"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 Kennok limb, 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 behind. "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. "Kennok limb, 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 anymore."
"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 everything 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 everything 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."