Professors Frankenstein and Verne had dismantled it to form their mysterious weapon. Now she had found something else.

Mayer used both hands to grip the locking valve and attempted to turn it. She had to use her digging implement as a lever to crack the seal. She cranked the round wheel until a hissing sound burst from the door as it unseated from its airtight jamb.

Had she perhaps found the living quarters of the Outsiders? That didn’t make sense, for the Outsiders had not truly come here, only sent manifestations of themselves because they were real. And the Game was not.

Somehow this ship sat on not just the technological fringe between science and magic, but some sort of pocket between Gamearth and reality. Perhaps the Rules lay bent and twisted here.

Maybe she was about to see what the old Sorcerers saw when they suddenly became the great Spirits.

Mayer pulled open the heavy metal door, closed her eyes, then stepped into the darkness. Silvery light shimmered around her as she entered the chamber.

Mayer stood in a hall of mirrors.

Each angled facet of the wall carried its own crystalline reflection. Mayer stepped deeper and saw thousands of images of herself unfold, reflected, bounced back. Each of the mirrors had angled the reflections on top of each other, overlapping, extending into a kaleidoscope of infinite images within images within images. Though she stood alone, Mayer felt surrounded by an enormous crowd of herself. Her dark eyes widened in awe as she turned around, staring.

Then she noticed that the images were not all the same. Some appeared subtly different in her bodily position, her motions, the clothes she wore. In one she saw long dark hair, in another she saw a scar on her face. In some her expression appeared lined with deep sadness and trauma; in others, filled with delight.

Mayer blinked with shock, as did most of her images. She couldn’t tell which image truly reflected herself. But these were all images of her, all Mayer, but all different, an unending series of Mayer characters.

“Is this some sort of game?” she said out loud. Her voice echoed much more than it should have, as if a thousand overlapping Mayer images had each spoken the same thing.

She considered a cruel trick the Outsiders might play, toying with their own creations. Except—one set of their creations had evolved and gone on to play their own games, to create their own characters.

As Mayer stopped and looked into the endless versions of herself, she felt the intuition exploding in her mind. One of her other images spoke before she could form the words.

“It goes on and on. In both directions!”

Another image interrupted. “The Outsiders create the old Sorcerers. The old Sorcerers go on the Transition, and then they create their own games, their own characters. . .who then go on to create their games.”

“And on and on,” said a new Mayer. “We’re seeing only a few links in an endless chain.”

“The Outsiders themselves must have some sort of gods, some external Players that manipulate their actions. And those gods in turn have their versions of the Outsiders.”

“It never ends!” several Mayers said at the same moment.

“The only thing that remains throughout,” Mayer said herself, and the other images stopped to listen to her, “is the Game! It’s all a Game, the whole universe, no matter who we are or what level we play in. The Game moves through—a game within a game.”

“Within a game.”

“Within a game.”

The phrase repeated and echoed, growing stronger and louder as if each version of Mayer had to say the same thing.

One of the mirrors shattered, sending shards of glass spilling outward, falling to the floor as the image of that Mayer vanished, leaving only a flat black spot on the wall.

“Within a game.”

Another mirror shattered, and another. Flying glass filled the air. The explosions grew louder as the mirrors crumbled. Images of Mayer disappeared.

She turned, covering her ears, trying to duck her head to keep the glass away from her eyes. The door behind her had vanished. She saw nothing, only the mirrors as they smashed again and again. Mayer tried to run, but she had no place to go.

“Within a game.”

A mirror beside her broke, and a long dagger of glass bounced next to her feet, but somehow she didn’t cut herself. One reflection of Mayer—with long hair braided in green ribbons—shrank back with a shocked expression on her face, and then she too shattered.

In the black void behind the mirror stood a young man, his form wavering as if he could barely remember himself. His clothes appeared wet. His eyes were wide and shining, as if they knew too much from within. “Only you and I understand,” he said to her.

Mayer froze in utter terror, completely without understanding—or perhaps understanding too much. She opened her mouth to scream.

“Let me show you the way out,” Lellyn said and extended a hand to her. “Out of the Game.”

And then Mayer felt the razor of pain bursting through her entire body, as she herself shattered.

19. Ice Fortress

“I won’t care about the Game after I am gone, so long as I have fun while I’m here. I want to die a hero.”

—Cayon, in a quest-telling at the village gaming hall

The Game held no interest for Delrael anymore. He sat listlessly polishing and sharpening his sword. The rest of his army bustled about, preparing for their surprise attack on Siryyk’s approaching horde.

Now that the avalanche had destroyed the quest-path along the side of the cliff, the monster army would have to ascend the steep bluffs overlooking the canyon. Delrael’s army waited out of sight. Siryyk would walk right into the trap.

Normally, Delrael would have been excited at the prospect of such an easy surprise blow. But all he could think of was the distant cannon explosion; all he could see was the sliding rock, the scrambling Black Falcon figures helpless on the narrow ledge, and the avalanche crushing them all away.

Now he had lost his father twice.

Romm came up to him. “The monster army is moving. They’re already climbing the slope. I’m sure they don’t know we’re here.” He paused, as if waiting for Delrael to say something else, but Delrael only looked at him.

Romm continued. “We’ve got the first line of defenses set up. All the archers are ready. The other fighters are anxious—this is the first battle for most of them, you know.”

“Good,” Delrael made himself say.

“It shouldn’t be too long now,” Romm said again. “The monsters are halfway up the slope.”

Delrael realized that the scout wanted him to get up and inspect the fighters, to encourage them, to lead them in the attack. “They know what to do,” he said instead. “Wish them luck.”

Romm looked crestfallen and turned to go. He stopped and said over his shoulder, “I’m sorry about your father, Delrael. I’m also sorry I didn’t recognize him at first.”

“Thank you, Romm.”

The scout left to join the others. Delrael stared at his own clean sword. As a commander, he had no right to act this way. He had destroyed far more of Siryyk’s soldiers in the fire in Ledaygen; Drodanis and the Black Falcon riders alone had probably killed at least an enemy apiece in their little skirmish. Delrael’s losses had been minimal.

Losses were never minimal.

The wind whipped cold around the rocks, and he stood up. Gray clouds dotted the sky, growing thicker. He seemed to have lost all sense of time.

He realized Siya stood beside him, frowning with a pinched expression. She had looked mortally stunned as Drodanis fell, as if reliving her nightmares, reminded of Cayon’s death all over again. But that had hardened her, tempered her somehow.

“It was Drodanis’s way of life,” she said, displeased with Delrael. “It’s how he wanted to die. A hero. He wanted to do something that characters would tell legends about.” Delrael kept gazing at his soldiers in line near the edge of the bluff.

“Delrael,” she continued, “heroes only count if they’re from the winning side.”

“I know,” he said.

He watched his fighters pause and tense. He thought he could hear the movements of the horde below, climbing closer. Suddenly all his human fighters lunged to their feet, shouting and banging their weapons.

They pushed against the line of large boulders they had positioned at the edge of the slope. Some characters shoved with their hands, others pried with sticks. Dozens of rocks crashed down like battering rams into the approaching army.

He heard the echoing uproar as the monsters discovered the surprise. The boulders rolled down, bouncing and smashing and kicking up stones.

Siryyk’s horde gathered itself for an angry surge up the slope now that they had an enemy they could see. Delrael knew that the boulders would have crushed scores of the monsters. With this one blow, he had avenged the death of Drodanis.

But not enough.

The front line of fighters dropped their sticks and ran behind the second line of Delrael’s fighters. They pushed to the edge of the slope, each armed with bows. They shot arrow after arrow into the helpless horde. Kellos and the surviving ylvans fired with their small crossbows.

The monsters shouted and screamed, scrambling to lift their shields. Many of them turned and tried to run back down the slope. They tripped and fell, taking others with them along the incline.

Delrael’s archers kept firing. The thrum of their bowstrings sounded like an enraged hive of bees.

But then some of the other human fighters, overanxious, drew their own weapons and charged howling down to meet the monsters. Delrael muttered to himself, upset that they placed themselves in danger before the archers had caused all the damage they could. If he had been in better control of his army. . .

“Don’t give up like your father did, Delrael,” Siya interrupted him. “For all those years. And look how he paid for it.”

Tayron Tribeleader, holding his polished wooden sword in hand and leading Ydaim Trailwalker and the other khelebar, pelted over the edge and down the rocky slope. Kellos and his ylvans surged after them. The rest of the archers stopped firing, secured their bows, and joined the attack with their blades.

Delrael took his own sword, looked at its new sharpened edge, and strode toward the fighting. His characters were falling now, his fighters were being torn apart by Siryyk’s monsters.

He saw the manticore seething and bounding around on the slope, striking with the blue lightning of his scorpion tail. Many of Delrael’s fighters already lay scattered and dead. The monster army rallied itself and pushed upward. Ranks of Slac had lined up, using their shields as an impenetrable wall and pushing up the hill.

Delrael’s fighters lost their advantage in only a few moments. They had used their surprise and sprung their traps. But now that they fought face to face, the monster army greatly outnumbered the humans. Delrael had already struck his blow; they would gain nothing by remaining.

Delrael stood to the front of the fighting and shouted orders to retreat. He stopped the rest of his eager fighters from marching over the side. Romm and several of the other fighters had held already them back, keeping them in their strategic position on top where they could strike at the monsters coming up.

“We’ve done our job for now!” Delrael shouted. “Retreat!”

Lightning bolts blasted into some of the monster soldiers. He looked up to see Tareah standing on a rock, holding the sapphire Water Stone in her hand.

Delrael turned to the fighters still standing on the top of the bluff. “Move! March—head northward along the quest-path. We must separate ourselves. We have to find time to set up another attack.”

He grabbed Romm by the arm. “Go to Tareah. Tell her that we need to stall the monster advance. Have her use the Water Stone to delay them. She can think of something.”

Romm ran off across the rocky ground. Delrael stood on the edge and urged his fighters to get to the top and to run. Many had already fallen and lay wounded. Some characters helped the injured back to the top of the slope; others lay there as little goblins swarmed over the terrain, slashing their throats.

The monsters cried out in surprise again as water gushed from cracks in the rocks and burst out to pour down the slope, drenching them all.

Tareah stood above with her hair flying in the air. She twisted the Stone, and the pouring water crackled and froze into a slick, silvery sheet of ice. Delrael allowed himself a smile. The monsters would find it impossible to make progress up the steep bluff.

Most of the human army had made it to the top and marched away. “We have to run! Move.”

Below, the horde continued to shout curses at them and clawed their way at the treacherous slope. Delrael turned and followed as his army moved. It would take them some time to tally their own losses.

Now, finally, Siryyk knew about the entire human army waiting to fight him.

#

While the monsters killed off the severely wounded left on the battlefield—their own wounded and the humans—Siryyk paced and thought. Much of the ice had melted. He glowered at Professor Verne, then swished his scorpion tail back and forth; the air seemed charged with the energy spraying from it. Verne appeared terrified, but tried to stand tall.

The manticore raised his right paw to swat Verne on the chest. The professor flew backward to the rocky ground with a torn shirt and long red gashes across his skin. “That was just a scratch,” he said.

Verne lay sprawled next to the bloody corpse of a young human fighter who had been stabbed and then decapitated. The fighter’s open-eyed head sat near his shoulder, mouth gaping dark and empty toward the sky. Verne stammered but could say nothing.

“We have only enough powder to fire the cannon a few more times, Professor.”

Among the rocks and bodies on the twisted slope, General Korux and his other Slac grunted and strained as they hauled the cannon up to the top of the bluff. The tall wheels were set too wide for any path, and Korux had to push it up the smoothest part of the cliff face. Siryyk wondered if Verne had done that deliberately when he designed the cannon.

“I want you to fix the Sitnaltan weapon.”

Professor Verne propped himself up with his bleeding elbows and tried to back away. “You can’t use it, Siryyk! Don’t you understand that it’s a doomsday device. If the Sitnaltan weapon is triggered, then all of Gamearth and maybe even all of the Outside will be destroyed.”

With a snarl, Siryyk brought his scorpion tail down to strike the headless corpse beside the professor. Blood and smoking flesh blasted out, spattering Verne.

“I will hear none of that! The weapon is mine. I want it to work. Whether I use it or not will be my decision. Now tell me what is mechanically wrong with it?”

Verne began to say something complicated and nonsensical, but Siryyk drew himself up to glare at him. The professor stopped. “The timer switch is broken. That’s all. The weapon itself is undamaged. It will be trivial to fix.”

“Then do it,” the manticore said and swiped at him again with his paw, keeping his claws sheathed. The blow knocked Verne sideways to his knees. The professor scrambled to his feet, and two Slac grabbed his elbows, escorting him over to where the weapon waited, strapped into the battered steam-engine car.

The monsters had taken some prisoners, and Siryyk stalked about before finally gesturing at one of the Slac. The Slac snatched up a tiny struggling man whose face looked battered; blood caked his mouth from broken teeth. The little man wore forest greens and browns that provided no camouflage at all in the stark mountain terrain. The little man’s jaw dropped as he stared at the immense manticore.

“Now, captive,” Siryyk said, “I want to know about this army that just attacked my troops. Where did it come from? Who is its leader? Who are you?”

“I have nothing to say to you,” the little man snapped.

Siryyk glared at the Slac holding the captive. The monster grabbed the little man’s hand and shoved it into his jagged reptilian mouth. The Slac bit down, twisted his chin, and snapped back. He spat out two of the captive’s twitching fingers.

The little man screamed as blood poured from his hand.

“Who are you?” Siryyk said again. “Who leads the army?”

“I am Kellos!” the little man said, shaking either with anger or with terror; Siryyk could not tell which.

The Slac grabbed Kellos’s arm again. Blood glistened from his pointed teeth. The little man snarled and struggled.

“Delrael leads the army! He commands them all. We struck at you in the forest. We ambushed you along the quest-path. We’ve been carving away at your army, and we will defeat you yet!”

The Slac released him, and Kellos stood, holding the bleeding stumps of his fingers against his chest to cut off the flow of blood.

Siryyk paced and turned around. “Delrael!” he muttered. His black lips twisted upward in a smile. It all became clear—the storms and the lightning and the forest fire and the unseen ambushes. Delrael had been using his powerful Stones all along. “So, the prisoner Jathen lied to me. This is the human army, closer than we thought.”

The Slac hissed, and suddenly Kellos broke into a run, trying to dodge between his captors and Siryyk’s great bulk. He ran toward an opening on the slope, as if he actually had a chance to escape.

Moving faster than his enormous size would seem to allow, the manticore whirled and lashed with his coiled scorpion tail.

Kellos screamed for only a moment before the flash of blue lightning incinerated him. His blackened and sizzling body flew ten feet in the air before striking the jumbled rocks and leaving a wet black stain as it slid sideways and stopped next to a clean patch of ice.

Siryyk turned to watch Korux and the others straining to get the cannon over the lip of the slope. Most of the other monsters had managed to negotiate the ice and the treacherous rocks.

Delrael’s army waited up there for him. Their surprise was over. “The Stones are in my grasp now.”

#

Tareah pointed at the map Vailret had drawn. Delrael held it against a flat rock surface with the sun shining on it; the corners kept flapping in the cold breeze.

Delrael squinted, trying to see what she meant. “It’s only a couple of hexagons away,” Tareah said. “We can return to the site of my father’s Ice Palace.”

She turned and looked at him. “Listen to me, Delrael! There’s mountain terrain blocking us off in one direction, the northern sea, frozen wasteland, and the Barrier River down the other side. It’ll be hard on the monsters, especially after Drodanis destroyed most of their supplies.”

Delrael pondered. The rebuilt Palace would provide a defensible fortress to hold his army. All his fighters needed a rest after their first taste of battle, not to mention the injured characters among his troops. It seemed reasonable, but he felt uneasy—he would be trapping his own army in a place like that. He wanted room to move, to strike and run. But they had been doing that all along.

Tareah stood up. “If I go now, and hurry, and your army follows behind, I can have the Ice Palace rebuilt by the time the fighters get there.”

Enrod stood beside her, intense but silent until he said, “I can use the Water Stone. I can help.” Tareah stiffened, looking defensive, but then she shrugged.

Old Siya waited nearby again, listening in. She had gathered swords from several of the fallen soldiers; while the army rested, she polished them for any character who might need a new weapon.

“That’s what Drodanis would suggest,” she said.

Delrael had no answer for that.

#

Though only a distortion remained on the smooth field of ice and snow, the site of the Ice Palace shone clear in Tareah’s mind. She had spent three decades there.

Her life had changed a great deal since the last time the Palace stood tall. She had been bound in the body of a small child, while Sardun waited for some other full-blooded Sorcerer to manifest himself. Enrod was the only other Sentinel still alive on Gamearth, but Sardun did not approve of Enrod’s philosophy.

Then Tryos the dragon had blasted his way into the Ice Palace to steal Tareah. In the dragon’s treasure grotto she had waited for some heroic character to rescue her, because that’s what she thought she was supposed to do. All those years with Sardun had taught her the old ways of the Game. She had never questioned what he said.

And Delrael did rescue her, taking her back only to find the Ice Palace melted and collapsed. Her father had succumbed to the half-Transition, adding his spirit to the dayid beneath the Palace.

Now Tareah that spent time with Vailret and Delrael and other human characters, the Game had taken on a new perspective for her. No longer did she merely read and chronicle the legends about other characters. She participated in the adventures herself—whenever Delrael allowed her.

She and Enrod trudged across the flat snow in the sunrise. They had walked the rest of the afternoon over the mountains, pushing ahead of Delrael’s army. They traveled through the night, resting for only a few hours in the coldest and darkest time before dawn.

Tareah didn’t feel tired at all, but eager. She would rebuild her old home.

She stepped into the boundary of the site, noting where the great ice pillars had collapsed, where the towers had melted and fallen to crumbling blocks. When she had returned here with Delrael and the others in the Sitnaltan balloon, Sardun had left a farewell message for her.

He would be greatly surprised if he could see her now. She had grown to her full height, and her joints had stopped aching. Tareah had become her own character.

The world hung silent around them. The cold made Tareah’s fingers numb, but the breeze had died away. The jagged hexagons of mountain terrain stood behind them, bounded by the black hex-line. The blue expanse of the northern sea channelled down into the rushing hex-wide Barrier River. The air smelled clean, with other scents dampened by the snow.

“This is probably going to take all day,” Tareah said.

Enrod squeezed a handful of snow until it melted through his fingers. He looked at the water dripping down.

She held the glistening sapphire cube in her hand. In the sunlight it reflected the white ice. Holding just one of the Stones, she could only use three spells, as would Enrod when she passed the Stone to him. However, Tareah hoped she could awaken the dayid that lived at the site, which would focus and intensify her spells far beyond anything she could do herself. Sardun had created the Barrier River that way.

She rolled the six-sided sapphire on the snow. The number “6” showed up, the highest she could roll. Tareah knew the dayid was already there helping her.

When the magic surged within her, she forced it through the facets of the Stone. She channelled the power to shape the surrounding water and ice and snow, sculpting it, pushing the towers and the parapets, making them rise tall and monolithic. She swirled the ice around into solid blue bricks.

She sucked all of the snow and mud and debris away from the underground vaults where Sardun had kept his old Sorcerer treasures. She scoured the area clean.

Tareah rolled sixes with all three of her spells.

For hours she kept herself submerged in the power, building up the walls, fashioning passages, opening rooms and adapting the structure to make it more appropriate for protecting Delrael’s army.

When her last spell ended and Enrod took the Water Stone from her fingers, Tareah saw him trembling. Enrod had not used a Stone since the Deathspirits stripped the Fire Stone from him. She wondered if he felt afraid of touching that power again, that it might unlock some scar within him, something that had caused him to turn evil.

She wanted to snatch the sapphire cube back. She had nearly finished the Ice Palace herself, she didn’t need his help. Perhaps by midnight, when she got three more spells, she could finish all the construction. Delrael’s army would arrive by then, but maybe the monsters would not be too close behind.

Before she could say anything, Enrod rolled the Stone. Tareah watched him become strong again as he grabbed the sapphire and turned toward the new Palace.

Numbed by her own exhaustion, Tareah leaned back, not even feeling the cold. She sat in the snow and watched the dark-haired Sentinel build the outer walls taller, make a slippery mound on all sides of the fortress, adding other defenses against the monsters. He thickened the fragile towers. He made hidden places where parts of the human army could march out and attack the unsuspecting monsters.

Enrod rolled again, and Tareah drifted into sleep. . . .

When the front portion of Delrael’s army arrived, stumbling and weary, she and Enrod stood in the tallest tower and watched the army approach. The first fighters passed through the wide gap in the first wall.

Enrod gazed out at the mountains, the northern sea, the rushing Barrier River. He seemed pleased with his work. “I prepared Tairé’s defenses, too,” her said.

Tareah paused to hide her initial skepticism. “It looks like a blocky fortress now. Not what I remembered at all.” She tried to keep the sour tone out of her words. “But I suppose it can’t be a fragile monument to the Sorcerer race anymore, not for our purpose.”

Enrod murmured his agreement. “A place to make a final stand.”

Tareah went down to meet Delrael and the others as they came marching into the courtyard and the main lodging rooms of the rebuilt fortress. Delrael seemed extremely tired, but his eyes glistened. He felt proud of her, she could tell. He stared around himself at the blue ice walls and grinned.

“There, Tareah,” he said, “see how I’m using your abilities? I’m giving you tasks to do, just like any other fighter in my army.”

He smiled, but Tareah scowled, feeling stung. It had not even occurred to her what Delrael thought he was doing. “You just ruined it by pointing that out to me, Delrael, rather than just making it seem like a natural decision.”

He blinked, confused by her reaction.

She went outside into the courtyard and watched the last of the human fighters come in. She waited a few minutes, but the hexagon of wasteland remained empty behind them, marred only by a wide, slushy trail where the army had marched.

Tareah raised her arms and motioned toward the central gap in the wall where the soldiers had passed through. By closing her eyes and letting the back of her mind touch the magic still in the ice, she imagined the two separated ends of the outer wall. They clenched and flowed together into an unbroken barrier, sealing the army safely inside the ice fortress.

#

At sunset several sentries called Delrael to the watchtowers. As they stared eastward in the long shadows of the fading light, they could see the massive crowds of dark figures pouring out of the mountain hexagon, crossing the black line, and swarming over the frozen wasteland.

Seen on the flat terrain rather than hidden by the mountains, Siryyk’s army appeared huge. They had arrived in seige.

20. Tunnels of the Worm-Men

“I wish the Game challenged us with only one enemy at a time, but the Outsiders are not so simplistic. As soon as we defeat one adversary, another waits in line to take its place.”

—Stilvess Peacemaker

Gold stood in puddles, still soft from the heat blasting out of the nearby lava lake. The seething temperature baked Bryl’s face, made his blue cloak hot to the touch. He used one hand to shield his eyes as he took another step closer. His knuckles stung from the searing air. His eyes filled with irritated tears.

At the top of the crater high above, he could see the hole where the orange-dappled volcano walls opened to the night. But the bubbling lava burned away any cool breezes that swirled around the island.

“We don’t even know there’s a dayid here!” Bryl said. His throat felt raw; when he sucked in a breath, his nostrils seemed on fire. His nose hairs curled. He fought back the urge to cough, because that would mean gulping in more of the heat.

“There must be!” Vailret shouted back. He stood in the shade, behind one of the large boulders. “Try anyway!”

Bryl squeezed his eyes shut and felt tears ooze down his cheek in cool lines that rapidly evaporated. “Easy for you,” Bryl muttered. “You’re not standing out here.”

Bryl had sensed the dayid at the heart of the volcano. It seemed likely that he would find one here, knowing what he did about the Sentinel spirits. But the volcano’s dayid felt small and weak, perhaps even dormant.

Bryl had to call it up and somehow speak with it.

He didn’t know if he could. Bryl’s parents had killed themselves in their half-Transition when he was just a boy, and he had grown up without magical training, always feeling inferior. His simple heritage as a Sorcerer had been blocked away for so long he wanted to make up for it, to show all of Gamearth that he could indeed use the magic that was meant for him. He could do that if he got all four Stones, if he became the Allspirit.

He thought of the dayid and clenched his hands around the folds of his cloak to cover the exposed skin. He squeezed his eyes shut and recalled how he had touched the dayid in Ledaygen, working through the Water Stone. He had to feel that power now, seek it out, pull it in front of him.

The Earth Stone had vanished. If the dayid remained here, the dayid would know. The perfect ten-sided emerald was the most powerful of the four Stones.

The lava glowed orange, belched and sputtered. The air reeked of sulfur like a handful of rotten eggs smashed all at once.

“Dayid—show yourself!” Bryl said in the loudest voice he could manage. He didn’t know what else to say. He knew no summoning spells, no binding he could place on the dayid. Either it would appear to him, or it wouldn’t.

He felt a warm presence like melted honey reaching within him from the depths of his stomach and back, creeping up along the inside of his spine.

“Bryl, look!” Vailret said, peeping his head around the rock.

Bryl tried to shade his eyes from the oven heat. As he looked, he felt the searing temperature change, cocooning and softening and spreading out so that Bryl could stare at the center of the lava lake.

With a pop, a lava bubble burst, shooting a tall flame upward like an orange feathery pillar that grew brighter, shining into the gullet of the volcano.

Bryl felt his skin tingle. The raw burns faded away; his singed hair no longer felt stiff and crumbly. “Dayid, I am Bryl,” he said. His voice pinged off the rock wall, tiny in the vast roaring chamber. Realizing that the name would have no significance, he added, “I am son of the Sentinels Qonnar and Tristane. If you can recall some portion of your past, you must remember them.”

The flame brightened and wobbled, bending toward Bryl. Images shimmered up from deep within him.

He saw flashes of his mother, his father, and a flickering series of other Sentinel faces. He recognized some of them, but most remained strangers. He saw his father and mother accused of poisoning Jarriel by his widow Galleri. Bryl felt their despair, confusion at how their good works had twisted around to strike at them. He felt other memories of the dayid’s components as they acknowledged Bryl’s presence.

“Dayid, we came for the Earth Stone. We know it was here. We must have it or Gamearth will crumble apart. The Outsiders will put an end to the Game. You must be able to sense that hexagons are already flying off into space. It won’t be long before this entire island is destroyed. With the Earth Stone, though, we can bring enough magic together to create an Allspirit.”

He clamped his lips together to keep from babbling. He trembled with fear and awe of the presence in front of him. “Help us find the Earth Stone,” he said again.

Images filled him again, congealing into an understandable message. Though his eyes still saw the fire and the lava in front of him, in another layer of vision he also watched Tryos’s treasure, piles of gold coins, strings of pearls, carvings of onyx and jade, studded with sapphires, rubies, and garnets. Bryl’s vision melted through layers until he saw the potent Earth Stone, as green as the heart of a leaf in the middle of summer. Ten-sided, the greatest stone of the four. Bryl felt elation to glimpse it even in this second-hand sight.

Then the dayid showed him other creatures, twisted forms with grayish skin, manlike torsos on bloated serpentine bodies. The creatures had blank saucer eyes, smooth heads, and clawlike hands protruding at the wrong angles from their shoulders. He saw swarms of the worm-men, werem, tunnelling up from below, breaking into the treasure vault. He watched grasping hands pluck away all the gems. They snatched the Earth Stone as well, intending to deliver it to their Master.

The visions faded. Bryl remained standing as the waves of heat returned, only this felt like the heat of anger. The worm-men had stolen the Earth Stone. The dayid felt outrage, but had no way of fighting. Not until Bryl and Vailret had arrived.

They needed the Earth Stone back.

“But where is it? How do we find it?” he said. His throat felt dry enough to snap if he raised his voice.

The flame of the dayid bunched up and flickered, breaking away from the lava. It shot through the air to blast at the inner wall of the crater. Among the jagged blobs of hardened lava, the flames struck and illuminated a blot of shadow, a passage descending into the rock.

Then the dayid’s flame petered out. The melted-honey sensation dissolved inside of Bryl, and he found himself uncovered and unprotected in the searing heat again.

He pushed his face into the folds of cloth on his elbows and staggered backward. He felt Vailret grab him and pull him to the cooler sections of the grotto.

“What happened?” Vailret said. “I saw the fire and I heard you talking, but it didn’t make any sense. Did you learn anything?”

Bryl’s eyes felt red, and his entire face seemed stiff and prickling from the shallow burns. “Yes,” he said. “I know what happened to the Earth Stone.”

#

To Bryl, the tunnel felt dank and claustrophobic, closing around them with stifling shadows. It plunged down, away from the heat and away from the volcano. He and Vailret stumbled along until the slope finally flattened out, then they continued at a more normal pace.

The smooth catacombs had no branch tunnels. Bryl’s hand-held flame lasted a long time, but he lost all sense of the passing hours. They had been too long without seeing the stars overhead.

“Do you think it’s daylight yet?” Vailret asked.

“Of which day?” Bryl said.

Vailret fell silent, walking behind his stretching shadow. He broke the silence again. “If the werem took all the gems, were they really interested in the Earth Stone in the first place? I seem to recall that they believe all gemstones belong to them.”

“Seeds of the earth,” Bryl said, “planted in the rock, from which all life springs. They took the gems to return them deep underground. But I think they had a special purpose for the Earth Stone. The dayid made me sense something that the werem call their Master.”

They continued ahead. “We just passed another hex-line,” Bryl pointed out.

Vailret turned to squint, then plodded along the tunnel. “Is that four now?”

“I can’t remember. We must be under the water hexes already.”

“We’re heading in that direction.”

Bryl followed him, maintaining the same pace. “Did I ever tell you about Delrael’s training in the old weapons storehouse?”

Vailret did not look back. Of course Vailret would remember his own storehouse training, when he had to imagine being captured by Slac, who made him fight an invisible monster in their arena.

Vailret stopped. “Del fought the worm-men, didn’t he? Did he win?”

Bryl remained silent for a few moments. “Nobody wins the storehouse training,” he said. “Drodanis and I set it up that way. But everyone learns.”

“What did Del learn then?” Vailret asked. Bryl could tell he just wanted to keep the conversation going, to break the tedium of their long, dark journey.

“He learned never to get captured by werem.”

“It figures,” Vailret said. He moved on as Bryl followed behind him with the ball of clean fire in his hand. Their shadows lurched ahead, dancing on the tunnel walls.

Bryl and Drodanis had planned young Delrael’s training meticulously, using all the details they could find from legends about encounters with the werem. When they brought young Delrael into the weapons storehouse, closed the shutters, and barricaded the door, Bryl asked him, “Are you ready?”

Delrael had nodded. He looked confused, but even then he seemed ready to confront whatever problem they threw at him. Bryl blew out the candle.

“Delrael, you are camped alone beside the shore of a lake,” Drodanis said from a dark corner of the room. “You have a small fire burning on the shore, and you have just finished eating. You’re relaxed. Your senses are dull. You’re about to go to sleep.”

“Then,” Bryl said, “the ground bubbles at the lake shore. Dirt spatters in the air as three worm-men tunnel out of the ground and lurch up into the moonlight. They’re caked with slimy mud. They have thin arms with sharp elbows, powerful claws. Their eyes are wide and white, blind because they live under the ground. Their bodies are long and segmented, trailing in their holes as they lunge forward.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Delrael said. Bryl could hear the alarm in his voice.

“What would you like to do?” Drodanis asked. “They come toward you from three different sides.”

“I’ve got my sword, right? And my armor? I’m going to fight.”

“Of course you are.” Drodanis’s voice carried a lilt of amusement.

“Pick a number between one and seven,” Bryl said. “Guess right, and we’ll let you defeat them.”

And so Delrael had fought several rounds against the worm-men, killing one of them, but then the battle became tedious, so Drodanis had the other two werem overpower Delrael’s character and drag him underground. They pulled him through the wet tunnels where dirt fell on him and mud caked his face, and he could hardly breathe. Though he continued to struggle, Drodanis wouldn’t let him break free.

The werem took him through their tunnels under the lake to a large central chamber. Their emperor sat atop his bulbous coils of segments wound in a high mound beneath him.

“The emperor grows one segment for every human character he kills,” Bryl said. He thought that was a nice detail.

When the werem hauled Delrael before him, the folds of the emperor’s segments split. Fat white grubs spilled from the cracks, wet and oozing mucous. They flopped along the emperor’s segments and left sticky trails.

“They are the larvae of the werem,” Drodanis said. “Like maggots, without the human arms and heads of full-grown worm-men. They have only a mouth filled with teeth—and the instinct to chew into a human body, to devour a character from the inside out. Only through the taste of human flesh can the larvae mature.”

Though Delrael’s character did break away and kill two more of the worm-men, they overpowered him again and dragged him in front of the werem emperor. Delrael struggled when they planted the larvae on his body. As he writhed and screamed and squirmed, Delrael could feel the grubs chewing into his arms, into his stomach, into his back.

Then the werem backed off and stood with their blind faces cocked toward him. Their nostril slits flared as they smelled his fear and pain.

Delrael lay on the floor and felt the larvae inside him, eating, snapping his muscles. Blood poured from his wounds.

“Once the larvae get to your heart, you will be dead,” Drodanis said.

Bryl kept his voice cold. “You are dead already. You have only a few moments left of the pain as you feel the grubs devour your body.”

“Can I get to my sword?” Delrael said.

Bryl hesitated, letting Drodanis decide.

“Yes. But the werem are backing away from you. You’ve already killed three of them. They won’t stand near, and you don’t have much control over your body.”

“I’m going to take the blade and hack at the hardened mud pillar in the center of the chamber. The one holding up the ceiling, and the water of the lake above.”

“Good, Delrael!” Drodanis said. “You’re weak, but the werem don’t know what you’re doing. You can take a few strikes at the pillar.”

“Pick a number between one and five,” Bryl said.

“Two.”

“The pillar is starting to crack.”

“I’m still swinging.”

“You can feel the grubs moving inside you. They’re chewing at your spine. Soon you’re going to collapse,” Drodanis said.

“I’m swinging again. And again!”

“Pick another number. Between one and four this time.”

“Three.”

“Oh, let him have it, Bryl.”

“The pillar cracks more. The ceiling is starting to fissure. Water is trickling down. By now the worm-men know what you’re doing, and they hurry forward. You have another strike, maybe two, with your sword before it’s too late.”

“I’m swinging again.”

Bryl laughed. “The pillar breaks. The ceiling is crumbling. Water gushes down. The worm-men are running about, frantic.”

“Do I have time for—”

“You have no time. The grubs have just eaten your heart. The last thing your eyes see is the ceiling collapsing, and the great explosion of water thundering down.”

The storehouse training always disturbed Bryl. It seemed so real to the characters, this role-playing game. He was glad it remained just a game. Vailret continued to walk in silence.

But suddenly the side walls of the catacombs flaked outward, and Bryl heard scratching, clawing noises.

“What’s going on?” Vailret said. Bryl’s hand-light bobbed against the ceiling.

The packed-earth walls split open. Mud-covered, smooth-skinned werem burst out on either side, reaching out. Bryl stepped back, stifling a scream.

He felt a lump on the floor, and a clawed hand snapped out to grab his thin ankle. He kicked and squealed, stomping down on the worm-man’s wrist. The whole creature emerged, rising higher and flinging mud off its chest and limbs.

The worm-men trapped them, front and back.

“Use the Stones, Bryl! The Fire Stone—now!”

Bryl grabbed both Stones out of his cloak. He held the diamond and ruby in his hand, gripping the sharp corners.

But his hand refused to drop the Stones. His arm remained locked into place. He strained as much as he could, but it didn’t seem to be his own hand at all.

“Roll them!” Vailret said.

The worm-men made wet clicking sounds as they slithered forward, not in any hurry at all. Their sightless eyes turned toward the captives.

“I can’t! I can’t move my arm!” Bryl said.

Vailret tried to turn toward him, but he froze as well. His legs locked. Vailret’s neck muscles twitched and jerked as he strained—but something else held onto him, controlled their every action.

“It’s the same thing that’s attacking Sitnalta!” Vailret said through clenched teeth. “The invisible force, it’s got us now!”

As they remained motionless, with legs together, Vailret and Bryl could offer no resistance as the werem picked them up. They glided down the bore of the tunnels, moving with a caterpillar-like motion that made Bryl feel sick. He found that his body cooperated enough to let him shiver.

Ahead, they saw two other werem widening a hole in the side of the passage. Bryl’s fireball bobbed along behind them.

As their captors reached the other worm-men, they stopped and plucked Vailret and Bryl from their segmented backs. They placed their captives on the dirt floor inside the grave-sized hole they had dug. The werem seemed to be clicking and chattering among themselves.

One of them turned, bent down with a liquid motion, and snatched up Vailret and Bryl, stuffing them into the hole.

Paralyzed, Bryl could do nothing but slump against Vailret and watch as the hideous blank-eyed figure of one werem leaned forward, filling the opening with his silhouette. He reached forward with one four-fingered hand.

“The Master will make good use of these,” the werem said in a scratchy, hollow voice. He snatched the Air Stone and the Fire Stone out of Bryl’s locked grasp.

The fireball illuminating the tunnels winked out, leaving them in complete blackness.

Bryl could only hear the worm-men moving and chittering. They slathered dirt as they built up the tunnel wall again, piling it back inside the cell. They walled Vailret and Bryl into the chamber, without food, without light, without air.

21. Sardun’s Vaults

“She is our future! Tareah is the last full-blooded Sorcerer woman. Our race will rise again. She will shepherd them back to us, to make things the way they were.”

—Sardun the Sentinel

Delrael’s army exhibited an odd mixture of remembered horror from their first battle and nervous frivolity from considering themselves safe in the ice fortress. Many characters slumped against the ice blocks, tucked a blanket behind them, and fell deep into a numb sleep.

Siya took great pains to provide an extra large and well-prepared meal for them all. She moved about as if in a daze, staring at the fighters, especially the wounded ones; something seemed to be working in the back of her mind since she had watched Drodanis die.

Tareah did what she could to help. The Ice Palace felt so different with a human army inside. She remembered Sardun’s little touches, his pennants and ice intaglios along the walls. Neither she or Enrod had been able to add unnecessary embellishments, so the great banquet chamber seemed larger and colder than it should have.

Enrod came up to her and stood, wanting to say something. She noticed him, but did not encourage conversation. She felt uncomfortable around him and his disjointed madness. He looked up at the vaulted ceilings and around the ice fortress.

“Tareah,” he said. His voice sounded calm, but his expression took on a harder appearance. “Sardun said harsh things.” He stared down a corridor, then flinched at something she couldn’t see. “Unfair to me.”

Tareah tried to keep any emotion out of her answer. “My father didn’t like you. Apparently he never considered the feud finished. He was upset because you abandoned your heritage.”

Enrod’s heavy eyebrows knitted together. “Not abandoned! I stayed! After the Transition, after all the Sorcerers ran away, I stayed! I used my abilities to help human characters. Help them! Sardun—lived too much in the past. More important work to do.”

Enrod drew a deep breath and ran his fingernails along the ice blocks of the wall, shaving off a thin line of white. “I used my power. I offered my assistance. We built Tairé.”

He lowered his gaze. The ice shaving melted on his fingertips. “We owed humans that much. We created their character race for our wars. We gave them Gamearth already broken. I helped fix it.”

Though Enrod’s hair remained dark and his beard bushy, Tareah could see how truly old the Sentinel was. He had lived nearly as many years as Sardun, a full generation more than Bryl, and for several generations of human characters.

“I should become the Allspirit,” he said, surprising her. “Me.”

Tareah looked at Enrod, wondering how he had reached that conclusion.

“I would lose nothing, and I—” He paused, and she saw the deep pain on his face. “I know how power can hurt. What kind of Allspirit would Bryl make? Not even a pure Sorcerer. Tainted! Tainted!” He took a deep breath then blew it out, seeing steam in the cold air wafting upward like smoke.

“A full-blooded Sorcerer should make the last Transition. I am the only one left.”

Enrod seemed to be speaking to himself. Tareah shook her head and felt her hair flowing behind her neck. “So am I, Enrod. Why does everyone always forget about me?”

Enrod blinked at her. “Sardun kept you locked away.”

Tareah felt angry now. No matter how much she did, they all continued to take her lightly, even the people on her own side.

“My father had his own reasons for protecting me, regardless of whether you or I agree with them. He isn’t here now, and I make my own decisions.”

Enrod shrugged.

In the large hall, Siya continued her work of cleaning weapons, sitting by herself. The other non-fighter human characters tended the wounded soldiers and helped the army bed down.

“Do me one thing, for the memory of my father,” Tareah said. She pointed at Enrod. “He was upset because you never once came here to see the history he had compiled. Go to the vaults yourself. Look at what he kept from past turns.

“You insist on looking toward the future, and that’s good. But the past might hold some surprises for you, too. Go to the vaults. You might be impressed.”

Enrod drew himself up and looked at her with his ageless eyes. “I will.” With a slight bow, he stepped backward and walked away. As he moved, he drew his fingernail along the wall.

Tareah held the Water Stone in her hands, thinking about what else Enrod had said. She already knew what she had to do.

#

Tareah tried to sleep. She lay in a re-creation of her old chambers. With her mind and her imagination she had rebuilt the room exactly as she remembered it, making the same polished furnishings, the same frost-intaglios in the walls, even to the single narrow window that now looked out upon the massed and huddling monster army on the ice-packed desolation. She could see only three or four small fires out there, apparently made with their limited supply of wood.

Delrael’s army would be asleep by now, except for a few sentries she could easily avoid.

Tareah wandered the blue-ice corridors again, just as she had always done when she couldn’t sleep. During the day the walls shimmered with rainbows from the sunlight; at night she saw only dark and refracted starshine. As a girl, sometimes she listened to her father tell legends that she already knew by heart.

That reminded her of the way she and Vailret had swapped stories back into the Stronghold village. She thought of Vailret and Bryl and how far away they must be. Surely by now they had managed to get the Earth Stone—but how would they know to come all the way up here to the Ice Palace? They were supposed to locate the human army somewhere in the mountains. Originally, Delrael had planned to send regular scouts to search for them returning. Now, though, even if Vailret and Bryl did happen to come up here, how could they ever get past the tight cordon of monsters?

They could do enormous damage with the three Stones, blasting their way in—but Bryl was only one magic user. . .and spells could fail.

Tareah stopped and shivered from a cold that didn’t come from the ice corridors. What if Bryl didn’t succeed? What if all three Stones passed into the hands of the manticore? Normally she would have doubted that any monster could bear a taint of Sorcerer blood, but the ogre Gairoth had proven otherwise.

In the last days of the old Sorcerers, their race had been weak. They mated with the humans, trying to regain their fading magic; some of them, more desperate, had interbred with a few of their more horrendous creations. Who could say that in all of Siryyk’s horde not one monster could bring magic from the Stones?

It was a foolish risk to take, she knew. Delrael, with his constant overprotection of her, had certainly lectured enough about senseless risks.

She descended a narrow staircase and got to the ground level of the ice fortress. The human army could survive a long seige within the battlements. They had many supplies, and Enrod could always replenish them.

Winter had fallen on the northern hexes, and even without the Water Stone’s magic, the fortress would remain frozen for months. Tareah had done all she could here.

The need was greater elsewhere.

She slipped out a low side arch, one of the doorways Enrod had added for brief surprise strikes and retreats. He hadn’t expected her to be the first character to use it.

Under a few stars that stood in black patches of night around clumps of clouds, Tareah approached the western wall of the defenses. Most of Siryyk’s horde lay camped along the opposite side, but that didn’t mean other sentries wouldn’t be stationed around the fortress.

After midnight her allotment of spells had been replenished, and now Tareah took out the Water Stone. She rolled the sapphire on the ground but got only a “3.” Though she felt the magic surging through her, the dayid must not be helping her this time. It did not want her to take the Water Stone away.

She walked forward into the wall.

The ice clarified and puddled around her hands, turning into water as she stepped through the blocks. The water shimmered and sealed behind her, refreezing as she stepped through. The ice trickled away in front of her, and she emerged on the other side.

Cold water dripped from her garments and her long hair, but a thought through the Water Stone left her warm again. Tareah called up a thick night fog to cover her movements from any monsters that might be patrolling the area.

She hurried across the snow, following her ears to the Barrier River, which lay only half a hex away. Her body felt refreshed and tingling from touching so much magic in so little time. But this would be only the beginning. She covered the distance in less than an hour.

At last, after all her studying of the Game and its legends, she had embarked on her own adventure.

Tareah stood on the hex-line where the rushing water poured through from the northern sea, gushing among the rocks and frothing with chunks of ice. Tareah fashioned a wide, flat raft of solid transparent ice that showed the water foaming beneath it in large bubbles. She stepped onto her raft, squatted down in the center, and detached it from the black hex-line of the shore.

With a lurch, her raft pushed southward, reeling away at the speed of the current, bouncing and twisting. She dug her fingers into the ice, melting hand-holds for herself. The raft swirled, and as the Water Stone spell continued, she called up waves in the current.

Giant blue hands of froth and spray rose up, one after another in a flurry, pushing the raft and then dissolving into the water again. A constant stream of the watery hands shoved her faster and faster, doubling the speed of the current so that the raft skipped and bounced over the river surface.

Tareah’s hair whipped behind her, and she couldn’t stop herself from laughing. The dim hexes of the shore sped past, blurry and dizzying at her rate of movement. The watery hands pushed and slapped her along.

She had two more spells to last the rest of the night. By morning she would be many, many hexagons away.

#

Enrod carried a flickering torch—a torch, because he had used all his spells that day in rebuilding the fortress. The flames hissed and crackled. He held his hand near the fire to feel its warmth. The light glinted and flared along the ice stalactites.

He wandered among the museum Sardun had spent his lifetime compiling. Tareah’s father had sent out human Scavengers, paying them for any relic they could uncover of the old Sorcerers, jewels or manuscripts or weapons or tiny keepsakes—anything to legitimize his collection.

Sardun had annotated each object. Enrod found the blackened swords of two old Sorcerer generals, apparently the actual pair that the commanders had thrown into Stilvess Peacemaker’s death pyre. Or was it some other pyre? Enrod couldn’t remember.

Even before the fall of the Ice Palace, Sardun seemed to know that his museum would collapse, and he had taken great pains to preserve everything. Glowing protection wards and shielding fields hovered around all the relics. Though Enrod was the first to set foot in these restored vaults, everything seemed pristine, as it always must have been.

The vault spread out to the edges of the torchlight. Under a low ceiling in the far end he saw ranks of bodies positioned side by side with great reverence. These were the empty, dormant bodies of the old Sorcerers.

Most of the race had gathered together in the broad valley, Stilvess and other Sorcerer commanders sat in their tent, rolling and rolling dice until they achieved an impossible, perfect roll that would set off the Transition. All the old Sorcerers had waited there, except those who had chosen to remain behind like Enrod and Sardun.

After the Transition had worked and the lives of all the old Sorcerers had forged together into the Earthspirits and the Deathspirits, they had left their physical bodies behind, empty and dormant—not dead, but not alive.

Sardun and the others had carried all of the bodies here and erected the Ice Palace as their monument. Over the years, Sardun arranged the figures, labeling each one with the name they had carried in life.

Enrod stood in the oppressive closeness of the vaults. He could imagine the long, slow intake of breath, perhaps only once every minute or two as the old Sorcerers inhaled in unison, then let out an equally interminable exhale. Their heartbeats seemed to echo like distant, widely spaced drumbeats: a faint thump, a long, long pause, and then a smaller thump.

Enrod thought about Sardun’s demise. He could feel the dayid, he could feel all the lives of the Sentinels who had vanished in the interim years, calling upon the half-Transition to destroy themselves when they could no longer tolerate their lives. The voices whispered louder in his head.

Enrod looked out at the tomb of the undead Sorcerers and wondered if this was what they really wanted.

He turned away then and poked among the relics for a last few moments. In a small, unimpressive container he found the spell for invoking and commanding a gargoyle, one of the stone creatures formed by a single Sentinel’s wandering spirit.

Enrod looked at the spell, realizing that it could be useful. Below it he found written a single name for the gargoyle to be summoned: ARKEN.

#

The next morning Delrael awoke refreshed and tingling with a new energy. The Game had turned in his favor, and he felt eager for it now.

His father had fallen in the battle, but Delrael could make it up to him if he won the war, if he saved Gamearth—as Drodanis had charged him long ago in the Rulewoman’s message-stick.

His army could rest and recuperate here. The fighters could strike at the horde whenever the monsters approached too close. Delrael had only to wait—Vailret and Bryl held the key to the next step, the end game.

Delrael arose at first light and, before his other fighters could stir, he walked along the ice corridors and climbed one of the tall turrets to look out over the frozen desolation. The last scraps of an unusual morning fog blew away with the dawn.

On top he met one shivering sentry, a woman whose hair had blown about and tangled in the night breezes; she looked as if she had reached the limits of what she could endure. The cold air snapped the last of Delrael’s weariness away as he stood beside the sentry.

“They’re just starting to move now,” she said. He listened to her teeth chattering.

He watched the forms of Siryyk’s army. The horde moved around their main encampment like ants from a stirred-up colony. A few creatures had surrounded the ice fortress at strategic positions. But as the morning fog burned off, Delrael knew that the monster sentries had done little or no good in the darkness.

He watched a detachment of Slac march across the flat snow to reach higher ground, a hilly jumbled terrain of broken ice blocks and brown-stained snow. Plumes of steam poured up, like fumaroles from some underground volcanic vent.

But as the Slac detachment moved onto the hummocks, they suddenly scurried away. The ground began to move around them. The lumps cracked, and powdery snow blasted into the air. The steam thickened and gushed upward. A dark form burst out from beneath its blanket of snow and ice.

The Slac ran for their lives, dropping weapons and shields. Their black cloaks flapped behind them as they fled.

Great pointed wings snapped free of the ice. A long serpentine neck rose up, sporting a pointed head filled with jagged fangs. Snorts of flame gushed out of the beast’s mouth, blasting two of the Slac. The enormous wings beat, lifting the entire form.

A huge, metallic-looking dragon rose into the air, sweeping cold gusts around it and craning its head. The morning sun glinted on blue and tarnished-silver scales. The dragon turned its head to stare down at the monsters that had disturbed it.

The dragon looked formidable, though relatively small for such a creature. Seen in comparison to the little Slac, though, it appeared immense indeed. The monsters mobilized toward the new threat. Delrael could make out the giant form of Siryyk striding out to direct his horde.

But the dragon flew up, circling around and shrieking down at the monsters as if greatly annoyed. It circled, and then flapped its wings again. Ice and snow flaked off, dropping to the ground in a jagged rain. The dragon let out another shriek and then swooped toward the ice fortress.

Delrael ducked back inside and started to charge down the tower steps four at a time, stumbling and leaping, shouting as he went. He heard other sentries sounding the alarm. A dragon had destroyed the Ice Palace the first time, when Sardun had tried to defend it; Delrael didn’t know what he could do that Sardun hadn’t tried. His words echoed throughout the corridors.

“Rouse everyone! We’re under attack! A dragon! All characters to arms!”

The human fighters stirred as he burst into the main room below. Several grabbed weapons; others scrambled to get into armor; a few blinked groggily, fighting off a deep sleep. A handful of fighters followed Delrael out into the courtyard just as the dragon slapped up snow and ice crystals where it landed in an open spot behind the protection of the walls.

The dragon strutted around in the courtyard, blinking its eyes with audible clicks and breathing with the sound of wind moaning through a cave. “Bad monsters!” the dragon hissed in a broken, rumbling voice. The words sounded distorted from echoing out of such a long throat.

Delrael stopped, gawking up at it. The dragon seemed to have no hostile intent. He wondered if it merely sought refuge from further disturbance.

“No sleep! Bah!”

Then Delrael recognized a rubbed-raw scar on the dragon’s throat where the scales had been worn away long ago and had never grown back. The reptilian skin was discolored and hard, but Delrael remembered the thick iron collar.

“Rognoth!” he said.

The dragon stopped, swished its long tail and smacked it into an ice wall. It curled the tail around its haunches with a startled hiss. “Rognoth,” it said.

This had been Gairoth the ogre’s companion, the ogre who had originally captured Bryl and held him in the swamps before taking over the Stronghold. Gairoth had let the runt dragon gorge himself on all the Stronghold’s supplies—until Delrael brought back Tryos. The larger dragon, furious at his little brother, had chased Rognoth far to the north and lost him.

Rognoth had been in the frozen wasteland all this time, maturing, toughening.

Rognoth looked down at Delrael, then craned his neck forward to push his monstrous head close to the man’s face. Delrael stood firm.

The other fighters rushed out, saw their commander face-to-face with the dragon, and backed up. Many drew their bows; others held swords and spears, but didn’t know what to do.

Delrael felt the thick stench of the dragon’s breath pouring over him. Rognoth blinked his eyes again and reared back, as if finally recognizing him. “Delroth! Haw! Now I kill you!” he roared in a very good approximation of Gairoth’s voice.

Delrael thought at that moment that he was doomed, that Rognoth carried the ogre’s grudge as well. Gairoth had followed Delrael across the entire map, trying to catch him, and had finally died on the threshold of Scartaris. Now Rognoth would finish the job.

The dragon shook his enormous head and spat-sputtered flame and smoke into the air. “Stupid Gairoth! Haw! Haw! Hope I never see him again!”

Delrael wanted to laugh with relief. “Gairoth will never come,” he said. “We’ve taken care of him. We also took care of Tryos. They’ll never bother you. They are all dead. You’re safe.”

Rognoth flapped his wings and made a rumbling sound in his throat that sounded like a purr. “Then you are my friend, Delroth.”

Delrael felt relief wash over him like warm bathwater. He called to all his gathered fighters to stand down and to sheathe their weapons. “It’s all right now, it’s all right!”

But later, when he went to Tareah’s chambers to tell her the news, all he found was her note.

She had taken the Water Stone and left them.

22. Technological Fringe

“I told you how Enrod turned his back on his Sorcerer heritage, but others have done far worse. I have even heard of one human city where all the characters have forsaken magic! How can this be? Without magic, Gamearth cannot function. All of these characters must be insane.”

—Sardun the Sentinel

Tareah stopped and stared at the enormous city of Sitnalta; though exhausted from her long journey, she ran forward. Its size amazed her.

Tareah had never before encountered such a large city so close. After growing up with only Sardun for company in the entire Ice Palace, she found it difficult to conceive of so many characters packed together in buildings. All the noise and activity overwhelmed her.

Entering Sitnalta, she strained her neck to gawk up at the tall buildings, down at the machinery puttering along the alleys. Her astonishment felt so unusual to her. These buildings and characters and clanking devices seemed as amazing to her as the grandest legends of old Sorcerer battles.

Sardun had warned her of this place. A terrible city, where the characters turned away from all magic, he said. But her father had told Tareah many things she now questioned.

Sardun had convinced her that Delrael, like the great Game heroes, was the type of character she should most admire. But though Tareah respected Delrael for what he could do, for his bravery and his drive to win. . .she just didn’t find him interesting enough for her. Vailret was the one who captured her attention; but she had never told him that. She wondered what he would have to tell her about his quest for the Earth Stone. She needed to find him first.

Vailret and Bryl had gone to Rokanun, but they had to pass through here first. She would ask about them in the city, find out when they had departed for the island. If Vailret and Bryl had already returned, then she would have to catch them on their way back to Delrael’s army.

Somewhere a long distance away—it seemed to be deep beneath her, shielded perhaps by rock—Tareah could feel the tingling pull of the other Stones. The three remaining Stones together contained enough magic that she could sense it even here. The tingling grew stronger, and then vanished.

She couldn’t understand it, but she did learn one heartening thing—that the Air, Fire, and Earth Stones had indeed come together. Vailret and Bryl had succeeded in that much at least.

“Excuse me, please,” Tareah said to a muscular woman in a grease-stained jumpsuit. The woman tinkered with some kind of monitoring box connected to pipes and tubes that ran under the streets. She looked up, distracted, and turned, finally setting her eyes on Tareah. She blinked. “Yes, what is it?” Tareah saw a smudge of dark oil across the weathered wrinkles on her cheeks.

“I’m looking for two companions. Their names are Vailret and Bryl—Bryl is a magic-user, Vailret a scholar.”

“Oh, I don’t think I know them,” the woman said and then frowned. “A magic user? In Sitnalta? My!” She bent back to her work and continued tinkering with the metal box.

Tareah caught the attention of another man who strode purposefully along. He wore dark clothes beneath a white lab smock. He didn’t slow as she spoke to him, forcing her to turn and hurry along beside him.

“—a magic user, old, and he wears a blue cloak. He’s with a young man, blond hair.”

The Sitnaltan man didn’t turn to her as he hurried off. “No, neither of those sound familiar to me. Too much is happening in Sitnalta these days. I can’t keep track of all the characters who come and go. I’m busy now. We don’t have much time left.”

He grabbed a door and walked inside a tall building with low ceilings. Tareah followed after him. Her multi-colored skirt swished as she moved. “What do you mean you don’t have much time? Why won’t anybody talk to me?”

The man paced down a corridor. On either side Tareah could see rooms and tables strewn with glass tubes and bottles, experiments cooking, complicated notations scrawled on chalkboards. In one room several men and women sat by a table, throwing dice and chalking scores on a board; by the grim feverishness on their faces, she could tell they didn’t consider their efforts a game.

The man proceeded to the opposite side of the building, where a door led back out to the streets again. He shrugged out of his dirty lab coat, grabbed a clean one from a hamper, and pulled it on. He straightened his sleeves, then flashed a glance at her.

“The invisible force, of course. It controls a handful of characters at a time, and it knows how to cause excessive destruction. It seems random, chaotic. Despite concerted efforts of our greatest teams and our most brilliant solo inventors, we haven’t found a way to stop it.”

He stepped into the street. His black shoes slapped the steps.

“It used to happen four times a day, like clockwork. We charted it on a graph.” He turned and made squiggling motions with his fingers against the brick wall.

Tareah didn’t know what a graph was.

“But then two days ago it suddenly jumped to six times a day. How are we supposed to resist that? We can’t even understand what makes it work once. So—” He stopped and slipped his hands into the wide pockets of his lab coat.

“I apologize for our attitude. Welcome to Sitnalta—but perhaps you could come back some other time when we’re not quite so busy? Hmmm?”

He turned and walked off again. This time Tareah didn’t follow him.

An invisible force, Tareah thought. Controlling characters? Attacking Sitnalta? That made no sense. When the man had said the force struck four times a day, then suddenly increased to six times. . .something clicked inside her head. She couldn’t be sure what it meant.

While she stood pondering, Tareah leaned against a stone bench that ran along the side of the building. Scrawled in black and red markings on the smooth seat, she found nonsensical equations, numbers, and half-finished drawings of preposterous inventions. She imagined characters sitting there, doodling ideas while waiting for someone.

From a nearby alley, Tareah heard a loud clanking, mixed with the din of ratcheting and chugging, like the slow approach of a weary behemoth. She stood up. Other characters also looked around; they seemed excited. Whatever made the noise, it moved out of sight behind the tall buildings. Above one rooftop, she saw a misshapen dome move forward with a lurch.

Several characters hurried toward it, not afraid but curious. Tareah had seen so many wonders in the city that she followed, anxious to see what could be so spectacular that it amazed even the Sitnaltans.

Rounding the corner, Tareah came upon other characters staring up at a colossal metal giant, fully as tall as any construction in Sitnalta. Its hands each looked as large as Tareah’s entire body. The mechanical man had bulky legs of different alloys, draped with wires and cables and pulleys, with bolts to hold all the pieces together. Steam chugged up from an exhaust vent at the robot’s shoulder. Polished brass rivets glinted in the light. Blinking indicator lights flashed on its square metal chest.

Tareah heard the gears grind and the cables strain. The towering automaton lifted its left leg, bending at the knee, and dragging its foot off the ground. The robot pointed its toe and extended it forward for its next step, feeling its way, learning how to walk.

The automaton had been armored and shielded with protruding iron spikes at its joints. It looked formidable enough to ward off any attacker.

The automaton’s head looked like a square bucket huge enough to hold food for an entire army. Its unblinking eyes were great paned windows, one larger than the other. Behind the eye-windows, she saw the shadowy figure of a human character moving about, pulling at controls.

The automaton shuffled forward one more step, then raised its right arm as if flexing a muscle. It stepped toward the corner with a ponderous gait—its steps proved so enormous that it passed along at a respectable pace.

As the robot reached the corner, it swivelled on one foot to turn sideways and stepped forward again. It cut the corner too close and walked into the wall instead, slamming its shoulder into the bricks with a clang and a thud. Tareah watched crumbling shards of mortar tumble down.

The automaton stepped backward, prying one of its long shoulder spikes free of the wall. It shuffled sideways, then advanced again, but it still could not clear the corner. Striking the edge with its metal arm, the automaton spun partway around to face the wrong direction.

The robot repeated its back-step and forward-march one more time before it finally cleared the corner. By this time it had knocked down part of the building, leaving piles of brick on the ground.

The automaton swiveled at its waist to focus the eye-windows down at the ground. The right metal hand extended toward a pile of brick in the street.

The spectators observed all this with delighted expressions. Tareah glanced at them, then watched the robot again.

Its right hand struck the ground to the right of the bricks. In a separate motion, its fingers curled together—but it missed the target.

The automaton stood again, straightened both arms to its sides, then bent over a second time, extending the right arm. The curling metal fingers missed the bricks again. Moving with meticulous care, the huge metal fingers could not grasp a simple object. The automaton bent over and stopped at its best guess for where the bricks lay. Steam burped and bubbled out of the exhaust slit, but the robot halted.

Tareah saw the shadow moving behind the eye-windows, in and out of focus. A metal hatch opened in the metal figure’s back, swinging upward. A single character emerged, a man wearing a dark helmet that appeared so heavy it nearly stopped him from moving. He worked his way down steps and rungs on the outer surface of the automaton until he reached the ground.

Several of the Sitnaltans cheered and applauded. “Hooray for Professor Frankenstein!” someone shouted. Tareah looked at the man with sudden attention—Vailret had told her about the brilliant Frankenstein. The professor seemed to ignore the attention of the spectators.

Frankenstein went to where the metal hand lay a full two feet to the wrong side of the bricks. He stared at the automaton, swaying backward from the weight of the helmet on his head.

He went to the wide foot of the robot, muttering and grumbling to himself. He kicked the metal leg out of spite, then let out a disgusted sigh. “None of this ever happened when Jules was here.” He stopped beside the mechanical hand resting on the hex-cobbled streets.

Frankenstein bent over, putting his back underneath the broad cables and pipes of the automaton’s wrist. He heaved and strained with all his might, lifting the hand up, shuffling sideways and dropping it down on top of the bricks.

“There!” He pulled a shining ratchet from his pocket and used it to tighten and readjust nuts and cables in the wrist. Straining upward, he tweaked something in the automaton’s elbow. “How many times do I have to calibrate you?” he shouted up at it. “And why am I talking to you? You’re just a machine!”

Several Sitnaltans had dropped out of sight, back to their work. Tareah saw from their expressions that they were embarrassed to watch Frankenstein’s difficulty with his own invention.

Tareah went toward the professor, though, conscious of the menacing bulk of the automaton. “Are you Professor Frankenstein?” she asked.

He stood up and swivelled his body at the waist to look at her. The heavy helmet gave him difficulties in turning his neck. He gazed at her with no recognition. “Who are you?” Then he frowned because, by her sapphire Water Stone and her hand-made clothes, Tareah obviously did not belong in Sitnalta.

She took two more steps toward him. The giant automaton looked even more awesome. She stared at the countless connections and adjusting nuts, pulleys, all the tiny systems Frankenstein had installed.

“My name is Tareah,” she said. “I’m a friend of Vailret’s and Bryl’s. Vailret told me about you, about the last time he came here to Sitnalta. They rescued me from the dragon.”

Frankenstein looked at her, pursing his lips. “Yes. They thought you were someone important, I seem to recall.”

“My father was Sardun.” She paused and, with some astonishment, realized that he did not recognize the name. “Sardun the Sentinel.”

“Was he a magic user?” Frankenstein asked.

She couldn’t believe what she heard. “Of course he was a magic user. He was a Sentinel. My father built the Ice Palace. He was one of the most powerful characters on Gamearth!”

“Not here he wasn’t,” Frankenstein said. “Wouldn’t have been able to make an ice cube this side of the technological fringe. Magic doesn’t work here, or at least it didn’t. Does that mean you’re a magic user, too? A good one?”

She drew herself up, trying to look impressive. “One of the last two on the whole map who carries full Sorcerer blood.”

Frankenstein’s dark eyes lit up with enthusiasm. “Ah! That could be most useful, then. Cover some of the contingencies in my plan.”

Before the professor could elaborate further, they heard shouts and mutterings. Tareah looked around. A broken brick struck the cobblestones at her feet, throwing shards in a star-shaped pattern.

Frankenstein held onto the side of his mechanical man and craned backward to look up. Characters had gone out on the crumbling rooftop of the building broken by the automaton. They shouted and moved stiffly, picking at the bricks and pelting them down.

Two shards clanged on the broad back of the robot. “Stop that!” Frankenstein yelled. Then the Sitnaltans started throwing bricks at him.

Other characters came down the street, but Tareah saw from their contorted expressions and bizarre synchronous movements that they were all being guided, driven by something she could not see. “What is this?” she asked.

“Oh, bother—they’re doing it again!” Frankenstein groaned. “I’m protected by my helmet, but you’d better come with me inside Drone. Wouldn’t want the controller to get hold of a magic user.”

A rain of bricks pattered down on the street and bounced off the metal hull of the mechanical man. One ricocheted and struck Frankenstein’s shoulder. “Ow! Time to go. Come on!”

The professor grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the nearest metal leg. He scrambled up the footholds and handholds to the hatch, swaying with exaggerated movements because of his helmet. Tareah slipped once, then climbed up after him. She stumbled through the hatch.

Frankenstein had seated himself in the cramped control compartment. “This was never meant for two characters, but we’ll make do. You’re shielded in here. Close that hatch!”

Tareah reached up and pulled the metal lid down. Rocks and bricks continued to strike the automaton, making dull echoes inside.

“You can lock it down with those flanges on the side.” She fumbled with the metal strips and soon had the hatch secured.

“Hang on.” Frankenstein pulled controls and steering levers. “No more time for practice.” He leaned back in his seat, and Tareah grabbed onto a support handle as the bulky automaton straightened at the waist. The professor played with the panel in front of him, turning dials, punching buttons, and engaging gears.

The inner compartment moved and shuddered. She heard the hiss of steam. Drone lifted one foot and set it down again. It began to walk.

All around her she saw a cluttered chaos of controls and wires; the metal floor of the pilot compartment felt warm where heaters boiled water for the steam engine. She could smell oil and grease and stuffy air in the chamber.

“Why did they start attacking you?” she asked. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Six times a day. I certainly hope I can find the source and stop it. I am beginning to lose patience.”

Tareah looked through the two eye-windows installed directly in front of where Frankenstein sat. She stared from one to the other down at the street; the view jumped, and Tareah saw that the panes of the left eye-window had been set at angles, curved into lenses so that the view out of one eye was magnified from what she saw through the other.

Drone jerked and bounced as it moved away. Outside, the Sitnaltan characters converged, and the steady patter of blows continued to ring on the hull of the automaton. Lines of characters stood on the rooftops, throwing things.

“Where are we going? How can we get away from this?” she said.

But Frankenstein jerked feverishly at the levers and tried to do dozens of things at once. He spoke to her in a clipped voice through lips that barely moved. “Don’t bother me! This is taking all my concentration.”

Tareah stared at the controlled characters around them. Every day this had happened four times, forcing the Sitnaltans to destroy their own buildings; recently the attacks had increased to six times a day.

Then her jaw slowly opened. A magic user with one Stone would have four spells a day. If that same magic user somehow obtained two more Stones—say, the Fire Stone and the Air Stone—the spell allotment would increase to six.

“Oh, no!” she said. The professor didn’t seem to hear her, but he glanced up when she spoke again. “That invisible force—it’s the Earth Stone! Someone is using the Earth Stone to do this.”

23. The Last March of the Old Sorcerers

“Commanding an army is much more complex than leading a small group of questers. A good commander must play all his forces as a unit, much as the Outsiders play the characters on Gamearth “

—General Doril, Memoirs of the Scouring

After only a few days inside the ice fortress, Delrael’s army grew restless, angry to go out and fight again. But Delrael bided his time, safe inside the high walls.

The manticore led three separate assaults against the fortress. Delrael’s fighters took great glee in shooting arrows or throwing spears at the approaching monsters. Siryyk’s troops could not scale or penetrate the ice walls.

The humans suffered only a single loss—one man who stood carelessly away from any of the defenses, laughing down at the impotent monsters. A stray arrow caught him in the chest, and he toppled over the wall. If the wound did not kill him instantly, the fall broke at least his legs, and the monsters rushed up to grab their symbolic captive. They dragged him away and made a great show of plunging their spears and swords into his form.

Delrael’s fighters grew angrier.

In the days since Tareah had taken the Water Stone away, their morale had initially dropped and then returned to its former high. The characters felt invincible within the ice fortress, and they were tired of waiting.

The fighters sat down against ice walls or hunched crosslegged on the floor. Many kept blankets around them, most wore their armor. Small groups amused themselves with dice games or tic-tac-toe scratched into the ice with knife points. Delrael spoke with them at least once a day, asking for their suggestions.

One woman with short brownish hair and wide-set dark eyes stood up and waved her hand. Delrael nodded for her to speak.

“I think we should strike a quick blow. A quick one. March out, attack, use our element of surprise, and then hurry back in! Our losses should be minimal. Just think of what damage we could do to the monsters.”

Minimal losses, Delrael thought. Drodanis and the remaining Black Falcon troops had been ‘minimal losses.’ The other fighters in the chamber murmured their agreement. One man who remained seated, huddled in his blanket, said, “At least we’d be moving around. It’s always so cold in this place.”

“It would be foolish to go out and attack!” Delrael raised his voice. They had been through this before, and his decision remained. “There’s no reason for more of our characters to die. The horde still outnumbers us.”

Romm stood up. A flush passed across his pale skin. “If you don’t think each of us can kill at least two monsters, Delrael, then we’re not suitable fighters. What difference does it make if they outnumber us?”

Delrael frowned. “Look, Siryyk is getting desperate. He’s already lost half of his fighters, and he has no more supplies. They only have enough wood to make one or two campfires every night. We can just wait him out and laugh at him in here.”

“Some commander,” one character mumbled, but Delrael couldn’t see who it was.

“What if Tareah and Bryl don’t come back with the Stones?” someone else shouted. Delrael chose to ignore that possibility.

Old Siya turned her head toward Delrael and kept her voice low, speaking to him alone, but her words carried well in the cold air of the broad chamber. “Fighting monsters is what the Game is all about, Delrael. Isn’t that what you always said? You can’t win by sitting and waiting. What would Drodanis think of you?”

Delrael scowled. “That’s uncalled for, Siya.”

She scowled right back at him.

“Wait!” Enrod said from the wall. He had held his hand against the ice block for so long that water trickled down; when the Sentinel removed his palm, Delrael could see a dark indentation from where his body heat had pressed the skin into the wall. Enrod’s hair remained wild, and his eyes clicked back and forth, as if tracking and trying to focus on something.

He paused at inappropriate times in his sentence. “I know how . . .we can win this game.” Enrod drew several deep breaths; just when Delrael thought he had completely lost his train of thought, the Sentinel swiveled his head. He met Delrael with a piercing gaze.

“Kill Siryyk. That alone—” He paused again, and then locked his eyes on Siya, and then out into the audience at Romm, as if he were playing a kind of staring game. “Will do a lot of damage. Siryyk commands them. Kill Siryyk. The monsters won’t know what to do then.”

The other fighters muttered agreement or questions. Enrod laughed. Delrael said, “But how would you kill him?”

The Sentinel nodded, but answered a different question. “A Slac general will lead after Siryyk falls.” Enrod grinned. “Then the Slac will feel favored in the army. The other monsters won’t like that. There’ll be in-fighting before—”

He stopped, stretched out his hand to the wall again and carefully lined up his fingers and his palm with the indentation he had already melted into the ice. “You see? I still have fire!”

“How would you kill the manticore?” Delrael asked again, raising his voice this time.

Enrod looked at his fingers and the ice; then with his other hand he reached inside his tattered robe to pull out a small scroll. Delrael could see words written on its surface.

Enrod nodded. “Arken.”

#

Siya stepped into the courtyard and felt the biting cold on her hands and arms. She had not bothered to bundle up. Standing next to the dragon would keep her warm.

She carried a large cauldron, swinging it to keep her balance. She stepped out under the muffled sky. The metal pot remained warm from the noon meal.

Rognoth the dragon beat his tarnished-silver wings and craned his neck, already waiting for her. As the dragon moved, Siya smelled a rank warmth that overwhelmed the cold.

Rognoth bowed his long neck and hissed as he stuck his head into the cauldron and began lapping out the leftovers. His breaths sounded like a blacksmith’s bellows echoing within the chamber. She heard the scraping sound of his tongue against the inner surface.

She had been bringing food, scraps, and garbage to the dragon since he had arrived. Rognoth distracted her from the haunting images in her head—Drodanis, an insignificant black figure falling in a rain of rock down the infinite cliff slope, or thoughts of her husband Cayon battling to the death out in the forest someplace without her.

What did these two know that she did not? What had Siya failed to understand? It seemed so clear how her life should be lived; and yet these questers who went out for adventure and swordplay and bloodshed. . .they seemed to know something. Siya looked around herself every day. She watched Delrael. She tried to understand.

“More?” Rognoth said, sticking his head into the cauldron again and plucking it back out. Globs of porridge stuck around his nostrils and pointed chin.

“No more,” she said. “Later.” They went through this ritual every day.

“More?” Rognoth said in a quieter voice, then turned his head away, as if in deep disappointment.

Siya reached into her cloak and took out five biscuits. “Here,” she said and tossed them to him. Delighted, the dragon snapped them up and seemed satisfied.

Rognoth appeared strong and happy, vibrant with energy. She looked at him and felt a pang inside herself. Even this dragon knew his place in Gamearth. He knew something she didn’t know.

The dragon lowered his head, and Siya felt warmth radiating from his nose and throat. He spoke again, the longest conversation he had ever had with her.

“Gairoth bad to me. Tryos bad to me.” He raised his head.

“Yes, they were bad to you,” she said.

“But you—nice.” He drew the last sound out into a long hiss, and then said it again. “Nice!”

Not sure she could stand anymore of this, Siya hurried back inside, leaving the empty cauldron with the dragon.

#

Long after darkness, when Enrod summoned up the magic to call Arken forth, he heard the whispering voices of the dayid within his mind. Any time he had worked magic inside the fortress, the voices tugged at him, distracted him, called to him. But Enrod didn’t mind. He was accustomed to hearing voices in his head. They kept him company.

Enrod watched the lump of rock protruding from the packed snow in the courtyard behind the ice walls. Moonlight shone down, making the rock dark with exaggerated shadows. Two characters held torches under the tall arches, lighting the area with reflected orange. Trickles of water ran down the ice walls next to the flames, then refroze before they reached the ground.

“Arken!” Enrod said again under his breath.

The boulder shifted, elongated, until it formed itself into a bulky body. The bottom half split vertically and thinned into two pillars that became legs. Arm columns lifted up. Protrusions from the back of the stone torso extended into wings. The forehead shoved forward and cracked open to show a single crystalline eye.

Clumps of snow clung in rough spots of the gargoyle, but they fell off as Arken moved and took a single step. “I am called again?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

Delrael went forward to take charge. Enrod watched, flicking his gaze to the gargoyle then to Delrael, back and forth, trying to see everything at once.

“We need to ask your help, Arken. Do you remember us?”

The blocky stone head turned, but all expression was lost on the rough features. “Of course, traveler. But is Scartaris not destroyed? I could feel that when it happened. I was free.”

Delrael nodded. “We need you to fight against the manticore who now leads his army.”

“Manticore?” Arken said. His stiff stone wings pried open and then closed again with a crunching sound. “Ah! It will be good to fight him again. He destroyed me last time.”

“Go out at night and wander among the creatures encamped around the ice fortress,” Delrael said. “In the morning when the other monsters can see, you’ll challenge Siryyk to single combat. We hope you can kill him.”

After a moment, the gargoyle spoke. “The manticore has already defeated me once.”

Enrod spoke up, clutching the scroll he had found in Sardun’s vaults. “Then we will summon you again! And again!”

Arken swung his head from side to side in a stiff motion. “No, fashioning this body grows more difficult each time. When Scartaris forced me to return and serve him—twice—I lost much of my strength. You see—” He held out one arm; the hand was just a blocky lump of stone without fingers. “I have done a poor job this time. It will get worse.”

Enrod crumpled the scroll in his hand. “Kill Siryyk the first time.”

#

The manticore strode out of his tent, slashing at the flaps with his claws. The burning sores on his face felt worse, continuing to burn from the venom Enrod had blasted at him.

Siryyk heard preparations among his troops, but he ignored them. He shook his maned head to clear away the last muddled nightmares, the backwash of fear and the Outsider David’s loss of control.

The Game would end soon, one way or another.

Siryyk had to capture the Stones before the time came. He didn’t know what he would do with them, but somehow their enormous magic could shield him. And if that didn’t work, and they were all going to die anyway—then Siryyk would use the Sitnaltan weapon to destroy everything, the Outsiders along with Gamearth.

The horde had trampled most of the snow and ice in the area, leaving only bare rocks and frozen footprints. General Korux watched as two Slac scooped snow into the boiler of the steam-engine car, making it ready. On its front seat sat the Sitnaltan weapon that Professor Verne had repaired. Other monsters wandered about, none of them knowing what to do. They were growing hungry, Siryyk knew. The human riders had ruined most of their supplies.

Three small goblins used pumice to scour off oxidation from the surface of Verne’s cannon. Today, Siryyk decided, he would blast the ice walls down.

Out of a nearby group of demons, a bulky stone figure plodded forward. Siryyk turned toward him. A gargoyle. . .he did not recall having seen this creature in his army before.

Then the manticore remembered him—Arken, the gargoyle who had broken from Scartaris’s control and attacked him instead. Siryyk had blasted him into shards of broken stone—

“Siryyk, I bring you a message from Delrael,” the gargoyle said.

Siryyk let out a rumbling roar, not knowing what Arken wanted. The other monsters stopped what they were doing and turned to watch. The manticore raised his scorpion tail, feeling the angry energy just behind the stinger. He wanted to destroy the messenger, but first he wanted to hear what Arken had to say.

“What is this message?” Siryyk said, rearing up to glare down at the blocky gargoyle.

In response, Arken bunched up one mammoth arm and put his entire body behind an enormous roundhouse punch, striking upward and cracking into Siryyk’s jaw.

The manticore stumbled one step backward with an astonished grunt, swayed, then fell into a sitting position. He tried to clear the black explosions of pain from his head. The world spun.

He must have lost consciousness for a few seconds, plunged into distorted dreams of the Outside. Vaguely, he realized that the other monsters were firing arrows and throwing spears at the gargoyle. Some left little white nicks on the stone, but otherwise caused no damage.

Siryyk shook his head. Blood dribbled down the side of his black lips, and he could feel a splintering ache in his mouth. The instant his vision cleared, he spat out a roar mixed with flying droplets of blood He lurched to his feet again and, throwing all his energy into the attack, he struck out with his scorpion tail.

But Arken had already stepped out of the way. When the flying mud and dazzling light cleared, Siryyk turned, still dizzy, and faced the clumsy gargoyle again. Other monster fighters had gathered around to watch the duel.

Siryyk struck a second time, but the moment before his stinger touched the slow-moving gargoyle, Arken’s stone arms and legs flowed back into a shapeless boulder. The manticore’s tail exploded the rock into flying sharp shards.

Then Arken emerged from another boulder by his side, fashioning stone arms and legs and striding forward out of the rock. Before Siryyk could turn, Arken slammed his fist into the manticore’s leonine body, cracking ribs.

Siryyk reared up, bringing both paws together in a hammering blow. He caught the gargoyle’s two wings between them and snapped off the sheets of stone. He struck with the stinger once more, but again the gargoyle vanished from the rock. The manticore felt drained, propped up only by the anger and the pain in his body. He had already expended most of his power.

Behind him, Arken strode forward out of a new rock, but this time he seemed thicker, more clumsily formed. He moved much slower.

Siryyk turned to attack with his weakened stinger, and the gargoyle slid out of the boulder, escaping into yet another rock. The manticore’s small bolt of power only splintered pieces of the stone surface.

Siryyk turned around and around, looking for the gargoyle to reappear. His head still screamed from the pain of the first punch from Arken’s fist; his cracked ribs sent stabs through his chest. But he could not show weakness in front of the other monsters.

He found one boulder slowly moving. Its outline pushed and reformed into a vague silhouette of Arken. But the figure seemed only half-completed, and then it stopped all motion, looking like a statue that had weathered away over the centuries. Siryyk panted and stared, wondering what the gargoyle’s trick was.

But nothing happened. The gargoyle did not move farther, all his energy expended. The monsters began to whisper; some cheered.

Siryyk strode forward, trying not to limp, and used his left paw to topple the petrified gargoyle. Arken broke in half among the other rocks.

#

Delrael stood atop the ice fortress, shading his eyes to make out the last details of Arken’s duel. The gargoyle failed in the end.

Delrael clenched his fist, seeing the knuckles turn white in the cold. He looked around at the other towers, where the sentries observed in silence. The wind whipped around the blocky battlements where more characters watched the duel. He heard their indrawn mutterings of disappointment.

Enrod had not even stayed to watch Arken’s contest. Instead, the Sentinel wandered through the ice fortress, speaking out loud to no one, stopping, and turning back the way he had come. He seemed to be debating with himself.

Arken’s fight stirred up the monster horde, though. The Slac general stood beside the wounded manticore as the other creatures waved weapons and yelled curses at the ice walls.

One of the sentries on the opposite tower called out and pointed. Several characters on the battlements looked down, craning their necks to see.

Across the snow ran a single figure dressed in armor and carrying a sword. Faint words drifted back in the cold air as the character shouted a challenge at the monsters. “Will no one fight me in single combat?” The figure stopped some distance from the monsters, planted feet squarely in the snow, and held the sword high.

“What!” Delrael blinked his eyes in astonishment. “Who is that?”

The creatures shouted and rushed forward, clattering their weapons. The single human figure did not move from the battle stance.

“Who is that?” Delrael shouted again, turning around.

Romm scrambled up the tower stairs and stood out of breath. “It’s Siya!” he said. He gulped in a breath. “She took a sword and some armor.”

“What?” Delrael grabbed onto the balcony wall. “Siya!” he bellowed as loud as he could into the wind. She couldn’t hear him. He whirled back at Romm. “What the hell is she doing?”

Reeling and angry, the manticore stormed forward to her. Siryyk snarled at the other monsters readying their arrows and spears. “The human is mine!”

Romm beat a fist against the ice wall. “We have to march now, Delrael! Get every fighter out there. We can save her.”

But Delrael saw the monsters approaching her only seconds away. They could never even get down the stairs in time. “It won’t do any good,” he whispered.

Siya looked ridiculously puny in front of the enormous manticore. Her sword looked too small to cause damage even if Siryyk did nothing at all to defend himself.

“Delrael!” Romm cried. “We have to go now!”

Delrael whirled to snap at him. “It’ll take at least half an hour to get our army out there. Think! She’s going to die in the next few minutes!”

With a flurry of smoke and fire, Rognoth burst into the air from behind the ice fortress. The sunlight glinted off his silvery-blue scales; his wings swirled the snow as he swooped down over the monster army.

“Leave her alone!” the dragon shrilled.

Siya craned her head upward, pointing her sword in the air. Rognoth coughed out short bursts of fire, torching four of the nearest creatures. The backbeat of his wings demolished a pavilion set up on the packed ground.

The manticore reared back at his true enemy. Rognoth flew down, attempting to land in front of Siryyk, but instead he crashed full into the monster commander.

Siya stumbled backward, away from the battle between dragon and manticore. Delrael, thinking fast, shouted down to the other gathered fighters. “Send Ydaim Trailwalker and Tayron Tribeleader! They’re our fastest runners! Go fetch Siya! Take her away from there.”

Siryyk reached up with both powerful forepaws and wrapped them around Rognoth’s neck. The curved lion’s claws scraped on silver scales, sending up a shower of sparks.

Rognoth threw his weight forward, pushing his leverage. His wings flapped, driving him farther. His own forelegs were weak, but he spat fire onto the manticore’s back and neck.

Siryyk twisted around to bring his scorpion tail up. Its end flickered with a skittering blue glow. The stinger struck and struck again into Rognoth’s armored side. Weakened from the recent battle with Arken, the manticore could not summon much power. But each blow blasted a dark hole in the dragon’s tarnished scales.

Delrael watched two khelebar streak out from the ice fortress walls, moving like reflections on the snow. Most of the monster army watched the titanic duel between Siryyk and the dragon, as did Siya.

“Why doesn’t she run out of there?” Delrael muttered to himself. His jaw hurt from the angry clenching of his teeth.

Ydaim and Tayron dashed up to her and, without pausing, snatched Siya from the ground. She struggled, but Ydaim grabbed her sword and Tayron forced her onto Ydaim’s back.

Rognoth hissed and craned his neck, snapping with sharp teeth at the manticore’s back. Siryyk stung again with his tail but doing little serious damage.

General Korux took up a jagged-tipped spear and rushed forward to stab at the dragon’s body. The scaled armor deflected the first blow, but when Korux recovered, he plunged the blade into one of the blackened wounds Siryyk had already made. The spear tip sank into an exposed area on Rognoth’s flank.

The dragon yowled and belched a scattered ball of fire at Korux. The spear shaft snapped out of his hand, and the Slac general fled, taking part of the flames on his shoulder. He rolled in the snow to extinguish himself.

Rognoth bent down to snap at the spear shaft embedded in his side.

Siryyk shifted his grip with his claws and tore at the wide band of scarred skin on the dragon’s throat, the patch where Gairoth’s iron collar had long ago worn away all scales.

Rognoth squawked and choked, flapping his wings to get away. Siryyk dug his long claws into the unprotected flesh and sheared sideways, then he lunged forward and sank his own fangs into Rognoth’s exposed throat.

Blood spurted, and the dragon no longer made any noise, just a long whistle of air hissing down the gurgling tunnel. The manticore reached deeper with his claws, tearing and roaring and stinging repeatedly with the scorpion tail.

The dragon’s spine snapped from the inside.

Siryyk tossed the dragon’s limp neck on the ground, smashing Rognoth’s head into an exposed outcropping of rock. Stepping away from the carcass, the manticore roared his victory.

The other monsters picked up the cry.

#

Come to us.

Join us.

You are the last.

Enrod stood with his hands at his sides, deep in Sardun’s vaults. The voices of the dayid spoke to him. He could see little light here, only a faint glow trickling through the thick ice. He had brought no torch with him this time; that would have shamed him in the company of his race.

You belong here.

Enrod had resisted this for centuries. He had watched Gamearth continue after the Transition, when only a few Sentinels remained. During the generations of the horrible Scouring, the Sentinels had assisted human characters in fighting off ogres and Slac; they helped the humans establish a stable society. As time passed, more of the Sentinels, seeing their work either finished or pointless, had annihilated themselves in a half-Transition that liberated their spirits and destroyed their bodies.

You are the last one!

But Enrod had never given up. He turned all of his enthusiasm into helping human characters. That battle would never be over, but he felt so old now and so tired. He had played the Game for more turns than any other character. He had avoided this for so long, and now it seemed the only way.

It was the last thing he could do, a proper sacrifice and a fitting end. It would cleanse everything else from his mind. He would go through the half-Transition himself. Now. It would liberate enough energy to resurrect all the old Sorcerer bodies.

He stood in the dimness and walked toward the sloping ceilings where, in shadow, lay all the frozen bodies that had not moved since the Transition.

“You will help now,” he said to them. “Yes, help. You will march out and fight. Fight until you drop. Feel no pain because you are not alive.” He made a fist. “Real soldiers. Not just players like before, with other characters to do your fighting.”

He bent down and looked at the motionless face of a middle-aged woman. Somewhere in the back pockets of his mind he should know her name, but it had been too long. He saw the frost in her hair, on her eyelids, on her cheeks.

He kept smiling in the dimness. “Do this for your human inheritors.”

He moved to another man whose gray-streaked hair hung braided over his left ear. Enrod placed his hand on the man’s frozen cheek, letting his own body heat soften the frozen flesh. Enrod bent close so that his breath warmed the man’s face.

“You can make up for abandoning the humans. I think you owe it to them, don’t you?”

He bent over the next motionless body. “Don’t you?”

Enrod stood, still crouching under the low ceiling. “Like an old Sorcerer council!” He raised his voice, letting his words echo from the ice. “Does any of you object?” He laughed. “I thought not!”

He stepped back to the center of the vaults where he could stand tall again. “All right, then, dayid. Take me now. I’m ready.”

He closed his eyes and hissed a long breath through his teeth. Deep within himself, he concentrated, pulled together threads of power into a pattern he had always known but had never dared to attempt. When he made the last connection, he squeezed his fiery eyes shut. A single tear oozed down his cheek.

And then he released it all with an exhale. The total magic he had learned through his long lifespan surged out, spewing through his veins, his muscle fibers, exploding out of every cell in his body. He saw an incredible light brighter than a thousand suns behind his eyelids. His body twisted, spiralled, spun into a cyclone of his own making.

He tapped into the vortex of the dayid below the ice fortress. Enrod felt it join him, help him along, increase his power. He knew what he wanted, and the dayid had already agreed.

All the power shot outward, melting the walls of the vault so that water gushed down the bricks into freezing stalactites. Steam swirled in the room as the magic spilled into the bodies of every one of the old Sorcerers lying there.

When nothing remained of Enrod the individual, silence hung for just a moment in the devastated vaults.

Then the bodies began to stir. The old Sorcerers sat up without blinking their eyes, staring straight ahead. They began to march.

#

Delrael ran down to the courtyard as Tayron and Ydaim hurried through the low gate, bearing an unconscious Siya between them. Though she could not hear him, Delrael became livid and shouted at her anyway.

“What do you think you’re doing? I’m in command here! No one goes out without my permission!”

At that moment lights shot through the ice of the fortress, and steam poured out the windows.

“What’s going on now!” Delrael held his arms up in exasperation as well as fear. He looked around but nobody could answer him. He guessed what it was. “Where’s Enrod?” He stormed back toward the main entrance to the ice fortress.

Other characters came running out of the doorway, flashing glances behind them. Several of the sentries had tumbled down from the turret stairs in terror.

Parts of the frozen courtyard slumped. Snow melted in puddles as cracks opened in the ground and hot steam pushed out. Delrael planted his feet to keep his balance steady. He took a deep breath. The rest of his soldiers milled around in confusion. Too much had happened all at once.

Delrael felt the anger bubbling within him again. “I’m supposed to be in command of this army! Why does every character do whatever he pleases without telling me?”

Then the first ranks of old Sorcerers marched out of the fortress.

Delrael stared, speechless. Hundreds of powerful characters shuffled ahead, but he recognized none of them. They wore ancient robes and jewels and had long hair styled in the manner of Sorcerer lords and ladies he had seen on paintings and mosaics. He recalled all the frozen bodies that had been under the fortress.

The old Sorcerers marched out as if directed by something else. The dayid? Or Enrod? Delrael’s own soldiers hurried out of the way as the resurrected characters moved toward the wall of ice.

A faint pearly glow surrounded the Sorcerers. They carried their ancient swords; some bore shields, others had taken the weapons Siya stockpiled within the fortress. Several went toward the older characters from the Stronghold village, the ones who would not fight, and commandeered their swords. Shocked, the villagers did not resist.

One Sorcerer woman, tall and thin with an angular face and unblinking vacant eyes, walked over to where Siya still lay only half-conscious. The Sorcerer woman picked up Siya’s sword, and walked back to join the ranks.

They lined up and pushed forward, more than a hundred of them, five across and twenty deep. They stood with their faces only inches from the tall barrier wall.

The ice rippled, clarified, and then crawled away from them, opening up an broad gate, a portal for the old Sorcerer army. At an unheard signal, they all moved forward, raising their swords to an attack position. They trotted out to meet Siryyk’s army, without a battle cry, without a sound.

Before Delrael could call after them and before some of his own fighters could think to run after and join in the battle, the ice wall bunched and rose, sealing them within the protection of the ice fortress.

Outside, the monsters howled and charged forward, seeing their enemy out to face them at last.

The old Sorcerer army marched out to meet them.

Interlude: Outside

David stared at the hexagons on the map. The black lines reminded him of an intricate net to trap him.

Outside, the wind from the storm sounded like the flapping fabric of a tent as visions of the manticore flickered behind his mind. He sat cross-legged, as he had for the past hour, and ignored his aching knees. His cheek still stung from his injury, much like Siryyk’s face must have felt.

A sharp thunder of pain went through his head—sympathetic hurt from the manticore? He squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’ve got an idea,” Tyrone said. “And it’s my turn.”

David looked up at Tyrone. Scott went to try the phone again, but he heard nothing this time, not a dial tone, not Lellyn’s voice. Melanie smiled at Tyrone, encouraging him.

She had lost the gargoyle and her Rognoth character—who had originally been played by David, back when he introduced Gairoth the ogre—but she had also saved Siya, and now launched an entirely unexpected fighting force against David’s manticore. Pleased with the game, she continued to flash defiant glances at him.

“I know you guys don’t think I know what’s going on,” Tyrone said. “But I do! I’m just so amazed, that’s all. I mean, who will ever believe us anyway? Rule #1, always have fun. Isn’t that what we said when we started this?” He looked at them.

“This is all straight out of the Twilight Zone. But think about it: if the Game can come out here and lock our doors and mess with the TV and the phone, and if it can blow up my mom’s kitchen table, and draw its blue line on the map, and if Lellyn’s ghost or whatever can come to talk to us. . .well, hey, what’s to stop us from going in?”

“It can’t work that way,” Scott said.

Tyrone turned on Scott. He had been pouting ever since Scott shouted at him before. “Listen, Mr. Science, you don’t know how it works any more than the rest of us. Why should it be any different? We’re the ones who came up with the rules in the first place. If I roll—” He grabbed up the transparent twenty-sided die from beside the splintered edge of Melanie’s map. “Say, a seventeen or better, what’s to stop me from going inside Gamearth?”

“Tyrone, don’t you dare,” David said.

Melanie stared down at the white hexagons of frozen wasteland. “There’s a battle going on down there. Are you sure you want—”

“A battle is the most exciting place! David plays Siryyk, but I’m handling the rest of the monsters. I handled the Black Falcon troops, and all the other fighters. I can certainly handle this.”

David grabbed his arm. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Tyrone jerked away. “Quit telling me what to do! It’s my turn, and I’m rolling.”

“Don’t!” Scott shouted.

Tyrone tossed the crystalline die on the carpet. It came to rest by the edge of the map, showing a perfect “20.” Gamearth definitely wanted him in.

Tyrone vanished.

Scott stood with his mouth wide and gaping. Melanie let out a gasp, choking in a quick breath. David hung his head.

“What do we do now?” Scott whispered.

#

The snow under his feet felt real and wet and cold. Tyrone wore only his socks.

The air smelled different, biting and clean. The afternoon sun shone bright in his eyes after the artificial light of the fireplace and the lamps in David’s family room.

“Wow!” he said, looking up into the sky with astonishment. He didn’t even notice the wind through his thin shirt. “It worked!”

He turned and saw the magnificent ice fortress, glinting like something out of Disneyland. Tyrone kept making unintelligible sounds of disbelief.

He saw the marching ranks of old Sorcerers coming toward him, exactly as he had pictured them in his mind. All four of the players must have had the same visions to create something as real as this. “Wait’ll I get back and tell them about this!”

Then he heard the shouting and the din of drawn weapons. He whirled to see the monster horde charging at him.

His nightmarish visions of reptilian monsters and sharp teeth and pointed blades had been only pale outlines of what he saw now. Even the most spectacular movie special effects had never been able to hint at the hideousness of these alien creatures.

They saw Tyrone and surged in his direction.

But he had created them. The monster horde with all its evil fighters were his own characters. He had moved them about, played them, used them to strike on the campaign. “Stop!” he said. But none of them noticed.

Too late, Tyrone realized that he should run.

#

The air in the family room made a wet, hissing sound, like rain falling on hot metal. Then Tyrone’s body reappeared.

He sprawled on the carpet, not moving. Blood oozed from a hundred separate stab wounds. His battered face and open, staring eyes held an expression of profound disbelief.

Melanie screamed and shrank away.

Scott retched, grabbing some old newspapers in a useless gesture to protect the floor as he vomited. His glasses fell off as he stumbled to the kitchen. David heard the water running.

He knelt down beside Tyrone and rolled him over to expose the horrible gashes that tore open his chest and abdomen. He saw no use in checking for a pulse, but he did anyway. “He’s dead.”

Scott stood by the entrance to the family room, shaking. Without his glasses he appeared strangely vulnerable. “It’s just a game! It’s just a game, dammit!” His voice had a thin, whining tone. “What are we going to do? We can’t keep playing a stupid game! Tyrone’s dead!”

Melanie looked at David, and he felt a kind of communion between them. She glared at the map of Gamearth as if it had betrayed her.

“It’s not a game,” David said. He held one of the crystalline dice in his hand. Tyrone’s blood still clung to his fingers and smeared on the transparent facets of the die.

“It’s war. And I’m going to put an end to it all.”

24. Werem Grotto

“Characters must never give up. That is not one of our options. We have a responsibility to the Game, and that goes beyond our wish for despair.”

—Enrod, on the second rebuilding of Tairé

Vailret felt trapped in a cell darker than the darkest night imaginable. The packed dirt was gritty and damp against his skin, caked in his hair. His fingers throbbed and stung from trying to claw out of the grave. The air grew thick and stifling, liquid with dust and dampness from their own respiration.

He had too little room to move. Next to him, Bryl had given up in despair. “We lost the Stones!” Bryl moaned. “All three of them. Everything’s useless now.”

“We failed in a big way,” Vailret muttered.

After the werem had packed the walls down tight, the invisible force had abandoned Vailret and Bryl, leaving them free to move, but with nowhere to go.

“They’re going to come back and plant their larvae in us,” Bryl said in the total darkness. “I just know it.”

Vailret could hear the half-Sorcerer’s teeth chattering together. “Or they’ll just leave us here to suffocate,” he said. He kept trying to scrape at the wall, but the werem had done something to the dirt and it seemed hard as dried mortar.

“If I still had the Fire Stone, I could blast us out of here,” Bryl said.

“You’d probably burn us, too.”

Vailret knew that Bryl had few other spells on his own without the crutch of the Stones. He tried to remember which ones Bryl knew—he could keep blades sharp or make them dull, or he could make flowers open prematurely. Neither of those seemed particularly useful at the moment.

Vailret stopped digging at the hard wall. He turned toward Bryl in the darkness. “You can still use your spell to replenish supplies, right?”

“Yes,” Bryl replied, “but we’re going to run out of air long before we starve to death.”

“No!” Vailret felt excitement rising within him again. “Create water—within the dirt wall. You can make the whole wall like soup, and we can just crawl through the mud.”

From Bryl’s silence, Vailret could tell he was thinking about the possibility. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “Any other time I can direct the water into casks and bottles. I should be able to direct it into the middle of this wall.”

“Then do it, Bryl!”

Bryl squirmed, jabbing Vailret with his elbow. Vailret tried to push his chest against the packed dirt, giving the half-Sorcerer as much room as he could. Bryl mumbled something, flailed his hands. “Well, I just rolled one of my dice, but I can’t see what number I got.”

But Vailret heard water trickling and running. His hands and chest suddenly felt drenched.

“It worked!” Bryl said. “See if you can push through.”

Vailret extended his hands. The earth turned soft, into muck, and gave way. Vailret strained and moved forward.

Bryl shoved at his back. “Go on!”

Vailret swooped with his hands, swimming through mud like cold, sticky gravy as he clawed onward. He thrust his head into the opening, still tunneling. He held his breath, puffing his cheeks out and trying to clench his nostrils shut. Then, with a cough and a gasp, he burst through the wall as it slumped away, falling into a puddle on the floor.

He splashed and rolled out, falling to his knees on the floor, sucking in great gasps of breath. Cold brown slime covered his hands and hair and face and clothes. He choked and then started laughing.

Bryl stumbled out and fell beside him. Everything remained dark and dank. He heard only the dripping slump of the waterlogged mud.

“Good job, Bryl,” Vailret said.

Bryl muttered beside him, a disembodied voice in the blackness. “So now what do we do?”

Vailret sat against a firm portion of the opposite wall. The question had not occurred to him, but the only answer seemed obvious. “We go ahead with our plan.”

“But we’re defenseless! The werem took our Stones.”

Vailret scowled at Bryl, who could not see his expression anyway, but he thought the cool tone in his voice would get the point across. “So? They can’t use the Stones. I can’t even use them. You need Sorcerer blood. You saw how the werem took the gems from Tryos’s treasure. They must be just keeping them somewhere. We need to get them back.”

“Are you sure that’s all they’re doing with them?”

“No,” Vailret answered. “But we don’t have any choice.” His voice became hard-edged, and he thought Delrael would have been proud at his commanding tone. “If you and I fail to get those Stones back, and if we can’t succeed in making the Allspirit, then Gamearth is doomed. We don’t have any right to give up, whether we want to or not. Now make some light for us and let’s go on.”

Bryl used another minor spell to conjure up a small glow that lit their way. Vailret and Bryl stared at each other, shocked at their wide-eyed, mud-spattered appearance, and tried to refrain from laughing or sobbing at how pitiful they looked.

“Remember,” Vailret said, “this is all supposed to be fun.”

#

They traveled for days, it seemed. The werem tunnel continued under the earth, wide and straight; occasionally they found disused side passages. They had been so long out of the light and away from other landmarks that Vailret had no idea which direction they headed.

Around a sharp bend, they found another alcove scraped out of the side wall. As the bobbing insubstantial light cast shadows on the sloping walls, Vailret at first thought three enemies lay waiting to spring on them. But as the glow fell on the figures, Vailret saw that these characters, sprawled in an uncovered grave, would never move again.

Bryl shuddered. Vailret leaned forward to see the horrifying corpses dressed in what appeared to be Sitnaltan clothes. They looked mummified, drained, and somehow broken, as if they had been devoured from the inside out. Their eye sockets were gaping, jagged holes, showing an empty skull where something had burst through the sockets. The joints looked broken; the chests had cracked outward.

Bryl turned sick and gray. “The larvae got them. That’s what werem do. They plant their grubs on humans so they can eat their way out.” He let the silence hang for a moment. “They’re probably going to do that to us.”

“If they catch us again.” Vailret felt queasy. “But they only seemed interested in the Stones.”

He put a finger to his lip, grimaced, then spat dried mud out of his mouth. “The invisible force in Sitnalta always seemed to be after us, when it made Dirac come with the car, when we tried to get away in Frankenstein’s balloon. I wonder if this werem Master was trying to take our Stones from the start.”

“Well, it got what it wanted,” Bryl said.

“So we have to take the Stones back.”

The side tunnels branched out more and more as they continued, until the hexagon seemed honeycombed with passages. Bryl’s light illuminated only a small area around them, and they could see nothing but blackness ahead and behind. Vailret began to wonder what exactly they would do when they came upon the werem.

The passage widened, and Vailret could hear clicking and trickling sounds. A diffuse glow flickered ahead, beyond the range of Bryl’s light.

“Walk slower, Bryl,” he whispered. “We don’t know what this might be.”

But before the half-Sorcerer could respond, two werem slithered out of side passages behind them. Bryl bit back a gasp, letting only a small whimper escape.

A shadow appeared in the glow ahead, the silhouette of a burly werem, nearly half again as large as any they had seen. Vailret felt afraid to move. “Nothing we can do,” he said to Bryl.

“We can be captured,” Bryl said.

“Besides that.”

The large werem came forward. In the uncertain glow light, Vailret saw complicated insignia tattooed on his chest and shoulders; gashes of ornamental scars stood out on his cheeks below staring white eyes.

The werem spoke with a hollow, inhuman voice. “Master has been waiting for you.”

The worm-man turned around at his waist and flowed back the way he had come. His long segmented body looped around and trailed after, dripping lubricating slime. The two werem behind them extended their clawed hands and prodded the mud-spattered backs of Vailret and Bryl.

The confining passage dropped away as they stepped into a huge grotto with wide echoing walls. Scores of them dug down into warrens as werem moved together in a swarming nest.

Thick, cement-hard support columns rose like fused stalactites from floor to ceiling, propping up the grotto. Sharp, bright clusters of crystals, clear, pink, and pale blue, protruded like ornaments from the walls. Gems studded other sections of the dirt, glinting and half-hidden as if the werem had planted them there. The chamber carried a crystalline sheen, a glow sparkling off everything, which the blind werem could never see.

In the center of the grotto floor, stood the sculpture of a gigantic outstretched hand, fingers extended and palm upward. Fashioned out of mud the same color as the walls and floor, it was large as a banquet table, perhaps an altar of some kind. In the middle of the cupped palm, Vailret saw the sparkling colors of the four-sided diamond Air Stone, the eight-sided ruby Fire Stone, and a perfect egg-sized ten-sided emerald—the Earth Stone.

“There it is!” Bryl said.

Vailret flicked his glance around, checking the positions of the other werem in the grotto. The guardians behind him had halted at the entrance to the grotto. He wondered if he could rush forward and snatch the Stones, tossing them to Bryl, so that he could blast their way out with the Fire Stone. He tensed. They didn’t seem to have any other choice. Vailret just hoped that Bryl could react fast enough.

Then the fingers of the giant clay hand trembled, as if loosening up. Then they curled together into a fist, closing down and covering the three Stones.

The far wall of the grotto wavered and shifted. The dirt and mud and clay became liquid, reforming as if something behind the wall was pushing its way to the surface.

Then a huge human head emerged, made of mud and protruding through the membrane of the wall. Vailret saw the eyes, the forehead, nose and chin emerge—a face as large as a Sitnaltan building.

The worm-men in the grotto focused their attention on the moving face. Gems and crystals popped out of the wall, discarded as the dirt convulsed. The werem hissed and swayed. They muttered the same word over and over again: “Master! Master!”

The clay smoothed, and distinctive features appeared on the cheeks, the eyelids, the lips. Vailret even noticed faint tracings of hair on the eyebrows, forehead, and beside the ears. It was a young face, a male face, and it seemed angry at something.

He had seen this face before as just a distorted glimpse long ago, when he had looked through the scattered lenses from Paenar’s eye-staff and caught a distant reflection of the Outside Players.

This was the visage of the Outsider David.

“Master!” the werem whispered.

“You’re not my master!” Vailret said. He stood defiant. Bryl looked at him in astonishment.

The enormous earthen face scowled at them, then the flexible lips curled up in a smile as wide as a fissure in the earth. “The one you called the Stranger Unlooked-For was Melanie’s ‘Apprentice.’ Her ‘Journeyman’ succeeded in destroying Scartaris.

“But I am Master. I have the Stones.” The clay hand in the middle of the floor pushed up and opened again to display them.

“You can’t win against the Outside. You’re just characters in a Game. Our Game. We created you. You can’t fight us.”

The face pushed farther out of the wall. Vailret resisted his impulse to cringe.

“I ruined Sitnalta so they can find no solution. My manticore holds Verne’s ultimate weapon.”

The clay face let the smile broaden. “Delrael’s troops are trapped in the ice fortress and can’t do anything but annoy my monster army.” He paused, and the echoes of his last words rumbled in the grotto. The worm-men stared with rapt attention.

“And you are here,” David said. “In my grasp.”

Another huge clay hand formed out of the side grotto wall and thrust toward them with blinding speed, knocking werem out of the way as it snatched both Vailret and Bryl in clay fingers.

The massive arm lifted them off the ground. Vailret’s arms and legs were pinned in the powerful grip. The fist pulled them across the grotto, sliding without a ripple through the dirt floor. It held them directly in front of the enormous, frightening face.

As the David visage opened its mouth to shout, his gullet seemed to go straight through the bottom of the map. “You killed Tyrone! You’ve given me nightmares! You’ve ruined my life!”

The crushing fist pulled them between the towering eyes that flicked and moved in sockets made of wet dirt. The hand squeezed. Vailret felt his bones about to crack. Black spots swirled in front of his eyes, and he could not breathe or even gasp.

“The Game is over!” David shouted. “And you have lost!”

25. Backfire

“Desperate measures—how the Outsiders enjoy them.”

—the Sentinel Oldahn, before destroying a Slac

citadel, and himself, to rescue Doril

The old Sorcerers battled with no finesse, no imagination, simply brutal persistence. But they attacked, and kept attacking, even after they received deadly injuries.

Siryyk’s monster fighters fell by the score; many split up and fled back toward the mountain terrain. The special Slac troops tried a different tactic, with five of them converging on a single Sorcerer, hacking the undead body to pieces, then moving to the next opponent. The snow had been churned into mud and blood.

The monsters howled and snarled and clanged their weapons as they battled; but the old Sorcerers spoke no word, gave no cry of triumph or pain or anger. They merely fought in silence, with a deliberate and ponderous ferocity.

Siryyk stood by the carcass of the dragon and felt agony in his body. His scorpion tail remained drained of power. He felt cracked bones in his chest and hot blood in his mouth from Arken’s attack; the wounds from Rognoth scored across his hide. He had never come so close to defeat before.

When he saw that the fighters marching out of the ice fortress were yet another wild card Delrael’s army played on him, he felt his fury rise to its highest pitch.

With a sudden snap in his mind, he also sensed a greater freedom of his thoughts, as if the Outsider David had diverted his attentions elsewhere. Siryyk knew this would be his chance to make a final gambit.

“I want those Stones now!” he snarled to himself, and then bellowed in a voice that crackled over the battlefield. “Korux!”

General Korux rode away from the fighting in the steam-engine car. Bound in the back, Professor Verne lay struggling. Korux enjoyed taunting the prisoner and trying to frighten him, but Siryyk had no more patience for that.

“Prepare the cannon!” the manticore said. “I want those fortress walls down immediately. Delrael is inside. These—” He glared at the attacking old Sorcerers. Blood-flecked saliva came down his black lips. “These are just diversions.”

Siryyk turned his squarish head and looked around the battlefield, seeing how many of his monster fighters lay slaughtered. It angered him that his own troops were such pathetic fighters.

Throughout this entire march the humans had defeated him again and again. Siryyk’s horde had once outnumbered the humans five to one—and now the forces seemed equally matched.

“Hurry!” he snapped at Korux.

The Slac general leaped out of the steam-engine car and ran to the black cannon. Its surface gleamed in patches from where the goblins had scoured it that morning, but their work had been interrupted by the appearance of Arken.

As the old Sorcerers continued to fight, and as wounded monsters kept screaming and snarling, Korux and several Slac assistants aimed the cannon barrel at the thick ice walls.

Siryyk drew himself up. In a moment the fortress would crumble. He would march in triumph and snatch the Stones out of Delrael’s dying hand.

In the steam-engine car, Professor Verne squirmed and managed to get himself into a sitting position with his elbows propped behind him. He coughed. His eyes looked wide and bloodshot, his appearance haggard, a character at the end of his play.

Korux and the Slac loaded the cannon with one of the last casks of firepowder, then they rolled the heavy cannonball down the gullet of the weapon.

“Wait!” Verne said. His voice was weak, but desperate. “Please wait. I know how to make it better.”

The manticore turned to him. “I am quite satisfied with the performance of your cannon as it is.”

“You don’t understand,” Verne sounded too tired to shout. “You saw the avalanche you created when you fired it before. Do you want to destroy the entire ice fortress? Please, I can adjust the detonation, change it so that the impact is less brisant. It will merely shatter the walls and open a way for you to get in.”

“It is a trick,” Korux said to Siryyk. The other Slac finished aiming the cannon and locked down the gears. They placed rocks behind the wheels to stop the recoil from hurling it backward.

“No trick. Let me save those characters. If I show you a clean way to break in, you can take what you want from them. There’s no need to slaughter the entire army.”

“Why should I bother?” Siryyk said.

Verne’s haggard face grew hard, and he snapped, “What if your unnecessary destruction ruins the Stones? How long is it going to take you to dig through a mound of rubble and dead characters just to find a few tiny gems?”

“All right,” Siryyk said. “But hurry.” The vision of tedious sifting through the wreckage had not occurred to him. If they could overwhelm the human forces and take Delrael prisoner, Siryyk would enjoy drawing claws across the human commander’s throat. It would be much more satisfying than just blowing up the place.

“Korux—watch him!”

Siryyk yanked the professor out of the steam-engine car and used his claws to rip free the bindings on Verne’s wrists and ankles. The professor cried out as the ropes snapped, and the manticore wondered if he had sprained the man’s wrists, then decided it didn’t matter.

Verne stumbled to the cannon, as if on the verge of breaking into sobs. He adjusted parts of the back end of the cannon, moving the bronze support struts that Siryyk had always suspected served no purpose. Verne seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Korux stood beside Verne with a short sword poised against his ribs. The professor turned to the Slac general and sneered. “I am incredibly weary of your bullying. I have nothing left to fear, so you’re wasting your energy.”

Korux hissed, but Verne ignored him and finished with the cannon. He glared at Siryyk. “It’s finished. You may fire it—and the rest of your efforts be damned!”

Siryyk knocked Verne sprawling toward the steam-engine car and then took up his position behind the cannon. “Korux, bring me a torch! Prepare the entire army for a charge into the fortress when we blast the walls down. Have them ignore these other fighters.”

Korux bellowed to all the monsters who could hear him. One of the other Slac handed Siryyk a burning brand from a scattered campfire.

The manticore, holding the torch in his huge paw, stepped behind the cannon.

#

Verne crawled to his knees and watched the end of his work. He had lived in such terror for so long that his emotions were scoured down into apathy. Tears seemed to freeze across his eyes.

Siryyk took his position directly behind the cannon, as he had done before, and raised his flame to the touch hole. The fuse hissed. The other Slac backed away, covering their ears.

The entire cannon exploded.

The back end of the barrel blew out in a tremendous sheet of flame and shrapnel. The iron cylinder blasted apart.

Verne rolled behind the steam-engine car for shelter. As the smoke and flames cleared, he saw the twisted wreckage of his cannon tilted onto one side on a broken wheel. With a groan, it slumped and collapsed to the ground.

Behind it, thrown backward five feet from the concussion, the bulk of Siryyk lay in a mess of blood and mangled tissue. His face and his broad chest had been blown away. His neck snapped backward, his spine turned inside out. A hiss like a leaking Sitnaltan air pump wheezed through the holes in the manticore’s punctured lungs. With a crackle of sparks and a dying blue glow, the deadly scorpion tail twitched once and then lay still.

The other monsters howled and shouted. Several ran to Siryyk’s body like flies settling on a fresh kill.

With a cry of triumph, Verne leaped to his feet and felt the raw edge of joy fill him again. In one blow he had destroyed the deadly cannon and killed the powerful commander of the horde—perhaps he had even saved Gamearth.

A sharp reptilian hand grabbed the hair behind Verne’s head and dug claws into his scalp, tilting his face up. Korux, two feet taller than the professor, glared down with sizzling slitted eyes.

“Now it’s time for my fun, Professor. And no one is going to stop me.” He put the point of his short sword against Verne’s abdomen.

Verne could not summon the energy even to struggle. Unlike when he had tried to throw himself into the void of broken hexes, this time his self-preservation drive did not try to assert itself.

“You have begged for this a long time,” Korux said.

Slowly, an inch at a time, he pushed the blade deep into Verne’s stomach until the bloody point came out his back.

The professor’s last thought was to wonder if he and Frankenstein had ever patented a sword-proof vest.

#

In disgust, Korux tossed Verne’s body down to the ground. Many of the monsters had stopped fighting. But the remaining old Sorcerer forces continued to drive forward and attack.

Korux immediately took charge. “We will destroy them all now!” he shouted. His own Slac came to him, adding their instant support. He spoke to them.

“We will use a tactic Siryyk himself feared. The professor created an ultimate weapon—and after we detonate it, we will be the victors. Gamearth is ours!”

With one hand, Korux snatched Verne’s bloody body up from the ground and dumped him into the back seat of the still-chugging steam-engine car. “It’s time for you to take a message to Delrael, Professor.”

Korux set the Sitnaltan weapon upright on the seat. It looked so much smaller, so much more harmless than the cannon, but though Korux did not understand how it functioned, he knew clearly the fear it inspired in Verne, and the hesitation that the manticore had felt when thinking about it.

Korux pushed the arming button and then set the newly repaired timer. He had watched the professor fix the device, and as he held a knife to Verne’s scrawny throat and hissed in his ear, he had forced the man to tell him how to use the weapon. For just such an occasion as this.

Now, when he released the timer and it began to tick like the rattling of a viper, Korux adjusted the steering levers and disengaged the braking lock. He jumped out of the car as it rolled forward.

The Slac general signalled his own fighters to back away, to be prepared to shield their eyes. “This will be spectacular!” he said.

The Sitnaltan weapon continued to tick as the vehicle drove in a straight line toward the ice fortress.

26. Underground

“Since all characters are different, with different skills, we should have many solutions to any problem. What cause is there for us to worry?”

—the Sentinel Arken, debates on the Scouring

Frankenstein’s Drone clanked and thudded as it continued along the streets of Sitnalta. The attack from the invisible force had stopped, and the giant mechanical man moved without hindrance.

When Tareah pressed Frankenstein about possible damage to Drone, he just shrugged. “A few dings and dents perhaps. I took special care to develop adequate armor. I wasn’t sure what it might be required to do.”

Drone walked into the center of a broad square and then stopped among large hexagonal tiles. A water clock spilled thin silver streams into a transparent receptacle etched with precise lines.

The professor looked at the bank of dials and gauges in front of him, adjusted one, and tapped the glass surface until he saw a needle bouncing and moving.

“Ah!” he said. “This is probably the best place.”

Frankenstein pulled a wide belt across his chest and buckled himself into the seat. “You’d better brace your body. I have installed gyros to stabilize this control compartment, but. . .” He shrugged in his chair. “I didn’t have time to test them.”

He grabbed another switch and flicked it upward. A hiss of steam shot from the boiler, and Drone sagged on its joints, bending into a crouch.

“But first,” the professor said, “tell me about this Earth Stone. What are we fighting? Bryl mentioned something about his spells and the gems he carried.”

As Tareah answered him, she remembered how her father had told the tale over and over again. She purposely altered some of the words and changed the phrasing so that the tale became her own.

“The four Stones together contain all the remaining magic of the old Sorcerers. Each Stone has power over one of the four elements. The Fire Stone controls fire, the Water Stone controls water and the weather, the Air Stone creates illusions out of the air—Bryl probably told you all that. The Air Stone and the Earth Stone had been lost since the Scouring, but Gairoth the ogre found the Air Stone and used it. The Earth Stone lay buried in Tryos’s treasure pile, until Vailret and Bryl went to get it.”

“But what does it do?” Frankenstein adjusted his lead helmet, cocking it sideways so he could hear her better. He seemed impatient with the history lesson, preferring practical information instead.

“Well, the Earth Stone controls living things. Whoever uses it can manipulate characters just like one of the Outside Players.”

“Ah, another game master inside the Game itself.” Frankenstein’s eyebrows raised. “So at last we have a rational explanation for what has happened to my city.” He paused, then pursed his lips. “I’m not sure magic counts as part of a ‘rational’ explanation, though.” He appeared puzzled.

“No matter. According to these readings, the controller—the character who holds the Earth Stone and now, from what you say, also the Air and Fire Stones—is directly below us. Deep in the earth.

“With Drone, we will go down and attack. Between the technology of this mechanical fighter and your magical abilities, we should take care of every circumstance.”

Frankenstein powered up the engine, and Drone settled against the tiles. Then the professor thrust the entire steering mechanism forward. Drone bowed into a kneeling position, squeaking and groaning on its huge joints and gears. The control compartment tilted along its stabilizers, partially righting itself.

Tareah pushed her body against the side of Frankenstein’s seat and a bare section of the control panel. She placed one hand against the far wall, but snatched it away from the hot metal.

Frankenstein narrowed his eyes and moved feverishly. Drone’s hands spread out. The metal fingers twitched.

Tareah watched through the eye-windows as the powerful claws scraped at the tiles. Drone pawed away the hexagons and exposed the raw dirt underneath.

Its hands moved rapidly, shoveling out enormous handfuls of dirt with each scooping motion. It jerked out a long metal conduit buried under the ground, snapping the pipe and hauling it up. Frankenstein stopped the automaton’s work and stared out the magnifying eye-window to see the broken metal end and the thin cables dangling inside.

“So much for the new street lighting system,” Frankenstein said. “Too ambitious a project anyway.”

Drone leaned forward as it continued to scrape and paw and dig into the earth. When its head pushed into the dark opening, all light blotted out from the eye-windows. In a distracted motion, Frankenstein flipped a small switch; a powerful light blazed out from the metal man’s forehead. All Tareah could see, though, was the dirt and mud falling as Drone continued to tunnel deeper.

The control chamber tilted again as the automaton plunged at a steeper angle, tunnelling like a gigantic rodent, scooping the dirt behind as it continued to plow ahead.

Frankenstein kept monitoring his gauges. “Yes, getting closer, getting closer.”

Tareah’s eyes stung from not blinking often enough. She felt her anxiety growing, and she gripped the Water Stone with her sweaty palm. She would get to the other three Stones soon. She had the last one in her hand. She could put an end to all this.

But the main dread in her mind was that something terrible had happened to Vailret and Bryl.

The two had taken a balloon and gone off to Rokanun days before. . .but they had not returned. Somehow the Stones had come back here, under Sitnalta.

The professor hunched forward to stare at one gauge that spun wildly. “Hang on! There’s something unusual ahead, a lack of resis—”

Suddenly Drone broke through the dirt wall and nearly pitched forward into a gigantic underground grotto. Frankenstein yanked back on the steering yoke to steady the automaton.

The spotlight stabbed into a chamber filled with writhing worm-men, with gray bodies and wet-looking skins and staring blind white eyes. They squirmed and covered their faces from the blinding light. Tareah saw more gems and crystals than even Tryos had kept in his treasure horde.

Frankenstein moved Drone forward into the chamber. The spotlight fell on the far wall. Tareah froze. “Look, it’s Bryl and Vailret! And the Stones!”

But the words seemed ridiculous to her as soon as she said them. The most awesome sight was the terrifying clay face taking up nearly one entire wall and the colossal hand that held Vailret and Bryl in a crushing grip.

“Great Maxwell!” Frankenstein said.

“There’s your controller,” Tareah said. “There’s the thing that’s been destroying Sitnalta.”

The professor looked at the titanic clay face that scowled at them, and his own expression filled with fury. He slammed his activation levers forward, and Drone strode into the chamber.

Tareah peered through the eye-windows and saw the metal feet squashing werem that could not wriggle out of the way fast enough. Some worm-men threw clods of dirt and gems, which did nothing to the automaton.

Frankenstein gave a sidelong glance at the werem. “What sort of evolutionary process could have made that a viable survival trait?” He snorted. “Professor Darwin has have some explaining to do.”

He yanked another lever that extended Drone’s dirt-spattered metal hands forward, as if he wanted to strangle the immense earthen face.

Drone towered halfway to the ceiling of the grotto. As it stomped across the floor, Frankenstein had to step sideways to avoid the thick support columns spaced in the center.

The Master’s vast clay hands cast Vailret and Bryl carelessly to the floor. The hands extended from the wall, palms outward, and grew larger as they pulled more dirt and mud. Tareah watched the three tiny Stones patter to the floor.

Frankenstein made Drone’s hands form two fists as the automaton steamed forward.

The right clay hand swelled larger and struck across, swatting Drone. The giant mechanical man reeled sideways and staggered to the far wall of the grotto. The left eye-window cracked and splintered; two of the smaller panes split out to tinkle on the grotto floor.

The control chamber rocked and tilted as the gyros tried to stabilize it against the violent motion. The professor grabbed at an emergency handle to regain control.

Below them, in the bobbing, glaring spotlight, the werem continued to move and hiss, lining up by Drone’s feet. But they could do nothing. They were soft.

Frankenstein checked his control panel. “Some damage, but not serious. It’ll be harder to walk. One leg joint doesn’t seem to respond properly.”

“I have the Water Stone,” Tareah said. “I could roll it in here and strike out at that thing.”

“No,” the professor said without hesitating. “Wouldn’t work. We’re shielded in here. If the Earth Stone magic can’t get in to manipulate us, then yours can’t get out. Complementarity principle, or something like that. It only makes sense.”

“Then I have to get out of Drone! How will I make it past the worm-men down there? If I can just take my Stone to the other four—” She looked through the shattered eye-window and saw Vailret and Bryl both scurrying toward the other gems. “If I can bring all four together, then we’ll be done! We’ll have the Allspirit. We’ll have won.”

Frankenstein kept his jaw clenched tightly, and his voice sounded strange. Tareah wondered if he had ever been battered by an opponent before.

“I’m going to charge forward, straight into that face and poke its big mud eyes out. When I start moving, undog the hatch and jump out. If you land right, you won’t hurt yourself. We’re not that high up. Help me out with your Water Stone if you can.”

“All right,” Tareah said. She braced herself as Frankenstein jammed his motion levers all the way forward.

Drone lurched ahead, steaming and hissing. She heard an abrasive clanking, and knew that one of the gears in the automaton’s knee must have been broken.

Tareah moved aside the locking levers in the hatch. She popped open the heavy metal door in Drone’s back and hung onto the edge. She shouted at the professor in the clanking roar of Drone’s charge. “Luck!”

“I don’t believe in Luck,” Frankenstein said without turning away from his controls. “It’s just a matter of probabilities.”

Tareah swung out from the hatch, tried to grab several of the handholds and footholds on Drone’s side, but the automaton lurched too much. The robot had stomped away from most of the werem, and she let go.

The heavy hatch on Drone’s back clanged shut but did not lock. It wobbled open and banged down each time the automaton took a step. Wet mud caked the Sitnaltan automaton, and a geyser of steam came from the exhaust vent on its shoulders. The steam grew black as Drone chugged toward the scowling visage on the wall.

The colossal clay hands extended out, reaching for the automaton. Drone held out its own metal hands and charged at its top speed into the clay.

Tareah rolled, got to her knees, and scrambled away. The werem hadn’t noticed her, intent on their Master’s battle. She grabbed the six-sided Water Stone and made ready to roll it, to call up some kind of spell to help Frankenstein.

But it was too late. Drone jammed its spread metal claws into the towering eye sockets with an explosive thud.

The huge face let out a howl of pain. The clay hands folded over Drone, and the face melted back into the wall, like a man sinking deep in a dark pool of water. The hands cupped around Drone, growing larger to cover the strugglings of the automaton. The hands pulled back into the earthen wall as well, dragging Drone down with them into an abyss of solid earth.

As the wall swallowed Drone’s spotlight, Tareah became blinded before she grew accustomed to a dimmer glow. She felt sick. The worm-men stirred.

“Vailret!” she called.

“I’m here,” he gasped. He sounded hurt.

She saw Bryl scrambling across the grotto floor, looking for the scattered Stones. He held the Air Stone in one hand and, as she watched, he grabbed the brilliant emerald Earth Stone.

“Bryl! I have the Water Stone,” she said.

“Yes, for the Allspirit!” he answered, wheezing. He crawled about, searching for the Fire Stone.

Tareah moved toward him. The werem hissed, and she saw them rising up. Scores of them lay dead and squashed, oozing a thick, mudlike blood. Their broken segments and severed bodies continued to squirm in opposite directions.

With a splitting smack, the far wall split open and Drone came flying out, stumbling backward, as if the jaws of the earth had spat out their morsel. Both eye-windows gaped, shattered, and she could see Frankenstein moving sluggishly inside, as if injured. He tried to regain control of his machine. The spotlight danced around like a glowing whip on the grotto walls, and then it flickered and went out.

Drone whirled out of control. One leg didn’t move and, as it tried to take too many steps forward, the automaton tottered, staggered, and then tipped over. Professor Frankenstein used the metal arms to try and stabilize it, but Drone toppled like a prodigious tree.

The automaton crashed into one of the thick support pillars. Dirt and chunks of cement-hard rock tumbled down. The ceiling groaned and split as a great fissure opened up.

Bryl cried out, sprawling toward the gleaming Fire Stone he found among the debris on the floor. Drone had kicked it out of the way. “I found the last one!” He scurried across the floor.

Frankenstein crawled out of Drone’s smashed left eye-window, heaving himself out and looking dazed. Blood smeared his forehead, and he staggered down, picking his way along the metal chest and shoulders of his automaton. He stared up at the behemoth he had built, now smashed and battered beyond all hope of repair. He blinked in shock and sorrow.

Bryl’s hand closed around the ruby Fire Stone. He sat up. His face gleamed in a rictus of triumph. “We have won!”

“Look out!” Vailret croaked.

Then an entire section of ceiling broke free and crushed down on top of Bryl.

27. Allspirit

“Never bring all four Stones together unless you are prepared for what will happen. It’s like magical synergy. More power resides in the combined Stones than even the six Spirits possess. . . . The Transition was an awesome enough thing to do once in the Game.”

—the Sentinel Arken

Delrael watched the manticore die in the cannon explosion.

He saw the havoc caused by the old Sorcerer troops as they slaughtered the monster army.

“All fighters, get ready!” he shouted to his own troops. “We’re going to march out and end this. Siryyk is dead. The monsters are on the run. We will win this Game!”

His army cheered and raised their weapons, eager to attack. But as soon as his army stood lined up and ready to charge, Delrael realized he didn’t know how to lower the ice wall.

Instead, one by one, the fighters had to push through the low doorways Enrod had left in the wall. A constant stream spilled out to the opposite side of the barricade, waiting and regrouping.

Inside the fortress, Siya blinked her eyes, still groggy. She looked devastated, burned out from the inside. But she managed a thin smile. “Was I brave, Delrael?” she asked in a small voice.

“You were stupid!” Delrael said, but the harshness in his voice did not sound genuine.

“I was brave,” Siya said and nodded. “That’s enough for now, I think. But you don’t have an excuse, Delrael. Go lead your army!”

When he passed under the low frozen arch, Delrael saw that most of his army had already grouped and charged forward with no plan, just a frenzy of attack. Delrael drew his own sword and moved after them in disgust. “Thanks for waiting,” he muttered.

He’d never had trouble managing his companions on a simple quest. They all acted as a team with the same goal; each knew his own responsibilities. But he did not picture himself as a domineering commander,.and this army was too much for Delrael to hold under rigid control.

These characters had come to the Stronghold as a rallying point, to meet and gain some training before they went off toward their common foe. They had been fidgeting inside the ice walls for days, watching their enemy within grasp. They had been stirred by the duel of Arken and Rognoth, even by Siya’s bravery. Now they had no patience for waiting or listening to Delrael.

But they were going to win the battle anyway.

He saw that the monster army already appeared to be backing away, leaving behind the manticore’s bloody carcass and the ruins of the giant cannon. The remaining old Sorcerers followed them, leaving chopped enemy corpses in their wake.

Then Delrael noticed the empty steam-engine car chugging directly toward them. He recognized it as a Sitnaltan vehicle—

Finally, something else made sense to him. He thought of the manticore’s cannon and how improbable it had seemed that the monsters could have developed such an incredible weapon. He wondered with a shudder if Siryyk had somehow captured one of the Sitnaltan professors.

What if the monsters were even now retreating from some new weapon, something planted in the steam-engine car that would cause even more destruction? Why else would they be running away?

Most of Delrael’s army veered to the left to engage the surviving monsters. Delrael planted his feet and waited for the steam-engine car to approach. It frightened him; the vehicle did not belong here. The monsters would not have given it up so easily, not such a prize.

Someone had sent it on a mission.

He could see no driver. The steering levers had been tied down. A polished cylinder sat upright on the front seat, and a bloody human hand draped over the back, trying to reach the device.

Delrael sprinted to meet the oncoming vehicle. He heard its chugging grow louder as the shouts from his army, the clash of weapons, the roars of monsters echoed across the cold, still sky.

Far ahead, Delrael saw Ydaim Trailwalker and Tayron Tribeleader loping faster than any of the other fighters toward the front line of creatures. A tall Slac general stood directing the troops and trying to exert his control.

Both Tayron and Ydaim attacked the Slac general at the same time, swinging down with their wooden swords, putting all the strength of their broad shoulders behind the blow. Delrael could see the muscles rippling in their backs. They reared up and raked sideways with their curved panther claws. The Slac general tumbled backward and flailed in his own defense, but the two khelebar struck him down.

Delrael tensed as the Sitnaltan car reached him. He dropped his sword in the snow, freeing his hands. He would not need the blade now—he needed his dexterity, and his mind. Somehow, he would have to understand and outwit a Sitnaltan invention.

His boots kicked up wet, blood-spattered snow from the retreating monsters. He ran and grabbed the battered red body, letting his feet skip on the ground.

Delrael dragged himself into the moving car, knocked the cylindrical device aside to make room for himself, and turned to the back seat. He looked with sick astonishment at the gaunt figure lying bloody in the back.

He barely recognized Professor Verne. The man appeared too thin and haggard, with great bags under his eyes, his bushy gray beard torn and unkempt. Blood soaked his torn shirt, and drying red spots stained his hands. With his last gasps of life he must have tried to haul himself over the seat toward the device.

A ticking sound came from it. Whatever this weapon was, it seemed far more sinister than the cannon.

“Professor, can you hear me? Speak to me!”

Delrael reached over the seat and tried to haul him erect, but Verne’s body felt stiff and cold. His jaws were strung together by dead muscles. Delrael let the professor fall back.

He looked up and saw the car chugging straight for the ice fortress wall. He remembered how Mayer had pulled and yanked at the levers to steer her car. Delrael unlashed the ropes that someone had tied around the levers.

He pulled at one, and the car lurched to the side, veering away from the ice fortress. He pushed another, and the vented steam increased. The vehicle picked up speed. Delrael needed to get away from his troops, away from the fortress if he couldn’t somehow learn what to do with this weapon of Verne’s.

The steam-engine car ground past the ice fortress walls, spinning deep ruts into the snow and ice, bouncing on barely covered rocks beneath the frozen desolation. They sped onward.

Verne had been trying to do something to the Sitnaltan device when he died. Delrael looked at the invention, but it made no sense to him: a cylinder of bright metal with red fins sticking out from the side; a trembling gauge protruded on an elbow, indicating some quantity approaching a red area on the dial. On the back he found scrawled numbers, “17/2,” but that meant nothing to him.

Then he located where the ticking came from—a large knob with painted numbers descending toward a red line marked on the device. Smears of blood ran down the metal, long fat fingerprints like the trails of infernal slugs. Verne had been trying to do something to this knob.

Delrael didn’t know what the knob did; he didn’t know what the entire device did. But some intuition—based on what little he remembered from Sitnalta and the gadgets Mayer had explained—told him that this had something to do with activating the device.

If so, then the numbers on the side showed exactly how to stop it. He gripped the knob with both hands, using all his strength to turn it clockwise.

Turning it toward zero. That would shut it off.

The clicking increased like a rapid rattle, and the red line moved quickly around.

Verne must have been clawing at the tight knob to do the same thing. Dying, the professor would never have been able to do it for himself.

Delrael twisted with his wrist. The zero approached, and he pushed harder. He would shut it off in just a moment.

Then his eyes flicked down, and he saw the curved smear of blood on the side of the knob. He stopped. It seemed too clear—Verne had been trying to rotate the knob the other way.

Delrael squeezed the knob with all his fingers to arrest its motion. The clicking slowed, but continued as the slippery surface kept turning.

A second possibility occurred to Delrael: If this were a timer of some sort, then zero would be the worst possible point, the point where the weapon would detonate.

He turned the knob the other way, but it seemed locked, able to progress in only one direction. He bashed at it with his fist. Finally, he jerked the dagger from his belt and used the blade to pry off the knob. The tip of the blade snapped, but the knob popped out and clattered onto the floor. A thin central rod still turned inside the device, and the clicking continued.

Delrael jammed the broken dagger into the slot and pushed it with his palm, bending the entire mechanism until something twisted and snapped inside. The device fell silent.

He felt icy sweat burst out of every pore of his body. Behind him the ice fortress looked far away; the vehicle had sped across the flat terrain while he had been preoccupied.

Delrael looked up and saw the Barrier River yawning in front of him, a huge plain of water ahead, swirling and churning.

He leaped out of the car. He could hear the rushing current and wondered how he could have ignored it. Even the ticking of the weapon had not been so loud.

Delrael landed on his belly in the snow and coughed as his breath left him. He crawled to his knees, attempting to suck in air. He wanted to pull Verne’s body free, to give the inventor some kind of safe burial.

But the steam-engine vehicle, still gushing gray-white exhaust from its stack, passed over the black hex-line, wobbled, then plunged into the deep and ice-choked Barrier River.

With a gurgle, the Sitnaltan car, its wheels still spinning, sank beneath the water, taking with it Professor Verne and the Sitnaltan weapon.

Delrael stood up and stared toward the ice fortress and the last part of the battle he was missing. It would be a long walk back.

#

Tareah scrambled among the broken chunks of rock and earth. Dust and pebbles still rained down, but she had reached the pile of debris that covered Bryl. She could see only deep shadows and jagged edges. The werem writhed in confusion; many had vanished into other catacombs.

“Bryl!” Tareah called. “Bryl!”

Vailret scrambled up to her and helped pull the rocks aside. Bryl had been kneeling there just a moment ago. “It’s not fair! Not now—we’re too close to the end,” he said. Dirt and terror smeared across his face.

With a grunt, he and Tareah rolled a large boulder away. She saw Bryl’s bloodied hand looking pale and fragile. “There he is!” Tareah said. She worked harder. Vailret reached down to grasp the half-Sorcerer’s hand and wrist. The thin fingers clenched in a weak but desperate response.

“Hurry!” Vailret said.

Together they uncovered most of Bryl’s body. The avalanche had crushed and broken him. Blood streamed out of his mouth, but somehow his head had escaped severe injury. The rock fragments had smashed his rib cage as well as his legs. One arm was pulverized.

Bryl would not live much longer. His eyes were glazed and squeezed shut in pain, but he gasped out a single word, forming it around a scarlet bubble of blood. “Stones!” he said.

In his intact hand he still held the three Stones. Tareah knelt beside him, holding her Water Stone.

“Isn’t he too weak to become the Allspirit?” Vailret said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“He’s still alive,” Tareah said. “He could summon the magic. But you’re right—he is too weak.”

She stared down at the frail form of the old half-Sorcerer. Enrod’s disjointed words came back to her. ‘Not even a pure Sorcerer. What kind of Allspirit would he make? Tainted! Tainted!’

Sardun had always insisted that within Tareah rested a great hope for the future, some important mission as the last of the old Sorcerer race.

She saw very clearly what she would have to do, how she could serve the destiny her father had claimed for her.

“I’ll have to go with him. We can be the Allspirit together.” She looked down at the dying half-Sorcerer. “My knowledge along with his experience, my enthusiasm and fascination along with his age and understanding of power.”

Vailret looked at her in horror. “Are you crazy Tareah? You have to stay here, stay here with me!”

Tareah felt a longing in her heart when she looked at him. It was the first time he had said something like that to her. She understood her attraction now, with Delrael being the man she most admired, but Vailret the one to whom she felt the closest kinship. But even so, she felt the greater calling of her Sorcerer blood.

Tareah had worked so hard to fit in with the human characters, playing her role but never feeling comfortable with it. She had spent three decades isolated, burying herself in the history of the Game, in the Rules, in what characters must do. She had admired them all, studied the legends in an academic fashion, but now the choice weighed directly upon her.

She could decide between remaining with Vailret, which she would enjoy greatly, or taking on this responsibility—a step as consequential as the old Sorcerers themselves choosing to take the Transition.

“No,” Tareah said. “This is what I need to do, and you know it as well as I do.”

Vailret stared at her with his eyes wide and devastated, seeing his friend Bryl dying and knowing she was about to depart as well. He moved his lips several times, but could say nothing. Tareah turned away from him; she couldn’t face any doubts.

She took out her Water Stone and bent down to lift the three Stones from Bryl’s bloody hand. She took his slick grasp in her own. He lay shuddering and dying, with only a moment left.

“We’ll go together, Bryl.”

She held the gems in her hand, feeling their heat, feeling their magic blinding her from the inside. Still grasping Bryl’s wrist, she rolled all four Stones.

#

Vailret stumbled backward, shielding his eyes as light greater than an exploding star crackled out of the gems. White, blue, red, and green, soaring up to engulf both Tareah and Bryl, settling around them like incandescent snowflakes. Vailret couldn’t tell exactly at what point he stopped seeing Tareah altogether, when she and Bryl became indistinguishable from the glare. The pinpoints of sorcery spread and grew and swelled into a blaze unrivalled since the Transition.

The remaining worm-men, with their thin gray skin unaccustomed to any sort of light, shrivelled backward as their bodies blackened. Those that did not die instantly fled deep into the earthen walls.

Vailret turned away from the brilliance, feeling a devastating sense of loss. In his mind he realized that he and Bryl had gone on their long quest for the sole purpose of bringing this about. But as he stared at the inferno of magic, he knew that Bryl was now as dead to him as if he had simply bled out his life on the grotto floor; only this way, Vailret lost Tareah as well.

But if this had gained a future for Gamearth and all its characters, a future for them to forge their own lives without the Outsiders, then perhaps, in a way that his mind understood but his heart did not, the sacrifice was well made.

When he looked up again, blinking colored spots from his eyes, the titanic Allspirit filled the grotto.

The Allspirit towered gray-white and hooded, bearing no resemblance whatever to Bryl or Tareah. Its features were hidden: the cloak seemed merely a metaphor, a symbolic boundary that defined the limits of its tangible existence. The form stood so immense that it seemed to fold in upon itself to fit within the walls, like infinity wrapped in a shroud.

Vailret couldn’t speak or move. He held his breath.

The Allspirit stretched out its silently flapping sleeves. It paid no attention to Vailret or anything else in the ruins of the chamber.

Frankenstein peeped up over the edge of Drone and stared.

Vailret did not dare to make any noise. The Allspirit grew brighter with a wind of power, energy draining through the fabric of the map and into the Allspirit’s body. Vailret wondered if it had drained the dayid from Rokanun. . .and probably the other dayids as well. It seemed to reel with its own new power.

“NOW WE ARE MASTERS OF THE GAME.” The sexless voice boomed out from the cavernous hollow in the hood. More stones and dust pattered down from the broken ceiling.

Vailret felt a surge of enthusiasm, then a chill as he realized that the Allspirit’s “we” did not mean the characters on Gamearth, but only the plural identity of what had been Tareah and Bryl.

“LET US PLAY WITH NEW CHARACTERS.”

With a wave of the flapping empty sleeves, another part of the wall cracked. But it wasn’t an actual crack—just a dark seam opening to somewhere else. More wind came out, this time with a silent roar that Vailret could not hear or feel, yet it buffeted him backward nevertheless.

Streaming out from other parts of the map, other parts of the universe perhaps, came the original six Spirits, three white and three black. Vailret remembered seeing the Earthspirits as they emerged, immense and awesome from Delrael’s silver belt on the threshold of Scartaris. He remembered the black Deathspirits, who had cursed Enrod, rising up from the broken hex-line, also to destroy Scartaris.

Now, though, the Earthspirits and Deathspirits appeared much diminished. Colossal as they had been before, they now looked weaker, insubstantial in front of the dominating Allspirit. The Deathspirits and the Earthspirits remained silent, as if cowering.

Beside Vailret, Frankenstein stumbled over the motionless wreckage of Drone and stood gaping at the Spirits with mouth wide and eyes bulging. “This is impossible! This is astonishing,” he mumbled to himself. Vailret glared at him.

The Allspirit spoke to the other six hooded forms. “NOW WE CAN PLAY. NOW WE CAN HAVE FUN.”

The air sang with exerted power. The Earthspirits and Deathspirits flickered and struggled, but eventually buckled, crouching down in a symbolic bow to the Allspirit.

Vailret finally closed his eyes because he could not take in the immensity of the spectral shapes. The Allspirit’s words sounded nothing like either Bryl or Tareah. The thoughts could not be theirs, but some sort of manifestation of the power in the Stones themselves, some reflection on the old Sorcerers who had created them—the Sorcerers, dissatisfied with being manipulated by the Outsiders, who had taken the extreme step of the Transition in an effort to escape.

“Tareah, listen to me!” Vailret shouted. His voice sounded like a ridiculous squeak. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, expecting to be wiped out of existence in a moment. The invisible weight of the Allspirit’s attention felt like a building collapsing across his back.

Vailret had nothing to lose. If the Allspirit didn’t do what they needed it to do, then Gamearth was doomed, whether at the hands of the Outsiders, or the Allspirit itself.

“Remember why you’re here! Tareah and Bryl—remember why you gave your lives to create this! You must save Gamearth.”

“WE WILL DO WHAT WE WISH TO DO.”

The scorn in the Allspirit’s voice made Vailret want to wither and throw himself over a cliff. But he shouted his next words through a raw throat, battering back his own emotions. They had to remember. Vailret had to make them see.

“Bryl, listen to me! Remember when you linked with the dayid to stop the forest fire in Ledaygen. You felt the power then, you know how dangerous it could be.

“Tareah, remember how Scartaris destroyed the Stronghold while you fought to save it. Remember how the power corrupted Enrod and made him want to use the Fire Stone for destruction!”

The Allspirit remained unmoved. Vailret continued to speak as fast as the words could tumble from his mouth.

“You knew this might happen! Think of the duel of Entarr and Dythat, when two rival Sorcerers unleashed such forces that swallowed them both up! You know all these legends Tareah! Remember the wedding celebration of Lord Armund and Lady Maire, and the disputed stone throw that sparked centuries of war?

“Bryl, think about how your parents were too weak to bear the accusations against them, so they used the magic to destroy themselves. Remember it! The power that’s working through you now is not a part of you. You can’t let it control you—it has to be the other way around! You control the power.”

The six Spirits remained silent, but the Allspirit spoke. This time the genderless echoing voice carried hints and undertones of Tareah or Bryl. “WE CANNOT FORGET. WE REMEMBER.”

Vailret realized he had a new tactic. “Then remember how you took on this quest, to gather all four Stones together to become the Allspirit. The object of that quest was for you to hold Gamearth together by taking it away from the Outsiders. That was your quest—remember Rule #2! ‘Once characters undertake a quest, they must see it through to completion!’”

He stood tall and opened his eyes again. “To complete your quest, you must save Gamearth. You’re still bound by the Rules.”

“THE RULES ARE BREAKING,” the Allspirit said. But despite the power behind the words, they seemed to lack conviction.

“Your true opponents are the Outsiders. You saw the clay face of the Outsider David. You know about the Rulewoman Melanie, and the Outsiders Scott and Tyrone. You must confront them.”

He let an excited smile flicker across his face, then lowered his voice. “If you play with us to exercise your power, you won’t have much of a challenge. But if you confront a real opponent, imagine how much more fun it will be.” Vailret paused for just a moment, then shouted, “Remember Rule #1! Always have fun!”

The Allspirit shimmered. “Yes, Vailret. We remember you.” The voices were more subdued now, a clear duet of Bryl and Tareah. “Our focus lies Outside.”

The Allspirit expanded and drew out its great cloaked form, as if unfolding from other dimensions. The smaller Earthspirits and Deathspirits rose up as well; they all seemed to know what to do. The three black Deathspirits and the three white Earthspirits and the single gray overarching Allspirit broke down the boundaries between themselves, coalescing into one omnipotent being, incalculably more powerful than any of the individual Spirits.

It was a kind of super-Transition that made the initial one seem like a half-hearted opening gambit.

Neither the grotto, nor the hexagon, nor the entire map of Gamearth could contain such a Spirit. Vailret fell to his knees, blinking and stunned as the being rose—and kept rising, streaming upward, pulling with it all the magic, all the knowledge that it had gathered from Gamearth.

Then it plunged outward into reality, leaving only silence roaring in its wake.

“Great Maxwell!” Frankenstein said.

Epilogue: Game’s End

David felt pain exploding inside his head, in fact his whole body. Parts of him, characters that lived within him, were being murdered one by one. He tried to cry out but couldn’t. His cheekbones felt as if they had been crushed like eggshells.

Tyrone’s blood-soaked corpse lay wide-eyed and mangled on the living room carpet, growing cold.

Melanie kept screaming down at the map.

Scott appeared broken, as if he had not the slightest idea what to do and couldn’t understand how it had happened this way.

David forced his eyes open through a red haze of pain.

With a crackling sound, the Allspirit streamed up out of the painted wooden map like some specter rising from a fire. The gray form spilled out of the hexagons, growing larger and larger until it towered to the ceiling.

David scrambled backward. Melanie gaped at it. Scott closed his eyes and shook his head.

The Allspirit surveyed them with its cavernous hood. The air sizzled with its buildup of power. “Your Game is over now,” it said. The words echoed around the walls of the house. The wind outside seemed to have stopped. “I will take Gamearth away from you. We want nothing more to do with the Outside.”

“And we want nothing more to do with you!” David shouted. His words snapped in his swollen throat.

Beneath the Allspirit, the map shimmered. The spidery black hexagon lines flowed like molten oil.

The Allspirit drew back, engulfing the map in its translucent form. The hexagons of Gamearth splintered and expanded, flying apart like pieces in a puzzle. Brilliant points of light spun like a galaxy around the form of the Allspirit. Even the tiny broken pieces by the fireplace lifted up and swirled into the cluster.

The Allspirit grew taller. “I leave only what is yours,” it said, then vanished with an audible pop. A few remaining bright hexagons flashed once, then winked out.

Only the Sitnaltan weapon remained behind, canted on the carpet, as its timer ticked the last two seconds to detonation.

“Well, Overlord Migan, this is most enjoyable. Shall we let the weapon detonate?”

Comtar Durat stared down at the maps spread before him, the detailed sketches of the characters’ houses, the careful drawing of the living room. Next to them rested crystalline chits showing statistics for the characters David, Melanie, and Scott; the chit for Tyrone had been removed from play.

Overlord Migan picked up the dice scattered on the playing surface. “I think we should roll for it.”

He tossed the dice.

The End

For Ed Hagstrom, who remembers Rule #1 as much as anybody

Acknowledgments

Other eyes and other imaginations have helped me keep this book on a steady course. I am especially indebted to the suggestions from my writer’s workshop: thanks go to Lori Ann White, Gary Shockley, M. Coleman Easton, Clare Bell, Michael C. Berch, and Dan’l Danhy-Oakes—and Linda Searle takes full responsibility for the joke.

About Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of nearly 100 novels, 48 of which have appeared on national or international bestseller lists; he has over 20 million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader’s Choice Award, and New York Times Notable Book.

Anderson has co-authored eleven books in the DUNE saga with Brian Herbert. Anderson’s popular epic SF series, The Saga of Seven Suns, is his most ambitious work, and he is currently at work on a sweeping fantasy trilogy, TERRA INCOGNITA, about sailing ships, sea monsters, and the crusades. As an innovative companion project to TERRA INCOGNITA, Anderson co-wrote (with wife Rebecca Moesta) the lyrics for two ambitious rock CDs based on the novels. Performed by the supergroup Roswell Six for ProgRock Records, the two CDs feature performances by rock legends from Kansas, Dream Theater, Asia, Saga, Rocket Scientists, Shadow Gallery, and others.

His novel Enemies & Allies chronicles the first meeting of Batman and Superman in the 1950s; Anderson also wrote The Last Days of Krypton. He has written numerous STAR WARS projects, including the Jedi Academy trilogy, the Young Jedi Knights series (with Moesta), and Tales of the Jedi comics from Dark Horse. Fans might also know him from his X-FILES novels or Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son.

His website is www.wordfire.com.

Look for These & Other Digital Works from WordFire Press

by Kevin J. Anderson

Mythical Creatures

An original, standalone story in the TERRA INCOGNITA universe: A prester in search of penance accepts an assignment to the rugged Soeland Islands, but he must confront his faith after he is cast overboard and then rescued by a mythical creature that the Scriptures tell him cannot exist. BONUS: Also contains the complete story and lyrics (written by Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta) for the two TERRA INCOGNITA crossover rock CDs performed by Roswell Six.

Alternitech

“Alternitech” sends prospectors into alternate but similar timelines where tiny differences yield significant changes: a world where the Beatles never broke up, or where Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t gunned down after the Kennedy assassination, where an accidental medical breakthrough offers the cure to a certain disease, where a struggling author really did write the great American novel, or where a freak accident reveals the existence of a serial killer. Alternitech finds those differences—and profits from them.

Kevin J. Anderson’s Alien Landscapes 1

Collection of four science fiction tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Landscapes,” “Fondest of Memories,” “Controlled Experiments,” and “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three.”

Kevin J. Anderson’s Dark Labyrinth 1

Collection of four horror tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Final Performance,” “Special Makeup,” “Much at Stake,” and “The Sum of His Parts.”

Kevin J. Anderson’s Fantastic Realms 1

Collection of four fantasy tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Loincloth,” “Frog Kiss,” “Short Straws,” and “Technomagic.”

RESURRECTION, INC.

In the future, the dead walk the streets—Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it. A microprocessor brain, synthetic heart, artificial blood, and a fresh corpse can return as a Servant for anyone with the price. Trained to obey any command, Servants have no minds of their own, no memories of their past lives.

Supposedly.

Then came Danal. He was murdered, a sacrifice from the ever-growing cult of neo-Satanists who sought heaven in the depths of hell. But as a Servant, Danal began to remember. He learned who had killed him, who he was, and what Resurrection, Inc. had in mind for the human race.

CLIMBING OLYMPUS

They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek’s adin, surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breathe Earth’s air. And they are still pawns.

For the adin exist to terraform Mars for human colonists, not for themselves. Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their world, killed by their own success. Desperate, adin leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to sabotage the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in a glorious, doomed campaign of mayhem—unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle to save both the Mars Project and the race she created.

“Drumbeats”

A chilling story cowritten with Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. A rock drummer bicycling through the African wilderness encounters a village that makes very special drums. This one will make your heart skip a beat. Includes essays by Neil Peart and by Kevin J. Anderson.

BLINDFOLD

Atlas is a struggling colony on an untamable world, a fragile society held together by the Truthsayers. Parentless, trained from birth as the sole users of Veritas, a telepathy virus that lets them read the souls of the guilty. Truthsayers are Justice—infallible, beyond appeal.

But sometimes they are wrong.

Falsely accused of murder, Troy Boren trusts the young Truthsayer Kalliana . . . until, impossibly, she convicts him. Still shaken from a previous reading, Kalliana doesn’t realize her power is fading. But soon the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. The Truthsayers’ Veritas has been diluted and someone in the colony is selling smuggled telepathy. Justice isn’t blind—it’s been blinded.

From an immortal’s orbital prison to the buried secrets of a regal fortress, Kalliana and Troy seek the conspiracy that threatens to destroy their world from within. For without truth and justice, Atlas will certainly fall. . . .

Gamearth Trilogy 1: GAMEARTH

It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

Gamearth Trilogy 2: GAMEPLAY

The Gamearth Trilogy continues. It was written in the Rules—Save the World! Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive. And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

Gamearth Trilogy 3: GAME’S END

The finale to the Gamearth Trilogy. It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

by Frank Herbert

Direct Descent

Earth has become a library planet for thousands of years, a bastion of both useful and useless knowledge—esoterica of all types, history, science, politics—gathered by teams of “pack rats” who scour the galaxy for any scrap of information. Knowledge is power, knowledge is wealth, and knowledge can be a weapon. As powerful dictators come and go over the course of history, the cadre of dedicated librarians is sworn to obey the lawful government . . . and use their wits to protect the treasure trove of knowledge they have collected over the millennia.

Destination: Void

The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hybernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship’s three Organic Mental Cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel’s functions—go insane. An emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: to create an artificial consciousness in the Earthling’s primary computer, which could guide them to their destination . . . or could destroy the human race.

Frank Herbert’s classic novel that begins the epic Pandora Sequence (written with Bill Ransom), which also includes The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.

The Heaven Makers

Immortal aliens have observed Earth for centuries, making full sensory movies of wars, natural disasters, and horrific human activities . . . all to relieve their boredom. When they finally became jaded by ordinary, run-of-the-mill tragedies, they found ways to create their own disasters, just to amuse themselves. However, interfering with human activities was forbidden, and by the time Investigator Kelexel arrived to investigate, things were really getting out of hand. . . .

The Jesus Incident (with Bill Ransom)

A sentient Ship with godlike powers (and aspirations) delivers the last survivors of humanity to a horrific, poisonous planet, Pandora—rife with deadly Nerve-Runners, Hooded Dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. Chaplain/Psychiatrist Raja Lon Flattery is brought back out of hybernation to witness Ship’s machinations as well as the schemes of human scientists manipulating the genetic structure of humanity. Sequel to Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void, the first book in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

Man of Two Worlds (with Brian Herbert)

Frank Herbert’s last published novel, a charming and witty science fiction adventure coauthored with his son Brian. What if the entire universe were the creation of alien minds? After an unfortunate spaceship accident, the hedonistic and ambitious human Lutt Hansen, Jr., finds himself sharing his body and mind with a naive alien dreamer. The two have to survive numerous dangers, schemes and assassination attempts . . . but can they survive each other?

by Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

ASSEMBLERS OF INFINITY

Nebula Award Nominee. The crew of Moonbase Columbus make an amazing discovery on the far side of the Moon—a massive alien structure is erecting itself, built up atom by atom by living machines, microscopically small, intelligent, and unstoppable, consuming everything they touch. The mysterious structure begins to expand and take shape, and its creators begin to multiply.

Is this the first strike in an alien invasion from the stars? Or has human nanotechnology experimentation gone awry, triggering an unexpected infestation? As riots rage across a panicked Earth, scientists scramble to learn the truth before humanity’s home is engulfed by the voracious machines.

ILL WIND

A supertanker crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling oil. Desperate to avert environmental & PR disaster, the oil company uses an oil-eating microbe to break up the spill. But the microbe, becomes airborne . . . and mutates to consume petrocarbons: oil, gas, synthetic fabrics, plastics. When all plastic begins to dissolve, it’s too late. . . .

IGNITION

NASA—you have a problem. In this high-tech action adventure from Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, terrorists seize control of the Kennedy Space Center and hold the shuttle Atlantis and its crew hostage on the launchpad. But astronaut “Iceberg” Friese, grounded from the mission because of a broken foot, is determined to slip through the swamps and rocket facilities around Cape Canaveral and pull the plug on the terrorists. With their years of experience in the field, Anderson and Beason have packed Ignition with insider information to create an extremely plausible, action-packed thriller.

THE TRINITY PARADOX

Activist Elizabeth Devane wished for an end to nuclear weapons. Surely, she thought, if they’d known what they were unleashing, the scientists of the Manhattan Project would never have created such a terrible instrument of destruction. But during a protest action, the unthinkable happened: a flash of light, a silent confusion, and Elizabeth awakes to find herself alone in a desolate desert arroyo . . . and almost fifty years in the past. June 1944. Los Alamos, New Mexico. While the Allies battle in the Pacific and begin the Normandy invasion in Europe, Nazi Germany deviates from the timeline Elizabeth knows and uses its newfound nuclear arsenal against America. Somehow, someway, Elizabeth has been given the chance to put the genie back in the bottle . . . yet could she—should she—attempt the greatest sabotage in history?

Craig Kreident 1: VIRTUAL DESTRUCTION

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—one of the nation’s premier nuclear-weapons design facilities—high-level physicists operate within heavy security to model and test new warhead designs. But politics can be just as dangerous as the weapons they design, and with gigantic budgets on the line, scientific egos, and personality clashes, research can turn deadly.

When a prominent and abrasive nuclear-weapons researcher is murdered inside a Top Security zone, FBI investigator Craig Kreident is brought in on the case—but his FBI security clearance isn’t the same as a Department of Energy or Department of Defense clearance, and many of the clues are “sanitized” before he arrives. Kreident finds that dealing with red tape and political in-fighting might be more difficult than solving a murder.

Written by two insiders who have worked at Lawrence Livermore, Virtual Destruction is not only a gripping thriller and complex mystery, but a vivid portrayal of an actual US nuclear-design facility.

Craig Kreident 2: FALLOUT

They call themselves Eagle’s Claw, one of the most extreme militia groups in the United States. They have infiltrated the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, and the most frightening display of nuclear terrorism is about to unfold.

Only the Nebula-nominated collaboration of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason could masterfully blend hard-as-nails high-technology with hard-driving intrigue to deliver such an explosive thriller. FBI Special Agent Craig Kreident—the unforgettable hero from Virtual Destruction—returns in this breathtaking tour de force of terrorism, cutting-edge technology, and raw emotional power.

Written by two insiders who have worked at the nation’s nuclear design laboratories and high-security research facilities, including the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Fallout is a pulse-pounding thriller of an extremist group and stolen nuclear weapons, as well as a detailed portrait of what happens behind the fences of government facilities.

Craig Kreident 3: LETHAL EXPOSURE

At Fermilab near Chicago, researchers use the world’s largest particle accelerator to unlock the secrets of the subatomic universe. While working late one night, Dr. Georg Dumenico—candidate for the Nobel Prize in physics—is bombarded with a lethal exposure of radiation. He will die horribly within days.

FBI Special Agent Craig Kreident knows it was no accident—but he has to prove it, and the clock is ticking. The nation’s most valued research is at stake, and only Dumenico himself knows enough to track down his own murderer . . . if he survives long enough to do it.

by Brian Herbert

The Timeweb Chronicles 1: Timeweb

Brian Herbert creates a universe of wondrous possibilities that is populated by sentient spaceships, shapeshifters, intriguing robots, and miniature aliens with mysterious powers. Humanity has become a mercantile society that has spread throughout the galaxy, ruled by wealthy merchant princes who live in decadent splendor—entirely unaware of another realm just beneath the fabric of the universe.

When galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe discovers the cause of a strange, cosmic disintegration, he embarks on an epic journey to restore the ancient balance to the crumbling galaxy. Noah must work with warring, alien races to unlock the secrets to a vast celestial puzzle.

The Timeweb Chronicles 2: The Web and the Stars

In Timeweb, Brian Herbert introduced readers to the fantastically beautiful galactic web of space and time that interconnects the cosmos, which can be used as a transportation infrastructure for sentient starships. But the web is unraveling, threatening to plunge the universe into oblivion.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe is struggling to hold the cosmic filigree together, while the evil shapeshifter race of Mutatis threatens to use a doomsday weapon against humanity. Noah has his own paranormal ability to journey into the depths of the universe, but he has made enemies of his own, including a third powerful force determined to destroy humans and Mutatis alike.

The Timeweb Chronicles 3: Timedancers

The conclusion to Brian Herbert’s epic Timeweb trilogy. As the human race and the sinister shape-shifting Mutatis continue their epic war, the connecting filigree of Timeweb strands that hold the universe together, begins to unravel. Sentient podships travel the strands of the web, but the cosmos itself is disintegrating.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe, possessed of special powers, is the one person who has a chance of saving all races. He is immortal, and faced with the crisis to the universe, he is also evolving, changing both mentally and physically . . . but into what? Noah is swept on a tidal wave of destiny and knows there is no turning back.

by Bill Ransom

Jaguar

In waking life, he is a combat vet with a mysterious sleep disorder, confined to a VA hospital bed. When he sleeps, he roams the plains of another world, invading the minds of the people as they dream and forcing them to do his will. They call him . . . Jaguar.

In both worlds, there are those who know the Jaguar’s secret. They are learning to link their minds across the void between worlds, following the dreampaths the Jaguar created—all the way back to where his body lies helpless . . . an easy target for their justice.

The Jesus Incident (with Frank Herbert)

A sentient Ship with godlike powers (and aspirations) delivers the last survivors of humanity to a horrific, poisonous planet, Pandora—rife with deadly Nerve-Runners, Hooded Dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. Chaplain/Psychiatrist Raja Lon Flattery is brought back out of hybernation to witness Ship’s machinations as well as the schemes of human scientists manipulating the genetic structure of humanity. Sequel to Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void, the first book in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

ViraVax

In the private laboratory known as ViraVax, Rico Toledo has uncovered a horrifying truth. In this place, run by a mysterious group called the Children of Eden, the worst suspicions of ex-intelligence officer Toledo have been confirmed: his partner has been genetically programmed for assassination—and Toledo may have been altered too.

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Table of Contents

Gamearth

Gameplay

Game’s End

About Kevin J. Anderson

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