“Grrraaaaak!” Flere-Imsaho screamed. Its casing glowed dull red and started to smoke. Gurgeh watched, transfixed. Nicosar stood near the center of the boards, surrounded by his guards, smiling at Gurgeh.
The fire raged above the cinderbuds. The hall emptied as a last few wounded people staggered through the doors. Flere-Imsaho hung in the air; it glowed orange, yellow, white; it started to rise, dripping blobs of molten material onto the board as it went, enveloped suddenly in flames and smoke. Suddenly, it accelerated across the hall as if pulled by some huge, invisible hand. It slammed into a far wall and exploded in a blinding flash and a blast that almost blew Gurgeh off his stoolseat.
The guards around the Emperor left the board and climbed over the benches and galleries, killing the wounded. They ignored Gurgeh. The sound of firing echoed through the doors leading to the rest of the castle, where the dead lay in their bright clothes like some obscene carpet.
Nicosar strolled slowly over to Gurgeh, stopping to tap a few Azad pieces out of his way with his boots as he advanced; he stamped on a little guttering pool of fire left from the molten debris Flere-Imsaho had trailed behind it. He drew his sword, almost casually.
Gurgeh clutched the arms of the seat. The inferno shrieked in the skies outside. Leaves swirled through the hall like dry, endless rain. Nicosar stopped in front of Gurgeh. The Emperor was smiling. He shouted above the gale. “Surprised?”
Gurgeh could hardly speak. “What have you done? Why?” he croaked.
Nicosar shrugged. “Made the game real, Gurgeh.” He looked round the hall, surveying the carnage. They were alone now; the guards were spreading through the rest of the castle, killing.
The fallen were everywhere, scattered over the floor and the galleries, draped over benches, crumpled in corners, spread like Xs on the flagstones, their robes spotted with the dark burn-holes of laserburns. Smoke rose from the splintered woodwork and smoldering clothes; a sweet-sick smell of burned flesh filled the hall.
Nicosar weighed the heavy, double-edged sword in his gloved hand, smiling sadly at it. Gurgeh felt his bowels ache and his hands shake. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and at first he thought it was the implant, rejecting, surfacing, for some reason reappearing, but then he knew that it wasn’t, and realized, for the first time in his life, that fear really did have a taste.
Nicosar gave an inaudible sigh, drew himself up in front of Gurgeh, so that he seemed to fill the view in front of the man, and brought the sword slowly toward Gurgeh.
Drone! he thought. But it was just a sooty scar on the far wall.
Ship! But the implant under his tongue lay silent, and the Limiting Factor was still light-years away.
The tip of the sword was a few centimeters from Gurgeh’s belly; it started to rise, passing slowly over Gurgeh’s chest toward his neck. Nicosar opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then he shook his head, as though in exasperation, and lunged forward.
Gurgeh kicked out, slamming both feet into the Emperor’s belly. Nicosar doubled up; Gurgeh was thrown backward off the seat. The sword hissed over his head.
Gurgeh kept on rolling as the stoolseat crashed to the ground; he jumped to his feet. Nicosar was half doubled-up, but still clutched the sword. He staggered toward the man, hacking the sword about him as though at invisible enemies between them. Gurgeh ran; to the side at first, then across the board, heading for the hall doors. Behind him, outside the windows, the fire above the thrashing cinderbuds obliterated the black clouds of smoke; the heat was something physical, a pressure on the skin and eyes. One of Gurgeh’s feet came down on a game-piece, rolled across the board by the gale; he slipped and fell.
Nicosar stumbled after him.
The screening equipment whined, then hummed; smoke gouted from it. Blue lightning played furiously around the hanging machinery.
Nicosar didn’t notice; he plunged forward at Gurgeh, who pushed himself away; the sword crashed into the board, centimeters from the man’s head. Gurgeh picked himself up and leapt over a raised section of board. Nicosar came tearing and trampling after him.
The screening gear exploded. It crashed from the ceiling to the board in a shower of sparks and smashed into the center of the multicolored terrain a few meters in front of Gurgeh, who was forced to stop and turn. He faced Nicosar.
Something white blurred through the air.
Nicosar raised the sword over his head.
The blade snapped, clipped off by a flickering yellow-green field. Nicosar felt the weight of the sword change, and looked up in disbelief. The blade dangled uselessly in midair, suspended from the little white disk that was Flere-Imsaho.
“Ha ha ha,” it boomed above the noise of the screaming wind.
Nicosar threw the sword-handle at Gurgeh; a green-yellow field caught it, propelled it back at Nicosar; the Emperor ducked. He staggered across the board in a storm of smoke and swirling leaves. The cinderbuds thrashed; flashes of white and yellow burst from between their trunks as the wall of flames above them beat toward the castle.
“Gurgeh!” Flere-Imsaho said, suddenly in front of his face. “Crouch down and curl up. Now!”
Gurgeh did as he was told, getting down on his haunches, arms wrapped around his shins. The drone floated above him, and Gurgeh saw the haze of a field all around him.
The wall of cinderbuds was breaking, the streaks and bursts of flame clawing through from behind them, shaking them, tearing them. The heat seemed to shrivel his face on the bones of his skull.
A figure appeared against the flames. It was Nicosar, holding one of the big laser-pistols the guards had been armed with. He stood just within and to the side of the windows, holding the gun in both hands and sighting carefully at Gurgeh. Gurgeh looked at the black muzzle of the gun, into the thumb-wide barrel, then his gaze moved up to Nicosar’s face as the apex pulled the trigger.
Then he was looking at himself.
He stared into his own distorted face just long enough to see that Jernau Morat Gurgeh, at the very instant that might have been his death, looked only rather surprised and not a little stupid… then the mirror-field disappeared and he was looking at Nicosar again.
The apex stood in exactly the same place, swaying slightly now. There was something wrong though. Something had changed. It was very obvious but Gurgeh couldn’t see what it was.
The Emperor went back on his heels, eyes staring blankly up at the smoke-stained ceiling where the screening gear had fallen from. Then the furnace gust from the windows caught him and he tipped slowly forward again, tipping toward the board, the weight of the hand-cannon in his gloved hands unbalancing him.
Gurgeh saw it then; the neat, slightly smoking black hole about wide enough to fit a thumb into, in the center of the apex’s forehead.
Nicosar’s body hit the board with a crash, scattering pieces.
The fire broke through.
The cinderbud dam gave way before the flames and was replaced by a vast wave of blinding light and a blast of heat like a hammer blow. Then the field around Gurgeh went dark, and the room and all the fire went dim, and far away at the back of his head there was a strange buzzing noise, and he felt drained, and empty, and exhausted.
After that everything went away from him, and there was only darkness.
Gurgeh opened his eyes.
He was lying on a balcony, under a jutting overhang of stone. The area around him had been swept clear, but everywhere else there was a centimeter-thick covering of dark gray ash. It was dull. The stones beneath him were warm; the air was cool and smoky.
He felt all right. No drowsiness, no sore head.
He sat up; something fell from his chest and rolled across the swept stones, falling into the gray dust. He picked it up; it was the Orbital bracelet; bright and undamaged and still keeping its own microscopic day-night cycle. He put it into his jacket pocket. He checked his hair, his eyebrows, his jacket; nothing singed at all.
The sky was dark gray; black at the
horizon. Away to one side there was a small, vaguely purple disk in the sky, which he realized was the sun. He stood up.
The gray ash was being covered up with inky soot, falling from the dark overcast like negative snow. He walked across the heat-warped, flaking flagstones toward the edge of the balcony. The parapet had fallen away here; he kept back from the very edge.
The landscape had changed. Instead of the golden yellow wall of cinderbuds crowding the view beyond the curtain wall, there was just earth; black and brown and baked-looking, covered in great cracks and fissures the thin gray ash and the soot-rain had not yet filled. The barren waste stretched to the distant horizon. Faint wisps of smoke still climbed from fissures in the ground, climbing like the ghosts of trees, until the wind took them. The curtain wall was blackened and scorched, and breached in places.
The castle itself looked battered as though after a long siege. Towers had collapsed, and many of the apartments, office buildings and extra halls had fallen in on themselves, their flame-scarred windows showing only emptiness behind. Columns of smoke rose lazily like sinuous flagpoles to the summit of the crumbling fortress, where the wind caught them and made them pennants.
Gurgeh walked round the balcony, through the soft black snow of soot, to the prow-hall windows. His feet made no noise. The specks of soot made him sneeze, and his eyes itched. He entered the hall.
The stones still held their dry heat; it was like walking into a vast, dark oven. Inside the great game-room, among the dim shambles of twisted girders and fallen stonework, the board lay, warped and buckled and torn, its rainbow of colors reduced to grays and blacks, its carefully balanced topography of high ground and low made a nonsense of by the random heavings and saggings induced by the fire.
Buckled, annealed girders and holes in the floor and walls marked where the observation galleries had been. The screening gear which had fallen from the ceiling of the hall lay half-melted and congealed in the center of the Azad board, like some blistered travesty of a mountain.
He turned to look at the window, where Nicosar had stood, and walked over the creaking surface of the ruined board. He crouched down, grunting as his knees sent stabs of pain through him. He put his hand out to where an eddy in the fire-storm had collected a little conical pile of dust in the angle of an internal buttress; right at the edge of the game-board, near where a fused, L-shaped lump of blackened metal might have been the remains of a gun.
The gray-white ash was soft and warm, and mixed in with it he found a small, C-shaped piece of metal. The half-melted ring still contained the setting for a jewel, like a tiny rough crater on its rim, but the stone was gone. He looked at the ring for a while, blowing the ash off it and turning it over and over in his hands. After a while he put the ring back into the pile of dust. He hesitated, then he took the Orbital bracelet out of his jacket pocket and added it to the shallow gray cone, pulled the two poison-warning rings off his fingers, and put them there too. He scooped a handful of the warm ash into one palm, gazing at it thoughtfully.
“Jernau Gurgeh, good morning.”
He turned and rose, quickly stuffing his hand into his jacket pocket as though ashamed of something. The little white body of Flere-Imsaho floated in through the window, very tiny and clean and exact in that shattered, melted place. A tiny gray thing, the size of a baby’s finger, floated up to the drone from the ground near Gurgeh’s feet. A hatch opened in Flere-Imsaho’s immaculate body; the micromissile entered the drone. A section of the machine’s body revolved, then was still.
“Hello,” Gurgeh said, walking over to it. He looked round the ruined hall, then back at the drone. “I hope you’re going to tell me what happened.”
“Sit down, Gurgeh. I’ll tell you.”
He sat on a block of stone fallen from above the windows. He looked dubiously upward at where it must have fallen from. “Don’t worry,” Flere-Imsaho said. “You’re safe. I’ve checked the roof.”
Gurgeh rested his hands on his knees. “So?” he said.
“First things first,” Flere-Imsaho said. “Allow me to introduce myself properly; my name is Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti, and I am not a library drone.”
Gurgeh nodded. He recognized some of the nomenclature Chiark Hub had been so impressed with, long ago. He didn’t say anything.
“If I had been a library drone, you’d be dead. Even if you’d escaped Nicosar, you’d have been incinerated a few minutes later.”
“I appreciate that,” Gurgeh said. “Thank you.” His voice sounded flat, wrung out, and not especially grateful. “I thought they’d got you; killed you.”
“Damn nearly did,” the drone said. “That firework display was for real. Nicosar must have got his hands on some equivtech effector gear; which means—or meant—the Empire has had some sort of contact with another advanced civilization. I’ve scanned what’s left of the equipment; could be Homomda stuff. Anyway, the ship’ll load it for further analysis.”
“Where is the ship? I thought we’d be on it, not still down here.”
“It came barreling through half an hour after the fire hit. Could have snapped us both off, but I reckoned we were safer staying where we were; I had no trouble insulating you from the fire, and keeping you under with my effector was easy enough too. The ship popped us a couple of spare drones and kept on going, braking and turning. It’s on its way back now; should be overhead in five minutes. We can go safely back up in the module. Like I said; displacement can be risky.”
Gurgeh gave a sort of half-laugh through his nose. He looked around the dim hall again. “I’m still waiting,” he told the machine.
“The imperial guards went crazy, on Nicosar’s orders. They blew up the aqueduct, cisterns and shelters, and killed everybody they could find. They tried to take over the Invincible from the Navy, too. In the resulting on-board firefight, the ship crashed; came down somewhere in the northern ocean. Biggish splash; tsunami’s swept away rather a lot of mature cinderbuds, but I dare say the fire’ll cope. There was no attempt to kill Nicosar the other night; that was just a ruse to get the whole castle and the game under the control of guards who’d do anything the Emperor told them.”
“Why, though?” Gurgeh said tiredly, kicking at a blister of board metal. “Why did Nicosar order them to do all that?”
“He told them it was the only way to defeat the Culture and save him. They didn’t know he was doomed too; they thought he had some way of saving himself. Maybe they’d have done it regardless, even knowing that. They were very highly trained. Anyway; they obeyed their orders.” The machine made a chuckling noise. “Most of them, anyway. A few left the shelter they were supposed to blow up intact, and got some people into it with them. So you’re not unique; there are some other survivors. Mostly servants; Nicosar made sure all the important people were in here. The ship’s drones are with the survivors. We’re keeping them locked up until you’re safely away. They’ll have enough rations to last until they’re rescued.”
“Go on.”
“You sure you can handle all this stuff right now?”
“Just tell me why,” Gurgeh said, sighing.
“You’ve been used, Jernau Gurgeh,” the drone said matter-of-factly. “The truth is, you were playing for the Culture, and Nicosar was playing for the Empire. I personally told the Emperor the night before the start of the last match that you really were our champion; if you won, we were coming in; we’d smash the Empire and impose our own order. If he won, we’d keep out for as long as he was Emperor and for the next ten Great Years anyway.
“That’s why Nicosar did all he did. He wasn’t just a sore loser; he’d lost his Empire. He had nothing else to live for, so why not go in a blaze of glory?”
“Was all that true?” Gurgeh asked. “Would we really have taken over?”
“Gurgeh,” Flere-Imsaho said, “I have no idea. Not in my brief; no need to know. It doesn’t matter; he believed it was true.”
“Slightly unfair pressure,” Gurgeh said
, smiling without any humor at the machine. “Telling somebody they’re playing for such high stakes, just the night before the game.”
“Gamespersonship.”
“So why didn’t he tell me what we were playing for?”
“Guess.”
“The bet would have been off and we came in all guns blazing anyway.”
“Correct!”
Gurgeh shook his head, brushed a little soot off one jacket sleeve, smudging it. “You really thought I’d win?” he asked the drone. “Against Nicosar? You thought that, even before I got here?”
“Before you left Chiark, Gurgeh. As soon as you showed any interest in leaving. SC’s been looking for somebody like you for quite a while. The Empire’s been ripe to fall for decades; it needed a big push, but it could always go. Coming in ‘all guns blazing’ as you put it is almost never the right approach; Azad—the game itself—had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years—the linchpin; but that made it the most vulnerable point, too.” The drone made a show of looking around, at the mangled debris of the hall. “Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we’d expected, I must admit, but it looks like all the analyses of your abilities and Nicosar’s weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.”
“They knew I’d win?” Gurgeh asked disconsolately, chin in hand.
“You can’t know something like that, Gurgeh. But they must have thought you stood a good chance. I had some of it explained to me in my briefing… they thought you were just about the best game-player in the Culture, and if you got interested and involved then there wasn’t much any Azad player could do to stop you, no matter how long they’d spent playing the game. You’ve spent all your life learning games; there can’t be a rule, move, concept or idea in Azad you haven’t encountered ten times before in other games; it just brought them all together. These guys never stood a chance. All you needed was somebody to keep an eye on you and give you the occasional nudge in the right direction at the appropriate times.” The drone dipped briefly; a little bow. “Yours truly!”
The Player of Games Page 35